by Simon Levack
‘If you left it up to those two clowns,’ Lily snapped, with the briefest glance at Upright and Shield, ‘I’m not surprised! I doubt if they could have got him to tell them his name!’
‘We did, too!’ cried Shield. A brief, contemptuous glance from the woman shut him up.
I marvelled at the change that had come over Lily.
When I had seen her and Howling Monkey in her own house, not so many days before, she had been at his mercy, forced to listen to a humiliating harangue about her son’s conduct at a time when her family was impoverished and barely able to fend for itself. Now her son was dead and she had recovered her wealth. It was hard to know whether the cause was the confidence born of being able to trade again or the belief that with her only child gone she had nothing further to lose, but for whatever reason she was plainly now in no mood to take any nonsense from anybody
‘Now where are his clothes?’ she demanded. I felt my face heat up as another contemptuous glance swept over me. ‘Where’s his cloak, his breechcloth?’
Upright spoke up. ‘Madam, they were just rags …’ he stammered.
‘By the time you’d finished with them, I expect so! What of it? Get him some new ones!’
‘Now wait a moment!’ Howling Monkey spluttered. ‘A man’s been killed, you know, and we have to investigate that.’
‘No you don’t,’ she said brusquely. ‘As I understand it he wasn’t found in one of our parishes but next door, in Amantlan. What’s it got to do with you?’
‘This knife was found on him.’
Howling Monkey made the mistake of proffering the weapon, which was promptly snatched from him.
‘Mine,’ Lily asserted. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? I thought as much when your messenger came to my house, looking for my father. I knew what you were about the moment I heard him mention the knife. You thought you’d happened upon a source of Tarascan bronze and you could help yourself to it. Well, sorry to disappoint you. This is the only one there is and it’s been in my family for years, as a memento. Now, where’s your evidence?’
‘Evidence?’ The merchant’s voice had become an indignant squeak. ‘My men found him near the body …’
‘No they didn’t! The messenger that came looking for my father said he was picked up this morning. The featherworker’s remains were taken away yesterday And besides, what do you mean, “your” men? I thought they worked for the parish!’
‘But the knife!’ Howling Monkey stammered desperately. ‘It’s covered with blood!’
‘Our own,’ Lily cried instantly. She must have had the answer to that worked out before she had come out that morning. ‘Whenever we sacrifice our blood to Yacatecuhtli we always slit our earlobes and tongues with this knife. It’s a family custom. What, you didn’t know? It’s how we remind the god where we got the knife, where our prosperity and his gifts come from.’
‘What if I believe you?’ Howling Monkey sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘If this man Joker really is your slave, and he had some business with that knife, what then? How do you explain what happened to Idle?’
Lily snorted derisively. ‘He didn’t have any business with the knife at all! He was trying to steal it!’ Then, as the predatory gleam flared up in the old merchant’s eyes again, she added brutally: ‘Of course, he was probably hoping someone like you would give him a good price! But he’s my slave and I have the right to punish him for that. As for the featherworker’s brother, I am sorry to hear about him but he really isn’t my problem. Let the Amanteca find themselves a real suspect!’
With that, she turned her back on the chief of the merchants’ parishes with as much haughty disdain as if he had been some disreputable foreign trader who had just offered her an insultingly low price for her earplugs. She strode between the silent, astonished policemen and stopped in front of me.
‘Up you get, you! You have a lot of explaining to do!’
One hand still hovered uncertainly over my private parts as I blinked up at her. ‘I haven’t got anything to wear,’ I whispered plaintively. It made no difference that the woman had seen me with no clothes on. She had seen as much before, although her manner towards me had been very different then. I simply could not contemplate being led naked through the streets of Tlatelolco, bent over, with my head bowed to avoid the astonished gaze of my fellow Aztecs.
Lily turned to Shield and snapped: ‘I asked for someone to replace his clothes! It’s not as if he needs anything decent. Go on, before I start getting angry!’
Shield slouched away, muttering to himself. A few moments later he was back with a breechcloth and a cape. They were plain, but better than anything I usually wore.
As I dressed I heard a step and, looking up, saw that Howling Monkey had relinquished his place on the mat to stand beside Lily.
‘What are you intending to do?’ he demanded.
‘Take this slave home and punish him!’
‘We haven’t finished questioning him!’
‘Questioning him about what? I told you where he got the knife from and what he was planning to do with it. That’s nothing to do with you or anyone else!’
‘But the body … Idle …’
Ignoring him, the woman bent forward and, encircling my forearm in a surprisingly strong grip, she dragged me to my feet. ‘Come on, you! Now,’ she added, glaring once more at the chief merchant, ‘I am going to take my property home, unless anybody proposes to stop me.’
Howling Monkey looked sick. He was in a difficult position. He had clearly been ready to enjoy wringing the truth out of me, with the enthusiastic help of his policemen, but Lily’s unexpected arrival and insistence that I belonged to her changed everything. I wondered at this, because where I came from, in Tenochtitlan, a woman’s voice, while it might be law in her own home, would not have been heard among men in another’s courtyard. Among the merchants of Tlatelolco, though, things were different. Women were left to run family businesses while the men were abroad, they decided what to bring to market and at what price, and women even served in their own right as directors of the marketplace. If I really were Lily’s slave, then the merchants’ chief would have no authority over me, unless he had real evidence that I had anything to do with Idle’s death.
He turned away
‘All right,’ he muttered darkly. ‘You take him, then. But if I hear he’s been seen in Pochtlan, or any of our other parishes, after today, I’ll have Upright and Shield knock his brains out – and you’ll answer for it as well! Just remember this, Lily. We have unfinished business. You may have got your family’s money back again, but I haven’t forgotten how your boy disgraced himself and his people. I still intend to get to the bottom of that!’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’, said the woman softly. ‘So do I!’
With another tug at my arm, none too gentle, she led me out of the courtyard.
3
Lily maintained a grim silence as she strode briskly towards the canal and a waiting canoe. Following in her footsteps, I felt like a small child caught stealing cactus fruit from the market and being dragged home by his mother to face a beating.
‘Lily …’
‘Shut up. Get in the boat!’
‘I just wanted to say “thank you”,’ I said meekly.
‘I told you to get in the boat.’ She turned to me suddenly. ‘And save your gratitude! I didn’t get you out of there for your own good. Those two bears of policemen could have spent the rest of the day working you over, for all I care! And if you don’t tell me what I want to know, then I’ll take you straight back there and invite them to make a start on you. I might even watch!’
Her hands were clenched around the material of her skirt, bunching the cloth and crumpling it the way a cook might crush coriander leaves to squeeze the flavour out of them. When I looked in her eyes they were hooded as if with rage, but they glistened too, as if full of tears.
‘Look, I know it can’t have been easy …’
She hit me suddenly, swinging her open hand
against my cheek with a ringing slap that left a hot streak of pain against my lower jaw.
I stared at her, slack jawed, until I became aware of the salty taste of blood and realized that the blow had made me bite my tongue. She said nothing but looked pointedly at the canoe. I climbed in meekly, settling myself in front of the boatman. He was Partridge, Kindly’s slave who had brought me the knife, but he gave no sign of having recognized me.
‘You know where to go,’ the woman said sharply, as he pushed off from the side of the canal. ‘And as for you,’ she added, looking at me, ‘you can start telling me the truth. I want to know what you did to my son!’
‘Lion and I told you what happened,’ I said blandly.
‘You lied! You killed him – you and your brute of a brother!’
‘How can you say that?’ I felt the blood drain from my face, leaving it chill and numb, as if she had thrown a pitcher of cold water over it. If she had guessed the truth then there was no telling where that would lead.
She leaned forward and hissed into my face like a snake about to bury its fangs in my cheek. ‘I know what Shining Light was doing on that boat. I know what he and Nimble had been doing between them. Now I want to know why you and your brother killed him. Revenge, was that it? Or was it because of what he and your son had been up to? Did you hate him for that? Or did you just want to spite me, because a few moments with you on a sleeping-mat didn’t make me your devoted slave for ever?’
Partridge’s eyes nearly fell out of his head at that, but he kept his face impassive and his gaze fixed on the water in front of him. I glanced anxiously at the Sun and realized, with a nervous start, that we were heading south, towards Tenochtitlan, and not towards Lily’s home in Pochtlan. I gripped the side of the canoe tensely as it occurred to me that she might be intending to give me back to my master.
I wondered how she had guessed the truth, or whether perhaps Kindly had deduced it in the same uncanny way in which he had worked out that Nimble was my son. I thought about trying to escape. I could have leapt over the side and swum to the shore of the canal, but the thought of scuttling away to hide among the neighbouring houses with her taunts and sneers ringing in my ears, like a cockroach dodging blows from a furious housewife’s broom, was too appalling to contemplate. The truth had to come out, but as I looked into her eyes and saw the pain in them – the raw skin under the lids, the spider’s webs of broken red lines traced over the whites and the dark furrows on her cheeks from night after night of weeping – I suddenly felt more pity than anything else.
‘It wasn’t any of those,’ I heard myself saying. ‘It was just self-defence. We – Lion and I – wanted to make Shining Light give up his sword, but he tried to kill me. There wasn’t anything – else we could do. We could have spared you the truth …’
‘You wanted to spare your son, and yourself from having to explain what he was doing on that boat!’
‘Well, that too,’ I conceded.
‘Who killed him? Who drove that sword into his skull – you or your brother?’
‘Does it matter? Lily, you know what Shining Light did. Don’t make me tell you all over again.’
Astonishingly, she laughed. It was a sort of laughter I had not heard before, a thin, bitter sound that seemed to come from high up near the bridge of her nose rather than her mouth, and had no amusement in it whatsoever. ‘Tell me? You don’t have to. I know what he was, but he was my son!’ The laughter shattered then, splintering into a shower of muffled tears as she buried her face in her hands, and I stared hopelessly at her bowed head and heaving shoulders. For an instant I thought she might pitch forward into my arms. I even raised my hands, ready to catch her, but her pride and anger were too strong for that.
At last she looked up again. Her palms glistened damply as she lowered them into her lap.
‘Just tell me who it was,’ she whispered. ‘I just have to know.’
‘Lion,’ I said reluctantly, because now there seemed no reason to lie. ‘But Lily, Shining Light did have his hands around my throat at the time!’
‘And what had you and your brother done to him? You goaded him into it, didn’t you? What did you do, taunt him with your cleverness, just because you’d managed to find out where he was hiding?’
‘It wasn’t anything like that. Lily, he … he was desperate. He knew he would never have been allowed to live. My master would have killed him – he’d have had him burned alive. You know he could have done that. Shining Light hadn’t just swindled the Chief Minister, he was a murderer, and he and Nimble were … well, you know the penalty for what they did together.’ I found it hard, even now, to acknowledge the crime my son and his lover had committed. I understood, as well as any Aztec could hope to, what had driven the two of them into each other’s arms, but nothing in my upbringing or teaching had equipped me to look at an offence against the gods with anything but disgust.
Lily would not meet my eyes. She looked over my shoulder, at something in the middle distance. When I turned around and saw what it was I felt as if my stomach were about to fall through the bottom of the canoe, because right up ahead of us, at the edge of a broad, traffic-choked canal, stood one of the tall stone cacti that marked the boundary between Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan. I was being taken back to my master.
I turned back to her. ‘Lily,’ I said earnestly, ‘you have to listen to me! I didn’t want your son to die. He wanted it himself and he wanted to take me with him! Don’t you understand?’
She kept her head up. Her eyes were dry and clear now, and her fingers lay still in the folds of her skirt without any trace of a tremor.
‘I understand,’ she said steadily. ‘You and your brother killed my son.
‘Yes … no, wait, didn’t you hear what I said?’
She looked at me then and gave me the thinnest of smiles. ‘I’ve heard as much as I want to from you. Anything else you want to say, you can save for your master.’
I gaped at her in horror.
‘What did you expect?’ she asked coldly. ‘You heard what Howling Monkey said – if you’re seen in Tlatelolco again there’ll be trouble. I’m taking you back to Lord Feathered in Black. No doubt he’ll be fascinated to know what you’ve been doing during the last couple of days.’
‘But he’ll kill me!’ I cried, and then, realizing that in her present state of mind that was unlikely to do me much good, I added: ‘I could tell him about your son – how he cheated him, what he and Nimble got up to …’ My voice tailed off as we both realized what I was saying.
‘You’ll tell him what your own boy did to him, will you? I don’t think so. He can’t hurt mine any more.’ She lifted her eyes. ‘Here we are – Tenochtitlan. Better start thinking about what you’re going to tell your master, slave.’
Ahead of us, looming over the houses and public buildings fronting the canal, I saw the pyramids of the Heart of the World, dark, angular masses against the afternoon sky. Tallest of all was the double pyramid belonging to Huitzilopochtli the war-god and Tlaloc the rain-god. How long would it be, I wondered, before I was dragged up the bloodstained steps on its western face to have my chest slashed open by the Fire Priest’s flint knife?
And that’s only if you’re lucky, I told myself, as I stared desperately into the indifferent faces of the men poling and paddling canoes along the great waterway, while our own boatman tried with some difficulty to get us into the thick stream of traffic. I looked over the canoe’s side towards the bank, speculating on my chances of swimming to freedom.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Lily snapped, as if reading my thoughts.
‘A gap,’ Partridge said sullenly. ‘All right, here goes!’
He dug his paddle into the water, driving us forward in a cloud of spray.
I could not see the space he had found. So far as I could make out the two vessels in front of us were nose to tail. In front was a big, scruffy barge, hacked out of the carcass of a whole tree. It lay low in the water, pressed down by the weight of
its cargo of long, rough-hewn planks. The sweating labourer struggling to push it along with his paddle wore only a breechcloth and a surly look. Immediately following the barge was an entirely different sort of craft, small and well made, its wood carved into an elegant shape that tapered sharply at each end, smoothed until it almost shone and painted a rich green. Its middle section was shaded by a cotton canopy with bright parrot and hummingbird feathers around its edges and at its corners. The man paddling it was better dressed than most boatmen, with a short, netted cape billowing around his shoulders, as well as the obligatory breechcloth. He cursed impatiently as he tried to find a way around the great lumbering thing in front of him.
Suddenly he had something new to swear at, as Lily’s canoe swung into his path.
‘Look out, you clumsy sod! Where do you think you’re going?’ he screamed, as he sank the blade of his paddle into the water and twisted it frantically in an effort to slow his boat down and prevent a collision. ‘This is a new paint job!’
All he got in reply was a grunt as Partridge deftly begun to swing Lily’s craft into line. I had to admire his skill: he had timed the manoeuvre to perfection, leaving little more than a finger’s breadth between his own charge and the cargo boat in front and the rich man’s canoe behind. However, his calculations had not included the presence in his boat of a desperate slave.
As the stern of the big vessel ahead of us swung across our bow, I leapt up, ignoring the violent rocking this produced, and let myself fall over while I clawed desperately at the side of the other craft. At the same time I kicked, pushing against the bottom of Lily’s boat with both feet as hard as I could. It worked. Suddenly we were no longer turning to follow the traffic. My kick exactly countered Partridge’s efforts, leaving the canoe stopped in the water for the space of a heartbeat before the boat behind ran into it with a crash that sent Lily, her boatman and the man in charge of the vessel behind tumbling overboard.
I clung with both hands to the big boat. It continued on its way, unaffected by the chaos behind it, and all but wrenched my fingers out of their sockets as it plucked me bodily from the wreckage.
