[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  From behind me there came a thin piping call, followed by a sound of desperate fluttering.

  I turned to find that Worthy had made the sacrifice. The quail he had beheaded still flapped feebly on the stone table behind the brazier. As we watched, its thrashing motions became more feeble and the spurt of blood from its gaping neck slowed to a trickle.

  As I silently handed back the censer, Worthy said: ‘Which way would you say it was going?’

  I looked at the smear of blood the headless bird had made in its last struggle. ‘West, I think.’

  ‘Really? Looks like it may have been north.’ I shivered, recalling that north was the most ill-omened direction, a sure portent of death. Worthy seemed to reflect for a moment before adding: ‘But we’ll give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and call it west, shall we?’

  I agreed eagerly, but as he picked up the pathetic little body I could not help wondering whether he was right. And if he was not, then whose death had the bird been hinting at?

  Worthy said: ‘Now, what was it you wanted to ask me?’

  I told him about my recent adventures and the mission that had brought me back to Tenochtitlan. ‘I need to find out what’s really happening down there, and warn my family as quickly as possible.’

  Worthy stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘There have been some funny goings-on around here, now that you mention it. You don’t exactly have the whole city spread out before you here, like they do in the great temples in the Heart of the World and Tlatelolco, but I can keep an eye on the neighbouring streets. I do seem to have seen more armed men than usual skulking about.’

  ‘Did they include a huge man with one eye?’ I demanded anxiously.

  ‘It’s hard to count people’s eyes from up here. Huge man, eh?’ He stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘Well, come to think of it I may have seen one or two huge men about lately…’

  ‘So he has been here.’ I gulped nervously. ‘I’m going to have to go down there. I just wish I could be sure of being able to reach the house without being seen.’

  ‘Difficult one. You won’t be doing it by way of the front gateway, that’s for sure.’ He paused, before a sly smile began to spread across his face, opening little cracks in the pitch that coated it. ‘Now, I wonder…’

  6

  I looked at the object the priest had given me with mounting concern.

  ‘I really don’t think this is going to work.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ he said impatiently.

  ‘For one thing, I’m not a great swimmer.’

  ‘That’s the beauty of it. You don’t need to be.’

  Worthy’s scheme was a simple one, in principle. I was to wade along the canal at the rear of my parents’ house, going on my knees so as to keep my head beneath the surface – the water would only come up to my chest otherwise – and breathing through the long hollow drinking tube the old man had put into my hands.

  ‘It’s foolproof. You’ll be invisible. You can sneak right up to the rear entrance and be inside the courtyard before anyone even knows you’re there.’ Worthy sounded pleased with himself as he enthused about his scheme. ‘You know how, at the sacred wine sellers’ festival, the old people sit around big bowls sucking the stuff through these straws…’

  ‘They’re for drinking through,’ I objected. ‘Drinking’s not the same as breathing, is it?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. If the sacred wine doesn’t leak out through the tube then water won’t leak in, will it? It stands to reason.’

  ‘Well, maybe, but if I’m underwater how can I see where I’m going?’

  ‘It’s a narrow canal, Yaotl. You get in the water a reasonable distance from where your parents live and just keep going forward. You can’t get lost.’

  ‘It’ll be cold!’

  The old priest looked at me scornfully. ‘So what? Didn’t you get used to being cold when you were a priest?’

  It was true that some of the rituals I had had to undergo had included baths in the icy waters of the lake at midnight, and this ought not to be as bad as that, since it was early afternoon, with the sun still high in the sky. On the other hand I had been much younger then, and I had not had a chance to get used to the rich food, chocolate and lazy routine of lord Maize Ear’s palace.

  ‘Have you ever tried anything like this yourself?’ I asked suspiciously.

  Worthy laughed. ‘Me? You must be joking!’

  I had been right about its being cold. The plunge into the still, dark water of the canal was shocking. I shot out into the air again, gasping and plucking long streamers of something wet and slimy from my face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Worthy innocently.

  ‘It’s bloody freezing and it smells!’

  ‘What do you expect? I don’t know, young people…’

  ‘Oh, don’t start that again. If I were young it might be different. I’m getting too old for this sort of insanity. Where’s that tube?’

  ‘Tube? Don’t tell me you dropped it in the canal?’ Then, hearing my groan of despair, the priest added with a chuckle: ‘Only joking. Here it is… Good luck! And don’t forget to keep the top of it above the surface!’

  I accepted the long, hollow reed from him. After looking at it doubtfully for a moment, I took several deep breaths, stuck it in my mouth and kneeled down.

  It did not take long to realize that wading along the canal breathing through a pipe was not going to be the simple proposition that Worthy had supposed. First, there was the sheer terror I felt when my eyes dropped below the surface. I was convinced that my first breath would fill my lungs with the evil, brackish stuff. I held my breath for as long as I could, and then, when I felt as if I would burst, I found myself taking rapid, shallow gasps like a dying fish. And the moment the water closed over my head, I was plunged into darkness. I wanted to stretch out my hands in the hope of at least touching one side of the canal, just to remind myself where it was, but I had them clamped around the tube, holding it rigidly upright for fear that its top might dip below the surface of the water. I was completely disorientated. It did not help that in order to hold the tube in place I had to keep my neck craned at a ridiculous angle so that I was looking up all the time.

  Finally, water kept leaking into my mouth, and it tasted foul. I began to worry about whether I would reach my parents’ house without poisoning myself.

  I do not know how long I remained where I was, fighting the temptation to scramble out of the water and give up the whole reckless scheme. Eventually I decided I had better just get it over with.

  No sooner had I begun to creep forward, scraping my knees painfully across the stones and rubbish on the canal’s bottom, than I discovered the last, fatal flaw in Worthy’s plan.

  He had been right, up to a point, in saying that I could not get lost. Although it was terrifying and confusing it was impossible to wander off my route once I had picked my direction: I only had to follow the canal. I knew exactly which way I was headed. However in a matter of moments I realised that I had no way to tell how far I had gone.

  I had estimated the distance I had to travel to be a couple of hundred paces, but a pace on foot was a different matter from my shuffling crawl, and anyway I soon lost count of how many times I had forced my knees to bend and stretch. I may have been invisible to anyone watching the house but this was of little use since I could see nothing at all.

  I began to feel as though I had been crawling through mud and filth and icy, brackish water for ever. When I dared to break the surface to look around me, though, I found that I had gone maybe a dozen paces. If my mouth had not been filled by one end of a reed pipe I would have groaned aloud. I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. In order to restrain myself from trying to look around me again before I had made any real progress, I shut my eyes and tried to remember some of the old hymns I had been forced to learn in the House of Tears. After a while the metre of the words and the rhythm of my breathing became indistinguishable. I started to lose track o
f time, along with all sensation in my arms and legs as the numbing cold seeped through them. I went on reciting the hymn but it became more and more mechanical. Part of my mind turned the words over again and again, and part of it made my legs move and my chest rise and fall, and the rest of me seemed to have gone to sleep.

  Something tugged sharply on my breathing tube.

  My eyes snapped open, peering uselessly into the darkness. My hands clutched at the hollow reed. But it had been a long time since I had felt anything through my fingertips and the first I knew that the reed had been snatched from my grasp was when water flooded into my mouth, down my throat and into my lungs.

  I choked, gasped and retched. I could not think of what to do and no instinct helped me. I could not jump out of the water because I did not know which way was up. I flapped about as wildly as the quail Worthy had killed earlier on, with my hands snapping at empty air as they searched vainly for the breathing tube.

  I might have drowned there, kneeling in a stretch of shallow water within shouting distance of the house I had grown up in, if a pair of strong arms had not locked themselves firmly around me and hauled me upright.

  At first all I could do was flop forward against them, coughing and spluttering while my feet slithered under me, scrabbling for a purchase. Then, as I brought my painful gasps for breath under control, it occurred to me to wonder who had grabbed me. I tried to turn, but was held fast.

  A voice I did not recognise rasped in my ear: ‘Hold still, you!’ From a little further away a second voice called out: ‘What have you caught, then, Ollin? It’s not an ahuitzotl, is it?’

  ‘No such luck. If this is a water-monster then I’m a Huaxtec. It’s just some clown crawling along the canal. I told you that tube sticking up there looked all wrong.’

  I made another effort to twist round. In response the man holding me released one of his arms so that he could hit me, striking the side of my head so hard that my teeth were knocked together. ‘I told you not to move!’ he snapped.

  ‘Who are you?’ I blurted out hoarsely.

  I was swung around to face the man who stood on the bank, and there was no mistaking the hair piled up on his head in a veteran soldier’s haircut, or the glittering blades of the sword he was brandishing.

  I had failed, I thought bleakly. The man who had caught me was a warrior. He was not the captain but it was not difficult to guess whose orders he was acting on.

  The man’s voice rasped in my ear. ‘See that man there? I’m going to put you on the bank in front of him now, and if you try anything clever he’ll cut your legs off at the knees and we’ll make you crawl back the way you came, without your breathing-tube. Understand?’ Without waiting for an answer Ollin lifted me up and tossed me bodily out of the water.

  I threw up my hands in an effort to control my fall but I was an instant too late. I flopped helplessly against the wooden pilings at the edge of the canal, catching one of them against my midriff and sending a foamy mixture of air and water spraying from my nose and mouth.

  I gasped and flopped over sideways, doubled up in agony, while the warrior on the bank seized one of my arms just below the shoulder and pulled me fully onto dry land.

  ‘So, what’s your game, then?’ he hissed.

  Something tickled my ear. I lay quite still, realising that what I felt was the sharpest edge in the world: the blade of an obsidian-studded sword. I began trembling uncontrollably, either from the cold or from fear, and the ticking became a sharp pain.

  ‘Careful,’ breathed the man holding the sword. ‘Nearly took your ear off.’

  ‘Let me get up,’ I croaked.

  ‘Not till you tell us what you thought you were doing.’ The chill was worse out of the water than it had been in the canal. The pain was like darts in my numb flesh and my right leg was twitching in the first stage of cramp. I could hear myself whimpering, while tears started uncontrollably from my eyes.

  ‘I was just going home,’ I sobbed.

  ‘You were what?’ the man in front of me said incredulously.

  Ollin said: ‘Down the middle of a canal? I don’t think so. Who sent you?’

  ‘Better search him for weapons,’ his comrade advised.

  Ollin scrambled out of the water and began tugging at my sodden breechcloth, looking presumably for a concealed knife. ‘What are you, a spy or a hired killer?’

  ‘He doesn’t look like an otomi to me,’ the other warrior said. ‘No muscles on him at all.’

  It began to dawn on me what was happening. These men had been expecting some associate of the captain’s or maybe even the dreaded otomi himself – which, of course, meant that whoever had stationed them here, it could not be my enemy. I opened my mouth to cry out my name and tell them that they had got it all wrong, but just at that moment the cramp struck my right leg with full force and I fell to my knees, squealing in agony.

  Ollin casually stuffed a rag in my mouth to shut me up and continued rummaging inside my breechcloth for weapons. As I struggled at his feet he shoved me the rest of the way to the ground with a heel between my shoulder blades.

  ‘No knife or anything.’

  ‘Tie him up,’ Ollin ordered his comrade, ‘and leave that gag in his mouth. We’ll take him to the house and see what they make of him there.’

  7

  Before I could move or utter a protest the two warriors had trussed me up like a deer, lashing my legs to my arms with a coarse rope that they must have brought with them for the purpose. They carried me between them, bouncing me carelessly up and down as they strode briskly alongside the canal. At first I tried shouting through the gag, but I soon gave up. I knew I would be able to speak soon enough. I was face-down and could not see where I was going, but I had guessed by now that they were not going to take me very far.

  They turned away from the canal path and into what looked like a courtyard, judging by the clean swept earth floor just beneath my nose. When they dropped me on the ground, I managed to turn my head to one side just quickly enough to avoid anything worse than a bruised cheek.

  ‘We’ve got one!’ crowed Ollin, his words echoing off the walls around us.

  A male voice replied: ‘Well done, Ollin. Who is he?’

  ‘Don’t know that yet,’ the warrior admitted. ‘We thought we’d bring him back here to question him.’

  ‘Good idea! We’ll get a fire going and throw some chillies on it. We can smoke the truth out of him.’

  As I grunted in impotent protest I heard another voice, this one a woman’s, saying: ‘Don’t you think we’d better take his gag off first? No point asking him anything if he can’t speak.’

  I knew the speaker. She was my elder sister, Quetzalchalchihuitl or ‘Precious Jade’. The man she had spoken to was none other than my eldest brother: Lion, the Guardian of the Waterfront, my family’s pride and joy.

  Ollin and his comrade had carried me to my parents’ house. The moment I recognised Lion’s voice I knew who the two warriors were: members of his bodyguard. He must have left them on sentry duty outside the house.

  My elder brother’s plan would have involved building a fire in the courtyard, throwing some dried chillies on it, and then holding me over it until the choking and the pain in my nose, mouth and eyes had loosened my tongue. Fortunately, my gag was off and I was able to speak before the fire was hot enough.

  ‘Yaotl?’ my sister said, as soon as I had finished shouting. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘My brother,’ Lion said dully, as though his disappointment were too much to bear, before turning to his men. ‘I don’t believe it. You bagged my brother!’

  I looked at Ollin and his colleague balefully while I tried to massage some feeling back into my legs and other members of my family emerged, one by one, through the doorways that surrounded the courtyard. All my relations seemed to have gathered there, as though for a festival. My mother and father stood together in one corner of the courtyard. The old woman’s faded blouse and skirt hung loosely fr
om her frail-looking frame, while her husband stood upright, wrapped in the ancient orange two-captive warrior’s cloak that was still his proudest possession. Neither of them was quite what he or she seemed. My mother was vigorous enough to take her own wares to the market every day. My father was no weakling, but his left knee had been destroyed by a javelin, and being too stubborn to use a stick, he had taught himself over the years to stand without one. His infirmity was obvious the moment he took a step.

  Also watching me were my brothers and sisters. I saw Tlacazolli, the second of my three brothers, a large, slow man a year or two younger than I, whose name meant ‘Glutton’. Near him were Copactecolotl, ‘Sparrowhawk’, a youngster proudly sporting the single lopsided lock of hair that meant he had taken one captive in war, and my younger sister Neuctli, or ‘Honey.’ Jade’s husband, Camaxtli, was there too, next to my elder sister; they were flanked by their grown up sons. Camaxtli and a couple of my nephews carried obsidian-tipped spears.

  ‘I don’t understand why you keep these two idiots around,’ I muttered, turning to my elder brother and gesturing towards Ollin and his comrade. ‘They’d be more useful as sacrifices!’

  ‘That’s not fair!’ the warrior appealed to his chief. ‘We saw him creeping along that canal. How were we to know he wasn’t up to no good?’

  ‘You weren’t,’ Lion replied shortly. ‘Yaotl, what in all the thirteen heavens possessed you to try sneaking up on us like that? And where did you get that stupid idea of trying to breathe through a straw?’

  ‘Worthy suggested it. He said he’d seen the otomi and thought it would help me sneak past him… What’s so bloody funny?’

  My brother’s laugh sounded like a stone shattering in a fire. ‘You believed him! You fool, I was talking to him only this morning. He hasn’t seen a thing – hardly surprising, considering how old he is. I doubt he can see his hands in front of his face! It’s good to know he hasn’t lost his sense of humour!’