Shadow of the Lords

2

Lord Feathered in Black had a splendid palace near the centre of the city, within easy reach of the Heart of the World, the sacred precinct, around whose temples and towering pyramids much of the business of our lives revolved. Also nearby was the still more magnificent palace of my master’s cousin: the Emperor Montezuma the Younger.

I returned to my master’s house feeling footsore and numb. After a sleepless and violent night followed by a long walk and a quarrel with my brother, I found it hard to think about anything other than the urge to find my own room, shed the clothes I had worn all night in favour of my old cloak, curl up on my reed mat, pull the cloak over my head and fall asleep.

Sleep was long in coming, however. I could not stop dwelling on the task my master had set for me, and my brother’s startling offer.

The law was kind to slaves, but my master had shown more than once that he was too strong for the law to bind him. I might be allowed to rest today, but tomorrow he was going to make me look for my son, and if I displeased the old man — if, say, the boy was allowed to get away again — then he would make sure I regretted it. He could find a way of disposing of me if he wanted, I was confident of that.

The prospect of being free of all these fears once and for all was tantalizing, and it kept me awake like an itch I could notreach. It was all the more maddening because, had I belonged to almost anyone else, my brother’s scheme would have worked. But I knew my master: if Lion approached him, old Black Feathers would just laugh in his face.

I lay shivering under my cloak, although it was not a particularly cold day, and was still wondering when sleep would come and chase my fears away when the steward shook me awake.

‘Yaotl!’

Something was amiss.

It was dark in my room; with the wicker screen that covered the doorway pushed aside it was not quite pitch black, but the pallid grey light of evening falling on my floor told me I must have slept what had remained of the afternoon away. That was not what had confused me, though.

‘Yaotl!’

I could hear drums. From somewhere close by came the sharp, shrill call of the two-tone drum and under it the massive, insistent beat of the ground drum. I could hear flutes as well, and the wail of a trumpet, but it was the drums whose voices I fixed on, as they seemed to reverberate through the stucco floor under me, making my sleeping-mat shake in time with their rhythm.

No, it was not the drums either. I was used to the drumming. It must mark a ceremony of some kind, an offering to a god: I would be able to work out which god when I woke up and remembered what day it was.

‘Yaotl! Wake up!’

There was something wrong with the voice. I knew it from somewhere: a rough growl made hoarse by years of shouting at people, but its tone was all wrong. It sounded polite, almost deferential, and seemed even more odd when I realized that the shaking was not the drums after all, but the speaker’s handgently pushing at my shoulder, as though he were trying to wake me up but was afraid of succeeding.

It all fell into place when I heard his next words. They were muffled, as if he were speaking into his hand, not wanting to be heard.

‘Come on, wake up, you lousy piece of shit! On any other day I’d be kicking your worthless head in!’

Then I remembered what day it was and what the music was for. I nearly laughed out loud. I stopped myself, though, and made do with sitting up as gracefully as I could, gathering my short cloak around my shoulders in what I hoped was a lordly manner.

‘What do you want, Huitzic?’ I asked coolly.

My master’s steward snatched his hand away as if burned. He stepped back hastily, catching the hem of his long three-captive warrior’s cloak with his heel as he did so, and all but fell over on his backside.

Huitztic: his name meant something very close to ‘Prick’, which was exactly how I thought of him.

To earn true renown as an Aztec warrior, you had to have captured at least four of the enemy. Then you were counted among the great: you could bind your hair up with bands with eagle-feather tassels, wear long labrets and leather earplugs and sit in the Eagle House, chatting on equal terms with men like my distinguished brother. All this was yours if you took four captives.

The Prick had taken three, the last of them many years before. In return he had been given a red cotton cape with an orange border, a richly embroidered breechcloth, a few other tokens and a job. The Emperor had graciously allowed him to become the overseer of my master’s household and then, since he failed to distinguish himself any further, had forgotten all about him.

For as long as I had known him, the steward had been an embittered, vicious bully. Fortunately, like most bullies, he was terrified of a higher power, be it human or divine. The last time he had touched me it had been to beat me mercilessly for running away, but this was my patron god’s name-day. I might pay for it later, but for the moment I was safe with the steward and his superstitious fear. It was said that anyone who chid or beat a slave on One Death would be punished by pustulating sores.

‘You have a visitor.’ He had retreated to the wall by the doorway, which was as far away from me as he could get without leaving the room. I noticed that he had something draped over one arm.

I scrambled to my feet. ‘A visitor?’ For a moment I dared to believe it was Lion, come to renew his offer to buy my freedom, and that my master might be disposed to accept it. ‘Who is it?’

‘No one I know,’ he said, dashing my hopes. ‘He turned up just now, while his Lordship was preparing to sacrifice to the god. He’s in the big courtyard, where they’ve set the idol up.’

I hugged myself under my cloak and shivered, still chilly from having lain on the cold hard floor. I looked through the doorway into the gathering gloom. ‘I’d better go.’

‘Wait!’

I turned curiously towards the steward as he stretched his arm towards me. Draped over it was a length of cloth, its colours still bright, freshly laundered if not brand new.

‘Master said you were to have this. We didn’t have time to give you a bath, but you have to have a new cloak, he said.’

I took it wonderingly, and as I dropped my old, soiled mantle and tied the new one on, I marvelled once again at Tezcatlipoca’s bizarre sense of humour. The cloth was only maguey fibre — even on this day I was forbidden cotton — andthe arm that had proffered it had been as stiff as a beam; but what a grand joke the Lord of the Here and Now must have thought this, making men who would curse and beat me on one day give me presents on the next.

Silently I followed the steward to the great courtyard in the middle of my master’s palace.

I was not going to be able to meet my visitor for a while. The edges of the space were packed with members of the Chief Minister’s household and guests, and it was as much as I could do to squeeze in among them to find a place from where I could see what was happening. One or two looked at me curiously, but they made way for me when they recognized me: something else that could have happened on no other day than this.

The middle of the courtyard had been kept clear. Off to one side, the musicians were still playing the accompaniment to a hymn. There were the drummers, trumpeters blowing into conch-shells and the flute players, whose instrument was Tezcatlipoca’s favourite. Around me the crowd swayed in time to the beat of the drums and the flutes’ thin, nasal piping.

My master stood with his back to me. He held himself upright still and from behind might have passed for a much younger man, but he was recognizable tonight by his regalia: the white cloak with the black feather border that was the mark of his exalted office.

In front of old Black Feathers stood the god.

Tezcatlipoca lived most of the year in a shrine inside the house, close to the principal hearth, but today they had brought him out, the better for us all to see him and pay him his due.

He had been in my master’s family for generations, and was beginning to look his age, with his paint chipped and faded in places and cracks opening up in the wood he had been carvedfrom. All the same he had lost none of his power. From the tall white plumes that crowned his head to the black disc of the scrying-glass in his left hand and the deer hoof, symbol of his terrifying swiftness, tied to his right foot, he was a faithful representation of the Lord of the Here and Now. When I looked at the broad dark stripe running across his face, so very like a frown, at the flint-tipped arrows in his right hand and at the very real blood smeared over half his face, I found it hard not to tremble. Men had fashioned this monstrous image, but the power that lived in it belonged to the god, and the tiny eyes boring through the cloud of sweet-smelling, resinous smoke veiling his immobile face held all of Tezcatlipoca’s ferocity and malice.

My master had gone to great lengths to appease him today, judging by the fresh flowers heaped in front of the idol and the equally fresh blood, whose reek overpowered the flowers’ scent. The headless bodies of sacrificial quails lay on the ground around him, their precious water of life spilling on to the earth-covered floor to make a rich dark paste.

The old man was coming to the end of a song. Old Black Feathers was a priest as well as head of the household, and the words he was intoning must have been so familiar to him that he could have mumbled them in his sleep. Yet there was something in the way he spoke them — a real fervour, such as I had not heard in his voice in years — that told me he genuinely needed Tezcatlipoca’s help tonight.

‘I make offerings

Of Flowers and Feathers

To the Giver of Life.

He puts the eagle shields

On the arms of the men,

There where the war rages,

In the midst of the plain.

As our sons,

As our flowers,

Thus you, warrior of the shaven head,

Give pleasure to the Giver of Life …’

He groaned his way through the verses as if wringing them from within his own heart.

I knew that they had been composed by his own long-dead sister, Macuilxochitl, many years before. Was that a coincidence, I wondered, or was he deliberately setting out to remind the god of everything his family had done to honour him, as if asking him to return the favour?

‘Laying it on a bit thick tonight, isn’t he?’ I muttered.

The man next to me in the crowd looked at me curiously. He was shorter than I was, slightly stooped, and his hair was grey and thinning. He wore a plain cloak that did not quite reach his knees and his hair was loose and unadorned. He looked like a commoner, but I assumed he was a merchant, concealing his wealth as they always did, or perhaps a craftsman — a lapidary or a goldsmith or a featherworker. My master was not given to inviting people to his house unless they were likely to have something he wanted: knowledge or money or a skill he could use.

I noticed he had been giving his blood to the gods; his cheeks and neck were covered with it, and some was still glistening.

‘If he is, it’s hardly surprising. We all have to appease the gods tonight. Why else do you think we’re all standing out here? Haven’t you heard?’

‘No.’

My reply took him aback. ‘Have you been asleep all day or something?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’ve not heard what happened last night.’

It was my turn to stare. Surely, he could not mean my master was beseeching the god to help him because of what we had been doing the previous night. I could see why he might have done, because our adventures on the lake had added a last twist to the crazy turns his fortunes had taken lately. However, there was no way old Black Feathers would have let that become public knowledge.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said carefully.

The man had been whispering, but now he lowered his voice until it was almost inaudible beneath the musicians’ thumping and squealing and my master’s entreaty to the god.

‘You must be the only person in Mexico who hasn’t heard! A god has been seen, in the streets, in the north of the city, in Tlatelolco. Several people saw him — I saw him myself! It was Quetzalcoatl, it was the Feathered Serpent!’

He looked at me expectantly.

If he expected me to gasp or groan or cry out or start tearing at my hair and skin or do whatever else people are meant to when seized by fear of the gods and the anticipation of their own doom, he was disappointed.

‘Really?’ I said.

I had reached my own understanding with the gods many years before. They had given their own blood and bodies to form the first humans and make the Sun and the Moon rise. To sustain them and recompense them for their sacrifice, we offered them the hearts and lives of great and beautiful warriors. Because we did that, we claimed the right to address them on their own terms. Whimpering with fright would not make the crops grow, stop the lake flooding or deflect the spears of our enemies; making sacrifices and demanding that the gods accept them and do as we asked just might.

Which is not to say that I took no notice of omens or that most of the city was not transfixed by them. Almost anything, from seeing a rabbit run into your house to dreaming about your teeth falling out, could be taken as a portent. In recent years, more strange things than ever had been seen: strange lights in the sky, temples bursting into unquenchable flames for no reason, the lake boiling and rising on a day when the air was still. Perhaps that was why everyone was so jittery about this latest apparition. Looking around me, it seemed to me that the crowd in the Chief Minister’s courtyard was unusually large, and unusually silent and attentive, even for Aztecs.

‘So what happened, exactly?’ I asked.

‘You’re a cool one,’ my neighbour grumbled. ‘What happened? Why, the god was seen up there, just after midnight. Lots of people saw the same thing. When Lord Feathered in Black heard about it, he summoned us all here.’ As Chief Minister my master was ultimately responsible for what went on in the streets of the city, and gods roaming around on the loose were clearly something he had to know about. I wondered whether he had been as sceptical about what he had heard as I was.

‘You say lots of people saw it?’ The streets of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were usually deserted at night. There were too many malignant spirits about. Nobody wanted to risk seeing an owl, a sure portent of your own death, or meeting the Divine Princesses, the ghosts of mothers dead in childbirth who avenged themselves on men by bringing sickness upon them.

‘I think there was a feast,’ my neighbour said defensively. ‘Maybe some of the guests …’

‘Maybe some of the guests had had a few too many sacred mushrooms. They might have seen anything!’

‘Do you want to hear about this or not?’ He took mysilence as assent. ‘The god was running — or trying to run. He was staggering along the side of a canal, and shouting — cursing. It was like he was drunk.’

‘What made everyone think he was Quetzalcoatl?’

‘He looked like him! He had a serpent’s face, all smooth and glittery, and the rest of him was covered in feathers — feathers sprouting from his head and down his back and even from his pendant and the shield he was carrying, great long green feathers everywhere. You should have seen it!’ he went on, breathlessly. ‘The most beautiful quetzal feathers ever, like nothing I’ve ever seen — and I’m a featherworker!’

I was still cautious. The description sounded too accurate: too much like the images that decorated countless shrines and temples. ‘Did you really see all this?’

‘I’m telling you, I was there! He was right in front of me — as close as you are now.’

‘You weren’t a guest at this feast you mentioned, I suppose?’ The more I heard, the more convinced I was it was the sacred mushrooms talking.

‘No,’ he said, plainly nettled. ‘Look, I was as sober as I am now, all right?’

I sighed; I had really not meant to start a row. ‘All right. I’m sorry, it just sounds incredible. Weren’t you scared?’

‘Scared? Look,’ he said, with a perverse note of pride, ‘I’m not ashamed to say it — I was so scared I wet myself!’

‘So you were wandering around in Tlatelolco by yourself …’

‘I was walking by the canal that separates Pochtlan from Amantlan — you know it?’ I did: I could picture the broad waterway, edged on both sides by landing stages and the whitewashed walls of houses and courtyards, most of them large and well kept, since Pochtlan and Amantlan were two of the richest parishes in the city. ‘I heard the commotion on the otherside — someone shouting, and running feet. It was too dark to see much in the way of detail from the other side of the water.’ The only light would have been the stars and the flickering glow of the temple fires burning at the tops of nearby pyramids. ‘All I could see was someone moving in the same direction as I was. I remember wondering if he was going to cross the bridge in front of me — then he did!’ I heard the man swallow nervously. ‘I was so frightened I couldn’t even run. I just watched him staggering across that little wooden bridge — I don’t know if he was drunk but he was definitely unsteady on his feet — and the next thing I knew, I was face to face with a god!’

Face to face with a god. In the man’s expression, in his staring eyes and bared teeth, I saw something of the terror he must have felt. He was telling the truth, I had no doubt of that. To have learned from others that they had seen what he had and that it had not been just a bad dream could only have added to his fear.

I was about to ask him what had happened next — where the god had gone, whether he had fainted or run away — when an urgent tugging at the hem of my cloak interrupted me.

‘Your visitor, slave,’ the Prick hissed.

My visitor would not come into the courtyard. The steward had to lead me out to him. He did so with ill grace, flapping the ground at his heels with the hem of his long cotton cloak in the hope of stirring some dust up into my face as I walked in his footsteps. By the time we got to the foot of the broad flight of steps leading from the terrace at the front of my master’s house to the canal that ran by it, he was muttering audibly.

‘Not much longer to go. Just you wait till tomorrow, you uppity little sod … Here you are.’

In the failing evening light the paved space at the front of the house bore a pale, colourless glow, as did the house opposite. The canal between them was a broad band of pure black. In the middle of it danced a shimmering patch of yellow light, the reflected glow of the fire on top of a nearby pyramid.

My visitor had contrived to stand so that his body was silhouetted against the patch of light, and all I saw of him at first was the angular shape of a tall man half turned towards me.

‘Yaotl?’

‘Here he is,’ the steward said unenthusiastically.

‘Thank you,’ my visitor said, and then, when the other man showed no sign of going away, added pointedly, ‘That will be all.’

I heard the steward’s cloak rustle as he turned on his heel and stalked back into the house. The moment he was out of sight I turned to the shadowy figure standing by the canal.

‘Thanks very much. Do you have any idea what that is going to cost me in the morning?’

The stranger laughed.

‘Shut up!’ I snapped. ‘You don’t have to put up with that oaf every day of your life. He’s bad news when he’s annoyed — and nothing annoys a flunky like him more than being ordered about by a complete stranger. Who are you, anyway?’

The laughter dried up quickly. ‘Sorry, but I thought it was funny — I mean, I should have known better, because we’re in the same position — but I have to give you a message, and it’s urgent and very private.’

‘“The same position”? So you’re a slave, too?’ I warmed towards him a little. To have seen the steward off as he had took some nerve, even if it was my hide that was likely to pay for it. By now, also, I was intrigued. ‘Whose slave? And what are you doing running errands on One Death? Shouldn’t you be having a rest?’

‘I volunteered. I’m new, you see — only sold myself a little while ago. My name’s Chihuicoyo.’ It meant ‘Partridge’. ‘I haven’t even spent all the money I was given yet, so by rights I shouldn’t be working, but my master needed me in a hurry, and you like to make a good impression, don’t you?’

I understood that. A valued slave might be given a position of responsibility, overseeing other slaves, or even get his freedom on easy terms. If he ingratiated himself enough with his master’s wife and the old man died off at a convenient time, then of course the possibilities were endless …

‘So when Icnoyo sent for me to give you a message, I didn’t think I ought to refuse.’

I stared at the man.

It was hard to make out any details in the poor light; just a short cloak that hung from his shoulder in the stiff way that cheap maguey fibre cloth does. ‘All I could see of his face was a pair of glittering eyes, narrow like most Aztecs’, and some strands of hair. He wore his hair shorter than I did, I realized, but so did most people: I kept mine hanging loose over my shoulders to cover my ears, mutilated as they were by years of penitential bloodletting as a priest.

It was not his appearance which made me stare, though. It was shock.

‘Did you say “Icnoyo”?’ I asked weakly.

Once, when I was a youngster in the House of Tears, one of the older boys gave me a piece of amber which, it turned out, he had been rubbing with a piece of cloth so as to wake up the spirit inside it. It had given me a shock and him a good laugh.

This slave’s words jolted me now as much as that piece of amber had.

Icnoyo, an old merchant with an unlikely name — it meant ‘Kindly’ — was Lily’s father, and the grandfather of Shining Light. To hear from the old man this evening, when I thoughtI had done with his household and had only to worry about my own troubles and the horrible dilemma I would be faced with in the morning, was the last thing I would have looked for.

‘That’s right,’ the slave confirmed. ‘Kindly was very anxious to get this to you straight away. I had to give it to you in person, nobody else. He said it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else, but you’d know what to do with it.’

‘Maybe I would. If it’s so urgent why didn’t his daughter tell me about it last night, or this morning? He forgets what I am. I might have been able to do something about it today, if I’d known what he wanted, but it’s no good now. I think my master has other plans for me.’ I sighed regretfully. Now I was getting over the shock I could feel my interest being piqued. What sort of cryptic message could Kindly’s slave be bearing?

‘Hold your hand out.’

Partridge’s voice abruptly dropped to an urgent whisper. Without thinking I did as he asked, and in the darkness I felt rather than saw the heavy cloth-wrapped bundle that fell into my palm. When I looked down I noticed that it was darker than the skin of my hand, and that was also when I registered that it was damp.

‘What’s this?’

There was no answer.

When I looked up again the slave had vanished.

I looked wildly about me. I took a deep breath, ready to call out, but stopped myself, and stood and listened instead.

The only sound was the soft pad-pad-pad of bare feet running away along the road by the canal.

I perched on the bottom tier of the stairway leading from the canal up to my master’s house and stared at the thing in my hand.

The sound of the drums still came to me, but now the musicians my master had hired were competing with those in other nearby houses, so that from where I sat the whole city seemed to echo with their rhythm. Every great house would be full of people praying and making offerings to Tezcatlipoca. For those who did not live in great houses or who could not get themselves invited to them, the priests in all the temples would be intoning hymns to Him Whose Slaves We Are. Everyone, from the most celebrated warrior and the richest merchant to the meanest serf shivering on his waterlogged plot out on the lake, would be demanding the god’s favour. The poor man would pray for the stroke of fortune that would make him instantly rich. The rich man would ask the god to stay his hand and let him keep what he had.

Almost alone in the city, I asked for nothing. I had nothing worth keeping, and I had seen too much ever to believe that the god could not make things worse if he chose.

The only thing I did have was a sodden cloth-wrapped bundle. As I hefted it an unpleasant thought occurred to me about why it might be so damp. Then, when I brought the thing up to my nose for a cautious sniff, I almost threw it away in disgust. There is something about the smell of human blood that retains the power to appal even the most accustomed of butchers.

Gingerly, with the bundle held at arm’s length, I started picking at its wrapping. As the thin, cheap cloth started to come away in shreds, I promised myself I would throw the nasty thing in the canal and wash my hands the moment I found out what it was.

My fingers, numb with cold and damp, seemed to move more and more slowly the closer they got to the middle of the parcel. There was something about its weight, tugging at my hand like a doomed fish being brought up in a net, about itsshape, sleek and full of purpose, about its unemphatic gleam, which I knew well enough to fear.

Then it lay in my hand, with the remains of its cloth binding littering the ground around me like the discarded skins of snakes.

My first impulse was to drop the thing. My second was to wrap my hand around it and clasp it to my chest in a fierce embrace and never let go. My third was to be violently sick.

In the event I did none of those things. I just sat by the canal and stared at what lay in my hand, a bronze knife sticky with congealing blood, and tried to grasp its meaning.

I knew this knife. I had been threatened with it more than once. The last time I had seen it, its blade had been buried in the breast of Kindly’s old slave, Nochehuatl. That had been five days ago, and it explained how the merchant had come by the weapon, although I realized with a thrill of horror that some of the blood that coated it now was fresher than the dead slave’s would be.

It was a grisly token, but it was more than that. The knife had been the only thing my son owned, his sole memento of his upbringing as an exile among the Tarascans, the barbarians beyond the mountains in the West who alone knew how to make and work bronze.

Why had the old merchant sent it to me now? Was he trying to tell me that my son had come back to claim it?