by Simon Levack
I left the fisherman squatting disconsolately on a bank at the water’s edge, picking at the severed strands of net and trying to splice them while his children ate his lunch. The only other thing I learned from them was that so far as anyone knew, whatever man or monster was prowling among the rushes had so far only ever struck at night.
I assumed a fish-thief, whether human or not, would be driven by hunger: a motive I could easily understand. But what reason could he or it have for sinking a canoe? That looked like an act of pure spitefulness – unless, of course, the fisherman had been right, and the intention was to scare people away from the neighbourhood.
‘Why would anyone do such a thing?’ I asked myself, but the answer was, unfortunately, all too obvious. Whoever or whatever lay behind the reports the chief minister and my elder brother had told me about was hiding out in the marshes, and the fewer people there were about, the less chance he had of being found. So this was no petty thief or vandal. There was a purpose behind what had happened: a purpose which evidently involved me. I, like the fisherman, was afraid of something that had appeared at night and had not seemed human, and it was hard to believe this was a coincidence. ‘Why me?’ The last thought came with a rush of self-pity. ‘As if I haven’t got enough to worry about!’
I needed to decide where to go next. I thought of returning straight away to Lily in Tlatelolco, but there was somewhere else I had to go first. I had to find out what had happened at the shrine and to Handy and the others guarding the grave. Once I was out of the marshes and able to think of something other than my own immediate peril, I began to be afraid that whatever had attacked us all might have finished them off before coming after me. ‘Maybe there wasn’t time for that, though,’ I told myself hopefully. ‘If it was really me he was after, maybe he left them alone.’
I returned to the centre of Handy’s parish in the middle of the morning, to find it busier than I would have expected, its paths and canals choked by a chattering throng, nearly all commoners to judge by their haircuts and plain dress. I fell in with them readily enough, as they seemed to be heading in the same direction as I was – towards the plaza in front of the temple where we had buried Star, and where the parish’s marketplace would be – but it surprised me to find them here now, with sun so high. Most traders and their customers would have arrived before dawn, and there was something in the way some of them walked, the men taking long, rapid steps and women tugging impatiently at the children’s hands, that told me whatever they were after, it was not just cheap cloth or dried chillies.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked an old man hobbling arthritically in the crowd’s wake. ‘Where’s everyone going?’
He glowered at me. He probably thought he needed all his breath for walking and resented having to waste any of it on some tramp who looked and smelled as though he had been sleeping rough for a month. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ he wheezed.
‘No, I only just got here.’
‘Then it’s probably none of your business.’ He kept his eyes on the people in front. ‘But a man had to bury his wife here last night, and there was a lot of running about and shouting at daybreak, so work it out for yourself.’
I stopped, staring at him in astonishment. ‘What happened?’ I demanded. ‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘If I knew that I wouldn’t have to go and look now, would I?’ he responded irritably. ‘But what I heard was, the body was stolen and two of the men guarding it have disappeared.’
‘Two of them?’ I yelped, but I was too late: he was still going and I was speaking to the back of his neck.
But it was obvious enough what had happened. I shut my eyes then, as if that could keep at bay the horror I felt creeping towards me. For all our and the women’s care, someone had interfered with the body. And assuming I was one of the two who had supposedly vanished, then it seemed as though my attacker might have claimed another as his victim.
I hesitated at the corner of the plaza, peering furtively around the edge of a wall while I tried to make sense of what I saw.
If the old man’s words had not given me reason to suspect as much before I got there, it would not have taken me long to realise that something was wrong.
The small square in front of me was full of reed mats spread with merchandise, but largely empty of people. They were all packed into the space in front of the temple, where we had buried the woman. Those on the edge of the throng were milling about and jostling each other as if trying to press forward into the middle, perhaps in order to get a better view of something.
Although I looked for Handy, Flower Gatherer and Spotted Eagle, it would have been hard to recognise any one person among the crowd. The only man who did stand out was of a kind I had learned over the years to avoid. He was a tall, thickset, rugged-looking man, whose square jaw was fringed by a thin dark wisp of beard. His long orange-and black-striped cloak emphasised the message of the hair piled up on top of his head: a veteran, a four-captive warrior. He carried no cudgel or other weapon and had no need of them: his reputation and status, advertised by the clothes and other marks of distinction he had earned on the battlefield, were enough to command respect anywhere in Mexico. He was trying to get men and women to move aside and make some space for someone in their midst, and he clearly expected them to do what they were told.
‘Wonderful,’ I thought. ‘I’m already hiding from the captain, not to mention some monster from the marshes, and now I have to run into the parish police.’ The man’s dress, which was that of a veteran warrior, combined with his manner, convinced me that he was the authority in Atlixco, the official charged with maintaining law and order in the parish.
I did not like policemen. I had fallen foul of them too often ever to feel comfortable around them even when I had not knowingly done anything criminal. It was Handy I wanted to talk to, not some official who would just bark questions at me and hit me if he did not like the answers I gave him. However, even as I hesitated over what to do, I realised it was too late to avoid the man, as he was already looking keenly in my direction.
I took a step away from him, looking nervously left and right, and undoubtedly giving a very clear impression of a man with something to hide. Probably I was the only person present whom he did not know by sight, which must have sharpened his interest in me. The filthy, ragged state I had been left in by the night’s adventures would have caught his eye too.
I had more sense than to try running away as he stepped between the traders’ deserted pitches to stand in front of me. We examined each other in silence for a moment.
From the way he looked me over I gathered that his mind was engaged in trying to match some offence to the scruffy, shifty-looking individual in front of him, who smelled of foetid mud from the lake and was apparently given to lurking suspiciously at the edges of plazas.
I blurted: ‘Er, look, let me explain…’
‘Explain what?’ the policeman said, pleasantly enough. ‘I’ve not asked you anything.’
I tried grinning disarmingly. ‘Oh, that’s all right then. Only, I thought…’
‘You thought what?’ he wondered out loud. ‘Let me see if I can guess. You thought I might wonder why you were lurking here like a thief. Not thinking of making off with any of the market traders’ stuff while they’re looking the other way, were you?.’
I glanced at the pitch beside my feet, a mat spread with lengths of cheap, poorly finished maguey fibre cloth. ‘Do I look that hard up?’ It was an effort to lighten the mood that I regretted at once.
The man growled at me. ‘In a word, yes. To look at you I’d say you have just one thing left in the world.’ He expected me to ask what that was. It seemed safest to oblige him.
‘The one thing you’ve got,’ he replied, smacking his lips as he relished his joke, ‘is a chance to tell me what you’re doing here. If I were you I wouldn’t waste it by lying!’
‘I’m not at thief!’ I wondered why I sounded so unconvincing when for once I was telling the
truth. Perhaps it was because I was more used to lying. ‘I’m a friend of Handy’s. You must know him. I only came back to see whether he and the others were all right. We were guarding his wife. Someone or something attacked us. I spent the night running away from him, it, whatever.’ When he said nothing I added hastily: ‘I came back as soon as I could. And they all ran off too… I think.’
There was a new keenness in the man’s expression when he looked at me now. ‘You must be the one they called Yaotl. The scrawny one with the mouth.’
It was almost a relief to hear him say it. It was not a flattering description but it was one I was familiar with. ‘That sounds like me, yes.’ I hesitated. ‘And the others. What happened to them?’
‘You’d better come with me.’
It was not an invitation. The policeman marched me across the plaza and right up to the crowd, and then through the press of people as they parted respectfully before my escort.
About sixty men, women and children were gathered in the small open space in front of the shrine. All were commoners. Some had tools, spades and digging sticks and hammers, suggesting that they had been on their way to the fields or some building site before something had caught their attention and drawn them here. It was easy to imagine them passing through the plaza and stopping, one by one, to stand and stare at the same spectacle.
They had left a small space clear in their midst. I felt the blood drain from my face as the policeman pushed me into it.
Ever since following the crowd into the plaza I had been nerving myself for the gruesome sight of a freshly exhumed corpse. It was no preparation for what greeted me as I stood by Star’s grave, though.
It had been robbed. The flagstone that we had hauled back into place after backfilling the hole had gone. Loose dark soil was strewn around as if someone had dropped a large sack full of it from a great height. Here and there I noticed smudges that may have been footprints although the soil had been churned up so badly, possibly by the crowd standing around me, that there could be no way of telling who had made them.
There was no sign of the dead woman.
3
Handy had not been part of the crowd. He and Spotted Eagle had kept themselves apart, squatting by the base of the small pyramid at the corner of the plaza. They had both got up and started pushing their way into the centre of the mass of people as soon as I had reached the site of Star’s grave. The first I knew of their appearance was when I heard Handy’s voice snarling my name from somewhere close by.
I glanced at him absently. I was still struggling to understand what I had seen.
‘Yaotl!’ the commoner snapped. ‘Where have you been?’ Neither his expression nor his tone of voice sounded particularly welcoming.
‘You’re relieved to find me safe and well, then,’ I said irritably. Tiredness and the strain of the night’s events had exhausted my patience.
It was Spotted Eagle who answered. ‘You ran away,’ he said scornfully.
It was a mistake to laugh, but I could not help it. The youth’s face and posture were as savage as any warrior’s in the presence of the enemy, the upper lip curled contemptuously, one bare shoulder thrust forward to show off the muscles bunched under the skin, the fists clenched, his hands brought together as though he wielded an imaginary weapon. Yet it was so incongruous, when the back of his head still bore that tuft of hair, the mark of one who had yet to take a captive in battle.
‘Too right, I did!’ I said cheerfully. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t!’
The lad screamed: ‘I didn’t run! I’m a warrior, you bloody coward!’ Then he threw himself at me.
He was young, strong and fast. Nonetheless, if I had been expecting his assault, then I could probably have defended myself, because he had no skill at all. His body crashed into mine, winding him as badly as me, and his hands clawed ineffectually at my throat as he tried to grip it. We both fell over. I was thrown into the man standing behind me, who uttered an explosive grunt as my head drove the air from his lungs, and then I was on the ground, staring at my assailant while his ferocious, snarling, spittle-flecked face filled my vision.
The fight can only have lasted for a few moments before the feeble grip on my throat was released and the body on top of mine hauled clear. My head flopped backwards onto the hard stone floor of the plaza as the face of the policeman swam into view before my misted-up eyes. From beside me came a sound of convulsive sobbing.
‘That’s enough,’ the four-captive warrior said, as I got to my feet, rubbing my bruised neck. He turned to Handy. ‘You obviously know this man.’
The big commoner was looking at his son. Then he passed the backs of his hands over his eyes and shook his head sharply. ‘I do, Cuixtli,’ he admitted. He turned to me. ‘I thought you’d gone back to Lily’s house. Where did you go? What happened? And did you see Flower Gatherer?’
A muttering in the crowd told me that I had an attentive audience for whatever I was going to say next. There was silence then, broken only by a faint snuffling from Spotted Eagle.
At least the policeman now had a name. ‘Cuixtli’ meant Kite; a good choice, if his eyes were as sharp and all-seeing as they ought to be.
‘Flower Gatherer’s missing, then,’ I said in a low voice.
‘No,’ said Kite heavily. ‘We just like to play this guessing game with strangers. We ask you where someone is for no reason at all. Then if we don’t care for your answer we put you in a cage and prod you with spears until you come up with one we like. Of course he’s missing! Would Handy have asked you if he wasn’t?’
I felt wearier than ever; too much so to match wits with this large, powerful man in the middle of his own parish, when he was surrounded by friends and loyal followers. I mumbled an account of my night’s adventures, aware all the time of all the eyes upon me, glittering with barely suppressed hostility. Each of them felt as though he himself had been attacked and was eager to retaliate. They might easily turn their anger on the only stranger in their midst.
I wondered what would happen if they believed that I had brought the trouble upon them. The thought made me hesitate, faltering at the point in my story where I was cowering in the maize bin.
Someone took the opportunity to interrupt me with a question. I recognised the voice as that of the old man I had spoken to on the way to the marketplace. ‘You said this monster was following you. Where from?’
‘It must have been from here, unless it picked up the trail earlier. The midwives though they saw something strange following Star’s funeral procession. It could have followed me all the way from Handy’s house.’
‘Why? And why you?’
The speaker was bent with age, so that he had to crane his neck to watch me, as if his eyes on my face would help him catch me out in any lie. I looked away, preferring to confront the policeman instead. ‘I don’t know, but I’ve an idea. And I do know it was me he was after.’ I explained how I had heard the hoarse, whispering voice utter my own name.
Then I told them about the otomi.
The reaction was as I had feared. There was an angry sound in the air; the rustling and shuffling noise of a crowd of people fidgeting impatiently and nudging their neighbours. I was becoming more nervous. Star had been a popular figure in this parish and if the feeling that I had somehow been responsible for what had happened to her started to spread, there was no telling what might happen next.
I appealed to Handy. ‘Look, I helped you bury your wife last night because you asked me to. I could have gone away. If that thing – man – whatever, was following me, maybe he’d have come after me somewhere else. But he was here before I was.’ I looked at Kite. ‘You know what’s been happening in the marshes. I talked to a fisherman and his children – Heart of a Flower and her brother.’
‘Zolin’s kids,’ he said automatically. The name meant ‘Quail’. There was a hissing sound from the crowd: my implicating still more of their neighbours in my adventures had not endeared me to them any more.
‘You can’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,’ I insisted.
‘I’ve heard things,’ he said non-committally. ‘But this... whatever people think they’ve seen, it’s never spoken to anyone before.’
‘You should lock him up.’ The speaker was that old man again. ‘Or take him away. Hand him over to the chief minister. He’s supposed to run the city for the emperor. And you’d get this man out of the parish then.’
I shivered at the mention of my former master. If the men lord Feathered in Black supposedly had watching over me had been nearby during the night, then they had done nothing to protect me. I was more than ever convinced they had never existed. It was not a surprise, to have to conclude that my former master had lied to me, but the thought did not make me any happier. Nor did it make the prospect of being handed over to him as a prisoner any more appealing.
There was a movement in the crowd, and suddenly I knew that things had come to a crisis, for there were two large men standing in front of me, arms already reaching in my direction. They looked like the identical twin offspring of a union between a mountain and a bear: blank faces set on torsos so heavily muscled as to be almost shapeless.
‘Leave this to us,’ one of them rumbled, the voice seeming to come from somewhere in his bowels while his lips barely moved.
I tried to back away but the press of people around me made movement impossible. I tensed, sensing that the massive, callused hands that were about to drag me away would not be gentle. I only hoped they were both going to pull me in the same direction, as they looked as though they could rip my arms and legs off without effort if they chose.
However, the policeman was having none of it.
‘That’s enough!’ he barked.
The two large men froze. They slowly turned their heads – something of a feat, considering neither had anything resembling a neck – and stared at each other.
‘Behave yourselves, you two. Isn’t it time you were back at the quarry? And as for you’ – he glowered at the old man, who looked defiantly up at him but said nothing – ‘this man isn’t going to the chief minister or anybody else until I say so! This is my parish, do you hear?’
