Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky. David Bowles
Lord of Time, he helped them devise a calendar to measure the solar year with all its attendant rites and agricultural seasons—eighteen months of twenty days, plus an unnamed period of five—365 days.
Each of the days of the month had a different sign, twenty in all: crocodile, wind, house, lizard, snake, death, deer, rabbit, water, dog, monkey, grass, reed, jaguar, eagle, vulture, earthquake, flint, rain, flower.
The gods gave the first people another calendar to keep track of the passing of time and to divine probable futures: twenty weeks of thirteen days—260 days.
The two calendars interlocked like gears. As the twenty-day months turned, so did the thirteen-day weeks. Our ancestors named days by combining the number of the week with the sign of the month. The very first day in the universe, then, was 1-Crocodile, as crocodile is the first day sign. The following days were 2-Wind, 3-House, 4-Lizard, and so on.
The ancients also named each year by its first day. Therefore do we know that creation began in the year 1-Crocodile, on the day 1-Crocodile.
The two calendars came into alignment once every fifty-two years, completing a cycle. A new year and fresh cycle would then begin on 1-Crocodile.
As each evening fell and Heart of Sky slipped past the horizon into the Realm of the Dead to be attended to by his minions there, Feathered Serpent taught Oxomoco and Cipactonal not to fear the dark, but to delight in the stars and give each one a name.
In time the couple had a child, a son they called Piltzintecuhtli, Young Prince. He grew to be a handsome, strapping young man, but there was no maiden yet alive to be his wife. Seeing his need, the Divine Mother took strands of long, black hair from the head of Xochiquetzal, goddess of beauty and fertility, and with them wove a lovely bride.
The years wore on, one calendar cycle after another. The giants multiplied and spread across the sea-ringed world. They lifted mighty temples and monuments in order to better worship the gods. There they performed their penances and bloodlettings and sacrifices so that the cosmic order would be sustained.
Heart of Sky looked down on the earth and was not pleased. The sacrifices seemed paltry to him, even the New Fire Ceremony meant to restore his strength every fifty-two years. Listening to the worship and prayers the giants lifted toward heaven, Heart of Sky was convinced that they favored his brother, Feathered Serpent. Temples to Feathered Serpent seemed finer, his priests more richly arrayed, the offerings sweeter.
The god of the smoking mirror coldly resolved to exterminate all the giants. Calling up vast reserves of divine energy, Heart of Sky sent his huge jaguar nahualli down to the sea-ringed world. Mountainheart sought out giants whose calendar day sign, determined by their birth, was jaguar. He taught them dark sorcery, how to transform into their nahualli and bend the minds of others, then he twisted them to his own purpose. When he had trained them to despise other giants utterly, he led them in a vicious war against their brothers and sisters.
In the year 1-Reed, on the day 4-Jaguar, Mountainheart and his army of jaguars devoured nearly every giant on the face of the earth. It was the 676th year since Heart of Sky had become the sun, the end of the thirteenth calendar cycle. A handful of men and women survived in the mountains. They cried out to Feathered Serpent, who descended to find his beloved creation despoiled and bereft. Seeing Mountainheart leap up at the sun to rejoin with his divine form, the creator god knew his brother was to blame.
Driven by indignant rage, Feathered Serpent attacked the sun at its zenith. Their struggle was great. It nearly rent the heavens in its violence. Twinning into Feathered Serpent and Xolotl, the creator simultaneously gripped Heart of Sky, his own plumage aflame, and uprooted one of the World Trees. Wielding it like a gargantuan club, he struck his brother from the third heaven, sending him plunging into the cosmic sea with such force that the god of the smoking mirror was nearly obliterated.
Thus did the first age of the world come to a tragic end.
The Second Age
Soon the gods descended once more to repair the damage done to the sea-ringed world.
The Divine Mother worked with Feathered Serpent to carve new humans from wood. Once he had bled life into them—his own chalchiuhatl, precious liquid—the men and women arose and lived their lives much as the giants had before.
This time Feathered Serpent became the sun, smiling down on his creation as they begot and bore children, erected wooden homes and temples, lived their small lives in honor, worshipping their magnanimous gods.
As the cycles wore on, however, a dark swirl began to form unnoticed in the cosmic sea, slow at first, but spinning ever faster down the years, a furious typhoon of spite and vengeance.
Then—at the end of the seventh cycle of this second age, on the day 4-Wind of the year 1-Flint, the 364th since Feathered Serpent had become the sun—Heart of Sky, Hurricane, the Smoking Mirror emerged from the trackless ocean and stormed across the earth.
His winds blasted and scoured the mountains, shredded fields and forests, emptied lakes and wore boulders down to pebbles. The wooden abodes of humans were ripped entirely from the face of the earth, and people themselves—much lighter than giants—were lifted by the gales and flung into the void.
Feathered Serpent, horrified and impotent, reached out to the few remaining men and women and gave them a desperate gift: tails to anchor them to whatever trees remained and feet that gripped the branches like a second set of hands. Thus were born the tlacaozomahtin, ape-men, who still live in dark corners of the world.
Mere moments after saving this small remnant, Feathered Serpent was beset by the howling, apocalyptic winds of his brother’s long-simmering wrath. Though he lifted flaming wings to beat aside the blast, the sun was torn from the sky and hurled beyond oblivion.
Thus did the second age of the world end in vengeance.
The Third Age
Hurricane—for he had truly ceased to be Heart of Sky—spent his ire and then stood alone upon the rocky, desolate earth. He called down the gods to begin again the work of creation, restoring flora and fauna, filling rivers and lakes, smoothing the rugged contours of the world.
With his red and blue sons, the god of the smoking mirror took clay from the guts of the earth and fashioned beings to serve and worship him. Wanting to more closely watch and rule them, he persuaded Tlaloc, lord of rain and lightning, to leave his paradise and his new bride Xochiquetzal to become the sun.
For several calendar cycles, Hurricane was content with the sacrifices and adulation of his creations. But the envy that had taken root in the dark god continued to grow. He looked upon Tlaloc’s wife Xochiquetzal and saw that she was the most beautiful being in the universe. It was intolerable that she pair herself with a lesser god.
So Hurricane entered Tlalocan and stole the goddess of fertility, forcing her to marry him and live within his dark heaven. Tlaloc, devastated, burned even brighter in the sky, glowering with betrayal and anger. With no lord or lady to instruct them, the tlaloques—servants of Tlaloc, the goggle-eyed god—ceased pouring water from the sky. Rain stopped falling. A great drought swept the world.
The people of the Third Age cried out to Tlaloc, begging for rain and a surcease from his anguished heat. But their prayers annoyed the sun. This attempt at humanity had been fashioned by his enemy’s hands, so why should he care? He spitefully refused to provide moisture, insisting that every thinking creature suffer as much as he did without his beloved. The men and women of earth continued to beg him as the rivers and lakes gradually dried up.
Hurricane allowed the suffering for a time, enjoying the constant stream of supplications and sacrifice. But he finally tired of Tlaloc’s tantrum. He descended to confront the god of rain.
Tlaloc would not heed the commands of his betrayer. They clashed above the parched earth, the sun bombarding Hurricane with massive waves of fire that were churned and spun away by typhoon whorls—toward the sea-ringed world. The whole earth burned, great storms sweeping across the land on screaming, furnace-like winds. Most people died, but a few found shelter in mountain caves. Furious