Blood, Feathers & Holy Men

By: Ben Nuttall-Smith

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This is a story of Quétzalcoatl – a major Toltec, Mayan and Aztec deity, connecting the ancient myth to a Tenth Century European Irish priest, a handful of young monks, two Norsemen, and an Irish slave-girl. When Hernando Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519 Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, believed him to be the god Quétzalcoatl returning, as promised. In 910, an Irish priest and five monks are shipwrecked in the Hebrides and taken as slaves by Norse traders. Through a series of cataclysmic geophysical events, the Norse ship is pushed to a strange new land, where the priest, three monks, the Irish girl and two Norsemen are left to learn the ways of the natives. One monk – the priest's spiritual rival – marries a chief's daughter and eventually becomes a shaman, opening the gate to a new understanding but contributing to a spiritual crises for the priest who escapes into madness. The mad priest and his companions travel on, reaching the Gulf of Mexico. The priest recovers his sanity and the Europeans seem content to remain among the fishermen natives. Miraculously, they find remnants of the serpent-headed Norse ship and decide to rebuild her. With a large contingency of Toltec warriors, the Europeans sail to Yucatan where the priest founds a new Toltec capital city in the desert, is made king, and becomes an historical embodiment of the Mayan-Toltec god Quétzalcoatl. The shaman-monk is summoned by visions to rescue the priest from forces of evil. Battles are fought and good men die. When everything seems to have been resolved, fate steps in fulfilling the mystery, beauty and horror of the Quétzalcoatl myth.