Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Four Hundred Rabbits by Simon Levack

Simon Levack’s writing career was launched when he won the Crime Writers Association of Britain’s Debut Dagger Award. The book introduced his series character Yaotl, an Aztec slave. Yaotl now appears in a fourth novel entitled Tribute of Death, published in 2007 by Lulu Enterprises UK. What a treat that this series, which the Guardian calls “always gripping and surprising,” now includes short stories.

* * * *

The Dance of the Four Hundred Rabbits was a part of the midwinter Festival of the Raising of Banners, a time when we Aztecs honoured our war god, Huitztilopochtli, the Hummingbird of the South. While warrior captives were having their hearts torn out in front of the war god’s temple at the top of the Great Pyramid, a more genial ritual was being enacted nearby, in honour of the gods of sacred wine.

The priest named Two Rabbit presided over the temple of the god whose name he bore. He called together dancers, young men from the Houses of Tears, the priests’ training schools. Each dancer represented one of the four hundred lesser gods of sacred wine, the Four Hundred Rabbits.

The task of organising the proceedings fell to Two Rabbit’s deputy, Patecatl. It was his job to set up the jars of sacred wine that were at the heart of the ceremony and to lay out drinking straws ready for the dancers at the end of their performance. For the climax of the dance was the moment when their graceful, sinuous movements broke up and they fell greedily upon the jars and the drinking straws, every man jabbing his neighbour with knee and elbow and fist in his eagerness to be first.

There were four hundred dancers and fifty-two jars. But there were only two hundred and sixty straws, and of those, only one was bored through. Among the four hundred young men who had been picked for this ceremony, one alone would stand with a hollow reed at a jar of sacred wine, happily drinking his fill.

It was a game of chance, but also a ritual, watched closely by Two Rabbit and Patecatl for clues to the will of the gods. Two hundred and sixty was the number of days in our sacred calendar, and fifty-two the number of years between the ceremonial kindling of one new fire and the next. To see which young man seized the right straw and which jar he drank from might give the priests a clue to what lay in the future for our people.

Unless somebody tried to shorten the odds.

“Move yourself, slave!”

I scrambled to my feet, narrowly avoiding the kick my master’s steward had casually aimed at me while I bolted what was left of my warm tortilla. The sweet girl from the palace kitchen who had passed it to me fresh from the griddle backed away into a corner, her eyes wide with sudden fear, but the big bully did not berate her for wasting bread on me. Nor did he demand to know what I was doing or hurl some witless insult at me, which was unusual. Instead, with a curt “Come with me!” he turned and stalked away.

“Thanks a lot, Huitztic,” I grumbled. I glanced over my shoulder but the girl had fled. “We were getting along nicely there, too...”

I hung back, preparing to dodge the kick that a remark like that would normally provoke, but all the response I got was, “This is no time for jokes. His Lordship has something to show you.”

That was restrained by the steward’s standards. Intrigued, I caught him up, and noticed that he was sweating. It was a cold, clear morning, when the frost lay late on the earth and the sky above the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was a blue so bright it hurt the eyes, yet his brow was beaded with moisture, glittering in the sunshine.

“In here.” He led me into a courtyard. “Your slave Yaotl, my Lord!” he announced in a loud whisper.

The enclosure was dark, surrounded by high walls the Sun had yet to clear, and the only warmth and light in it came from a squat brazier at its centre. I paused, squinting into corners while my eyes adjusted and I tried to make out what it was I was meant to see.

The feeble glow of the coals set off my master’s features perfectly, picking out every line and wrinkle in his gnarled old face, but making his bright, ferocious eyes shine. Lord Feathered in Black, the chief minister, chief justice, and chief priest of the Aztecs, the second most powerful man in Mexico-Tenochtitlan and perhaps the most dangerous, did not trouble to greet me. Instead he leaned forward in the high-backed wicker chair that was an emblem of his rank, clutching his jaguar-skin mantle around him, and snarled: “Look at the boy — the rabbit, here. Tell me what happened to him.”

I followed his gaze and saw for the first time that there was a young man sprawled against the courtyard wall. His legs were splayed like an infant’s. In the poor light, his skin looked sallow and unhealthy, and a trickle of saliva glittered like silver leaf on his chin. His eyes were open, but as I looked more closely I realized he saw nothing through them. Their pupils were huge black disks that stayed fixed on something far away when I passed a hand in front of them. His breath had a sour reek that I knew well. He had been drinking sacred wine. Perhaps he had been celebrating: I noticed that he was missing the single lock of hair that boys grew at the napes of their necks, and this was a sign that he had taken his first captive in battle, and could call himself a warrior.

Why had my master called him “the rabbit“?

I felt a moment of panic as I struggled to answer His Lordship’s question. The old man was not renowned for his patience.

It was the steward who saved me, unwittingly. With a sudden nervous giggle he called out: “Come on, Yaotl. What’s he taken? You’re the expert!”

I stiffened indignantly at the taunt. Huitztic knew my past: how I had sold myself into Lord Feathered in Black’s service, trading my freedom for the sum of twenty large cloaks, enough to keep me in drink when I had nothing left but the breechcloth wrapped around my loins. He knew also what had first driven me to seek refuge in a gourd of sacred wine: the despair and humiliation of being expelled from the priesthood, years before. As a priest I had learned and experienced the use of every kind of leaf, herb, seed, and root, everything a man could put into his body to turn him into a slobbering imbecile. The steward’s comment was a deliberate jibe, and it stung, but even as I bit back my retort I realized the oaf had given me the clue I needed.

My master responded before I could. “Be quiet, you idiot,” he snapped. “You’re in enough trouble over this already! Yaotl, I want your answer before I have both of you strangled!”

“He’s been drinking,” I said hastily. “That’s obvious, I can smell it. But it’s not just that. Sacred wine wouldn’t leave him like this. He’d just have been violently sick and then fallen asleep, and by now he’d have a sore head and a tongue like tree bark. Anyway, you didn’t send for me to tell you he’s got a hangover. He’s had something else — mushrooms, perhaps: the Food of the Gods. But I don’t understand...” I hesitated before turning to look at the grim-faced old man in the chair. “What’s he to you, my Lord? Why do you need to know what happened?”

“Isn’t it enough that some prankster chose to break up the Dance of the Four Hundred Rabbits — a religious ceremony, and me the chief priest? But it just so happens that this young fool is my great-nephew. So I take what happened rather personally.”

The Dance of the Four Hundred Rabbits! In the years since I had left the priesthood I had all but forgotten about it, but it came back to me now. And the young man had reeked of sacred wine, which could mean only one thing. “Your great-nephew won the contest?”

The chief minister’s deathly features twisted into something resembling a smile. “His prize turned out to be more than he expected — as you have confirmed for me. Now you’ll find out the rest — how it happened, and who was responsible.” He cast a sideways glance at his steward, who squirmed grotesquely. “You and Huitztic will look into this together.”

I had to repress a groan. Being made to investigate what sounded like a childish trick would be bad enough without having that vicious buffoon of a steward for company.

“I will not be made a fool of.” I noticed with a thrill of dread that my master’s voice had dropped to a whisper, a sign of his rage. “I will not have my family made fools of. Somebody did this to young Heron here to spite me. After you’ve brought me his name, I’ll have him cursing the gods for ever letting him be born!”

“What are you in trouble for?”

We were barely out of earshot of Lord Feathered in Black. The moment we were dismissed, Huitztic strode on ahead as before with barely a backward glance. I hung back until I judged I was out of range of his fists before I dared mention the thing that had most intrigued me about the interview we had just had: the steward’s obvious fear and our master’s equally evident anger with him.

I had miscalculated. The man spun on his heel and his long, powerful legs brought him back to me in two steps. Before I could react he had the knot of my cloak in his fist and was twisting it, tightening the rough cloth around my neck until I could feel my skin burning under it and was struggling to breathe.

“Let’s get one thing clear, you little worm.” Spittle flew into my face as he dragged it closer to his. “I am not the one in trouble. I only did what he told me to. It was Patecatl who let him down, not me, and I’m not going to let you talk the old man into believing other-wise. I’ll cut your tongue out if I catch you even thinking about it!”

“Patecatl?” I managed to gasp. “You mean the priest?”

“He’s already in prison. That’s where we’re going now — to see if they’ve sweated the truth out of him yet. Maybe you can think of some clever way of tricking him into giving it to us. If you can’t, then you’d better just keep your mouth shut. Old Black Feathers may have told me I had to have you trailing around after me like a lost dog, but I don’t have to like it!” He let go with a snarl, thrusting me away from him so hard that I fell over backwards, my legs buckling under me.

“The priest’s in prison?” I repeated as I got up. I had to run to keep pace with him as he made off into the street outside our master’s palace. “What for, though? You may as well tell me what you think he did.”

Huitztic ignored my suggestion until he was brought up short by one of the city’s countless canals. As he looked right and left for a boat that could take us to the prison, he apparently had second thoughts. Wrinkling his nose as though he had caught a whiff of the green water at his feet, he muttered: “All right. I may as well, since we’ve got to see him together. But you remember what I said. I only did what I was told!”

“So how do you think Heron managed to win the contest?” the steward asked as he flopped angrily into the stern of the boat.

“It wasn’t just luck, then?” I had already guessed that if the gods had willed the outcome, they had had some human help to arrange it.

“Only if having one of the most powerful men in the world for your great-uncle counts as luck. Actually, old Black Feathers can’t stand the young toad, but he dotes on his niece — the boy’s mother — and she wants to see her son get to the top.”

“And winning a contest like this won’t do the lad’s career any harm.” To be marked with the gods’ favour counted for almost as much as taking a captive in war. “So our master ordered you to give him a helping hand, is that it?”

Huitztic gripped the boat’s sides so hard his knuckles turned white. “Me and the priest both. Young Heron had the only hollow drinking-tube sewn into the hem of his cloak, after I’d been to get it from Patecatl. Only I reckon it had more than a hole in it. How hard would it have been for him to prime it before he gave it to me?”

I thought about it. “Not hard. Mushrooms, you could dry them, grind them into powder, and as long as you didn’t pack them in too tight I suppose the young man could have sucked it up with the sacred wine without noticing — at least until it started to work. Did anyone look at the tube afterwards?”

“Sure. Heron was still clutching it when he was brought here. But the poison was all gone by then, of course.”

“It would have been a lot simpler to put the stuff in the jar, wouldn’t it?”

Huitztic sniggered. “You’re not so clever after all, are you? Which jar would you put it in, then?”

I grasped his meaning: How could the poisoner have known which of the fifty-two vessels to dope? “All of them?”

“No. Lord Feathered in Black let some of his serfs drink the rest of the jars dry. You missed an opportunity there! They could barely stand up afterwards, of course, but it was nothing like what happened to Heron.”

I frowned. “The rest of the jars?”

“Heron had polished off the jar he was drinking out of before the stuff started taking effect. So we can’t tell what may have been in it.”

I was still puzzled. Cheating the gods was a fearful thing to do, but at least their vengeance was uncertain, and might be a long way off. I could not understand why a priest who had agreed to do that would go on to risk the immediate and all-too-certain consequences of angering Lord Feathered in Black.

Perhaps I was about to find out; for the long stone wall of the prison now loomed above us.

I knew the prison. I had been confined here once, awaiting punishment after my arrest for drunkenness. I had to halt on the threshold for a moment, clutching the doorway and shutting my eyes as the sights, sounds, and smells came back to me in a rush: the lines of cramped wooden cages stretching away into the gloom, the stench of piss and fear and starvation, the shouting. At almost any time of the day or night, as I remembered, somebody would be raving, protesting his innocence or hurling abuse at the guards or calling for his mother, and when he fell silent others would take up the cry, screaming or crying and rattling the wooden bars of their cages hopelessly.

Somebody was shouting now. The words seemed to run into one another as they echoed through the long hall, so that I could not make them all out.

Huitztic shoved me from behind. “Get a move on, before I have them lock you up too!”

I stumbled forward, almost colliding with the guard who had come to find out what we wanted. When we had told him he said: “Good thing you’re here. Maybe you can make him shut up.”

My master’s steward laughed harshly. “Just bash him over the head! That ought to do it.”

The guard, a stolid-looking man in a veteran warrior’s long cloak and embroidered breechcloth, hefted his cudgel and gave us a lopsided grin. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to have to explain to my chief why I laid out Two Rabbit.”

I frowned. “I thought it was his deputy you had in here.”

“It is. But the prisoner’s chief came to pay him a visit. And he’s the one shouting.”

We hurried past the rows of cages, ignored or tracked obsessively by the wretches who squatted in them. At our approach, the shouting seemed to reach a crescendo, before dying out abruptly as the tall, slender figure standing in front of one of the cages swung his gaunt face towards us.

If he not been making so much noise, I might have missed him altogether. As a priest, he was draped in black, and had stained his face and limbs with pitch, so that in the gloom there was little to see of him but his eyes, which were wide and startlingly pale.

The guard stepped forward. “Now, Two Rabbit,” he urged, “there’s no need for this. You’ll start them all off, and that’ll bring my chief running, and I’ll never hear the end of it.”

The priest turned back to the cage and kicked it hard enough to make the bars rattle. There was a rustle of movement in response, but with Two Rabbit between us I could not clearly see the occupant.

“Hey!” the guard yelled. “Be careful, that’s government property!”

“Do you know what this creature did?” the priest rasped. The words burst between his tightly compressed lips like steam from a green log thrown on a fire.

Huitztic pushed himself forward. “We know exactly what he did!” he cried eagerly. “And my master’s going to see him punished for it!”

“Your master?” The pale eyes narrowed. “But you’re Lord Feathered in Black’s steward, aren’t you?”

“That’s right, and the chief minister will...”

We never found out what the chief minister was going to do, because his steward’s words were drowned by the other man’s outraged howl. “Lord Feathered in Black! He’s as guilty as this vermin here. He ought to be in that cage with him!”

“Now, steady on,” the guard said anxiously. “That’s dangerous talk.”

“As dangerous as mocking the gods? As dangerous as making a laughingstock of their priests?” With a last, baleful glance at the cage, he moved, pushing past us before stalking out of the hall. “He won’t get away with it! Tell him that from me!”

Huitztic said nothing. It was the man in the cage who spoke next.

“Yaotl? Is that you?”

Everybody appeared to be staring at me: Huitztic, the prison guard, even the desperate, hollow-eyed prisoners in the shadows around us. They all seemed to be saying: You know this person? And the tone in which they seemed to be saying it was not friendly.

“You must remember me, Yaotl. We trained together.” With Two Rabbit gone, I could see his former deputy clearly now. Patecatl had pushed his hand between the bars of the cage in an imploring gesture.

At first I could only gaze at him while I tried to work out where he might have seen me before. When the answer came to me I could only whisper: “Fire Snake?”

“Yes!” the man cried eagerly, straining against the wooden bars until they creaked. “Fire Snake, that’s right! Your old pal. Listen, you’ve got to get me out of here.”

Fire Snake: a name from my childhood, from the House of Tears, the harsh school for boys who would be priests. We had not known each other well or liked each other much, but if I had been where he was, I too might have looked upon any familiar face as a long-lost friend’s.

Huitztic interrupted before I had a chance to reply. “ ‘Get you out of here’?” He took a step towards the cage and swung his foot at it, making the prisoner leap backwards as the wooden bars rattled for a second time.

“Will you leave my bloody cage alone?” the guard yelled.

Ignoring him, the steward went on ranting at the prisoner. “This slave isn’t going to get you out of anything! All he’s here for is to listen to you tell us how you poisoned Heron. Go on, how did you do it? How did those mushrooms get into that tube?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the man in the cage protested. “Anyway, I’m not telling you anything. It’s your fault I’m in here. You set me up!”

“You’ll talk, or I’ll... I’ll...” Huitztic lunged at the cage, grasping the bars and shaking them impotently. “Let me at him! It’s time we got him out of there and knocked the truth out of him!”

“You keep away,” the guard warned. “Nobody touches my prisoners without orders.”

“This is ridiculous!” Huitztic spluttered. “Don’t you know I work for the chief minister?”

“So do I,” the guard pointed out.

Just then Fire Snake spoke up. “I’ll talk to Yaotl. No one else.”

“Who asked you?” the steward snapped. “We’ll make you talk!”

“How are you going to do that?” I inquired. “The guard won’t let you torture him.”

The steward turned on the guard resentfully. “What kind of a prison are you running here, anyway?”

“We usually just starve them,” the other man offered. “A few days without food loosens their tongues, and it’s much less messy than mutilation.”

“We haven’t got a few days!”

“I’ll talk to Yaotl,” the man in the cage offered quietly.

“Why don’t you leave him to me?” I suggested. “Lord Feathered in Black told me to investigate this business, didn’t he? So let me do it.”

“This man’s a friend of yours!” the steward objected. “You just want to get him off and put me in that cage instead!”

It was a tempting thought, but all I said was: “Then leave the guard here. He’ll tell you if we start hatching any conspiracies.”

“This had better be good,” I told the man crouching on the other side of the bars, “otherwise Huitztic’s likely to talk the old man into having me move in there with you.”

The steward had stormed off, declaring that he was going to see what the chief minister had to say about this, and that he would be back.

Fire Snake peered up at me miserably. “But he’s the man who set this thing up! You’ve got to help me, Yaotl!”

I glanced uneasily at the guard, who was pacing about the hall, snarling at his other charges as if it would help him keep them in order. I suspected he was wondering whether it would not after all have been wiser to have looked the other way while Huitztic beat a confession out of his prisoner.

“Old Black Feathers sent me here for a reason,” I replied, speaking half to myself. “If he wanted you roasted over a slow fire for what happened to his great-nephew, then you’d be cooking already. I think I’m here because he doesn’t know what happened himself and he doesn’t believe what he’s been told about it.”

“So you think I’ve got a chance?” he demanded eagerly, his hands gripping the bars.

“Only if you tell me the truth. I can’t convince the old man otherwise. Did you put the poison in that straw?”

“No!”

“How did it get there then?”

“Huitztic must have done it!”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” I said a little testily. “It’s just your word against his. Who’s the chief minister going to believe, you or his own steward?” And more to the point, I thought, what would the steward do to me if I accused him without evidence?

Fire Snake looked at the floor. “I don’t know what happened,” he admitted. “That straw was clean when I gave it to the steward. I remember holding it up to the light, to check it had been bored right through. There was nothing there.”

“Why did you agree to help Heron cheat? Two Rabbit was right — you were making a mockery of the ceremony. Did you expect the gods to be happy about that?”

“Lord Feathered in Black isn’t afraid of the gods,” he muttered. “His steward made it pretty clear what would happen to me and my family if I didn’t cooperate. He even had the cheek to suggest I make whatever sacrifices were needed to assuage the gods’ anger afterwards!” The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable, and for the first time I felt a pang of sympathy for him.

“I know what it looks like,” he added wretchedly. “I was there when they tested all those jars, right up until the last slave started snoring and they took me away. If any of the sacred wine was poisoned, it was only the jar Heron drank out of, and how could anyone have known which one that would be? It has to have been the tube, but I wasn’t the one who put the stuff in it.”

“There’s no way he could have taken the stuff before the dance? Or during it?”

“No chance. Someone would have noticed him munching on mushrooms between dance movements, and if he’d had them before it started he wouldn’t have been standing up by the end.”

“Then somebody must have poisoned the sacred wine,” I said. I had been stooping over the cage. Now I stood up briskly. “It has to have been one or the other, doesn’t it? The straw or the pot. Did you see anybody else doing anything to the pot Heron drank from?”

“No, but there were so any of them clambering over each other and pushing each other out of the way it was hard to see anything clearly.”

I imagined the climax of the ceremony: fifty-two clay pots in the middle of a violent, heaving mass of eager young men. Even if one of them had been able to guess which jar Heron would drink out of, how had he managed to slip the poison into it without anyone noticing?

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the guard moving purposefully towards us. Our conversation was almost over. As I turned to leave, however, one last thought struck me. “Could Heron have told anyone about the edge you and Huitztic had given him? Someone with a motive to interfere?”

Fire Snake uttered a gasp of laughter. “I can think of three hundred and ninety-nine men who had a motive!” he said. “Four hundred if you count Two Rabbit.”

“Why him?”

“You heard him just now. He thinks the gods have been mocked and he’s been made a fool of. And he blames me. He’s never liked me, says I’m too ambitious.”

“Heron’s hardly likely to have told Two Rabbit what he was planning, though, is he?”

Fire Snake scowled for a moment, as if in disappointment. “I suppose not. He could have boasted about it to someone else, though.”

“Who would that be — one of the other young men? One of his rivals in the competition? I don’t think so. Is there anyone else?”

“I don’t know... I think he has a girl. But I don’t know where you’d find her.”

A cough at my shoulder told me it was time to move on.

I crept furtively about my master’s palace, peering cautiously in before I would look into a room, keeping to the shadows as I skirted the edges of courtyards, taking cover when I needed to behind acacia bushes, yucca plants from the lowlands, and other greenery. I did not want the steward to see me until I had reported to the chief minister, and I would not be ready to do that until after I had spoken to Heron. I assumed he was still at the palace, since I suspected that even if he had recovered consciousness, he was unlikely to be in fit state to go wandering off for a while yet. I wondered whether he would cooperate if I asked him whom he had told about the trick. If he did not, then I had no idea what I would do. I did not seem to have learned anything useful from Fire Snake.

I wondered about the girl the priest had mentioned. A young man like Heron, with his noble connections and fresh from his first triumph on the battlefield, might have his pick of the girls from the pleasure houses. From what I had heard, though, it sounded as though he had a more settled arrangement than that. If she knew about the young man’s attempt to cheat the gods, I had to find out; and then I would need to know whom she might have told the secret to.

I was padding as silently as I could along a dark colonnade when a sudden sound stopped me in my tracks: a loud groan, a cry of pain.

The noise appeared to be coming from a nearby courtyard. As I crept towards it, I heard it again, but this time it was shut off abruptly, and replaced by something quite different: a woman’s voice, hissing furiously: “It’s no use moaning and expecting me to feel sorry for you. What happened was your own fault!”

“How do you make that out? I didn’t put mushroom powder in that jar myself, did I?”

I grinned. It seemed as though I need look no further for Heron or his girl.

“If you hadn’t tried to cheat, it wouldn’t have happened!”

“How was I supposed to win if I didn’t cheat? And please don’t shout, Precious Flower.”

The girl had not raised her voice above a whisper, but clearly the sacred wine and the mushrooms had not quite worn off, so it probably sounded to Heron as though a Master of Youths were shouting orders into his ear. I peeped around the corner to watch them. He lay stretched out on a stone bench with a cloth over his head. The girl, a tall, slim beauty in a fine cotton blouse and skirt, stood over him with her arms folded. Her hair was loose, like a pleasure girl’s, but there was no red stain around her mouth and no sign of the yellow ochre that pleasure girls wore to lighten their skins.

Heron raised his head a little, thought better of it, and let it drop again. Hastily Precious Flower stooped to put her hand under it to stop it striking the bare stone.

“Anyway,” he mumbled ungratefully, “how did they find out what I was going to do? You must have told them!”

She stepped away from him, probably wishing she had let the hard limestone knock some sense into his skull after all. “It would serve you right if I did!” she cried indignantly. “You would keep boasting about having an edge over the others!”

Heron squirmed, either in pain or anger, but did not get up. Instead he turned his head to glare at the girl. “I knew it!” he snapped. “Who did you tell, you bitch? Was it Firstborn Son or Owl?”

I watched shock and hurt cross the girl’s features, making her blink in time to the young man’s words. “No, I...”

I decided I had heard enough. Strolling into the courtyard I said, deliberately loudly: “You’re absolutely sure it wasn’t the steward who poisoned you, then?”

The girl squealed and darted to one side. Heron gasped, squirmed again, and fell onto the floor in a tangle of limbs and soiled cloth.

I smiled at the girl. “I’m Yaotl. His great-uncle told me to find out what had happened.”

She stared at me through big, moist eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“Did you tell anyone about the trick with the tube?”

“She must have done!” the young man protested, heaving himself back onto his seat. “How else did they know to put the mushrooms in that jar?”

“Oh, shut up,” I told him. I looked at the girl.

She did not lower her eyes. “No,” she replied firmly. “I didn’t, and I will eat earth.” She bowed down and touched the ground with a fingertip, then put it to her mouth, in the gesture that was an Aztec’s most sacred oath.

The young man was sitting up now, with his knees slightly apart, and seemed to be watching something fascinating on the ground between them. “It can’t have been Huitztic,” he said indistinctly. “He’s my pal. Keeps my great-uncle off my back — covers up for me when I’m out late. When the old man’s gone and I get my share of his lands, there’ll be something in it for old Huitztic — he knows that.”

“So he expects to profit from your advancement?”

“That’s it,” the youngster said eagerly. He looked up. “The old man told me you were a priest, so you know what winning that contest would mean, especially now that I’ve taken my first captive.” I wondered whether that had been arranged for him too. “Why would Huitztic want to screw it up for both of us?”

It made sense, I realized. I realized something else, too: My master was too shrewd not to know what was going on between his steward and his great-nephew. That was why I had been told to look into it with Huitztic. Old Black Feathers had not been able to think of any explanation for what had happened that did not implicate the steward, but he had not been able to work out what Huitztic’s motive for humiliating his great-nephew might have been either.

“So who else did you tell, apart from Precious Flower here?”

“I didn’t! And I’ll eat earth too, if you want!”

“Don’t bother. Just tell me about those two you mentioned — Owl and Firstborn Son. Who are they, young toughs like you?”

“That’s right. Thought they were my friends, too, but Owl in particular...” He shot a venomous look at the girl.

“What was I supposed to do?” she cried out, colouring. “He asked for me. I’m a pleasure girl, Heron, I’m not allowed to save myself for you, you know that!” And then, suddenly, she burst into tears. “It wasn’t me, really it wasn’t. I wouldn’t tell anyone, even though I was angry with you. And I was only angry because you kept boasting about what you were going to do!”

As she went to embrace him, and he allowed her to, I decided it was time to withdraw. I had learned all I was going to here, and I had seen enough of Heron’s smirking, winking face.

I decided it was time I paid a visit to the temple of the god of sacred wine.

To my surprise, the temple was deserted. As I approached its precinct I had to shoulder my way through the city’s usual evening crowd — traders taking unsold goods back from the marketplaces, youngsters going home from the Houses of Youth, labourers returning from the fields — but as soon as I was within the walls, all the bustle and noise was gone, replaced by a strange, echoing silence. The sudden change gave the place a forlorn air, added to by the way it had been left. Normally the flagstones would have been carefully swept, but not today. It did not appear to have been touched since the chaotic events of the previous afternoon. The large pottery jars stood where they had been put out for the dancers, mostly empty now but still filling the air around them with a stale, sour smell. On the ground around them were scattered the reeds, apparently lying where they had been dropped. Some were slightly flattened, probably squashed by the young men as they squabbled over them. Here and there a scrap of torn cloth or a severed sandal strap showed where a fight had broken out.

I had been hoping to find the head priest, Two Rabbit, here, but he was clearly not coming back today. I noticed that the brazier in front of the temple, which ought to have been permanently lit, had gone out. I wondered whether after what had happened, the priest was afraid that the gods might have withdrawn their favour. Maybe he thought the place was now unlucky. I remembered that Lord Feathered in Black had sent his serfs to taste the sacred wine that had been left in the pots, but presumably he did not care what curses he might bring down on their heads.

I shivered. I felt suddenly sick, not with fear but from the smell of all that sacred wine. Some of the old craving had returned, and I was glad the pots were empty, because my body had started telling me that what I needed at that moment was a drink.

“I’m wasting my time,” I muttered, kicking at the straws scattered at my feet. “I got nothing out of Heron and his girl, and there’s nothing here either. I still don’t even know how they managed to get the poison into that jar, never mind who did it.” For a few moments I pretended to look for clues, although I had no idea what I hoped to find: something that looked like powdered mushrooms, perhaps. I soon gave up in disgust.

“Nothing here,” I repeated. “Just fifty-two empty pots and two hundred and sixty straws no one could drink out of.” I thought about that. “No, two hundred and fifty-nine, of course.”

Then I thought about it again.

I looked at the straws scattered around me, now looking pale as bones in the gathering dusk. I whispered a curse, and then set to gathering them, scooping them up in handfuls and carrying them to a corner.

After I had taken a last look around to ensure that none had rolled away unnoticed, I began to count them.

By the time I had finished my task, sorting the reeds into thirteen neat piles, the light in the plaza was too poor to see by, and I was working by touch, stooping to put the last few straws in place. I finished the job in haste. Night and the things that haunted it frightened me less than they did most Aztecs — my priest’s training helped with that — but there was something about this place that unnerved me, making me feel as though I were being watched. I wanted to be done as soon as I could.

By the time I had finished, however, I knew how the chief minister’s great-nephew had been poisoned, and I could make a good guess at who might have done it. I had to smile as I thought about the trick: It was clever and somehow fitting.

I could feel my smile fading as I contemplated the report I would have to give my master. I remembered the vain young man I had seen arguing with the pleasure girl, Precious Flower, and wondered whether the person who had decided to teach him a lesson truly deserved whatever brutal punishment Lord Feathered in Black had in mind. But I could not see what I could do to prevent it without bringing the old man’s wrath down on my own head.

There was no sound in the courtyard that I could hear. Nonetheless the sensation that I was not alone would not go away. I could feel it as a tingling at the nape of my neck and a coldness beyond the chill of the evening air.

I turned to go, expecting to feel my way out of the plaza. However, I had not taken three steps before I bumped into something large and hard.

“Hey...!”

The thing moved. Suddenly I was lifted off my feet, the breath squeezed out of me in a bear hug. I heared a man’s voice, very low but clear: “So the priest told you, did he?”

I struggled, lashing out with my feet but kicking only empty air. I wanted to shout but had no breath to do it with.

“Where is it?” the man holding me hissed. “You found it, didn’t you? What have you done with it?”

All I could manage by way of reply was a strangled gasp. My assailant’s grip slackened a little when he realised that I could not answer his questions unless he stopped trying to suffocate me.

I thought quickly. “It’s all right,” I croaked, using up the little air he allowed me. “I know what happened. It was Huitztic, the steward! He put the poison in — I’ve got the proof!”

It did not work. The powerful arms gripped me tighter than ever. I felt dizzy. Coloured lights began to dance before my eyes.

Then another man spoke, from somewhere in the shadows. I knew the voice instantly.

“Who’s that? Yaotl? What’s going on?”

The man holding me dropped me on the ground.

As I fell, crashing backwards onto the flagstones, my lungs filled up and I was able to yell: “Huitztic, stop him!”

The steward did not understand. “There you are!” he bellowed triumphantly. “I know your game. You thought you’d hide from me until you’d made up a pack of lies to tell to Lord Feathered in Black. I’ll see you dead before you pin this thing on me!”

I groaned aloud. “No — you idiot! — quick, stop that bastard before he runs away!”

A foot flew out of the night and slammed into my shoulder. I gasped in pain. I drew breath to call out again but then I heard the sound of running feet, moving away.

Huitztic yelled: “Got you, you miserable slave — wait, who are you?”

His words turned into a cry of pain as the young man who had assaulted me hit him.

After that there was a long silence, broken only by the steward’s painful whimpering.

“So which one was that?” I wondered out loud, while I nursed my bruised throat. “Was it Owl or Firstborn Son, do you think?”

There was no answer.

“I think we’d better go and see old Black Feathers now,” I continued, “and if you don’t say anything about how both you and that young fool tried to silence me, then I won’t.”

My master received me alone, seated in his favourite place, under the magnolia on the roof of his palace. We left the steward in the courtyard below to fret and pace about nervously. He still thought I was going to accuse him, but I knew that would not do for the old man. He wanted proof.

I showed him what I had brought from the temple. It was, I had guessed, the thing the young man who had attacked me had been after: the one reed out of the two hundred and sixty I had found that had seemed lighter than the rest. As he held it up to peer at the Moon through it, I told him what had happened.

“There were four hundred dancers, two hundred and sixty straws, and fifty-two jars,” I began.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he replied absently, still squinting through the tube.

What I said next got his full attention, however. “Wrong! There were two hundred and sixty-one straws — and two of them were bored through. The one your great-nephew had, and this one.”

“No, that doesn’t make sense. If two of them had cheated, one of the others would have become intoxicated — or worse, if he’d drunk from the same jar as Heron.”

“He was at the same jar as Heron, my Lord. He didn’t drink, though. He must have smuggled that tube in just as Heron did, but he never intended to suck through it. He blew.”

My master’s sharp eyes glittered as he stared at me.

“That ceremony always turns into a riot. There’s no time for anyone to check whether the tube they’ve got is hollow or not, if they’re lucky enough to be able to lay hands on one at all. So you’ll always get several young men sucking away at each jar, most of them due to be disappointed. The one who poisoned your great nephew knew that and took advantage of it. He stuck close to Heron with a hollow reed full of powdered mushrooms, knowing nobody would think anything of it if he dipped his reed in the same jar. He blew the poison in just as Heron was slurping the stuff up.”

Lord Feathered in Black looked at the tube with distaste. “Clever,” he conceded. “But if what you say is right, then how do we know which of them it was?”

“I don’t think we ever will,” I replied carefully. I was sure it had been either Owl or Firstborn Son who had attacked me, but I did not blame him. He must have been terrified when he found out how hard the chief minister had taken his prank.

“Well, at least we know where he got the straw from,” the chief minister said.

“We do?”

“Two Rabbit. He vanished yesterday, just after you saw him at the prison. Collected a few things from his lodging at the temple and hasn’t been seen since. I don’t suppose he ever will be again, at least not in Mexico.”

I found Fire Snake looking none the worse for his brief stay in the prison.

“You did it! Well done, Yaotl — thank you, old friend, thank you! I shan’t forget this...”

“I wish you would,” I said shortly.

“If there’s ever anything I can do...”

I looked at his eager face, the grin white against the pitch he used to stain it, and felt disgusted. The gods had been affronted, but all that mattered to Fire Snake was that he had got away with it. “Just tell me something,” I said quietly. “How did Two Rabbit know what you and Heron had done?”

The effusion of words abruptly halted. He hesitated before saying: “But we talked about that. Didn’t he learn it from someone Heron had been bragging to? What about that girl?”

“Precious Flower didn’t talk. I’ve met them both. She didn’t like what Heron had done but there’s no way she’d betray him. That young fool doesn’t deserve her.”

“Well, then...”

“In fact,” I went on, “it seems to me there’s only one person who could or would have told him, expecting him to do exactly what he did. His assistant, the one he thought was too ambitious. You knew how this was likely to turn out, didn’t you? When that young man attacked me — I still don’t know who it was, by the way, and I don’t want to — he said he thought the priest had told me what happened. At first I thought he meant you, but he was talking about Two Rabbit. Your chief gave one of Heron’s rivals a tube full of sacred mushrooms, but he only did it because he knew what Heron was going to do. And he can only have learned of that from you.”

“That’s absurd!” Fire Snake protested, but I could hear the tremor in his voice.

“No, I think it’s quite clever. You didn’t actually poison young Heron but you found a way to bring it about. The possibility of implicating poor old Two Rabbit must have made it even sweeter for you. Of course, it went a bit wrong when you were arrested — you didn’t expect that, I’d guess — but it all turned out well in the end, didn’t it? Will they make you chief priest now, I wonder?”

He clutched anxiously at the hem of my cloak as I turned away from him, but I did not want to hear any more claims on an old friendship that had never existed.

As I walked out, though, I called over my shoulder: “But don’t worry. I won’t tell old Black Feathers. I don’t really care who made a fool of his great-nephew, or why. It probably served him right.”

© 2008 by Simon Levack