Shadow of the Lords

3

So we set off for Tlacopan — the captain, Fox, Handy, the steward and I.

It was going to take us the best part of the afternoon to reach it, but as I kept assuring my companions, it was the largest and most important town on the western side of the valley, and so easily the best prospect as our quarry’s hiding place.

Most of the journey was undertaken in silence. We had little to say to each other in any case, and every reason to keep our voices down. Although we avoided towns and there were not many people about in the fields, no part of the valley was ever quite empty and there was always the possibility that rumours of our approach would run ahead of us. It did not help that we all so obviously came from the great city at the centre of the lake.

The people who lived in these parts, the Tepanecs, were not barbarians. They spoke our language, and we thought of them as allies. Their ancestors had sprung from the womb of the World at the Seven Caves at the same time as ours. However, that did not mean they loved us.

Once, long before, the Aztecs had been the subjects of a Tepanec city, Azcapotzalco, which in those days had been so populous that it was known as the Anthill. It had been my master’s father, the great Lord Tlacaelel, who had persuadedthe Aztecs to rise against their masters, and when the revolt was over the city of Mexico had been freed and Azcapotzalco reduced to a small tributary town whose only claim to distinction was a big slave market.

Only one Tepanec city had sided with the Aztecs in the revolt. As a result of its help, Tlacopan was grudgingly admitted into an alliance with Mexico, but the Aztecs did not treat the Tepanecs as equals. Tlacopan got the smallest share of the spoils of war, and our Emperor treated its king as a subject in all but name. There were plenty of people living on the western side of the lake who had grown up with stories from their fathers and grandfathers of how Tepanecs had once ruled the World and made even the Emperor of Mexico do their bidding. Who could blame them if, from time to time — such as when they visited Mexico during one of the great festivals, when the tribute was distributed, and saw how meagre their shares were in comparison with the Aztecs’ — they wondered how it might be if the old order were restored?

‘So watch what you say and who you say it to,’ growled the captain, reminding us all of this history. ‘These people won’t try to kill you on sight, but if they see a chance to put one over on you, they’ll grab it!’

He set a brisk pace, driving us towards the town at a steady trot during the warmest part of the day. He barely broke into a sweat, despite being clad in quilted cotton from head to foot, and if Fox was finding the going any harder he was not about to show it. Handy, used to hard work in the fields in all weathers, ran on without complaint, the effort he was making showing only on his glistening brow and in the firm, determined set of his jaw.

As for me, I had been trained to manage feats of endurance and bear great pain without a murmur. In my time as a priest, I had been pierced all over with maguey spines, had slit openmy tongue and drawn ropes through it, had bathed naked in the lake at midnight and had fasted till I was faint with hunger. I ran now until my thighs and calves burned like raw flesh, my chest felt too weak even for shallow gasps and my tongue was a strip of dried meat dangling limply in my parched mouth, like a freshly skinned pelt hung up in the Sun. Then I kept running, with my discomfort set aside, my legs left to work by themselves, and the knowledge that when I was allowed to rest, that was when the real agony would set in.

Not long afterwards, the steward fell over.

‘I don’t believe this!’ the captain roared. He turned back, still running, towards the gasping, twitching heap by the roadside. ‘Don’t either of you sit down!’ he warned Handy and me as he passed us. ‘We’ll be off again as soon as he’s back on his feet. What’s the matter with you?’

Handy was doubled over, trying to massage some life back into his legs, while I kept mine straight in an effort to stop them buckling at the knee. ‘He hasn’t done this for a few years,’ I offered, between deep, painful breaths. ‘Not really part of his duties now.’

‘And he calls himself a warrior? Can’t stand a man who lets himself go soft. Come on, you, up!’

I felt dizzy, as if I had taken a very mild dose of sacred mushrooms. It made the spectacle of the mighty, one-eyed warrior jabbing my master’s steward roughly with his foot seem all the more unreal. Part of me wanted to summon up the last of my breath to cheer the captain on and urge him to kick the fallen man harder. The rest of me felt something like awe. Here was my tormentor, the Chief Minister’s steward, a man who treated me worse than a dog, suddenly made another man’s helpless victim. The sight made me wonder what the Otomi might do to a mere slave, if he thought he had cause.

‘Can’t go on,’ the steward gasped. ‘Have to rest.’ When he looked up at the captain his face was puce.

‘Bugger.’ The captain pivoted sharply on one foot and kicked a stone across the road with the other, no doubt wishing it was the steward’s head. ‘Nearly there, too!’

His brutal, ravaged face swung in my direction. I blinked the sweat out of my eyes and turned to follow his gaze.

I had been too caught up with putting one foot in front of the other to take much notice of the countryside, but now I saw that we were leaving the open fields. Just ahead of us the road was flanked by a long, low wall. Plum trees reached over it with naked, frost-stripped boughs. I glimpsed a house deep within the orchard, its whitewashed walls gleaming behind the dark cage-work of the branches.

Taller trees reared up beyond the orchard, the green of cypress and fir catching the sunlight and flashing brilliantly among the bare black skeletons of oak and ash. Farther away still, towering over the tallest of the trees, were the squared-off humps of Tlacopan’s pyramids.

‘We’ve made good time, you know,’ I told the captain. ‘It won’t hurt to rest a while.’

He spared a glance for the steward, who had now made it on to his hands and knees, although the sound of his breathing reminded me of an angry rattlesnake. ‘And what then?’

‘You could send me on ahead,’ I suggested hopefully. By now, I thought, when the heat of the afternoon was over, the townspeople would have come out of their houses and the place would be bustling again. There would not be much of a crowd compared with the vast numbers that filled Mexico’s sacred precincts during a festival, but there should still be plenty of opportunities for an undistinguished-looking slave to slip quietly out of sight.

The captain snorted derisively. ‘No chance! You thinkyou’re leaving me in charge of this?’ His foot twitched in the steward’s direction again. ‘No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Fox and I will go on ahead. We’ll start making some discreet enquiries in the marketplace.’ The mobile half of his face grinned, showing a broken row of blackened teeth. Plainly he was looking forward to scaring information out of Tepanecs. I found this strangely reassuring: this man would have no trouble persuading people to talk, but getting them to tell the truth would be entirely beyond him.

‘You three will follow us. We’ll meet up in the sacred precinct, under that temple.’ He gestured with his ugly sword towards the tall pyramid beyond the trees. ‘Be there before nightfall.’ Then, waving the weapon in my direction, he added softly: ‘I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you’re not!’

Handy and I watched the two warriors as they trotted away to bring terror and uproar to Tlacopan.

The big commoner let out a long sigh. ‘It’s a relief to get rid of those two, isn’t it? If that captain of theirs had made us run any further I’d be in the same state as him!’

We both glanced behind us, towards where the steward was slowly getting to his feet.

‘He probably runs twice around the lake before dawn,’ I said, with a nod towards the cloud of dust the warriors had kicked up. ‘Now, I don’t know about you, Handy, but I think I’m getting too old for this sort of sport! Why don’t we rest here for a while and then see if the Tepanecs can find us something to eat?’

I gathered from the smile that began to form on Handy’s face that he had no more enthusiasm for what we were up to than I did. ‘Now there’s an idea,’ he replied. ‘Come to think of it, one of my brothers-in-law was here once, and he told me there was an old woman in the corner of the marketplacewho sold the best gophers in chilli sauce he’d ever tasted.’

The hopeful look on his face froze at the sound of the steward’s voice.

‘Rest? Eat? What are you two talking about?’

The Prick was breathing heavily and his face was still dark, but he was on his feet and no longer the wreck of a man the Otomi captain had been kicking a little while earlier. As he glowered impatiently at us both I realized that he must have feigned his exhaustion, at least in part. His was not the sort of pride that would flinch at a childish trick like that. He had felt humiliated and belittled by the Otomi, but had been prepared to suffer a little more abuse just to get rid of him. Now his tormentor was gone, and he was his own man again, and free to show it in the only way he knew how.

‘Thought you were going to bunk off, did you, Yaotl? Thought you’d have a nice, quiet afternoon, taking your ease in the shade of the fruit trees before a gentle stroll into Tlacopan and maybe a light snack to round off the day? Is that what you thought?’ He took two steps towards me and thrust his face close to mine. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see his fists balling, as if he was about to hit me, although they remained at his sides, no doubt because Handy was there. The commoner was not my master’s possession, and if he chose to intervene the steward could not be sure of winning either the fight or the court case that would follow.

‘We’ll see what Lord Feathered in Black has to say about your idea of obedience later,’ the steward crooned, ‘but first I think we’d better make a start, hadn’t we? Why don’t we go to the market, like your friend here said, and try asking a few questions?’

I hung my head submissively. ‘All right,’ I mumbled, ‘you’re in charge.’

I comforted myself by reflecting that the steward had nomore chance than the Otomies of getting a useful answer out of anyone here. On the other hand, I thought gloomily, as I trudged after him along the road leading into the centre of the town, I still had no idea how I was going to get away.

Get away I must, though. As I walked, my son’s knife bounced against my hip, reminding me that I had urgent business elsewhere.

To an Aztec born and raised in Mexico, Tlacopan was a strange place.

Mexico was a city of whitewashed adobe houses and courtyards, more than anyone had ever been able to count, crammed together so tightly that from the outside it was hard to tell one from another, and almost every one of them was served by a canal. We spent so much of our lives on the water that some of our children learned to paddle a canoe before they could walk. Apart from the great, broad avenues that spread out from the Heart of the World in each of the Four Directions, most of our roads were narrow paths. Our fields lay on the outskirts of the city, on artificial islands made of mud dredged from the bottom of the lake, and they throbbed with activity all year round because their permanently damp soil could bear fruit even at the height of the dry season.

How different were the towns on the mainland! We found ourselves sauntering along wide, dusty streets, between expansive plots that would be full of maize, amaranth, beans, squash, sage or chillies by the end of summer but which now lay largely empty. In the middle of each plot stood a house, its walls stouter than we were used to, since the people here had no bridges they could pull up in the event of an attack.

‘What’s that smell?’ Handy wrinkled his nose. ‘Don’t they empty their privies around here?’

‘What do you expect?’ the steward rasped. ‘Barbarian scum!’

‘They can’t help it,’ I said indulgently. ‘They don’t have boats to take it away, like us. They have to spread it straight on to the fields or carry it all the way down to the lake.’

The steward made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat.

I found myself looking anxiously at the few people we passed, and then at my companions, in case the steward’s obvious contempt for the locals somehow showed. I need not have worried, however, since after a day wandering around in the marshes, we looked less like the all-conquering masters of the One World than a little party of bedraggled peasants.

‘I suppose the market must be near the sacred precinct,’ the steward said. ‘So we’ll make for that pyramid.’ He gestured towards the tallest building in Tlacopan, which now reared up above the trees in front of us. We would be in its shadow soon.

‘And what then?’ Handy asked.

‘We do what we were told, of course — ask around, find out if the man and boy have been seen. It wouldn’t hurt to get to them before the Otomi does!’

Handy looked enquiringly at me. I returned his gaze impassively. So far as I knew my son had never been near Tlacopan. If the steward wanted to waste his time searching for him here, that was fine by me.

‘Let’s go, then,’ I said. ‘We might even find your old woman and her gophers on the way!’

The pyramid loomed ever taller as we approached it. Soon we found ourselves looking up at it between the branches of the trees around us, its bulk like a great shadow thrown across half the sky, blotting out the Sun.

‘Nearly there,’ said Handy to no one in particular. ‘Where’s the royal palace, though? I thought that faced the sacred precinct.’

‘You’re looking at it, I think,’ I told him. ‘They don’t build on the sort of scale we’re used to here.’

In front of us stood a low wall with a building beyond it. It was the sort of house a well-to-do family from Tenochtitlan or Tlatelolco might have lived in, a long, single-storey affair with a low thatched roof. It sprawled over more ground than the houses we were used to but to our eyes it had little else to distinguish it. Homely sounds came from behind the walls: women’s voices, children chanting a nursery rhyme, the repetitive clacking of weavers using back-strap looms.

‘What do you expect?’ I asked, as Handy and the steward gaped. ‘We take the spoils of war and the king in there, he gets whatever Montezuma thinks he can spare him. Tlacopan is supposed to get a fifth of the proceeds of the Empire, but I bet if you looked in a tribute warehouse here you’d find it was half empty.’

‘So they probably don’t like us very much,’ muttered the steward. ‘So what? Who does? Where’s the marketplace?’

‘Follow the road round the corner of the wall,’ I suggested. ‘Everybody seems to be coming from that direction. I suppose trading’s over for the day.’ I looked quickly up at the sky and frowned. ‘Funny, it’s early yet.’

‘They’re not going home,’ Handy said. ‘They’re running away from something!’

Perhaps forty people were coming along the road straight towards us. They were women, their brightly patterned skirts bunched in their hands as their knees flashed beneath their hems, their blouses flapping like paper streamers in the wind, and children, naked under their billowing cloaks, and a few men wearing only breechcloths, their untrimmed hair streaming wildly behind them.

‘Off the road!’ I snapped. ‘They’ll mow us down!’

We darted out of the way just in time to let the little group surge past. None of them spared us a glance.

‘What’s going on?’ asked the steward.

‘Here come some more,’ Handy said. ‘Why don’t you stop one and ask?’

The steward looked at us both indecisively, as a second wave of fugitives bore down on us. Then, with a sudden access of courage, he darted into the streaming crowd and hauled out the smallest child he could find.

‘You!’ he barked at the kicking, squealing infant. ‘What’s all this? What are you running from?’

‘Aztecs!’

The cry of alarm seemed to convulse the crowd. It recoiled as one person, shrinking away from us like a coyote threatened with a blazing torch. One woman alone threw herself at the steward, screaming abuse and slapping his face so hard that he staggered back, before she snatched the child and ran on.

‘Funny.’ Handy stared after them while the steward, clearly dumbfounded, rubbed his cheek. ‘They all ran when they heard your voice. It must have been your accent, but I didn’t know we were that frightening!’

‘We’re not,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Something’s happening up ahead.’

I looked around me. The wall of the little palace hid the sacred precinct and the marketplace from view, and gave no clue as to what might be going on beyond it. The voices we had heard a few moments before were silent, and I imagined the women, hearing the commotion outside, abandoning their work to snatch up the children and usher them hastily indoors.

Nearby grew a small silk cotton tree: a native of the hot lands in the South, no doubt planted here as an ornament and to shade the courtyard on the far side of the wall. Iglanced speculatively up at its widespread branches. If I could climb high enough, I thought, I might be able to see what had stirred the townsfolk up without having to get too close to it.

I stripped off my cloak and passed it to Handy. ‘Give me a leg up.’

The boughs creaked and bowed alarmingly under my weight, making me thankful for my slight build and the meagre diet that kept me from accumulating much in the way of fat. I climbed as high as I thought I could, and perched there uncomfortably while I surveyed the ground around me.

‘Well?’ the steward demanded. ‘What can you see?’

‘I can see the marketplace. The sacred precinct is just beyond it. All the traders’ merchandise is still laid out on mats on the ground, but there’s hardly anyone about. Strange. All the people there are standing around in one corner. There’s a little crowd there — all men. Some of them are armed but they’re not doing anything. That’s where the trouble is, in the middle of the crowd.’

‘What trouble?’

‘I can’t see.’

Then I caught it: a telltale flash of green, vivid against the brown flesh colour of the men surrounding it. The spectators had formed a ring around two figures in their midst. I knew one of them at once, even though it was too far away to see his face. ‘It’s the captain! And he looks as if he’s caught someone!’

Then, as the implications of what I was seeing dawned on me, I cried out, unthinkingly: ‘But that’s impossible! The boy can’t have come here, he just can’t …’

Fortunately neither Handy nor the steward heard me. A new arrival had distracted them.

‘There you are! What’s the slave doing up in that tree?’

I looked down to see Fox’s face staring up at me.

‘He’s watching your captain,’ replied Handy.

‘Well, he can come down now,’ Fox said, ‘because we’ve got the bastards!’

The steward let out a whoop of joy, of relief at the thought that the search was over and he could go home.

My head swam. Despair overwhelmed me, making me feel dizzy and sick and short of breath, as if my lungs suddenly saw no point in continuing to work.

Since we had in reality been pursuing one person, not two, there could be no doubt who the warriors had laid hands on. Who else could it be but Nimble?

‘You stupid boy,’ I groaned softly. ‘Why did you have to come here? Why here, of all places?’

Starting down the tree, I groped blindly for a handhold, missed and fell.

Branches lashed my back, arms and legs as I crashed to the ground, but they broke my fall, so that instead of killing myself I ended up in a bruised, shaken, dusty heap at the foot of the tree, with the steward’s and Fox’s laughter ringing in my ears.

‘Don’t just lie there, you lazy turd! Get up!’

I took no notice of the steward. I could not bear to look at his grinning, gloating face. It would not make much difference to my fate whether I obeyed him now or not, so I kept my eyes on the earth, shaded and shielded by my forearm.

‘You didn’t fall that far!’

Someone touched me. I flinched, expecting a blow, but the touch was gentler than that: a hand under my shoulder, making as if to lift me off the ground.

‘Come on, Yaotl.’ Handy’s voice growled in my ear. ‘We’ve got to go. Here’s your cloak.’

I wanted to shrug him off, tell him to leave me alone, but then I heard the steward snarling again.

‘How sweet,’ he sneered. ‘There’s no coming between you two, is there?’

I felt the commoner’s grip on my shoulder tighten. He was about to lose his temper, which would do him no good at all. I forced myself to remember that he did not have to help me and that if he were just to stand by and watch the steward and Fox kick me to death he might save himself a deal of trouble.

I hauled myself to my feet, accepted my cloak and glowered at the steward.

Handy asked the question I could not bear to voice.

‘So which one did you get, then?’

I shut my eyes to stop the tears from flowing. I would have clapped my hands over my ears too, if I could have done it without it being obvious.

‘The older one. No sign of the boy yet.’

‘What?’

My eyes sprang open. I stared at Fox, open mouthed but mute because I could not trust myself to speak.

My son was not the man at the centre of that crowd, being dragged about by the green-suited warrior. I could only thank the gods for that, and wonder who the captain’s victim really was.

‘But … but …’ Handy stammered.

‘Come and see,’ Fox cried, turning towards the marketplace. ‘I think the captain’s enjoying himself!’

As he and the steward set off, I could see Handy’s mouth working and realized he was about to blurt something out that we would both regret. I moved swiftly to one side and planted a foot firmly on top of one of his, converting his next words into a muffled oath.

‘Quiet!’ I hissed. ‘I need to think.’ Aloud I said: ‘How did you catch him?’

‘Oh, easy,’ Fox called out over his shoulder. ‘The captain’sgood at this sort of thing. It’s just like collecting tribute from barbarians, really. You just march into the middle of the marketplace, knock over one or two pitches to get their attention — starting with the potters is best, it makes a good noise, though breaking up a few turkey pens works just as well — and tell everybody exactly what you’re looking for. Once they saw the captain’s costume they couldn’t move fast enough!’ He laughed. ‘What was really funny was how apologetic they were that they couldn’t bring us both of them. Someone produced this pathetic specimen and told us he was the only runaway Aztec they’d seen. I think the captain’s trying to make him tell us where the boy is now.’

We rounded the corner and were at the edge of the almost empty marketplace. I stared across the rows of pitches, the straw mats strewn with merchandise, obviously hastily abandoned, judging by the refuse that lay about them: small change in the form of open bags of cocoa beans, half-eaten tortillas with a couple of bewildered-looking turkeys pecking at them, a water-seller’s gourd spilling its contents on to the dusty floor. In the far corner stood the crowd: the bravest of the local youths, or at least the keenest to show off, no doubt unable to tear themselves away from the spectacle of one Aztec torturing another. Everybody with any sense had run away as soon as they thought the warriors had found what they wanted.

‘Come on!’ cried the steward. ‘We’ll miss the fun!’

He trotted forward, leaving the rest of us behind in his eagerness to watch another man suffering. I wondered whether he was hoping to pick up some tips.

Then I forgot his state of mind as an appalling thought occurred to me.

The captain and his victim were hidden from me by the backs of their spectators and at this distance I could only justhear the familiar bark of the Otomi’s battle-trained voice, but I suddenly knew who his victim was.

What Aztec had run away two nights before, presumably to seek shelter on the western side of the lake?

It could only be my master’s boatman, the one who had abandoned the Chief Minister and his canoe two nights before. He must have gone to ground in the middle of the largest nearby town — just where I had told the warriors to search.

‘The idiot,’ I muttered. ‘Why didn’t he keep running?’

How long did I have, I wondered, before the captain beat the truth out of him? How long before he learned that I had laid a false trail?

An unnaturally high-pitched wail from within the crowd seemed to be my answer.

The steward quickened his pace. I could almost hear him salivating. Fox was close behind him. Soon they were pushing their way into the crowd, elbowing aside young men whose backs parted meekly before them while their eyes remained glued to the fascinating spectacle in their midst. Handy and I, too, found ourselves drawn towards the horror at the centre of the circle of men. We two stopped short of the clear space around the captain, keeping close to the edge of the crowd of his spectators, although Fox and the steward were soon standing next to him, looking down admiringly at his handiwork.

I noticed the blood before I saw the man.

The earth in front of me was covered in it. It lay in streaks and dapples and little puddles, as if jerked out of its victim a little at a time. Here and there among the dark red spots and splashes lay tiny fragments of something hard and white that I struggled to identify until I turned my eyes towards the boatman.

If I had not already worked out who the pathetic figure lying with his legs drawn up to his chest and shivering at thecaptain’s feet was, I would not have recognized him. He had turned his face upward, perhaps in a vain appeal for mercy, but it did not look like his face any more. It was a mask of congealing blood with a hideous, jagged hole at its centre, for the white fragments that lay on the ground around him were pieces of his teeth.

Before he had started working on the man’s mouth the captain had obviously lavished attention on the rest of his face, as the boatman’s nose was broken, his ears were shapeless rags and the flesh around his eyes was a mass of pulp, but it was the teeth which were the worst. He was using a small flint knife, no doubt looted from a nearby stall, to chip away at them, reducing them one by one to jagged, bloody stumps.

‘Now,’ he said conversationally, ‘let’s try again. I haven’t cut your ears off yet, so I know you can hear me. Where’s the boy hiding?’

‘Yaotl, I don’t like this.’ Handy’s voice rumbled close to my ear.

‘Yaotl?’ The captain caught my name and looked up. ‘Good, you caught up with us! You were right, you see? You led us right there. Now I was just showing these Tepanecs how we Aztecs treat people who let us down — do you want to join in?’

I felt the crowd around me shuffle uneasily, and suddenly there was a little space around me and Handy, as if the men nearest to us had realized who we were and decided not to stay too close.

The shattered face turned towards me. The eyes, the only part of it that seemed to have been left mostly intact, rolled in my direction. A movement of the hand holding the captain’s flint knife distracted them for a moment, but they were soon back, thin, pale ellipses fixed unwaveringly on me. The boatman let out a small keening sound, as if he were trying to say something. I did not know whether he was speaking to me orabout me but he plainly knew who I was, and if I did not think of a way of preventing him from telling the captain, I was likely to feel the edge of that bloody little knife myself.

The steward unwittingly saved me.

‘Let me!’ he cried, almost dancing across the space in the middle of the crowd in his eagerness to join in. ‘We’ll show these Tepanec scum what we’re made of!’

The spectators did not like that. I heard muttering and shuffling feet.

The captain glared at the steward. ‘Save your breath,’ he sneered, gesturing angrily with the knife. A drop of blood fell on the steward’s arm. ‘You might need it if you have to run anywhere!’

The Prick looked down at the splash of blood, dark against his skin. He was suddenly very still.

Somebody in the little group of men around me made a low noise at the back of his throat. Fox, who had been standing next to the captain and looking uncertainly from him to his victim to the steward, gave a nervous cough. He could see the spectators getting more and more restive. Whatever they might think about Aztecs, seeing us quarrelling with each other would not make them any more biddable.

‘You can slip away, can’t you?’ I muttered to Handy, out of the corner of my mouth.

‘Why? What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to start a riot. I want you to get a message to my brother. Get him back here with a squad of warriors.’

He glanced over his shoulder, considering the distance to the shore of the lake. ‘If I can get to the causeway, I can be back in the city by nightfall,’ he said, ‘but I still don’t understand …’

‘Go on, then!’ I urged him. ‘There’s no time to lose!’

He gave the pitiful creature on the ground one lingeringglance, just as the captain took a step towards it and raised his knife again. Then Handy reached out, slapped me once on the arm, and ran.

‘Where’s he going?’ snapped Fox.

‘Thought he saw something,’ I said. ‘Might have been the boy. He’ll be back in a moment.’

‘Ah!’ The captain bent towards his victim. ‘Did you hear that? Now we can really start to have some fun!’

Then he drove the knife one more time into the already ruined mouth. The boatman let out a bubbling scream and writhed and jerked like a stranded fish.

‘How did this happen?’ I asked quietly.

Standing next to me was a young man. His head was shaved, and I guessed that meant that he had lost the tuft of hair that he would have borne throughout his years at the House of Youth, or wherever boys from Tlacopan did their training. So he had been to war and taken a captive, but judging by his nervousness and the way his eyes followed the captain, constantly flicking from the man’s villainous face to the flint knife and back again, he was no seasoned veteran.

‘Someone told me they found the man hiding in a granary,’ he said. ‘They could tell he was an Aztec, of course, so they had him locked up in the palace and sent a messenger to Mexico. Then the Otomi came. He said the Aztec Chief Minister had sent him. He ordered us to hand over any Aztec runaways to him, so we brought the man out.’

‘And you let him get away with it?’ I said, raising my voice provocatively.

I glanced quickly at the men in the middle of the crowd but they were concentrating on the boatman, who was coughing and spitting blood and fragments of teeth out on the ground. How long did I have before he started to speak?

‘What kind of warriors do you have here, anyway? Twomen start terrorizing your women and children and breaking up your marketplace, and you just do what they tell you? Didn’t anyone think to stop them, or ask them why they were doing this?’

Fox looked up, frowning, and took a step towards his captain, as if he wanted to warn him of something. He must have heard me, I thought desperately, but then the boatman reached up to grab the hem of the captain’s cloak, tugging at it as if he were trying to haul himself upright, and I realized that he was trying to speak as well and that whatever time I had was fast running out.

‘Call yourselves men?’ I cried out at last, letting as many of the crowd as possible hear the scorn and incredulity in my voice, and no longer caring whether or not the captain, Fox and the steward realized what I was up to. ‘Why, it’s no wonder we Aztecs rule the whole World!’

‘No wonder at all, when your Emperor keeps our King as a hostage in his palace and all our seasoned warriors are sent abroad while yours squat at home with nothing to do except drink chocolate and torture their neighbours!’

I turned, as did the men around me, to look at the speaker.

He was a priest. I could tell that immediately, by looking at his face, which was stained black with soot, streaked with blood drawn from his earlobes, and framed by a mass of lank, tangled hair. He wore a long robe, of cotton rather than maguey fibre, and the tobacco pouch that hung from his neck was no mere shapeless bag but a miniature jaguar, complete with jaws, four paws and a tail, exquisitely fashioned from real ocelot skin. He must, I realized, be a man of some standing. Perhaps he was from the city’s chief temple. I looked up at the summit of the pyramid that loomed over the sacred precinct and the marketplace and understood: he had been standing up there, watching the captain’s and Fox’s activities, and havingseen the disturbance in the marketplace and realized that nothing was being done to quell it, he had come down to take a hand.

I looked at him and laughed deliberately. I was still trying to sound scornful; moreover I wanted to keep the relief out of my voice.

‘Tell me, O Wise One,’ I said sarcastically, ‘just how many Tepanecs does it take to subdue two Aztecs, then?’

‘Here …!’ One of the young men next to me put a hand on my arm, warning me to show more respect, but the priest quelled us both with a look.

‘One,’ he assured me, before stepping through the crowd into the space at its centre.

He walked straight up to the captain. The Otomi glared at him with his sole eye.

‘What’s the meaning of this?’ demanded the priest.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘A servant of Tezcatlipoca.’

The captain’s answer was to stoop briefly to pick up his cruel-looking sword and then bring himself up to his full height, with the weapon raised so that its blades flashed in the evening sunlight.

‘A servant of Tezcatlipoca, eh? Well, the warriors of Huitzilopochtli tell you to mind your own business!’ he roared, shoving the priest in the chest with his free hand.

It was not a hard blow, merely a warning. The Tepanec stumbled back but kept his balance. Nonetheless, it was too much for the spectators. Men surged forward, baying and growling. Elbows and knees barged me aside, almost knocking me over as the youths around me, their pride wounded by my taunts, rushed in to defend their priest.

For a moment there was so much shouting and scuffling that I could not work out what was going on. I heard hoarse cries,the thump and slap of feet and fists striking flesh and the sharper sound they made upon bone, and yelps of pain. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the flash of sunlight on the blades of the captain’s sword. A jet of red liquid shot through the air, droplets falling hot on my cheeks, and someone squealed in pain.

After that there came a long, despairing wail, a cry of sheer terror in a voice that reminded me of my master’s steward’s. Then, gradually, all became quiet again.

Standing on tiptoe, staring between heads and over hunched, tense shoulders, I was able to make out just enough to establish what had happened.

The Otomi had the priest by the throat. He seemed to have forgotten the boatman, at least for now. He was not holding his sword: someone must have managed to wrench it from his grasp.

Fox stood with his back pressed against his captain’s. If they were not a pair, they were prepared to fight as one now, defending each other to the death and taking as many of the enemy with them as they could. There was still a small space around them, no man daring to come within arm’s length.

The steward was easier to see because three of the Tepanecs were holding him up like a trophy. His eyes and mouth were wide open with terror.

‘Well?’ The captain’s voice was tense but steady. He jerked his terrible head towards the steward. ‘Never mind him. He’s nothing. Which of you is going to be first? You’ll have this priest’s blood on your hands!’

A kind of shudder went through the crowd, but nobody moved.

Then the priest spoke, his voice hoarse through being forced out past the Otomi’s almost lethal grip.

‘Nothing lives for ever on Earth,’ he gasped. ‘You can killme, and my ashes will be buried with a dog to guide me through the Nine Hells, and I’ll find my resting place in the Land of the Dead. But then you’ll just be torn to pieces, and the pieces dumped outside the city like garbage, for the vultures and coyotes to pick over. You’ll never rest, and your families will never be able to stop mourning you.’

The captain had no answer to that that I heard. I did not see the grip on the priest’s throat slacken, but I did not see any of the men around him move either.

I was not looking at them any more. Before the priest had finished speaking, I was running as fast as I could towards the shore of the lake and the causeway that would take me back to the city.