[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  Osier Twig proffered the basket unbidden, like a good hostess. Gentle Heart accepted a dough ball and began chewing on it mechanically.

  ‘Thank you. I haven’t eaten or slept since last night.’ She looked exhausted, her eyes red and their lids puffy. ‘I keep thinking about your poor sister,’ she told Goose, ‘and what I might have done differently, but I just’ – I thought she was going to choke on the mouthful she had taken – ‘I just can’t understand it.’

  Seeing her niece’s wide eyes and trembling lip, Goose no doubt thought she was about to burst into tears again. ‘Go indoors, child, and fetch some bread for your father and Spotted Eagle.’

  As the girl fled she turned back to the midwife. ‘Giving birth is the woman’s battle,’ she said stiffly. ‘Tezcatlipoca and Cihuacoatl will not always grant us victory.’

  ‘I tried. You have to believe me. I tried everything I know,’ Gentle Heart said imploringly. ‘Your sister did fight – I fought too – there wasn’t anything I could do!’

  ‘You could have helped us afterwards!’ Goose hissed. ‘You didn’t come back, last night, when her husband needed you. What were you doing then?’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ the midwife replied in a voice half-choked with sudden tears. ‘I wanted to. I wanted to say goodbye, to tell her what I’ve told you – that she had fought, that she’d died like a warrior – but I couldn’t. Don’t you understand?’ She looked around at us all, her eyes wide with distress, and something in them moved me to reply. Perhaps it was the eyes themselves, the redness of their rims and the jagged, broken veins that had coated their whites in a pink wash. They reminded me of Lily waking from a bad dream, wanting only to be held.

  ‘You were afraid you’d get it wrong, that you’d forget the words,’ I said quietly.

  ‘But she’s got to know what to do!’ Goose said impatiently. ‘You must have had this happen before.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ Gentle Heart protested. ‘I only know what others have told me. I’ve never – Star was the first who’s ever…’ She ended on a sob.

  Cactus stepped towards her. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured. ‘It’s all right. You’ve been through much. Let me help. Look, I can make you feel better…’

  He was fumbling for that cloth pouch once more. I told him to keep his bloody weeds out of sight. Turning back to Gentle Heart I said: ‘How long have you been a midwife?’

  ‘Since I was too old for the House of Pleasure – for the warriors who came there, I mean.’

  ‘That must have been a few years ago,’ Goose said tartly.

  ‘And before that?’ I persisted.

  She looked at me gratefully. ‘I’m from Chalco originally. But Goose is right – that was a long time ago. I was a tribute slave. I think I was intended to be sacrificed, but someone thought I’d be better employed entertaining warriors in the House of Pleasure than dancing and dying at a festival.’ She seemed a little more composed: the remote past was easier to talk about than the events of yesterday. Goose, by contrast, looked as though she were about to give way to tears again.

  ‘But you were in the Pleasure House long enough to learn your trade?’

  ‘We all learned. We helped each other, and the older ones taught us. Some of us ended up as warriors’ wives or concubines to great lords, of course, but we all knew we might have to make our living looking after other women. Many wanted that, anyway. It’s a privilege no man can ever know.’ She sighed. ‘Goose, please try to understand what I’m saying. I know my work, I really do. I know what will happen if a pregnant woman chews gum or looks at anything red. I can tell her when she must accept her husband, to form the baby, and when she must stop. I can attend her in the sweat bath, turn a baby in the womb, offer the herbs when they’re needed…’ This recital of the midwife’s skills came out in a single breath, and I wondered whom she was trying to convince. ‘I’ve brought so many children into the World, Goose, and yet I have never seen anything like what happened to your sister. It was as if… It was as if, when we struggled to bring him out, there was someone else in there with us, fighting us. Can you believe that? I was scared!’ By the time she had finished, Gentle Heart was no longer looking at any of us. She had buried her head in her hands and was weeping silently.

  I looked helplessly over her shoulder towards where Handy and Spotted Eagle were finishing up, but there was no comfort for anyone to be found there. Father and son were staring, grim-faced, at their handiwork, and had no eyes for us.

  The ground over the grave looked as though it had never been broken, if anything stamped harder than the earth around it. The sight reminded me of that other grave, in front of the shrine in Atlixco plaza. And that was when I realised what it was that had looked wrong; the thing that had looked out of place, or rather, that had not been in the place where it should have been.

  8

  By the time Gentle Heart and Cactus had left, the sun was well past its zenith. It was the time of day when labourers in the fields would be putting their lunch-bags aside and getting back to work.

  I tried to explain to Handy what I thought might have happened to his brother-in-law. I was rewarded with a sceptical stare. ‘You’ve changed your mind, then,’ he remarked. ‘You thought he’d just run away before.’

  ‘I don’t know for sure,’ I said. I looked towards the doorway leading into the house, where Goose was listlessly going through the motions of some domestic task.. ‘I don’t think we should tell her until I’ve checked. So the sooner I can go and find out, the better.’

  ‘One of us had better go with you.’

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ I protested. ‘I’m only going to see your policeman, and he’s hardly likely to let me get into any trouble.’

  Handy was not taking any notice, however. He was looking at his gateway, and his young sons running through it.

  Snake and Buck were both panting slightly, having raced each other all the way back from my mistress’s house. ‘We found the place!’ Buck called out, when he got his breath back.

  ‘Only because I told you where it was,’ Snake gasped.

  ‘Liar! You got lost twice!’

  ‘How was Lily?’ I snapped impatiently. ‘What did she say?’

  Buck stared at me as if he had forgotten why they had gone to Tlatelolco in the first place. His brother grinned at me. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be you. She’s livid!’ From that I took it that one of them at least had had the wit to pass on the message.

  ‘What do you mean, livid?’ I asked, an odd mixture of trepidation and hope stirring in me.

  ‘I mean when I told her you were staying here to help us, she said who gave you permission?’

  ‘And who do you think you are?’ Buck put in.

  ‘And you can sleep out in the courtyard when she’s done dragging you home by the heels…’

  ‘…if she hasn’t pitched you into a canal on the way. And another thing…’ I never found out what the other thing was, because I was laughing too loudly to hear it. I went on laughing until the tears were running down my cheeks, heedless of Handy’s and Spotted Eagle’s mute, astonished stares.

  The image of Lily in one of her immense, foot-stamping rages was funny in itself; but what was so much more precious, what made me laugh and weep until my sides hurt, was relief. For her to be that angry, I thought, she must be feeling better.

  I was spared an escort when I went to see Kite. Both Snake and Buck were too exhausted after their run to do any more than collapse in a heap against the courtyard wall. In the process they brought down some of the hastily built-up masonry that had blocked the hole made on the previous night. While Handy and Spotted Eagle rushed into the billowing dust-cloud this produced, I took the chance to slip away, darting nimbly through the gateway and running along the canal-path outside until I was out of sight.

  I had every intention of helping to find out what had happened to Star’s body. I had every reason to do so. It was not merely that I feared risking the anger of the dead woman’s spi
rit and pitied her surviving family. Whoever or whatever had attacked me during the night must have had something to do with the theft. At the very least it had scattered the men watching the grave for long enough for the thief to do his work. However, if the fear that had assailed me when I talked to Cactus the curer had any foundation, then what the thief had taken might make the monster that had hunted me still deadlier than before. An invisible, invincible warrior out for my blood!

  As I trotted back to the centre of the parish I thought longingly of the relative security of Lily’s house in Tlatelolco, but I realised that safety was almost certainly an illusion. Neither I nor anyone close to me could afford to rest until the mystery of what had happened to Star’s body was solved.

  The obvious place to look for a policeman in any parish in Mexico was in the parish hall. However, before I had reached the long, low building, skirting market pitches that were as oddly empty of traders and customers as they had been the day before, I realised that I would not need to go inside in order to ask after Kite. He was standing at the edge of the canal that bordered the plaza opposite the little pyramid, close to the bridge that took the path across it.

  There was a small crowd gathered around the policeman, although he was doing his best to shoo the bystanders away as I approached. When I heard what he was saying, I felt sick, although it was neither more nor less than I had expected.

  ‘All right, so you’ve seen it. You all know what a body looks like. Now bugger off, the lot of you, and let me get on with my work! And what do you want?’

  The last words were meant for me. I heard mutterings from one or two people who remembered me from the day before, but nobody tried to stop me as I pushed my way through the crowd of onlookers to Kite’s side.

  ‘Look, Kite, I’ve been thinking. About yesterday. I’m afraid I was wrong. I’m not sure Flower Gatherer ran away after all. I think I know what may have happened to him. You’ll need to dredge the canal.’

  He folded his arms and looked down his long, straight nose at me. ‘Oh, really? And what do you suppose I’ll find if I do that?’

  ‘A body. Weighed down by…’ I heard my voice tail off as I saw where he was looking. I lowered my own gaze to follow his. When I saw what lay at his feet, I staggered, my legs having suddenly lost most of their strength, and might have fallen over if I had not toppled against a man standing just behind me.

  The remains were scarcely recognisable as those of a man. The legs and the lower part of the trunk were exposed, apart from the groin, coyly hidden by what was left of a breechcloth. The upper part of the body too was swaddled in some tattered material. The stench rising from the corpse was enough to make me gag. Knowing the smell of rot and piss was mostly that of the pool of canal water surrounding the body did not make it less nauseating.

  I swallowed hard. The stink was not the worst of it, by a long way.

  Aztecs were not strangers to the sight of human blood. Priests in particular were used to seeing hearts ripped, still beating, from the chests of sacrificial victims; but at certain times anyone might see blood carried through the streets in gourds and daubed on the faces of idols, or men dancing in the flayed skins of captive warriors, or an enemy’s flesh stripped from a severed limb and turned into the makings of a stew. Most men had been to war, and seen friend and foe alike pierced and mutilated. However, I would have guessed that nobody present had ever seen anything like this.

  The condition of the body was horrific. Both legs were broken, the knees twisted at bizarre angles, and there was what looked like an extra joint in one calf. Elsewhere the flesh was torn and gouged, criss-crossed by cuts ranging from grazes to deep gaping rents. What I could see made me thankful for the cloth covering the rest, which from the look of it was even more grotesquely misshapen. The cloth itself was so sodden with canal water and stained with dark blood that it was impossible to make out what colour it might have been before. It had been ripped, so that it looked little better than a rag, and part of it appeared to be missing altogether.

  Something lay beside the body. Like the cloth it was heavily stained. It was rectangular, hard and smooth: a slab of dressed stone.

  ‘Well,’ I said quietly, ‘I was right about the paving slab.’

  A hand gripped my upper arm, not gently. ‘Now, what was that about dredging the canal?’ Kite’s voice rasped in my ear. ‘I think you’d better tell me what you know, don’t you?’

  Without taking my eyes off the body, I said: ‘After we’d buried the woman, we put the paving slab back into place over the body. I realised that I hadn’t seen it when I came back here this morning, after her body had been dug up again. Something that heavy doesn’t just blow away in the wind. Flower Gatherer was missing. I wondered if the two had disappeared together.’

  ‘The paving slab was tied to the body with this.’ The policeman stirred the stained cloth with his sandaled foot. ‘Anything to say about that?’

  ‘If the slab was used to weigh the body down,’ I said dully, ‘then they had to have been tied together with something.’ I looked up into the policeman’s face. ‘This looks like part of a cloak.’

  ‘But what’s it doing here, Yaotl?’

  For all the orders Kite had been bellowing when I had arrived, the crowd around us had not dispersed. They were all looking steadily at me, and it felt as though I were surrounded by spears, their tips of flint and obsidian poised to be thrust into my flesh. I began to wish I had let someone from Handy’s household come with me after all; at least I would have felt less alone.

  I stammered through the best explanation I could come up with. ‘When the monster attacked us it killed Flower Gatherer and threw his body in the canal. It must have used his cloak to tie the dead man to the paving slab.’ I hesitated. ‘I suppose this is Flower Gatherer’s body? Did anyone recognise it?’

  Kite laughed grimly. ‘Look at him! His own mother wouldn’t recognise him! But what are you saying? That someone else has vanished in this parish? I hope you’re wrong. One missing person and one body, I can just about cope with. Two men vanished and one body wouldn’t add up.’

  ‘The women saw a three-captive warrior following us last night. They got a piece of his cloak. So why don’t you go and talk to Red Macaw?’

  There was a stirring in the crowd around me. Somebody tittered, as though I had said something funny. It sounded incongruous, as Kite’s own mirthless laugh had not, and the policeman’s expression now was as bleak as ever.

  ‘I can’t talk to him,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Why not?’ I stared at him. ‘You can’t mean he’s disappeared too?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ The man looked troubled. His expression had not been tranquil before, but now, for the first time, I felt that he was not in command of the situation, and that he knew it. He put a hand to his forehead and frowned deeply as if afflicted by a sudden pain between his temples. Then he whipped the hand away, and glared balefully at the people gathered around him.

  ‘Didn’t I send you lot about your business ages ago?’ he snapped. He raised his arm in a fierce gesture. ‘Go on, scram! Not the slave, though. You’re coming with me!’

  In one movement the arm descended and the hand seized my elbow in unbreakable grip.

  As he dragged me towards the parish hall, visions of tiny cells swam before my eyes: open cages in airless, lightless rooms, filled with the stench of unwashed bodies and what came out of them. I squealed with fear, but nobody was listening.

  9

  The parish hall stood at the corner of the marketplace, facing the temple, with the waters of the canal lapping its rear wall. It was a long, low adobe building. Rooms opened onto three sides of its square central courtyard, the front being the outer wall dividing it from the marketplace, with the entrance in its middle. Opposite the entrance, a stairway led up to a broad flat roof. There was a doorway at ground level on either side of the steps.

  Some of the doorways leading off the courtyard were closed by wicker screens. Others
were dark holes giving no clue to what lay beyond them. I knew in general what such places contained: the parish records, weapons, quarters for local officials. I wondered which room held the stout wooden cages where prisoners would be kept. I was afraid that I might be about to find out, but that was not what Kite had in mind. Instead, he led me towards the steps leading up on to the roof. On the way he barked out orders to a couple of his deputies to go and clean up the mess by the canal outside. They moved reluctantly from where they had been squatting on the hard earth of the courtyard, two men who may have been the pair who had moved to arrest me that morning, or just two more who had been carved out of the side of the same mountain.

  ‘Up here,’ the policeman ordered.

  The roof of the parish hall was decorated with plant pots. What grew from them were mostly hardy specimens. Many were desert varieties. ‘A lot of cacti,’ I observed nervously. ‘What are they for, torturing prisoners with the thorns?’ It was a genuine question. There were some forms of torment – beatings, pricking with maguey spines, drenching in ice-cold water – that I could endure, having known worse as a priest. If that was what the policeman had in mind then I could make myself ready for it.

  ‘No, they just do well on the roof. I prefer dahlias, really, but it’s too exposed for them up here.’

  I stared at him incredulously. ‘Next you’ll be telling me you like sitting up here in the morning, watching the sun rising over the lake while you compose poetry!’

  ‘And what if I do?’

  Flower and Song, was what we called poetry. I supposed Cactus and Song would do as well. I was trying to think of some witty remark to that effect while the policeman squatted on the edge of his roof terrace and motioned for me to do the same.

  ‘I didn’t bring you up here to admire the blooms,’ he said, ‘nor to beat a confession out of you.’