by Simon Levack
‘What do you want?’ he demanded, adding, before I had time to answer, ‘I hear you know something about my daughter and my son-in-law. Tell me about it!’
I eyed his pets suspiciously, having always thought myself that the only place for dogs was in a nice hot bubbling stew with beans and chillies. ‘I went to see Skinny and his wife today …’
Angry interrupted me with a loud snort.
‘They told me you weren’t the best of friends.’
‘Did they, now?’ His face darkened. He glanced down at the dogs, as if noticing they were there for the first time.
‘Acamapichtli! Ahuitzotl! Come here!’
As the beasts trotted, whimpering, towards him, he bent down and scooped them up in a fold of his cloak. Then he turned away again, but only for as long as it took to catch the eye of his elderly servant.
‘I’m busy. Look after these two.’ He handed the beasts over with more tenderness than I would have thought him capable of. His servant held them at arm’s length as though he thought they were about to defecate all over him.
‘You must be fond of dogs,’ I observed.
Still looking away, the big man grunted. ‘My wife was. She bought a couple to breed from with the cloaks I gave her when we were married, and got quite successful at it, but for some reason none of hers ever ended up in the pot. Whenever we ate dog it always came from the market. I keep those two you saw for her sake. They’re the last of their line.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘When did you lose her?’
‘Three years ago. It’s none of your business. Tell me about my daughter.’
I told him about my meeting with Skinny and Butterfly, repeating the story I had offered them: that I was Kindly’s slave, sent by the old merchant to retrieve his property ‘They said Marigold and her husband disappeared on the night the costume went missing. Of course, I don’t know that your daughter had anything to do with the theft, but it would help if I could find her. Kindly is very keen to sort this out as quietly as possible.’
‘So you think I’ll help you find my daughter, do you?’
‘Or I could help you find her,’ I said coolly. ‘Skinny and Butterfly said she hadn’t come here. So I thought you might be anxious to know where she was, as well.’
There was a long, dangerous silence while he thought about what I had said. Then, surprisingly, he uttered a harsh, mirthless laugh.
‘I see what you’re about! I must be desperate to find my daughter and that wastrel of a husband of hers, and so if I don’t cooperate with you it’s because I’m hiding her, is that it?’ Suddenly he leaned towards me and showed me just how delicate those long, broad fingers were.
I was caught unawares. I stumbled back. Before I could regain my balance Angry’s thumbs were pressing into my throat, one either side of my neck, and I was fighting for breath and struggling to keep my feet at the same time, while my hands flailed vainly in the air between us.
‘You’re strangling me!’ I gasped.
His face was so close to mine our noses almost touched. ‘So I am,’ he murmured nonchalantly. ‘A little more pressure and I’ll crush your windpipe.’
My knees were trembling and my eyes were straining to get out of their sockets. I tried to cry out but all I could manage was a feeble rattle at the back of my throat. There was a sound in my ears like waves crashing on a rocky beach. I began to feel dizzy.
Then I was on the ground, spluttering, coughing and choking, with one hand clawing at my bruised throat.
I lay groaning and shivering and willing my arms and legs to move so that I could get up and stagger away, out of the featherworker’s sight. When I shook my head to clear it a wave of pain and nausea swept over me. I retched feebly, but nothing came out. I slumped on the hard earth of the courtyard, seeing nothing, but distantly aware that I could still hear Angry talking.
‘No, Axilli, you don’t understand.’
‘But, Uncle, if he can help us find Marigold …’
The other speaker was a boy whose voice was on the verge of breaking. I twisted my neck cautiously until I could see them both.
‘If only you were right!’ the featherworker cried. ‘But he can’t. It’s too dangerous.’
From where I lay Angry and the boy who called him ‘Uncle’ were dark shapes against the bright afternoon sky Axilli, whose name meant ‘Crayfish’, was a slight figure beside his uncle’s bulk. He looked down, as though dejected.
I levered myself upright. ‘Dangerous?’ I said hoarsely. ‘Why? All we want is the costume back. Kindly will even pay for it. No questions asked.’
The big craftsman stared at me. ‘And you think Marigold has it?’
Before I could reply, he had turned his back. I watched him step delicately over a heap of discarded feathers to stand in front of the nearest wall. When he spoke again, his voice was surprisingly soft: so soft that I had to make an effort to hear him.
‘You see all these empty niches and ledges? She took all the idols with her, when they moved to Atecocolecan. She had to have them with her, you see.’
I scrambled unsteadily to my feet. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘My daughter loved the gods, Joker, or whatever your name is. She feared them, but she adored them as well. Do you really think someone like that would steal the raiment of one of them?’
He gently laid one of his enormous hands on a ledge. Then a long, low sound escaped him: something between a sigh and a groan.
‘It’s funny. I used to think they were quaint, while she was here. A nuisance, even. Now I miss them.’ He turned around, but not to face me: his eyes were fixed on the ground at his feet, while his hands hung loosely at his sides, as if he had forgotten what they were for.
‘Marigold is my only child, she’s all I have – can you understand that?’
When his hands moved this time, it was not to encircle my throat, but to cover his eyes and the rush of tears that threatened to flood them. Crayfish was at his side, but all he could do in the face of his uncle’s torment was wring his hands helplessly.
Watching them, I had to force down the memory of what I had felt just that morning, tipping dismembered and desecrated remains out of those stinking jars by the canal.
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I had just the one son myself. He … I think it would help him, if I could find this costume. If it wasn’t your daughter who stole it, maybe it was her husband – can’t we work together?’
He dropped his hands. His glistening eyes widened. He looked at me for a long moment, frowning thoughtfully, as if he were making a decision. Then, gruffly, he asked what I wanted to know.
‘You could start by telling me what it is between you and Skinny’
Angry laughed, a short, harsh sound, such as one of his dogs might have uttered. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘I could,’ I said. ‘I might, except he isn’t here.’
He sighed. ‘We might have been friends, partners, instead of rivals, if it hadn’t been for … well, never mind. Look, I’ll show you something.’ He turned to Crayfish. ‘This is my nephew,’ he said, by way of introduction, before adding, to the boy: ‘Go and fetch me one of the dahlias, will you?’
‘Dahlias?’ I echoed, confused. The last dahlia I had seen had been killed off by frost at the end of autumn. Why would the featherworker want one now, anyway?
When the boy came back, I understood. He was carrying a picture of a flower.
It was a mosaic, made entirely of feathers: red feathers, on a background of black feathers. As Angry handed it to me, I admired the way it captured and reflected the light. The bloom in its centre had been built up in layers, to give it a depth of colour that a real flower could barely have surpassed. If there had been any bees around at this time of year, I thought, they would be swarming over it.
‘See this?’
‘It’s beautiful.’ I imagined a single bloom dropped on the lake, an offering perhaps to Chalchihuitlicue, the goddess who presided over the waters
. I saw this flower drifting about the city at night, on its bed of water as deep and dark as the dense, shimmering black feathers – from a grackle or some other species of crow – and sinking slowly into it as it became waterlogged, until it silently vanished.
The picture was snatched from my grasp and thrown to the floor.
‘“Beautiful!”’ Angry spat the word contemptuously back at me. ‘Of course it’s beautiful! It’s just as beautiful as every other picture of a sodding dahlia that’s come out of this workshop in the last thirty years. And you know why?’ He whirled around, almost turning a full circle as he threw an arm out to encompass his courtyard. ‘Because of Crayfish here and all the rest of my little army. Because everybody does one job, carding cotton, tracing patterns, mixing glue, hardening feathers, whatever, one job, the same, day in, day out, until they get so good at it they never even have to think about what they’re doing. Not a real craftsman among us, but we can turn out anything you want – shirts, skirts, shields, fans, mosaics – anything, as long as it doesn’t have to be unique, original, something none of your friends will ever have seen before.’ He glared at me. He seemed to be daring me to ask the obvious question, and so I did.
‘What if it does?’
‘What if it does what?’
‘Have to be unique, original, or whatever?’
He looked away. He was silent so long that I thought he had not heard me, even though I was standing only a couple of hands’ breadths from him, but then I caught his almost inaudible reply.
‘Then you go to Skinny, of course.’
He stood with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed, as motionless as a tree stump, and his eyes were pale slivers against the dark flesh of his face. He was a larger man than I was in every way, and stood a head taller than I did, but I felt that to meet those eyes I would have to squat.
In the long silence that followed, I noticed that many of those sitting around me were making as if to go, laying aside their feathers, bone spreaders, paper and copper knives and creeping towards the exit from the courtyard with a furtive air and the bow-legged, hunchbacked gait people adopt when they are in plain sight and wish they were not. They did not want their employer to see them leaving, even though the sky was darkening and there was a chill in the air. I guessed that Angry drove his workers hard, but now he seemed oblivious to them.
‘Uncle …’ ventured Crayfish eventually, stretching out a hand which was brushed aside.
‘It’s getting late,’ the big man muttered. ‘It’ll be dark soon. I’m going indoors.’
He turned and stalked off. I looked at the youth standing next to me, who sighed. ‘Come on’, he said.
I let him lead me towards the back of the courtyard and the kitchen, where I knew I would find the Old, Old God watching over three hearthstones surrounding a low fire.
3
The embers lit up Crayfish’s face as he prodded them into life. The sight reminded me of sunlight falling on the bare hills beyond the mountains that ringed our valley, his cheeks, brow and nose picked out like the high places by an orange glow, while his mouth and eyes lay in shadows as dark as the deepest valley. The effect was to make him look much older than he was, and oppressed by his cares.
It was strange to watch a boy cooking, but with his aunt dead and his cousin gone, evidently there was no woman in the house to do it. Once the fire was going he set an earthenware pot on it, standing it over the flames on a tripod, and soon the room was filled with the appetizing smells of burning charcoal and maize gruel being warmed through.
Angry sat by the fire too, staring into it, letting the flames catch his eyes and make them glitter.
‘You have to understand,’ he began, while his nephew stirred the gruel with one hand and steadied the pot with the other, ‘that most featherworkers don’t live in Amantlan any more – not if they’re any good, at least. Now I’m different,’ he added unselfconsciously. ‘So’s Skinny, for that matter. We’re private featherworkers, and always will be, but these days most of the best ones, especially the young ones, get taken into the Palace. Our youngsters go to the Priest House as part of their training. It’s so that they understand the pictures they’re making: who’s in them and the stories behind them. Crayfish here is going later this year.’ His nephew tested the gruel for warmth with his finger and went on stirring it. ‘The Emperor’s scouts come to the Priest House and pick the most talented ones out. They get lodged, fed, paid well, and they work for the Emperor, making fans and costumes and decorations for him to use as gifts or rewards for the valiant warriors. Isn’t that stuff ready yet?’
As Crayfish reached behind him for three bowls I asked his uncle why he and Skinny were different.
The young man dipped a bowl in the porridge and passed it to me, after first sprinkling a little of the contents on to the fire, for the god. I accepted it gratefully, my stomach reminding me sharply that I had last attended to it before dawn, and then had promptly thrown up. While his uncle lifted his own bowl to his lips, Crayfish answered for him.
‘My uncle could have gone to the Palace, but he wouldn’t.’
I almost choked on my porridge. ‘What?’
‘It’s hot,’ Crayfish warned me belatedly. ‘Do you want some salt or dried chillies?’
‘No, thanks.’ I turned to Angry. ‘You turned the Emperor down?’
He regarded me through the steam rising from his bowl of gruel. When he spoke the steam vanished, blown away like cobwebs. ‘The way I work wouldn’t have suited them,’ he said shortly.
‘And Skinny? Did he turn the Emperor down too?’
‘Skinny and I were the best featherworkers we had. Of course, we were great rivals, forever trying to outdo one another. I made the best feather mosaics ever.’ The big man’s tone as he said this was matter-of-fact, without a hint of conceit. ‘Some of them looked so real you would have sworn they were real flowers and birds and maize cobs and fish and people, not pictures at all. Skinny used to make fans and costumes and insignia for warriors to wear on their backs. He didn’t use glue much, he usually went for the frame and thread method, but he did incredible things – I can show you a fan of his that looks like water when a stone hits it, the feathers flying outward and the whole thing looking as if it’s about to burst.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I got more and more commissions – from lords, great warriors, foreigners. I had more work than I could keep up with, even with my family working flat out. I got more and more of my relations in to help, and now, as you can see, I’ve a whole houseful. To be honest,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘some of them aren’t actually related to me at all, so I’ve had to bend the rules a bit to employ them all. Everybody does something different, and knows exactly how to do it.’ He put his bowl down thoughtfully and stared into it. With the fire burning between us it was impossible to read anything into his expression. ‘But you know what? I don’t think there’s one of us, maybe not even me, who could make a feather fan or a mosaic from scratch by himself, not now. And everything we do is flawless, but … Well …’
‘But not original or unique.’ I remembered that picture of the dahlia. ‘But Skinny doesn’t have the same problem. So what happened to him?’
‘He didn’t go the same way as I did. I don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t want to work that way. Maybe it has something to do with where he came from.’
‘I’d been wondering about that. He’s not an Amantecatl, is he? How come he ended up in featherwork?’
‘Oh, you know that, do you? That’s right, he started life in Atecocolecan. But he was born on an auspicious day for a craftsman, and somehow he got himself adopted into one of the families here. I don’t know how. Someone must have decided he’d be wasted as a labourer. He certainly had talent, but he was always a loner – always insisted on working by himself, even when he couldn’t sell what he’d made except at a huge loss. He couldn’t compete with us, not when we were able to give our customers what they wanted, whe
n they wanted it, and guarantee the quality.’
‘Quality?’ I cried, forgetting myself for a moment. ‘But nobody ever produced featherwork like Skinny! Well, except you, of course.’
‘Save your breath!’ Angry said scornfully. ‘I couldn’t touch Skinny at his finest, and we both knew it. But most of the time, you see, Skinny wasn’t doing his best work. A lot of the time he couldn’t do anything at all. He’d just sit in the middle of a pile of feathers, just picking them up and staring at them all afternoon.’
I imagined the gaunt, hollow-eyed man I had seen earlier that day, idling away his life toying pointlessly with a heap of precious feathers.
‘It’s funny,’ Angry went on. ‘He could have turned out perfectly good fans or anything you wanted whenever he was asked, time after time, but it was as if he couldn’t bring himself to do anything but his best and wouldn’t trust anyone else to help him, even though what he earned from his work was all he had to live on.’
‘You turned the Emperor down. You didn’t tell me whether Skinny did too.’
‘I’d have had to go and live in the Palace, making fans and costumes to the order of Montezuma and his nobles. That would have meant abandoning my set-up here, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure I could work without it. The Palace may have thought this too, because they didn’t insist. I don’t know about Skinny. I’m sure he just didn’t want anybody telling him what to make, even if it was the Emperor. Later on, his work dried up, and he started gambling and taking a lot of sacred mushrooms and peyote buttons, and after that the Palace wouldn’t have wanted him anyway.’
‘So what happened to him? How come he went back to Atecocolecan? To that hole he’s living in now?’
Crayfish answered. ‘I think it all started when he got married. That was about two years ago.’
‘He left it late, then, didn’t he?’ I said. Most Aztec men married in their twenties, when they left the House of Youth. Skinny would have been considerably older than that.
