Shadow of the Lords

TWO DEER
1

‘Come on. Wake up!’

It was dark and bitterly cold. How typical of my master, I thought, to treat me to a new cloak that was too thin to keep out the cold. Then I realized that there was no cloak over me and I was lying shivering on my sleeping-mat in nothing but my breechcloth.

I must have thrown my cloak off in my sleep, I thought, rolling over and groping for it. My fingers found the rough leather of a sandal, and then the calloused skin of the foot in it just at the moment when the foot left the floor and flew towards my ribs.

It was more of a sharp poke than a blow. I managed to bite back my cry. I realized who the foot must belong to and did not want to give the Prick the satisfaction of hearing me howl.

‘Move yourself!’ he snapped.

I sat up. ‘Where’s my cloak?’

‘Here. This is yours.’

A heap of cloth was thrown at me out of the darkness. I thought there was something wrong when I unravelled it. It seemed too rough, was frayed at the edges, and smelled.

‘What’s this? Where’s my new one?’ I regretted the question straight away.

The steward laughed. ‘It’s not One Death any more, slave.You didn’t think his Lordship was going to let you keep a brand-new cloak, did you?’

The steward and I passed through a maze of canals out on to the open lake, with me, naturally, plying the paddle of our canoe.

From all around us came the sounds of a city emerging gradually into wakefulness. The dying echoes of the pre-dawn trumpets fell from the temples, drifting through the streets like fog on a still day. From the houses on all sides we heard the swishing noise of courtyards being swept and the gentle splashing sounds made by the women as they laved the faces of household idols. I may have imagined it but I thought I heard an unusual note in these sacred rituals this morning, as though some of the brooms were being wielded more vigorously, the little statues being dowsed more liberally, than usual. I wondered whether rumours of Quetzalcoatl’s appearance had something to do with it.

Life went on, however. Along with the other sounds came the wholesome slap of maize dough being thrown on a griddle. A couple of times I heard a baby crying and a woman’s voice cooing softly in response. From somewhere nearby came a coarse oath, as a man set out for the fields or the marketplace, realized he had forgotten his lunch and turned back to get it.

Far away in the East, the souls of dead warriors would be practising their songs and dance-steps as they waited to escort the Sun through the sky. Of course, you could never hear their voices and stamping feet, but the sounds they made seemed to my mind to grow and swell beneath the chatter of the Aztecs around us in the way you hear the hum of a hive beneath the buzz of one or two stray bees.

A man who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone spent four years in the Sun’s entourage; after that, we believed, he was reborn as a hummingbird or a butterfly.

‘Now will the Sun rise

Now will the day dawn

Let all the various firebirds

Sip nectar where the flowers stand erect.’

‘What’s that? What are you talking about? What do you think you are, some sort of poet?’

My son’s bronze knife lay concealed in the folds of my breechcloth, an uncomfortable weight knocking against my hip. The impulse to whip it out and shut the steward up for good was almost overwhelming. I restrained myself, though. What would I do afterwards? I had come face to face with this truth before: if I ran away now, I would not be safe anywhere in Mexico, and in a world full of our enemies, no Aztec was truly safe anywhere else.

One day soon, I realized, thinking about the beatings and humiliations I had suffered at the Prick’s hands and about the young man old Black Feathers had ordered me to look for, I might have to raise my hand against my master and his servants, but until then I was better off just doing what I was told. I could not let anything jeopardize the goal I had set myself: to find out why Kindly had sent me the knife.

Besides, I had an answer for the steward.

‘It’s a hymn,’ I said reprovingly. ‘Don’t you know it? It’s the one we sing to the Maize God every eight years …’

‘Used to sing, in your case,’ he sneered. All the same he looked uncomfortable, as if caught in some impious act. He huddled beneath his cloak and kept his eyes fixed on the water around us.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked. The waterway had broadened and the close-packed houses had given way to small one-room huts half hidden by sedge and willow.

‘Back to the merchant’s boat. We’ll pick up Handy …’

‘You don’t mean to say he’s still there?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about him — he’s being well paid!’ The steward laughed harshly. ‘Then we go after our fugitives. Lord Feathered in Black reckons they won’t have got very far. He thinks they’ll have holed up somewhere near the lake shore yesterday. They’ll have realized we had men out looking for them and they’ll have wanted to rest and keep under cover in daylight. They may have moved last night, but if we can pick up their trail and move more quickly than they can, we’ll have them!’

‘What if we can’t?’ I asked naively.

The steward leaned towards me so that his face was uncomfortably close to mine and I could smell the chillies and cheap tobacco on his breath.

‘If we can’t,’ he snarled, ‘then I’ll make sure old Black Feathers knows whose fault it is, and no doubt he’ll do to you what he’d do to those two if he could catch them. I think an arrow through the balls was what he had in mind!’

The merchant’s boat was as we had left it, except that the bodies that had lain on its deck had gone.

‘Shining Light’s mother sent a boat to pick him up,’ Handy explained when the steward and I hailed him from the canoe.

‘And the others?’

‘Over the side. Some warriors came out yesterday morning. Tied rocks to their feet and threw them in. Very efficient about it, too — they even brought the rocks with them.’

‘Warriors?’

‘Otomies. Real hard bastards.’

‘Otomies? Are they still here?’ the steward asked quickly, glancing nervously at the boat, which was plainly unoccupied except by Handy.

‘Yes, they’re bobbing about under the water and breathingthrough straws,’ Handy snapped. ‘Of course they’re not here! They paddled their boat over to the mainland. I didn’t feel like asking them to take me with them!’

I understood his annoyance. It was born of fear.

The Otomies are a race of savages who live in the high, dry, cold lands to the north of the valley of Mexico. They are renowned for being brave, strong and stupid, and for painting their bodies blue. We used to make jokes about them: ‘A real Otomi, a miserable Otomi, a green-head, a thick-head, a big tuft of hair over the back of the head, an Otomi blockhead …’ The joke was that you could say all that to one of these foreign dimwits in a conversational tone and he would nod and smile as if you were asking after his grandmother.

‘Otomi’ was also the name of some of our most ferocious warriors, the army’s elite, berserkers sworn never to take a step backward in battle — and if that sounds reasonable, then you try wrestling a big Texcalan nobleman to the ground without losing your footing once, and see how long you last. These psychopaths resembled their barbarian namesakes in every respect except the blue paint, and the fact that you did not make jokes about them, not if you valued your life.

I had to quell a sudden feeling of panic as I realized they must be engaged in the same search we were. If they got to my son before I did, I thought, he would not stand a chance. If the Chief Minister wanted him alive they would probably cut one of his feet off to stop him running away and then keep the foot as a souvenir.

‘The mainland?’ said the steward, biting his lip. ‘We need to get over there.’ He was as nervous about meeting the Otomies as Handy and I were. After all, as a mere three-captive warrior, he was almost as far beneath their contempt. The moment I realized this, I caught the earliest glimmer of a plan, as faint and elusive as the first star in the evening sky.

‘We need to get after them,’ I said briskly. ‘If they’re hunting the same people we are, we ought to be joining forces, don’t you think?’

‘Well, I don’t know …’

‘I’d rather go back to the city,’ Handy grumbled. ‘You haven’t been stuck on this boat for a day and a half. Do you have any idea what my wife’s going to do to me when I finally get home?’

‘Old Black Feathers isn’t going to take kindly to anyone going home before we’ve looked for these two.’ I looked straight at the big commoner to make sure he grasped my meaning. ‘All we really have to do is find the Otomies and point them in the right direction …’

“‘All we have to do”?’ the steward spluttered. ‘Are you mad? Look, we’re not talking about a bunch of little kids out looking for frogs and water-snakes in the marshes. Chasing a couple of runaways is one thing, but this is getting dangerous!’

‘And what’s our master going to do to us if we go back empty handed?’ One look at the steward’s face told me I had touched a nerve. Old Black Feathers could easily make life almost as unpleasant for him as for me. ‘Let’s face it, we’ve no chance of finding them by ourselves, and if we do, how are we going to get them back alive? If we find the soldiers and tell them where to start looking, they’re as likely as not to tell us to get lost — then we can go back to our master and tell him we’ve done our bit.’

Handy seemed to make up his mind then, scrambling over the side of the merchant’s boat and making our canoe rock alarmingly.

‘You won’t have far to look for the warriors,’ the commoner said. ‘They camped just beyond that stand of bulrushes over there. They were singing half the night — kept me awake, not that I was about to complain! If our two runaways heardthem I should think they’d have taken off pretty quickly.’ I thought so too, before remembering that there were not two runaways, only one, and I strongly suspected that he had not run anywhere. Besides, I realized that the singing must have been a feint: while some of the Otomies pretended to carouse noisily, serenading the creatures of the night with boastful warrior songs, others would be creeping quietly through the dense growth of reed and sedge at the shoreline, using the noise as cover. ‘I just want to know what you’re going to tell them.’

As I dipped the paddle into the water and began to propel our overloaded, suddenly ungainly craft in the direction Handy had indicated, I gestured towards another place at the water’s edge, where I could make out a fresh disturbance in the mud and a short trail of flattened plants.

‘I’ll tell them to look over there,’ I said. ‘That’s where their quarry landed.’

Handy followed my glance. Then he stared at me. He opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it again.

The place I had pointed out was where my master’s boatman had grounded his canoe and run away, two nights before. Handy had witnessed the whole thing. I tried not to let the tension show on my face while he decided whether to mention it or not.

‘Over there,’ he said at length. ‘Right.’

Before I could groan with relief the steward asked: ‘Why didn’t you tell our master this yesterday?’

‘It was too foggy yesterday morning. I couldn’t be sure.’ I turned quickly to Handy, hoping to change the subject. ‘What will happen to this boat?’

‘Lily and her father will send someone to fetch it, I expect. There’s enough merchandise left on it — bales of feathers, bags of cocoa beans — lots of stuff from the hot lands in the South — they won’t want to leave all that floating around in the middle of the lake!’

‘But if it was dark when they escaped …’ Whatever else you might say about my master’s steward, he was persistent.

‘What’s that over there?’ I asked. ‘Looks like smoke to me.’

A thin streak of smoke, the sort of thing you might expect to see rising from a pipe that had been packed too tightly, had appeared over the top of the rushes in front of us.

‘It is,’ Handy confirmed. He looked at me. ‘I think that’s from the fire the Otomies made.’

We were very close to the bank now: so close that I could see the water below us changing colour, from dark blue to a cloudy green, and hear the buzzing noise of the flies and mosquitoes that lived in the shelter of the tall plants. Ducks paddled listlessly in and out of the reeds, their feet just visible below the water’s surface, little dark angular shapes making eddies in the scum around them.

‘Where do we go now?’ I began to ask, but the question died in my throat before I had finished asking it.

Something whistled through the air. The boat shuddered. Handy, standing up in the bows, cried out in alarm. An instant later came a scream and a loud splash and suddenly there was no sign of the steward.

I grabbed both sides of the canoe and clung to them as the vessel lurched from side to side. The water was in turmoil, with ducks streaking across its surface in all directions and a large shape floundering noisily about just under its surface.

‘What’s happening?’ I cried. ‘Where’s the steward?’

‘He jumped in.’ Handy dropped on to one knee and reached out over the water towards the submerged creature splashing about beside us. ‘Bet he can’t swim.’

For a moment I hoped he was intending to shove the steward under and hold him there until his struggles stopped, butthen a hand came up, groped blindly towards one of his arms and seized it with enough force to throttle a dog.

‘Help me, won’t you?’ he grunted as he hauled the sodden, helpless object towards the boat. I did not move. I thought I was doing enough by restraining myself from bashing the steward over the head with the paddle. Instead I looked around for whatever had attacked us. It took only a moment to find it.

‘Harpoon.’ Handy had seen it at the same time: a short hardwood spear projecting from the boat’s side, near the bow. Its flint tip was buried deep in the wood. ‘You were lucky, Yaotl — a hand’s breadth or so higher and that would have gone through your spleen!’

A length of rope trailed from the spear’s shaft. I tugged at it with my fingers, making the rope rise dripping from the water, and then dropped it suddenly when I realized that our assailant must be at the other end of it.

‘Who threw this?’ I whispered hoarsely. We were floating in plain sight of the bank and had made enough noise already to scare every bird on the western side of the lake, but I still felt the urge to be quiet.

‘I’d take a wild guess,’ retorted Handy drily, ‘and say it was the man standing over there among the rushes. It’s the throwing-stick and the rope he’s holding. They sort of give it away.’

I had not seen or heard him but that was hardly surprising. An Otomi’s favoured tactic when confronted by the enemy was to rush screaming towards him and drag him noisily to the earth by his hair, but that did not mean he would have forgotten all of his hunting skills. Perhaps he had been lying in wait for us all along or perhaps, as soon as he had heard us coming, he had crept towards the shoreline to greet us. Either way here he was, and I felt myself caught off guard.

He was tall and spare, without a sign of any excess flesh under his dark, weather-beaten skin. He wore only abreechcloth, his full warrior costume having presumably been discarded in favour of being able to move about without having it rustle on the ground behind him or against the tall plants on either side. He carried no sword, but that gave me no comfort. One look at his hairstyle — the tall column that crowned his forehead and the loose locks flowing extravagantly over the nape of his neck — assured me that he could probably have killed all of us with his bare hands.

Following Handy’s gaze, I took in the throwing-stick, a long plain length of wood with a notch at the end for the spear. The warrior had been hoping to catch his breakfast and we had got in his way.

He watched our antics in silence. While Handy hauled the spluttering, coughing steward over the side, I took up the paddle to propel us towards the bank.

Handy and I jumped into the water, tugged our feet out of the muck beneath it and waded ashore. The steward fell in, got to his knees and began to be violently sick.

Only when he had finished retching and stood up, pulling his waterlogged cloak around him in an effort to restore his dignity, did the Otomi deign to speak.

‘Who are you?’

‘Lord Feathered in Black is my master,’ the steward gasped, ‘and this is …’

‘I didn’t ask you!’ the stranger snarled. ‘I know perfectly well who you are and what your master wants. What’s he got to say?’ He nodded towards me.

‘I’m Yaotl,’ I said. ‘I’m the Chief Minister’s slave, and this here is a retainer of his, Handy. We were just looking for …’ Suddenly inspiration died on me like a plant withering for lack of water and manure, and I found I was left floundering helplessly. ‘Just looking for …’

‘A man and a boy?’

‘Have you found them?’ the steward asked eagerly. My stomach lurched fearfully at the thought that the Otomies might already have found their prey, or the boy at least, and my son might even now be on his way back to my master, trussed like a deer, shivering with pain from whatever the warriors had done to him and terror at the tortures the Chief Minister was intending to inflict.

‘No,’ the Otomi said sourly. He bent down and tugged sharply at his rope. The spear at the other end splashed into the water, making me wonder how much strength it took to pull it free with so little effort. ‘Not a trace of them. Spent the whole of yesterday wading through this muck. Nothing. The lads up in the hills behind us haven’t done any better, but at least they kept their feet dry!’ He scowled at each of us in turn as he reeled in his rope. ‘So old Black Feathers decided we needed some help, did he?’ There was no need to ask how much help he thought we were likely to be. ‘You’d better come with me. You can tell my captain why the duck he was going to have for breakfast is happily paddling away on the wrong side of the valley!’

The steward pursed his lips dubiously at the prospect of meeting a squad of hungry warriors. ‘We want to show you something first,’ he said hastily.

‘Really? What is it — a side of venison?’

‘Yaotl thinks he knows where the two you’re looking for went.’

The Otomi looked me up and down. ‘Experienced tracker, is he?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s just that …’

‘Only we could do with one. Look, we’re not used to this sneaking-about stuff, you see? Show me some Texcalan scumbag who thinks he’s hard enough to take me on and I’ll show you what I can do with him, but following a trail through the marshes isn’t my idea of fun, I can tell you!’

Handy, loyal as ever, took up the steward’s theme. ‘Well then, Yaotl here’s your man. He could track a bird through the air!’

‘Wait a moment!’ I cried, alarmed. I could see my plan to mislead both the steward and the Chief Minister’s warriors succeeding altogether too well. What would happen if they expected me to lead them to their quarry and found out that I had no more idea of where to start looking than they had?

The Otomi looked at me. ‘Quite right,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘we can’t just go running around on my say-so. We ought to go and see the boss first.’ With that, he turned and vanished into the rushes, leaving only a small gap between the tall, swaying plants as a clue to the direction he had gone in.

The steward looked at me. ‘What now?’ he asked in a disgusted tone.

‘Better get after him, I suppose,’ I said reluctantly.

‘Good idea, smartarse. Where did he go?’

‘Follow the smoke smell,’ Handy suggested.

It did not take us long to make our way along the trail of broken reeds and churned-up mud to the site where the Otomies had built their fire. Above the rustle of rushes and the slap of mud beneath our feet I could hear urgent, angry whispers being passed back and forth.

‘So what did you catch, Cuectli? A deer? A heron? A duck?’ The voice had an odd quality, as if the speaker were murmuring asides out of one half of his mouth only.

Cuectli, whose name meant ‘Fox’, responded with a sad sigh. ‘Only idiots.’

I could not quite catch the captain’s reply, but plainly it was not an encouraging one, as the next thing I heard was Fox’s voice singing my praises. ‘One of them’s a tracker, though. An expert. Claims he can follow a bird through the air!’

‘Let’s have a look at him, then!’

The next thing I knew I was being pulled through the tall plants into the clearing, there to stand face to face with one of the ugliest-looking individuals I have ever seen.

If I had needed a reminder of the type of man the Emperor liked to have in the vanguard of the army, in the front row of the battle line, one glance at this one would have been enough.

Unlike Fox, the captain was fully dressed. His torso, arms and legs were tightly wrapped in a suit of bright green cotton, which served only to emphasize the bulging muscles under it. His feet had been thrust into broad, flat sandals that put me in mind of paving slabs. He had bound up his grey-streaked hair in the same way as Fox. I could not see the insignia he would carry on his back when he went into battle — a tall, teardrop-shaped device, crowned with long green feathers, which would make him instantly recognizable to friend and terrified foe alike — or his round, feather-bordered shield, but I guessed they were both close at hand, carefully wrapped up to preserve them from the mud and damp. No doubt they would have impeded his progress through the rushes, but in his case, I thought, they were hardly needed. He would have been fright-ening enough stark naked, because, even though I took all the details of his costume in and grasped their meaning without conscious thought, I forgot all about them when I saw his face.

Someone had taken a sword to it, many years before. Someone had cut through flesh and bone, from brow to jawline, and where the left side of his face should have been had left nothing but a glistening slab of scar tissue.

How had he survived a wound like that? I felt a chill when I realized that he must have won the fight in which he got it, since otherwise he would be dead, his heart torn from his breast at the summit of a pyramid in Texcala or Huexotzinco. Perhaps his partner had saved his life, for Otomies alwaysfought in pairs. What was left of his lower lip sagged under the weight of a human wrist-bone that dangled from it, and I suspected that this had belonged to the man who gave him the wound.

Behind him, his comrades were trying to build a fire out of reeds and some kindling they had brought with them. The ground was too damp and all they were getting was clouds of thin smoke, which would be doing nothing to sweeten their tempers, especially once they realized they had nothing to cook on it anyway. Some of the warriors were dressed like their captain, while others wore only their breechcloths. I wondered briefly why any of them had bothered to put their uniforms on, since they were not going to war, but then I realized that the answer was all too obvious. It must be so long since any of these blood-glutted veterans had met anyone equal to him in battle that a fight scarcely meant anything to them any more. Their business was killing and maiming men who were already paralysed with fear. That was what they had come here to do, and they had dressed accordingly. And they were hunting my son.

The captain interrupted my thoughts in the crudest manner possible, by stretching out an arm, seizing my jaw and dragging my face close to his. He tilted my chin up towards his face and let his sole eye rove lewdly over my features.

‘Name?’ he snarled.

I should have been meek, but his examination reminded me of the slave market, of strangers looking into my mouth, feeling my muscles and measuring my worth in lengths of cloth and bags of cocoa beans, and I could not help answering him back.

‘I can’t tell you when you’re holding my jaw,’ I pointed out unintelligibly.

‘What?’

Fox said: ‘I think he wants you to let go.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Suddenly the pressure on both sides of my face doubled, forcing my mouth open and stretching the skin of my cheeks over my teeth. It was impossible to scream but the pain made me squirm. My head was wrenched from side to side so hard that the motion made me dizzy, and then the captain shoved me backward and let go, making my knees buckle and sending me sprawling on to the ground. My head hit Handy’s chest on the way down, driving the breath from his lungs with a loud grunt.

‘Funny man,’ the captain sneered. I rubbed my jaw as I glared resentfully up at him.

‘I think his name’s Yaotl,’ Fox offered.

‘“The Enemy”, eh? Well, he’s the first enemy we’ve seen today What about it, lads? Do we show the runt what it feels like to meet the Otomies?’

There was a stirring among the shadowy figures behind him. I sat up quickly, knowing the captain’s followers would tear me to pieces on command.

‘I’m the Chief Minister’s slave. I was sent here after the same two men you’re looking for. We’re all here to do the same job and we’re none of us here because we want to be …’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that! Nice and quiet here — no one about — we could have some fun. How about a game where you all pretend to run away and we hunt you down like wild pigs?’

‘No …Ya …Yaotl’s right.’

To my amazement, it was the steward who spoke up. His voice shook so much that I could barely make out the words, but plainly his fear of being caught up in the Otomi’s sadistic fantasy was enough to loosen his tongue.

‘Lord Feathered in Black sent us. Yaotl can tell you where the man and the boy went — can’t you, Yaotl?’

I got up slowly, too nervous myself to appreciate the wheedling note in the steward’s words to me. I spat blood out of my mouth, carefully avoiding the Otomi’s feet.

‘I think so,’ I said slowly. ‘I saw where they landed. I can try to pick up the trail from there.’

The captain turned his eye on Fox. ‘What’s he talking about?’

‘I expect he means that spot where the ground’s all churned up — where we thought someone must have run a canoe ashore, going quite fast.’ He gave me a hard stare. He was right, of course, and I tried to hide my dismay. These men were going to be more difficult to fool than I had thought, and the consequences if they thought I was leading them astray on purpose did not bear thinking about. ‘We checked that place out yesterday,’ Fox added, ‘and there’s nothing. Someone ran off into the rushes, all right, but there’s only one set of prints and they disappear as soon as you get up into the fields. What makes you think you’re going to find anything else?’

‘Yaotl’s an expert tracker,’ my master’s steward put in maliciously. He had little idea what we were looking for but would be happy to let me take the blame for not finding it.

I had no choice but to play along with this. Even if it cost me my life, I had to keep these brutal killers from picking up my son’s trail.

‘Let’s at least go and have a look.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not as if any of us has anything better to do!’