How to see ghosts or surely bring them to you

Title: Salt and Ashes
Fandom: Original. Written for s2b2 'historical romance' issue 24
Rating: R
Warnings: Gay Aztec sex. Don't let it put you off.
Summary: Historical slash fiction. Read here at the shousetsu bang* bang archive.People seem to like it. I am pleased.
 
Salt And Ashes

I don't usually write slash, but I *do* write historical fiction, so when I read this month's prompt I was undecided whether or not to submit anything. I did, of course, and I'm glad I did.

Mesoamerican history is endlessly fascinating.I never got taught any of it in school, so it's new and exciting in a way that say, North American, Irish, or English history isn't.The one thing I knew was that the Aztecs (Mexica) didn't have wheels (true, they lived on a lake surrounded by a lot of pointy mountains and had no draft animals, so there wasn't much point) They also had one of the largest cities in that period. They had an incredibly sophisticated civilisation. And yes, they sacrificed people.

I didn't know whether or not to put human sacrifice in Salt and Ashes. It's the one thing everyone knows about the Mexica, but then, it's also the one thing everyone knows about the Mexica. It went in, because by then I'd made my main character a priest, but I had deeply ambivalent feelings about including it.

Take Apocalypto, for example. It's Mayan, (similar culture, further to the south) but set in the same time period as this story. The film is the best film about Mayan civilisation I've ever seen. It's also the only film about Mayan civilisation I've ever seen, but that's beside the point. The film goes out of its way to make the city folk seem bizarre. There are corpses (lots of them) and blood (lots of it), and as the wonderful Jonathan Dalton of the webcomic Lords of Death and Life says, none of it was untrue. You can't look at any one element of the film and say 'The Maya didn't do that'. Including the sacrifices.* Especially the sacrifices.

Whether the film gives a balanced portrayal of the Maya civilisation is a whole different question.

But anyway. Enjoy the story. I enjoyed writing it. I could have happily spent longer writing about the crazy mid-and post-Conquest adventures of Zolin and Matlal and their forbidden god-sanctioned love, but it's time to move on.


*although the Maya probably wouldn't have had piles of sacrificed corpses lying around all over the place. They would have been eaten.