"Legion commander! The revered Divine King has issued a decree and sent me with a reply!..."
"! What did His Majesty the Divine King say?..."
"The Divine King said the Zapotec may be given a funeral! It will lessen some future resistance to the Alliance Army's southern conquest... But you must, absolutely must, without fail, protect Prince Xolotl's safety! Oh, and a squad of twenty Shadow Guards has come along too..."
"Good! I've already contacted the Zapotec side... Then report back to the Prophet. Three days from now, before the Zapotec stockade at the mouth of the valley, we will hold a sacred funeral!..."
The Sun rose three times, and the sacrificial Divine Altar was built once more. Two thousand Alliance Warriors, clad in armor and gripping spears, guarded the high Divine Altar, watching the east vigilantly.
Two or three li to the east was the end of the long, narrow valley road, the stockade at the mouth of Oaxaca Valley. At this moment, hundreds of Zapotec warriors stood atop the crude wooden wall, clustered together as they looked west. More than thirty envoys from the various Zapotec tribes all wore bird feathers and feather robes, standing beneath the Divine Altar with complicated eyes.
The morning sunlight carried the orange of the bonfires, laying a warm, faint glow over both the living and the dead. More than two hundred bodies of Zapotec nobles and warriors were wrapped in war garments and laid out in a line across the open ground.
The Zapotec envoys had already checked the identities of these bodies. Some wept, some prayed, and some took the dead men's teeth and hair, carefully placing them into cloth bags. Of course, still more bodies could not be identified and had no one to claim them, like wandering souls without