by Simon Levack
‘Come on!’ cried the steward. ‘We’ll miss the fun!’
He trotted forward, leaving the rest of us behind in his eagerness to watch another man suffering. I wondered whether he was hoping to pick up some tips.
Then I forgot his state of mind as an appalling thought occurred to me.
The captain and his victim were hidden from me by the backs of their spectators and at this distance I could only just hear the familiar bark of the Otomi’s battle-trained voice, but I suddenly knew who his victim was.
What Aztec had run away two nights before, presumably to seek shelter on the western side of the lake?
It could only be my master’s boatman, the one who had abandoned the Chief Minister and his canoe two nights before. He must have gone to ground in the middle of the largest nearby town – just where I had told the warriors to search.
‘The idiot,’ I muttered. ‘Why didn’t he keep running?’
How long did I have, I wondered, before the captain beat the truth out of him? How long before he learned that I had laid a false trail?
An unnaturally high-pitched wail from within the crowd seemed to be my answer.
The steward quickened his pace. I could almost hear him salivating. Fox was close behind him. Soon they were pushing their way into the crowd, elbowing aside young men whose backs parted meekly before them while their eyes remained glued to the fascinating spectacle in their midst. Handy and I, too, found ourselves drawn towards the horror at the centre of the circle of men. We two stopped short of the clear space around the captain, keeping close to the edge of the crowd of his spectators, although Fox and the steward were soon standing next to him, looking down admiringly at his handiwork.
I noticed the blood before I saw the man.
The earth in front of me was covered in it. It lay in streaks and dapples and little puddles, as if jerked out of its victim a little at a time. Here and there among the dark red spots and splashes lay tiny fragments of something hard and white that I struggled to identify until I turned my eyes towards the boatman.
If I had not already worked out who the pathetic figure lying with his legs drawn up to his chest and shivering at the captain’s feet was, I would not have recognized him. He had turned his face upward, perhaps in a vain appeal for mercy, but it did not look like his face any more. It was a mask of congealing blood with a hideous, jagged hole at its centre, for the white fragments that lay on the ground around him were pieces of his teeth.
Before he had started working on the man’s mouth the captain had obviously lavished attention on the rest of his face, as the boatman’s nose was broken, his ears were shapeless rags and the flesh around his eyes was a mass of pulp, but it was the teeth which were the worst. He was using a small flint knife, no doubt looted from a nearby stall, to chip away at them, reducing them one by one to jagged, bloody stumps.
‘Now,’ he said conversationally, ‘let’s try again. I haven’t cut your ears off yet, so I know you can hear me. Where’s the boy hiding?’
‘Yaotl, I don’t like this.’ Handy’s voice rumbled close to my ear.
‘Yaotl?’ The captain caught my name and looked up. ‘Good, you caught up with us! You were right, you see? You led us right there. Now I was just showing these Tepanecs how we Aztecs treat people who let us down – do you want to join in?’
I felt the crowd around me shuffle uneasily, and suddenly there was a little space around me and Handy, as if the men nearest to us had realized who we were and decided not to stay too close.
The shattered face turned towards me. The eyes, the only part of it that seemed to have been left mostly intact, rolled in my direction. A movement of the hand holding the captain’s flint knife distracted them for a moment, but they were soon back, thin, pale ellipses fixed unwaveringly on me. The boatman let out a small keening sound, as if he were trying to say something. I did not know whether he was speaking to me or about me but he plainly knew who I was, and if I did not think of a way of preventing him from telling the captain, I was likely to feel the edge of that bloody little knife myself.
The steward unwittingly saved me.
‘Let me!’ he cried, almost dancing across the space in the middle of the crowd in his eagerness to join in. ‘We’ll show these Tepanec scum what we’re made of!’
The spectators did not like that. I heard muttering and shuffling feet.
The captain glared at the steward. ‘Save your breath,’ he sneered, gesturing angrily with the knife. A drop of blood fell on the steward’s arm. ‘You might need it if you have to run anywhere!’
The Prick looked down at the splash of blood, dark against his skin. He was suddenly very still.
Somebody in the little group of men around me made a low noise at the back of his throat. Fox, who had been standing next to the captain and looking uncertainly from him to his victim to the steward, gave a nervous cough. He could see the spectators getting more and more restive. Whatever they might think about Aztecs, seeing us quarrelling with each other would not make them any more biddable.
‘You can slip away, can’t you?’ I muttered to Handy, out of the corner of my mouth.
‘Why? What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to start a riot. I want you to get a message to my brother. Get him back here with a squad of warriors.’
He glanced over his shoulder, considering the distance to the shore of the lake. ‘If I can get to the causeway, I can be back in the city by nightfall,’ he said, ‘but I still don’t understand …’
‘Go on, then!’ I urged him. ‘There’s no time to lose!’
He gave the pitiful creature on the ground one lingering glance, just as the captain took a step towards it and raised his knife again. Then Handy reached out, slapped me once on the arm, and ran.
‘Where’s he going?’ snapped Fox.
‘Thought he saw something,’ I said. ‘Might have been the boy. He’ll be back in a moment.’
‘Ah!’ The captain bent towards his victim. ‘Did you hear that? Now we can really start to have some fun!’
Then he drove the knife one more time into the already ruined mouth. The boatman let out a bubbling scream and writhed and jerked like a stranded fish.
‘How did this happen?’ I asked quietly.
Standing next to me was a young man. His head was shaved, and I guessed that meant that he had lost the tuft of hair that he would have borne throughout his years at the House of Youth, or wherever boys from Tlacopan did their training. So he had been to war and taken a captive, but judging by his nervousness and the way his eyes followed the captain, constantly flicking from the man’s villainous face to the flint knife and back again, he was no seasoned veteran.
‘Someone told me they found the man hiding in a granary,’ he said. ‘They could tell he was an Aztec, of course, so they had him locked up in the palace and sent a messenger to Mexico. Then the Otomi came. He said the Aztec Chief Minister had sent him. He ordered us to hand over any Aztec runaways to him, so we brought the man out.’
‘And you let him get away with it?’ I said, raising my voice provocatively.
I glanced quickly at the men in the middle of the crowd but they were concentrating on the boatman, who was coughing and spitting blood and fragments of teeth out on the ground. How long did I have before he started to speak?
‘What kind of warriors do you have here, anyway? Two men start terrorizing your women and children and breaking up your marketplace, and you just do what they tell you? Didn’t anyone think to stop them, or ask them why they were doing this?’
Fox looked up, frowning, and took a step towards his captain, as if he wanted to warn him of something. He must have heard me, I thought desperately, but then the boatman reached up to grab the hem of the captain’s cloak, tugging at it as if he were trying to haul himself upright, and I realized that he was trying to speak as well and that whatever time I had was fast running out.
‘Call yourselves men?’ I cried out at last, letting
as many of the crowd as possible hear the scorn and incredulity in my voice, and no longer caring whether or not the captain, Fox and the steward realized what I was up to. ‘Why, it’s no wonder we Aztecs rule the whole World!’
‘No wonder at all, when your Emperor keeps our King as a hostage in his palace and all our seasoned warriors are sent abroad while yours squat at home with nothing to do except drink chocolate and torture their neighbours!’
I turned, as did the men around me, to look at the speaker.
He was a priest. I could tell that immediately, by looking at his face, which was stained black with soot, streaked with blood drawn from his earlobes, and framed by a mass of lank, tangled hair. He wore a long robe, of cotton rather than maguey fibre, and the tobacco pouch that hung from his neck was no mere shapeless bag but a miniature jaguar, complete with jaws, four paws and a tail, exquisitely fashioned from real ocelot skin. He must, I realized, be a man of some standing. Perhaps he was from the city’s chief temple. I looked up at the summit of the pyramid that loomed over the sacred precinct and the marketplace and understood: he had been standing up there, watching the captain’s and Fox’s activities, and having seen the disturbance in the marketplace and realized that nothing was being done to quell it, he had come down to take a hand.
I looked at him and laughed deliberately. I was still trying to sound scornful; moreover I wanted to keep the relief out of my voice.
‘Tell me, O Wise One,’ I said sarcastically, ‘just how many Tepanecs does it take to subdue two Aztecs, then?’
‘Here … !’ One of the young men next to me put a hand on my arm, warning me to show more respect, but the priest quelled us both with a look.
‘One,’ he assured me, before stepping through the crowd into the space at its centre.
He walked straight up to the captain. The Otomi glared at him with his sole eye.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’ demanded the priest.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘A servant of Tezcatlipoca.’
The captain’s answer was to stoop briefly to pick up his cruel-looking sword and then bring himself up to his full height, with the weapon raised so that its blades flashed in the evening sunlight.
‘A servant of Tezcatlipoca, eh? Well, the warriors of Huitzilopochtli tell you to mind your own business!’ he roared, shoving the priest in the chest with his free hand.
It was not a hard blow, merely a warning. The Tepanec stumbled back but kept his balance. Nonetheless, it was too much for the spectators. Men surged forward, baying and growling. Elbows and knees barged me aside, almost knocking me over as the youths around me, their pride wounded by my taunts, rushed in to defend their priest.
For a moment there was so much shouting and scuffling that I could not work out what was going on. I heard hoarse cries, the thump and slap of feet and fists striking flesh and the sharper sound they made upon bone, and yelps of pain. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the flash of sunlight on the blades of the captain’s sword. A jet of red liquid shot through the air, droplets falling hot on my cheeks, and someone squealed in pain.
After that there came a long, despairing wail, a cry of sheer terror in a voice that reminded me of my master’s steward’s. Then, gradually, all became quiet again.
Standing on tiptoe, staring between heads and over hunched, tense shoulders, I was able to make out just enough to establish what had happened.
The Otomi had the priest by the throat. He seemed to have forgotten the boatman, at least for now. He was not holding his sword: someone must have managed to wrench it from his grasp.
Fox stood with his back pressed against his captain’s. If they were not a pair, they were prepared to fight as one now, defending each other to the death and taking as many of the enemy with them as they could. There was still a small space around them, no man daring to come within arm’s length.
The steward was easier to see because three of the Tepanecs were holding him up like a trophy. His eyes and mouth were wide open with terror.
‘Well?’ The captain’s voice was tense but steady. He jerked his terrible head towards the steward. ‘Never mind him. He’s nothing. Which of you is going to be first? You’ll have this priest’s blood on your hands!’
A kind of shudder went through the crowd, but nobody moved.
Then the priest spoke, his voice hoarse through being forced out past the Otomi’s almost lethal grip.
‘Nothing lives for ever on Earth,’ he gasped. ‘You can kill me, and my ashes will be buried with a dog to guide me through the Nine Hells, and I’ll find my resting place in the Land of the Dead. But then you’ll just be torn to pieces, and the pieces dumped outside the city like garbage, for the vultures and coyotes to pick over. You’ll never rest, and your families will never be able to stop mourning you.’
The captain had no answer to that that I heard. I did not see the grip on the priest’s throat slacken, but I did not see any of the men around him move either.
I was not looking at them any more. Before the priest had finished speaking, I was running as fast as I could towards the shore of the lake and the causeway that would take me back to the city.
4
It was dark by the time I reached Pochtlan. I ran much of the way. In my anxiety to put as much distance between myself and the Otomies I did not stop even to urinate. When I finally stumbled, gasping, to a halt, beside the canal that skirted the merchants’ parish, I was desperate.
I might simply have used the canal, but Aztec modesty prevented me. For a moment I hesitated, shifting my weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, until I saw the solution. A wooden bridge spanned the waterway and at the far end of the bridge, in the featherworkers’ parish of Amantlan, stood a wicker shelter.
I trotted towards it. Others might have hesitated, mindful of tales of demons that caught men during night-time trips to the latrines, hideous female dwarfs whose appearance heralded sickness and death, but my need was urgent enough to overcome such fears.
The frost had made the bridge’s planks slippery and treacherous, forcing me to take short, shuffling steps across it, with my eyes fixed on my feet.
The bridge shook. A tremor ran up both my calves and told me I was not alone. I looked up and the next moment was fighting to keep my footing as my legs shot out from under me.
A god glared silently at me from the far end of the bridge.
I cried out in shock and dread. Even while the rational part of my mind was telling me that what I saw was easy to explain, something older was shouting it down: the terror I had known as a little child, staring up at the fearsome idols in their niches in my parents’ house, and the lore drilled into me in the House of Tears, when I had learned the harsh ways of the gods while sacrificial blood streamed from my tongue and earlobes and shins and penis.
Smoke or steam wreathed the god’s face. Glittering scales fell one over another across his skin. Long, blue-green plumes, each as stiff and sharp as a spear-point, crowned his headdress and towered over his conical fur cap. His eyes were perfect black circles, whose gaze seemed to pass over and through me as indifferently as if I were a thing so insignificant as to have no meaning in his world. Savage fangs, curved like the young Moon, guarded his yawning, ravenous mouth. There was no tongue but I thought I saw something moving inside that dark maw, something that threatened to uncoil and snap out at me with the speed of a lash.
He came towards me through a cloud that thickened and swirled as he spoke.
‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ he cried. His voice was muffled, as though coming from inside a cave.
My legs finally gave way and I toppled backward, crashing on to the hard wood with a shout of pain and fear. The bridge bucked under me. For a moment I lay staring straight up at the stars, with my arms spread out and my palms flat on the floor.
Whimpering with fright, I struggled to get to my feet, falling backward twice before my hands and heels got any sort of a purchase on the slippery w
ood. I sat bolt upright and stared wide eyed at the empty bridge ahead of me and the entirely empty road beyond it.
I blinked several times to clear my vision.
There was nothing to see.
I hauled myself to my feet, slipping over more than once, and half ran, half slid to the end of the bridge, careless of the fact that a false step could send me tumbling into the canal’s icy water. I staggered on to dry land.
The waters of the canal, hidden from view by its high banks, lapped loudly. I wondered at the splashing sound for a moment, as there was no wind and nothing to disturb the water’s surface, but then I thought that in the empty silence of the night all noises would be magnified, and concentrated on what I could see.
I was in Amantlan now. The featherworkers’ homes stood in a single uninterrupted row in front of me. None showed any sign of wakefulness and there were no dark passageways between them that a man or a god could be hiding in.
I let out a long breath and watched it cloud the air in front of me and slowly disperse.
‘Vanished into thin air,’ I grunted. I felt a renewed jab of fear. I had no difficulty recognizing what I had seen. No Aztec could have mistaken it.
‘Nonsense,’ I told myself. ‘He must be around here somewhere. He’s hiding, that’s all. If I wait long enough I’ll see the bastard.’
But it sounded hollow. However hard I tried, I could not convince myself that I had not seen what others had seen: the Feathered Serpent, the Precious Twin, the Lord of the Wind.
‘Quetzalcoatl?’ I whispered. ‘Why?’
If the god of wisdom, the god who had created mankind by mixing his own blood with ground-up bones he had stolen from the Lord of the Underworld, was abroad in the city, what could this mean? The god bore the same name as the last king of the Toltecs, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, our own Emperor Montezuma’s predecessor. It had long been rumoured that the Toltec king had never died, but had fled his realm vowing one day to return and reclaim what was his. Did what I had just seen somehow portend the end of Montezuma’s reign? If it did, what would come after it?
