Shadow of the Lords

5

‘The raiment of a god.’

It was so obvious, I thought, and it explained so much. I cursed myself for an idiot, for the terror I had felt on the bridge, confronting what I had thought was an omen. ‘I bet I can guess which one.’

‘You’ve heard the stories, then.’

‘About the vision? I can do better than that, Kindly. I saw him myself!’

He stared at me. ‘You?’ he spluttered. ‘When?’

‘Just before I got here.’ Suddenly I felt the urge to laugh, remembering my own incredulity at hearing the featherworker’s account at my master’s house. Of course neither of us had seen a god. We had both met a man in a stolen costume, although what he was doing haunting the canal between Pochtlan and Amantlan, and how he had managed to vanish so completely, were still a mystery.

Kindly stared at me dumbly while I told him what had happened to me. ‘So it’s still in this parish,’ he muttered when I had finished. ‘Maybe it’ll be all right after all.’

‘Just how did you get hold of this thing? It must be worth …’ My voice tailed off as I tried vainly to imagine what you could barter for something so valuable.

He laughed. ‘It’s priceless, Yaotl! It’s not even as if Skinny was the only craftsman whose work went into it. Naturally asa featherworker he was the last to handle it, since the feathers are the most fragile part, but … well, you saw the mask? The serpent’s head? The scales are turquoises, and so’s the spear-thrower the god was given to carry.’

‘His sandals were made of obsidian,’ I recalled.

‘That’s right, and the front of his shield was striped with gold and seashells, and there was a bloody great emerald set into his cap that would have bought you twenty times over.’ I had to grit my teeth at this callous reference to my status. ‘I tell you, the lapidaries had a field day! But it’s the feathers you would really have noticed. I’ve never seen anything like them.’

‘Me neither.’ Nor, I remembered, had the featherworker I had spoken to at the Chief Minister’s house. ‘So how did you manage to get hold of this thing? For that matter, why? It surely wasn’t Skinny’s to sell!’

‘Skinny and I go back a long way, you see,’ he replied carelessly. ‘His father and some of his uncles used to work for me. Our families helped one another out, from time to time.’

I looked at him coolly I thought I could work out what came next. The featherworker obviously knew Kindly was broke, and that his grandson had made off with everything his family had. He obviously assumed the old merchant would do anything to make money, and if offered what looked like a bargain would snap it up with no questions asked. ‘I don’t suppose you stopped to think that maybe whoever originally commissioned this fabulous costume might want to get his hands on it?’

‘Of course I did! But we had our story ready’ He grinned ruefully. ‘We were going to say it had been stolen from his workshop.’

And no doubt, I thought, by the time the costume’s owner started making serious enquiries, it would already have been sold.

I thought about what Kindly had described to me, the fabulous wealth that the gold, the stones, the feathers, even the seashells, each one picked out and placed with such care in its setting, must represent, the unique craftsmanship that must show in every facet and every plume. I wondered where he could possibly hope to sell something like that, and who would dare buy anything that distinctive. Surely nobody in the city, or in any of the other towns in the valley of Mexico. Perhaps, I thought, Kindly had meant to send it abroad. I knew his family dealt in feathers, importing them from the hot lands in the South and the East, and that they must trade with the barbarians who lived there. Was he hoping to exchange the god’s costume for feathers, for working capital to replace what his grandson had taken?

I thought then that I understood what he had been up to. However dangerous it might have been, to Kindly it would have been worth everything he staked on the venture, to have the prospect of being able to trade in his own right again. For so long, he and his daughter had been impoverished, their business crippled by his grandson’s cheating. The sacred wine Kindly drank so freely may have dulled his judgement, but it had not blunted his pride. He had seen a chance to free himself, to exercise once again the independence that set his merchant class apart from the rest of us Aztecs, and he had seized it without a second’s thought.

How ironic it was that, with his grandson dead and the boat with all the family’s wealth on it recovered, that independence had become his and Lily’s for the taking, without his having to lift a finger.

‘So, to sum up,’ I said sourly, ‘you think I am going to go and look for this costume — or rather, for the man wearing it — in the hope that I might find out what became of my son on the way?’

‘That’s right,’ Kindly said blandly. ‘Of course, I’m sure we could negotiate a finder’s fee …’

‘Oh, don’t bother!’ I cried, suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of disgust. I had no choice in the matter, of course, as I had known full well from the moment I had been given my son’s knife, but I did not have to like it. ‘If you can think of a way of telling my master where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing that won’t get me killed out of hand, than I’ll settle for that!’

‘Really?’ he replied brightly. ‘Is that all? That’s a deal, then!’ Then, seeing my scowl, he added: ‘Oh, come on, Yaoti — I’m joking! Look, I don’t know what you’re going to tell your master, but I guess if you were really worried about that you’d be sitting obediently at the old man’s feet instead of squatting there talking to me. Let’s face it, each of us needs to find something and the chances are the things we both want are in the same place. I can’t very well go running around after them — I’m too old and too well known. So it has to be down to you. Now what about it?’

All my exhaustion, a day and most of a night of unceasing activity and strain, seemed to descend on me then, and I bowed my head, cradling it on my knees, within my folded arms. ‘All right. You win. I’ll look for your precious featherwork.’

‘Excellent!’ he chortled. ‘Now, I think we ought to seal our bargain with a drink, don’t you? There’s a gourd of sacred wine in the kitchen. I won’t be a moment.’

Before I could stammer out an answer the old man was out of the room and padding across the courtyard. A moment later he was back, thrusting a gourd full of sloshing liquid in my direction. I recoiled silently.

‘Oh, come on, Yaotl. You can’t pretend you’re not partial to a drop. This isn’t the usual rotgut, either. It’s pure maguey sap, not some rubbish made out of spit and honey!’

‘I don’t want it,’ I said, looking down.

He had pulled out the maize cob that served as the gourd’s stopper, letting out the sharp smell of the stuff inside. ‘Why not? Used to be meat and drink to you, this stuff, didn’t it? Oh, suit yourself.’

He tipped the gourd up to his own face. I found I could listen to the liquid inside it with more detachment than I would have thought I was capable of. Was this because what I was looking for was so important to me that it cut through the old craving? I clung to that thought: I told myself that if I ever felt that way again, so desperately in need of a drink that I would do anything to get one, steal, betray the people closest to me and abase myself in ways unthinkable to an Aztec, then perhaps I only had to remember that I had a son, and the yearning would pass.

Eventually I managed to say: ‘Just find me a blanket and a clean breechcloth and let me stay here for the night, won’t you?’

There was no answer.

After a moment or two I looked up, surprised.

Kindly had put the gourd down. He was shuffling his feet awkwardly, shifting his weight from side to side and sending nervous glances out through the doorway.

‘What’s the matter?’ I could barely keep my eyes open by now. In my imagination I was already swaddling my aching limbs in a rabbit’s-fur blanket, with my head cradled on my rolled-up cloak and no intention of waking up until long after daybreak, but a glance at the old man’s face was enough to dispel all that. I moaned, realizing that I was not likely to get any sleep that night after all, and feeling like a runner who has just topped what he thought was the last ridge before home only to see that, on the far side of the valley below him, there is a steeper slope than ever for him to climb.

‘I’m sorry, Yaotl.’ His tone was too distant and distracted to be apologetic. ‘I can’t let you stay here. This is the only empty room and I need it — all the stuff off that boat is coming back before dawn, you see, and it’ll have to go in here. You know we merchants always move our merchandise by night. I can lend you a blanket, though, and give you some water and something to eat.’

There was not much of the night left by the time I left Kindly’s house, with an old, patched blanket wrapped against my shoulders and my hands clutching a tortilla and a drinking-gourd that the old man had generously pressed into them at the last moment.

‘Do your best, Yaotl,’ he said, as he all but pushed me into the street. ‘I’m relying on you! And so’s your son!’

He seemed keen to be rid of me after I had declined his offer of a drink. I wondered about that, as I stood by the whitewashed stone wall of his house and watched its pale reflection catch ripples on the surface of the canal at my feet, making each one gleam fleetingly. I wondered about his air of distraction, of something like embarrassment. I wondered too about the odd cries I had heard. They seemed to come from close by, but I had not heard them again and there was nothing to see.

Then I sighed, telling myself that these were minor mysteries compared to the others I had got caught up in of late. Wrapping myself more tightly in the blanket, I turned and walked on, back towards the bridge that led across the canal to Amantlan. If I was going to look for old Kindly’s precious feathered costume, I thought, then I might as well start by talking to the man who had made it.

It was as I was padding back across the bridge that I first noticed the trail of blood.

It caught my eye as a thin dark smear, glistening with reflected starlight. I knelt and ran my finger through it and sniffed it. It was fresh.

I got up and looked back and forth along the short bridge. To my surprise the trail started about where I was standing, and ran on to the far shore. Had there been a fight here, with the wounded man staggering off in the direction of Amantlan? I looked down again. There were a few marks in the frost that coated the bridge’s planks. I could see my own footprints, melted into the frost by my bare soles. There were other, less distinct marks, streaks that might have marked the passage of something heavy, being dragged across the canal, and the bloody smear was in their midst. I could not see anything that suggested a struggle.

Frowning, I walked slowly over the bridge, following the trail until I saw where it was going to take me. That was when I hesitated, stopping to sniff the air, and feeling the first spasm of nausea as I realized what must lie beyond the wicker screen at the bridge’s far end, the one I had been making for when I thought I saw the god.

My sense of smell may have been more acute than most. As a priest, I had spent much of my life in darkness — in the niches at the backs of temples where the Sun’s rays were never allowed to penetrate, surveying the stars from the summit of a pyramid, or patrolling by night the hills around the lake our city stood on, seeing nothing but alive to the scents the wind brought, of pine and sage and briny water. His eyes sometimes mattered less to a priest than his nose, and the old instincts still served me when I needed them.

I stood by the wicker screen. I watched as the foggy cloud my breath made dispersed in the cold, still night air, and then took a slow, deep, deliberate sniff.

I fought back the gorge rising in my throat as each of the smells pressed its claim to recognition. They were all foul: piss and ordure and, underlying the others but unmistakable, an odour no priest or former priest could ever forget — the reek of fresh human blood.

I looked down. There was no doubt that this was where the short trail I had followed led. The smell came from behind the screen, and there was nothing I could do now but go and look for its source.

I knew something of what I would find. There would be pots into which passers-by could relieve themselves, and which would be taken away by boat for sale in the markets as dyestuff or manure. Sure enough, I found several large, squat, plain clay vessels, their outsides streaked, spattered and darkly stained by years of careless use. I peered at the unsavoury things as closely as I could in the darkness, but could see nothing out of the ordinary. Then I took a step forward, and felt my stomach lurch.

My bare feet stuck to the ground.

I did not need to look down. The smell rising from all around me was enough to tell me what I was standing in. The space around the pots was awash with it. Enough blood had been spilt here to satisfy even Cihuacoatl, our most ravenous goddess, if it had been offered as a sacrifice.

My head spun. I was tempted to lean against the screen for support but stopped myself just in time, as the flimsy structure would surely have collapsed. I looked around wildly, probing each dark corner for some sign of a body, desperate to assure myself that the dead man had not ended up where I could see he almost certainly had.

Groaning, I accepted the evidence of my eyes and ventured towards the nearest pot. I pushed it nervously with the heel of my hand. It was too heavy to fall over, and merely rocked backon to its base. I tried to upset it again, failed again and finally, howling with frustration and disgust, got both my hands on its slippery rim and shoved.

I jumped back as a stream of vile sludge slopped across the ground at my feet. Mercifully, there was not enough light to see what colour it was, but there was no mistaking either its smell or the pale thing that flowed out on the dark, stinking stream. It was part of a human arm. The hand was turned up towards me, as if in supplication, although its fingers were closed around something, a small, hard, gleaming object, with an irregular shape, like a carving in jade or obsidian.

I bent towards the hand for a closer look, but at that point nausea finally got the better of me. I ran to the edge of the canal and vomited, voiding my almost empty stomach and heaving drily and painfully until I scarcely had the strength to draw breath. For a long time after that I just knelt by the water’s edge, watching the gathering pre-dawn light catch the ripples on its surface until the moisture in my own eyes turned them first into vague ghostly shapes and then into a feeble, pale flickering, like a blanket being shaken out on a dull day.

A long time passed after I had fled from the horror I found behind the screen, during which I did nothing but crouch wretchedly beside the canal. When my stomach had stopped heaving I wept, and when my tears had dried up I merely stared at the water.

I ought to have gone back, to tip up all the other pots and confront their secrets. I shifted my weight from my heels to the balls of my feet twice, meaning to get up and look behind the screen again, but both times I stayed where I was. I thought I could guess what had happened, and I could not bear to have it confirmed.

My son had gone to Kindly’s house, looking for his knife. Iwondered whether he had surprised another thief, whoever had stolen Kindly’s costume, or whether, as Kindly himself believed, the two of them had been in it together and had fallen out. One of them had stabbed the other, and the victim had ended up here. I looked back along the bridge and tried, in spite of myself, to visualize what had happened: the killer carrying the body as far as the middle of the bridge, perhaps, and then dropping it and dragging it the rest of the way before cutting it up and concealing it hastily in a public privy.

Could Nimble have done such a thing? I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the boy I had known all too briefly killing a man for the sake of a bronze knife and a feathered costume. It was difficult. Nimble had been the lover of a vicious, cold-blooded and sadistic murderer, but he was no killer himself. Yet the alternative explanation was worse: that it was my son’s body that lay in pieces, just a few paces away

I had to know.

Swallowing once, I forced myself to my feet, and then realized that the matter was out of my hands and my chance had been lost.

It was almost dawn and the city was coming to life. Canoes began gliding by, and one or two of their boatmen glanced curiously at the miserable creature standing by the canal, his face pale from retching, his eyes raw and his clothes reduced to rags. I knew that I had better move on quickly before somebody else discovered what I had seen and connected it with me.

With one last brief glance at the screen, I went on my way.