This post was inspired by a writing prompt in the Worldbuilding Community - Worldbuilding Prompt #1047 - Tomorrow
Just for a change, I've set it in our own world, a few centuries in the past.
Enjoy !
The cell's walls were made of massive cyclopean stone blocks. Bernardo watched as the cool stones forced the water vapour in the intensely humid air to condense. Occasionally, a droplet would start to run down the block it had formed on. He'd lick it off; it was the only sustenance he'd had for three days.
Three days since the savages had captured him. His comrades and he had been beaten back across the causeway, a hurried fighting retreat that so nearly turned into a rout. They'd got away, mostly. Some of them had been killed, hit by sling stones and dropping into the murky waters. Others had gone down fighting, buried under a tide of natives led by their ferocious jaguar warriors. Bernardo was one of them. It was a discussion they'd had around many camp fires, the peculiar way these odd natives fought to try to take captives rather than killing every enemy they could as decent Europeans would do.
No-one had expected the natives to fight back so fiercely after El Capitano had trapped their king in his own palace, maintaining the facade that the Spanish were honoured guests. But all the while the native king had been plundering his own people to try to raise the ransom demanded for his freedom. And, as it turned out, sending secret messages to get his vassals and subjects to raise a massive army of relief.
Now, Bernardo was sitting in this cell waiting to find out what would happen next.
The heavy wooden door creaked open, and two natives entered. First was a jaguar warrior, his spotted fur hood pushed back and mask hanging at his side, but his maquahuitl with it's razor-sharp obsidian blades held at the ready. Then following him, one of the native girls; slim, dark skinned and dark eyed, dressed in a white cotton tunic, her black hair held by a headband of coloured beads.
She spoke to him, in his own language. He struggled at first to understand; her Spanish was poor, and she still used the lilting accent of her people.
"Tomorrow is the day, Spanish. Do you want to know what you will be doing tomorrow ?"
Bernardo nodded. His heart was beating in his chest; no prisoners had ever been returned to their army or exchanged for the high-ranking nobles they'd taken. No one knew what had become of them.
"Tomorrow you will ascend the pyramid of the Sun, escorted as an honoured prisoner by jaguar warriors. At it's peak, you will be in full sight of your army. They are camped at the edge of the lagoon, licking their wounds like beaten chihuahuas. You will be greeted at the top of the pyramid by an eagle priest of Tonatiuh. He will cut your heart out and show it, still beating, to your invader friends. This will grant us victory and a good harvest.
She smiled, a strange beneficent expression.
"I am here to wash you. What you will be doing tomorrow, Spanish, is dying."