by Simon Levack
‘You’ve got that wrong, my lord,’ I said, removing my hand from Lily’s arm. ‘Victims are usually fasted before the sacrifice, not fed!’
The king could not have looked more shocked if I had stepped forward and spat in his eye. Beside me, Kindly drew in his breath with an audible hiss. ‘Careful! Remember where you are!’
I ignored them both. I turned instead to lord Feathered in Black, my former master, to find those piercing eyes fixing me with an unblinking stare. My courage – a frail thing at the best of times and now sustained only by despair – almost failed me then, but I managed to stammer some more defiant words: ‘I suppose I should feel honoured. What made you come in person, rather than sending some hireling?’
Young lord Maize Ear started forward, but surprisingly, my former master restrained him with a gnarled hand on his wrist. The old man did not shift his gaze. When he spoke, it was in the low growl that I had come, over the years, to fear more than his most thunderous rages.
‘Prostrate yourselves before the king!’
I heard two bodies hitting the ground. Out of the corner of one eye I saw Kindly lying in an awkward posture, twisted sideways, as his knees had obviously given way on his way down, while his daughter was propped up on the heels of her hands in an effort to save her damaged fingers.
‘You too!’ the chief minister barked, and then my muscles seemed to give way of their own accord as I flopped forward onto the cold flagstones.
‘That’s better.’ A faint creaking told me lord Feathered in Black was settling himself more comfortably in his chair. ‘You’re too soft, Maize Ear,’ he muttered in an aside to his young relation. ‘Your uncle the emperor would have had them all dismembered just for looking at him! And as for you, Yaotl, you ought to watch that tongue of yours. It will get you into trouble some day!’
I raised my head enough to see both the king and my former master. The former had resumed his seat. He was not looking at me. He stared sideways at the malevolent old man next to him, and I noted with interest how pale he was, and how the veins stood out on the backs of his hands, as though he were tense or furious.
‘My lord,’ I said to him, ‘I am sorry. I forgot myself, seeing my former master here. It was a shock. I didn’t think he knew where I was.’
‘I will overlook it,’ lord Maize Ear said absently. ‘Although I may say that I had no idea that he knew where you were either!’
Lord Feathered in Black grinned humourlessly. ‘Did you really believe, cousin, that lord Montezuma would let you reign in Tetzcoco without keeping a careful watch on your court? His concern for your welfare would never allow it!’
So our safe, comfortable resting place in the royal retreat of Tetzcotzinco had been an illusion. I groaned at my own naivety, and the king’s. Old Black Feathers had known where we were from his spies almost from the moment we had arrived.
‘Of course,’ the old man went on, ‘we lost touch with Yaotl when he first came here. Hence the unfortunate, er, misunderstanding…’
‘Misunderstanding!’ the young king cried. ‘Your men invaded my kingdom…’
‘Half a dozen hotheads are hardly an invasion, Maize Ear,’ my former master said sharply, ‘and anyway they weren’t my men. I’ve explained that. They came of their own accord.’
That provoked Kindly into breaking his silence. ‘You mean the otomi and his men, don’t you? They came because you told them to look for us in Tetzcoco. You didn’t manage to have Yaotl sacrificed the way you wanted, so you sent…’
‘Not “sent”, remember,’ I said drily. ‘How about “encouraged”?’
‘Yes, that’s a good word. You “encouraged” those madmen to come after us. And look what they did! Look at my daughter’s hands!’
‘Oh, stop babbling!’ said lord Feathered in Black wearily. ‘Yes, all that’s true, but so what? I was angry and disappointed, and I really don’t care for disappointment. Yaotl had let me down, so he had to be punished, naturally.’ He sighed, and his eyes took on an unfocused, faraway look, as though he were seeing, in his imagination, something pleasant, a long way off, impossibly remote, never to be attained. ‘And I’m still angry. Really, Yaotl, I’d still like to see you flayed alive! But there it is.’ He sounded brisk, all of a sudden. ‘We can’t always have what we want, can we?’
‘You can, it seems.’ I had heard my former master’s words but in my anger and bitterness had missed their meaning entirely. ‘So where’s your tame otomi? Did you bring him with you or is he at home in Mexico, roasting children for supper?’
Apart from a loud cough from Maize Ear, that remark was greeted by silence, until eventually lord Feathered in Black murmured, in a voice little more than a whisper: ‘Ah. Yes, the otomi. Now…’
‘And how come you’re here, instead of him? I thought he ran your errands, not the other way around!’
His lordship’s patience finally snapped. ‘Shut your mouth, slave!’ he roared in a voice that must have carried to the far side of the valley. ‘Interrupt me again,’ he added, more quietly, ‘and I’ll have things done to you that will make you curse the gods for ever letting you be born, do you hear? And that goes for you two as well!’
I heard movement from beside me. Glancing sideways, I discovered that Lily was as still as if she had been frozen solid, but her father was fidgeting and shuffling as though trying to put as much distance between me and him as he could.
Lord Feathered in Black went on: ‘Yaotl, if you talked less and thought more it might have occurred to you to wonder why all three of you aren’t already shrieking your lungs out in agony. Don’t imagine I’m not tempted by the prospect! But the fact is that right now I need you alive more than dead. You asked me where the otomi was. Here’s your answer: I don’t know! So what do you think of that?’
It was just beginning to occur to me that the old man had not had us brought up here to kill us, after all, but I was too bewildered now to feel relief. My mind grappled with his last words. ‘You’ve lost him.’
For some reason the old man seemed to find that funny: it set off a throaty, wheezing noise that I had learned to recognise as laughter. ‘You might say that! I… what was the word? I “encouraged” him and his men to come here, as you know…’
‘To kill me and Lily.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ It was typical of him that he could acknowledge this without a trace of embarrassment. ‘Now, I have no idea what happened to him here. No doubt you know more about it than I do! He came back alone, without any of the men who’d been with him. I must say, Yaotl, that if you managed to dispose of a squad of otomies, there must be more to you than I thought!’
‘Um, well, I didn’t exactly…’
‘Of course, I told him to have another go. But then he disappeared. I thought I’d heard the last of him then. I had the impression, when he was telling me – babbling incoherently, to be more precise – about what you’d done to him, that his nerve had gone. But then I started getting… reports.’
‘What sort of reports?’
‘Incidents – violent ones. People attacked in the street – always at night, alone, never with any witnesses. Rumours of a monster, a demon, creeping about in the city after dark. The fishermen are terrified: something’s been raiding their nets, stealing their catches.’ He paused, either for breath or for effect. ‘The rumours are especially strong down by the lake, in the south of the city. And in two parishes in particular – Atlixco and Toltenco.’
‘My parents live in Toltenco!’ I burst out.
‘So they do. And doesn’t your friend Handy have his house in Atlixco?’ The chief minister knew perfectly well where both my family and Handy’s lived.
I had an unpleasant suspicion about what the old man might have in mind.
I had not killed the otomi’s comrades, as it happened; but died, they certainly had, in a violent clash that only their leader had survived. He had been on the point of adding me to the pile of corpses when something had happened to him that, comi
ng on top of everything else, must have driven him insane.
He had thought he had seen a god. Cihuacoatl, that most feared of goddesses, She of the Serpent Skirt, whose voice spelled doom to all who heard it, had called out to him out of the darkness.
The apparition had, as it happened, a perfectly mundane explanation: but for him, a typically superstitious warrior, a man who feared no human enemy but could be transfixed by an owl’s call or the sight of a badger, mundane explanations did not exist. He had fled, gibbering, into the night. I had imagined that might be the last I would see of him.
I abandoned my prone position to rise to my knees. My former master watched me doing it but said nothing.
‘You think he’s given up trying to get to me directly,’ I said slowly. ‘He’s going to get his revenge on my family instead. And Handy…’
‘He has a grudge against him too, I gather, and of course he knows the commoner is a friend of yours.’
‘How are you going to stop him?’ I demanded. ‘You have to catch him before anyone else does. Because if they do, and they start asking questions, it could be a bit awkward, couldn’t it?’
‘Assuming they can take him alive, yes. Some of the tasks I gave him and his men to do were a little, well, unorthodox. And he lacks a certain delicacy of manner, which is very necessary in an otomi warrior, but it can be taken too far.’ He glanced sideways at the king, who sat looking straight ahead, his lips compressed in a grim expression. No doubt he was thinking of the havoc the captain had wreaked in his own realm. ‘If it became known in the wrong quarters that I had been...’ He hesitated as if searching for the right expression.
‘ “Encouraging” him?’ I suggested. ‘I can see the consequences might be a bit awkward. Fatal, even, if “the wrong quarters” happened to be anywhere near Montezuma!’
‘Quite so. But as to how I stop him… Well, now we’re coming to the point. I need your help.’ He leaned forward as he said this, gripping the arms of his chair and talking very slowly and carefully in his eagerness to be understood. ‘Your help,’ he repeated, ‘in exchange for your life.’
I could only stare at him while my mind tried to grapple with what I was hearing. Surely, I thought, this must be some cruel joke. It sounded as though the chief minister were offering me some sort of deal, but the notion of lord Feathered in Black being anything less than ruthlessly, violently single-minded in his quest for vengeance was too surreal to bear. Less surprising to find that the gods had reversed the order of night and day or replaced the mountains with rolling hills.
It was Lily who spoke, while I was still trying to remember how my tongue worked. ‘You want Yaotl to find the captain for you?’ She had levered herself up on her elbows to glare defiantly at the old man on the chair, and she did not take her eyes off him even as I unthinkingly helped her up into a kneeling position. ‘Why? You have enough men of your own you can call on. Why don’t you just send them after him?’
‘Because if he’s hiding where I think he is – at the edge of the lake, among the marshes and the chinampa fields – then it would take an army to flush him out. It’s a labyrinth there, as you well know. And I can’t send an army. I’d have to tell far too many people exactly what they were searching for, and why!’
‘So how do you plan for me to do this, then?’ I asked.
‘Come back to Mexico,’ he replied airily. ‘Go about your normal business and wait for him to find you. A couple of my men could follow you. At a discreet distance, naturally.’
‘Discreet enough so that it takes a conveniently long time for them to get stuck in, you mean? Time enough for him to finish me off and rid you of two problems at once?’
‘Oh, you do make everything so difficult!’ old Black Feathers replied petulantly. ‘I’m sure we can come up with some way of reassuring you, and it would be well worth your while, you know. I can offer you – all of you – a lot more than just your lives. How long were you going to stay here, in Tetzcotzinco? What would it be worth to you, to be able to live here in Mexico openly? Do you really want to be exiles, or be forever skulking in the shadows, afraid someone will recognise you?’
The wheedling tone he had adopted did not impress me; but his words themselves did. I had been living on my wits ever since I had run away from him. I was tired. I wanted to stop running and hiding. And above all, I wanted to go home.
No Aztec would ever feel at home anywhere but in Mexico. In the scant few bundles of years since the war-god had brought the Aztecs to the island in the midst of the lake, shown them an eagle perched on a cactus and told them that it was to be their dwelling-place, my ancestors had turned Mexico’s marsh and rock into the greatest city in the world. They had filled it with houses, temples, palaces and gardens and surrounded it with chinampa fields, ever-fertile plots made of mud dredged from the river bed. Every street, every canal, every wall bore the stamp of my people; every plaza rang with voices chattering, cursing and laughing in the accent I knew. In Mexico I had been hunted like an animal, abused, imprisoned, tortured and threatened with death; but suddenly, now that the chief minister had shown me what my choice was, I realised the thing I dreaded most of all was exile. I had left the city and had felt safe for a while, but I did not want to accept that I would never be back.
I knew, without needing to look at them, that Lily and her father would feel the same way as well. They were merchants, but beneath that, they were Aztecs.
‘How do we know we can trust you?’ I asked cautiously.
I heard that harsh, cackling laugh again. ‘Yaotl, I’m not so naïve as to think for one moment that you’ll ever trust me! But you don’t need to. Remember those rumours I told you about. Just go to the marketplace in Tetzcoco and ask any visitor from Mexico. You’ll soon learn that I’m not making it up. Are you going to abandon your family to a monster?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘This is the deal. If you do as I say then I’ll promise to leave you and Lily and her father alone. It’s not much I ask: just come back to Mexico, let people see you – no skulking in shadows – just until the otomi takes the bait. And we’ll be watching over you, of course.’
‘And if I don’t?’
My former master grinned nastily before turning to his young cousin. ‘And if he doesn’t, Maize Ear?’ he purred.
The young king looked down, apparently taking a sudden interest in his knees that were drawn up together in front of him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘But it seems that you will no longer be my guests.’
‘And where will you go then?’ My former master asked. ‘Even if you’re prepared to leave your family to their fate, Yaotl, do you really want to go wandering among barbarians? Tarascans, Zapotecs, Mayans, scum like that? ’ He grinned once more. ‘Don’t make things any more difficult for yourself than they have to be. I want you alive, at least for the time being. I may have further uses for you!’
2
It was early for breakfast, but the king insisted we eat, ordering his attendants to fetch tortillas for us from the palace kitchen. The bread was delicious, still warm from the griddle, but apart from lord Feathered in Black, who devoured his ravenously, talking all the time, nobody appeared to have much appetite. Kindly, Lily and I nibbled politely and in silence until the chief minister’s flow of palace gossip and his meal were both finished.
My former master excused himself abruptly after that, remarking that wealth and power were no protection against the afflictions of old age. Two of his bearers were summoned from the palace to help him out of his seat. As soon as he was gone, the king stood up.
‘I think,’ he said ruefully, ‘that means we are all dismissed! Come, I’ll walk with you to the end of the causeway.’
We walked in silence for a few moments, while the waters of the lake lapped gently around us. There was too much anger and resentment for the peace to remain undisturbed for long, however.
‘That – that bastard!’ I burst out. A tiny stone lay on the carefully swept path in front of me. I aimed a kick
at it with my bare foot, sending it into the water to vanish without so much as a ‘plop’. ‘He has me brought up here, convinced I’m going to have my heart cut out, but oh no, even that’s not good enough for old Black Feathers. It’s too much trouble for him, I suppose, so I’ve got to arrange my own death by going one-on-one with the otomi. I’m even expected to find the bugger myself, because our ever-vigilant chief minister’s managed to lose him!’
Kindly peered curiously at me through his filmy eyes. ‘What are you complaining about? We’re in this too, and we didn’t do anything to offend the old man in the first place. Besides, you’re still alive, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t care!’ I cried irrationally. ‘And I won’t do it. I’m not going back to Mexico to face that madman. I’d rather lie in wait for old Black Feathers and throw him and his litter down the hillside.’
‘I’d like to see you try it!’ Kindly laughed. ‘I wonder what odds I could get on your chances?’
Turning to the king, Lily said sharply: ‘You promised to protect us!’
‘Not forever,’ the king said. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not free to do what I want, any more than you are. Lord Feathered in Black’s spies told him where you were almost the moment you arrived here. This hill must be crawling with them, and I didn’t even know! How long would I last if I defied him now?’
‘Your father wouldn’t have let old Black Feathers push him around!’
‘Things were different in his day,’ Maize Ear replied bitterly. ‘My father didn’t have a brother with his eyes on the throne and half the kingdom loyal to him, and the Aztecs didn’t rule most of the world then either.’ Then he smiled grimly. ‘No good will come of it, though. For all their chief minister and my uncle the emperor can do, the Aztecs have angered too many people. One day their enemies will combine against them, and Mexico won’t be a good place to be then. You might want to think about going to live among barbarians after all!’
