Clash of Star-Kings by Avram Davidson

obsidian.
    “Stay! Hold!”
    The Huitzilopochtli itself mounted the steps. Something gleamed in its paw. It seemed simultaneously vexed and puzzled. “We had anticipated the joy and pleasure of tasting heart and of being strengthened by the fluid of life,” it said. “But — see — ” It was the golden
ocelotl
, just now fallen from Luis’s suddenly spastic fingers. “This is a sigil of the so-called Great Old Ones and it is in some way connected and in communion with them. And even though we have often defeated them and driven them away from this and other worlds, and even though it is true that they are indescribably far from this world at present….”He brooded, emitting small squawking sounds from time to time; then the great grotesque head bobbed abruptly, nodded.
    “Release him; do not choose him again. Where he obtained a sigil, how many fives of centuries old it may be, I do not know. But inasmuch as our total plans embrace the ultimate and absolute defeat of those Great Old Ones, it is far from our desire that they be made aware of our presence for now. So. Go!” It flung out its hand and stalked stiffly away.
    The three men gazed at each other, blinking. They seemed to have awakened from a dream. Then the one with the knife severed Luis’s bonds. Another helped him to his feet, and the third restrung the cord with its gleaming symbol about his neck. “The gods have exempted you from sacrifice,” they said to him, softly, awed, without resentment. “How you have been honored!” And after a ceremonial leave-taking, they helped him rearrange his tattered clothing and conducted him respectfully back out of the hidden valley, down the gorge, and far, far down the escarpments of Ixtaccihuatl, until at last their feet touched a much-trodden trail.
    “Con permiso,”
he said, irony upheld by belatedly returned courage.
    They looked at him with sober eyes, sarcasm having totally passed them by.
“Pase Vd.,”
they said. And they watched him go, faces only faintly regretful, and totally drained of anger.
    There were many things in the mind of Luis as he picked his way down the path. Not smallest of the wonders was the difference between these men as he had known them in their outer appearances, boors and buffoons, dwellers in a despised quarter; and as he saw them now in their innerness, heritors of an antique trust and an ancient, unbounded faith.
    But the improvement was one which he felt that he and his fellow countrymen could well afford to do without.

VIII
    Tata Santiago Tue, his nephew Domingo Deuh, and others of the council of the pueblo of San Juan Bautista Moxtomi, sat at the feet of the Great Old Ones. The vast and benign countenances of the latter gazed upon the calm and trusting faces of the Indians.
    “It was not by our own wish,” explained the Elder Old One, first among equals in their own councils, “that we should leave you. True, that we were pleased to return to our home in the most distant stars, my sons. But we traveled, even then, between here and there with little more difficulty than any of you might travel between Chalco and Cuautla. Often we went, often we returned. We knew the Olmec, we knew the Toltec and the Mixtec and the Maya, as well as the Moxtomí and others. We loved them as our children, they loved us as their fathers; we taught them, they were apt, and learned. And so the maize grew and was harvested, and so the ages passed.”
    “When the Tenocha, whom some call the Azteca, came down from the north, what were they?”
    Tuc answered, his seamed face split by a bitter and contemptuous smile. “A handful of savages, lizard-eaters, knowing nothing of agriculture or of any other of the arts of civilized men. War was all that they knew — only war!”
    But as the Aztecs were descending from the north, fighting and butchering as they went; at about this same time the Huitzili were descending on the land from their own home-world among the distant, distant Evil Stars.