[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  ‘I like that,’ I retorted, ‘coming from someone who wouldn’t recognise a joke if you’d just been introduced!’

  ‘I wouldn’t need an introduction, brother,’ he responded coolly. ‘I’ve known you since you were born!’

  ‘That’s enough!’ my mother snapped. ‘Yaotl didn’t come here just so that you could insult him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lion replied meekly. Our mother was probably the only human being he had ever been afraid of. ‘Though to be fair, he does make it very easy.’

  I sighed. My brother relished his rare jokes. He was capable of terrifying rages, but I was starting to think I liked him better angry than when he was in a good mood.

  I looked around me.

  Apart from Lion, who was still enjoying his private joke at my expense, everyone appeared to be scowling.

  I sighed. ‘Why isn’t anyone here ever pleased to see me?’

  The last time I had come here my arrival had precipitated a family quarrel, with my father trying physically to throw me out of the house, and this occasion looked like going the same way. The old man lurched forward. ‘Pleased to see you?’ he snapped. ‘After the trouble you’ve caused? Last time you were here I told you I didn’t want to see you ever again, and that was before all this started! Ollin, you can put him back in the canal where you found him!’

  My brother’s bodyguards looked taken aback at that. ‘But our chief said Yaotl was his brother,’ Ollin managed at last. ‘You can’t really mean that!’

  ‘Do you want to bet?’ I muttered.

  Lion had composed himself by now. ‘He doesn’t mean it,’ he said, with a glance at my father. The old man grunted and looked away: head of the family though he was, he would let his distinguished favourite son have his own way.

  My brother turned back towards me. ‘Now, Yaotl…’

  I interrupted him. ‘Just a moment.’ I looked nervously at my father, afraid the mere sound of my voice would send him flying into a further rage. ‘You said “before all this started.” All what?’

  The old man did not deign to answer me. It was my mother who spoke. ‘Look around you, Yaotl,’ she said quietly. ‘What do you see?’

  I did as she told me, frowning in puzzlement. ‘I don’t know… It doesn’t look any different… About time that wall was whitewashed… I give up!’

  My father growled. Jade said hastily: ‘It’s us she means, you fool! Look at us!’

  ‘When’s the last time you saw all your brothers and sisters here, together?’ snapped my mother impatiently. ‘Lion included? And his bodyguards as well?’

  ‘It’s like being under siege in my own house,’ my father rumbled. ‘And all on account of you!’

  Lion said: ‘I told them to gather under one roof: it makes them easier to look after. I wanted them to come to my palace as it’s more defensible, but father wouldn’t leave.’

  ‘My father built this house in the first Montezuma’s time!’ the old man cried. ‘I’m not quitting it now, not for anyone!’

  ‘You mean you knew about the otomi?’ I shouted. ‘Then I needn’t have come here at all!’

  There was a moment’s silence before Lion and Jade both spoke at once.

  My brother leaned towards me. ‘You mentioned the otomi before. What do you know about him?’

  Jade said: ‘Why did you come here, Yaotl?’

  ‘I wanted to warn you about him,’ I told her. ‘My former master – lord Feathered in Black – told me he thought he was haunting the marshes near here, and at Atlixco, and he thought he might come here.’ I gave them a brief account of my meeting with the chief minister outside Maize Ear’s palace. ‘I was trying to find out for sure, and I wanted to make sure you were all safe. I suppose I’ve wasted my time. You obviously know more than I do!’

  ‘Well, I should hope I know what’s going on in the marshes,’ Lion replied dryly. ‘I’d not be much use as Guardian of the Waterfront if I didn’t!’

  ‘So it’s true, then? The captain is out there?’ I felt strangely let down. I could not have said what sort of reception I would have anticipated from my family. I would have been surprised if it had been especially cordial, but the last thing I would have expected was to be told that everything I had come to warn them about was already provided for and that my mission was unnecessary.

  ‘It sounds that way,’ my brother said. ‘I don’t know for sure what’s out there, mind you, but whoever or whatever it is, it’s certainly got old Black Feathers worried. He even took the trouble to warn me about it, and normally he and I aren’t on speaking terms.’ He frowned. ‘The only thing that puzzles me is why he took the trouble to warn you as well. What did he expect you to do?’

  ‘I’m bait,’ I said bleakly. I explained that part of the chief minister’s plan.

  ‘He’s got men shadowing you?’ Lion asked incredulously.

  Ollin spoke up. ‘We didn’t see anyone else, Chief. I think we’d have noticed.’

  ‘He was probably lying,’ I said. ‘He claimed I was more use to him alive, but he didn’t say how much more.’

  ‘That would be a first, either way,’ my father mumbled. ‘You’ve never been much use to anyone before!’

  My mother scowled at him and he fell silent.

  Lion said: ‘I should think your former master was lying, Yaotl. He lured you here in the hope that the otomi would kill you. Then he probably expects me to avenge you and get rid of that maniac for him in the process. Which I suppose I’d have to do,’ he added, in the weary tone of a man acknowledging the need to do some unpleasant job he has been putting off too long, such as mending his roof in the wet season.

  ‘You’d better stay here,’ my mother suggested. ‘You’d be safe.’

  ‘Not from me, he wouldn’t,’ my father snapped rebelliously.

  She glared at him again. ‘He may be a failure and a slave and have brought disgrace upon our house, but he’s still our son!’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said sullenly. ‘I can’t stay, though. I’m needed elsewhere.’ I told them about Star and the promise I had made to her husband, to return to help him bury her. There was a moment of shocked silence.

  ‘The poor woman,’ Jade said softly.

  My mother hung her head and murmured: ‘It’s true what the midwives say: “Certainly it is our mortality, we who are women, for it is our battle, for at this time our mother, Cihuacoatl, Quilaztli, exacteth the tribute of death.”’ She looked up. ‘You’d better go and see what you can do for her family, then.’

  Sparrowhawk, my youngest brother, had had nothing to say up to now, and when he did finally open his mouth I wished he had kept it shut.

  ‘The chief minister laid a trap for Yaotl,’ he said as solemnly as a poet revealing the deepest mysteries of life and death. ‘That’s what all this amounts to, isn’t it? But if it’s just him they’re after, why does it matter to the rest of us?’

  ‘If you knew the kind of people we’re talking about, you wouldn’t ask such bloody silly questions,’ I snarled at him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Because the threat to you lot is the one thing old Black Feathers certainly wasn’t lying about. The otomi would have as much hesitation before slaughtering you all and burning this place to the ground as you would before cracking a flea between your grubby nails. And if I do happen to fall into his hands, how much are you willing to bet that he’d stop then?’

  Sparrowhawk blinked.

  ‘These two lads,’ I continued, indicating Ollin and his partner, ‘and the rest of you are all very well, but if the captain ever does come here… Lion will tell you what he’s capable of!’

  ‘If he’s an otomi,’ my elder brother said darkly, ‘then he’s capable of anything.’

  Anxious looks and a nervous shuffling of feet greeted his remark. It was my mother who replied. ‘So what do you intend to do about him, Yaotl?’

  ‘Do? What do you mean? I’ve done it, haven’t I, warning you…’

  ‘You’ve
told us you think he may come here to avenge himself for what you did to him,’ she said crisply. ‘We knew that already, thank you. Now you’ve also told us that there’s nothing your brother’s bodyguards and your brothers can do. So it’s up to you, now, isn’t it? Whatever this threat is, you’d better deal with it.’

  I gasped, astonished at her reasoning, but my mother did not wait for me to reply. ‘You made this mess, Yaotl,’ she told me, as though I had just upset a bowl of maize gruel over her newly swept courtyard, ‘and now you’ll have to clear it up.’

  ‘But I can’t!’ I cried. ‘What do you suggest I do? Take on that madman with my bare hands?’

  ‘I could lend you a spear,’ Sparrowhawk volunteered. My sister told him to shut up.

  My mother made an exasperated noise, somewhere between a sigh and a groan. ‘Yaotl, don’t pretend to be stupid,’ she said to me. ‘You can’t do that, obviously. But you can try to find him before he finds you, can’t you?’

  ‘I can help,’ Lion offered. ‘Lend you a couple of men. Can’t spare any more – we’re at full stretch trying to catch this lunatic as it is.’

  ‘Men like these two?’ I scoffed, looking at Ollin and his comrade. ‘Forget it, brother. They’d just get in the way.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ He sounded hurt at my rebuff, and the tone of his next words was scornful. ‘After all, it’s not as if you’ll need help. You’ll be on familiar territory, after all – didn’t you used to gather stone dung for a living?’

  I did not reply to that. It was true, though. Stone dung was what we called scum scraped from the surface of the lakes. It was formed into cakes and sold in the marketplace as food. For a while after I had been slung out of the priesthood I had made ends meet by collecting it. It was revolting work which had given me a lifelong aversion to eating the stuff.

  ‘You can at least find out what the otomi wants,’ my mother said. ‘Maybe you can reason with him.’

  ‘I know what he wants! Me! Preferably in bite-sized pieces, in a stew topped with beans and maize! And as for reasoning with him…’

  ‘Just keep talking,’ my father murmured. ‘You can bore him to death!’

  8

  The afternoon was moving towards evening when I left my parents’ house. The air was becoming chilly. My skin was still damp from my adventure in the canal, although my mother had grudgingly lent me a dry cloak.

  Ollin and his comrade escorted me at first; but their presence was not enough to save me from an ambush.

  I ought to have expected to find someone lying in wait for me, but I was too preoccupied. It was hard to come away from a meeting with my family without feeling that I was in some way a terrible disappointment to them all: Yaotl the failed priest, the wastrel, the slave. And what my brother and my mother had said disturbed me. I had never allowed myself to believe lord Feathered in Black when he said that he wanted me alive, but that had not stopped me from wishing it were true, and that the men he supposedly had following me were real and would protect me. I had been naïve, I realised, wanting to accept what he had told me because it made it easier to do what Lily, her father and I really wanted to do, which was to go home. But my former master had had me put in a cage once, with every intention of having me gruesomely killed. Why should he have changed his mind now?

  My mother had made it clear that I must confront the otomi, for my own sake as well as my family’s, unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. But I would have to face him alone, it seemed, and where would I begin to look?

  My thoughts turned naturally to the woman who might be the only person in the world who cared whether I lived or died. I surprised myself, then, by how much I missed Lily, although I had been away from her side less than a day and still intended to return before the next morning. I just wanted to hear her voice again. To be reminded of what we two had endured together and how we had come through it might have made the otomi seem less fearsome, my parents’ lack of regard for me less hurtful and Handy’s despair at the loss of his wife less overwhelming.

  I was so caught up with thoughts such as these that I did not see who was waiting for me in the street until it was too late to get away. The two warriors with me missed him as well, because they were looking straight ahead rather than down.

  ‘Hello, Yaotl.’

  The sound of my own name, spoken by someone immediately behind me, was as shocking as a blow between the shoulders. I stopped, tensing, not turning around because for a moment I was too startled to move.

  The two warriors recovered before I did. They both whirled, swords at the ready, but relaxed visibly at the sight of the speaker.

  ‘Hello, youngster,’ Ollin said. He took a step forward, with his sword now dangling loosely in his hand. ‘What are you doing there? What’s your name?’

  ‘I came to meet Yaotl.’

  The speaker was one of Handy’s sons: the youngster, Obsidian Snake, whom I had seen at his father’s house that morning. The pang of fear I had felt on hearing my name called was replaced by anger, but that soon subsided into a kind of sullen resignation.

  ‘Your father send you to check up on me, did he?’

  He gave me a bland look. ‘He just wanted to be sure you were all right.’ His expression changed to a puzzled frown. ‘Are you all right? There’s a funny smell – did you fall in a canal?’

  ‘It was an accident,’ I said shortly.

  Ollin looked at each of us in turn. ‘Do you need us, then?’ My brother had told him and his comrade to make sure nobody sprang at me out of the shadows on my way out of the house, but they were plainly uncertain what to make of the boy.

  ‘No,’ I sighed. ‘I’ll be fine. After all, it looks like I’ll have an escort from here onwards!’

  I walked briskly in the direction of Handy’s house in Atlixco. The boy scampered after me on his young legs. As he caught up with me I muttered at him out of the corner of my mouth: ‘Handy didn’t need to send you after me. Did he think I wouldn’t come back for the funeral? I said I would.’

  ‘He wanted to make sure you did,’ Snake replied, with more candour than an adult would have shown. ‘Besides, I wanted to come.’

  I watched him curiously. ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought you could use me. Father said you had enemies in the city. And I’m a good lookout.’ Perhaps it was a skill he had practised while his brothers were stealing fruit or tortillas from market stalls. ‘Anyway, I had to get out of the house. It’s no fun at home at the moment – when we came back from my cousins’, my aunt and my grandparents weren’t even talking to each other and my little brothers and sisters were all making an exhibition of themselves, weeping and tearing their hair out. It was driving me crazy!’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘Just staring at the walls, the same as when you left him. He’s got my oldest brother with him – not that he’ll be much use. They can be miserable together.’

  I looked sharply at him, wondering now at his easy, relaxed gait, and the casual note, the sneer almost, in his speech.

  Snake’s hair had been shaved close – it was the custom, and it helped control head-lice – but the single tuft that would shortly mark him as old enough for the House of Youth was beginning to sprout at the back of his head. It was not much more than a fuzz around the nape of his neck but it would be enough to distinguish him from his younger brothers and cousins and it probably made him feel grown up. Perhaps that explained it, I thought, the lad already practising the arrogance of Aztec manhood, the confident air of warriors whose mere reputation was usually enough to put their enemies to flight.

  Perhaps.

  ‘And what about you?’ I asked softly.

  I had met Snake while his mother was alive, and liked him: he was a shrewd, quick-witted lad, small for his age, more of a talker than a fighter, who had reminded me a little of myself as a youngster. Perhaps that resemblance was why his words troubled me.

  ‘What about me?’

 
I stopped walking. He carried on for a couple of paces before looking around.

  ‘Snake,’ I said deliberately, ‘I’m sorry about your mother.’

  ‘My mother was a warrior,’ he informed me coldly, ‘and I’ll be one too, soon.’

  ‘Even warriors are allowed to mourn their dead comrades.’

  ‘A warrior has to grow a heart of stone,’ he said stubbornly.

  ‘It’s not the truth, though. It’s what they say, I know. It’s what you’re supposed to show to the other warriors – especially your enemies. But no man really feels that way, or he’d be mad. Your father doesn’t.’ I hesitated before adding: ‘I was sent to the House of Tears when I was not much younger than you.’

  He looked startled. ‘You were a priest?’

  ‘I know – astonishing, isn’t it? But when I went I was told I must not weep: I must not keep looking back at my home and my parents. It wasn’t my home any more.’ I smiled ruefully at the memory. ‘My eyes were like waterfalls! And so were all the other youngsters’. You could have held the lot of us over a pile of burning chillies and no-one would have noticed the difference.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ The boy searched my face as if looking for some meaning there.

  ‘I’m just saying that when you’re told you have to have a heart of stone, that’s not really how anyone is, not if they know what’s good for them. Or if they are like that, it’s because stone is strong, not brittle like obsidian. If you go on pretending things that matter don’t – if you keep telling yourself you don’t miss your mother – then sooner or later you’ll snap like a used razor.’

  The boy blinked. He did not look convinced. I hoped he was smart enough to remember what he was told and sooner or later learn from it.

  But as we walked on it occurred to me that there must be some who never had grasped the difference between obsidian and stone, the ones who had never understood that to be hard and sharp was not the same as to be strong. Whatever I might say, there was a place for men like that in the ranks of our armies. They could be found among the berserkers, the warriors who fought with no pity and who valued their own lives only a little more than they minded anybody else’s, which was scarcely at all. Such men might be mad, but so long as their madness was turned on the enemy, that was all right.