Each year the Aztec emperors came to Teotihuacan to pay homage to the G.o.ds. They walked down the Way of the Dead toward the Temple of the Sun amid other temples and the tombs of ancient kings who had become G.o.ds. Now the Healer and I walked in the footsteps of those Aztec rulers.

"The Sun and Moon, husband and wife, became G.o.ds when they sacrificed themselves to take the earth out of darkness, becoming the golden fire of day and silvery light of night," the Healer said.

We stood before the greatest pyramid on earth, the Temple of the Sun, covering ten acres of ground.

The old man cackled. "The G.o.ds are still here; you can feel them. They have your heart clutched in their fist, but they will not rip it out if you honor them."

He pulled up his sleeve and nicked the tender skin on the underside of his arm with an obsidian knife. He let the blood drip to the ground and handed me the knife.

I cut my arm and held it out so the blood would fall to the ground.

Three men and a woman came out of the shadows of a temple and slowly walked toward us. I recognized not their faces but their occupations: sorcerers and wizards, all of them. Each was as ancient and venerable as the Healer.

They exchanged the esoteric greetings of secret signs and veiled language known only to those who practiced the Dark Arts.

"These will be your guides to speak to your ancestors," the Healer said. "They will make your blood Aztec and take you to places where only those with true blood are permitted to enter."

Up to now I had not taken seriously the Healer's comments that I was to speak with the G.o.ds. Looking at the venerable faces and secretive eyes of the sorcerers who had come to guide me, I became anxious. How does one speak with the G.o.ds?

They led me to an opening in the great Sun pyramid, a hidden recess that I would not have found by myself even if I had been looking for it. The tunnel led to a huge cavern in the bowels of the pyramid, a cave as big as an indio ball court.

A fire in the center of the cave was waiting for us. I heard the trickle of water along the sides of the walls. The smell was of fire and water.

"We are in the womb of the earth," the woman said. "We came out of caves and into the light a thousand ancestors ago. This cave is the mother of all caves, the holiest of the holy. It was here before the Pyramid of the Sun was built." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "It was here during the darkness after each of Four Suns had gone dark and cold."

Blood from our arms was spilled into the fire. We sat before the fire, our legs crossed. A wind blew against me, a cold breeze that frightened the hair on the back of my neck and sent a cold serpent of fear shivering down my spine. Where the wind had entered the cavern, I could not tell, but never before had I felt a wind that seemed to be so alive.

"He is with us," the old woman chortled.

One of the sorcerers chanted an ode to the G.o.ds:

In heaven you live;

The mountains you uphold,

Anahuac is in your hand,

Everywhere, always you are awaited,

You are invoked; your are entreated,

Your glory, your fame are sought.

In heaven you live:

Anahuac is in your hand.

Anahuac was the heartland of the Aztec Empire, the valley now called Mexico, with its five interlocking lakes, Zumpango, Xaltocan, Xochimilco, Chalco, and Texcoco. It was in the heart-of-the-heart of Anahuac that they built Tenocht.i.tlan.

Our Father the Sun,

In plumes of fire;

Our Mother the Moon,

In silver night.

Come to us,

Bring your light.

Wind as cold as the underworld caressed me again. I shivered down to my toes.

"The Feathered Serpent comes to us," the Healer said. "He is with us now. We called him with our blood."

The woman knelt behind me and put an Aztec warrior's cape of bright feathers, yellow and red and green and blue, over my shoulders. She put a warrior's helmet on my head and handed me a sword of hard wood with an obsidian edge so sharp it could split a piece of hair.

The Healer nodded approval after I was dressed. "Your ancestors will not honor you unless you come to them as a warrior. From the moment of birth, an Aztec was trained to be a warrior. That is why his birth cord was taken into battle and buried on the battlefield by a warrior."

He motioned for me to sit before the fire. The old woman knelt down beside me. She was holding a stone cup filled with a dark liquid.

"She is xochimalca, a flower weaver," the Healer said. "She knows the magic potions that let the mind bloom so that it can rise to the G.o.ds."

She spoke to me, but I did not understand what she said. I recognized the language as related to Aztec, but it was again the priestly language known only to the few. The Healer interpreted for her.

"She will give you a potion to drink, obsidian knife water. In it are many things, octli, the drink that intoxicated the G.o.ds, the cactus bud the white faces call peyotl, the holy dust called ololiuhqui, blood sc.r.a.ped from the sacrificial block at the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenocht.i.tlan before the Spanish destroyed it. There are other things in it, substances that are known only to the flower weaver that came not from the ground we stand upon but the stars above us.

"Those whose hearts were ripped out at the sacrificial block were given this drink before they were sacrificed. As with warriors who die in battle and women who die in pregnancy, those sacrificed are paid the divine honor of living with the G.o.ds in the House of the Sun. Obsidian knife water takes one there, to the G.o.ds."

Seated before the blazing fire, surrounded by the chanting of sorcerers, I drank the potion.

Ayya ouiya! My mind became a river, a dark, flowing stream that soon turned into raging rapids and then into a black maelstrom, a whirlpool of midnight fire. My mind twisted and turned until it spun out of my body. When I looked back, I was soaring in the shadowy ceiling of the cavern. Below me was the fire with the wizards and my own familiar form gathered around it.

An owl flew by me. They were birds of evil omen, announcing death with their nocturnal hoots. I fled out of the cave to escape the death that the owl carried. Day had become night outside; a moonless, starless black shroud encased the earth.

The Healer's voice came to me, whispered in my ear as if I still sat beside him next to the fire in the cave.

"Your Aztec people were not born in this mother of caves in Teotihuacan but in the north, the land of winds and deserts where the Dark Place is found. They did not call themselves Aztecs. That was a name bestowed upon them by the Spanish conquerors. They called themselves Mexicas. They were driven from their northern land by bitter winds; storms of dust, because no rains fell. They were driven south by hunger and desperation, south to the land the G.o.ds favored and kept warm and wet. But there were already people in the south, people powerful enough to stop them and destroy the Mexicas. These people were blessed by the sun and rain G.o.d. They built a wondrous city called Tula. Not a place of the G.o.ds like Teotihuacan, but a city of beauty and pleasure, of great palaces and gardens that rival those of the Eastern Heaven."

It would be in Tula that our Aztec ancestors first understood their destiny, the Healer said.

Tula: the name was magic in my ears even as I listened to the haunted voice of the Healer. Sahagun, a Spanish priest who came to New Spain soon after the conquest, compared the legend of Tula to Troy, writing, "that great and famous city, very rich and refined, wise and powerful, suffered the fate of Troy."

"Quetzalcoatl had been at Teotihuacan, but he left it for Tula," the Healer said. "At Tula he angered and affronted Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, the G.o.d of wizards and sorcerers, and Tezcatlipoca took his revenge. He tricked Quetzalcoatl into getting drunk on pulque; and when lost in this drunken haze, Quetzalcoatl lay with his own sister. Shamed by his sin, he fled Tula and set sail on the Eastern Sea, swearing that he would return someday to reclaim his kingdom.

"Quetzalcoatl is one of your G.o.d-ancestors, but there are many others. The most important is Huitzilopochtli, the warrior G.o.d of the Aztecs. He took the form of a hummingbird and spoke to his tribe with the voice of a bird. Huitzilopochtli will be your guide."

Huitzilopochtli. Warrior. G.o.d. Hummingbird Wizard.