by Simon Levack
After that, his master owned his time but not his life. A slave’s property was his own, not his master’s. His master had no rights over his family or his children. A slave could not be ill treated or killed or even sold without good reason – although once he had given his master cause to get rid of him he might well find himself being bought by the priests as a cheap sacrifice.
There were worse fates than slavery that could befall a man, so long as he had no self-respect. A slave could not glorify and enrich himself by going to war and dragging home captives, or pay his debt to his city by giving his labour to some great public work, as it was not his to give. In the eyes of my people, I counted for nothing more than an extension of the Chief Minister’s right arm.
‘What’s so funny?’ my brother demanded.
We were standing on the Tlacopan causeway, the broad road connecting the island of Mexico with the lake’s western shore.
Handy had put us all ashore, ferrying us in relays to the small town of Popotla. There my master and the woman had found canoes to take them home, leaving Lion and me to walk. Ordinarily Lion could easily have hired a boat himself, but he had no money with him, and in his present state no one would have taken him for the distinguished and wealthy man he was.
Now he and I found ourselves in the middle of a dense, jostling crowd. In the northern part of the city the great market of Tlatelolco alone drew at least forty thousand men, women and children every day: buyers and sellers of everything from feathers and jewels to slaves, building materials and human dung to spread in the fields. Most of the bulky items, such as hides or tree trunks or stone from the quarries, came in by canoe, but there was enough traffic left over to jam the roads. Lion had just avoided having his eye pecked out by a live turkey slung over a farmer’s wife’s shoulder, and his snarl as he recoiled and caught my involuntary grin reminded me that this was not what he was used to.
My elder brother’s origins had been as humble as mine, naturally, but his career had been no less remarkable. Unlike me, he owed his advancement to his own prowess rather than the day of his birth. Like almost any commoner’s child he had gone to the House of Youth as a boy and learned all the skills needed to fit a man or woman for life as an Aztec. In the case of boys that meant rudimentary instruction in song and dance, medicine, history and polite speech, and advanced and intensive training in physical fitness, tactics and weapon handling. Lion had excelled at his studies, and then, when turned loose on our enemies, had fought his way to fame and fortune, dragging home more distinguished captives than he could count himself, and winning one of the highest ranks a commoner could attain: Atenpanecatl, Guardian of the Waterfront. With his rank had come the marks of distinction and high office: the yellow cotton cloak with the red border, the cotton ribbons that bound his hair, the distinctive earplugs and the special sandals with oversized straps that he was allowed to wear within the city’s limits.
‘What’s funny?’ I echoed his question. ‘Why, this. I mean, look around us. Tezcatlipoca has really surpassed himself this time, hasn’t he?’
Lion’s retort was choked off as he lurched forward involuntarily. Someone had barged into him from behind. He was a porter, probably on the last leg of a long journey from one of our tributary provinces. He had not been looking where he was going, probably because he had his head bowed against the weight of the bale hanging from his brow by a tump-line. From the faintly resinous smell about him I guessed the bale was full of copal incense.
The man muttered something that might have been apologetic in his own language, and my brother’s outraged rebuke died in his throat. Lion turned on me instead.
‘If you mean having me rub shoulders with peasants and barbarians is Tezcatlipoca’s idea of a joke, brother, then perhaps you could tell your patron god that I don’t get it!’
If he was trying to sound belligerent then he spoiled the effect by sending a hasty glance skyward, as if anxious that he might have said too much.
‘I didn’t mean you,’ I assured him, although I could easily imagine the god laughing at the picture my brother presented now: the illustrious warrior with his hair hopelessly tangled, his cloak torn and bloody and one of his sandals missing. ‘I was being purely selfish. Look at me: I was born on this day, remember? On One Death: Tezcatlipoca’s name-day. I was always going to achieve everything or nothing. So our father got me into the priesthood, no doubt expecting me to end up as the Keeper of the God of the Mexicans or something similarly illustrious, and what do I find myself doing? Celebrating the god’s name-day, and mine, as one of his own creatures – a slave. You have to admit, that is funny.’
‘It was your choice. You didn’t have to sell yourself. You could have come back home.’
‘And done what? Spend my days with a digging-stick, stirring shit into the soil?’
‘Honest labour in the fields was good enough for our father. I suppose you thought all that was beneath you. Well, brother, let me remind you …’
‘Don’t!’ I could guess what was coming: a resume of my downfall, culminating in the moment when I had had my head shaved, and sparing no detail – especially my brother’s role in wielding the razor himself, after he had persuaded the judges to spare my life. ‘I didn’t need your lectures then and I don’t need them now. Didn’t you think I’d suffered enough?’ Seeing a gap in the throng in front of me, I plunged into it, hoping to shake off both my brother and the things he made me remember.
The crowd had parted to make room for a raucous quarrel between two pleasure-girls. No doubt it had begun as a trivial dispute over who was going to ply her trade from what spot in one of the city’s many markets, and so far they had not got much beyond cracking chewing-gum in each other’s faces, but it had potential. I found myself grinning at the thought of what my stiff-necked, pious brother would run into if he followed me: black hair flying around him, fleshy, tattooed arms, stained pale with yellow ochre, reaching out to him with wickedly long fingernails, the air heavy with the vanilla scent of cheap perfume and ringing with inhuman shrieks from those vivid red mouths …
I forgot that there was more to being a great warrior than brute strength. The hand that tugged sharply at my cloak’s hem and almost wrenched the garment from my shoulders reminded me that Lion was more agile than I was and there was almost nothing I could get into or out of faster than he could.
‘I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you,’ he shouted, trying to make himself heard over the cries behind us, ‘that your family might have helped?’
‘I’d had your help,’ I said shortly. ‘Sorry, brother, but it came at too high a price.’
‘And the disgrace? What about the shame you brought on yourself?’
‘On you, you mean! Don’t try and kid me, Lion. That’s what this was always about, isn’t it – keeping me busy digging over some weed-infested mud-patch somewhere, safely out of sight, so I wouldn’t blight your precious career!’
To my surprise, the mighty warrior did not fly into a rage. He looked briefly, sadly, at our feet – his with the one precious sandal that was what remained of his dignity, mine bare as always – and mumbled: ‘No, it’s not that.’ Then he looked up again, his face wearing as thoughtful an expression as I had seen on it. ‘Look, your antics over the years haven’t helped – but I’ve overcome that; all of us have. Except you. Are you really going to be a slave for the rest of your life? No one lives for ever, Yaotl, not even slippery characters like you. The best you can hope for is to leave a good name behind. Maybe it didn’t matter before, when you thought you had no children, but now you know you’ve got a son. Don’t you want to leave him anything, beside the knowledge that his father died a slave? If you won’t exert yourself for your own sake, what about his?’
It was a long speech for him, delivered softly, with none of the hectoring tone his lectures were usually couched in. In the awkward pause that followed I reflected that it must have cost him a lot of effort. I wondered whether he had been saving it up, rehearsing
it.
I turned away from him. The crowd flowing around us suddenly seemed distant. I tried looking into the busy, preoccupied faces that were hurrying past me, but for some reason it was hard to bring them into focus. I wished he had not mentioned Nimble.
Eventually I muttered: ‘If my son has any sense, he’ll be on the far side of the mountains by nightfall. He’ll never know me.’
‘Maybe he’ll be back, some day.’
I shook my head furiously, to clear it. ‘Anybody would think I had a choice!’
‘You could run away. It’s One Death – you could do it today.’
‘Only if I happened to be in the marketplace.’ I knew about the custom he was alluding to, the tiniest chink of an opening that was offered to slaves on Tezcatlipoca’s special day. ‘And then only if I managed to reach the Emperor’s palace without being caught first. Oh, and the rule is I have to tread in a turd on the way, remember?’ I had always suspected this last twist revealed the custom’s true purpose: to give the bystanders a good laugh. What could be funnier than watching a man running through the market with soiled heels, with his cursing master behind him, stumbling in his efforts to avoid stepping in his slave’s footprints? ‘Do you think I’m likely to be let near the marketplace today? It’s a fairy tale, Lion. Nobody ever really escapes that way – not unless he’s more trouble than he’s worth and his master lets him go just to spare himself the expense of feeding him.’
‘Buy your freedom.’
I laughed out loud. Startled faces turned towards me, and even the piercing cries of the girls still squabbling behind us dried up, as if they had realized that their audience’s attention had wandered.
‘Buy my freedom?’ I hissed, abruptly feeling the need to be a little bit discreet. ‘You must be joking! With what?’
Lion looked ruefully down at the tattered remains of his cloak. ‘I’m still the Guardian of the Waterfront, even if I don’t look like it! What did old Black Feathers pay you for your liberty – twenty cloaks? I can double that. I can offer more if it isn’t enough.’
‘And how would I pay you back?’
His answer caught me unawares. He said nothing. Instead, he lunged at me with both arms outstretched and his palms, held out flat in front of him, slammed into my chest with all of a hefty, muscular warrior’s substantial weight behind them.
I was a pace or two from the edge of the causeway, with my back to the water. With a shout of alarm, I staggered back under the force of the blow until there was nothing under my heels but empty space. For a moment my arms whirled frantically as I tried to keep my balance, and then I fell, breaking the surface with so much force that the breath burst from my lungs as a glistening cloud of bubbles.
By the time my head was in the air again, with water streaming from my mouth and nose, I had got the joke. I gathered he had explained it to the bystanders, judging by the laughter that greeted my reappearance.
‘Happy birthday!’ he cried.
‘Very funny,’ I gasped, as my fingers sought a purchase among the rough stones lining the causeway’s side. ‘It would be funnier still if you’d help me up!’
‘Going Through the Water’, we called it: the traditional ducking your friends and family would give you on your name-day. ‘I suppose I’m supposed to provide you with a feast,’ I muttered, as I scrambled back on to the road. ‘Sorry, Lion, but you’re out of luck there!’
‘All right,’ he replied mildly, ‘I’ll let you off. But as for paying me back – I’m offering you the chance to buy your freedom as a present, you idiot!’
For a moment I felt light headed with relief.
I had a day ahead of me when I could pretend to be my own man; but that was only because I belonged to Tezcatlipoca, and on his day, that one day in every two hundred and sixty, nobody dared lay a finger on a slave. Tomorrow, I would be returned to my duties, and the first of them would be to hunt down my own son.
Yet my brother was saying that this need not happen. I could be free every day of my life. I could be free of old Black Feathers’s arbitrary and often murderous will, with a new beginning that somehow cancelled all the shame and misery I had known since the day I left the Priest House. The prospect was like the best sacred wine I had ever tasted: it made me feel almost giddy but still sharp, and even as I was about to embrace it – as I was about to embrace my brother, for the first time since we were children – I saw the fatal flaw in the scheme.
‘Forget it,’ I said brusquely, forging ahead into the crowd.
‘Forget it?’ For a moment Lion could only stand still, echoing my words incredulously. Then he dashed after me, rudely shouldering aside a couple of men who had strayed into his path. ‘What do you mean, forget it? Are you mad? Don’t be so stubborn, Yaotl. Listen to me!’
I kept looking for gaps between the broad backs blocking the way ahead – anything rather than meet my brother’s confused, anxious, angry eyes.
‘I’m not being stubborn, brother,’ I said at last. ‘It’s Lord Feathered in Black we’re talking about – the Chief Minister. You could offer him twenty times my worth and it wouldn’t matter. He’s the second-richest man in the World. He doesn’t need your money, or anyone else’s. If he keeps me on, it’s because he still has a use for me – and the moment he doesn’t I’m dead, and nothing you can offer will make the slightest difference.’
For a moment Lion looked as hurt as if I had struck him. Then the streak of bloody-mindedness that was possibly the only trait we had in common took over, and I saw his face freeze into an impassive mask.
‘If that is how you feel, Yaotl,’ he said stiffly, ‘then all I can say is, I hope you enjoy your holiday!’
2
Lord Feathered in Black had a splendid palace near the centre of the city, within easy reach of the Heart of the World, the sacred precinct, around whose temples and towering pyramids much of the business of our lives revolved. Also nearby was the still more magnificent palace of my master’s cousin: the Emperor Montezuma the Younger.
I returned to my master’s house feeling footsore and numb. After a sleepless and violent night followed by a long walk and a quarrel with my brother, I found it hard to think about anything other than the urge to find my own room, shed the clothes I had worn all night in favour of my old cloak, curl up on my reed mat, pull the cloak over my head and fall asleep.
Sleep was long in coming, however. I could not stop dwelling on the task my master had set for me, and my brother’s startling offer.
The law was kind to slaves, but my master had shown more than once that he was too strong for the law to bind him. I might be allowed to rest today, but tomorrow he was going to make me look for my son, and if I displeased the old man – if, say, the boy was allowed to get away again – then he would make sure I regretted it. He could find a way of disposing of me if he wanted, I was confident of that.
The prospect of being free of all these fears once and for all was tantalizing, and it kept me awake like an itch I could not reach. It was all the more maddening because, had I belonged to almost anyone else, my brother’s scheme would have worked. But I knew my master: if Lion approached him, old Black Feathers would just laugh in his face.
I lay shivering under my cloak, although it was not a particularly cold day, and was still wondering when sleep would come and chase my fears away when the steward shook me awake.
‘Yaotl!’
Something was amiss.
It was dark in my room; with the wicker screen that covered the doorway pushed aside it was not quite pitch black, but the pallid grey light of evening falling on my floor told me I must have slept what had remained of the afternoon away. That was not what had confused me, though.
‘Yaotl!’
I could hear drums. From somewhere close by came the sharp, shrill call of the two-tone drum and under it the massive, insistent beat of the ground drum. I could hear flutes as well, and the wail of a trumpet, but it was the drums whose voices I fixed on, as they seemed to reverb
erate through the stucco floor under me, making my sleeping-mat shake in time with their rhythm.
No, it was not the drums either. I was used to the drumming. It must mark a ceremony of some kind, an offering to a god: I would be able to work out which god when I woke up and remembered what day it was.
‘Yaotl! Wake up!’
There was something wrong with the voice. I knew it from somewhere: a rough growl made hoarse by years of shouting at people, but its tone was all wrong. It sounded polite, almost deferential, and seemed even more odd when I realized that the shaking was not the drums after all, but the speaker’s hand gently pushing at my shoulder, as though he were trying to wake me up but was afraid of succeeding.
It all fell into place when I heard his next words. They were muffled, as if he were speaking into his hand, not wanting to be heard.
‘Come on, wake up, you lousy piece of shit! On any other day I’d be kicking your worthless head in!’
Then I remembered what day it was and what the music was for. I nearly laughed out loud. I stopped myself, though, and made do with sitting up as gracefully as I could, gathering my short cloak around my shoulders in what I hoped was a lordly manner.
‘What do you want, Huitzic?’ I asked coolly.
My master’s steward snatched his hand away as if burned. He stepped back hastily, catching the hem of his long three-captive warrior’s cloak with his heel as he did so, and all but fell over on his backside.
Huitztic: his name meant something very close to ‘Prick’, which was exactly how I thought of him.
