[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  ‘You tell me what happened, or I’ll start flaying you alive from the feet up!’ the otomi bellowed.

  My courage left me then. The stinging pressure of the obsidian blades increased. ‘All right!’ I stammered out an account of the three-captive warrior’s death. ‘But he was dying! We couldn’t have saved him, not with a wound like that! Why did you do it if you wanted him alive?’

  The otomi’s expression was always hard to read. At this angle it was nearly impossible, but I watched the muscles twitch and bulge and saw his agitation, even something that might have been remorse. At the same time the blades were biting deeper into my skin. I could feel blood running along the inside of my leg. Much more of this, I thought desperately, and he’ll have my foot off.

  What he said next was not meant for me. It was not even a question. ‘I didn’t intend killing him. I didn’t know it was him! How could I? He crept up on me. I didn’t have time to look!’ He let out a wild groan. ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘Let me go!’ I gasped. ‘What can I give you, to let me go?’ He ignored the pathetic squirming thing begging for its life at his feet. He went on talking to himself: ‘Why did he have to come out here? I haven’t got long now. If he’d just clung on a little longer. I’ve got to think!’ He seemed to come to a decision. He dropped my foot. His war club swept towards my face, stopping still a hair’s breadth from my eyes, so close I could not bring the blades into focus.

  ‘Get up,’ he barked.

  ‘I can’t, not with that club there. It’ll take my nose off!’

  The weapon was twitched aside. ‘Get up! Any more wisecracks and you’ll lose more than your nose!’

  I tried to rise and fell backwards, gasping with pain from my leg. Suddenly it was not numb any more. The captain growled threateningly, and I forced myself to stand, bracing myself unsteadily against the wall of the shed.

  ‘Now get in there and drag that body out. You’re going to bury it, here, quickly. Any funny business and this fool starts to die – slowly!’

  I looked at Kite. From the way his eyes were rolling under half-closed lids it was hard to tell whether he was conscious or not, but I knew the otomi would find a way of waking him up.

  ‘Get on with it!’

  I hastened to obey, only hesitating when I stepped through the door of the shelter and the smell of what was inside hit me once more. For some reason it seemed stronger and ranker than it had before. When I looked down I realised why. The captain must have taken some convincing before he would believe Red Macaw was dead. It looked as if he had picked the body up and shaken it in the hope of getting some response. What this had done to the dead man’s innards is something I try not to recall at mealtimes.

  There was no point in attempting to pack everything back inside the wound. I reminded myself that I had seen hearts torn, still beating, from the breasts of sacrificial victims. I swallowed the gorge rising in my throat, and applied myself to the job of dragging the body outside by the heels. I assumed the otomi would send me back inside for any parts that I left behind.

  Where do you want him?’ I asked, throwing the question over my shoulder like a servant carrying a wicker chest into his master’s newly-built house.

  The response was the swish of a sword swinging through the air and a soft thump that might have been made by blades sinking into unresisting flesh.

  I dropped the body and whirled around, shocked and indignant. ‘What are you doing? Leave him alone! I brought the body out, like you said...’ I fell silent as I saw what the captain was doing.

  He was not using his club to carve pieces from the policeman’s body, as I had thought. Instead, he was standing over Star’s grave, attacking the edges of the shallow hole so as to make it bigger. ‘Get that thing over here,’ he snapped, without looking up. ‘Hurry up! And don’t leave anything behind, do you understand?’

  I did what I was told.

  The otomi stood aside, swinging his vicious club suggestively as I rolled what was left of Red Macaw into the shallow hole. When I went back to scrape up the mess on the ground between the grave and the shelter, I noticed that he kept looking away, glancing at the dense growth of rushes at the edge of the field as though expecting to see someone emerge from them at any moment. I stared at him in wonder. It seemed that he was nervous about something, but that was almost inconceivable: what could this man be afraid of?

  ‘You’re scared,’ I blurted out, unthinking.

  He ignored that. ‘Now get a shovel from in there and fill the hole in!’ he barked.

  ‘You don’t want me to climb into it first?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ He prodded me with the blunt end of his sword. ‘Once Red Macaw’s hidden, I’ll start on you. I’m going to take my time over that, and I intend to make the most of it!’

  When I emerged from the shelter for the last time, I was armed with a shovel. I looked at its fire-hardened wooden blade in despair. Against the captain and his obsidian-studded club, I still stood no chance.

  I stood by the entrance to the hut and looked into the otomi’s only eye. It glared, unblinking, back at me. ‘Well?’ he growled.

  Something made me drop the shovel. As it fell with a soft ‘plop’ at my feet, I cried: ‘Why are you doing this?’

  The question did not seem to make him angry. If the twitch of his one eyebrow meant anything, it looked like bemusement. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was right, wasn’t I? You’re afraid of something. You saw Red Macaw dead in there and it spooked you. Why?’

  ‘It’s nothing to you. Pick up that shovel!’ He jerked his obsidian-bladed club threateningly, and I responded by stooping towards the tool I had dropped, which lay half-buried in the mud. It came up with a loud squelching sound and heavy with stinking ooze. I shook it once, to knock some of the muck off. I hesitated before shaking it again, much less vigorously, and at the same time I looked at the captain and spoke again, picking up my train of thought in an effort to distract him.

  ‘You’ve got to hide this body quickly, before someone finds it. Why? You aren’t afraid of any man. You’d tell the emperor to eat his own breechcloth if you felt like it. So it’s something more than a man you’re frightened of. It’s not even lord Feathered in Black, is it?’

  ‘You’re the one who ought to be frightened,’ he snarled. ‘You’re about to die. If you do what you’re told it might not take as long, that’s all! And this has nothing to do with the chief minister. I’m not afraid of him, not any more. With the edge I’ve got over him now, he’d better be afraid of me!’

  ‘What edge?’ My thoughts were racing, as I struggled to hold everything in my head at once: the shovel in my hands, the wounded and the dead who lay around me, the monstrous, disfigured warrior and the mysterious fear that had gripped him. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ I cried. ‘That edge – that’s what’s got to you. It’s the sorcerer! You’re afraid of the sorcerer!’

  He took a step towards me and jabbed me with the end of club again, hard enough this time to make me stagger backwards. ‘I told you to fill that hole in! Now pick that shovel up and dig! I can take the rest of today and all day tomorrow killing you or I can do it in a moment, understand?’

  I understood, but it no longer mattered.

  When he prodded me with his club, the captain and I were as close as we were going to be. It would have to do, I judged. With all my strength I thrust the shovel towards him, jerking it sharply towards his ruined face. He did not so much as blink, but a gobbet of thick mud flew from the tool’s flat blade into his one good eye.

  He leaped back instinctively, howling in shock and fury. I threw the shovel at him, but did not wait to see whether it connected before turning and running blindly away.

  I did not get far.

  It is almost impossible to run barefoot through thick, churned-up mud. The stuff clung to my feet, relinquishing them only reluctantly with loud sucking noises. I did not know where I was going. I had had no time to think or pick a direction, instead
merely turning towards the nearest canal in the vain hope of crossing it and losing myself in the fields beyond. Yet from behind me the furious roar and the splashing of massive feet striking the mud told me how futile this was, and the edge of Handy’s plot, bounded as it was by the canal separating it from his neighbours, put an end to all thoughts of escape.

  I hesitated, teetering on the edge of the canal, unable in that moment to decide whether to leap across or somehow try to hide. That moment of indecision was enough for the panting, roaring, splashing creature behind me to catch me up.

  ‘Got you!’ he shouted, his breath like a warm wind on the back of my neck. ‘You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that!’

  I could only turn to stare mutely at him.

  Then a dart whistled past my head.

  It buried itself in the wall of the hut with a soft thump. I stared at it for a moment. Then I came to my senses and threw myself flat on the ground as a second missile soared through the air to catch the otomi on the arm.

  His scream split the air around us. I thought it made the willow trees shake, although that may have been a trick of the wind. Then he was on the move, his club raised high over his head, its blades flashing, his voice shrieking in an ululating war-cry as he raced towards his unseen opponents.

  I glimpsed something moving in the reeds at the edge of the plot. The otomi bore down on them. He had covered half the distance towards them before he stumbled, and I saw that he had a dart buried in his knee. Almost without breaking stride, he bent down, tore the projectile from his flesh and hurled it away.

  ‘Come out here, you cowards!’ he screamed. ‘Come and show yourselves!’

  The only answer was a flurry of darts from whoever was concealed among those reeds. Two of them landed in the mud near where I stood, causing me to jump backwards in fright. One clipped the captain’s skull, doing him little damage but causing him to stumble. He recovered without breaking his stride, but suddenly he was running, not toward the hidden marksman, but away from him.

  One enormous leap took him clear across the channel separating Handy’s plot of land from his neighbours’, and then he was gone, reduced to a bellowing, splashing presence, somewhere out there at the edge of the lake.

  9

  First to emerge from the edge of the field was Spotted Eagle. He ran across the muddy plot in the captain’s wake, yelling incoherently. He would have vanished into the greenery as fast as he had appeared if a strong male voice had not called him back.

  The voice belonged to Quail, the fisherman. He crashed through the reads after Spotted Eagle, but unlike the young man, he was not chasing anybody. Instead he made directly for the shelter and the wounded man lying against it. He took no notice of me, dashing past the shallow pit I had been working on with barely a glance.

  As Quail stooped over Kite, he shouted over his shoulder at Spotted Eagle: ‘Get over here and don’t be a fool, boy!’

  The young man stood in the middle of the field, looking this way and that, clearly at a loss. ‘But he’s getting away!’

  ‘Good! You’ll never catch him and it’ll be the worse for you if you do. Leave him to others. This man needs help! And you, don’t just stand there, we need something to carry him with – can’t you find a mantle or a blanket in that shed?’

  The last words were thrown in my direction. I was about to splutter an indignant reply when I noticed that others were pushing the reeds aside to join us. Two were young men I did not recognise, but I was startled to see that the third was Quail’s daughter, Heart of a Flower, and even more amazed to when I realised that she was the one carrying a throwing stick. She still held a dart between her right thumb and forefinger.

  Spotted Eagle thumped the soil by his feet with his sword, but he did as he was told. ‘There’s a blanket in the shelter,’ he said sulkily. I remembered that we had been intending to wrap his mother in it, but she was not likely to be needing it for warmth.

  ‘I’ll help,’ I said, falling into step beside the newcomers. To the girl I added: ‘That was good shooting.’

  ‘It was crap shooting,’ she said disgustedly. ‘I should have put his other eye out! But it’s harder than it looks when they’re running straight at you.’

  Her father was looking anxiously into the policeman’s eyes. ‘I’m no curer,’ he muttered. ‘But I think he’s in a bad way. We need to get him out of here quickly.’

  ‘I won’t argue with that,’ I said. Spotted Eagle beat me to the doorway and I let him go to look for the blanket while I added: ‘How did you get here? What happened?’

  ‘We heard someone shouting and blundering about among the rushes. Then the boy appeared, yelling something about murderers and thieves.’

  ‘You didn’t see who he was following?’

  Spotted Eagle came out of the shelter with the blanket. Quail grabbed it. ‘Help me get it underneath him,’ he said to the men who had come with him. ‘We’ll use it to carry him home. Hope we can make it to the parish hall.’

  ‘I was following the sorcerer, I think,’ Spotted Eagle said in a low, chastened voice. ‘But he disappeared.’

  ‘Of course he did,’ Heart of a Flower said contemptuously. ‘If you understood the first thing about hunting you’d know better than to make all that noise! You probably ran straight past him!’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Quail told his daughter reprovingly. He probably thought her outburst was not quite seemly in an Aztec maiden. ‘We didn’t see him either, remember.’

  ‘I just did what Kite told me to do,’ Spotted Eagle said defensively. ‘Run about and make a lot of noise, he said. So when that monster appeared at the edge of the field, I did. Then I saw this movement in the reeds and went after it.’

  ‘You didn’t get a good look at him?’ I asked anxiously.

  The answer was interrupted by a loud yell from Kite as the three local men heaved him onto the blanket. Quail whispered some reassuring words to him; the two must have been old friends.

  ‘No,’ the young man said mournfully. ‘It was all too quick. I don’t know that he was moving that fast, but he obviously knows how to keep hidden. I didn’t see anyone until I ran into these people.’

  ‘We were gathering stone dung at the edge of the city,’ Quail’s daughter said. ‘Father says it’s as far out as we dare go at the moment, with the demon roaming about.’ I realised they must be desperate. Gathering scum from the lake’s surface was always a disagreeable, slimy job, and it required particular care the edge of the city because of all the jars of poisonous whitewash that got emptied into the water. ‘I had my throwing stick just in case I had a chance to catch a bird. We’ve not had meat or fish lately.’

  ‘You didn’t see anyone else at all?’ I asked.

  ‘Only others like us. Mostly old people stooped over the water.’ Quail and his comrades lifted Kite off the ground and began carrying him slowly in the direction of the city.

  ‘Wait a moment!’ Spotted Eagle cried. ‘What about my mother? We can’t leave her here!’

  ‘And Red Macaw,’ I added. ‘He died. He’s in this hole too!’

  Quail did not look back. ‘They’re already dead,’ he said indifferently. ‘Let’s see if we can keep Kite alive. Then we’ll worry about them.’

  10

  Dusk had fallen by the time Spotted Eagle and I had made it back to his father’s house. Quail and the others had gone directly to the parish hall, while Heart of a Flower ran to find a curer. I hoped it would not be Cactus.

  As we trudged wearily through the entrance to the courtyard, Lily came out and ran towards us. She stopped suddenly within a few paces of where we stood, and the whites of her eyes showed plainly as they widened with shock.

  ‘Yaotl!’ she gasped. ‘What happened? You’re hurt!’

  ‘What?’ I looked down and noticed that I was covered in blood. It soaked my breechcloth and cloak and was smeared over my belly and legs. The memory of dragging Red Macaw’s partly eviscerated body out of that hut came to me,
and for the first time it made me feel faint. I staggered forward, doubled over as if it had been my stomach the captain had opened up.

  Lily cried out and darted forward, catching me and crying out again as she felt the pain in her fingers.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I managed to gasp, although the world was starting to spin around me. ‘It’s all right, Lily. It isn’t mine!’

  Then I fainted.

  I came to beside the hearth.

  The sleeping mat underneath me was firm and dry. The mantle I was wrapped in smelled of freshly laundered cloth. Half of my body – the side nearer to the flames – was bathed in delicious warmth. A woman cooed gently in my ear, telling me to rest, and a hand – bandaged but still comforting – lay on my brow. I sighed contentedly, and turned over, to feel the fire’s heat on my face.

  A voice that was anything but soothing barked: ‘Awake, is he? Come on, Yaotl. Up you get! We need to talk.’

  Handy’s voice shattered my mood. I groaned and rolled onto my back.

  ‘Leave him be!’ Lily cried. It had been her voice that had been on the point of lulling me back to sleep. ‘He’s tired.’

  ‘We’re all tired,’ Handy said. ‘But Yaotl’s got some explaining to do!’

  I sat up stiffly, shrugging off both the cloak and Lily’s hand. ‘All right,’ I muttered irritably. I looked about me.

  I must have been carried indoors and laid by the fire. A sweat bath would have done me good but it was too late in the day for that: a glance at the doorway showed me it was now dark outside.

  The little room was crowded, mostly with members of Handy’s family, although I recognised the face of Quail, the fisherman, among those around me. I caught a glimpse of movement through the doorway and sensed that the courtyard outside was crowded.