[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  Kindly laughed again. ‘I’m too old! No, I’m for going home. I’m going to sit in my own courtyard with my patolli mat and a gourd full of sacred wine, and if our enemies or avenging gods do come then I expect I shall be past caring.’

  The king looked at me. ‘Apart from mugging your chief minister on his way home,’ he asked, ‘What do you intend to do?’

  We had reached the edge of the lake by now. I turned and stared moodily back at the palace, but there was no sign of my former master. Having made his wishes plain, he had presumably lost interest in us.

  ‘I don’t have a choice, do I?’ I said bitterly. ‘He’s not wrong. We need to go back to Mexico sooner or later. And I need to find out if he’s telling the truth – if that madman really is threatening my family, not to mention Handy and his brood.’

  ‘Can’t your brother look after them?’ Lily asked. My eldest brother, whose name was Mamiztli – ‘the Mountain Lion’ – was a distinguished warrior, who had fought his way up from the obscure origins we shared to the high office of Atempanecatl, Guardian of the Waterfront. ‘If anybody’s capable of taking on the captain, it’s him and his bodyguards.’

  ‘Only if he knows what’s going on. He’ll have heard the rumours, of course, but old Black Feathers won’t have told him what’s behind them. He and my brother aren’t friends. It would be like telling the whole city. I need to warn him. I ought to warn Handy as well.’

  Something disturbed the air above us: a small flock of ducks, their wings beating heavily as they headed west towards the great lake in the bottom of the valley, with the mighty city at its centre. Ducks are reluctant fliers, and their laboured progress looked like an omen. We had to go that way too, whether we wanted to or not.

  The noise caught Lily’s attention as well. When she turned to watch the birds out of sight, the rising sun at her back caught the white strands in her hair, making them seem to glow briefly.

  ‘If we have to go,’ she said abruptly, ‘then let’s get on with it. Yaotl, you need to see your parents in Toltenco, and your brother, and Handy in Atlixco – where to first, then?’

  ‘I think Handy’s place,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘He still runs errands for lord Feathered in Black from time to time. He may be able to tell me something useful. But I’ll go alone.’

  ‘Oh, no, you won’t!’ she cried. Her dark eyes glittered when she turned them on me. ‘We’re all caught up in this thing now, aren’t we? What if you don’t manage to find the otomi? What will old Black Feathers do to us then?’

  ‘No more than the otomi would if he caught us all together,’ her father muttered. ‘Besides, I’m not in any condition to go paddling through the marshes after some madman, and nor, young lady, are you.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me as if were a child!’ she shouted at him, stamping her foot in as childish a gesture as I ever saw. ‘I’ll do what I want. If you want to go home and squat in your own courtyard guzzling sacred wine with your senile friends that’s up to you. I’m going with Yaotl!’

  The king looked from one to the other of them with eyes narrowed in consternation. I decided I had better settle the row before it became a brawl that got all three of us thrown bodily off the top of the hill. ‘Your father’s right, Lily. There won’t be much you can do: it’s me the otomi wants, and I’ll be safer on my own.’

  ‘But what about the men lord Feathered in Black was going to have following you?’

  ‘What about them? Chances are they don’t even exist. If they do, I’m afraid I don’t believe what I said to him was wrong. They won’t lay a finger on the captain until it’s far too late for me. My only chance is to do exactly what old Black Feathers told me not to do – skulk in the shadows, and I can’t do that in company. You and Kindly should go straight back to Tlatelolco. Make sure your house is still in one piece!’

  From the way she reacted to my words I thought I might have said too much. She rocked backward on her heels as though I had threatened to hit her and her lips trembled.

  ‘You might get hurt!’ I burst out, desperately.

  She pressed her lips together, forcing them into stillness. ‘I’m already hurt,’ she said calmly. There was no need for her to show me her wounded hands to demonstrate the point, but she dragged the back of one of them across her eyes before adding in a small voice: ‘I don’t want to be alone as well.’

  Then she tried to turn away, but I had caught her in my arms before she could move.

  ‘You won’t ever be that, lady,’ I said hoarsely.

  ONE FLINT KNIFE

  1

  In the event we did not leave lord Maize Ear’s kingdom until early the following morning. The king had his own boatmen paddle us across the lake, taking Lily and her father to the merchant’s quarter of Tlatelolco in the north of the city of Mexico and me to Atlixco, the poorer parish in the south where my friend Handy lived. We left before daybreak. We were all keen to make an early start, and the king was just as eager to slip us quietly back into the city we had come from, as though we had never set foot in his domain.

  Lily had eventually come to her senses and agreed that I should go alone to see Handy and my family. I could be back at her house by nightfall.

  The king undertook to tell lord Feathered in Black where I was going, so that his men could be on hand to keep a discreet eye on me, and intervene in case the captain appeared. As I had made clear to Lily, I placed no reliance on this. I still suspected that if the chief minister had his way, any action his servants took would come just a moment too late to prevent the otomi from finishing me off.

  Trumpet calls filled the air around me as I approached Handy’s house. They might have been an ironic fanfare to herald my arrival: a little man in a commoner’s short cape and plain breechcloth. In fact the calls were made by priests blowing into huge conch shells as they stood at the tops of the pyramids, to herald the dawn.

  There were a hundred thousand houses like this one in the city of Mexico. All there was to see from outside was an adobe wall, its whitewashed surface pale in the weak light of early morning and featureless except for a single dark opening. There was no screen or cloth over the doorway. It was hard to see inside, but I knew what was there: a sparsely-furnished room opening out, at its far end, onto a square courtyard of hard earth, bounded on two sides by high walls and on the others by the few rooms in which Handy’s family lived. There would be a few idols on low stone plinths and, against one wall, a small dome-shaped structure in dried mud: the sweat bath.

  When I first saw the house I quickened my pace, afraid that I might miss my friend before he set out for his day’s work. As I neared it, however, I slowed down and paused. Something was wrong.

  I could hear nothing. Handy had nine children, I recalled, and the last time I had seen him there had been a tenth on the way; and he had nieces and nephews besides. Whenever I had been to this house, the place had been in a state approaching uproar. Piercingly high voices had sung, shouted or grizzled, while deeper ones had bellowed or sworn in frustration. And then I realised it was not even the lack of these sounds of a typically large Aztec family that had shocked me into stillness, but the absence of something even more basic.

  There was no smoke billowing from the hole in the roof, no slap of dough on a griddle, no smell of baking bread. Nobody was making tortillas, and in a household in Mexico at daybreak, that was unthinkable.

  I crept towards the doorway, fearful of what I might find. It suddenly occurred to me that the otomi captain might have been smarter than I had given him credit for, and there might be a sinister explanation for the silence and the atmosphere of tension about the place.

  ‘Er… Hullo? Handy?’ I put a hand on the doorpost, peering past it while I nerved myself to leap backwards, whirl around and sprint away from the house if I had to.

  For a moment there was no response. Then a pair of eyes gleamed, deep within the room’s darkness. Someone shuffled towards me. A female voice snapped: ‘What do you want?’

 
‘My name’s, er, Yaotl.’ I hoped that was not the signal for my enemy to spring out of the shadows. I shot a nervous glance towards the flat roof, realising too late that anything could be lying in ambush just above my head.

  ‘I know,’ the woman told me. She came into the light. ‘I asked you what you wanted.’

  I stared at her.

  I had seen her before. She was Atototl, or ‘Goose’: a pretty, lively, gossipy woman, the sister of Handy’s wife. She was very close to her sister and much like her in temperament. At least that was how I remembered her, but to look at her now, with her eyes heavy-lidded and deep in shadow, her dark hair lank and tangled and her blouse and skirt looking as though she had not changed them in a month, I had to think again before I was sure she was the same person. It was plain that whatever was afflicting her, it had nothing to do with me. It was more like some great grief or fear.

  ‘What’s the matter, Goose? I just wanted to speak to Handy, to ask him a question, but…’ And then I realised what must have happened, and I closed my eyes and groaned, a sound of pain, despair and remorse. ‘So I’m too late. He’s been here already. It wasn’t yesterday, was it?’ Had the captain struck while Lily and her father and I dawdled for a whole day in Tetzcoco?

  She stared at me, her heavy eyelids blinking slowly as though she were getting used to the light. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The otomi. Did he come here yesterday?’

  ‘What’s an otomi got to do with my sister?’

  It was my turn to stare now. ‘Your sister? Citlalli?’ Star, her name meant: the mother of Handy’s children. ‘You mean it’s Star, not Handy, who’s…’ Finally I understood. When I groaned for a second time, it was out of grief, for someone I had only met twice, but had liked, and whose sharp tongue, easy humour and stout courage I suddenly feared might be gone forever.

  Handy, I recalled again, had a tenth child on the way.

  ‘It’s the baby, isn’t it? Something’s happened to her and the baby.’

  A kind of pall always hung over Mexico at this time of year, during the Month of the Ceasing of Water. Long poles had been set up everywhere, with sharp points at their tips and strips of paper dashed and spotted with liquid rubber dangling from them. They stood in most houses, in the forecourts of temples, in the Houses of Youth and the Houses of Tears, as stark as trees in a burned forest. They were a reminder to the rain god of what was required, their points seemingly pricking the sky to draw moisture from it. The forlorn creaking sounds they made and the rustling of those paper streamers were a reminder to us, too, of those who had to die to ensure the god took notice: the young children whose bodies were left on the mountains where the clouds gathered.

  However, as I looked around Handy’s courtyard, I saw no sign that any attention was being paid to the ritual. The pain that showed on the faces of those around me was not for the rain god’s anonymous victims, but for somebody close. All eyes were on the small, dome-shaped sweat bath.

  Handy squatted just opposite the entrance hole. He was a stolid, broad shouldered man, still strong but with the grey, thinning hair of middle age. Normally at this time he would be on his way to the waterlogged plot of land he tended at the edge of the city, getting it ready for the coming Spring. Now though he seemed fascinated by the wisps of steam still drifting out of the sweat bath to form thin clouds in the crisp early morning air. The fire that had been built against the side of the dome to heat the water inside it had become a few bright embers in a dark bed of ash.

  Near to Handy, standing with ashen faces and downcast eyes, were an elderly, heavily jowelled man and a thin, bony woman whose fingers constantly twisted around each other. From their air of tension and the way they held themselves apart from the rest of the family I guessed they were Star’s parents. A few youngsters squatted or kneeled nearby. I recognised one of them as Itzcoatl or Obsidian Snake, one of Handy’s younger sons, a boy of eleven or twelve years. I frowned as I noticed his slight figure: I was accustomed to see him looking lively and alert, but now he was hunched silently among his brothers and sisters and they all looked dejected and weary.

  When I reappraised the scene I realised that apart from Handy and Goose, everyone was arranged in a rough semicircle against the walls of the courtyard. As Goose kneeled heavily on the earth floor with her nieces and nephews, I sidled across to speak to her, leaving her brother-in-law alone. I wondered what we were all distancing ourselves from: was it whatever was happening in the sweat bath, or was it Star’s husband and his grief?

  ‘There hasn’t been a sound from them since the last of the stars went out,’ the woman whispered, without prompting. She was not looking at me. ‘Not even a groan.’

  I looked at the dome in the corner. It seemed too small to contain one person, let alone two. ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘The opossum tail didn’t work.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Childbirth was a mystery to me. It was not something I had ever been concerned with in my former life as a priest. It was the preserve of midwives, who had their own mysteries and rituals.

  ‘The opossum tail,’ she repeated dully, ‘and before that the cihuapatli, the women’s herb. Everything seemed to be going so well. She felt her first pains yesterday, just when she was due. All her children have been like that, never any problem. But something seems to have gone wrong since they went into the sweat bath. The midwife was shouting…’ Goose paused for a long, shuddering breath before continuing: ‘When we sent for my sister’s midwife, we were told she couldn’t be found. My niece had to go to the Pleasure House, to ask the women there if one of them would come instead. She was lucky to find Yolyamanqui.’ The name was an appropriate one for someone in her profession, I thought, as it meant ‘Gentle of Heart’.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Handy move, leaning forward as though he had seen or heard something.

  ‘She knows her work, and she’s done her best. She brought the women’s herb and the ground-up opossum tail. But it doesn’t seem to have done any good. She thought the baby might be adhering to the womb. She took my sister into the sweat bath at midnight. I know she’s doing everything she can – we could hear them from out here, my sister crying out and the midwife shouting at her – but everyone knows that if the opossum tail doesn’t work there’s nothing to be done. It was horrible, Yaotl, but this is worse. This silence…’

  If she said anything else I did not hear it. A sound had erupted from the sweat bath: a loud, convulsive sobbing. I, like everyone else in the courtyard, was on my feet, starting instinctively towards the source of the crying. Then we all froze, everyone, it seemed, realising at once what that noise meant.

  Only Handy approached the dome in the corner, but even he stopped when a woman emerged, crawling, through the hole in the wall. When she stood up I saw that she was not Star. She was a woman in late middle age, whose greying hair framed features that might normally be soft, the eyes wide and the nose a gentle curve, but whose face was now crumpled into a mask of anguish. The hem of her skirt and her legs were darkly spotted with what I took to be blood.

  She had a small, cloth-wrapped bundle in her hands.

  A gasp broke from Goose’s throat. One of the children called out: ‘Father!’ but Handy seemed not to have heard him. He just stood and stared at the midwife as she cradled his child.

  Goose stepped towards the woman. ‘Gentle Heart, what has happened? Is my sister…’

  The midwife looked at her and frowned. ‘Your sister?’

  ‘My sister, Star!’ Goose was almost screaming. ‘How is she?’

  The other woman suddenly seemed to come to her senses. ‘I’m sorry. Please forgive me, I’m very tired.’ Then she turned to Handy, who stood just a couple of hands’ breadths away from her, his body swaying slightly, like a sapling rocked by wind, but his face as rigid as if it had been carved out of basalt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, but this time deliberately, so as to leave her listeners n
o room to doubt what was to follow. ‘I did what I could. But it doesn’t seem to have been enough.’

  A loud groan escaped the man. The old couple behind him both looked as if their faces had been slapped.

  ‘The mother is with the Turquoise Prince, the sun, now; she has joined the Divine Princesses. She has paid her tribute of death. And the child...’

  Gentle Heart’s words fell on me like a blow, leaving me – a visitor here, not much better than a stranger – speechless and shocked out of any real awareness of what was going on around me. Sights and sounds seemed for a moment to come from a great distance away, or to be something imagined, made up from a story I had been told by someone else, as if I had not been there. I saw Handy dropping to his knees, his head bent as if he were being sick, his sister’s eyes widened into pale, blank discs and his parents-in-law grasping each other with the force of drowning bathers seizing hold of a low branch. They all seemed fixed in place, like figures in a frieze or a mural: the background against which Gentle Heart alone acted out a forlorn ritual.

  ‘The child,’ she said, in a low, faltering voice, ‘has obeyed the will of Tezcatlipoca, whose slaves we are. He has returned whence he came, to suckle from the divine milk-tree until it is his time to be born on Earth.’

  2

  Handy was still on his knees. His wife’s parents spoke to the midwife, his mother-in-law cradling the inert bundle in her arms as though it were not entirely beyond comforting. From behind me I heard Goose’s voice chattering as she tried to usher her nieces and nephews out of the courtyard. I stood rooted to the spot, ignored by everyone, which was probably just as well, as a fierce argument was developing.

  Handy was looking up now, squinting into the face of his father-in-law as the old man stood over him, berating him over something. The midwife seemed to be trying to get in between them while the baby’s grandmother stood by, still clutching the child’s body protectively to her breast.