Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  ‘All right,’ said Handy mildly. ‘Yaotl, let go of him. What’s all this about?’

  I took two steps back from fire, dragging the old man with me so that he was out of the smoke, although I was not ready to release him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t seem to have had much luck getting your attention up until now. If you’ll listen to what I’ve got to say, I’ll make it as quick as possible, and then I’ll go.’ I looked at Jade and Handy. ‘Is that all right?’

  Neither of them said anything, but neither of them moved either. I seemed to be surrounded by life-sized statues, Handy and my brother on one side, Jade and her perplexed husband on the other, and just next to me the priest, who looked on the point of tucking his conch-shell under his cloak and going home.

  ‘You won’t come back?’ my father muttered.

  ‘Not if you don’t want me to, no.’

  He grunted something that may have been assent. I relaxed my grip, and he did not at once turn around and try to kick me in the groin with his good leg, and so I decided I was safe for the moment.

  ‘Now, I’m going to tell you all a story,’ I began.

  The young priest interrupted me. ‘Excuse me, but this is supposed to be a vigil!’

  ‘So we’re awake,’ growled Handy. ‘You can still blow your trumpet, if it makes you feel any better!’

  ‘May the gods forgive us,’ my mother whimpered fearfully.

  I looked from one to another of them in bewilderment, before deciding I might as well carry on. ‘As I was saying …’

  6

  ‘You probably heard most of this from Handy, while I was away with Lion.’

  ‘I told them everything you told me,’ the commoner replied. ‘They know about your son, and the business with Kindly, the featherwork.’ He shot a brief, nervous glance at Jade. I grinned sympathetically. Jade was capable of extracting gossip from an oyster.

  ‘All right. So most of the story you know already. Here’s the rest of it.’

  I told them about Skinny and Idle; how their father had done some service for Kindly and how the merchant, in return, had arranged his talented son’s adoption into a family of featherworkers from Amantlan. I told them how the lad had prospered at first, and how it had all started to go wrong.

  ‘He dried up. He tried all sorts of things to get himself working again – which to him must have meant making something every time that was better than his last effort. Nothing worked, of course. All he was doing by joining in with his rival, Angry, following his brother around into drinking and gambling dens and getting married, was taking his mind off the fact that the task he’d set himself was all but impossible.’

  ‘So what about this suit he was making, the one that was nicked from Kindly’s house?’ Handy asked.

  ‘Yes,’ my elder sister Jade added, ‘what was so special about it that Skinny suddenly managed to remember what he was supposed to be doing for a living?’

  ‘It may not have been the costume itself, although it was something special.’ Mindful of the Emperor’s threats, that was as much as I was going to say about Skinny’s last commission. ‘I think he finally managed to find what he’d been looking for for so long: a source of inspiration. I think he fell in love.’

  Glutton frowned deeply. ‘He was married, Handy said. He and his wife …’

  ‘Forget his wife! It was his brother’s wife he fell for – Marigold!’

  All of my family stared at me, wordlessly. I had lost them, I could tell, and I was not surprised. It had been a pure guess on my part, but it made sense to me.

  ‘Skinny spent a large part of his youth in the House of Tears, being taught by priests. All featherworkers’ children do. They don’t become priests themselves and I’m sure they’re spared the full rigours of a priest’s training, but at the sort of age they are when they’re there, all that sacred lore is bound to get under their skins. Judging by what his own wife told me, it made a big impact on Skinny And then, years later, when he was at his wits’ end, with his skills having deserted him, close to despair, who did he meet but the most devout woman in Mexico?

  ‘There are more idols in that house in Atecocolecan than there are in the Heart of the World. Marigold brought them with her when she dragged her husband back to his home parish. According to Butterfly, she thought the move would do him good, but I’m not sure it was Idle she was thinking about at all. I bet what she really wanted was to get him away from his brother. She was the sort to sacrifice herself for the sake of Skinny’s art, so he could go on honouring the gods.’

  ‘It didn’t work,’ my mother pointed out. ‘Skinny followed them.’

  ‘He couldn’t work on the costume in Angry’s house. It was too secret. Marigold may not have known that.’

  ‘Maybe he couldn’t bear to be away from her,’ Jade suggested.

  ‘That too. If I’m right, and she was his inspiration, then maybe he couldn’t work if they were apart. Angry told me Skinny’s work started going to pieces again around the time his brother married, and the two things may have been connected. Somehow he had got over it by the time he started working on the costume …’

  ‘I’ll say he got over it!’ Jade cried. ‘How do you think Marigold came to be pregnant?’

  I stared at her. ‘You don’t think …? No, she’d never …’

  ‘Don’t be so simple, Yaotl! Nobody’s that pious! Besides, if she really thought sleeping with her brother-in-law would enable him to finish the work, I bet she’d do it. Don’t you think so, Mother?’

  I was always amazed by my female relations’ ability to put the most prurient interpretation on anybody’s actions. All the same, my mother, perhaps catching the troubled look on Jade’s husband’s face, settled for a prim frown and a comment that there really was no way of knowing.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ I said, ‘Skinny got to work on the costume, and it went well – in fact, he finished it. Unfortunately, it was never delivered.’

  ‘He sold it to Kindly,’ Handy pointed out. ‘Why would he have done that?’

  ‘He didn’t. His brother did.’

  ‘Idle?’ Handy said. ‘No, that can’t be right. Kindly told you Skinny sold the thing to him. He wouldn’t have made a mistake over which brother he was dealing with. He’d known their family since they were little boys.’

  ‘Not quite,’ I corrected him. ‘He knew the family when they were little boys. I don’t suppose Kindly had much to do with the brothers after they grew up, particularly after their father died. Idle would have been too feckless to be any use to him and Skinny was in another line altogether. But even if he did come across them over the years, it would still have been an easy mistake to make. They were identical twins. I found an idol of Xolotl at Idle’s house. It had been knocked off its plinth and hidden. I thought maybe someone had been ill, and the idol desecrated after he died. But I’m sure Xolotl was worshipped because there were twins in the house. Maybe Skinny was angry with the god after his brother died, and broke the statue in a fit of pique.’

  There was a long silence before Handy said: ‘Let me guess. Idle sold Kindly the costume, pretending to be his brother. Why? And what made Kindly buy it?’

  ‘Idle was a mushroom-head and a gambler with no money of his own. He saw something in his brother’s workshop that he thought he could barter with. And I don’t know how things were between the brothers just then. Maybe Jade was right about Skinny and Marigold. Perhaps his main motive wasn’t profit, but spite. As for Kindly, he may have wondered why the man he thought was Skinny was so keen to sell something so valuable, but he’s too greedy to turn down a bargain. He wasn’t about to ask any awkward questions.’

  Jade, as shrewd as ever, told me what happened next. ‘The featherworker found out, and stole the goods back.’

  ‘That’s what must have happened,’ I agreed. ‘Skinny wouldn’t just have known what his handiwork was worth. He also knew – as I’m pretty sure Idle didn’t – who had commissioned it. And let’s just say he wo
uld have been seriously scared at the idea of having to explain that it was missing.

  ‘Skinny planned the theft well. He seems to have known where to look, and that there would be a lot of people about who’d be in no real state to recognize him or work out what he was doing or stop him doing it. He just had one piece of bad luck. There was one other person in the house who was wide awake and alert, because he was there for the same reason as our featherworker: my son, Nimble.’

  At the mention of my son’s name, something rippled through my audience: a kind of restlessness, a shuffling of feet and one or two sighs. Even my father, who had ignored me ever since I had started speaking, looked up sharply. None of them had ever set eyes on Nimble, or even known of his existence until a few days before, but nobody could fail to respond to the idea of a long-lost grandson, nephew or cousin. Perhaps, I thought, they were all able to take one look at his father and feel sorry for the lad. It saddened me that they would probably never meet him.

  ‘He wanted to get his bronze knife back. He knew his …’ I looked at the eager faces around me and hastily amended what I had been about to say to avoid offending their sensibilities. ‘He knew his associate, Shining Light, had taken it to Kindly’s house and left it there. The knife wasn’t all he found, of course.

  ‘Only the gods know exactly what happened when our two thieves surprised each other. Obviously there was a fight: I saw the bloodstains, on the floor and in the courtyard outside, and on the knife itself, and I saw what looked like a knife wound on Skinny’s hand. I don’t suppose Nimble tried to stop Skinny taking the costume. He just wanted to grab the knife and run. Maybe Skinny found it first, and the fight started when Nimble tried to take it off him.

  ‘I’m afraid Nimble came off worse. In fact, for a while, after I found the body at the bridge, I thought he’d died.’ A groan came from several throats. ‘It didn’t occur to me at the time that the blood I saw on the bridge couldn’t have anything to do with what I’d seen at Kindly’s house, because there was no trail connecting them.

  ‘As for Skinny – I don’t know whether he’d planned what he did next or whether it just occurred to him on the spur of the moment. Instead of carrying the costume home, he put it on. It didn’t slow him down any more wearing it than it would carrying it, and he knew that if he was dressed as a god anyone he met would run away rather than try to stop him. It worked so well he wore it again a couple of nights later, when I saw him. Then he was trying to scare people off while his accomplice disposed of his brother.’

  The fire was burning down rapidly: it was little more than a pile of ash harbouring a few stunted flames, although there was still plenty of smoke. There was a chill in the air, even though the sky was brightening and the mountains were appearing in the East, their peaks and ridges dark and jagged against a pale pink background. The Sun would be up soon, heralding the end of the fast and the start of the festivities as well as, for me, the day I had to satisfy both my masters – the Chief Minister and the Emperor – or perish.

  ‘I think Skinny and Idle had their last argument when Skinny got home. He’d have been spoiling for a fight. He’d got involved in one brawl already that he hadn’t been ready for, and then had a terrifying journey home. Maybe Idle had words to say about how close Skinny and Marigold had been getting. It’s hardly surprising they came to blows. Idle died. I don’t know whether Skinny meant to kill him or whether things just got out of hand, but the next thing they knew, they had a body to dispose of.’

  ‘They?’ Glutton had been frowning in puzzlement for much of the night, but he had been following the story well enough to ask the question.

  ‘Skinny, of course, and his wife, and for all I know Marigold. None of them had any reason to love Idle. For all I know they were all in it together.’

  ‘Why did they choose that latrine to dump the body in?’ Jade asked. ‘It was taking an incredible risk, carrying it all that way. Why not just bury it in the marshes at the back of the house?’

  I frowned. She had a point. ‘They’re working on the chinampa plots up there,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they were afraid of someone finding it so close to the house. It would have been too easy to connect it with them.’

  Jade’s husband thought he had spotted a flaw in my account. ‘I thought it was Skinny who identified the body after the police found it,’ he pointed out. ‘That doesn’t figure, if he’d hidden it in the first place.’

  ‘The police knew his brother was missing. There can’t be a lot of unidentified corpses in Amantlan at any one time. That’s why they came and asked him to help identify the body, and when he found his brother’s charm, he had to own up to who it was. It wouldn’t have mattered that much. There was nothing to connect him with the killing, after all.’

  ‘So the featherworker got his piece back, and killed his brother, and all the stories about people seeing visions of the god Quetzalcoatl were down to him.’ Handy was motioning with his fingers, as if he were trying to count off all the unsolved mysteries one by one. ‘All right, so what happened to him? And his … well, whatever was going on between them – to Marigold?’

  ‘Oh, that’s simple,’ I said airily. ‘Butterfly killed them both.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, who else? She hated Marigold. Whether her relationship with Skinny was innocent or not, I’m pretty sure I can guess what Butterfly made of it all. It was simple jealousy. She killed Marigold, probably shortly after Idle died, and later she killed her own husband. Perhaps he’d been fretting over where his girlfriend had got to, and it started to get on her nerves. I think she did it just before I went to her house the second time, when she told me Skinny had gone out. She didn’t make nearly as good a job of dumping the body as her husband had: she just left it floating in a canal and it was found almost immediately. That may be why she took more care over Marigold’s body. Nobody’s found that yet.’

  ‘You went to that house a third time.’ My mother’s unblinking stare and sneering tone told me Handy had told her what had happened the night I tried burgling the featherworker’s home.

  I sighed. ‘I don’t know what to say about that. You know about the woman, and the god.’

  ‘Who was wearing the costume then?’ Jade asked. ‘Both brothers were dead, weren’t they?’

  I looked at her seriously. ‘I don’t think there was a costume then. Maybe it was the Morning Glory seeds, or … I don’t know. But that time, I think it really was the god.’

  Nobody had an answer to that. A long silence ensued. Even the crackling of the fire had ceased.

  Eventually Handy asked, hesitantly: ‘So, where’s the featherwork?’

  ‘Butterfly’s house,’ I said quickly, relieved to have a question I could answer sensibly. ‘Where it had been all along. You see, there was one place I didn’t know about – although I should have realized it was there at the time …’

  ‘Featherwork?’ My father’s voice, heard for the first time since I had begun, silenced me and made everyone sit up. ‘Forget the featherwork, who cares about that? What about your son?’ He looked at my mother. ‘Our grandson. Where is he? What are you going to do about him?’

  ‘Oh, that’s even simpler,’ I said.

  Then I did one of the most stupid things I have ever done. I told him.

  SEVEN GRASS

  1

  The young man with the trumpet seemed eager to be off as soon as the Sun came up. He could not decently leave until the parish priest arrived to perform the sacrifices and formally end the fast, and he even managed to sound a few half-hearted notes, but he kept staring at the eastern sky, as if willing the Sun to get a move on. Every so often he would look nervously at me, but I could hardly blame him for that. For a priest, accustomed to long fasts and sleepless nights, the office he had been expecting to perform at my parents’ house would have seemed like a holiday. The last thing he had needed was a madman turning up uninvited and throwing the whole carefully planned ritual into chaos.

  Eventual
ly, he got his wish. It was dawn, and the parish priest was at the doorway.

  ‘I’ll be on my way, then,’ the young man said, gathering up his conch-shell and his flute.

  ‘Won’t you stay?’ my mother cried, alarmed and upset. ‘There’s food and drink. You must be hungry.’

  ‘No, that’s all right,’ he said, although the food and drink were his due – payment for his role in the household’s celebrations. The other musicians and the singers shuffled anxiously, no doubt wondering whether they were going to have to go without as well. ‘The others can stay, but I’m not hungry, to be honest. Or thirsty. Have to go!’

  He almost ran past his colleagues, whose faces had all broken into relieved grins, and past the parish priest, who turned and watched him go speechlessly from where he was waiting, just outside the gateway

  ‘This is all your fault,’ my mother hissed at me.

  ‘Why? I didn’t tell him his conch-shell sounded flat, or anything …’

  ‘Don’t try to be funny!’ my father snapped. ‘You know you upset him, falling asleep and talking all night when we’re supposed to be honouring the gods. These young priests, they can be very temperamental …’

  ‘Look, don’t tell me about priests. I was one, remember?’

  ‘I remember. I’m surprised you can, with all the sacred wine that’s been sloshing about inside you over the years …’

  We were squaring up to one another, our chests puffed out like turkey cocks’, my father stooping slightly as he leaned forward on his good leg so that his face was just on a level with mine. At any moment, I thought, yesterday’s fight would resume, and either I would be driven bodily out of the house or I would have to do the old man some serious harm.

  I was not going to let that happen. I felt myself begin to relax as I resolved to turn around and walk away while both of us could still stand.