[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  As I looked out over the edge of the patio in front of the palace and down the hill, however, I realised that our peace was about to be disturbed. ‘It looks as if somebody managed to get past the sentries, though. Who’s this coming up the hill? At this time of evening?’

  ‘Some flunky, I suppose,’ the old man suggested in a bored voice. ‘The royal chefs probably ran out of newts or something like that, so they had to send out for some in a hurry. It won’t be anything to do with us.’

  Kindly’s eyes were too poor to see much in the gathering gloom, but his daughter craned her neck to follow my gaze. ‘Torches,’ she said. ‘And you’re wrong, father. Whoever that is down there, he’s more than a servant. Those men are carrying a litter! Yaotl, you don’t think…?’

  Lily’s last words were spoken in a whisper, through a throat constricted by sudden terror, and when I stood up to stand by her, the hand I laid upon her arm for comfort was trembling.

  Why we should both have been seized at that moment by the same sense of foreboding, I could not say. Perhaps it was something about the litter’s painfully slow progress up the slope, or the delicacy with which its bearers set it down in the forecourt of a small house set in the hillside below us, lowering their charge to the ground as gently as a mother laying her baby on his cradleboard.

  My former master was a frail old man, who would demand that sort of care; but why should he be here?

  ‘Lord Feathered in Black doesn’t know where we are,’ I said. The tremor I felt through the thin material of her blouse reminded me how much effort she was putting into living from one day to the next, and how close she still was to falling into the abyss that surrounded her, the memory of what she had just been through. ‘And we’re the king’s guests, remember?’

  ‘He could have changed his mind.’

  ‘He made a promise, Lily. He ate earth.’ I tightened my grip on her shoulder, wondering whether kings considered themselves bound by a form of oath that I myself had violated on occasion.

  I stared down the hill, but in the gloom it was impossible to identify the person in the litter, which was draped in cotton and bedecked with feathers. A few human shapes moved about: the thick shadows of the litter bearers, the slighter forms of attendants with flickering torches, and another, whose brisk, determined stride gave him, even in the dark and at a distance, the look of an officer.

  My breath caught in my throat when I saw which way he was going, and I heard a startled gasp from Lily at the same time, for he was coming up the steps leading to our house.

  I looked accusingly at Kindly. ‘“It won’t be anything to do with us,” you said.’

  ‘Can’t be right all the time,’ he murmured in a troubled voice.

  ‘“Some flunky,” you said. “Royal chefs run out of newts.”’ Fear made me fling the words at him. ‘I suppose this man’s here to borrow a cup of chocolate!’

  Lily hissed: ‘Yaotl, that’s enough! We’ll know in a moment.’

  The lone man reached the top step and skirted the small pond at the front of our residence. His long cloak, glittering labret and earplugs and piled-up hair seemed to confirm my first impression of him: here was a veteran warrior, whose valour in combat had earned him much wealth and prestige in his own right. Only a king or a great lord could have sent such a man on an errand. I knew where the king of Tetzcoco was now: in his palace at the summit of the hill, and not being carried around in a litter like a cripple. If any other great lord had business with us, it was unlikely to be good news.

  Still, as Lily had remarked, we would know in a moment. The officer stood on the edge of the pond, glancing at each of us in turn as though unsure which of us to address. Finally, with his eyes on the floor in front of him, he gave an embarrassed cough and began: ‘My lords…’

  I gaped at him. I wondered briefly who he thought we were, before blurting out: ‘Oh, it’s all right, he’s got the wrong house. No lords here!’

  Lily silenced me with a bony elbow in the ribs. Stepping forward, she greeted the stranger graciously, with the customary words: ‘You have expended breath to get here, you are tired, you are hungry. First you must rest and have some food.’

  I giggled hysterically. ‘We’ve got pots full of newts!’

  ‘Yaotl, shut up!’ my mistress cried, exasperated.

  The soldier’s astounded gaze swung from one to the other of us like a spectator’s at a ball game, but at the mention of my name it came to rest on me. ‘Yaotl,’ he repeated.

  I looked wildly around as though another Yaotl might have appeared out of the shadows beside me. ‘It’s a common enough name,’ I said defensively.

  ‘My lord…’ he began again.

  ‘No, look, there must be some mistake,’ I protested, but I fell silent as I took in the expression on the man’s face. For all his warrior’s strength and vigour, his cheeks were hollow and his eyes darted about in their sockets as though looking for a means of escape. Something had terrified him, I realised suddenly: something he had seen very recently, perhaps this very evening.

  I became aware that he was still speaking. I had not been paying attention: it had been some long, formal pronouncement, delivered in a monotone.

  Kindly answered: ‘An invitation? To what, though?’

  ‘Lord Maize Ear, the Great Chichimec, lord of the Acolhuans…’

  ‘The king, yes. Spare us all his titles, he’s a friend of mine,’ the old man lied outrageously. ‘What about him?’

  The officer looked wretched, his tension evident from the sweat glistening on his forehead. What frightened him was the possibility that we would not respond to his message as we were meant to, and he, the messenger, would get the blame. Kindly knew this and was making the most of it. I wondered if Lily’s father had sensed that there was more to the man’s fear than that, however.

  He stammered: ‘Although my master’s house is mean, and he can offer but poor food…’

  ‘You mean the king? Rubbish, he lives in a palace, of course. Mind you, if he’s run out of newts again…’

  ‘Father!’ Lily snapped. ‘Will you let the poor man finish?’ She turned to the officer and smiled weakly at him. ‘Forgive us,’ she said gently. ‘We haven’t been the king’s guests for long, and this is all new to us. He wants to see us, is that right? Just tell us when and where.’

  The man seemed to gain a couple of fingers’ breadths in height, like a porter straightening his back after untying his tump-line and dropping his burden on the ground. His formal manner vanished. ‘Up the hill.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the king’s palace at the summit. ‘Be there at dawn tomorrow.’

  ‘Then please tell his lordship we will come…’ Lily began, but in my agitation I could not restrain myself from speaking across her.

  ‘You didn’t come straight here from Maize Ear’s palace, though, did you? You came from down there.’ I gestured towards the house where we had seen the litter taken. ‘So if this invitation is from the king, it includes someone else. Whoever it is, you asked him first, then you came to us. And I’m guessing as well that whatever it is that’s put the wind up you, it’s something more than whatever lord Maize Ear will say if he doesn’t see our faces beaming at him over breakfast. So just who is this scary person? Who are we calling on tomorrow – besides your king?’

  He took a step backward, until one of his heels was over the water: any farther and he would have been in. No doubt he was not used to hearing slaves speaking like that. But he had an answer for me: a name. It was the one name guaranteed to silence me.

  ‘Lord Feathered in Black.’ His voice shook with awe. ‘The chief minister of the Aztecs is here to see you.’

  3

  ‘But what does he want?’

  I paced up and down in my agitation, my bare feet slapping the stuccoed floor of the small room Lily and I had retired to. The king’s expensive feather and cotton wall-hangings deadened the sound they made, and for some reason I found that irritating, so I brought my soles d
own on the floor still harder until they hurt. This did not make me feel any better.

  My owner and I shared a sleeping mat. We had not slept apart since we had come to Tetzcotzinco, not since the night, a few days and a lifetime ago, when we had been thrown into a cell in the dark prison in the heart of king Maize Ear’s palace. In all that time we had not made love once, although we both knew, without either of us mentioning the fact, that this was likely to come. What we shared now was need. Lily had to know that when she fled from sleep, shrieking and thrashing about in her efforts to escape the monsters that haunted her dreams, I would be there.

  I had never been given to flattering myself. I was a scrawny slave, and not a very reliable one at that, besides being a failed priest. My long hair was going grey and fast receding away from my forehead. As a man I had nothing to recommend me except this: I was a man, I was here, I was real, and she never had to tell me who or what she was dreaming about, because I already knew.

  It had been possible to believe we had a future together, or at least pretend to believe it, so long as we were safely hidden. But now lord Feathered in Black was here.

  Tetzcoco was an independent kingdom, and its king had offered us his protection. However, everyone knew lord Maize Ear owed his position to his uncle, the Aztec emperor Montezuma. My former master, besides being Montezuma’s cousin, was also the emperor’s chief minister. If he told the king to hand Lily, Kindly and me over to him, it would be hard for Maize Ear to refuse.

  Lily looked up at me from the sleeping mat. ‘It’s obvious what he wants.’ Her voice shook. ‘He wants to finish what the king’s servants started.’

  I looked at her bandaged fingers and groaned. It was part pity, part remorse. ‘Lily, I’m sorry. I got you into this. You and your father. You should have left me in that slave-dealer’s cage!’

  She shivered violently. ‘Well,’ she whispered, ‘I didn’t.’ She looked down. ‘Will he take us back to Mexico, do you think? Or has he brought the captain with him?’

  The captain was my former master’s favourite henchman. He was an otomi, a member of that select band of elite warriors who were among the most feared in the Aztec army. The otomies were berserkers, sworn never to take a step backwards in battle. They were instantly recognisable in the field by their close-fitting green cotton uniforms, their hair, worn piled up on their heads and flowing over the napes of their necks, and the towering feather-bedecked devices that they carried on wicker frames strapped to their backs. The mere sight of an otomi was usually enough to cow his enemies into submission. The captain was even more terrifying than most of his comrades because he had lost half his face and one eye during some particularly brutal fight many years before. The fact that he had survived the encounter at all was not the least frightening thing about him.

  And he hated me. With my friend Momaimati, a commoner whose name meant One Skilled with his Hands or ‘Handy’, I had once humiliated the captain by leading him into a hostile crowd from which he had had to be rescued by a squad of Aztec warriors. The captain and his men had pursued me to king Maize Ear’s kingdom of Tetzcoco. I knew that he would blame me for what happened as a result: a fight with the locals in which his followers had perished and from which he had been forced to flee. He would not rest now until one or other of us was dead.

  ‘Perhaps we could run away,’ I suggested.

  ‘How? This hill is ringed with guards. Remember what my father said. If a centipede couldn’t get in, how do you think we’re going to sneak out of here? And where would we go? Back to Mexico? Where lord Feathered in Black is chief minister?’

  ‘Then I’ll have to fight him,’ I said stoutly. ‘Challenge him, maybe. Old Black Feathers likes to bet, you know. I could wager our lives on the contest – if I beat the otomi, the old bastard has to let us go!’

  Lily laughed. It was a brittle sound with no humour in it. ‘Don’t be absurd! You’re no warrior, and half the army couldn’t take on the captain and win. Besides, would you trust the chief minister to honour the bet if you did win?’ The laughter suddenly dissolved into the strangled, choking sound of barely-suppressed tears. ‘It’s hopeless,’ she gasped. ‘And I thought… No-one lives forever, I know, but you and I, we might have been happy…’

  If I had been able to find any words, I would never have managed to squeeze them out past the constriction in my throat. I squatted awkwardly in front of her. I reached out to her as if to take her hands in mine, but then dropped my arms when I remembered how tender to the touch her fingers still were.

  For a long moment neither of us said anything. Lily looked between her knees at the mat, while each of us waited for the other to speak. When she at last looked up at me, there was no more concealing the tears that started from the corners of her eyes and rolled silently down her cheeks.

  I stretched my arms towards her again, this time to touch her face, cradling it between my palms. ‘Lily,’ I groaned. ‘I’m sorry.’

  THIRTEEN MOTION

  1

  The same messenger called for us just before daybreak, repeating his summons with the same awkward diffidence he had displayed on the previous evening.

  ‘I’ll say this for the Kingdom of Tetzcoco, you have the politest way of delivering a death warrant,’ I told him sourly as we came out of the house. ‘Where I come from, it’s a lot less formal. They just throw you in a cage and leave you there till they get around to strangling you.’ The man stared at me, looking gratifyingly shocked, but then for all I knew he genuinely believed he was inviting us to breakfast.

  The four of us made a glum little procession as we climbed towards the royal Palace at the summit of the hill. Grey mist, rising from the mighty lake that filled the bottom of the valley of Mexico, swirled around us, wrapping us in darkness and making each of us clutch our cloaks tighter for warmth. Moisture dripping from branches and rocks made the ground slippery and treacherous. Even if we had not all been sunk in our own thoughts, we would have been too busy trying to keep our footing to speak to one another.

  Near the top, steep steps had been etched into the rock, and our progress up them reminded me too vividly of the shuffling gait of captives being led up the side of the great pyramid in Mexico. It was the right time of day too, I judged. Around now, the priests would be hailing the dawn with trumpet calls and killing the first prisoner of the day, cutting his heart out to nourish the gods, in the hope that they would let the sun rise once more.

  Sure enough, the sun was there to greet us when we reached the summit.

  The officer strode on towards the king’s palace. But he was used to this place. Kindly, Lily and I were not, and for moment we could only stand and stare at the things around us like little children at their first ball game.

  None of us said anything until Lily let out a sob. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she whispered.

  We had climbed above the mist. The valley below us was like a pale grey sea, empty save for the mountaintops in the distance, their slopes picked out in pink and gold by the newborn sun. Most astonishing of all, though, was what lay at our feet: for in the middle of the sea of mist was a lake.

  Lord Maize Ear’s grandfather had carved a huge reservoir out of the rock at the summit of the hill and built his palace on an island at the centre of it, in the shade of a grove of cedars. We had seen it once before, in moonlight, and then it had been lovely. At daybreak it was like one of the thirteen levels of heaven. The ripples on the lake glittered, the trees were hung with dewdrops that sparkled like jewels where the sunlight hit them, and the birdsong rising from the valley somehow made the foot of the hill, the mist-shrouded land below us, seem more remote than ever.

  A causeway led across the lake to the palace in its centre. Against the gleaming surface of the water it was black, like a deep crack across the face of a gold statue. I hesitated to set foot on it, knowing who must be waiting for me at the far end; but the officer beckoned, and there was nothing we could do but follow.

  Among the cedars, bathed in
the morning’s first rays of sunlight, two men sat on high-backed wicker chairs. One was in his twenties, tall, fresh-faced, his slight but well-muscled frame sheathed in a plain white robe of fine cotton and his brow crowned with the turquoise diadem of a king. His neighbour could not have looked more different: shrunken with age, with grey wisps of hair framing a face like an old leather mask, and his hands swollen and liver-spotted and shaking. My former master was dressed gaudily, as was his habit, in a blue mantle decorated with orange butterflies and a matching breechcloth, with grackle feathers in his hair. The effect was of a grotesque, overdressed doll – or it would have been, but for the eyes that shone out of that ravaged face, their gaze steady and bright with cunning.

  Two girls in plain skirts and blouses, with their hair modestly bound up, kneeled just behind the wicker chairs. They were obviously there to fetch food or drink or anything else the great men required. I saw no-one else. My head darted from side to side as I looked anxiously for the hulking figure of the otomi captain, but if he was there, he was hiding.

  We walked slowly forward, my hand on Lily’s arm and hers on her father’s. She was trembling, but I was oddly calm, even numb. If I felt anything at all it was anger rather than fear.

  ‘How could that young bastard do this to us?’ I muttered. ‘We’re supposed to be his guests!’

  ‘He’s emperor Montezuma’s nephew’, Kindly reminded me. ‘He probably doesn’t have a choice. As soon as the chief minister learned we were here…’

  ‘And how did he find that out, then?’ I demanded. ‘Who told him?’ I could feel my fists clenching with barely suppressed rage, all the fiercer for my helplessness.

  Before Lily’s father could answer, the young king had got to his feet, speaking the ritual words of greeting in a soft treble voice: ‘You are welcome. You have come far, you have expended breath to get here, you are hungry. Please, rest and have some food.’ At the same time my nose caught the warm scent of freshly-made tortillas from somewhere within the palace at his back.