Shadow of the Lords

3

Lily maintained a grim silence as she strode briskly towards the canal and a waiting canoe. Following in her footsteps, I felt like a small child caught stealing cactus fruit from the market and being dragged home by his mother to face a beating.

‘Lily …’

‘Shut up. Get in the boat!’

‘I just wanted to say “thank you”,’ I said meekly.

‘I told you to get in the boat.’ She turned to me suddenly. ‘And save your gratitude! I didn’t get you out of there for your own good. Those two bears of policemen could have spent the rest of the day working you over, for all I care! And if you don’t tell me what I want to know, then I’ll take you straight back there and invite them to make a start on you. I might even watch!’

Her hands were clenched around the material of her skirt, bunching the cloth and crumpling it the way a cook might crush coriander leaves to squeeze the flavour out of them. When I looked in her eyes they were hooded as if with rage, but they glistened too, as if full of tears.

‘Look, I know it can’t have been easy …’

She hit me suddenly, swinging her open hand against my cheek with a ringing slap that left a hot streak of pain against my lower jaw.

I stared at her, slack jawed, until I became aware of the salty taste of blood and realized that the blow had made me bite my tongue. She said nothing but looked pointedly at the canoe. I climbed in meekly, settling myself in front of the boatman. He was Partridge, Kindly’s slave who had brought me the knife, but he gave no sign of having recognized me.

‘You know where to go,’ the woman said sharply, as he pushed off from the side of the canal. ‘And as for you,’ she added, looking at me, ‘you can start telling me the truth. I want to know what you did to my son!’

‘Lion and I told you what happened,’ I said blandly.

‘You lied! You killed him — you and your brute of a brother!’

‘How can you say that?’ I felt the blood drain from my face, leaving it chill and numb, as if she had thrown a pitcher of cold water over it. If she had guessed the truth then there was no telling where that would lead.

She leaned forward and hissed into my face like a snake about to bury its fangs in my cheek. ‘I know what Shining Light was doing on that boat. I know what he and Nimble had been doing between them. Now I want to know why you and your brother killed him. Revenge, was that it? Or was it because of what he and your son had been up to? Did you hate him for that? Or did you just want to spite me, because a few moments with you on a sleeping-mat didn’t make me your devoted slave for ever?’

Partridge’s eyes nearly fell out of his head at that, but he kept his face impassive and his gaze fixed on the water in front of him. I glanced anxiously at the Sun and realized, with a nervous start, that we were heading south, towards Tenochtitlan, and not towards Lily’s home in Pochtlan. I gripped the side of the canoe tensely as it occurred to me that she might be intending to give me back to my master.

I wondered how she had guessed the truth, or whether perhaps Kindly had deduced it in the same uncanny way in which he had worked out that Nimble was my son. I thought about trying to escape. I could have leapt over the side and swum to the shore of the canal, but the thought of scuttling away to hide among the neighbouring houses with her taunts and sneers ringing in my ears, like a cockroach dodging blows from a furious housewife’s broom, was too appalling to contemplate. The truth had to come out, but as I looked into her eyes and saw the pain in them — the raw skin under the lids, the spider’s webs of broken red lines traced over the whites and the dark furrows on her cheeks from night after night of weeping — I suddenly felt more pity than anything else.

‘It wasn’t any of those,’ I heard myself saying. ‘It was just self-defence. We — Lion and I — wanted to make Shining Light give up his sword, but he tried to kill me. There wasn’t anything — else we could do. We could have spared you the truth …’

‘You wanted to spare your son, and yourself from having to explain what he was doing on that boat!’

‘Well, that too,’ I conceded.

‘Who killed him? Who drove that sword into his skull — you or your brother?’

‘Does it matter? Lily, you know what Shining Light did. Don’t make me tell you all over again.’

Astonishingly, she laughed. It was a sort of laughter I had not heard before, a thin, bitter sound that seemed to come from high up near the bridge of her nose rather than her mouth, and had no amusement in it whatsoever. ‘Tell me? You don’t have to. I know what he was, but he was my son!’ The laughter shattered then, splintering into a shower of muffled tears as she buried her face in her hands, and I stared hopelessly at her bowed head and heaving shoulders. For an instant Ithought she might pitch forward into my arms. I even raised my hands, ready to catch her, but her pride and anger were too strong for that.

At last she looked up again. Her palms glistened damply as she lowered them into her lap.

‘Just tell me who it was,’ she whispered. ‘I just have to know.’

‘Lion,’ I said reluctantly, because now there seemed no reason to lie. ‘But Lily, Shining Light did have his hands around my throat at the time!’

‘And what had you and your brother done to him? You goaded him into it, didn’t you? What did you do, taunt him with your cleverness, just because you’d managed to find out where he was hiding?’

‘It wasn’t anything like that. Lily, he … he was desperate. He knew he would never have been allowed to live. My master would have killed him — he’d have had him burned alive. You know he could have done that. Shining Light hadn’t just swindled the Chief Minister, he was a murderer, and he and Nimble were … well, you know the penalty for what they did together.’ I found it hard, even now, to acknowledge the crime my son and his lover had committed. I understood, as well as any Aztec could hope to, what had driven the two of them into each other’s arms, but nothing in my upbringing or teaching had equipped me to look at an offence against the gods with anything but disgust.

Lily would not meet my eyes. She looked over my shoulder, at something in the middle distance. When I turned around and saw what it was I felt as if my stomach were about to fall through the bottom of the canoe, because right up ahead of us, at the edge of a broad, traffic-choked canal, stood one of the tall stone cacti that marked the boundary between Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan. I was being taken back to my master.

I turned back to her. ‘Lily,’ I said earnestly, ‘you have to listen to me! I didn’t want your son to die. He wanted it himself and he wanted to take me with him! Don’t you understand?’

She kept her head up. Her eyes were dry and clear now, and her fingers lay still in the folds of her skirt without any trace of a tremor.

‘I understand,’ she said steadily. ‘You and your brother killed my son.

‘Yes … no, wait, didn’t you hear what I said?’

She looked at me then and gave me the thinnest of smiles. ‘I’ve heard as much as I want to from you. Anything else you want to say, you can save for your master.’

I gaped at her in horror.

‘What did you expect?’ she asked coldly. ‘You heard what Howling Monkey said — if you’re seen in Tlatelolco again there’ll be trouble. I’m taking you back to Lord Feathered in Black. No doubt he’ll be fascinated to know what you’ve been doing during the last couple of days.’

‘But he’ll kill me!’ I cried, and then, realizing that in her present state of mind that was unlikely to do me much good, I added: ‘I could tell him about your son — how he cheated him, what he and Nimble got up to …’ My voice tailed off as we both realized what I was saying.

‘You’ll tell him what your own boy did to him, will you? I don’t think so. He can’t hurt mine any more.’ She lifted her eyes. ‘Here we are — Tenochtitlan. Better start thinking about what you’re going to tell your master, slave.’

Ahead of us, looming over the houses and public buildings fronting the canal, I saw the pyramids of the Heart of the World, dark, angular masses against the afternoon sky. Tallest of all was the double pyramid belonging to Huitzilopochtli the war-god and Tlaloc the rain-god. How long would it be, Iwondered, before I was dragged up the bloodstained steps on its western face to have my chest slashed open by the Fire Priest’s flint knife?

And that’s only if you’re lucky, I told myself, as I stared desperately into the indifferent faces of the men poling and paddling canoes along the great waterway, while our own boatman tried with some difficulty to get us into the thick stream of traffic. I looked over the canoe’s side towards the bank, speculating on my chances of swimming to freedom.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Lily snapped, as if reading my thoughts.

‘A gap,’ Partridge said sullenly. ‘All right, here goes!’

He dug his paddle into the water, driving us forward in a cloud of spray.

I could not see the space he had found. So far as I could make out the two vessels in front of us were nose to tail. In front was a big, scruffy barge, hacked out of the carcass of a whole tree. It lay low in the water, pressed down by the weight of its cargo of long, rough-hewn planks. The sweating labourer struggling to push it along with his paddle wore only a breechcloth and a surly look. Immediately following the barge was an entirely different sort of craft, small and well made, its wood carved into an elegant shape that tapered sharply at each end, smoothed until it almost shone and painted a rich green. Its middle section was shaded by a cotton canopy with bright parrot and hummingbird feathers around its edges and at its corners. The man paddling it was better dressed than most boatmen, with a short, netted cape billowing around his shoulders, as well as the obligatory breechcloth. He cursed impatiently as he tried to find a way around the great lumbering thing in front of him.

Suddenly he had something new to swear at, as Lily’s canoe swung into his path.

‘Look out, you clumsy sod! Where do you think you’re going?’ he screamed, as he sank the blade of his paddle into the water and twisted it frantically in an effort to slow his boat down and prevent a collision. ‘This is a new paint job!’

All he got in reply was a grunt as Partridge deftly begun to swing Lily’s craft into line. I had to admire his skill: he had timed the manoeuvre to perfection, leaving little more than a finger’s breadth between his own charge and the cargo boat in front and the rich man’s canoe behind. However, his calculations had not included the presence in his boat of a desperate slave.

As the stern of the big vessel ahead of us swung across our bow, I leapt up, ignoring the violent rocking this produced, and let myself fall over while I clawed desperately at the side of the other craft. At the same time I kicked, pushing against the bottom of Lily’s boat with both feet as hard as I could. It worked. Suddenly we were no longer turning to follow the traffic. My kick exactly countered Partridge’s efforts, leaving the canoe stopped in the water for the space of a heartbeat before the boat behind ran into it with a crash that sent Lily, her boatman and the man in charge of the vessel behind tumbling overboard.

I clung with both hands to the big boat. It continued on its way, unaffected by the chaos behind it, and all but wrenched my fingers out of their sockets as it plucked me bodily from the wreckage.

I fell into the water, suspended by one aching arm from the barge’s side. For a few moments I was dragged along, spluttering and choking and gasping for breath, until at last I managed to get a grip on the damp wood with my other hand.

‘Give me a lift up with your paddle!’ I cried.

The boatman looked at me over the stern of his craft. He seemed oddly unsurprised. ‘Why should I?’

‘I’ll give you my cloak.’

‘It’s all wet.’

‘It’ll dry out. Are you going to get a better offer?’

He thought about that for a moment, before dipping his paddle once in the water to push his boat along and then extending the dripping blade to me. ‘All right, but mind you don’t tear that cloak!’

The bargeman left me at Copolco in the west of the city, from where it was easy to get to the causeway in time to blend in with the crowd streaming across the lake towards their homes in Tlacopan or Popotla or any of the other towns and villages dotting the shore. With my cloak carefully folded and tucked away in the one clean and dry spot on the barge, my breechcloth sodden and stained and my hair unkempt, I looked like any serf or slave or day-labourer returning home for the night.

I was tempted to rest when I reached the western shore of the lake, to find some quiet spot where I could simply sit and bask in the blissful realization that the body I had found had not been my son’s. I wanted to laugh and weep for joy, but I could not spare the time. The Otomies might still be combing this countryside, looking for me, and I was convinced that if Nimble was still alive then he needed me and I had to get to him as quickly as I could. The only lead I had was still the costume. The task of finding that would not have been made any easier by Idle’s death, since I had assumed that he had it, but I had to try. That meant going back into Mexico. In any event my son must be in the city somewhere. I was certain he had gone back there to retrieve his knife.

I knew he valued the weapon not for itself but for the last link it gave him with his former life, with the mother he had never known and with the man who had raised him and protected him out of love for her. I tried not to believe that hehad killed Idle, either for the sake of the knife or for any other reason, but it made little difference.

Now Lily had the knife. I wondered what Nimble would do if he knew that. Would he try to take it from her too? The thought made me shudder as I realized how easy it might be for her to lay a trap for him. The way she had treated me showed what an appetite she had for revenge. Her son and his lover had duped her cruelly, and it would not be surprising if she hated the young man for it.

As I crossed the causeway, all of this passed through my mind, along with the practical problem I now faced: I was in danger not only from my master and the Otomies but also from the police in at least one parish, not to mention Lily. To return to the city, I concluded, I would need a disguise: a role I could slip into easily and convincingly What might that be?

A sly grin spread across my face when I thought of the solution.

Once on dry land I turned aside from the jostling crowd and made my way up through the forests and fields into the low hills that edged the valley, the foothills of the mist-covered mountains that walled off the civilized world from the barbarians outside. I avoided the terraced fields and the houses scattered among them, climbing up under cover of the trees where I could, until I was far enough away from the lake shore to be reasonably certain that no one would recognize me. After that I took less care, scrambling up the bank separating a plot from the one directly above it, walking straight across a field freshly sown with spring flowers, squeezing between the tall fleshy leaves of the maguey plants that edged the field and skirting the wood above it.

Just beyond that I found what I had been looking for. The ground rose away from me towards the mountains. A track crossed it, a vague but clearly distinguishable line worn bygenerations of feet making their way between the woods on one side and the bare hillside with its cacti and clumps of coarse greenery on the other. About twenty paces in front of me and right in the middle of the track was a stain: a large round patch of dark grey ash that showed where many fires had been lit over the years.

I breathed a sight of relief, knowing that my memory had not failed me and I had indeed found the place again after all these years.

I did not think anyone would be using it now. All the same, I took the precaution of arming myself with a fallen branch from an ash tree before approaching the place. I brandished it in front of me like a club as I stepped out into the last of the evening sunlight, looking constantly from right to left.

No one disturbed me as I stood over the place, or as I knelt down and, laying the branch aside, plunged both hands into the black ash and started rubbing it vigorously into my face.

As soon as I was satisfied that my skin must be stained as black as a priest’s I sat on a tree stump a few paces off the track and looked around.

A layer of cloud was rolling in, threatening to plunge the valley into darkness. The branches above and around me were vague dark shapes against a sky that was not much paler, as indistinct and threatening as the memory of a nightmare. Soon there would be no light at all.

Far away, something howled, a long, anguished cry that stopped as sharply as the scream of a man falling from a cliff. From much nearer I heard a rustling sound that I could not identify, except that whatever made it must have been bigger than a shrew and smaller than a jaguar.

Later, I knew, once the priests had sounded the midnight trumpet from the tops of the temples, an undeniably human noise would arise from the vast slumbering city at the centre ofthe valley floor and drift out across the lake and up to me in the hills: the sound of singing, as the boys and young men of the Houses of Youth raised their voices to show our neighbours and enemies that Aztecs never slept and were always alert. Until then, I had only the creatures of the night for company: weasels, centipedes, badgers, owls — every one of them, in Aztec eyes, a monster, a portent of death.

I shivered. It was getting colder. The clouds overhead meant there would be no frost, for which I was thankful, although they threatened rain, which would be almost as unpleasant for a man stuck out of doors with no cloak. I tried to reassure myself. As a priest I had been trained to venture into the darkness, to face the horrors that would leave most of my fellow Aztecs petrified, and defeat them. I had fought the spirits that haunted the night air while patrolling these very hills, and had survived, and taken pride in having kept them from the men, women and children sleeping in the valley below. I knew they could be beaten, and besides, they were essential to my plan.

I waited on my tree stump until my backside grew numb and the cold became so intense that I no longer had the energy to make my teeth chatter. I lost any sense of the passage of time. Unable to see the stars overhead, I had no idea how long it was until midnight, and then I found myself wondering whether I had passed out and missed the trumpets, for it would have been the easiest thing in the darkness for my eyes to close of their own accord for a few moments or half the night without my noticing.

I sat bolt upright, jerking myself awake.

There was a new noise among the rustlings and scamperings and snufflings filling the woods close by. I turned my head this way and that, listening intently to make sure I had heard it, and could catch it again. My wait was over.

Something was moving towards me. It was large, and proceededmore purposefully and less furtively than an animal hunting by night. As I heard the steady but cautious tread approaching, pausing and then moving away as it moved along the track, I knew that my plan appeared to be working. What I was listening to was a priest, making his rounds in the hills circling the city, walking a path so well known that he could find his way along it in the dark. Soon he would stop to make an offering to the gods, burning a bundle of reeds and censing the air with copal resin.

I walked slowly up the path behind the priest and stopped a few paces back from where I knew he would lay his reeds down and reach for his fire stick: the patch of ash I had found before nightfall. I was close enough to hear the scratching noise it made as he whirled the stick around to strike sparks from it, while my hand tensed around the knobby lump of wood I had picked up to defend myself with.

Suddenly the reeds flared into life, sending bright orange flames skyward, blindingly bright after the unrelieved darkness that had surrounded me since sunset, while the flames’ roar and crackle filled my ears.

I turned aside, trying to blink away the ghostly green shapes that danced in front of my eyes. I forced myself to turn back again, to squint into the fire, knowing that reeds do not burn for long, and I had moments only in which to bring my plan off.

The priest was clearly visible, or at least his shadow was, a dark shape hunched before his fire.

I stepped forward slowly and trod on a large thorn.

I howled. I yelped and shrieked like a demon, jumping up and down on my good foot while my improvised club swung madly through the air.

The priest leapt to his feet with a shout of alarm. He spun around, brandishing his censer before him, and sending a sweet-smelling, choking cloud towards me.

‘Who are you?’ he cried. His voice trembled but he was a brave man and he was standing his ground. ‘What are you? Are you a man, or a demon, or a spirit, or a god?’

I could not see his face with the firelight behind it. I hoped he could not see mine, although I was still hopping around so much that it cannot have been more than a blur.

‘I am Ehecatl!’ I cried. ‘The Lord of the Night Wind!’ I forced myself to stop hopping and planted the toes of my injured foot on the ground. I took another step forward, and walked into the cloud of incense. Suddenly to my troubles was added the urge to sneeze.

‘M-my Lord?’ The priest’s voice was that of a young man, terrified but determined to prove himself. I felt a twinge of remorse for what I had to do. I felt as if I were hearing myself, twenty years before, and wondered what he thought he was confronting: a god indeed, or the transfigured soul of a magician, out for a night of mayhem, or maybe just a man, desperate enough to be here on his own and for all he knew as frightened as he was.

‘Prostrate yourself!’ I cried, lurching forward on my good foot.

He ignored my order, instead thrusting his censer towards me again and waving it about to send more waves of scent over me. Now the desire to sneeze was almost overwhelming and I had to clap my free hand over my nose and mouth as I swung my stick, catching the censer and sending it flying.

The effect was dramatic. The priest howled, and a moment later I had my wish as he threw himself to the ground, cowering before me like a beaten warrior inviting his captor to seize his hair in the ritual gesture of victory and so set him on the road all warriors were meant to desire: the road that led to the temples of Mexico and a flowery death at the hands of the Fire Priest.

His hair, greasy as priests’ hair often was, since they were not allowed to wash it during fasts, glistened in the firelight. I was glad there was so much of it, as it would cushion the blow and make what I had to do next so much easier.

I brought the length of ash down on the top of his head with enough force to split the wood and send a jarring pain up my arm.

My victim slumped silently on to the forest floor.

I stood there for a moment, not daring to believe it had worked, until he had lain still at my feet for long enough to convince me. Then, with a long, loud groan, I collapsed next to him.