[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  ‘That’s a relief,’ I said weakly.

  ‘I’ve not given up on that idea, though! However, there are things we need to talk about. Starting with Handy.’

  There was an awkward pause while I pretended to admire a fat, globular Eagle’s Claw, a variety normally to be found halfway up a mountain. Kite must take his hobby seriously, I thought. ‘Handy’s an old friend of yours.’

  ‘I’ve known him a long time. But then, I’ve known most of them a long time.’ He glanced across to the small pyramid, letting his gaze take in the busy marketplace spread out before it. ‘They’re like children,’ he sighed. ‘I have to shout at them and thump them sometimes and make them do things they don’t want to do, but it’s for their own good. And I can look after them. I don’t need interference from your high officials – the palace, the chief minister, pompous upstarts like the Guardian of the Waterfront.’

  I had to suppress a smile at the reference to Lion. I wondered whether Kite had any idea that he was my brother. Then I found the policeman was looking straight at me. ‘I can’t always keep the rest of the world out, though, can I? Let alone the rest of the city. Like when you turn up, for instance, and before you know it Handy loses his wife and maybe his brother-in-law, and there are monsters and thieves roaming around...’

  ‘Not my fault!’ I cried.

  ‘Maybe not, though you can hardly deny some of this is connected with you. By your own account the monster, or whoever attacked you, called you by your name.’

  A movement in the courtyard distracted him for a moment: his men bringing the body inside, mercifully hidden from sight by a blanket.

  ‘Still,’ he continued, ‘about Handy. You were there this afternoon. How’s he taking it?’

  I thought about what I had seen and heard at the commoner’s house. ‘Not well. They’re coping, I suppose. They don’t understand what’s going on around them.’

  ‘They’re not alone in that!’

  ‘They had to bury the child this morning,’ I added. ‘They wanted me to help. Maybe I did, a bit.’

  He looked at me curiously. ‘I’d have thought that was the midwife’s job.’

  ‘It should be, just as Star’s burial last night was. But she didn’t turn up for one and she didn’t exactly rise to the occasion for the other, either.’ I was surprised at the anger I felt rising within me as I described the pathetic little ceremony beside Handy’s maize bins, and Gentle Heart’s arrival with Cactus in the midst of it. ‘She didn’t seem to have any idea! It’s not just that she didn’t know the words. For that matter, as far as I know there aren’t any words. It’s that she didn’t seem to have much idea what it was all for. Neither did I, at first, but then I used to be a priest – my business was with gods, not men, and gods don’t have any feelings at all.’

  The policeman pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘And what about this character who came with her?’

  ‘Cactus?’ I thought about the curer, seeing his straggly hair and his grubby cloak again in my mind’s eye. ‘He’s a fake at best. At worst…’ I told him about the conversation I had had with Cactus, and about the terrifying possibility that had occurred to me, that the thief of Star’s body might be both a warrior and a sorcerer.

  Kite took the hint. ‘You think he may have been trying to put you off the scent? But that would make him the thief, then, wouldn’t it?’

  I shivered. I had been resisting the idea that I had stood within a few fingers’ lengths of a sorcerer and had had a conversation with him. ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘Well, I know what he looks like. Next time he puts in a appearance in the market, I’ll bring him in.’

  I still did not know quite why he had brought me up here. It was as though there were something in particular that he wanted to say to me but for some reason he was reluctant to bring it up. I decided to force the issue. ‘Well,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘It’s getting late. Time I was heading back…’

  A sinewy hand grasped the hem of my cloak hard enough to tear the material, had I made any real effort to get away. I looked down at the policeman, wondering why, when I was standing and he was still on his haunches, I still felt as though he towered over me.

  ‘Not so fast,’ he said quietly. ‘I told you I wanted to talk about Handy…’

  ‘You have talked about him. Then we moved on to Gentle Heart and Cactus. Then you said maybe the man I’d been talking to this afternoon was a sorcerer. I thought I’d go before it got really scary!’

  ‘… Handy and Red Macaw.’

  That silenced me.

  ‘Now,’ Kite continued, as I slowly lowered myself back into a squatting position, ‘it’s common knowledge that the two of them didn’t get on.’

  ‘I got that general impression.’

  ‘Then you can see what’s coming, and why I got you up here to talk about it rather than mouthing off in the middle of that bunch of gossipy old women down there in the plaza. I have one old friend – and he is, or was – who’s just lost his wife in about the worst way you can imagine, and not taking it very well.’

  ‘Yes.’ I could not very well disagree.

  ‘And I have an unidentified body which may belong to another old friend with whom Handy had a long-running feud.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Red Macaw’s gone too. That’s what I meant when I said I couldn’t talk to him.’

  I gaped at him. ‘Red Macaw’s gone… where?’ On occasion my gift for asking penetrating questions deserted me.

  ‘If I knew that…’ he began patiently. ‘I can tell you where he said he was going. He came to see me yesterday afternoon. He’d heard there was to be a flowery war with Texcala. He wanted to join up.’

  Texcala lay beyond the mountains to the east, a nation of proud warriors whom the Aztecs had never managed to subdue, although we kept their borders so tightly sealed that they lived in the kind of wretched poverty that produces the hardiest and fiercest soldiers. Every few years their army and ours would meet at a prearranged place for a formal battle. It gave both sides the opportunity to practise their skills and take the kind of prisoner the gods most wanted to have as sacrifices: men known to be mighty fighters, rather than effete barbarians.

  Unfortunately our army had been badly beaten in the last clash, and many of our young men had long been clamouring for another one, to avenge their losses.

  ‘He’s too old to fight,’ I objected. ‘And surely with his bad leg…’

  ‘The army would accept a three-captive warrior,’ Kite assured me, ‘if he can only catch them up; because they’ve already left, including the draft from this parish. All I could do was wish him luck. And hope he found what he was looking for.’ He looked at me steadily as he said this, and I understood.

  Red Macaw might be seeking fame or glory, but at his age his chances of finding either would be slim. It sounded to me as though what he had really been eager for was death: what our poets and priests sang of as the sweetest end a man could have, death in battle or on the sacrificial stone of an enemy’s temple: the flowery death. I wondered what might have driven him to that.

  Kite was saying: ‘I need a reason why the body was hidden in the canal. If it is Flower Gatherer’s body, then what would be the point of doing that, since everyone knows he was here last night?’

  ‘Could be a double bluff,’ I suggested, without much conviction. ‘Slow you down, fool you into looking for the wrong man.’

  ‘Maybe. It’s possible, though, isn’t it, that Red Macaw’s fate overtook him before he even set out on the road?’

  I was barely listening, however. I was too busy contemplating an unpleasant idea that had just formed in my mind.

  Red Macaw – or someone wearing a cloak that looked just like his – had been seen following Star’s funeral procession. If a flowery death was not what Red Macaw had wanted, then perhaps the ageing warrior had gone looking for something to protect him against the keen young braves he would have to face. He might have armed himself
with charms to make him invincible – cut from a dead mother’s body.

  I lowered my voice deliberately, leaning towards Kite so that he could hear me whispering. ‘You can’t be suggesting Handy might have murdered him!’

  ‘Why not? Do you know what they’d quarrelled over?’

  ‘No, but I’m sure it wasn’t anything to kill a man for!’

  ‘Are you, though? You see, I’ve no idea what the matter was either. Not many things in this parish are secret from me, but this is. The two of them kept their mouths very firmly closed over it – except to each other, of course.’

  Where was this going to end? I wondered. Bad enough to have been talking to a sorcerer. To have been talking to him while a murderer was quietly trampling the earth over his child’s grave just paces away from me was still worse. I started looking for more arguments. ‘Handy has an alibi. He wasn’t alone. He had his son, and Flower Gatherer with him. His clothes would have been covered with blood…’

  ‘He could have changed them. In the dark, who’d know? Spotted Eagle wouldn’t speak up against his father. And Flower Gatherer’s missing too, so he isn’t going to tell.’

  ‘Flower Gatherer could equally well be the killer.’

  Kite laughed. ‘If he was, then he’s managed to fool a lot of people over the years. Nobody in this parish would have believed he had it in him!’

  ‘Sorcerers are subtle.’

  ‘They are.’ His tone and his look were suddenly serious again. ‘So much so that I’m prepared to believe anything now. Handy, Flower Gatherer, Red Macaw, you – as far as I’m concerned any of you could have been responsible for what we found in the canal. If you want me to believe otherwise, it’s up to you to find me some proof.’

  10

  The afternoon was well advanced by the time Kite let me out of his parish hall. I stood in the gateway for a long moment, wondering at my freedom and doing my best to savour it while I watched the people of Atlixco parish going about their business.

  The scene around me must have been repeated that day in many other small marketplaces across the city. Although it was getting late, most traders still occupied their pitches, their wares spread out before them on reed mats: cheap plates and sauce bowls here, obsidian blades there, lengths of rough maguey fibre cloth across the way. There were few of the luxury items you might look for in one of the big markets, such as that of Tlatelolco: no cocoa or feathers or cotton, because nobody here could afford to buy them. The men, women and children mumbling and shuffling between the pitches were a colourless lot: commoners, their feet bare, their clothes made of coarse cloth, the men’s hair worn loose or tonsured to show they were not great warriors. They were ordinary Aztecs going about their daily lives.

  One or two of them stopped to stare curiously at me, and then hurried on, leaving me feeling lonely and ashamed. Had I brought death among them, leading my enemies into their midst?

  I looked up at the sun. The clear, brilliant yellow disk was descending now towards the West, and shortly it would vanish behind the buildings on that side of the plaza. I remembered the souls of the dead mothers who escorted the sun towards his rest each day. Star’s might be among them; so far away, and yet for a moment I felt closer to her than to the living, breathing humans around me, because I thought she alone might understand what I was trying to do.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I blurted out impulsively.

  A woman, walking past with an infant strapped to her back and another clutching her hand, glared at me and quickened her pace, the twin tufts of hair over her forehead bobbing in mute warning.

  I took a deep breath and stepped into the marketplace, meaning to cross it on the way to Handy’s house. However, I paused when I saw someone I recognised.

  ‘Quail!’ I hailed him as much for the sake of having one of these people speak to me as because I expected him to tell me anything. ‘Do you remember me? How are your children?’

  The fisherman had been standing beside the canal, chatting to one of his fellows. From the morose looks they were exchanging I suspected that the monster in the marshes had ruined both men’s catches, leaving them with little to do here but commiserate with one another.

  Quail recognised me: that much was plain from the look he gave me, which was the sort that might have crossed a man’s face on turning a corner to find an eviscerated dog in his path. ‘Yaotl,’ he said neutrally, as his companion slipped away.

  ‘Did you hear about what happened?’ I asked. ‘About the body?’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone in this parish will talk about much else,’ he confirmed reluctantly. ‘At least, until the next bad thing happens!’ He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘You’ve been talking to Kite, haven’t you? They’re saying the body might be Red Macaw’s.’

  ‘It might be,’ I admitted. ‘But the state it’s in, it could be anybody’s. I’m sorry – did you know him?’

  ‘No better than I know everyone else around here. Who does Kite think did it?’

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  Quail glanced furtively about him, as though he wanted to make sure nobody saw him take a step closer to me. ‘Listen,’ he said confidentially, ‘I don’t care what anyone says: there’s no way Handy would have done it. Kite ought to know that as well as anybody.’

  I stared at him, mystified. ‘Nobody said...’

  Whatever I might have gone on to add was swept aside by the urgency in the man’s voice. ‘The policeman’s a good man, but he doesn’t know what it was between Handy and Red Macaw, and he’s not going to know, you understand?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘All right, put it this way. Handy’s a well-respected man in this parish. You want to know what I mean? Well, when I walked past his plot – he farms one of the chinampa fields on the edge of the lake, near where I set my nets – I saw someone turning over the soil. I didn’t get a clear look at the man, because I was too far away and it was getting dark, but it wasn’t one of Handy’s sons, because they’re all at home with him, so it must have been a neighbour. What’s more, it looked as though he’d done something to fix up a little hut in the corner, though I know Handy hasn’t troubled to repair the roof in years. Now what I’m saying is this: we’re all busy with our own work, but one of his neighbours took the trouble to go and do that, turn over his field, because it’s near the planting season and Handy would be in trouble if it wasn’t done in time. If he wants to keep a thing to himself, there isn’t anyone in Atlixco who won’t go along with it. Do you see?’

  ‘Enough to understand that I wouldn’t want Kite’s job,’ I replied. ‘And I get the general idea: no questions about Handy. Well, I’ll pass that on, for what it’s worth. Maybe he’ll tell me what it’s all about one day.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’ Quail stepped away from me, having apparently said what he had wanted to.

  I was not prepared to leave it at that, though. ‘What about Red Macaw, then?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Is he as popular?’

  Quail’s brow furrowed. ‘He’s a fine warrior.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a “no”.’

  ‘They keep themselves to themselves,’ the man said defensively. ‘Nobody really knows them that well.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘Red Macaw and his mother.’

  ‘He lives with his mother?’

  ‘She’s his only family. He never married...’ Quail shut his mouth with a snap, like a man who realises he has said too much already, and took another furtive look around him. ‘Look, I’ve got to go now. Just remember you’re a stranger here, all right? You can’t expect people to tell you everything.’

  As I walked back along the canal towards Handy’s house, I felt extraordinarily weary. I found myself dragging my feet, scraping my heels on the hard earth of the path. It seemed that all the events that were happening around me – the mutilated body I had seen this afternoon, the monster that had pursued me in the night, the theft of Star’s
body, Flower Gatherer’s disappearance, even in some way Star’s death – all had some connection with this feud between her husband and Red Macaw. I was filled with despair at the prospect of trying to unravel a secret that the people of Atlixo would not share, even with their parish policeman.

  It was while I was wrestling with these thoughts, with my eyes downcast so as to avoid the reproachful glances of the people around me, that I met an old acquaintance: one I would happily have avoided if I had recognised him in time.

  ‘There he is!’

  I looked up at the sound of a familiar voice. When I saw the face that went with it, my first thought was: ‘Oh no, not you again.’

  It was the old man I had spoken to in the morning, who had urged Kite to lock me up or hand me over to the chief minister. However, I dismissed him from my thoughts the moment I saw who was with him.

  The old man was holding a conversation with someone in a canoe. It was that person who had caught my attention. He was looking directly at me. His jaw dropped as he took in my appearance, but he recovered from his surprise quickly, and a moment later he was out of the canoe and striding along the canal towards me. His cloak – a three-captive warrior’s, like Red Macaw’s – flapped around him and his long hair bounced at his temples in time with his steps.

  I stared at him, horrified and amazed. He was none other than my former master’s steward, Huitztic the Prick, the same man who had bullied and taunted me relentlessly during the years I had spent in lord Feathered in Black’s household.

  He stopped a few paces away from where I stood. The old man he had been speaking to and a few others trailed diffidently behind him, halting a respectable distance away and trying to peer over his shoulder.

  The steward stared at me. It seemed to take him a little while to find his voice. ‘Yaotl! What are you doing here?’

  Having concluded that he had lied about the men who were meant to be protecting me, I had all but forgotten about my former master. The horror and terror I had experienced since the previous day had all but driven the chief minister and his servants from my mind. But it seemed he had remembered me. It had been inevitable that he would get to hear where I was, ever since I had returned to Atlixco that morning, and found myself the centre of attention. Now I was face-to-face with his steward and had to decide whether to cringe or to defy him.