Blood Descendant

By Barbara Lund

In a family of priests and priestesses that are touched by the gods, Eztli thinks of herself as the least—least favorite, least gifted, least loved. She seems to have very little in common with them, and even less to offer the people of the city.

But when a fearsome warlord arrives to bring blood and slaughter, Eztli scrambles to protect the prophesied one, the world’s only hope for survival: her younger sister Zumi.

No five-year-old should have to stop a war no matter what the gods have decreed, so Eztli decides to keep her sister safe. Safe from their neighbors in the city, safe from the invaders, and safe from the prophecy. With only an ironwillow knife and a stubborn streak a river wide, Eztli embarks on a dark adventure that will test her beliefs, her sanity, and her sister’s love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara Lund
• Release date: Aug 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944127176

Barbara Lund

Award-winning speculative fiction author Barbara Lund has several indie-published novels, dozens of short stories, and has been traditionally published in Daily Science Fiction and L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 37 (November 2021).She won the Writers of the Future Golden Pen (2021), along with a First Place, three Silver Honorable Mentions, and two Honorable Mentions. She won the 24th Annual Critters Best Magical Realism Short Story.She's always working on new novels and short stories.Add a husband, two kids, and a martial arts obsession, and she keeps pretty busy.

Book preview

1

The ironwillow trees saved me in the beginning, and they saved me at the end.

- Blood Priestess Eztli Patli-daughter, five moons after the darkness

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When the fire-breathing pig jumped the ironwillow fence and escaped into the marketplace, I cursed my mother’s decision to send me to sell the tapir, then I bolted after it. As long as no one scared it, the tapir wouldn’t flame, but if it did…

That would be bad.

Shouts and upflung hands told me where to go as I chased the beast down. Fire-breathing tapir meat was the tastiest—though my brother was breeding tapirs unable to breathe fire as well—and this tapir so particularly stubborn that only Ollin could control it, which is why Mami wanted to sell it. But all the people of our city respected my older sisters and mother as priestesses, and brothers and father as priests, giving them an unfair advantage at bargaining. My younger sister had only five winters. That left me.

At least Mami had instructed Ollin to give me a handful of cacao beans, my only hope for coaxing the tapir back to its tiny mud-wallow pen under the late afternoon sun.

Darting through the marketplace, I averted my eyes and stoppered my ears from the sneers and pointed fingers with the ease of practice. Our marketplace was set up in squares, with beasts in the east, plants in the west, cloth in the south, tools in the north, and holy relics at the center, so I chased the tapir around pens of deer, spider monkeys, and macaws. The caged jaguar caused it to pause, and I readied my handful of beans to shove under its snout, but someone yelled, and it thundered away again.

As if it knew it was to be sold and eaten. I’d have run too. Smart tapir.

Finally, when I was breathless from sprinting and spinning and ducking and dodging, the beast took refuge in a knee-high shadow under baskets of mojarra and roncador fish. Slowing so as not to startle it, I dropped to my knees under shade made deeper by maize thatch, and held out my hand.

The tapir sniffed, then lipped gently at my closed fingers. Despite its stubbornness, it had learned that biting would delay its treat while the bean-wielder shrieked and flailed. I allowed it to taste one bean, then slid back.

Eztli. The way my long-term rival said my name—though why she thought she was my rival when her hair was smoother, her earrings more elaborate, and her friends more numerous confounded me—made me wince. She continued, Can’t you control your stupid beasts? What if it had knocked over all my fish?

Sacnite—named for the rare white flower found only in the highest valleys, and most beloved girl in the city—towered over me as I crouched in the dust. If I stood now, the tapir would lose the scent of cacao and flee again, so I stared at her sandals and smelled the sweet red oil she had anointed herself with, and thought of how after my run through the marketplace I did not smell so sweet. I clicked my tongue at the tapir and slid back an arm’s length.

It followed, blinking long black eyelashes as it eased into the sun. I couldn’t help but compare Sacnite’s subtly darkened lashes with the tapir’s and had to stifle a chuckle. She would not appreciate being compared to a pig, and would delight in planning some subtle revenge. Cutting the laces on my second-hand sandals, perhaps.

Do not ignore me! Sacnite stomped her foot just as prettily as she did everything else, but the puff of dust caused the tapir to shy.

It pinned back its ears, preparatory to breathing fire, so I thrust my hand beneath its nose again. Its snout quivered, and its ears came forward. I’m not ignoring you. I pitched my voice low so she could barely hear me. Unless you want the tapir to cook your fish for you, I suggest you leave us alone.

The girl turned, her brightly colored skirt flaring. Mami! I’m going to help Eztli take the tapir back.

Though I knelt in the sun, my skin bumped with cold foreboding. You don’t need to do that, I told her.

But I want to!

So Sacnite the white flower led us through the crowds, commenting artlessly on how horribly incompetent I had been to allow the fire-breathing tapir to escape into the marketplace and how wonderful it was that the gods had prevented disaster by helping her to be there to catch the beast and how kind she was to return it to its proper place. Everyone watched her flip her beads and braids and skirt and no one noticed my knees, bloodied from crawling in the dirt.

After I closed the gate on the tapir and gave it the last of the cacao beans, I waited, kneeling in the dust, for Sacnite to leave. My blood mixed with the dirt beneath my knees to form a crude clay.

An eternity later, a woman cleared her throat and I looked up. My tormentor had left and customers waited. A warrior with an obsidian machete tied to his waist and his wife and son at his side pointed with his lips to the tapir and asked, How much?

We bargained fiercely. After an admonition to slit the fire-breathing tapir’s throat while it was still calm, I finally sold the beast to the warrior, who was the head of a group of families living on the far side of the city. He gave me a pouch of jade and turquoise beads, then killed it where it stood while his wife held a basket underneath to catch its life’s blood. Spatters fell and mixed with mine in the dirt.

Then the wife offered me a new skirt to be completed within a hand of days if they could use an ironwillow pole from my pen for one afternoon. I agreed, and watched the warrior cut the lashings, snatch up the pole, and thrust it through the tapir from throat to tail. Lifting the pole over their shoulders with tiny grunts of effort, the warrior and his wife carried the tapir away, leaving their son to run the basket of blood to the temple for a sacrifice.

I had no magic over the beasts like my brother Ollin, nor over the plants like Mat, nor over fire like Xipil… I had no magic at all. I wondered sometimes how different my life would be if I had been born a seer, like my sister Nelli or a healer like Mami. I stared after the dead fire-breathing tapir and wondered what the gods wanted from me, that I was so alone in a city—and family—full of people.

2

Prophecies are useless babble… at least until too late to change them.

- Priest Yolo Cadmeal-son, in the days before the darkness

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Finally free from my duties in the marketplace—the tapir having been properly sold, slaughtered, and tithed to the temple—I wandered, pausing near the jaguar to admire its shiny black coat, then near the macaws to hear their mimicry, and next to the white-tailed deer where my mouth watered thinking of supper, carefully avoiding the fish. No reason to run into Sacnite again. Meandering through the stalls of dyed and plain cotton ready to be made into skirts, shawls, and loin wraps, I hoped the family would return the ironwillow pole promptly. Mat would never forgive me if I lost one of his nearly indestructible poles, but the temptation of having the wife make me a skirt had been too much, especially because I hated to sew.

Sometimes I despaired of what I was to become as much as Mami did. No magic, no love for women’s work, nor really for men’s either, despite my clandestine spear lessons with Mat.

When I reached the borders of our fields, I ran away from my thoughts. The jarring as my heels hit the dirt loosened the muscles in my back. Avoiding the pens of ahuizotl which ran from the land into the shallows of the river—deceptively empty this time of day, since the river dogs liked to hide in the shadowed eddies, watching for foolish children or spider monkeys wandering too close to the edge of the river—I pelted through the raised beds of black bean plants and squashes, careful where I set my feet.

Climbing the steps to our patio stretched the muscles in my legs. The blue-green tiles circled the giant ironwillow tree around which our ancestors had built the house. Red-winged coatl nested overhead, basking in the heat of the afternoon sun. I drew in a deep breath—hot air, coatl, chile and cacao—and let my shoulders relax just a hair more.

Then my brother’s wife Tepin stepped out of the yellow doorway, fancy beadwork still in hand. She stood and looked at me—that was all—but I felt the prickles of my skinned knees, my shoulders climbed back up, and the muscles in my back knotted again. Without a word, I turned and ducked into the red doorway, the entrance to my parents’ house.

Leaning on the stone wall, I let the silence loosen my scowl. My brother Xipil and his wife Tepin had lived with her parents for two years—as good newlyweds should—while cleaning out and tidying up the house left behind by an uncle when his family moved away, but I could wish they—and Xipil’s twin and his wife, who had moved into another house attached to the patio last rainy season—had stayed away another year. Or two.

My father’s voice drifted through the doorway. Do you think he is the one?

Mami replied from their sleep room. We’ll have to wait and see. All the signs are there.

Prophecies. Papi grunted. Useless babble.

Even the ones told by your own daughter? Mami’s voice came closer to the door, so I tossed the bag of beads into the basket nearest their door and bolted back out to the patio. Never did I want to be involved in a conversation about Nelli, my oldest sister living in