The wonderful M.G. Ellington has been kind enough to lend me some space on the Apex blog, where I ramble on what I should have done when writing Obsidian and Blood:

When I settled down to write my novel, the Aztec noir fantasy Servant of the Underworld, I had only the vaguest idea it might turn into a series. My first thought was to finish the darn thing, and not really to map out what might be happening to my characters after the plot was over.

That was 2007; now we’re in 2010. I’ve sold Servant and two more books in the Obsidian and Blood trilogy to Angry Robot; I’ve turned the sequel, Harbinger of the Storm, to my publisher; and I’ve just completed a tentative synopsis for the as-yet-untitled book 3. Looking back to how I wrote the series, there are a few things I did right, and a few things I should have paid more attention to.

Read more.

Go check it out!

In other linkage news, Mike Johnstone reviews the February 2010 issue of Asimov’s, which contains my alt-hist “The Wind-Blown Man”:

Her prose deftly taps into the atmosphere, rhythm, and thoughtfulness of Chinese tales (Buddhist, Taoist myths): it is measured, unhurried, soothing; it suggests a depth just tantalizingly out of reach.

That’s all for now. I’ll go back to RL stuff and programming (and %% implicit conversions).

It’s the 28th of the month again, and I’m blogging over at SFNovelists on Narrative, Resonance and Genre in different cultures. Go check it out!

So I thought I’d post about this here, because there’s a bunch of clichés floating around about Ancient China that are not exactly true, or at least not in the way you think. By order of growing annoyance:

-All Chinese practised special brands of martial arts: er, ok. While martial arts are pretty old (Shaolin Monastery, for instance, was founded in the 5th Century), martial arts have always been viewed with suspicion, and it’s only recently that they’ve become mainstream. The dominant and mainstream culture of Ancient China was Confucianism as practised by scholars, and this frowned upon sports (which were viewed as risky and unbecoming of an apprentice scholar, who had better things to do than rub in the dirt–such as learning the Classics by heart). To a lesser extent, diehard Confucianists also frowned upon religion, especially the excesses they engendered: both Daoism and Buddhism promote setting aside the world, and this didn’t sit well with a culture that valued ancestral worship and promoted family ties. Shaolin monastery, and many other places where martial arts were practised, were the target of several government purges because they were suspected of harbouring dissidents. So, if you have a martial arts practioner, chances are the authorities will not be looking kindly on them (nor his neighbours, if they’re scholars).

-All Chinese had pigtails: that one is a bit of a sore spot. When the Manchu invaded China in the 17th Century to found their own dynasty, they forced all Chinese to wear pigtails as a means of differentiating between Chinese and Manchus. The pigtail was a humiliation: before that, the Chinese wore their hair in buns.

-China has always been ruled by the Han Chinese: or not. It’s been more a “Chinese rule, mongol rule” for a long time: the Song dynasty (960–1127, 1127–1279) held only part of China, and co-existed with the Liao and the Jin dynasty, neither of which were ethnic Han, the Yuan (1271–1368) were Mongols (Gengis Khan founded the dynasty), the Ming (1368–1644) were Chinese (but pretty closed to external commerce as a backlash to the previous invasion), and the Qing (1644-1911), the last imperial Chinese dynasty, was founded by the Manchu, who have much more in common with the Mongols than with the Chinese (at the beginning. They adapted pretty well afterwards, though they never did get the hang of customs like bound feet).

-Chinese porcelain is pretty blue designs on white porcelain: ironically, this kind of design was way more successful abroad (both in Islamic and in European countries) than it ever was in China. Chinese ideas of beautiful porcelain is more celadon, or other techniques that produce a glaze without deliberate motifs.

-White is the mourning colour and very unlucky. Yes and no. White is the mourning colour, and is worn at funerals, associated with ghosts, etc. But strictly speaking, the colour this is referring to is su, which is that of unbleached hemp–a sort of brownish-yellowish pale colour, rather than pure white. Hemp was worn as mourning clothes because it’s uncomfortable as much as for the colour. Also, while some things associated with white are unlucky (wearing white in one’s hair, for instance), white has associations with virginity, purity and the unknown. You thus find a lot of references to white in Daoism.

-Chinese culture didn’t change for millennia: That’s about as rational as saying that French Gaul and France today are the same. There have been some pretty big upheavals (Mongol invasions, see above), but even then, the culture changed a lot. The traditions evolved: during the Han dynasties (3rd century BC-3rd Century AD), China didn’t know Buddhism, and even Daoism was still developing its ideologies. The flamboyant princesses of the Tang dynasty have very little in common with the Qing dynasty women, cloistered in their apartments and with very few rights of their own. Also, China is huge, and different regions have wholly different histories: the area around Beijing doesn’t have much in common with that around Guangzhou, climate-wise, food-wise, culture-wise…

So, I’ve recently noticed I started writing Aztec steampunk (“Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood”, up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders” forthcoming in Interzone, and “Prayers of Forges and Furnaces”, which I haven’t sold yet). I’ve had several people mentioning how it’s a bit odd to be mixing Aztecs with the steampunk aesthetic, and that set me wondering about where I was coming from when I was writing that kind of stuff.
Continue reading →

I’ve been a member of SFnovelists for a while, but I was mostly lurking. Now I have decided to de-lurk, with my very first blog post on translation, language and cultures. You can find it here (and I’ll be posting monthly from now on).

My fellow Shine author, Gareth L Powell, very kindly invited me to play in his sandbox. Hop over to his blog to see me (briefly) discuss scientific plausibility in SF. Take a look–any and all comments welcome!

(and many thanks to Gareth for the space)

So, I said I was going to get around to reviewing this, which I’ve had for a couple of months now.

Meet my Bebook Mini:

Just in case you’re wondering about scale, here’s the pomegranate that’s propping it up compared with other, more familiar objects (the pomegranate in question is one from Chili, weighs close to one kilo and has got to be the biggest one I ever saw. It was very tasty, too). The smudges is me reading in quick succession a bad quality newspaper and an ebook–the ink stays on my fingers, and transfers…

I bought this after much hesitation and browsing over at mobileread.com. My initial specifications for an e-reader went something like this:

• Must have e-ink (way better for my eyesight, battery holds out longer), and no glare
• Must support variety of formats (so I didn’t have to worry too much about conversion, and above all didn’t end up stuck with a proprietary format at a time the industry’s still trying to agree on a standard)
• Must have memory card (handy for swapping books, even though it would take a lot of books to fill even 512MB)
• Must be cheap (I wasn’t willing to pay above 250 euros for it).
• Must be relatively straightforward to order (because I wasn’t willing to jump through hoops for this)

I didn’t care so much about wifi (I was going to load books before, say, leaving on a trip), or about touchscreen or other niceties like that. Its primary function would be to read books, not to be another laptop.

This set of criteria turned out to be more restrictive than I thought… In particular, it ruled out both Sony readers (the PRS-300 doesn’t take a memory card, and the PRS-600 has a %%% reflective layer over the screen so that it can be touchscreen). The Kindle I didn’t like so much, mostly because I don’t care for being tied to amazon, for all their usefulness; and the Nook wasn’t/isn’t available in Europe (haven’t been following up on that). I could have got a PRS-505, which is the same brand my father bought, but I had handled it and hadn’t been so much a fan of it; plus, by the time I decided I was going to get an ebook-reader, Sony had phased out the PRS-505 and it was near-unfindable in France. That essentially left me with the Bebook and Bebook Mini, both devices sold by the Dutch firm Endless Ideas. The Bebook is the rebranded version of a Chinese handset, the Hanlin V3, and the Bebook mini is the rebranded version of its successor the V5. The difference between both was screen size: the V3 is 6”, the V5 is 5”. As I’m a fast reader, I was worried I would end up turning way too many pages for the 5” to be viable. But the V3 is older hardware, with fewer graylevels and a slightly older processor, and I didn’t much like the idea of buying old stuff. In the end, I plumped for the Bebook Mini, aka V5.
I’ll gloss over the “straightforward delivery” (it would have been fast, if some unforeseen problems hadn’t held up the package for a few days), and skip to the device itself.

First things first, I’m not regretting the size at all. There’s practically no strain from turning pages, and the big advantage of a 5” over a 6” is that I can fit it into my handbag. That way, I always have something to read.

Second, the battery life on that thing is amazing. I’m using it for more than two hours a day, and I’ve charged it maybe a handful of times since acquiring it. The charge is good for weeks at a time.

What else? Well, it supports a lot of formats, but it’s really unequal: the display options vary greatly between formats. For instance, .DOC support is really lousy, with very few fonts and very few font sizes; RTF is the best I’ve found so far (I’m told f2b is even nicer), with a choice of two fonts, several sizes and some other nice stuff. PDF is OK but not great, since PDF is so heavily geared towards one page size and the screen is much smaller than that (the first ebook I read on the device was Spin in PDF format, and it was a bit of a pain, with huge blanks in the middle of pages). EPUB is the one I’m most used to, since a lot of ebooks are in EPUB format: you can’t change the font, but you have five levels of zoom (though all but the lowest two are actually useless unless you have serious eyesight problems).

On the reader, you can set your books into a folder architecture. You’ll laugh, but some of the other ereaders don’t actually support folders. At any rate, it’s handy to keep stuff organised. There’s an edition of Adobe Digital Editions, too, which I haven’t tested yet (bought the paying books from Baen’s. More on this in a minute). Reading’s pretty nice, with the contrast a little lower than paper–in particular, it means I need decent light to actually make out the words on the page (good thing we’re in summer and I no longer take my bus in the dark). The transition’s a little funky at first (the whole screen goes back, and then flashes into the next page), but you get used to it pretty quickly.

There’s one unexpected bonus: the three different ways to turn the pages. You can hit the rocker on the right-hand side of the reader, hit the two arrow keys at the bottom, or the two on the left-hand side–and all of those will allow you to navigate through the ebook. This hadn’t struck me as practical–at least, not until I got to stand in a packed suburban train, holding onto my handbag with one hand, and turning the pages with the other. The rocker might be the easiest way to turn the pages when I’m sitting, but let me tell you the left-hand buttons are life-savers in a crowd (way easier to hit one-handed).

I really like it, bar one or two things. The first one is that I wouldn’t want to use it for books to keep, as I’m extremely unsure I’d still be able to open those in, say, 20 years (and yes, I’m the kind of person who would like to keep books for 20 years). The second, somewhat related problem with ebooks, is that searching is kind of awkward. You can’t really flip the pages, and if you happen to be looking for a specific passage without wanting to read the whole book in sequence, you’re sort of stuck. Even going to a specific page number is a pain in the neck. (I suppose a search function with a proper keyboard could fix some of that, but I still miss being able to flip through the physical pages. Funny).

And the third, and last problem…

Well, it doesn’t really have to do with the ebook reader, per se. It has to do with ebooks. See, I’d be quite ready to buy them and pay for them–but I’m not allowed to. Many sites on the internet (fictionwise, I’m looking at you) will only sell to visitors from a certain country. The reasoning, I presume, goes something like this: I live in France, so I’m only allowed to buy from French sellers. Who, you wouldn’t know, sell books in French, because that’s what they have the right to sell. Which is great, but I happen to be a little weird linguistically speaking, and I want to read in English (or Spanish. Or whatever). And I know or suspect those US/Canadian sites don’t have the right to sell books in France, but it’s really dumb. The French shops sell the translated French version, and I don’t want that, I want the original, and I just can’t buy it. It’s a little like showing up in a shop with cash, and being told they don’t want to see my kind of people here. Now, all of this made sense at the time we had physical stuff, but in the days of the internet… For ebooks, selling rights by country feels outdated, real fast (not to mention really annoying. I’ve never been so sorely tempted to pirate stuff). Rights by language would be smarter, but I’m sure it’s a lot easier to say than to iron out legally speaking.
Whatever the case, I sure hope this can be sorted out in a smart way (ie, not the way they sorted out the DVDs, which leaves me unable to get English subtitles for Japanese anime unless I buy the UK version. Because everybody in France only wants French subtitles, right? *grr*).

Rant aside (and this isn’t a problem with the device, more with the lay of the land at the moment), this is a terrific little machine. Does what it says on the can, and I’m not regretting the purchase. I just don’t think I’m going to use it for books I’m going to be rereading heavily in the next few years. I’ll get the paper version for those.

Afterword: so where am I getting my books? At the moment, I’m buying from Baen’s webscriptions, one of the few places that sells DRM-free and worldwide. I’m also told that Waterstone’s sells DRM-ed books to any country, but I haven’t tried yet. I’m also downloading a lot of stuff from gutenberg, for free, and from magazines like Tor.com, which has EPUB versions of all their short stories. And I read a lot of the freebies I got from various sources (Hugo voter’s package, Nebula Awards shortlist through SFWA, …).

So, Eastercon is approaching: this year, it’s at the Radisson in Heathrow, the same place where I attended my first convention in 2008 (also an Eastercon)–and my first real experience at socialising in English on a massive scale (I went to Bootcamp and WOTF before that, but I’d never actually dealt with so many people in such a small amount of space).
My first Eastercon will always remain etched in memory as the moment I realised that being fluent was one thing, but being a non-native speaker came with a few annoying side-effects. Here are a few:

• Unintentional idiomatic language:
  English is full of idioms–and it’s made worse by the fact that I have to reckon against a lot of local variations (the ones I know most are UK and US, but I bet I miss out on a lot of others, too, like Indian English and Australian English). Now, I generally know what a given idiom means; but the reverse–knowing that I’m using an idiom when I’m writing–is a lot less obvious. For instance, in Harbinger of the Storm, I have references to “bean counters” that are precisely that: dried beans used as die and counters for the patolli game. However, of course, the word has the other, far more common meaning of “accountants”, providing for much unintentional fun…
• The cocktail party effect (or lack thereof):
  You might not know what the cocktail party effect is. It’s a little magic trick of the brain: when you’re talking to someone in a noisy environment, your brain will automatically edit out the background noise (even and especially if said noise includes intelligible conversations), allowing you to focus on the person(s) you’re speaking with. It’s invaluable in parties (hence the name), but also in restaurants, bars, and other kinds of social functions.
  Sadly, I’m completely immune to it in both English and in Spanish, the languages I speak as a non-native. I think it comes from those hours of classes that forced me to listen to the language in order to understand it (and to fill in little summaries to make sure I’d made out the meaning of the words correctly). Now, when I hear people speak, I have to make a pass at understanding it. Even if it’s a conversation that’s completely unrelated to me. As a result, pub-time with me? I might look a little bewildered if the pub is particularly noisy. It’s not because I don’t care what people I’m saying–but rather because I’m trying to disentangle the current conversation from the four others happening at the neighbouring tables.
• Spelling issues:
  Ah yes. I think part of that one comes from the fact that I’m a visual person, and part of it from the fact that I’m a latecomer to English (I only started investing heavily in it at 16 or so). The most obvious effect of that one is that I will need a long moment to process when you’ve spelled a word. At, say, signings, it’s a little more problematic than I anticipated. I live in terror of the day I won’t have understood someone’s spelling out of their name, and will inscribe a book to the entirely wrong person.
  The other side effect is related to the other way around: if you’re pronouncing a familiar word in a way that I don’t expect, I’ll blank it out as “this funny word I can’t figure out”, even though I quite possibly know that word already. This happens a lot with French words or with words I’ve only seen in writing. I don’t seem to have quite the same flexibility for pronunciation as I have in French: figuring out alternative spellings for words I don’t recognise right off the bat has never worked out for me.
• Accents:
  That one often puzzles my BF. I can understand a lot of the more common accents (Scottish, Irish, Australian, etc.), because I sat for my Cambrigde Certificate of Proficiency back when I was 17, and that part of the training for that included listening to a text which would necessarily be in an accent of the Commonwealth. However, somewhere along the line to fluency, I lost the ability to understand the accents of non-native speakers: someone speaking English with a heavy French accent is going to be very painful for me. I remember we went to a panel at the 2005 Worldcon, which had four native English speakers plus a Japanese man. I couldn’t make head nor tail of what the Japanese guy was saying; my BF, however, couldn’t understand the natives, but could deal with the Japanese accent just fine. I think that for him, all non-native accents are somehow kindred, no matter how different they might be from French. For me, they’re just… too unusual to be parsed, I guess.
  (it’s not that bad, though. A few hours are usually enough for me to pick up a new accent and add it to my repertoire. I had a lot of trouble understanding Jetse de Vries‘ Dutch accent when we first met, but by now it’s become second nature).

So… is it just me? Do you share some of those, or know people who have the same issues? Are there other pitfalls when you’re a non-native?

So, I came back from Vietnam recently; and one of the things that happened was sitting on the sofa and trying to explain stuff to the BF–and seeing how it all came together (or not) for him. That in turn made me think of an exercise I’ve attempted several times now, which is writing stories set in France for the benefit of an Anglophone audience–and of how this didn’t quite pan out the way I’d thought it would.

It’s a very different exercise from writing in a culture not related to me, such as the Aztecs (I’ll leave aside China, which is a little more problematic for me because China gave so much to Vietnam). And this set me thinking about the different approaches to writing a culture.

To simplify matters, let’s assign letters (yup, engineer at work). Suppose we have two cultures in presence. I’ll call the first one “A” (Americans, for instance). It’s your target audience. The second one is “B”, the one you’re attempting to write about (say, Chinese, Vietnamese, French…).

If you’re a member of B, then there are a number of things that are going to be way easier for you. The small things–you’re not going to oversweat, say, what time people of B usually get up at and what they have for breakfast, because you know. The big things: your outlook on life is likely to be typical of B already. You’re not going to contaminate the narration by, say, having a Vietnamese shouting at or striking his mother (pretty much unthinkable in Confucian ideology), or thinking that good French students go to university (we don’t. It’s rather complicated, but we have a two-tier higher education system, where only the worst students go into the state universities. The best ones go into “Grandes Ecoles”, the great schools of business, engineering and literature).
There are a number of things that are going to be harder, though. For you, pretty much anything belonging to B is natural, which means that you’ll likely spend less time describing it or even mentioning it at all. When a French character of mine goes home after work, I’m not going to make a big deal of their buying bread at the bakery, because for me it’s perfectly natural. I’m going to be tempted to skip the bakery description, too, because I assume my reader will know what I’m talking about.
Of course, the problem is that maybe they won’t. Maybe they come from a place where they don’t sell bread. Maybe a French bakery–with a long counter displaying cakes and viennoiseries under glass panes, and a cash register behind which you’ll find the different kinds of bread from baguettes to loafs–isn’t a sight that’s familiar to my reader at all. What I subconsciously assume is natural to A might not be at all: it might be slightly different, it might be counter-intuitive. I don’t describe the streets of Paris, but the truth is that they’re not the same as those of Los Angeles.
It’s what I’d tend to call the “insider” point of view: the flavour of the narration is pretty much bang to rights, but it can end up feeling pretty hard to relate to for a member of A, because you’ll likely end up leaving out the details that might have made sense to A (not to mention that the attitudes of the characters will be those of B, and that A might find them hard to relate to without explanations. It’s not easy to understand why the French are so obsessed with their two-tier education system unless you’ve been there). And I think that’s why people sometimes have trouble relating to “insider” stories–because they tend not to be formulated in the frame of reference to which the people of A used.

On the contrary, if you’re a member of A writing about B is going to have to learn things the hard way, by researching the culture–and speaking as someone who has a moderate amount of experience in the subject, this could be one of those things that take years before you can be anything like remotely proficient in culture B. But the sad truth is that no matter how many years you spend researching B, you’re always going to make mistakes. Even after all that research, you’ll get some of the little details wrong: the food, the daily habits. You’ll have some of your culture creeping into mindsets (because those tend to revert pretty quickly to your default pattern unless you’re really careful about what you’re doing. I know I always have the temptation to be an advocate for women’s rights in my historical fiction, even though I know that the idea of equality between genders didn’t make its way into popular culture until, at best, the tail end of the 19th century.
You’re going to have one huge advantage over a member of B writing about B, though: you’re already part of the target audience. You know, or can pretty easily find, what members of A will find odd or non-intuitive about B. At worst, this can degenerate into exoticism, where you use B for a touch of local colour and not much else; at best, it makes you able to find the bits of B that will speak to your audience, and make those bits stand out. You have a common frame of mind with your audience, which makes you able to easily reach out to it. Also, you’ve just spent some time (months to years) learning about B–and you’ve already gone through all the hassle of understanding the parts that didn’t seem to make sense at first. You know what is striking or unfamiliar, and you will usually think of describing those in your fiction.
This is what I’d tend to call the “outsider” writing: a lot of the time, the narration will be familiar while the mindset will be anything from completely wrong to slightly off, but this will have a much more palpable flavour, at least at first read.

Obviously, for a member of A looking for an “authentic” [1] narration about B, neither insider nor outsider are really satisfying: the first lack the details/character empathy that will make them feel included in the conversation between author and reader; and the second, while much easier to get into, is ultimately rather frustrating because it’s likely to be off.

I guess the best way to be authentic would be to merge both approaches, but it’s hard–I haven’t found many books that pulled this off satisfactorily (in fact, as I’m writing this, I’m struggling to think of a single one. If you know one, please chime in). It requires you to be equally proficient in both A and B, in order to both know about B and the bits of B will appeal to A. And then we move into a whole new category of problems, the main one being separating A and B in the author’s mind (same thing for a member of B who’s been living in A for a while, and is now writing about B).

In the meantime, you’re left with those–and I guess both have their merits and their flaws. I don’t have an easy solution to this (and I certainly don’t advocate that everyone should stick to writing what they know, which makes it all too easy to keep minds closed to other ways of life and other cultures). But it certainly brings up an interesting set of problems.

What do you think? Am I just stating the obvious? Have I got it completely wrong? Are there any approaches I left out, or anything else worth pointing out?

[1]It’s not the point of this post, but I think we can argue for a long while about what “authentic” means. It’s nowhere as clear-cut as it seems, especially in the light of today’s world where you can find very distinct subcultures everywhere (if you take Asians, Asian-Americans and Asians living in Asia will have a lot in common, but also a lot of differences. And the culture of, say, my grandparents is no longer the culture of twenty-something Vietnamese, even though they both live in the same country).
When do you start being authentic–is it only when you write about the little bit of subculture that you happen to be a part of? Is it when you write about your own country of origins? What if you’re a first or second-generation immigrant, or a mixed-race? It’s a thorny subject, and it’s likely to get thornier as the world shrinks on itself and people move effortlessly across boundaries.

This is part 4 of a series of posts on the setting of my Aztec fantasy series Obsidian and Blood, as a leadup to the release of Book 1, Servant of the Underworld, published by Angry Robot/HarperCollins (more information here, including excerpts and a book trailer). You can find part 1 (the Valley of Mexico) here, part 2 (the city of Tenochtitlan) here, and part 3 (about the Sacred Precinct and religion) here.

4. Acatl, and death in Mexica religion
My main character in the book is Acatl, High Priest for the Dead, who has the responsibility for investigating magical offences in the capital city of Tenochtitlan.

The word Acatl means “Reed”. It’s shorthand for his actual name, which is his date of birth in the calendar: Chiquacen Acatl, which means “The day Six Reed” [1]. I chose that name back when I was first writing “Obsidian Shards”, the very first story that featured him, for a number of reasons. The first is the association with the god Quetzalcoatl, Ce Acatl Topiltzin (see previous article)–who, among other things, was the patron of priests and of knowledge. The second is the symbolism of the day Six Reed itself: it has associations both with Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death (Acatl’s patron), and with the god of Justice–a fitting set of protectors for a death priest engaged in the investigation of magical crimes. [2]

Acatl’s patron is Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death. His name means “Lord of the Place of Death” (which I’ve shortened to “Lord Death” in the book for ease of reading), and he is one of the gods associated with the end of life. You can see a picture of him below, with the characteristic skeletal look.

The Aztec death system, like its religion, is complex. The basic idea is that there are several destinations for the spirits of the dead. What determines where someone ends up isn’t the respect of a particular morality (as in Christian religion). Instead, the only separating factor is the manner of death.

For those happy few who died in battle, their destination was Ilhuicatl Tonatiuh, the Heaven of the Sun. This included warriors who died on the battlefield, most sacrifice victims, as well as women who have died in childbirth. This last one can seem odd–but for the Mexica, childbirth was a struggle to bring a captive (the baby) into the world, an activity as dangerous as fighting other warriors in an effort to secure prisoners for sacrifice. Once ascended, the men would accompany the sun to its zenith; the women would then take over, from zenith to sunset. After four years, the spirits would come back into the mortal world: the men as butterflies, the women as moths. Below is a statue of a woman who has died in childbirth–transformed into a Cihuateteo, a fearsome female deity.

Another possible destination was Tlalocan, a watery paradise ruled by Tlaloc, the god of rain and storms. Those destined for Tlalocan had died of drowning, lightning strikes, and associated diseases (such as dropsy). There, they would enjoy the bliss of a land where crops bloomed year-long–Tlalocan is very much a peasants’ paradise, as Ilhuicatl Tonatiuh is that of warriors.

The babies who had died while still breastfeeding would go to Omeyocan, the Place of the Duality, where the supreme gods Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl would keep their spirits until they could be reborn after the end of the current age. In Omeyocan, the babies would suck the sap from a huge tree, as they had sucked milk from their mothers’ breasts. You might wonder what is the significance of breastfeeding: the answer is that it goes back to the link between blood and fertility. Those children are the ones who have never tasted the fruit of the earth–the fruit that have been sprouted thanks to the blood offerings of men. Hence, those babies have no debt either to the earth or the sun, and their spirits exist in a state much like the Christian state of grace.

You’ll notice that this barely covers any people at all. What of all the other spirits? The vast majority of people, those who did not fall into any of the categories outlined above, would go down into Mictlan, the Place of Death, or the underworld. This was a gloomy, cheerless place split over nine levels–from the entrance all the way down to the palace of Mictlantecuhtli and his consort Mictecacihuatl. On each of those levels, the spirit would face a gruelling trial. After four years of tribulation, the spirit reached the last level, where it was finally allowed to dissolve.

I adapted some of Mictlan’s trials into the underworld creatures Acatl deals with. The Wind of Knives, an elusive creature made of obsidian shards, corresponds to level five, where a wind as cutting as broken obsidian would tear the spirits apart. The beasts of shadows, with their taste for human hearts, come from level eight, where the spirit had to present a jade heart in order not have their own devoured by beasts.

Acatl himself takes on functions that pertain to all those places, since he investigates into magical crimes regardless of where the spirits might have gone (though he has access only to those spirits who have entered Mictlan, which can hinder him in his inquiries). I also gave him the more prosaic role of organising funerals, and helping the spirits’ passage into Mictlan. [3] Below is a particular form of funeral: a mummy bundle, which consists of putting the body in a foetal position, wrapping it in layers of clothes, and adding ornaments such as jade stones (the manner of disposing of the body also depended on the manner of death, but I’ll not go into details here).

And that concludes this series of articles about Aztec history–remember, Servant of the Underworld is out today if you want to check out what I did with all this nifty research. (order now–tell your friends–etc. :=) )

[1] The Mesoamerican calendar is a fascinating and complex system. I refer you to The Aztec calendar or Marie Brennan‘s article in Strange Horizons for brief introductions.
[2]In the series, I had to strike a balance between the Mexica fondness for tongue-twisting names, and readability for a Western audience unused to words of more than 4-5 syllables–so a lot of names were chosen for phonetic reasons and not because of any particular meaning.
If you’re curious, the names that do mean something, apart from Acatl and the gods’ names, are Ichtaca (“secret”), Mihmatini (“prudent one”), Palli (“leaf”), Teomitl (“arrow of the gods”), and Tizoc (“chalked leg”]). I’ll put up a character index at some point, promise.
For much the same reason of readability, I also fudged the rules for tacking on the honorific “tzin” at the end of a name (there’s a series of non-intuitive ways to tie together a noun and its “tzin”, but I figured I’d go a little easy on that before my readers went crazy).
[3]I fudged a bit here. There is, in reality, little evidence of a wide religious body associated with funerals. There is some reference to people who burnt bodies on pyres, but they seemed to have been officials rather than priests.