September

Issue 36

     The stone serpent's ruby eyes shimmered in the crisp morning sun, its two-hundred-foot body stretching up the staircase, the head resting at the bottom and the tail disappearing onto the top-most platform. Workers painted its fang-bared face with glittering opalescence. Halfway up the pyramid stretched a band of frescos featuring frogs, fish, and egrets. Only the occasional shuttle flying silently overhead interrupted the clean blue expanse of the sky.

     Quicaltia--the monument's chief architect--counted a hundred and eighty steps as he and the construction foreman climbed the pyramid. "The second one-eighty is on the other side," the foreman said. "The extra five are over there." He pointed to the one-story blue temple to be dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc in two weeks. "The goldsmiths assure me the idol for inside will be ready by early next week."

     Inside the temple, stone façade covered only one wall but several white-mantled workers were cementing a second together over the steel framework. Another man worked on a mural of mountains and rain clouds on the one completed wall.

     "Exquisite work," Quicaltia said, stepping up for a closer look. He'd painted in his youth, before family obligations forced him to take up more tedious but lucrative work.

     "A thousand thanks," the man replied.

     "It's not very traditional though."

     "The new high priest desires something more realistic, so the god may feel at home in His new temple."

     Quicaltia stepped back for a full view. "Hopefully it won't become too splattered with blood. I'd hate to see such beauty obscured by grime."

     "Rest assured I'll keep it clean of the traditional 'grime', as you call it," the city's high priest of Tlaloc said as he stepped through the doorway. His stringy, blood-wetted hair hung around his shoulders like willow branches, and he wore a heavy black alpaca robe and large jade-stone plugs in his earlobes.  He carried a computer pad and used one of his exceedingly long fingernails as a stylus. "I didn't commission Tlacuilo here to paint this just to cover it in blood."