Shadow of the Lords

THREE RABBIT
1

I had no difficulty in memorizing the directions Kindly had given me. Still I managed to get lost four times. The horrifying discovery I had just made kept forcing itself into my thoughts, making it hard to concentrate. It was not until late in the morning that I found myself where I wanted to be, and even then I was not certain I had got it right.

The route Kindly had given me took me among the sturdy, respectable houses of the featherworkers, and past them. It led me down narrow, overgrown, silted-up canals whose stagnant waters reeked even on a cool winter’s morning, among wretched hovels, some of them little more than one-room huts, some of them obviously long abandoned and others with their roofs coated with moss and their sides piled high with stinking garbage, and into what I was convinced must be another parish altogether.

Eventually I asked a water seller to confirm that I was where I thought I was. He was standing up in a canoe, using his paddle to hack his way through the reeds in his path while lumps of green scum swirled and coagulated in his wake. The canoe was laden with pots that I presumed were full of fresh water from the spring at Chapultepec, on the mainland. Every morning the water sellers drew it from the aqueduct that had been built over the lake in Emperor Ahuitzotl’s time, and filled their pots with it for sale to countless thirsty households in thecity Of course, Mexico was riddled with canals, but nobody in his right mind would ever drink out of them.

My question made him laugh. ‘Amantlan? You must be joking!’ His voice had a nasal tone, the result of trying to avoid breathing through his nose. ‘Amantlan’s back there.’ He jerked his head to indicate the way I had come. ‘This is Atecocolecan.’

I stared about me, bewildered. I had not realized I had walked so far, but as I took in my surroundings it began to make sense. Atecocolecan: the Place of the Angry Water. I had walked all the way to the edge of Mexico’s island, close to where the northern causeway linked the city to Tepeyac on the mainland. ‘It’s a dump! Look — there isn’t even a path over there. It’s just a marsh — you can’t tell where the canal ends and the ground starts. These houses must be waterlogged all the time.’ The name of this place was no accident. After a serious flood many of the hovels around me would be driftwood.

He dipped his paddle in the water. ‘Afraid so,’ he acknowledged.

‘Do you know where Skinny lives?’ I called after him, as his canoe at last got under way through the gap he had hacked through the foliage. ‘Only I was looking for him, but I got lost.’

‘Skinny?’ He laughed shortly without looking around. ‘You’re not lost. He lives right here!’ He waved his paddle at a house just a few paces away. ‘Doesn’t owe you any money, does he?’

‘No.’

‘Good for you! If you catch him, mention me, eh? Tell him I’ll settle for a nice plump turkey hen, as long as she’s a good layer. Otherwise he can drink his own piss!’

The paddle hit the water with an emphatic splash, throwingup a jet of green and brown muck. It did not propel the canoe forward with any great speed, but it probably felt good.

Skinny’s house was not one of the meanest in this part of the city. It was in better condition than the dwellings on either side. On the other hand, they were both ruins, evidently deserted, unless you counted the rats. The featherworker’s property looked sturdy enough, but its walls were in desperate need of rendering and all that remained of the garden on its roof was a few bedraggled brown leaves trailing over its edge.

A gang of men driving wooden piles into the bed of the swamp at the back of the house, shaking the ground with their hammering and tormenting the air with their tuneless singing, did nothing for the neighbourhood. The water seller’s s parting remark came back to me. Here was the home of a family down on its luck.

I wondered how a featherworker could possibly have ended up here, especially one as eminent as Skinny Amantlan was like many parishes in Mexico, in that its people were a close-knit community, bound together by ties of kinship, whose sons and daughters rarely married outside and were expected to carry on a family business that they had in common with all their friends and relations. Put two Aztecs together and there would be rivalry, and the Amanteca were no exception to this, but something extraordinary must have happened to allow a great craftsman to fall so far, without his peers doing anything to stop it.

Considering the state of his home, I began to wonder whether it would, after all, be so surprising if Skinny had sold the god’s costume to Kindly. He might well have been desperate enough.

A low square doorway, leading straight into a room, broke the clean white expanse of the wall in front of me. There wasno screen but the interior was too dark to give anything away. The glare of a sunlit courtyard, visible through another doorway directly opposite the street entrance, made it look darker. By squinting I was just able to make out a few features in the courtyard: the domed shape of a sweat bath against the rear wall, another doorway off to one side.

There was no one in the first room and I went straight through into the courtyard. That was deserted too. This puzzled me, because most dwellings in Mexico were home to more than one household and were consequently crowded, even during the day with the men away in the fields.

I stopped wondering about that when I saw the idols.

Every house in Mexico had them. In most a ledge near the hearth served as a shrine, a home for the household’s patron deities, who might be feared or adored but were always cherished and often treated as if they were members of the family.

Here, it seemed, things were done differently. Two of the courtyard’s four walls, the ones that were not lined with rooms, were richly decorated with statuettes of the gods. Some were new, some old. The biggest was half my height and I could have closed my fist around the smallest. They were made of everything from brilliantly polished greenstone to crudely carved wood, ash or fir or something similarly cheap and plentiful. I saw Tezcatlipoca, Xipe Totec with his mask of human skin, Tlaloc with his protruding, goggle eyes and his consort Chalcihuitlicue, She of the Jade Skirt, Ohmacatl, the vain and importunate lord of the feast, several other gods I knew and a few I did not know. I supposed the particular gods of the featherworkers — Coyotl Inahual and the women Xilo and Xiuhtlati — must be here, and I recognized Yacatecuhtli, the merchants’ god, whom the featherworkers honoured as well.

There was something odd about these figures, apart from their number and variety. All of them, despite having beenplaced so carefully in niches that had been lovingly prepared for them, were coated in a fine layer of dust, and some were stained, smeared, defaced with dried muck. One of the idols had even been broken. It was impossible to tell which god it represented, because all that was left was a jagged greenstone stump.

Clay flower pots stood on the floor of the courtyard. One of them had fallen over and cracked, leaving the floor around it strewn with soil. That made me frown, for sweeping was a sacred duty and for a pious Aztec to neglect it altogether was all but unthinkable.

When I looked up again I saw I was no longer alone.

Although the wall to my right stretched the whole length of the courtyard, there was only one opening in it, the one I had caught sight of from the front of the house. A short, grubby cloth screen had been hung across it. This still shivered, as it would if it had been tugged aside and jerked back into place. A man stood in front of it.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here? This is a private house. Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want any. Get out!’

I took a step back, astonished. It was not the sort of greeting I would have expected to get anywhere in Mexico, where visitors could normally expect to be received with almost ceremonial courtesy I stared at the stranger, taking in as much of his appearance as I could while I tried to think of a suitable reply.

He was about my height and, like me, perhaps forty years old. He was thin and gaunt, with his ribs showing plainly where his cloak parted. Dark hollows around his eyes added to my impression that he was in need of a square meal. Their lids were heavy as well, and he kept blinking as he stared at me, in the slow, stupid manner of someone who has just been roused from a deep sleep.

A long scratch ran down one of his cheeks. It was a recent wound, and I doubted that it was deep enough to leave a scar, but it might easily have been much worse, since it began a hair’s breadth from the corner of his left eye.

I cleared my throat uncertainly. ‘You must be Skinny. Is that any way for a great craftsman to greet a customer?’

The eyebrows shot up to the top of his forehead and fluttered down again. ‘A customer?’ He gaped at me.

The screen behind him rustled and was pulled aside. He jerked his head around quickly, and I saw one of his hands clench and loosen nervously as I peered over his shoulder to see who was following him into the courtyard.

A woman’s voice cooed: ‘Skinny? Who’s this?’

Aztec children learned at an early age that it was rude to stare openly at someone. If my father could have seen me at that moment he would probably have had me hanging upside down over burning chillies, grown man or not, until he judged that seared lungs and streaming eyes had reminded me firmly enough of my manners.

She slipped from the room as silently and gracefully as an ocelot stalking a sparrow along the branch of a tree, and stood next to the man, so close that her bare arm brushed against his, all the time keeping her eyes fixed on me with a stare as frank as mine. Perfect ellipses, those eyes were, wide and glistening, their irises pure black, matching the hair that fell loose about her face and cascaded like molten tar over her shoulders. No doubt its dark sheen owed something to indigo dye, but a man would have to have been made of marble to care about that. I was not, which was why I could not help noticing, beneath her plain skirt and shift, the curve of the woman’s thigh and the swell of breasts tipped by nipples as small and sharp as arrowheads.

‘Says he’s a customer.’

Skinny’s voice snatched me out of my reverie. Hastily I forced my eyes back to the woman’s face. It was a perfect oval of clear, unblemished skin, with an interesting pallor that might have been natural but was more likely the result of staining with yellow ochre. I wondered how old she was, thinking she must be much younger than the man, perhaps not yet twenty.

‘Madam, I am sorry to have troubled you,’ I mumbled, ‘but I was looking for Skinny the craftsman …’

She yawned. A hand flew upward to cover her mouth, and dropped again to reveal a weary smile.

‘I beg your pardon. You must think we’re very rude, but neither of us slept very well. You must have come far, you’ll be tired. Have a rest and something to eat.’ It was merely the conventional way to greet visitors but she managed to make it sound as if she was truly concerned. Detaching herself from the man, she began walking towards a doorway in the wall behind me.

I forced myself to take my eyes off her and turn back towards the man. ‘You are Skinny, the featherworker? I have got the right house?’

He looked hastily from me to the girl and back again. ‘Yes,’ he admitted gruffly. ‘And this is Papalotl, my wife.’ Her name suited her. It meant ‘Butterfly’. ‘We weren’t expecting visitors. Who did you say you were?’

‘I’m Moquequeloa,’ I said, on the spur of the moment, and instantly regretted it. It was one of the names we used for Tezcatlipoca, and meant ‘Joker’. ‘I was looking to buy a piece of featherwork for my master.’ I could not resist a quick look over my shoulder, but all I could see of the girl was the sheen of her long hair in the dark room beyond the doorway she had gone through.

‘You want to buy a piece of featherwork?’ The man’s holloweyes widened and then narrowed suspiciously. ‘What kind of piece, exactly? What made you come here?’

That seemed like an odd question, coming from a renowned master of his craft, but I was spared the need to answer it straight away by his wife’s reappearance.

‘I can’t offer you very much, I’m afraid,’ she said. She had a drinking-gourd in her hand which she proffered, this time with modestly downcast eyes. ‘Here is some water. All we have to eat are some cakes of stone dung.’

‘Thank you.’ I took the stopper off the gourd and raised it. I took a cautious sniff before pressing it to my lips, and decided I was not thirsty after all. It must have been a long while since Skinny’s credit with the water seller had run out. I passed the gourd to Skinny, who took it and drank without hesitation, as if he no longer noticed what the contents tasted like.

‘It’s very kind of you,’ I added politely, ‘but I ate and drank before I came here.’ Stone dung was what we called scum skimmed off the surface of the lake, which was dried and sold in the markets as crumbly cakes. It was nourishing enough, provided nobody had been emptying pots of whitewash into the water while it was being harvested, but scarcely appetizing. During one of the lowest periods in my life I had made a living collecting the stuff, and so I was even less fond of it than most Aztecs.

Skinny gave the gourd back to his wife. ‘The man says he wants to buy a piece of featherwork,’ he muttered.

Her frown etched a single straight line in the exact centre of her forehead, and was almost as pretty as her smile.

‘We had better sit down and talk about this. Can you bring some mats out, darling?’

Wordlessly he turned and went back into the room, emerging a moment later with three reed mats that he threw on the floor at our feet. As each one struck the earth it raised a little cloud ofdust whose motes spiralled lazily in the bright still air. Again the slovenliness of the household puzzled me. In almost any other courtyard in Mexico the mats would not have been needed, unless it had been raining, because the ground would have been swept so clean you could have eaten off it. As I squatted and tried to make myself comfortable, I wondered what the gods, looking down from their niches in the walls, could possibly make of it all.

Skinny rested his buttocks on the mat next to mine. Butterfly knelt facing us.

‘You must think us very impolite,’ she said. ‘We’re in a terrible mess at the moment.’

I did not comment.

‘We live here with Skinny’s brother, Tlatziuhqui. He and his wife have that room over there. Her name’s Cempoalxochitl.’ Tlatziuhqui was a curious name: it meant ‘Idle’. Obviously he had shown even less promise as a little boy than his brother. Cempoalxochitl meant ‘Marigold’.

I followed her glance towards the doorway she and her husband had first emerged from, and then looked back at her, letting my expression pose the obvious question for me.

‘They aren’t here. They …’ For the first time she seemed unsure of herself, faltering and looking at Skinny for help.

‘Disappeared,’ he said shortly. ‘That’s why we aren’t doing any business at the moment. Too much to sort out. This house is really my brother’s, so we need to make sure the parish will let us keep it. Sorry you’ve had a wasted journey.’ A smile formed on his mouth but his eyes were still glowering at me. He was not sorry about my wasted journey and did not mind if I knew it. He wanted me in his house the way a gardener wants slugs, and he did not mind my knowing that too.

‘Disappeared?’ I echoed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘One day they’re here, the next they’re not. Don’t ask me why.’

I turned to the girl. ‘When did this happen?’

She gave me her discomfitingly sensuous smile. ‘Three nights ago, on Thirteen Snake.’

I frowned. Thirteen Snake was the night the costume had been stolen from Kindly’s house. ‘And they simply walked out? Your husband said this was Idle’s own house.’

She fidgeted on her mat. I kept my eyes at about the level of her chin to avoid becoming fixated by those slender brown knees.

‘We’ve been asking ourselves Why? ever since — haven’t we, love? But we can’t think of an answer. Nobody has seen them. We thought they might be with Marigold’s father, but he doesn’t know any more than we do.

‘We can only hope,’ she added, catching her breath, ‘that they haven’t met with an accident.’

It was difficult to imagine what sort of accident might befall two people at once, unless they were caught out on the lake in a canoe and swamped by a storm, or their house fell on their heads in an earthquake. If there had been any storms or earthquakes in the valley in the last few days, then I had slept through them.

Skinny said: ‘Joker isn’t interested in our troubles. We’ve already told him we can’t help him. Let’s not waste any more of the man’s time.’

‘You’re not.’ I was not sure that the featherworker’s brother’s disappearance had anything to do with what I was looking for but I was curious, to say the least. I glanced around quickly, to remind myself of my surroundings. The house was not large, but with just four adults living in it, it would not have been overcrowded. Aztecs were used to living on top of one another. I dismissed the idea that the vanished couple might just have wanted some space.

‘Does anyone else live here?’

‘No.’

I hesitated before asking my next question. Skinny clearly did not have the most even of tempers and I was not anxious to provoke him, but I could not leave without satisfying my curiosity on one point. ‘Forgive me, but … why are you here? This isn’t the featherworkers’ parish, it’s not even close. How come you ended up …’ I nearly concluded ‘in this hovel?’ but changed it at the last moment to ‘in Atecocolecan?’

‘I was born here.’ Not even Skinny’s lips were smiling at me now. ‘I think we’ve talked long enough. Thank you for coming. Sorry we can’t help. The street,’ he added pointedly, with a significant look towards the doorway I had first come through, ‘is over there!’

I did not move. His answer was as astonishing as anything I had heard. I thought about probing further, but in the meantime I found myself staring speculatively at his cheek, not troubling to hide my interest.

‘There was a fight, wasn’t there?’

‘What?’

‘How did you get that scratch?’

‘It was an accident,’ the woman snapped. She dropped her sultry tone for a moment and her voice suddenly had a shrill, nervous edge. ‘And it’s none of your business anyway!’

‘What sort of accident?’

They both started to get up. For a moment I wondered whether they were going to attack me. I tensed, ready to defend myself if they made a move to throw me bodily into the canal outside. I could probably have taken on the man, I thought, and I assumed the woman would be of no account in a fight by herself, but I was not sure about both of them together, and there had been a dangerous quality in her voice, a hint of something she had kept hidden, a reminder that I did not know for sure what she might be capable of.

Their eyes met, and some sort of unspoken signal seemed to pass between them. They both froze for an instant, and then relaxed. As quickly as it had come the danger seemed to pass and they resumed their former attitudes, he glowering at me from his mat, she smiling at me from hers.

The man let out a long sigh while the woman said: ‘Forgive us. We don’t mean to be discourteous but we’re both under a lot of strain at the moment.’

‘It was a copper knife,’ Skinny added. ‘It slipped while I was trimming a pattern on the cutting-board. Happens all the time. Look, here’s another one.’ He held up his hand. Across the palm was an ugly gash, a much deeper wound than the one on his cheek, but no older; the edges had been stitched together with hair and the stitches were still there.

‘There was no fight,’ the woman said earnestly. ‘If there had been, and Idle and Marigold had run away, they’d have gone to her father, but I told you, he hasn’t seen them.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Cuehmoliuhtoc,’ said Skinny, rubbing his wounded hand absently. A corner of his mouth twitched as though at a private joke. ‘My chief rival, the great featherworker. There’s no love lost between us, anyone will tell you that.’ This was only to be expected if the man’s disposition matched his name, since Cuehmoliuhtoc meant ‘Angry’. ‘Of course, he’d be the first person his daughter and my brother would run to if there were a problem between us — but there isn’t!’

I decided to drop the subject for the time being. If the costume had disappeared with the vanished couple then I would have to look elsewhere for it. If it had not, then I still had some bargaining to do. ‘Listen, you still don’t know what I came here for.’ I looked from one to the other, finally settling on the man, because I thought his face was more likely to give something away when I told them my story. ‘Kindly the merchant sent me.’

Skinny had been on the point of picking up the water gourd again. It lay neglected on the ground beside him, while his hand froze in the air above it. His eyes narrowed.

‘Go on,’ he said eventually.

I glanced slyly at the woman. Her face was impassive, but the last trace of the flush had left her cheeks.

‘He bought something from you recently. A costume of Quetzalcoatl. He has, um, mislaid it.’ I laid as much emphasis on ‘mislaid’ as I dared and paused to let the words sink in. ‘Now he would like to replace it. He would like very much to get another one, exactly the same. Exactly the same.’

I had given a good deal of thought to this. Somebody had come to Kindly’s house knowing that he had something of great value, and meaning to steal it. The person most likely to have that knowledge was the person he had got it from. I might well be looking at the thief, and if all I had wanted was to find the merchant’s stolen goods, it seemed to me that my task could not be much simpler. I had no assurance that Kindly would pay a ransom to get his property back but I was certain he would. It was not as if he could not afford to. I did not much care whether he could afford to or not, anyway: compared to my own plight, the knowledge of what had almost certainly happened to my son, I thought the old merchant’s troubles were trifling.

I sat back and waited for Skinny to name his price.

The man glared at me more fiercely than ever.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he growled dangerously.

I sighed wearily. ‘Yes you do. All Kindly’s asking is, how much do you want?’

‘To make a feather costume? I told you, we aren’t in business at the moment. I’m sorry to disappoint you and your master, but I can’t help!’

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. I looked at the woman again. She was watching her husband intently and did not seem to be paying any attention to me.

‘I suppose you expect me to make you an offer,’ I said at last. ‘Very well. We will give you what Kindly paid you the first time. That’s in return for not reporting the matter to the chief of your parish, not to mention the featherworkers’ elders.’

‘Reporting what?’

‘The theft of the bloody costume!’

In the silence that followed, my exasperated cry seemed to bounce back at me off the walls of the courtyard.

Skinny and his wife both stared at me, their expressions as cold and unmoving as those of the idols on the walls around us. I began to wonder whether I might be wrong, and whether it was possible that the featherworker had not stolen the costume from Kindly after all.

It was the woman who spoke.

‘I really think you ought to leave now, Joker.’ She hissed the words at me between clenched teeth, but followed them with a deep sigh and a reminder of her smile. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve made a mistake. Things are hard for us. You must understand.’

Skinny scowled at me. I scowled back, but plainly pulling faces was not going to do me any good.

I got to my feet. ‘You know where to come if you change your mind!’

I spoke to the man, but I let my eyes linger for a moment on the woman. I did not care if it seemed ill mannered. I had had enough of playing games with the two of them, and besides, she was beautiful, and I did not expect to see her like again soon.