by Simon Levack
I swallowed. ‘My Lord, I …’
‘I could ask you to give me a good reason why I shouldn’t just take the Otomi up on his suggestion. I gather he has a talent for dentistry that any curer would envy’ I shuddered at the memory of what I had seen in Tlacopan. ‘But what’s the point? You’ll only lie to me, and anyway, I know perfectly well what you’ve been up to. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do instead.’
I tensed, feeling my mouth go dry with fear as I waited to learn my fate. A flicker of something that may have been amusement crossed my master’s face, and he moved a cracked, leathery hand once in a barely perceptible gesture.
A moment later a girl was at his side, presenting him with a steaming bowl. The aroma of chocolate and vanilla filled my nostrils, and a sudden sharp pain in my stomach reminded me how long it was since I had eaten or drunk. As his Lordship sipped delicately at his drink I tried to take my mind off my fear by wondering how they managed to serve him freshly whipped chocolate at just the right temperature so quickly. I supposed a drink must be kept just outside the room, to be poured away and replaced if it was not called for, but what if he had wanted a different flavouring – honey or green maize or pimentos instead of vanilla?
I got so absorbed in this nonsense that it took me a moment to realize that my master had started speaking again.
‘Of course, you have run away Whatever happens, you know I can’t overlook that. I shall have to admonish you. That will be for the second time. Once more and you know what will happen.’ Of course I knew: I could lawfully be sold, and having been marked out as obviously useless, could expect to be bought for only one purpose.
But at that moment the prospect of being sacrificed barely entered my thoughts. All I could understand was that I was being reprieved. My master was giving me another chance.
I swallowed, I gaped, and then I fell to my knees, less out of gratitude and deference than because my legs had buckled. I flopped forward in front of his Lordship, prostrating myself, with my arms flung out towards him.
‘My Lord! Thank you! I …’
My words ended in a scream as something hard slammed into the top of my head. I heard a crack like a fir branch full of sap bursting in a fire, and there were pieces of pottery on the floor and scalding liquid all over my head and neck. Unlike most Aztecs, my master liked his chocolate piping hot, and the contents of his bowl seared the tender, bruised flesh of my scalp, making tears spring to my eyes and my hands snatch convulsively at my hair.
‘Don’t start thanking me, you worm! Why do you think I didn’t just give you to my steward and the captain and let them take turns breaking every bone in your body, one by one? Eh? Look at me!’
I raised my head towards my master. A pathetic sight he must have thought me, with fragments of pottery in my hair and chocolate running down my face and over my eyes, forcing me to blink.
‘I’m going to let you live – for now – on one condition.’ Disgust twisted his mouth, as though I were the corpse of some verminous thing found rotting in one of his storehouses. ‘You tell me where the boy is.’
‘The … the boy?’
He leaned towards me slightly, probably as far as his ancient back would allow. ‘The boy, Yaotl. Don’t play dumb. You know who I mean. Shining Light’s accomplice, the one I want for cheating and humiliating me. Your son, Nimble!’
‘My son? How can you … How …?’
‘How do I know? How do you think? His boyfriend’s mother told me.’
‘Lily?’ I asked, incredulously. I remembered Upright telling me how she had gone to Lord Feathered in Black after I had escaped.
‘Yes, Lily. He only had one mother, as far as I know. And she told me everything you told her. So I know what her son did, and what your son did.’ Suddenly his Lordship laughed, a cackling sound followed by several dry, shallow wheezes. ‘Have you any idea how much that woman hates you? She thinks your boy led hers astray! That’s why she was bringing you back to me. She thought you’d get what you deserved here. If you didn’t, she told me, she’d take your skin off you with her fingernails!’
I said nothing but my mind was in turmoil. I understood, now, how the Otomi I had met by the canal the day before had known who he was looking for. After she had snatched me from Howling Monkey’s house Lily must have come straight here and passed on everything I had told her. But had I told her that much?
I tried to remember what I had said to the tense, bitter woman sitting opposite me in the canoe. I had not intended to mention Nimble. Where had I gone wrong?
‘I know what you were up to in Tlatelolco.’ The Chief Minister’s voice had become soft, and years of experience told me that there was no more dangerous sound in the World. ‘You were looking for him, weren’t you? You convinced that meathead of an Otomi to go blundering into Tlacopan after him and then went to Tlatelolco because somehow you knew that was where he’d really gone. So where is he, Yaotl?’
I looked down and squeezed my eyes shut against the tears that threatened to overwhelm them. ‘My Lord, I don’t know,’ I muttered truthfully. Then I took a deep breath and looked up again, straight into my master’s startlingly clear brown eyes. ‘But you may as well send for the captain now, because even if I did know, I couldn’t tell you.’
3
‘And then what happened?’
Handy, the big commoner my master retained as his general dogsbody, was following my story with a look of frank amazement. I was no less astounded to be looking at him. In fact I was surprised to find myself looking at anything at all: by now, I calculated, my eyes ought to be dangling out of their sockets like a couple of dead flowers drooping over a wall.
‘He said he’d give me a day to think about it.’
I still marvelled at the changes that had come over my master’s face in the moments after I had defied him. It had darkened with fury its lines deepening and bunching together and his lips drawing back over his teeth in something like a snarl. Then, abruptly, it had cleared. His hunched shoulders had relaxed a little and he had sat back, letting his fingers caress his chin while he thought over his decision.
I could have one day.
‘Mind you, he told me not to let you out of my sight,’ Handy pointed out.
‘Could have been worse,’ I said. ‘I might have had the Prick for an escort!’
A day during which I was at liberty: no duties; go where you like, Yaotl; start by having a bath and a good meal. Remind yourself how sweet life can be, and ask yourself if you really want the captain to part you from it.
I was not that naive and his Lordship knew it. If I was lying, a day would make no difference. If I was telling the truth, he expected me to look for Nimble again as soon as he set me free. And he had given me Handy as an escort knowing that I thought of the commoner as a friend and would think twice about slipping away and leaving him to face the Chief Minister’s fury.
I had had the bath and the meal, and now Handy and I sat in one of the Palace’s many courtyards while we brought each other up to date on our exploits.
‘I saw Lily when she came to see his Lordship. Angry? She was spitting. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of anything like that, I can tell you, and I’m used to Citlalli at her worst.’ Handy’s wife had a tongue like an obsidian flake: it had scratched me in the past. ‘I couldn’t work out what she was doing here, mind you. You say she told Lord Feathered in Black her own son had duped him? What would have been the good of that?’
‘She probably thought she had no choice. She was in deep trouble for spiriting me away from her parish chief the way she did. I suppose she thought the best way out of it was to bring me back here once she’d got what she wanted from me. The merchants could hardly complain about her restoring the Chief Minister’s slave to him, could they, even if she had a funny way of doing it?’ I sighed regretfully as I realized that what Lily had done probably had a simpler explanation than that. I could not see her handing me over to the Chief Minister in cold b
lood, just to spare herself a confrontation with her parish elders. She was too proud to have stooped to that. If she really had intended to deliver me to my master, then she had been prompted by anger and a desire for revenge. ‘When I screwed it up for her by escaping there was nothing for it but to come here anyway and tell his Lordship what she’d learned from me, and hope that would be enough. Which apparently it was.’ My master had by all accounts been more than happy with the woman’s tale. He had even rewarded her with a load of cotton that had gone back to Pochtlan in her canoe.
But how had she known so much? I kept asking myself what I might have said to enable her to guess the truth about Nimble, but I still had no answer.
I asked Handy what had happened to the steward and the captain in Tlacopan after I had fled.
He grinned. ‘They got roughed up a bit. The trouble with people like your captain is they depend on people being so shit scared of them they won’t fight back. But even the Tepanecs were able to work out eventually that there were far more of them than the Otomies. It’s probably just as well that the local version of the Chief Minister turned up eventually, before things started getting really bloody. By the time I got back there with your brother and his warriors, there wasn’t much going on except a lot of snarling and swearing. It didn’t do me any harm – the Prick even thanked me for going to get help.’
And the boatman had, in the event, escaped with his life. He would be living on maize gruel and mashed-up squashes for the rest of his life, but having bolted and left Lord Feathered in Black stranded he might consider himself lucky. I almost envied him. He had taken his punishment. Mine was yet to come, and it was probably going to be far worse.
‘So, it looks like you’re the boss for a day,’ Handy reminded me, ‘since I have to follow you everywhere. Where to now?’
I looked up at the sky There were no clouds. It was beginning to darken, a deeper blue washing over it from the East, with a star-studded indigo to follow. My stay of execution ended at noon the next day: I had a night and a morning.
I dismissed any thought of going to look for Nimble. Even if I could find him in the time I had, it would only be to deliver his death warrant. I doubted that I would live long after that, whatever my master might have said.
Desperate as I was, there was only one place I could think of going. When I thought of it, I realized that that was where I might find the only person who might conceivably be able to help me.
‘I think,’ I said, unexpectedly having to squeeze the words past a sudden lump in my throat, ‘I’d like to go home.’
By ‘home’, I meant my parents’ house in Toltenco.
The name meant ‘At the Edge of the Rushes’ and it fitted the place well. It was in the south of Tenochtitlan, about as far as you could get from Skinny’s and Idle’s home in Atecocolecan without leaving the island altogether, but the two parishes had much in common. Each of them managed to give the visitor the impression that this was a place where the land could barely be bothered to stay above water: canals and streets blending into waterlogged fields and many of the houses crudely built, thrown up in obvious haste after the last flood to give their dispossessed owners a roof over their heads before the rains came again.
None of this had struck me while I was growing up. In the short time I had had between being old enough to take notice of my surroundings and being taken to the House of Tears, I had known only that we had space and clear air, unlike people who lived in the middle of the city, whose houses were all crowded together and permanently wreathed in the smoke of their neighbours’ cooking-fires. It was only later, on my rare visits to Toltenco as an adult, that I had learned to sneer at the place. Later still I had done my best to forget all about it.
Prior to my last visit to my parents’ home, I had scarcely set foot in the parish in ten years. That last visit had been only nine days before, though, so my surroundings were more familiar than they might otherwise have been.
‘It’s not that bad,’ Handy said. ‘Our place in Atlixco isn’t much better than some of these.’
‘Maybe I’m not doing it justice. I left under a bit of cloud, after all. Still, if you’re that easily impressed, you’ll like my parents’ place. It’s on slightly higher ground, so it hardly ever floods.’
Handy dug his pole into the bottom of the canal and shoved the canoe in the direction I showed him. My master had very generously lent me a boat. I wondered where he expected me to go in it. I had spent most of the time it had taken to get to Toltenco checking to see whether he was having me followed, or was relying on my escort to keep me from straying. If I had a shadow, then he was very good at keeping himself hidden, since none of my anxious backward glances revealed anyone other than the occasional incurious passer-by
‘That’s never it there?’ Handy cried suddenly. ‘The one with the tall pole in the courtyard?’
I had to smile in spite of myself. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, without troubling to follow his stare, ‘that’ll be it. The tallest tree in Toltenco.’
The tree was a shorn trunk, dragged across the lake from where it had been felled on one of the hillsides on the mainland, and stood upright in the middle of my parents’ home. It was there for the annual festival of the Coming Down of Water, when we honoured the mountains that surrounded our valley, on account of the dark clouds that gathered around them, and the other gods who brought rain, such as Quetzalcoatl Ehecatl, Lord of the Wind, and Chalchihuitlicue. The coming night and the next day, I recalled suddenly, would see the climax of the festival. The pole would be pasted with banners made of rubber-spotted paper and offerings made to the gods. There would be a vigil, followed by a feast. Most of my family would be at home and there would be many guests the following morning. This was one of our more enjoyable festivals, especially if you could afford to celebrate it in style. In the morning there would be food and drink in abundance, and even sacred wine, which at other times commoners were forbidden to touch.
Organizing all this was no small undertaking, and it was not cheap either. I was sure my mother would claim it was all on account of my father’s bad leg. It was especially important for the lame to placate the mountain gods. No doubt the fact that none of her neighbours could afford to put on such a show had something to do with it, though.
‘Tie up at the landing stage here,’ I said.
‘Your people do all right for themselves,’ my companion remarked as the canoe glided to a stop. ‘We couldn’t afford to set up our own pole, not when it means having to feast the singers and musicians as well. We always go to a neighbour’s house.’ There was a wistful note in his voice, no doubt because he would be missing the next day’s celebrations.
‘That’s on account of my brother. Lion sends enough home for my mother to be able to make a big splash and spend the rest of the year complaining about the mess.’
I heard my family before I saw any of them. There were not so very many of us – my parents and their grown-up children, five besides myself, and my nieces and nephews – but put them all together within the walls of a small courtyard and they could sound like a busy day at Tlatelolco market.
‘It’ll be worse tomorrow, after the guests arrive,’ I assured Handy
‘I’m sure. What are we waiting for?’
We were still standing on the landing-stage, to one side of the entrance, so that we were not visible from the courtyard. I pretended to inspect an imaginary crack in the smooth, newly whitewashed plaster on the wall beside me while I pondered Handy’s question. Why was I hesitating?
On my previous visit here, my father and my brothers, apart from Lion, had been away. All commoners, except slaves whose labour belonged only to their masters, could be made to work for their parish or the city, and it had been their turn. However, their task would be done by now, and they would probably be here this evening.
It had been many years since my father and I had been able to meet without practically coming to blows. Each of us had too much to resent ever to have bee
n able to let it drop. He begrudged the price he had paid to get me into the Priest House, which had all gone to waste when I was thrown out. I blamed him for the ridicule and petty insults that had been heaped on me at home for failing in a way of life I had not chosen but had grown to love, and the bitterness and humiliation that failure had caused me.
No doubt that was it, I thought, not wanting to dwell on the alternative explanation: that when I stepped through the doorway, it would be to say goodbye for ever. Even if I tried to save my life – if, say, I were to paddle my master’s canoe to the edge of the lake and run clear out of the valley – I would surely never be back here again.
‘Nothing,’ I muttered. ‘Better go, I suppose …’
The final decision that it was time to face my family was taken out of my hands by a shrill but strong voice.
‘Who are you?’
I looked about me, startled. ‘Who said that?’ The voice seemed to have come from nowhere.
‘Me!’
‘Try looking down, Yaotl,’ suggested Handy. ‘I can tell you’re not used to children!’ He crouched down next to me. ‘What’s your name, then?’
I would have put the newcomer’s age at about three. He was naked apart from a short cloak that barely covered his loins. He took no notice of Handy but looked curiously up at me and sucked nervously on a finger. ‘What did you do to your face?’ he mumbled.
I opened my mouth and then shut it again when I found myself unable to think of a sensible answer. I looked hopefully at Handy, who was standing up. ‘He fell over,’ he said.
For some reason this struck the child as funny He started giggling.
‘Well, he seems to like you,’ the commoner said. ‘One of your nephews?’
‘Possibly. Or a great-nephew, even.’
‘His name,’ said an icy female voice, ‘is Quiauhtli. Quiauhtli, this is your great-uncle Yaotl. What are you doing here?’ she asked me. ‘It’s no use scrounging for food, you know – the fast doesn’t end till tomorrow!’ In a slightly milder tone she added, ‘And who’s your friend?’
