I

Ahuitzotl stood before the palace door watching work crews emplace masonry atop the second tier of the future Great Temple in Tenochtitlan. Handsome and possessed of a solid, muscular frame that rose to medium height, an aura bespeaking of lordly confidence embodied his personage. He was not as elaborately attired as might have been expected, shunning the profuse embellishments his peers would have proudly displayed. He had none of the facial ornaments—the golden earlobes, half-moons, or lip insertions—that others wore; his jewelry was limited to the golden arm bracelets common to the aristocracy. Nothing about his dress, his golden embroidered breechcloth, his blue cotton tunic, or his tilmantli, a cape fastened over his right shoulder hanging down to knee level, not even his feathery tasseled headband with gold trimmings, made him stand out as a particularly distinguished individual. It was his sandals which set him apart; of turquoise blue fabric and golden laces, they marked him as a member of the highest nobility, that of the royal house.

In bitterness Ahuitzotl gazed upon the project, meant to be an abode for their chief tribal deity, the war-god Huitzilopochtli, and the rain-god Tlaloc, who would occupy separate shrines upon its uppermost platform—the crowning achievement of Tizoc, seventh Revered Speaker and monarch of the realm. Its conception was not Tizoc’s; that claim belonged to his predecessor, Axayacatl, and it was he, not Tizoc, who began construction on it to commemorate his triumph over Tlatelolco, Tenochtitlan’s twin city on the lake, and their merging into one metropolis. He died unexpectedly from wounds received in an earlier war; Ahuitzotl had expected that the interclan council would appoint him as successor, but it chose Tizoc. And now, in his fifth year of rule, he decided to make the temple his major priority and directed all his energies toward its completion. Plaudits would come to him for this—acclamations immortalizing Tizoc as the builder of that imposing structure.

Treasonous thoughts raced through Ahuitzotl’s brain. They were brothers, all three of them—Axayacatl, Ahuitzotl, and Tizoc—grandsons of the famed Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina and inheritors of an establi