I made myself cry. My parents cried too. I couldn’t see them following behind us, but I knew they were with me.

The procession wound its way up the path in the dim light of predawn to the mournful sound of flutes. There were seven litters, and I was in the seventh, dressed in the finery that the priests had given me the night before. I was carried by two teenaged priests: one in front and one behind. My face was painted with itchy liquid rubber and dotted with brown amaranth paste, but I didn’t scratch it. I was careful to follow my parents’ and the priests’ instructions.

The seven of us being carried were all little kids, or “littles” as we called ourselves informally. In contrast to the liminal, dependent existence of nursing infants who were under four, we littles ate maize, wore clothing, and trained in the professions of our parents. The next quadrennial Izcalli festival that would have made us “bigs”—when I would have been ten and the others as young as seven—was yet three years away.

Because we had been claimed by the rain gods, we would never see it.

We reached the first stop, a stone platform on the mountain Quauhtepetl. My litter was moved along with the others to form a circle. The litter of the first boy, perhaps six years old, was lowered. He stepped forward as the priests carrying him stepped back into the circle. The first boy, who now shared the mountain’s name, who was the mountain, this place of respected and feared mahuiztoc power, was dressed in a dark green cape that matched the feathers encircling his head and the greenstone necklace and bracelets that we all wore. His cape was the same colour as mine, but decorated in pieces of paper.

The mountain boy bravely approached the fire priest who stood on the platform. Last night’s vigil had softened the shock of the priests’ appearance, but still, I thought I could see the boy tremble as he stepped up to the priest. 

Like all of us, he understood what was to happen. Perhaps like me, both of his parents had talked to him about it many times, helping him to understand, comforting him, practising as much as possible.

Remember us, my father had said. Remember everything that you love, everything that you’ll miss. Use that to fuel your tears. You must cry.

Remember duty, my mother had added.

No one but us could do this. It was an honour, a privilege, a burden. 

One that none of us could, or asked to, change.

Without death there is no life, my mother had said once. Without us, the gods would be weak, and without the gods, we would not live.

The boy didn’t flinch when the fire priest grasped his arm, though the priest looked scarier than death, scarier than hunger. His long black hair was thick and tangled, matted with old blood, cascading down his back until it tangled at his waist. Never washed and never cut, my mother had told me, to protect the fiery power of his tonalli. The priest’s ears were covered in scabs from autosacrifice or self-bloodletting.

The priest looked neither cruel nor kind, only resolved. He untied the cape around Quauhtepetl, and the singing stopped. Only the wind—Ehecatl—blew, waiting for his sacrifice, his choice, his child. The sky was lightening.

A moment of eye contact between the fire priest and the boy.

Then the priest slashed Quauhtepetl’s throat.

No one made noise. Red blood ran onto brown skin, gushing like the rain that was so desperately needed, like the clear tears of the boy that had fallen dutifully, lovingly, necessarily, until the end. A life for a life, a death for rebirth.

The priest eased the boy down to the stone.

The boy was still there in his body, and would be for hours yet. The active tonalli would fade, its passive remnants lingering in his hair, and the tonalli and ihiyotl both would disintegrate with the corpse. However, the teyolia, which was the boy’s self, spirit, and heart, was not embodied. It would be released when he was buried beneath the soil of the earth, the earth that linked this plane to that of Tlalocan.

We would not stay to watch the burial. The litters were already moving, circling the platform once before starting down the hill again. The group divided. The parents of the boy and some priests and priestesses would stay. 

The sun, Tonatiuh, was breaking over the horizon when a voice rang out into the quiet. A lone singer heralded the dawn, and mourned Quauhtepetl. Others joined her until we were surrounded by a chorus. It was a song of heartbreak, of change, of cycles of loss and rebirth.

I had never been so close to singers—mostly priestesses, priests, and tlatlocotin—and the beauty of the sound was enough to bring back my tears. The flutes started up again: sad, sweet, a sound of wind rather than fire.

And wind brought the rains.

Wind was a part of us, my mother had taught me. The ihiyotl is the body’s wind, a cool force that came from the earth to oppose and balance the tonalli which came from the sun. Both kept us alive, and kept ourselves—our teyolia—with our bodies.

But soon we would no longer be alive. We would move on to Tlalocan, the lush realm of the rain gods, where we would have new work to do. We would give them life and strength with our deaths, by allowing them to die and be reborn through our bodies, and after, we would serve them.

My mother had explained it once. The gods are not so different from us, she had said. They are more powerful, and we respect and depend upon them for it, but a human can become a god and a god can claim a human. Like everything in this world, the gods too are vulnerable, and the gods too can die. Maize and rain and sun and wind are all gods, and they all need new strength sometimes, to be reborn. They are fragile like us, and would grow old and weak without the gifts of our sacrifice.

I closed my eyes and listened to the beautiful singing and the steady marching of feet. In this way I was carried all the way to our second stop—the mountain of Yoaltecatl.

Again, our litters formed a circle. Again, one was lowered. The second boy stepped forward hesitantly. His cape was black striped with chili red. Like all of us, he wore it fastened below the neck as if we were nobles, which only three of us actually had been. When my cape had first been put on me, I had wanted to tug the knot over my right shoulder where it usually lay.

Yoaltecatl looked younger than the rest of us—perhaps four compared to my seven—and had to be prodded forward toward the fire priest. He wasn’t crying—his eyes were too wide with fear. It was a bad sign. Both of my parents had told me that. You must cry.

Yoaltecatl resisted at the last minute, but he had no hope of escape. His blood washed down his chest as the priest lowered him. Someone wailed, half singing, half crying. It was harder to watch, my mother had said, when someone struggled.

No one wants to do this, my father had said more than once, his face grim, but it has to be done. Without the rains, we will all die. We all must do our part, including you.

Again, we left. Again, some stayed. Again, the devastatingly sad music began again.

The next stop was Tepetzinco.

It was the month of Atlcahualo. On a normal year, it was the first of four months when we children were sacrificed to the rain gods, the others being Tlacaxipehualiztli, Tozoztontli, and Huey Tozoztontli. In the first month there were seven of us. In the second there were fourteen—two at each place. In the third there were twenty-one. In the fourth there were twenty-eight. In times of drought, when the rain gods did not send rain from the mountains, more children were sacrificed. My mother told me of a sacrifice in the year I was born where forty-two children were sacrificed in one day, and after they were sacrificed their bodies were buried in the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan itself.

“Why children?” I had asked my mother. I knew that two thirds of sacrifices were of adults, and that most sacrifices involving children were not exclusively of us.

“Because the rain gods asked for you,” she said tenderly, brushing a hair from my cheek. “You are new, like the life created by rain. They have a place for you in Tlalocan.”

“Tlalocan is beautiful,” my father said, that same pained gravity in his eyes. His hand sought out my mother’s, though his eyes didn’t waver from me. “Lush with life. There is always enough rain there, so there is always enough food. You will work, of course—there will always be work to do—but Tlalocan is beautiful.”

Tlalocan was only one of four destinations after death, I knew. My younger brother who had died last year while still nursing had gone to Chichihuacualco instead.

“It’s a great tree that will keep nursing him,” my father had explained while my mother cried. “Then he will come back and be reborn to another family.”

Those who went to Chichihuacualco—infants still nursing, who hadn’t yet eaten maize or become littles—were the only ones who returned to the world of the living.

We formed a circle at Tepetzinco. This time it was the girl who was lowered, who stepped forward. She looked my age, in a loose shift and long skirt of light blue, her wavy black hair reaching her shoulders. Long hair was something only allowed at adulthood at thirteen and was kept either until marriage or until a warrior made his first capture.

Tepetzinco was brave. She did not look afraid, did not hesitate as she approached the priest, flint knife in hand. She did the mountain justice; embodied its strength and resolve. She even smiled for a moment at the priest, unless I imagined it. Instead of a cape to untie, the priest helped her remove her shift, leaving only her long skirt tied at the waist by a darker blue sash. Again, the singing stopped. Somewhere a bird cried. And Tepetzinco’s throat was cut in a single smooth motion. She was lowered gently to the ground.

There were only three more littles in front of me, before it would be my turn. I hoped that I could do Yiauhqueme justice, be Yiauhqueme in the one moment where I needed to be. To have the strength, power, and grace of a rain-bringing mountain; to let it die and be reborn through my flesh.

It had already begun. I wore the colours and insignia of the mountain, and they changed me. I felt braver, stronger, older. The teotl or god version of myself, and the human version of the mountain. I wore liquid rubber on my face, and rubber sandals or cactli on my feet, for rubber showed the rain. I wore a cape the same dark green as lush vegetation, tied at the front to expose my otherwise naked body. I wore bracelets and a necklace of real greenstone. I wore a headband from which tall feathers extended, among them the most precious green feathers of quetzal birds.

The priests carrying me swapped out for others, sweat dripping from their brows, and we set off again.

We were from Popotlan, my parents, my three sisters, my elder brother and I. It was a small city southeast of Tlacopan, on the shores of the lake. Our city welcomed any who took the northern branch of the western causeway out of Tenochtitlan. Across the water at the end of the causeway, we could see Tenochtitlan itself—the most powerful of the three capitals, and the greatest city in the empire.

We were from a calpulli that specialized in mat weaving. We were ordinary folk who walked barefoot, our feet tough and calloused. We wore our capes fastened over our right shoulders. We used green stones in place of real greenstone when needed. We wore clothing of maguey fibre, not the softer, lighter cotton that I now wore. We never owned quetzal feathers.

But I, like the other six littles, had changed. We had been chosen.

Last night the seven of us had held vigil in the House of Mists in Tenochtitlan along with the priests. The priestesses had served us finer food than I had ever eaten, and we had been able to speak to each other a little. The girl in blue had been a Tepaneca who hailed from a calpulli of feather workers in the capital of Tlacopan, and Quauhtepetl, the first to die, had been an Acolhua from the capital of Texcoco on the eastern side of the lake. Most of the others had come from places I didn’t know, except the boy who now road first in line, a noble boy from Tlatelolco, which was the sister city of Tenochtitlan and shared the same island.

We stopped. It was the Tlatelolcan boy’s turn now. We were at the base of the mountain of Poyauhtlan—this time we did not climb it, but stopped where a spring trickled from the mountain’s side. This time the litters formed a semi-circle, facing the altar beside the nearly dry spring.

The boy Poyauhtlan was lowered and he stepped out of his litter. He approached the priest and the platform with his chin high, his steps confident, despite that he wore no cape. Instead, every part of his naked body had been painted black with coloured liquid rubber. Even his sandals were black. The green of his necklace, bracelets and feathers stood out.

Silence fell. I had forgotten all of the sounds until they stopped. The boy Poyauhtlan was proud, and gazed boldly into the eyes of the fire priest. A single tear fell from his eye, a flash of triumph the last expression on his face before Poyauhtlan’s throat, too, was cut. Emotion roiled in my gut, my liver, and I turned it into tears. I was afraid, but I did not show it.

With Poyauhtlan’s death we headed away from the hills and mountains, toward the lake, but we stopped almost immediately, not far from those who had stayed with Poyauhtlan. The three remaining litters had been lowered. My mother had told me of this. When we had gone half way, when four of seven had died, we would have a chance to go pee.

And I did so with relief, ignoring the people. My gaze caught on Pantitlan for a moment, the boy who was destined for the lake. He wore a cape studded with pearls. Like all of us, he was naked underneath. The wearing of a maxtlatl or loincloth was something reserved for bigs, just like the piercing of ears, though girls wore the clothing of adult women (a skirt to go with their shift) when they became littles. I would have started wearing a maxtlatl at my Izcalli in nearly three years (or two years and seventeen of eighteen of the year’s months away). Then I would have been ten, on the oldest end of littles becoming bigs, and only three more years from becoming an adult.

Before we started off again, they handed us drinks so we wouldn’t be too dehydrated to cry. I took the cool ceramic cup and stared down into the dark and frothy drink within. Chocolatl—a drink gifted by the gods and reserved for nobility. The only times I had drunk it in my life were before we set out in the morning and during the previous night’s vigil. I sipped the thick drink as my litter was hoisted up again. It was cool and very bitter, with the unmistakable spice of chilli peppers. It was the last thing I would ever drink.

It was midday now, and the day was warm and dry. The sun, the 5th sun, would be changing hands now. Almost everyone who was sacrificed went to Tonatiuh Ilhuicac, the realm of the sun Tonatiuh. The men helped the sun rise, and the women helped it sink until it was passed to the hands of the people in the lower world of Mictlan and the earth became dark. For four years those men and women helped the sun make it across the sky, and then they changed—the women into goddesses, the healing Tzitzimime, and the men into hummingbirds and other nectar drinkers and pollinators, helping plants to grow. This was the destiny of almost all of those who were sacrificed. We were an exception.

The rain gods choose their helpers carefully, my father had said. Some go by lightning, others by drowning, some by illnesses of water.

Tlaloc tecuhtli and Chalchiuhtlicue were the greatest of the Tlalocs, but there were many of them, including all of the great mountains that would die today. They had chosen me, and I belonged and was now part of them.

The singing lulled me into a sort of detached peace. They were singing the heartbreak, so I didn’t need to dwell in it. I only needed to listen and marvel. I was Yiauhqueme.

At the shores of Lake Texcoco, canoes waited for us. Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco was on an island to the south west of this lake, the greatest of the four lakes that merged into one during the wet season. The canoes were made from dugout tree trunks, each with an animal sculpted out of the bow, and we rode two to a canoe. Not everyone would come with us. Only seven canoes were paddled out, three of them carrying the last three of us to die. The others from the procession, including my parents, would wait on the shore.

We weren’t expected to paddle or even stand, so instead I knelt and listened. In the four canoes that didn’t hold a child, the person in front began to play a drum, standing just like the paddlers behind them. They all played in the same time, though they embellished it differently, and the paddlers followed the rhythm. The singing became more chant-like, punctuating the beat. The only other sound I could hear was the steady lapping of water against the hull. I knelt, back straight, and kept my gaze forward on the stunning, sparkling lake in front of us. The front of my canoe was an eagle’s head.

Pantitlan was a place I had heard of even before I had been chosen. It was a place in the middle of Lake Texcoco where a whirlpool often formed, a place sacred to Chalchiuhtlicue and Tlaloc tecuhtli, a door to their world. Pantitlan alone—the boy in a cape of blue and grey, spotted with pearls—would not be buried. Instead he would enter the realm of earth and water via the lake itself.

I was not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what looked like a small belly button in the lake ahead. It looked only two handspans across, but we stopped a ways back from it. The canoes rafted up to each other, one person holding on to the wood of the next, with the canoe of the main priest and the boy Pantitlan on one end. The drums had stopped, and now the chanting did too.

I closed my eyes before remembering I shouldn’t. I opened them in time to see Pantitlan, his cape gone, crumpled into the fire priest’s arms, his chest covered in blood. After all of his blood had flowed into the lake, the boy’s body was passed over to the next canoe, and that canoe broke off from our raft as the head priest’s was drawn closer. The single canoe approached the whirlpool, the two men standing and paddling while the body of the boy lay between them. When they were close to the whirlpool, one lifted the body. For a moment I could see the rock tied to the boy’s ankle before he was dropped over the side and the two men quickly paddled back. Pantitlan had joined Pantitlan, reborn and re-strengthened, and the boy would soon reach Tlalocan.

I had never been so close to sacrifices, I reflected as I was paddled back. I had seen them from a distance of course—everyone had—but never close enough to see the face of the priest or the cut wound of the person who was sacrificed. I had never talked to the person who died before.

Last month was an ordinary Izcalli and no one was sacrificed—in contrast to the one every four years where littles became bigs and people were sacrificed—but the month before had been Tititl, where, like most months, there was a sacrifice in the main capital. A human god or teixiptla was sacrificed, a human who was transformed into their teotl—god or perfected—form so that through them, a god might die and be reborn. I had seen this from a distance, from down below, outside of the Great Temple Precinct. From there, the decaying heads of the tzompantli rack were at least as horrifyingly fascinating as anything happening at the temples within.

And it wasn’t true that I had never seen such people myself before they died. The teixiptla of Tezcatlipoca wandered the huey capital all year before another one took his place. We had seen him once, on a trip to Tenochtitlan, and my two elder sisters had spoken their admiration for the handsome young god.

Tezcatlipoca was the reason my mother knew so much about the empire’s rituals, and could tell me in advance what the fire priests looked like up close. A long time ago, she had been one of Tezcatlipoca’s wives.

She still sounded sad when she spoke of it.

Tezcatlipoca was one of the most powerful gods, my mother told me. He was the brother of Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl and both were gods of wind and sky, but Tezcatlipoca existed in night winds and bad smells instead of Ehecatl’s day winds and good smells. Like the ihiyotl, the breath of wind that flows through everyone, Tezcatlipoca could be intimately close, or as far away as the winds of a distant storm.

Choosing the teixiptla, the human form of Tezcatlipoca, was very important. The man had to be perfect: beautiful and smart, with musical talent and good speaking skills. He could not be too short or too tall, fat or disabled in any way. This is why my sisters had swooned.

But my mother had not. Years ago, she had been Xochiquetzal, one of Tezcatlipoca’s four wives who lived with him for the last month before he was sacrificed. She had gone with him in the same boat, him and his other three wives, as they rowed to the small temple where he would die. She had returned. Tezcatlipoca had not.

It felt like what was happening now, with Pantitlan, and I took comfort in knowing that my mother had experienced something similar once. 

We are trusting you, she had said sadly. It is a great responsibility to be part of this, to serve the gods, to pay them for their gifts, to help them live. We are trusting you to do what adults do. And I know you will. She hugged me. I love you, she murmured fiercely into my hair.

I tapped the life back into my feet as we pulled up at the shore again, and I walked the short steps over to my litter. I sat and was raised up once again, the remnants of the procession around us. I was second in line now, behind Cocotl. Singing and flute-playing began again, and I closed my eyes to listen. I felt the wind touch my black hair and painted skin, and breathed it in. Wind brought the rains, and needing the rains to come was the reason we were all here. Our blood for water, our bodies for food.

The singers took up a new song and I recognized it, but the words took on a new meaning for me now.

“This, friends, is your precious song, and this I know, and this you also know: life passes once. In but a day we’re gone, in but a night we’re shorn on earth. And as for having come to know each other, this we merely borrow here on earth. May we live in gentleness, in peace!”

The power of those words filled me, and the hope of those words. Hope, I realized, was why we were all here. Hope that life would continue. Hope that it would be worth the cost.

Cocotl was a hill that we crested next. No circle of litters were made now, for mine was the only one left. Cocotl’s human form was a boy of about five, in a cape of chilli red and leafy green. He didn’t stand tall, but rather approached the priest with his shoulders caved. He looked like he had seen too much, like he didn’t want to believe what was happening. When he reluctantly approached the priest and the priest reached out to untie his cape, Cocotl suddenly lurched forward into the priest’s arms. 

Even the priest looked surprised for a moment, before duty reclaimed his expression. He patted Cocotl on the back and pushed him away gently but firmly. He stared him in the eyes for a moment. I’m not sure what happened, but Cocotl nodded, taking in an uneven breath, and started to cry audibly.

The priest removed his cape and pulled out his flint knife. Cocotl closed his eyes, clutched his brown hands to his heart, and then collapsed in a waterfall of blood.

Yes, I was afraid, but no, I didn’t let it claim me or my tonalli. I, in a body and a complex of sunshine and heat, earth and wind, refused to give up any ounce of my life until I gave it all. I would be Yiauhqueme. I would be a mountain, a rain bringer, a life giver. I would help my people just as my mother had once done. 

I had to focus. You must cry, my parents had told me. For crying helped bring the rains.

Remember duty, my mother had urged.

Remember us, my father had wished. Remember everything that you love. Use that to fuel your tears.

So I did. I closed my eyes, and pictured our home in Popotlan, not far from the lake. From the outside you could see a garden of crops next to a building with baked adobe walls and a thatched roof. Inside was a single room divided into four: the cooking area where my sisters and mother prepared tortillas and tomales; the corner where the shrine to the gods sat (among them Nappatecutli, the god of mat-weavers and our calpulli district); the dining area where we ate together; and the sleeping area where we slept together, blankets folded neatly in a basket during the day. The floor was covered in woven mats, but a simpler kind than what my parents made for nobles. I remembered watching my father, diligently, but also in awe, as he wove mats of bright colours and intricate designs, mats that wove fire yellows into lush greens, water blues into sacred blacks, and white like bone and ash through them all.

I remembered accompanying my mother on a market day when she sold the mats and taught my sisters how to barter. I remembered the shouting and the happy, busy cacophony of market day in Tenochtitlan. I remembered being part of my family.

I stopped, blinking open my eyes, unable to keep going. I didn’t fight the tears.

We were climbing Yiauhqueme. It was almost the end.

“We only rise from sleep,” the singers sang. “We come only to dream. It is not true, it is not true, that we come on earth to live.”

The lament filled me with despair. I scrunched my eyes tight. It was a common idea, one that I had overheard my sisters discussing not long ago, that life was a dream. But whatever that meant, I had lived it. I had dreamed. I had loved my family.

It suddenly felt of utmost importance that I remember, that I not lose my last few moments. I closed my eyes to the trees and the priests, and opened them again to a past that tore through my teyolia, that tore through my self, with feeling. The voices of tlatlocotin singing in an aching chorus with the priests and priestesses called forth a memory from my past, and I let the memory surround me. 

I had overheard my parents talking about a thief from a neighbouring calpulli who had been sold as a tlacotli to the noble family he had tried to rob. The tlatlocotin were people paying off debts, my father had explained to me when he found me listening. Sometimes those debts were from crime, but sometimes people sold themselves or their children as tlatlocotin because they were poor. My mother had hugged me then, and murmured her thanks that we were not so badly off.

But we all had debts to pay, I knew. Life itself was a debt. A debt to so many gods for so many things. We owed Tlatecuhtli who had become the earth in a world of water, and Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca who had torn her apart to create it. We owed the god Nanahuatzin, who jumped bravely into a fire and sacrificed himself in order to become the 5th sun in a world of darkness. We owed Coatlicue and all those who sacrificed themselves afterward in order to make that new sun move. We owed Cihuacoatl, for grinding bones and blood to create humans, to make a new—the fifth, the final—age of human life. We owed the rain gods who fed our crops and gave us the water we so desperately needed.

And we owed each other, in addition to the gods. We owed the dead of Tonatiuh Ilhuicatl who helped the sun across the sky each morning, the men lifting, the women lowering. We owed the dead of Mictlan, who then took it through the lower world to the eastern horizon once more. We owed the priests, who did what so few of us could ever manage to do.

We owe you, my father had said gently, his hand on my bare left shoulder across from the knot of my cape. Just as you owe all those who came and died before you. You can never repay them, but you can play your part.

When you reach Tlalocan, my mother added, you will have a part to play then as well, with the honour of serving the rain gods.

But we will miss you, my father said softly, his dark eyes bright with tears.

The same tears that now flowed down my face.

We had arrived. I was lowered, too fast. I stood and approached the priest as the light of an ending day shone golden. I searched his eyes for signs of who he was, of who he had been, but all I saw was what my mother had spoken of: duty and resilience.

I was Yiauhqueme, his teotl human, and I felt that strength. Yiauhqueme was me and was in me and with my death, he would be reborn. I was part of a great weaving, just like those created by the father of a common boy from Popotlan. I was a thread of dark green, the colour of the cape I wore, the colour of healthy leaves.

The colour of Tlalocan.

The priest reached forward to untie my cape, and I saw, up close, the dried blood that crusted around the holes in his ears, and matted this thick, tangled black hair. The cape fell from my shoulders, and with it, I felt like a toddler again, an infant who yet walked naked in the world, who had yet to eat maize, one more gift for which we owed.

I remembered the hugs of my siblings the day before. I remembered my eldest sister squeezing my hand, her face beautiful even in the resolve of her grief. I remembered my parents, holding me between them, and felt them watching from the now-small circle.

The priest’s hand gripped the dark flint knife, carefully worked on both sides. I thought of life. I thought of love, and the hope it created. A final tear slid down my painted cheeks.

A flash of pain at my throat, a warm rush of blood, and I fell forward into the priest’s arms on the mountain I had become.

***

This is a work of historical fiction based on the annual sacrifice of children to the rain gods by the Aztec people, ca. 1500CE(AD). In the Aztec Empire, human sacrifice was an incredibly important practice for maintaining the balance of nature, and all types and ages of people were sacrificed, including children much younger than the protagonist here. Childhood was divided into three stages (in this piece, the older two are called “littles” and “bigs”), and adulthood was reached around 12 or 13 (though all of these stages were defined by groups of children rather than their exact ages). Overall, children were treated much like adults in Aztec culture, so while the seven-year-old protagonist in this piece is very young by modern Western standards, he would have already had more responsibilities and maturity than many equivalently aged children in the West today, and would have been working with his parents from around the age of four. The sacrifice of children to the rain/rain gods was likely an annual practice, but most colonial and Spanish estimates of Aztec sacrifice are far higher than what the archaeological and other data suggest: rather than tens of thousands per year, probably only hundreds of people were sacrificed in a normal year in the empire (of nearly 6 million people), including war captives from outside the empire itself.