Shadow of the Lords

FOUR WATER
1

I was allowed to stay the night. I slept by the hearth, making the most of its warmth, luxuriating in it so long as I was awake and relishing the contrast with what I had undergone the night before. I could enjoy remembering the cold, the exhaustion and the numbness in my feet while I basked in the comforting warmth of the slowly subsiding flames. They still flickered when my eyes closed and I lost interest in them. By the time I woke again, to the distant sound of the pre-dawn trumpet, there was nothing left but glowing embers, ready to be blown into life again.

As soon as I was awake and able to move about, I left and headed back towards Pochtlan. I had no intention of trying Angry’s uncertain temper any further than I had to. I thought I might find Kindly and tell him what I had found out. I was more than ever convinced that Idle held the key to his stolen property. Kindly knew his family and would be able to tell me things about him. And I was beginning to wonder how much the old merchant knew about the history of the costume. Who had commissioned the work, and how long would it be before he started making his own enquiries about it?

But my immediate concern was with Idle. He would know what had happened to my son. That thought hurried me along through the dark, empty streets. If my son was alive I had to find him as quickly as possible. If not then finding outwhat had become of him was the last service I could render him.

The weather had changed abruptly, as it was often apt to at this time of year. A thick layer of cloud had come down off the mountains and the city still lay in its shadow. As I made my way back towards the bridge leading to Pochtlan, I had to pick my way carefully alongside the canal. The clouds had unloaded a fair amount of rain in the night and the ground was damp and slippery. By the time the bridge came into sight, illuminated by a flickering light, my already frayed nerves were stretched so far that I did not even stop to wonder where the light might be coming from.

I found out the moment I stepped on the bridge.

‘Not so fast, you! Stay where you are!’

I had imagined the orange flame at the far end of the bridge to be coming from an unguarded brazier, not a pine torch resting in the huge callused fist of a veteran warrior. When I heard his harsh challenge I froze, with one foot in the air, and I seemed to stand like that, poised at my end of the wooden structure, for an age before any of my muscles would give way in response to my urge to run. All that happened, as the warriors came for me, was that my whole body sagged and my suspended foot thumped the wood with the hollow sound of a rubber hammer hitting a drum.

‘Well, well,’ rumbled the man who held the torch. ‘What have we got here, then?’

At first, all I felt was despair at the thought that my master and the Otomi captain had finally caught up with me.

It was too easy to imagine what would happen next. I would be dragged home, hauled through the streets by my hair, my scalp tearing and burning as pitiless hands tugged at it, the skin flayed from my heels as they scraped along the ground,leaving dark trails of blood, while passers-by watched my anguished throes with indifferent curiosity. I wondered what they had in store for me. Would the Otomi want to practise his way of knocking out teeth with a flint knife, or would he use a finer blade, a sliver of obsidian perhaps, the sort that could part a man’s skin from his flesh and his flesh from his bones and leave him still alive?

Strangely, I found that I did not care much. All that mattered was that I had failed. I would never find out what had happened to Nimble.

Then I looked again at the two men striding towards me.

Both were seasoned warriors: even in the torch’s unreliable light, their hard, glittering eyes, thin determined mouths and sleek, sinewy arms and legs were enough to tell me that, and had I doubted their status, the hair piled on top of their heads would have confirmed it for me. However, neither of them was an Otomi. As soon as I realized that I felt a twinge of hope. The captain would not have sent anyone to come looking for me: he was the sort to have wanted to see to it himself.

These men were locals: the parish police. Every parish in the city had them. Someone had to keep order within the parish boundaries, whether this consisted of moving beggars and vagrants along, arresting drunkards or thieves or rounding up anyone who thought he could shirk a work detail or a spell of military service. Officially, they went by a variety of names — Calpixque, Telpixque, Calpolleque — and unofficially they got called a lot of other things, especially by people with a history of falling foul of the law.

The chief policeman’s name, I was to learn, was ‘Yectlacamlauhqui — ‘Upright’ — and his deputy’s Chimalli, or ‘Shield’. They were from Pochtlan, as I assumed they must be since they had been at the merchants’ end of the bridge. Naturally they could call upon the men of their parish to lenda hand when their own unaided efforts would not do, although I would have bet they did not need to very often. The wall of muscle, bone and sinew that separated me from where I was trying to go might as well have been a mountain range for all my chances of getting past it.

I took a step back, risking a swift glance out of the corner of my eye in case there was anyone behind me threatening to cut off my retreat. I could not help but notice the swords both men carried. Upright’s in particular caught the light, the obsidian blades set into its edges flashing as he toyed with it. I thought he looked nervous, and wondered if it had something to do with being out after dark, at a time when a god was thought to be haunting the streets. Or were they worried about meeting a human foe: whoever had killed and cut up the person I had found at the Amantlan end of the bridge?

It was easy to see what these men were doing. After what had happened here lately they would want to question everybody they saw, and woe betide anyone who could not give a convincing account of himself.

I took another step but was brought up short.

‘I told you to stay where you are!’ Suddenly Upright thrust his sword in my face and there were razor-sharp blades hovering under my nose. ‘Don’t think I won’t use this. I don’t have to kill you. I can carve you up like something on a meat stand in the marketplace and still leave you able to talk, and believe me that’s what you’ll do, you’ll be that desperate for me to put you out of your misery. Now keep your feet still!’

I shied away from the blades. I bent my neck first and then my back until I was looking up at the sky and the weapon still pressed forward until I was on the point of losing my balance. I fought the urge to take another step, knowing it might be my last, and then it was too late anyway as my legs were buckling under me. Squawking in alarm, with my short, torn cloakbillowing around me and my arms flapping as frantically as the wings of a frightened turkey, I went over, striking the hard surface under me with a bone-jarring crash that left my ears ringing and my backside numb.

Something clattered on to the wood by my hip.

I tried to get up on to my elbows, and bent my leg in a vain effort to cover the thing up with my thigh, but Upright was already standing over me with the sword hanging by his side and one foot poised over my chest. His narrow mouth twitched with amusement while he watched my struggles, and then, without a word, he casually planted his heel on my sternum and forced me down again.

‘Shield,’ he said quietly, gesturing with his sword as the air erupted from my lungs.

His companion, following the direction in which the weapon was pointing, stepped around his chief and stooped to pick up my son’s knife. When I had taken my tumble it had fallen out of my breechcloth.

‘A knife.’ Shield took it in his free hand and inspected it, sniffing at it as delicately as a well-bred girl smelling popcorn flowers. ‘It’s metal! What is it — copper?’

I said nothing, although the pressure on my chest increased.

‘Covered in blood! I think we may have our man.’

Upright’s heel was threatening to drive my lowest rib into my liver. I gasped and arched my back involuntarily, my head snapping up to bring my eyes into line with the knife. Its point was aimed at my head as directly as an accuser’s stare.

I tried to cry out in protest but it was impossible to draw breath. With every gasp I took, the foot jabbed me harder. My head swam and my vision began to blur.

Faintly, as if from a long way off, I heard Shield’s voice saying: ‘You ought to take your foot off his chest now, boss, he’s about to pass out.’

‘Why don’t you wake him up, then.’

Even if I had understood what Upright meant I would have been too weak to do anything about it. At first all I knew was that the pressure on my chest had gone. My lungs filled themselves with a great spasmodic whoop followed by a fit of explosive, racking coughs that left me doubled over. The next I thing I knew, I was falling. Shield had taken his superior’s suggestion as an order to pitch me over the side of the bridge.

Hitting the surface of the canal was like falling flat on my face on to flagstones, except that it gave way immediately and then I was enveloped by icy water. My shout of pain and surprise turned into a silent explosion of bubbles. Water filled my already tormented chest. I was swallowing the stuff and coughing and retching at the same time, while my arms made frantic, futile swimming motions. I tried to lash out with my heels, but could not move my legs. Something held them fast by the ankles.

An instant after that my head was in the air too, with water streaming out of my nose and mouth and my body thrashing and twisting like an animal in a snare. My feet were caught but my hands were free. My fingers curled spasmodically as I tried to grab something, anything, to stop my wild, sickening gyrations and let me start trying to work out which way was up, but there was nothing within reach.

‘Right, he’s awake,’ Shield rasped. ‘What now, another ducking?’

I made a feeble noise in response. Hearing the deputy’s voice, I began to realize what had happened. He was holding me upside down, with my head just over the water’s surface, and my hair dangling in it, its saturated weight tugging at my scalp.

I willed myself to stop struggling. Slowly the twisting and turning began to slow down. The pain in my stomach and chest began to subside and the choking and heaving ceased.

‘Better find out who he is, first.’

‘Oh, we’ll do that, boss! We’ll soak it out of him, it’ll be like getting blood out of a tunic after a fight — lots of cold water!’

The agonizingly tight grip on my ankles slackened suddenly and I fell, my face hitting the icy water just at the moment when Shield’s hands caught me and yanked me upward again with a nauseating lurch.

I came up twisting and swaying once more. The moment I stopped, my stomach emptied itself once more, sending water and whatever else it contained spewing out of my mouth into my nose and eyes, blinding me momentarily and sending a violent shudder through me that my tormentor obviously felt, because it made him laugh.

‘Shall we see if we need another rinse, or what?’ He dandled me like a baby, letting me fall towards the canal and snatching me up again before the surface touched me. ‘Perhaps you’d rather tell me your name!’

I groaned. ‘Joker,’ I managed to gasp.

He seemed to think about my answer for a long time before making his mind up about it.

‘So what?’ he said indifferently, and a moment later my head was under water again.

When he hauled me out there was a sneer in his voice. ‘That’s not a name that means very much to me. You’ll have to do better than that!’

Instead of dropping me in, he yanked me towards him. For a moment I felt myself swinging through space with the air whistling past my ears until my shoulders caught the wooden edge of the bridge with a sickening crack.

I screamed.

‘We can split your head open!’ Upright roared. ‘We can drown you and make it take all night! We can cut your balls off!’ he added gratuitously. ‘Now talk!’

I felt dizzy I could not see. The red darkness that had threatened to engulf me when I had a foot driving into my chest had come back. There was a roaring in my ears and I could feel my stomach heaving again even though it was empty. I could not tell the truth but to say nothing seemed a certain way to get myself killed.

I could think of only one thing to say: a name.

‘Kindly!’ I gasped.

The grip on my ankles slackened abruptly, although not enough to send me plunging into the canal again.

‘What did he say?’ Shield’s voice was suddenly hushed.

‘Kindly!’ I spluttered again. ‘The merchant! Kindly the merchant! I was going to see him! He’ll vouch for me!’

For a moment, as I hung upside down over the water, I did not know how the police were going to take what I had said. All I knew was that I was in danger of having my brains knocked out against the side of the bridge like a fish killed for bait.

Shield muttered slowly: ‘Kindly the merchant?’

A moment later I was swinging slowly through the air and being lowered, surprisingly gently, on to the surface of the bridge.

As my head made contact with the wood and the rest of me was laid down like a piece of cloth being measured out for cutting, I heard Upright add: ‘I don’t think I’d trust anybody that claimed to know that slippery old bugger! Still, if he says he can vouch for him, we had better check, hadn’t we? If he’s lying …’

I did not hear what would happen if I turned out to be lying, because that was when I passed out.