Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  Then he was gone, and I was on my knees at the water’s edge, being violently sick.

  It was only when the last uncontrollable spasm had passed through me and I squatted, gasping and shivering, by the canal that the full import of what the Otomi had said began to sink in.

  He had told me he and his comrades were looking for a slave – me – and a boy. But when I had left him in Tlacopan, the captain had still been convinced that he was pursuing a third person. The boatman he had been torturing would not have known any better.

  So how had the Otomies learned the truth?

  I stayed where I was for the remainder of the afternoon, trying to rest. Once night had fallen, I finally abandoned my disguise, washing the soot off in the canal and hiding the cloak behind a patch of nettles. Then I made my way back to the house in Atecocolecan.

  I scrambled up the willow that had got Crayfish on to the roof earlier in the day and crawled around the edge, as the boy must have done, for fear of falling through the insubstantial plaster in the middle. Then I paused, looking around me and hesitating while I thought about what I intended to do. The sky overhead was brilliant with stars, although luckily the moon had not risen yet. When I looked over my shoulder I could see the faint, flickering light of the brazier at the top of the parish temple, but it was too far away to shed any light on me. There was no sound except the wind stirring the willow by the house and the trees and rushes that lined the parish’s plots out on the lake.

  What I intended to do here was to find Kindly’s featherwork for him, because it was the only thing I could think of that might lead me to where my son was. I was convinced that the place to look for it was the room Idle had shared with Marigold. There was something concealed in that room, I was certain of that: why else would Butterfly have been so desperate to keep me out of it?

  As I shifted my weight and prepared to drop into the courtyard as quietly as I could, sudden dread made my stomach cramp painfully. What I was about to do, trespassing in a house at night, was a serious crime, but it was not that which frightened me. I had committed capital crimes before and got away with it, one way or another. What terrified me was the conviction that whatever Idle had died for, it had something to do with what I had come here to find, and whoever had killed him would not hesitate to kill again.

  I took a deep breath and jumped.

  As soon as my feet were on the ground I darted into the shadows. From there, after a quick look around me to ensure I was alone, I crept towards the forbidden doorway I had to hold my breath as I lifted a corner of the cloth that covered it, in case I missed any sound that might betray the presence of someone in the room: a cough or a footstep, a grunt or a snore or the faint rustle of someone turning over under a blanket. Butterfly had told me that this had been Idle’s and Marigold’s room, and I assumed from this that it was unoccupied, but if Skinny and his wife had moved into it since the afternoon then I intended to be out of the front doorway before they could stir.

  Hearing nothing, I slipped into the room and let the cloth fall back behind me.

  Now there was no light whatever. I would have to do all my searching by touch. I cursed under my breath. The last thing I needed to be doing now was blundering about in a strange room with my hands groping the air in front of me in the hope that one of them would connect with something important, but I had no choice.

  I took a single step forward, and a moment later was in agony, with my tongue clamped between my teeth to stop me screaming and my legs buckling with pain and shock.

  I had stubbed my toe.

  Tears sprang to my eyes as I tried to work out what I had walked into. Whimpering, I dropped to one knee, curling the leg with the injured foot protectively under me as I felt for the thing. It was a piece of rock, rough hewn and jagged, or so I thought until I managed to turn it over and discovered that parts of it had been polished smooth. As I ran my fingers over its curves and ridges I realised that it was a carving, although there was no way of telling by touch what it was meant to be.

  ‘I wonder how this got broken?’ I mused. ‘Maybe some other clumsy moron bumped into it before me.’

  I got up, grimacing as my sore toe touched the floor. Edging around the place where I had left the stone, I found another piece, as rough as the first, when my heel brushed against it.

  Butterfly had not lied when she said the place was a mess. Working my way along the room towards the back of the house, I soon found a pile of rubbish. Somebody appeared to have made a loose heap of all Idle’s possessions and just left it in the middle of the floor. Fishing around in it with my hands, I found stale tortilla crusts, broken pottery, cloth, thread, something sharp that I thought must be an obsidian razor and feathers. There was a surprising number of feathers.

  The pile spilled across the whole width of the room, so that I had to clamber over it to find out what lay beyond it. I started nervously as something fell off the top of it, and rolled across the floor with a loud clatter. I froze for a moment but heard no other sound.

  The room turned out to be smaller than it had looked from the outside because I found the rear wall of the house immediately beyond the heap.

  I ran my hands over it briefly. There seemed to be no shelves or niches, just plain plaster. The surface had a rough feel as though it had been hastily finished. There was a draught around my feet, which made me think mice from the fields behind the house must have eaten their way through the adobe from the outside.

  An unpleasant smell filled this part of the room. It was vaguely familiar, but for the moment I could not recall where I had come across it before. It was not difficult to guess where it emanated from, however: somewhere in the mass of garbage behind me. I sighed, realizing that I had no choice but to rake over the heap. I had already decided why it had been left there. It was the obvious place in which to have concealed the costume.

  I clambered back over it, meaning to search it from the other side where there was more room to work.

  I was stooping over the pile with my back to the doorway when I heard something behind me. It sounded like a light, stealthy footstep.

  I tried to stand up but I was an instant too late.

  Something crashed into the back of my head, and before I even hit the floor I was plunged into a darkness even murkier than the room around me.

  4

  A snake danced in front of me. It was not the venomous kind. When it raised its broad, flat head and opened its mouth to send its tongue darting silently towards my face, I saw no fangs. It was the sort that killed its victim slowly, squeezing until he could not draw breath, until ribs cracked and organs split and burst. With every movement I made, I knew its grip would tighten further. I kept as still as I could, taking short, shallow breaths until the strain on my lungs and the sensation in my head, a feeling that it was whirling and rocking even while the rest of me was pinned to the ground, became too much and I gasped and coughed.

  The snake did not react. Its eyes watched mine. As I gazed into them I realized that they looked wrong: their pupils were not thin elliptical slits but perfectly round black beads and their irises were a warm brown that I knew from somewhere.

  I kept my eyes on the snake’s because I could not look at the flickering light that illuminated them. It seemed to swing back and forth like a censer in the hands of a priest, looming towards me until it threatened to fill my head up and then shrinking to a shimmering point the size of a star.

  I could hear a voice. It seemed to come from far away and I was not sure whether it was uttering words or inarticulate cries. The sound was so faint that when it stopped I could not decide whether I had really heard it, but when it resumed, the snake seemed to respond to it.

  ‘Can you hear us?’

  I blinked. My eyes were shimmering, misty. It was becoming harder to focus on the creature’s face, on those unsettling eyes, the scales that glistened where they caught the light, the lipless smirk on its mouth. I shut my eyes but somehow the snake was still there, its
head now moving from side to side in a slow, sinuous dance. I felt its coils moving over my body, and terror convulsed me, making my hands clench and snatching my head up off the floor, but the choking, suffocating pressure did not come. I lay still again, wondering at the sensuous caress of the snake’s skin against mine, its tongue flickering over my throat and chest.

  It reared up then, as if to strike.

  ‘Can you hear this?’ it asked, more loudly than before.

  It had a woman’s voice, throaty, compelling, thrilling. It was a voice to fill a man with yearning even when on the point of death, or perhaps particularly then, when all he has left is the desire for life and what creates life.

  I groaned.

  It seemed to me that the voice was not speaking to me. The distant voice answered it with a sound like sobbing.

  ‘Oh, we can do better than this. We can make much sweeter music than this, can’t we?’ purred the snake.

  Then it seemed to shed its skin, letting it fall away the way a snake will, leaving last year’s scales draped over a rock or a cactus to dry and shred and blow away in the wind. In the moment before it moved towards me, blotting out the light, I caught a last glimpse of the creature’s body, of the play of shadows over its pure, smooth new flesh, and I thought it was most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The yearning stirred in me again, stronger than before when I had merely heard the creature’s voice, and when it slithered over me again, curling itself slickly around my manhood, for all my fear I could not find it in me to struggle. Instead I found myself trying to writhe in time with the snake, to match its own undulations with my own, and when I found myself still pinioned too tightly to move it was frustration, not pain or terror, which made me groan again.

  ‘Oh, this is good!’ The voice had changed, becoming wilder, higher in pitch. ‘Can you hear how good this is?’ Again its words seemed directed somewhere else, despite the intimacy with which its flesh was engaging mine.

  A pain, tiny at first but growing and getting more insistent, started to gnaw at the back of my head, even as I heard my own moans of pleasure beginning.

  ‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’ The words were definitely meant for me now, whispered from lips that brushed my ear in time to them.

  I groaned again. I had to get out but there was nothing I could do, and the urge to let this continue was too strong.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me who you really are?’ The lovely caresses slowed almost to a stop. ‘If you don’t, I might stop. Do you want me to stop?’

  I could manage only a gurgling noise.

  ‘I didn’t think so. I gave you some of those little black seeds of Idle’s. Now you can’t let me stop, can you? We use them ourselves, so I know.’ An unpleasant, snickering little laugh stirred the hair around my ear. ‘Even if this didn’t tell me!’ She squeezed me once, making me gasp. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Something other than fear or sexual desire jerked the reply from my throat, something that seemed to have overridden my will and produced answers to her questions without my thinking of them. ‘My name’s Cemiquiztli Yaotl,’ I gasped, ‘a slave of Lord Feathered in Black. I was looking for my son.’

  She was still for a moment. Then she rose, still gripping me, to look down at my supine figure. She leaned slightly sideways so that the light, the flickering yellow glow that I could now see came from a pine torch, fell over her face, and, reflected in the light, I caught the glint of a bead of sweat on her cheek.

  ‘Why did you think he’d come here?’ She was still whispering.

  ‘I thought he and Kindly’s featherwork might be in the same place.’ Her movements had ceased. Part of me willed them to resume. Part of me wanted to scream at her to stop. The pain in my head was intensifying.

  She bent towards me again and I felt her hair and her breath on my face. ‘I don’t have to lie to you about this,’ she murmured. ‘There’s no featherwork here and I don’t know anything about your son. If we ever let you go, you can tell Kindly that. But now …’

  She moved again suddenly, her hips grinding against mine with a new urgency, her hands kneading the bare skin of my chest and little cries bursting from her lips.

  The pain in my head seemed to expand with her excitement, making me feel that my skull was about to explode. Nausea seized my stomach and the breath stopped in my throat as if I were being choked. I groaned aloud, making a sound like ecstasy even at the moment when my manhood began to shrivel.

  The world spun around me, sucking me back down into the darkness. The last thing I heard was her scream.

  It was more than a sound of pleasure. It was a war-cry, the vaunting boast of the victor, a triumphant shout.

  I drifted in and out of my dreams and from one dream to another.

  Fantastic creatures danced in front of me. I thought I saw nests full of snakes, their glittering skins patterned with stripes and whorls and painted in glorious colours, scarlet and yellow and blue and green and colours I had never seen before and never would again, colours that I could taste on the tip of my tongue and whose sounds were like flutes or falling rain or laughter. Sometimes I could not see the snakes but only the patterns on their skins, growing and merging and dividing and wavering before my eyes.

  I thought I was in a room filled with birds. Their wings darkened the space around me and their beat filled my ears until it drowned out my own heartbeat. Their feathers seemed to fill my nose and mouth, making me sneeze and gag.

  Then I found myself in a world peopled by gods.

  A single, brilliant light shimmered through my tears. It seemed to pulse in time with the throbbing at the back of my head. Was this what the Sun looked like, I wondered, when seen from the Thirteen Heavens, above the sky and the clouds? Or had night fallen and the Sun dropped below the western horizon, parting from the souls of dead mothers who formed his guard of honour before making his return journey through the land underneath the Earth? I felt a chill come over me as I realized that I might be in one of the nine regions of Mictlan, the Land of the Dead.

  I wanted to move then, to run away or beat my fists on the ground or curl up into a ball around my terror and the pain and the sick feeling in my stomach, but something held me flat on the ground, at the mercy of any creature or demon that might come for me.

  At that moment I knew I must be dead or dying, because I heard a woman’s voice.

  It seemed to me that I had heard it not long before but had not known it for what it was, but now there was no mistaking it. It had no words for me, but that did not matter. Racked with bitter sobs, each one torn out of a throat tormented by pain and hunger and reproach and regret and flung at me through the icy darkness of Hell, it could only belong to Cihuacoatl, Snake Woman, the goddess whose cries were the most terrifying sound an Aztec could hear, foretelling utter disaster, death and the ruin of the city.

  ‘No,’ I wanted to cry out, but all I could manage was a husky whisper between dry lips.

  A large, irregular shadow filled my vision. Its shape was strange, but familiar. As it dawned on me what I was looking at, I felt all my fear renewed and redoubled.

  I had seen every detail of the figure before. From the long, graceful plumes that towered over his head and flowed down his back to the sheen of obsidian on his sandals and, more than anything else, the blank, terrifying, gaping face of his serpent mask, I could not fail to recognize the god. I was in the presence of Quetzalcoatl: the Feathered Serpent himself.

  I dared not make a noise. I lay, paralysed with fear, watching him as he knelt over me.

  The black pits that served him for eyes seemed to roam speculatively over my helpless, bound body. I squirmed, my buttocks clenching as my bowels threatened to turn into water.

  Then the god advanced upon me, with a small, glittering object in his hand. I could not help a squeal of fright as I recognized a copper knife: an implement fine enough to prise feathers apart, or peel a man’s skin away in layers. I was a gripped by a fear of something worse than dea
th: if I truly was in Hell, could the god go on torturing me for ever?

  ‘No …’

  The god stood over me. He raised his free hand, extended his finger, and held it up in front of his mouth. He was motioning me to silence.

  As he knelt over me, reaching towards me with the knife, I could not have found my voice even if I had wanted to. I merely lay trembling silently as he tugged at the ropes that bound me, slicing them cleanly one by one until I was free.

  He straightened, but put his empty hand on my chest, pressing gently but firmly in a gesture that meant I must not get up. He might have spared himself the trouble: my limbs were too numb and leaden to move.

  Against the light there was less expression than ever in the serpent mask, but something told me that the mind behind it was troubled and perplexed, as though he had come across something unexpected and could not decide what to do about it.

  In the end he mumbled: ‘Why are you here?’

  His voice sounded as though it were coming from the bottom of a clay pot. It also sounded young, but then I supposed gods were ageless.

  I felt compelled to answer. ‘I …’

  ‘Quietly!’ he hissed. ‘She’ll hear you!’

  His warning had come too late.

  Something stirred at the far end of the room. A sound like a yawn came to us, and then her shape appeared, uncurling itself from where she had lain, rising and stretching as naturally and gracefully as a jaguar waking from its midday nap, while the shadow cast by the wavering torchlight on the wall behind her danced suggestively.

  Quetzalcoatl was on his feet in an instant, turning with a rustle of feathers and a tiny grating noise from the heels of his sandals.

  ‘You’re back at last!’ Hearing her speak was like having my ears stroked with down. Her voice was soft and seductive, but there was something about it, some quality or feeling or memory it evoked, which made me shiver. She walked towards the god with her arms outstretched, and in the instant when the light fell directly across her body I saw that she was naked.