LITMIR.BIZ

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      PEGGY NICHOLSON

      grew up in Texas with plans to be an astronaut, a jockey or a wild animal collector. Instead she majored in art at Brown University in Rhode Island (LARGE welded sculptures), then restored and lived aboard a 1920s wooden sailboat for ten years. She has worked as a high school art teacher, a chef to the country’s crankiest nonagenarian millionaire, a waitress in an oyster bar and a full-time author. Her interests include antique rose gardening, Korat cats, ethnic cooking, offshore sailing and—but naturally!—reading romances. She says, “The best thing about writing is that, in the midst of life’s worst pratfalls and disasters, I can always say, ‘Wow, what a story this’ll make!’” You can write to Peggy at P.O. Box 675, Newport, RI 02840.

      To Ron duPrey, stars in his bow wave, attended by dolphins, reaching toward the dawn. Fair winds, my darling.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Chapter 27

      Epilogue

      Prologue

      Tenochtitlan, Valley of Mexico. Spring, 1520 A.D.

      “T his Cortés is a man, I say, and not a god! All this foolish talk in the marketplace that he is the Quetzalcoatl—pah!” The high priest spat into the brazier’s flames. “You have only to look at his eyes, how they glow when he sees our gold! He burns for it like a boy in rut. He’s no sort of a god. He’s a soulless, hairy dog of an unbeliever, come to rob the Aztecs of all but their clouts!”

      “If you say so, my lord.” Like most traders, the pochteca was a practical man. He believed in a fair weight of cacao beans, and the sheen of parrot feathers. A leather pouch clicking with turquoise or coral. He’d leave the gods and their savage requirements to the bloody priests. One had to make a living in this world before he faced the gods in the next, he knew, though he’d never dare give voice to such an opinion.

      “I do say it. But though this Cortés is a man, he brings our ruin. The city will fall.”

      The trader grunted in surprise. “I heard Cortés had fled, he and his men. After they murdered King Motecuhzoma. That they’d been driven from the city and were running for the east.” The pochteca had returned only this morning from a profitable venture to the western ocean. He’d barely had time to bathe himself, then hurry his laughing young wife to bed, before the summons had come from the temple. From the high priest of Quetzalcoatl himself!

      “Cortés will return, with more warriors than the fire ants. We have asked the one true Feathered Serpent, the real Quetzalcoatl, and so he says. Tenochtitlan will fall. Our men will be trampled like corn stalks beneath the hooves of their terrible beasts. Our women will be driven weeping into slavery. Our children will be meat for their sacrifice.”

      The pochteca swallowed a protesting laugh. One didn’t laugh at a priest and live. “The god says this?” he asked weakly. Or his old women priests putting words into the Quetzalcoatl’s mouth? Tenochtitlan was the finest, largest city in all the world, home to two hundred thousand of the bravest. Floating like a lily on its lake, the imperial capital could be approached only by guarded causeways or by canoe. To think that it could fall to a handful of rude, hairy, sweat-soaked foreigners? What nonsense.

      “Already our end has begun. The strangers send a poison through the air before them. The people to the east of here breathe it and die—an illness of coughing and fever and spots on the face. The city will fall, says the Serpent. He says that if His children would survive this plague, they must return from whence they came. To Aztlan, the Place of the Herons.”

      “Aztlan,” the trader repeated without inflection. Aztlan was no more than a tale to tell children. A fading dream of a homeland somewhere far to the north. Hundreds of rainy seasons ago the Aztecs had abandoned that city, but nobody remembered where it was located or why they’d fled. They’d marched south for year upon year till at last they came to an island in a lake, where they spied an eagle perched on a nopal cactus, devouring a serpent. There they’d stopped and founded Tenochtitlan, which became the navel of their empire.

      But the pochteca had ventured north and west as far as a sensible man might walk in four moons of hard walking and he’d never heard a whisper of Aztlan. If such a place existed, he’d have learned of it. It would have markets same as any city,

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