Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  I heard a loud cough from the direction of the gateway.

  ‘Excuse me.’ It was Imacaxtli, the parish priest. ‘May I come in?’

  Imacaxtli was an institution in Toltenco. He had served our little temple on top of its stumpy pyramid for as long as I could remember. He had watched me and my brothers and sisters grow up, and I suspected he had been instrumental in getting me into the Priest House, something for which it had taken me a long time to forgive him. Now, watching his bent figure and wizened features as he stood, strangely diffident, on my parents’ threshold, I wondered what this old man thought of his position. Did he hanker after the honour and glory to be found at the top of the Great Pyramid, or would he rather serve in a place where he knew everybody’s business and everybody knew him?

  ‘Of course!’ my mother gushed. ‘Please, you’ve come a long way, you must be out of breath. Have a rest, have something to eat.’ The formal greeting sounded faintly absurd when addressed to someone who lived only two streets away.

  ‘Not at all, not at all. Now, who do we have here – why, it’s Yaotl, isn’t it?’ He walked straight up to me. ‘I haven’t seen you since … now, let me think …’

  ‘I was just going,’ I said hastily.

  ‘Oh no you aren’t,’ my father snapped, seizing my arm in a painfully tight grip.

  ‘But you said …’

  ‘You’ve probably done enough to offend the gods already,’ he snarled. He looked at my mother. ‘Not to mention her. So you can bloody well stay for the sacrifice.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I have to …’

  ‘I know perfectly well what you have to do. You’re going to need all the favours the gods can spare you, and you won’t help yourself by running out now. So you stay for the sacrifice,’ he repeated, in a low but determined voice, ‘and then you go and find your son!’

  While the priest inspected the little dough figures they had made, my mother, Jade and Honey looked on, as proud and anxious as parents presenting their children for the first time to the masters at a House of Youth.

  ‘These are beautiful,’ the old man said. ‘You have all done very well. The gods are honoured to have such devoted servants.’

  ‘We did our best,’ my mother simpered. A slight flush coloured her cheeks. ‘We know what is right in this household, and try to live by it.’ She glanced reproachfully at me for a moment before turning back to the priest. ‘Here is the weaving-stick.’

  The priest took the implement she handed him, murmuring a few words of thanks as he turned it over in his hands. It was nothing more than one of the flat, curved weaving-sticks that all Aztec women learned to use as little girls, but once a year, in those households that observed the festival of the Coming Down of Water, it served another purpose.

  Bending down, he picked Tlaloc up from his tiny reed mat, looked lovingly into the god’s shiny little bean eyes for a moment, and then drove the weaving-stick into his breast.

  He twisted the stick this way and that, not so hard as to break the figure up, but with the kind of ferocious expression that I had seen on the faces of Fire Priests digging the hearts out of real, living men and women on the sacrificial stone. He bent the god’s head back until it was at an angle that would have snapped a human being’s neck. Then he put the stick down and pulled a tiny lump of dough out of the figure’s chest. He held his prize up towards the East, presenting it triumphantly to the rising Sun, before dropping it into the god’s own tiny bowl of sacred wine, just as the Fire Priest would have cast his victim’s still-beating heart into the Eagle Vessel.

  He did the same to each of the other little statues, one by one, until all the gods were dead and their decapitated, eviscerated bodies lay in the courtyard among their offerings, while their hearts floated and softened in their own bowls of sacred wine. Then he gathered up the bowls and the plates with the tiny tamales and the paper clothes that had adorned the gods, and threw them all on the bonfire.

  My family cheered. The ritual had been performed flawlessly, and no doubt they were relieved that the fast was over and the guests were about to arrive and there would be food and drink in plenty.

  ‘Thank you!’ my mother cried. ‘You don’t know what it means to us, having this ceremony performed here.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said the old man. He was already gathering up the reed mats, the little instruments and the remains of the dough figures, all of which would go back to the temple with him. The mats and the instruments were too expensive to burn every year, while the dough was the delicious kind, flavoured with honey, that we made sweets out of, and was part of his payment for performing the rite. ‘My best wishes for the rest of the day’

  As the first of the guests began to flow through the doorway, bringing with them their offerings, ears of corn, grains of dried maize and paper banners for the children to hang on the pole in the middle of the courtyard, he suddenly turned to me.

  ‘You too, Cemiquiztli Yaotl. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

  He left then, with his offerings gathered in the folds of his cloak, and me staring dumbly after him.

  My mother gave me my cloak back. I might need it, she told me.

  ‘I’m only going to Tlatelolco, not the summit of Mount Popocatepetl,’ I pointed out. ‘Anyway, it’s day now, it’s starting to warm up – the time I’d have needed it was last night! Look, I told you, it’s yours …’

  ‘Well then, bring it back when you’ve finished with it.’

  I winced. For all my confidence that I had solved the mystery of Kindly’s featherwork, I knew full well that there was no guarantee I would ever be back. Being able to satisfy the Emperor was one thing, but the Chief Minister was another matter, and his demand was one I could never give into. So Montezuma probably would not have me killed, but unless he exerted himself to save me from my master I might yet die.

  ‘Look, Mother, I might not see you again …’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘You always come back. Now go and do what you have to, and if you could manage not to get that cloak too dirty, I’d appreciate it.’

  She turned away quickly. I began to stretch a hand towards her, but I hesitated too long, and she was out of reach, lost among the crowd of her guests.

  I headed for the doorway, but Handy was in the way

  ‘What about me, then?’ he asked plaintively.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What about me? Look, I know what you’re about. You’re going to warn your son old Black Feathers is after his blood, and once you’re sure he’s safely out of the city, you’ll go to ground or run away yourself. Well, fine, I’d do the same, but where does it leave me? The old bastard’s bound to blame me if you get away – and I can’t run. I’ve a family to think of.’

  I looked at him blankly. ‘Um, right.’ His dilemma had never occurred to me. ‘You have, yes. Er, well, can’t you just tell him you couldn’t stop me? No, I suppose not.’ Handy stood a head taller than me and had muscles conditioned by his time in the army and years of hard work in the fields and on the city’s building sites. He could have picked me up and carried me back to the Chief Minister’s palace if he had wanted to.

  Glutton, Amaxtli and Jade came up to us. ‘Come to see you on your way,’ Jade said. ‘We wanted to make sure you were really going! What’s up?’

  ‘Handy’s worried he’ll get the blame if I manage to find Nimble and help him escape,’ I explained.

  ‘Oh, that’s no problem,’ said Jade’s husband sourly. ‘Bash him over the head, tie him up and shove him in a ditch somewhere — preferably a long way away from here!’

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Handy.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ cried Jade.

  ‘What, like this?’ said Glutton.

  My brother was even bigger than Handy Before any of the rest of us knew what he was doing he had stepped up behind him and clouted him on either side of the head with his fists.

  We heard a soft thump. Handy’s eyes rolled into the
top of his head and he fell forward on to the floor.

  Jade screamed and rushed towards him.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to do that!’ I shouted. ‘You might have killed him!’

  ‘I didn’t feel anything break,’ my brother said defensively. ‘Anyway, it was for his own good, wasn’t it?’

  I stared at him.

  ‘Are you going, or not?’ Amaxtli asked testily.

  I looked down at the prone figure of my friend. As far as I could see past my weeping, hysterical sister, he appeared to be breathing normally. I looked at the crowd in the courtyard. Every back was turned towards me, as if telling me I had no further business here.

  I did not answer my brother-in-law I just went.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Kindly’s slave Partridge took a step back through the entrance to his master’s house. He had to, to avoid being run through by the bronze knife I was pointing at his throat.

  ‘Where’s who? No, you can’t come in. The mistress’s orders …’

  ‘Get out of my way. Or have you learned how to breathe without a windpipe?’

  The man stumbled away from me and then turned and fled, shouting for help. I followed him, letting the knife dangle from my fingers.

  The fleeing slave almost bumped into his mistress. Lily was standing in the middle of her courtyard, beneath the fig tree that dominated it. In the tree’s shadow, against the base of one wall, squatted her father. The old man had a drinking-gourd in his hands, as always, but he was wide awake and staring at me with a quizzical expression.

  ‘Hello, Yaotl,’ said Lily coolly. She ignored her slave, who was cowering behind her. ‘We were expecting you last night.’

  ‘I got held up,’ I said drily. ‘I want to see my son.’

  ‘He’s probably asleep.’

  ‘So bloody well wake him up, then!’ I snapped, waving the knife in front of me furiously.

  If Lily found my gesture threatening she did not show it. The corner of her mouth twitched in amusement when she looked at the gleaming blade.

  ‘Why don’t you put that thing away before you cut yourself? And you, Partridge, stop whimpering and do something useful. Go and see if the boy’s awake … Ah, no need.’

  Nimble stood in a doorway, blinking as his eyes took in the sunny courtyard.

  I stopped waving the knife and gazed at him.

  I could see immediately that he had been in a bad way. His face was gaunt with shadows around the eyes. I thought he seemed old. He had always appeared older than his years, but now the lines etched in his forehead by pain and fever made him look almost as ancient as his father felt. It was hard to say whether he now looked any better than the pale figure I remembered glimpsing across a canal, two days before. Nonetheless he stood up straight and his eyes were clear and alert.

  ‘Nimble,’ I said. It was difficult to speak. My mouth was dry and the sides of my throat seemed to have stuck together. Eventually I managed to add: ‘I brought your knife back.’

  I ought to have been more careful. As we ran into one another’s arms, winding each other in an ecstatic, breathless embrace, I nearly stuck the weapon’s point in his shoulder by accident.

  ‘I knew you’d come. I thought if I just sent you the knife, you’d know where to find me. I couldn’t think of any other sort of message I could send that would be safe. I was afraid that if I had Kindly or Lily write anything down it might fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘You mean old Black Feathers’, or one of his minions’.’ I kept looking at the lad and grinning like an idiot. I had thought I would never see him again, I had thought him dead, more than once. It was hard to accept that we were squatting together in the middle of Kindly’s courtyard, talking, having a conversation, behaving, just for the moment, at least, like a normal father and son. ‘It worked,’ I added. ‘I knew you could only have got the knife from Lily. But I should have guessed where you were anyway, because she’d told my master who you really were, and she didn’t hear that from me – did you, Lily?’

  The woman knelt next to her father, with her plain skirt tucked under her knees and a plate of small honeyed maize cakes nestling in its folds. They were the kind of token food offerings that was always presented to a guest, but I noticed that this did not stop Kindly from reaching across his daughter’s lap and plucking one from the plate every so often.

  ‘No,’ she conceded. ‘Your son told me. Not that he meant to, but he was pretty feverish the day after he was wounded. I think I heard just about everything.’

  ‘Including who he was, and …’ I looked directly into her eyes as I continued: ‘And how your son died, and why’

  She met my glance steadily. ‘That’s right. Everything. But I had to know for sure, you see? I couldn’t trust … sorry, Nimble, but I couldn’t rely on what you said when you were delirious.’ She smiled at the youth and reached out and touched his arm, as if to reassure him. He lowered his head and said nothing. ‘That’s why I took you from Howling Monkey’s house,’ she told me. ‘I needed you to tell me what happened, to confirm what I’d heard from your son.’

  ‘And then you told my master.’ At one time it would have been an accusation, hurled in her face with all the force I could muster, but with Nimble sitting by us I found I could state it calmly.

  ‘I’d no choice,’ she said. ‘I’d taken you – not to mention that knife – from the chief of my parish and then you’d escaped. I had to protect myself. Going to your master and telling him what had happened seemed the best way of doing it.’

  ‘So you told him you’d got his runaway slave and had tried to bring him back.’ I sighed. ‘All right, I understand that much. Why tell him Nimble was my son?’

  ‘He asked what you’d been up to, so I told him. And why not? It didn’t make any difference to the boy whether your master knew who his father was or not. It’s not as if I was about to tell old Black Feathers where to look for him! I know it won’t have made life any easier for you – but let’s face it, why should I have worried about that?’

  It was my turn to look down, to stare at the floor while I made sense of what she was saying. There was no spite in it, I realized. I wondered how it had come about that we were able to speak to each other so dispassionately about things that, to anyone else, would have represented betrayal and the deepest kind of wound. I had not killed her son but she knew I had had a hand in it. It was hard to believe that neither of us cared any more.

  ‘We … we slept together, once,’ I mumbled.

  That produced an explosive guffaw from Kindly, swiftly stifled by his daughter shoving another maize cake into his mouth. She glared at me. ‘Once,’ she said, pointedly.

  ‘Is that why you sheltered my son?’

  She laughed. ‘Forget it, Yaotl! My father found him lying in the middle of the courtyard, with the bronze knife in him, and the other thing that had been kept in the same room as the knife was missing. So he was the only witness to the theft. What would you have done?’ She turned to Nimble. ‘I’m sorry, but … well, we didn’t know you then.’

  ‘Besides,’ Kindly said, ‘you may have forgotten, but my daughter wasn’t at home that night. She was messing about on the lake with you and your brother and old Black Feathers. By the time Lily came home in the morning he was stretched out on a sleeping-mat with his chest strapped up and covered with ground pedilanthus stalks. When the fever started the doctor gave him watered-down peyote juice. Myself, I’d have watered it down a bit more: I think that’s why he started raving.’ Kindly had clearly not forgotten all the medicine he had had to learn as a merchant, journeying unprotected among barbarians.

  ‘I was here two nights later. I heard you crying out,’ I said to my son. I turned to Kindly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You knew what he was to me by then, didn’t you – and it wasn’t a clever guess at all, because he’d told you himself.’ I answered my own question before he could. ‘You didn’t tell me because you wanted me to look for your bloody featherwork, and you thoug
ht you could use my son as a lure. That was it, wasn’t it? No wonder you got me out of the house so fast. Why, you …’

  ‘Oh, save your breath. I’ve been called enough names over the years, I’ve heard them all.’ The old man inspected his daughter’s lap but the maize cakes had all gone, most of them down his own throat. He sighed and picked up his gourd instead. ‘Look, if you’d known where he was, what would you have done? The lad wasn’t fit enough to remember his own name, let alone go anywhere, so you’d have ended up hanging around here like a lovelorn youth haunting the house where his favourite pleasure-girl lives. Your master would have been on to you both in no time. This way, you were able to stay one step ahead of the old bastard – at least for a while.’ He grinned wryly before putting the gourd to his lips. ‘And I really thought you might be able to find that bloody costume, but I suppose you can’t have everything!’

  ‘I did find it.’

  Sacred wine exploded in all directions like water when a large stone is dropped in a pond. The gourd fell on to the old man’s lap, its contents soaking his breechcloth, and he did not notice.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I found the costume. I mean, I know where it is. Shouldn’t be a problem going to get it.’

  He coughed. I looked at Lily and Nimble and was gratified to see them both staring at me.

  I told them what I had told my family during the night.

  Kindly forgot his gourd. It lay beside him, slowly leaking its contents on to the surface of the courtyard. Once or twice he closed his eyes and muttered to himself, and I thought I heard him say: ‘No, that’s wrong.’ However, he did not interrupt until I had finished.

  I leaned back, feeling the warmth of the wall through my cloak, and waited to be congratulated.

  The old man picked up his gourd again. He hefted it, sniffing disgustedly when he realized it was empty.

  ‘Well?’ I demanded.

  ‘Well what? It’s the biggest load of old bollocks I’ve ever heard!’

  I felt my jaw drop. ‘What are you talking about? Look, can’t you see, it all makes perfect sense … Nimble, Lily, listen …’