Shadow of the Lords

4

It was dark by the time I reached Pochtlan. I ran much of the way. In my anxiety to put as much distance between myself and the Otomies I did not stop even to urinate. When I finally stumbled, gasping, to a halt, beside the canal that skirted the merchants’ parish, I was desperate.

I might simply have used the canal, but Aztec modesty prevented me. For a moment I hesitated, shifting my weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, until I saw the solution. A wooden bridge spanned the waterway and at the far end of the bridge, in the featherworkers’ parish of Amantlan, stood a wicker shelter.

I trotted towards it. Others might have hesitated, mindful of tales of demons that caught men during night-time trips to the latrines, hideous female dwarfs whose appearance heralded sickness and death, but my need was urgent enough to overcome such fears.

The frost had made the bridge’s planks slippery and treacherous, forcing me to take short, shuffling steps across it, with my eyes fixed on my feet.

The bridge shook. A tremor ran up both my calves and told me I was not alone. I looked up and the next moment was fighting to keep my footing as my legs shot out from under me.

A god glared silently at me from the far end of the bridge.

I cried out in shock and dread. Even while the rational part of my mind was telling me that what I saw was easy to explain, something older was shouting it down: the terror I had known as a little child, staring up at the fearsome idols in their niches in my parents’ house, and the lore drilled into me in the House of Tears, when I had learned the harsh ways of the gods while sacrificial blood streamed from my tongue and earlobes and shins and penis.

Smoke or steam wreathed the god’s face. Glittering scales fell one over another across his skin. Long, blue-green plumes, each as stiff and sharp as a spear-point, crowned his headdress and towered over his conical fur cap. His eyes were perfect black circles, whose gaze seemed to pass over and through me as indifferently as if I were a thing so insignificant as to have no meaning in his world. Savage fangs, curved like the young Moon, guarded his yawning, ravenous mouth. There was no tongue but I thought I saw something moving inside that dark maw, something that threatened to uncoil and snap out at me with the speed of a lash.

He came towards me through a cloud that thickened and swirled as he spoke.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ he cried. His voice was muffled, as though coming from inside a cave.

My legs finally gave way and I toppled backward, crashing on to the hard wood with a shout of pain and fear. The bridge bucked under me. For a moment I lay staring straight up at the stars, with my arms spread out and my palms flat on the floor.

Whimpering with fright, I struggled to get to my feet, falling backward twice before my hands and heels got any sort of a purchase on the slippery wood. I sat bolt upright and stared wide eyed at the empty bridge ahead of me and the entirely empty road beyond it.

I blinked several times to clear my vision.

There was nothing to see.

I hauled myself to my feet, slipping over more than once, and half ran, half slid to the end of the bridge, careless of the fact that a false step could send me tumbling into the canal’s icy water. I staggered on to dry land.

The waters of the canal, hidden from view by its high banks, lapped loudly. I wondered at the splashing sound for a moment, as there was no wind and nothing to disturb the water’s surface, but then I thought that in the empty silence of the night all noises would be magnified, and concentrated on what I could see.

I was in Amantlan now. The featherworkers’ homes stood in a single uninterrupted row in front of me. None showed any sign of wakefulness and there were no dark passageways between them that a man or a god could be hiding in.

I let out a long breath and watched it cloud the air in front of me and slowly disperse.

‘Vanished into thin air,’ I grunted. I felt a renewed jab of fear. I had no difficulty recognizing what I had seen. No Aztec could have mistaken it.

‘Nonsense,’ I told myself. ‘He must be around here somewhere. He’s hiding, that’s all. If I wait long enough I’ll see the bastard.’

But it sounded hollow. However hard I tried, I could not convince myself that I had not seen what others had seen: the Feathered Serpent, the Precious Twin, the Lord of the Wind.

‘Quetzalcoatl?’ I whispered. ‘Why?’

If the god of wisdom, the god who had created mankind by mixing his own blood with ground-up bones he had stolen from the Lord of the Underworld, was abroad in the city, what could this mean? The god bore the same name as the last king of the Toltecs, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, our own Emperor Montezuma’s predecessor. It had long been rumoured that theToltec king had never died, but had fled his realm vowing one day to return and reclaim what was his. Did what I had just seen somehow portend the end of Montezuma’s reign? If it did, what would come after it?

I let out a long, shuddering breath, and looked down, feeling a chill about my loins. I realized wryly that I no longer needed the latrine after all.

I discarded my breechcloth, replacing it with a strip of maguey fibre ripped from the bottom of my old cloak. Then, feeling naked and chilly but with my modesty still essentially preserved, I crossed the bridge again and went to meet the old man who had sent me the knife.

Kindly’s was the only house in Pochtlan that I knew well. Until recently he had lived here with Lily and Shining Light. Lily had lost her husband many years before on a trading venture. Since then she had run the household more or less alone. Her son had grown up, despite all her care, into a dissolute monster, and her father, the household’s nominal head, was an old man close to senility who made full use of the licence the law gave him to drink all the sacred wine he could hold.

Once, briefly, Lily and I had slaked each other’s despair and loneliness. The moment had passed, swept away like leaves on a flooding river by a tide of feelings — her care for her son, mine for my own survival — but it had left its mark. Now I found it hard to approach this house without thinking of its mistress as she had been then, and afterwards: coolly courageous in her determination to find her worthless boy, utterly broken in her grief over his body.

I swallowed once. I had no need to be nervous, I told myself. I was not entering this house as a trespasser, as I had once before. I had been summoned here. I gripped the bronzeknife and stepped over the threshold, with my head darting to left and right as if I expected to be ambushed.

Nothing moved in the shadows around me. I allowed myself to relax, until a querulous old man’s voice snapped at me out of the darkness.

‘There you are! Took your bloody time, didn’t you?’

I started. After everything I had seen and done that day, culminating in the apparition on the bridge, it was as much as I could do not to turn and run. I made myself stand still, while my breathing slowed and the pounding in my chest settled down to a normal rhythm, before I replied.

‘Kindly? Is that you?’

I was answered by a shuffling noise, a harsh growl as of someone clearing his throat and about to spit, and a shadowy movement that gradually became a little, bent figure coming into the starlight in the middle of the courtyard. It was hard to make his face out in the gloom, but even if I had not known his voice, I could have guessed who he was from the sour reek of his breath.

‘Of course it’s me. Who else would it be?’

‘What are you doing out here at this time of night?’ I demanded suspiciously. ‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘Freezing! But I don’t sleep much at night now. I heard you scampering about out here and thought I’d better take a look before you woke the rest of the household. You picked a funny time to call.’

‘You sent for me,’ I said shortly. ‘Your slave gave me this. I came as soon as I could.’

I held out the bronze knife. He waved it away.

‘I’m sorry it had to be so theatrical, but I needed to get your attention!’

I tucked the weapon back into the scrap of cloth tied around my waist. ‘You got it. Now what do you want from me?’

I heard shuffling footsteps moving slowly away.

‘Come into the kitchen.’

I followed the old man into the most important room in the house: the kitchen, the room with the hearth, whose flickering yellow flames cast deep shadows across the faces of the idols surrounding it, throwing them into stark, grotesque relief.

I had looked into this room once before, but a few things had changed. The long, tall merchant’s staff that had stood in one corner, propped up and wrapped in bloodied strips of paper — offerings against its owner’s safe return, from whatever remote corner of the World his calling might send him to — was missing. Then I remembered that the staff had belonged to Shining Light and his mother would have had it burned with his remains. Where it had stood were neat piles of goods: tobacco tubes, cocoa beans and spices, cups and plates, enough wood for a huge fire. They must have been bought for the young man’s wake.

‘Where’s Lily?’ My question came out as a croak, because my mouth had suddenly gone dry at the thought that I might see her again, that she might be sleeping or stirring just a few paces away.

‘Away,’ he said shortly. ‘Now we’ve got our merchandise back, we need to shift some of it quickly, to get some capital back into the business. She’s in Tetzcoco, for the market. She went straight there, as soon as she’d finished washing her son’s body.’

I sighed, although whether it was with disappointment or relief I could not have said myself.

‘Now, there are things I have to show you.’

The old man was pushing something into the fire. A moment later the room was filled with the bright flames and acrid, resinous fumes of a pine torch.

‘Follow me.’

He led the way slowly across the courtyard: a little man, lurching along, with the flickering torchlight catching his silver hair, and his head bowed like a hunchback’s.

As I fell into step behind him, a sharp cry sounded from somewhere near by.

It was stifled in an instant, as if someone had clapped a hand over the caller’s mouth, but it seemed to hang in the air: a shout of pain or terror, the sort of sound a very young child might make waking from a nightmare. However, the voice that uttered it had not been a child’s.

‘What was that?’ I asked in a hushed voice.

The old man did not break his stride. He had turned his head sharply in the direction of the cry but his only response was the sharp hiss of an indrawn breath, a sound of irritation rather than fear.

‘Nothing,’ he snapped, hurrying on.

I looked over my shoulder, towards where the sound had come from. I stared at the opposite corner of the courtyard, where doorways were pools of absolute blackness opening out into the surrounding gloom. Peering at them told me nothing. ‘It must have been something. Listen, I saw something tonight …’

Kindly did not answer me, and when I turned back towards him I saw that he had gone, but the light of his torch flickered inside a nearby room and spilled out of the doorway, as faint as moonlight reflected off the surface of a canal.

I followed him.

‘What’s this all about?’

The old man carefully set the torch into a bracket on the wall. Then he gestured silently at something in the middle of the room.

I looked around me briefly. I had been in here before, andrecognized the peculiar decorations. The walls and ceiling in one half of the room were immaculately whitewashed and adorned with neatly executed, if not elaborate, paintings of the gods. By contrast the rear of the room had been left bare, covered only with a thin, uneven coating of brown plaster. There had once been a false wall dividing the two halves of the room, as there often was in merchants’ houses, to conceal hoarded wealth.

Now the room was empty except for a wicker chest in the middle of the floor. There were some brown stains around it.

The chest lay open. I walked towards it and stooped to look inside.

‘It’s an empty box.’ I straightened up and faced Kindly. ‘Stop playing games with me, old man. I want to know about this!’ I brandished the knife in front of his face. ‘Why did you send it to me?’

‘Just look again.’

The lid was not merely open. Someone had wrenched it off, ripping its leather hinges. One side of the box was crushed and bent, as if it had been kicked or thrown, and some of the reeds it had been woven from were torn. When I looked at it more closely, I saw that it was soiled: something had splashed on to it, the same brown stuff that had stained the floor, and although it was not sticky any more I had no difficulty, even in the poor flickering light of Kindly’s torch, in recognizing blood.

Then I looked in the box again and saw that it was not empty after all. Something lay in the bottom, curled against its sides in a smooth, perfect curve, as still and natural as a snake contentedly sleeping off a meal. It was a frail thing, hard to spot in the deep shadows cast by the box’s sides, although I recognized it as soon as I knew it was there.

I reached inside the box, fingered the thing, stroked itreverently and gently lifted it out. As I held it up to the light it uncurled itself to its full length, greater than one of my arms. It seemed to glow in the torchlight, shimmering as my breath disturbed it, its colours changing from green to blue to turquoise to something else that was none of them and all three at the same time.

‘A quetzal tail feather,’ I breathed. I could not remember having handled anything so precious. For an Aztec this represented true wealth, far more than gold or shiny stones. It was beautiful, iridescent, and the colour of the young maize stalks on which our hopes rested every summer; it was hard to get, for it had to be plucked intact from the living bird; and it was fragile, like life itself.

And I had seen others just like it only that night. I stared at Kindly in disbelief. Surely, I thought, it must be coincidence. How could this old man be connected with the apparition that had confronted me on the bridge? ‘Where did this come from?’

‘Off the arse of one of those funny-looking birds that fly around in the forests down in the South, of course. Where do you think? It’s not where it came from that I care about — it’s where the rest of it went!’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Look at the base of the feather.’

Instead of a sharp quill, the plume ended in a jagged stump. ‘It’s been broken. It looks as if it was torn off something.’

‘It was.’ The old man sighed wearily. ‘Didn’t you think that was rather a big box to hold one feather, even a very special one? Until the night before last there was some important property of mine in there — more or less all I had, at least until you found that boat with all the stuff my grandson stole from us. Now this is all that’s left.’

‘This wasn’t one of a bundle of loose feathers,’ I said. ‘It wasbroken off a finished work.’ I looked at the old man suspiciously. ‘What was it, a fan, a banner, a costume?’

‘Something like that,’ he mumbled, as though he felt embarrassed.

‘How did it get broken?’

His shoulders sagged even more than usual. ‘Someone stole it — all but this feather!’

‘When?’

‘Two nights ago. The night we held the banquet.’

‘But your house was full of people — lords, merchants, warriors …’ I had been at that banquet, attending my master, who had been among the guests.

‘Yes, exactly. Full of lords, merchants and warriors, most of them out of their heads on sacred mushrooms. What better time to for someone to sneak in and steal a priceless work of art, eh?’

Another voice interrupted him: the one that had sounded across the courtyard earlier.

‘There it is again,’ I said, but the old man’s reaction was the same as before, his head turned sharply aside and a look of annoyance on his face.

‘Nothing,’ he muttered nonchalantly. ‘Probably an urban fox. We get them around here, rummaging around in people’s middens. If the parish police did their job it wouldn’t happen.’

‘Didn’t sound like a fox to me,’ I began, but he had already changed the subject.

‘Now, whoever stole this piece must have got in here very late — not long before dawn, in fact.’ Kindly spoke briskly. ‘We had guards on the doorway. We didn’t release them until long after midnight, when everyone had either left or gone to sleep. You were long gone. I didn’t notice anything was amiss until the morning.’

‘And what did you find then?’

‘Why, just exactly what you see. Nothing but this one feather and the box it was stored in!’

‘So what was it?’

The old man squinted at me thoughtfully. He cleared his throat noisily. He seemed reluctant to speak, and his silence endured until I could not stand it any longer.

‘Look,’ I snapped, ‘you brought me here so that you could show me something. I came all the way from the western shore of the lake, at no small risk to my own life, let me tell you, especially if my master and his steward get to know where I’ve gone. Now I’m tired and hungry and very tempted to go and throw myself at my master’s feet and beg his pardon just for the sake of a few hours curled up on my own sleeping-mat. So if you want me to know what was in that box, then tell me now. Otherwise I’m going!’

Kindly let out a deep sigh that tailed off into a dry rattle. ‘All right,’ he said wearily. ‘But this is a secret, do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed doubtfully.

‘You’ve heard of Pitzauhqui?’

‘Pitzauhqui? The craftsman?’ Of course I had heard of him. He was famous, although he had obviously not shown much potential as a child, since his name meant ‘Skinny’.

‘Who else?’ He clucked in exasperation. ‘Skinny, the featherworker.’

‘You’re not serious?’ I stared down at him. ‘It’s really by him? Why, it must be worth … it must be priceless! How did you get your hands on it?’

If feathers were our most precious commodity, featherwork was our most elevated art form. To the skill of the scribe or the embroiderer were added the dexterity and judgement of the featherworker who chose, trimmed and placed feathers whose shape and natural colour could bring to vivid life the mostextravagant design. Featherworkers created mosaics, costumes, fans whose plumes seemed to radiate from their settings like petals from the heart of a flower. A skilled practitioner of the craft was a man of standing, not as high as a warrior’s but as high as a merchant’s and with none of the envy and bitterness that attended a merchant’s wealth. The featherworkers made the most of this status: like most craftsmen, they passed their skills down from father to son and mother to daughter. I did not know either the featherworkers or their parish, Amantlan, very well: the Amanteca, as they were called, guarded their secrets jealously.

Among the featherworkers there were perhaps a couple of craftsmen as renowned as Skinny, whose skill was such that he was said to be a sorcerer, with the power to make the plumes fly into place and even change colour at a word of command. I had seen one of his pieces once. It was a small thing, just a fan made of roseate spoonbill feathers, but I had never forgotten it. The craftsman had contrived to set and layer the plumes so that no two caught the light in the same way. They were all red, but just to glance at them was to see so many colours: orange, chocolate, scarlet, a pink that put me in mind of a magnolia in flower, and blood at every stage from freshly spilled to three days old and cracking.

Skinny’s work was legendary, and would command whatever price the seller asked. I could not begin to guess how Kindly had been able to afford one of his pieces or who might have been so desperate as to sell it to him. All the same, if I had had to guess, the last name that would have occurred to me was the one Kindly gave, answering my question.

‘I got it from Skinny himself.’

‘I thought he was dead.’

‘I can assure you he isn’t.’

I stared at the feather in my hands: it was waving wildly,picking up my own agitation, and as it caught the torchlight its blue and green colours chased each other like waves along its length from stem to tip. I looked at the broken end, and tried to imagine the work of art it had been wrenched from. I thought of the man who had made it, and felt something like awe at the thought that the feather I was holding had been part of it, that the great craftsman himself had selected it, handled it and found it its rightful place, gluing it there with turkey fat that he applied himself because no one else could be trusted to do it properly.

‘I heard that he never replaced a feather. He always chose the perfect plume and placed it perfectly, first time. My master tried to commission something from him and couldn’t get it — and people don’t usually say “No” to the Chief Minister! That’s why I thought he was dead. He hasn’t been heard from in years, anyway, and there was a rumour that he’d gone out of his head on sacred mushrooms.’ I frowned at the old man suspiciously. ‘How do you know it was really something of his?’

‘I told you, he gave it to me himself!’

I bent down and carefully laid the feather back in the bottom of its box. It weighed nothing, and I was afraid that if I just dropped it it would blow away. It might even drift up into the torch flame and be ruined, and that would never do. I felt an urge to preserve the thing, against the day when it might be reunited with the rest of whatever peerless creation it had once been part of.

I did not stand up again at once, because I wanted to think. I stared into the dark space inside the box and thought about what I was going to do next. I knew what I ought to do: turn around, walk straight past Kindly and step out of the room, out of the courtyard and into the night. I did not know where I might go after that, but I could already see that the alternativewas likely to bring even more trouble down on my head than I was already in.

However, I had my son’s knife. It had been sent to me for a reason, and until I found out what the reason was, I could never rest. And so, in spite of everything, I stood up and faced the old man and asked him the question he knew I had to ask, to which I already knew the answer.

‘So somebody stole a piece of featherwork from you. I’m sorry to hear about it, but what’s it got to do with me?’

Kindly looked at his feet. At least he had the good grace to appear embarrassed.

‘Well,’ he mumbled, ‘you see, I rather hoped you might find it for me.’

‘And why would I do any such thing?’

He looked up again. In the torchlight his eyes glinted like polished jade. He pursed his lips, as if in thought, before answering: ‘Because … It’s like this, Yaotl. The featherwork wasn’t the only thing in that box. There was something else — something I left in here for safe-keeping because, to be honest, I couldn’t decide where else to put it.’ He nodded towards the angular shape on my hip. ‘I’d wrapped the knife up in several thicknesses of maguey fibre cloth to stop any blood getting on the costume. It was just a shapeless lump of material, but someone found it and took the trouble to unwrap it.’

‘And used it, too.’ I took the knife out once more and examined it. It was valuable in itself, since it was made of bronze, that dull, hard metal that only the Tarascans in the West knew how to work and which was almost unknown in Mexico, but its material worth was not what Kindly had been thinking of.

‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You think whoever came here the other night knew the knife was in this room …’

‘In the house, at least. This was the only empty room, and the rest of the house was full of people, so it would have been the first place a thief would look anyway.’

‘And then, having taken the knife, he decided to lift this costume as well?’

‘It can’t have been that simple. For one thing, there was some sort of struggle over the costume, because that feather was broken off. For another …’

‘The knife was used.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you don’t know who was injured?’

His frown turned the lines on the old man’s face into ravines. ‘I don’t. Nobody in my household, and I think one of the guests would have complained if he’d woken up with stab wounds, don’t you? But there was a trail of blood from here out into the courtyard.’

‘There were two of them.’ In spite of myself I was curious. ‘What happened — did they fall out?’

‘It looks like it, doesn’t it? What else could it have been — two men burgling my house in the same night, both of whom just happened to know exactly what they were looking for and where to find it, and one of them deciding to stick a knife in the other? I think that sounds unlikely.’

‘Where did you find the knife?’

‘In the courtyard.’

I stared at the knife again. It occurred to me that it ought to be cleaned up, but then I thought that was not my task. It was my son’s. Mine was to return his knife to him.

‘What I thought,’ Kindly was saying, ‘was that maybe whichever of them stabbed the other changed his mind and carried his friend home. Of course, they had my property with them. And if you found either of our thieves, you see, then you’d find my property. But at least one of them camehere looking for that knife. And you want to know who that was, and why, don’t you?’

‘So that’s why I’m here,’ I said dully. I kept looking at the weapon. Suddenly I was seeing it with fresh eyes. It was valuable, to be sure: but what might it be worth to someone who had never owned anything else?

My grip on the thing tightened until it shook and my knuckles turned white.

‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ the old man said softly. ‘You’ll do anything to get this back to its owner.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Call it a lucky guess. Lily told me what happened on the lake, the other night, and all the things you’d said to her about yourself while you and she were … while you were here before. It wasn’t too difficult to work out that that boy must be yours. And if you thought he’d been here, instead of running away from the city and putting a safe distance between himself and the Chief Minister, you’d be desperate to find out where he was, and what he was up to.’

I remembered the effort and heartache it had cost me, learning that Nimble was my child. How had Kindly discovered it? I shivered at the thought that if this feeble-minded old man could manage to deduce the truth so easily, in spite of the lies I had told his daughter, others might be able to as well — my master among them.

‘So you think my son came looking for his knife,’ I replied in a low voice, ‘and that I’m bound to go looking for him, and if I find out what happened to him, I’m bound to find your precious featherwork.’

He clapped his hands together delightedly. ‘I knew you’d understand! Of course, I’ll pay you if you bring it back in one piece. When can you start?’

My jaw dropped so fast and so far that it hurt. ‘I don’tbelieve you! You somehow manage to get hold of a fabulously valuable piece of featherwork. You keep it here, in a house full of mushroomed-up warriors who everyone knows have no love for you merchants — not to mention the other merchants you invited as your guests, all of them rivals of yours who would cheerfully steal from you out of spite. Then when it gets stolen — big surprise, that! — you expect me to go and get it back from you? Are you mad?’

Anyone else might have accepted what I said. I might have expected a different man’s face to darken or turn pale, according to whether he felt embarrassed at his own foolishness or angry at my reproof, or perhaps to crumple dejectedly when he realized he was not getting his own way. Indeed, I watched Kindly’s face as I finished speaking, but I saw none of these things, and it quickly dawned on me that I was not going to.

The Kindly I had known was a broken old man, good for nothing except lounging against the wall of his courtyard, swilling sacred wine and talking idly with anyone who still had the patience to listen to him. The steady, unremitting stare with which he returned my gaze belonged on another, still older face than his: the face of a merchant who had once journeyed through hot lands, frozen lands and steamy swamps, who had seen friends die, his son-in-law among them, who had burned his fellow merchants’ travelling-staffs with their bodies and then fought and beaten the barbarians who had killed them. No words of mine were ever going to touch this old man.

‘You know I’m not,’ he said stonily. ‘And I know you’ll do what I’m asking, Yaotl, because it’s the only way you’ll find out what happened to your son.’

I was still gripping the knife. It would have been ridiculously easy to stretch out my arm and sink the blade in this vile old man’s chest. Nobody could have known my hand wasbehind it: nobody except Kindly himself knew I was there. For a moment there was nothing I would rather have done, but my arm seemed to have gone dead.

I dropped the arm with a sigh, letting the weapon dangle loosely from my limp fingers.

‘All right. You win, you old bastard. You’d better tell me just what this wonderful piece was. A headdress, a warrior’s back device, a mosaic?’

‘Oh, no. Nothing so mundane.’

‘Well, what, then?’

‘It was the raiment of a god.’