Huitzilin, the Warrior Hummingbirds

Aunt Bramble
Wyrdlore Society

Tonight the lanterns are lit, the leaves are all down, and everyone is tucked in, so let me tell you about the littlest, brightest travellers in the whole wide world: the hummingbirds.

Long ago, in the land we now call Mexico, the Mexica people believed the sun needed friends to go with it. Every morning the sun climbed up into the sky, and every evening it slipped down into the dark, and in between it crossed a very long road indeed. It did not walk that road alone. It was carried, people said, by warriors, the bravest of the brave, who had given all their courage to the sun and were allowed to walk beside it as it crossed the morning sky.

For four years, so the story goes, these warriors travelled with the sun, singing it up over the mountains each day, shield and feather bright, keeping it good company. And when the four years had passed, something wonderful happened. Each warrior came home. Not as a soldier, not as a person at all, but as a hummingbird, small as a thumb, dressed in feathers the colour of fire and river water.

The Mexica called these little travellers huitzilin. They believed that when a hummingbird hovers by a flower, flashing green and red and gold, it might be one of those old warriors, returned to the gardens of the living, still swift, still fearless, only quieter now, and sweeter, feeding on nectar instead of glory.

That is why, even today, people watch for hummingbirds around the time the dead are remembered, when marigolds are set along the paths and candles are lit for those who are gone. A hummingbird at the window, they say, might be a visitor, come to see how the garden is doing.

So if ever you see one, hanging in the air as if it weighs nothing at all, wings too fast to see, you might think of a warrior who once walked beside the sun, and who found his way home again, small and gold and already halfway into flight.

Aunt Bramble keeps the Society's stories for its smallest members. She has never been anywhere in a hurry, owns a very old coat with very deep pockets, and holds that a story does not have to be tidy to be true.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.