Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  I had been too caught up with putting one foot in front of the other to take much notice of the countryside, but now I saw that we were leaving the open fields. Just ahead of us the road was flanked by a long, low wall. Plum trees reached over it with naked, frost-stripped boughs. I glimpsed a house deep within the orchard, its whitewashed walls gleaming behind the dark cage-work of the branches.

  Taller trees reared up beyond the orchard, the green of cypress and fir catching the sunlight and flashing brilliantly among the bare black skeletons of oak and ash. Farther away still, towering over the tallest of the trees, were the squared-off humps of Tlacopan’s pyramids.

  ‘We’ve made good time, you know,’ I told the captain. ‘It won’t hurt to rest a while.’

  He spared a glance for the steward, who had now made it on to his hands and knees, although the sound of his breathing reminded me of an angry rattlesnake. ‘And what then?’

  ‘You could send me on ahead,’ I suggested hopefully. By now, I thought, when the heat of the afternoon was over, the townspeople would have come out of their houses and the place would be bustling again. There would not be much of a crowd compared with the vast numbers that filled Mexico’s sacred precincts during a festival, but there should still be plenty of opportunities for an undistinguished-looking slave to slip quietly out of sight.

  The captain snorted derisively. ‘No chance! You think you’re leaving me in charge of this?’ His foot twitched in the steward’s direction again. ‘No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Fox and I will go on ahead. We’ll start making some discreet enquiries in the marketplace.’ The mobile half of his face grinned, showing a broken row of blackened teeth. Plainly he was looking forward to scaring information out of Tepanecs. I found this strangely reassuring: this man would have no trouble persuading people to talk, but getting them to tell the truth would be entirely beyond him.

  ‘You three will follow us. We’ll meet up in the sacred precinct, under that temple.’ He gestured with his ugly sword towards the tall pyramid beyond the trees. ‘Be there before nightfall.’ Then, waving the weapon in my direction, he added softly: ‘I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you’re not!’

  Handy and I watched the two warriors as they trotted away to bring terror and uproar to Tlacopan.

  The big commoner let out a long sigh. ‘It’s a relief to get rid of those two, isn’t it? If that captain of theirs had made us run any further I’d be in the same state as him!’

  We both glanced behind us, towards where the steward was slowly getting to his feet.

  ‘He probably runs twice around the lake before dawn,’ I said, with a nod towards the cloud of dust the warriors had kicked up. ‘Now, I don’t know about you, Handy, but I think I’m getting too old for this sort of sport! Why don’t we rest here for a while and then see if the Tepanecs can find us something to eat?’

  I gathered from the smile that began to form on Handy’s face that he had no more enthusiasm for what we were up to than I did. ‘Now there’s an idea,’ he replied. ‘Come to think of it, one of my brothers-in-law was here once, and he told me there was an old woman in the corner of the marketplace who sold the best gophers in chilli sauce he’d ever tasted.’

  The hopeful look on his face froze at the sound of the steward’s voice.

  ‘Rest? Eat? What are you two talking about?’

  The Prick was breathing heavily and his face was still dark, but he was on his feet and no longer the wreck of a man the Otomi captain had been kicking a little while earlier. As he glowered impatiently at us both I realized that he must have feigned his exhaustion, at least in part. His was not the sort of pride that would flinch at a childish trick like that. He had felt humiliated and belittled by the Otomi, but had been prepared to suffer a little more abuse just to get rid of him. Now his tormentor was gone, and he was his own man again, and free to show it in the only way he knew how.

  ‘Thought you were going to bunk off, did you, Yaotl? Thought you’d have a nice, quiet afternoon, taking your ease in the shade of the fruit trees before a gentle stroll into Tlacopan and maybe a light snack to round off the day? Is that what you thought?’ He took two steps towards me and thrust his face close to mine. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see his fists balling, as if he was about to hit me, although they remained at his sides, no doubt because Handy was there. The commoner was not my master’s possession, and if he chose to intervene the steward could not be sure of winning either the fight or the court case that would follow.

  ‘We’ll see what Lord Feathered in Black has to say about your idea of obedience later,’ the steward crooned, ‘but first I think we’d better make a start, hadn’t we? Why don’t we go to the market, like your friend here said, and try asking a few questions?’

  I hung my head submissively. ‘All right,’ I mumbled, ‘you’re in charge.’

  I comforted myself by reflecting that the steward had no more chance than the Otomies of getting a useful answer out of anyone here. On the other hand, I thought gloomily, as I trudged after him along the road leading into the centre of the town, I still had no idea how I was going to get away.

  Get away I must, though. As I walked, my son’s knife bounced against my hip, reminding me that I had urgent business elsewhere.

  To an Aztec born and raised in Mexico, Tlacopan was a strange place.

  Mexico was a city of whitewashed adobe houses and courtyards, more than anyone had ever been able to count, crammed together so tightly that from the outside it was hard to tell one from another, and almost every one of them was served by a canal. We spent so much of our lives on the water that some of our children learned to paddle a canoe before they could walk. Apart from the great, broad avenues that spread out from the Heart of the World in each of the Four Directions, most of our roads were narrow paths. Our fields lay on the outskirts of the city, on artificial islands made of mud dredged from the bottom of the lake, and they throbbed with activity all year round because their permanently damp soil could bear fruit even at the height of the dry season.

  How different were the towns on the mainland! We found ourselves sauntering along wide, dusty streets, between expansive plots that would be full of maize, amaranth, beans, squash, sage or chillies by the end of summer but which now lay largely empty. In the middle of each plot stood a house, its walls stouter than we were used to, since the people here had no bridges they could pull up in the event of an attack.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ Handy wrinkled his nose. ‘Don’t they empty their privies around here?’

  ‘What do you expect?’ the steward rasped. ‘Barbarian scum!’

  ‘They can’t help it,’ I said indulgently. ‘They don’t have boats to take it away, like us. They have to spread it straight on to the fields or carry it all the way down to the lake.’

  The steward made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat.

  I found myself looking anxiously at the few people we passed, and then at my companions, in case the steward’s obvious contempt for the locals somehow showed. I need not have worried, however, since after a day wandering around in the marshes, we looked less like the all-conquering masters of the One World than a little party of bedraggled peasants.

  ‘I suppose the market must be near the sacred precinct,’ the steward said. ‘So we’ll make for that pyramid.’ He gestured towards the tallest building in Tlacopan, which now reared up above the trees in front of us. We would be in its shadow soon.

  ‘And what then?’ Handy asked.

  ‘We do what we were told, of course – ask around, find out if the man and boy have been seen. It wouldn’t hurt to get to them before the Otomi does!’

  Handy looked enquiringly at me. I returned his gaze impassively. So far as I knew my son had never been near Tlacopan. If the steward wanted to waste his time searching for him here, that was fine by me.

  ‘Let’s go, then,’ I said. ‘We might even find your old woman and her gophers on the way!’

  The p
yramid loomed ever taller as we approached it. Soon we found ourselves looking up at it between the branches of the trees around us, its bulk like a great shadow thrown across half the sky, blotting out the Sun.

  ‘Nearly there,’ said Handy to no one in particular. ‘Where’s the royal palace, though? I thought that faced the sacred precinct.’

  ‘You’re looking at it, I think,’ I told him. ‘They don’t build on the sort of scale we’re used to here.’

  In front of us stood a low wall with a building beyond it. It was the sort of house a well-to-do family from Tenochtitlan or Tlatelolco might have lived in, a long, single-storey affair with a low thatched roof. It sprawled over more ground than the houses we were used to but to our eyes it had little else to distinguish it. Homely sounds came from behind the walls: women’s voices, children chanting a nursery rhyme, the repetitive clacking of weavers using back-strap looms.

  ‘What do you expect?’ I asked, as Handy and the steward gaped. ‘We take the spoils of war and the king in there, he gets whatever Montezuma thinks he can spare him. Tlacopan is supposed to get a fifth of the proceeds of the Empire, but I bet if you looked in a tribute warehouse here you’d find it was half empty.’

  ‘So they probably don’t like us very much,’ muttered the steward. ‘So what? Who does? Where’s the marketplace?’

  ‘Follow the road round the corner of the wall,’ I suggested. ‘Everybody seems to be coming from that direction. I suppose trading’s over for the day.’ I looked quickly up at the sky and frowned. ‘Funny, it’s early yet.’

  ‘They’re not going home,’ Handy said. ‘They’re running away from something!’

  Perhaps forty people were coming along the road straight towards us. They were women, their brightly patterned skirts bunched in their hands as their knees flashed beneath their hems, their blouses flapping like paper streamers in the wind, and children, naked under their billowing cloaks, and a few men wearing only breechcloths, their untrimmed hair streaming wildly behind them.

  ‘Off the road!’ I snapped. ‘They’ll mow us down!’

  We darted out of the way just in time to let the little group surge past. None of them spared us a glance.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked the steward.

  ‘Here come some more,’ Handy said. ‘Why don’t you stop one and ask?’

  The steward looked at us both indecisively, as a second wave of fugitives bore down on us. Then, with a sudden access of courage, he darted into the streaming crowd and hauled out the smallest child he could find.

  ‘You!’ he barked at the kicking, squealing infant. ‘What’s all this? What are you running from?’

  ‘Aztecs!’

  The cry of alarm seemed to convulse the crowd. It recoiled as one person, shrinking away from us like a coyote threatened with a blazing torch. One woman alone threw herself at the steward, screaming abuse and slapping his face so hard that he staggered back, before she snatched the child and ran on.

  ‘Funny.’ Handy stared after them while the steward, clearly dumbfounded, rubbed his cheek. ‘They all ran when they heard your voice. It must have been your accent, but I didn’t know we were that frightening!’

  ‘We’re not,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Something’s happening up ahead.’

  I looked around me. The wall of the little palace hid the sacred precinct and the marketplace from view, and gave no clue as to what might be going on beyond it. The voices we had heard a few moments before were silent, and I imagined the women, hearing the commotion outside, abandoning their work to snatch up the children and usher them hastily indoors.

  Nearby grew a small silk cotton tree: a native of the hot lands in the South, no doubt planted here as an ornament and to shade the courtyard on the far side of the wall. I glanced speculatively up at its widespread branches. If I could climb high enough, I thought, I might be able to see what had stirred the townsfolk up without having to get too close to it.

  I stripped off my cloak and passed it to Handy. ‘Give me a leg up.’

  The boughs creaked and bowed alarmingly under my weight, making me thankful for my slight build and the meagre diet that kept me from accumulating much in the way of fat. I climbed as high as I thought I could, and perched there uncomfortably while I surveyed the ground around me.

  ‘Well?’ the steward demanded. ‘What can you see?’

  ‘I can see the marketplace. The sacred precinct is just beyond it. All the traders’ merchandise is still laid out on mats on the ground, but there’s hardly anyone about. Strange. All the people there are standing around in one corner. There’s a little crowd there – all men. Some of them are armed but they’re not doing anything. That’s where the trouble is, in the middle of the crowd.’

  ‘What trouble?’

  ‘I can’t see.’

  Then I caught it: a telltale flash of green, vivid against the brown flesh colour of the men surrounding it. The spectators had formed a ring around two figures in their midst. I knew one of them at once, even though it was too far away to see his face. ‘It’s the captain! And he looks as if he’s caught someone!’

  Then, as the implications of what I was seeing dawned on me, I cried out, unthinkingly: ‘But that’s impossible! The boy can’t have come here, he just can’t …’

  Fortunately neither Handy nor the steward heard me. A new arrival had distracted them.

  ‘There you are! What’s the slave doing up in that tree?’

  I looked down to see Fox’s face staring up at me.

  ‘He’s watching your captain,’ replied Handy.

  ‘Well, he can come down now,’ Fox said, ‘because we’ve got the bastards!’

  The steward let out a whoop of joy, of relief at the thought that the search was over and he could go home.

  My head swam. Despair overwhelmed me, making me feel dizzy and sick and short of breath, as if my lungs suddenly saw no point in continuing to work.

  Since we had in reality been pursuing one person, not two, there could be no doubt who the warriors had laid hands on. Who else could it be but Nimble?

  ‘You stupid boy,’ I groaned softly. ‘Why did you have to come here? Why here, of all places?’

  Starting down the tree, I groped blindly for a handhold, missed and fell.

  Branches lashed my back, arms and legs as I crashed to the ground, but they broke my fall, so that instead of killing myself I ended up in a bruised, shaken, dusty heap at the foot of the tree, with the steward’s and Fox’s laughter ringing in my ears.

  ‘Don’t just lie there, you lazy turd! Get up!’

  I took no notice of the steward. I could not bear to look at his grinning, gloating face. It would not make much difference to my fate whether I obeyed him now or not, so I kept my eyes on the earth, shaded and shielded by my forearm.

  ‘You didn’t fall that far!’

  Someone touched me. I flinched, expecting a blow, but the touch was gentler than that: a hand under my shoulder, making as if to lift me off the ground.

  ‘Come on, Yaotl.’ Handy’s voice growled in my ear. ‘We’ve got to go. Here’s your cloak.’

  I wanted to shrug him off, tell him to leave me alone, but then I heard the steward snarling again.

  ‘How sweet,’ he sneered. ‘There’s no coming between you two, is there?’

  I felt the commoner’s grip on my shoulder tighten. He was about to lose his temper, which would do him no good at all. I forced myself to remember that he did not have to help me and that if he were just to stand by and watch the steward and Fox kick me to death he might save himself a deal of trouble.

  I hauled myself to my feet, accepted my cloak and glowered at the steward.

  Handy asked the question I could not bear to voice.

  ‘So which one did you get, then?’

  I shut my eyes to stop the tears from flowing. I would have clapped my hands over my ears too, if I could have done it without it being obvious.

  ‘The older one. No sign of the boy yet.’

/>   ‘What?’

  My eyes sprang open. I stared at Fox, open mouthed but mute because I could not trust myself to speak.

  My son was not the man at the centre of that crowd, being dragged about by the green-suited warrior. I could only thank the gods for that, and wonder who the captain’s victim really was.

  ‘But … but …’ Handy stammered.

  ‘Come and see,’ Fox cried, turning towards the marketplace. ‘I think the captain’s enjoying himself!’

  As he and the steward set off, I could see Handy’s mouth working and realized he was about to blurt something out that we would both regret. I moved swiftly to one side and planted a foot firmly on top of one of his, converting his next words into a muffled oath.

  ‘Quiet!’ I hissed. ‘I need to think.’ Aloud I said: ‘How did you catch him?’

  ‘Oh, easy,’ Fox called out over his shoulder. ‘The captain’s good at this sort of thing. It’s just like collecting tribute from barbarians, really. You just march into the middle of the marketplace, knock over one or two pitches to get their attention – starting with the potters is best, it makes a good noise, though breaking up a few turkey pens works just as well – and tell everybody exactly what you’re looking for. Once they saw the captain’s costume they couldn’t move fast enough!’ He laughed. ‘What was really funny was how apologetic they were that they couldn’t bring us both of them. Someone produced this pathetic specimen and told us he was the only runaway Aztec they’d seen. I think the captain’s trying to make him tell us where the boy is now.’

  We rounded the corner and were at the edge of the almost empty marketplace. I stared across the rows of pitches, the straw mats strewn with merchandise, obviously hastily abandoned, judging by the refuse that lay about them: small change in the form of open bags of cocoa beans, half-eaten tortillas with a couple of bewildered-looking turkeys pecking at them, a water-seller’s gourd spilling its contents on to the dusty floor. In the far corner stood the crowd: the bravest of the local youths, or at least the keenest to show off, no doubt unable to tear themselves away from the spectacle of one Aztec torturing another. Everybody with any sense had run away as soon as they thought the warriors had found what they wanted.