Children of the Sun - The Fall of the Aztecs

I have long wanted to tell this story. The Conquest of Mexico by the Spanish is one of the great conflicts of history and many have written about it. ‘Children of the Sun’ however, tells the story from the Aztec point of view.
We all know about the bloody sacrifices but how many of us know about the other side of the Aztecs. That they loved poetry and music. They were fine orators. They would spend hours in philosophical discussion. They were terrible gamblers, sometimes selling themselves into slavery to pay their debts. They ran a huge empire whose capital, the beautiful city of Tenochtitlan housed 250,000 people. They had law and order and universal education for all boys and some girls. But despite all this, they lived in constant fear of their gods whom they fed with a daily diet of human hearts, preferably still warm and beating.

This is a novel. Although I have followed the history closely, some of my characters really existed – the Emperor Montezuma, his daughter Tecuichpo, whom I have called Jewel, his Chief Councillor the Woman Snake.There would have been a High Priest of Tlaloc like Black Dog. I needed a scholar like Lizard to re-write the histories after they were destroyed. And I had to have a dwarf – they were adored at court where they performed as acrobats or played and sang in the choirs and orchestras.And no story of the Aztecs would be complete without a merchant like Wandering Coyote. It was the merchants who made Tenochtitlan the rich mercantile city that it was. More...