Zoraida ordered, the men fell back and Kendric rose. She made a quick signal and they filed out through a further door.
"Come," she said to him. She caught up a cloak which had slipped from her shoulders, a thing of silken scarlet, and led the way down the hall.
He followed, ready and eager for a talk with her which would be the last. He fully meant to make a break for the open tonight. And alone.
He was a.s.suring himself that he drew a vast pleasure from that consideration--that he was free from now on to play out his own hand in his own way without reference to others. What he did not admit to himself was that he was trumping up an explanation of the fact that, while he was following Zoraida, he was thinking of Betty. He was wondering where Betty had gone in such a flurry, when he should have been asking himself where Zoraida was taking him and for what purpose of her own.
CHAPTER XV
OF THE ANCIENT GARDENS OF THE GOLDEN TEZCUCAN
He supposed that Zoraida was conducting him to the barbaric chamber in which she had received him the other evening. For she led, as the little maid had done, out under the stars, along the rear corridor, into the house again by the same door. Once more in the building they came to that heavy door which in time was thrown open by the evil-looking Yaqui with the sinister weapons at his belt. The man bowed deeply as Zoraida swept by him. Another moment and Zoraida and Jim were in the room which appeared always to be pitch black. But from here on the way was no longer the same.
He heard Zoraida"s quiet breathing at his side. She stood a long time without moving, apparently waiting or listening, and he stood as still.
Then she put out her hand and caught his sleeve and he followed her again. Their footfalls were deadened by a thick carpet; Kendric could see nothing. Never a sound came to him save that of their own quiet progress. They went forward a dozen steps and Zoraida paused abruptly.
Another dozen steps and again a pause. Then he heard the soft jingle of keys in her hands; lock after lock she found swiftly in the dark until she must have shot back five or six bolts; a door opened before them. He could not see it, since beyond was a dark no less impenetrable, but caught the familiar creak of hinges. He heard the door close softly when they had gone through; he heard the several bolts shot back. Then Zoraida left him, groped a moment and thereafter the tiny flare of a match in her upheld hand showed her to him and, vaguely, his surroundings. They stood in a low-vaulted, narrow pa.s.sageway through what appeared to be rock.
Set in a shallow niche in the wall was a small lamp which Zoraida lighted. She held it high and continued along the pa.s.sageway. Now Kendric saw that a long tunnel ran ahead of them, walls and ceiling rudely chisseled, the uneven floor pitching gently downward. Herein two men, their elbows striking, might walk abreast; here a man as tall as Kendric must stoop now and then. The tunnel ran straight a score of paces, then turned abruptly to the right. Here was another door with its reenforcement of riveted steel bars and its half dozen bolts and padlocks. Zoraida gave him the lamp to hold, then produced a second bunch of keys and one after the other opened the padlocks. The door swung back noiselessly; they went through, Zoraida closed it and dropped into place the steel bars.
"Doors and bars and locks and keys enough," mocked Kendric, "to guard the treasure of the Montezumas!"
She turned upon him with her slow, mysterious smile.
"And not alone in doors and locks has Zoraida put her faith," she said.
"If I had not prepared the way neither you nor another man, though he held the keys, could ever have come so far! I have been before and removed certain small obstructions. Come! I will show you others, Zoraida"s true safeguards."
They were in a small square chamber faced with oak on all sides excepting ceiling and floor which were of hewn rock. The panels of the walls, each some two feet wide, had, all of them, the look of narrow doors, each with its heavy latch. Zoraida put her hand to the nearest latch and opened the door cautiously. Kendric saw only a long, very narrow and dark pa.s.sageway.
"Listen," commanded Zoraida.
He heard nothing.
"Toss something down into the pa.s.sage," said Zoraida. "Anything, a coin if you have no other useless object upon you."
So a coin it was. He heard it strike and roll and clink against rock.
Then he heard the other sound, a dry noise like dead leaves rattling together. Despite him he drew back swiftly. Zoraida laughed and closed the door.
"You know what it is then?"
He knew. It was the angry warning of a rattlesnake; his quickened fancies pictured for him a dark alleyway whose floor was alive with the deadly reptiles and he felt an unpleasant p.r.i.c.kling of the flesh.
"If you went on," she told him serenely, "and you chose any door but the right one--and there are twelve doors--you would never come to the end of a short hallway. And, even though you happened to choose the right door, it were best for you if Zoraida went ahead. Come, my friend."
She opened another door and stepped into the narrow opening. Though he had little enough liking for the expedition, Kendric followed. Once more he heard a rustling as of thousands of dry, parched leaves, and was at loss to know whence came the ominous sound. Again Zoraida laughed, saying: "I have been before and prepared the way," and they went on. Then came another door with still other bars and locks.
Zoraida unlocked one after the other, then stood back, looking at him with the old mischief showing vaguely in her eyes.
"Open and enter," she said.
He threw back the door. But on the threshold he stopped and stared and marveled. Zoraida"s pleased laughter now was like a child"s.
"You are the first man, since Zoraida"s father died, to come here," she told him. "And never another man will come here until you and I are dead. It is a place of ancient things, my friend; it is the heart of Ancient Mexico."
The heart of Ancient Mexico! Without her words he would have known, would have felt. For old influences held on and the atmosphere of the time of the Montezumas still pervaded the place. He forgot even Zoraida as he stepped forward and stopped again, marveling.
Here was a chamber of colossal proportions and more than a chamber in that it gave the impression of being without walls or roof. And in a way the impression was correct for straight overhead Kendric saw a ragged section of the heavens, bright with stars, and at first he failed to see the remote walls because of the shrubbery everywhere.
Here was a strange underground garden that might have been the courtyard to an oriental monarch"s palace, a region of spraying fountains, of heavily scented flowers, of berry-bearing shrubs, of birds of brilliant plumage. It was night; the stars cast small light down here into the depths of earth; and yet it was some moments before the startled Kendric asked himself the question: "Where does the full light come from?" And it was still other moments before he located the first of the countless lamps, lamps with green shades lost behind foliage, lamps set in recesses, lamps everywhere but cunningly placed so that one was bathed in their light without having the source of the illumination thrust into notice.
That here, at some long dead time of Mexican history, had been the retreat of some barbaric king Kendric did not doubt from the first sweeping glance. He knew something of the way in which the ancient monarchs had builded pleasure palaces for their luxurious relaxation; how whole armies of slaves, captured in war, were set at a giant task like other captives in older days in Egypt; he knew how thousands, tens of thousands of such poor wretches hopelessly toiled to build with their misery places of flowers and ease; how to celebrate many a temple or palace completed these poor artificers in a mournful procession of hundreds or thousands as the dignity of the endeavor required, went to the sacrifice. Now, standing here at Zoraida"s side in this great still place, these thoughts winged to him swiftly, and for the moment he felt close to the past of Mexico.
"What was once the country place of Nezahualcoyoti, the Golden King of Tezcuco," said Zoraida, "is now the favorite garden of Zoraida. For the great Nezahualcoyoti captive workmen, laboring through the days and nights of many years, builded here as we see, my friend. Here he was wont to come when he would have relief from royal labor and intrigue, to shut himself up with music and feasting and those he loved. Here he came, be sure, with the beloved princess whom he ravished away from the old lord of Tepechpan. And here she remained awaiting him when he returned to the royal place at Tezcotzinco. And here were placed, four hundred and fifty years ago, the ashes of the golden king and of his beloved princess--and here they remain until this night. Come, Senor Americano; you shall see something of Zoraida"s garden which after Nezahualcoyoti came in due time to be Montezuma"s and after him, Guatamotzin"s."
Kendric found himself drawn out of his angry mood of a few minutes past, charmed out of himself by his environment. Following Zoraida he pa.s.sed along a broad walk winding through low shrubs and lined on each side with uniform stones of various colors that were like jewels.
These boundaries were no doubt of choice fragments of finely polished chalcedony and jasper and obsidian; they were red and yellow and black and, at regular intervals, a pale exquisite blue which in the rays of the lamps were as beautiful as turquoises. They pa.s.sed about a screen of dwarf cedars and came upon a tiny lakelet across which a boy might have hurled a stone; in the center, sprayed by a fountain that shone like silver, was a life-sized statue in marble representing a slender graceful maiden.
"The beloved princess," whispered Zoraida.
They went on, skirting the pool in which Kendric saw the stars mirrored. Now and then there was a splash; he made out a tortoise scrambling into the water; he caught the glint of a fish. They disturbed birds that flew from their hidden places in the trees; a little rabbit, like a tiny ball of fur, shot across their path.
Before them the central walk lay in shadows, under a vine-covered trellis. A hundred paces they went on, catching enchanting glimpses through the walls of leaves. Here was a column, gleaming white, elaborately carved with what were perhaps the triumphs of the golden king or some later monarch; yonder the walls of a miniature temple, more guessed than seen among the low trees; on every hand some relic of the olden time. Suddenly and without warning amidst all of this tender beauty of flowers and murmurous water and birds and perfumes Kendric came upon that which lasted on as a true sign to recall the strange nature of the ancient Aztec, a nation of refinement and culture and hideous barbarism and cruelty; a nation of epicures who upon great feast days ate of elaborately-served dishes of human flesh; a people who, in a garden like this, could find no inconsistency, no clash of discordancy, in introducing that which bespoke merciless cruelty and death, a grim token and reminder that a king"s palace was a slaughter house as well; a strange race whose ears were attuned to ravishing strains of music and yet found no breach of harmony if those singing notes were pierced through with the shrieks of the tortured dying.
Just opposite the most enchanting spot in these underground groves of pleasure was a great pyramidal heap of human skulls, thousands of them.
"The builders," explained Zoraida calmly. "Those who obeyed the commands of the Tezcucan king, who made his dream a reality, who were in the end sacrificed here. Five priests, alternating with another five, were unremitting night and day until at last the great sacrifice was complete. The records are there," and she pointed to a remote corner of the garden where vaguely through the greenery he made out stone columns; "I have seen them and I have made my own tally. Not less than ten thousand captives expired here." It struck Kendric that there was a note of pride in her tone. "Look; yonder is the great stone of sacrifice."
He drew closer, at once repelled and fascinated. A few yards from the base of the heap of skulls was a great block of jasper, polished and of a smoothness like gla.s.s. Upon this one after another of ten thousand human beings, strong struggling men and perhaps women and children had lain, while priests as terrible as vultures held them, while one priest of high skill and infinite cruelty drove his knife and made his gash and withdrew the anguished beating heart to hold it high above his head. Again Zoraida pointed; on the stone lay the ancient knife, a blade of "itztli," obsidian, dark, translucent, as hard as flint, a product of volcanic fires.
Kendric turned from stone and knife and human relics and looked with strange new wonder at Zoraida. She claimed kin with the royalty of this ancient order; perhaps her claim was just. He had wondered if she were mad; was not his answer now given him? Was she not after all that not uncommon thing called a throw-back, a reversion to an ancestral type? If in fact there flowed in her veins the blood of that princess of the golden king of Tezcuco who could have smiled at the whisperings of her lord and the tender cadences of music floating through the gardens his love had made for her, while just here his priests made their sacrifices and she, turning her eyes from his ardent ones, now and then languorously watched--was Zoraida mad or was she simply ancient Aztec or Toltec or Tezcucan, born four or five hundred years after her time? Her slow smile now as she watched him and no doubt read at least a portion of what lay in his mind, was baffling; he might have been looking back through the long dead years upon the Tezcucan"s princess: in her eyes were tender pa.s.sion and a glint that might have been a reflection of light from the sacrificial knife.
Speculation aside, here was one point which Zoraida herself had vouched for: since girlhood she had been accustomed to coming here. It would appear inevitable that the atmosphere of the place would have deeply influenced young fancies; that what she was now was largely due to these conflicting influences. What wonder that she saw nothing unlikely in her dreamings of herself as queen of a newly created empire? All that Zoraida was, all that she did, all that she threatened to do, the pa.s.sion and the regal manner and the look of a naked knife in her eyes, was but to be expected.
Zoraida led on and he followed. Their way led toward the stonework he had glimpsed through the shrubs and vines. Here was a many-roomed building, walls richly carved into records of ancient feasts and glories, battles and triumphs. They pa.s.sed in through a wide entrance; within the walls were lined with satiny hardwoods, the panels chosen with nice regard to color and grain. Doors opened to right and left and ahead, giving views of other chambers on some walls of which still hung ancient cloths; there were chairs and tables and benches and chests. Zoraida went on, straight ahead and to the doorway of a much larger, high-vaulted chamber. And again was Kendric treated to a fresh surprise.
As she stood in the door and he looked over her shoulder, six old men, evidently awaiting her arrival, bent themselves almost to the floor in a reverential posture that expressed greeting and adoration. Again Kendric"s fancies were drawn back into ancient Mexico. They wore loose white cotton robes; their beards fell on their aged b.r.e.a.s.t.s; in their sashes were long knives of itztli, like that upon the sacrificial stone. They might have been the old priests who sacrificed for the Tezcucan, their existences prolonged eternally here in an atmosphere of antiquity.
Zoraida spoke and they straightened, and one man answered. Kendric could not understand a word. Then, shuffling their sandaled feet, the six went out through a door at the side.
"I thought you said," said Kendric, "that since your father"s death no man had entered here?"
"And do these six look as though they had come here recently from the outside world?" she retorted, smiling. "The youngest of them, Senor Jim, first came to Nezahualcoyotl"s gardens more than sixty years ago.
When he was less than a year old, hence bringing with him no knowledge of any other place than this."
"And you mean that they have never gone out from here?"
"Would they thrust their heads through solid rock? Would they tread along corridors carpeted with snakes? Would they grow wings and soar to the stars up there? Not only have they never gone out; they do not so much as know that there is an Outside to go to."
"But you come to them!"