[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  Handy and I looked at it together. I let my eyes linger on the face, noting the wide, bloodshot eyes, lips curled back in agony, but searching for more: for some trace of what it might have been in life.

  The commoner swore under his breath. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I’d guess he didn’t just trip over and hit his head. You don’t know him, I suppose? He’s not Red Macaw or’ - I looked over towards the house, where I assumed Goose was just rising to attend to her daily chores – ‘or Flower Gatherer?’

  ‘I don’t know. He could be either of them, or anyone else. The state he’s in, it’s hard to tell.’ He took his eyes off the body and looked at me. ‘What happened?’ he asked again.

  I told him. I hesitated when I got to the part about the sorcerer and how he had brandished what I was sure must be Star’s forearm. To my relief he merely shut his eyes and sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t catch him,’ I said.

  ‘It could have been worse. If I’d lost the boy as well…’ The man shivered.

  I regarded the mutilated corpse again. ‘Obviously, it must have been his scream Spotted Eagle and I heard. The creature, or whatever it was, must have carved him up. Your son said it was armed.’

  ‘Why do that, though? He must have been slashing away long after the man was dead.’

  ‘He, or it, must have been out of control. Something happened to make it angry.’ I swallowed hard as an unpleasant thought struck me. ‘Perhaps they – the sorcerer and the demon – weren’t expecting this man to be here. They wanted to get into a house, but he surprised them before the sorcerer’s spell could work.’

  ‘Whose house?’ His hushed tone told me Handy had guessed the answer to his own question.

  ‘Yours,’ I told him grimly. ‘Somebody stole your wife’s forearm in order to get into your own house!’

  He stared at me, ‘Why…?’

  Before he could get the rest of the question out, another voice – the last one I would have expected to hear – interrupted him, calling out of the twilight: ‘Where is he?’

  I stood and stared and felt my mouth fall open stupidly as the speaker came into view, striding purposefully towards us out of the early morning shadows.

  ‘Where is he?’ the woman demanded again, and then she was in front of me, and although I should have felt joy and relief, I was too shocked for either.

  Lily’s black hair flew wildly about her head, her eyes glistened and her bandaged hands were raised as if to strike someone. ‘What do you mean by this?’ she screamed. The words were barely intelligible. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  I cowered. I took a step backwards. ‘Lily, I can explain…’

  ‘You were supposed to be here one day! A day! That was two days ago. Do you have any idea…?’

  Handy tried to intervene: ‘Didn’t you get our messages…’

  ‘Of course I got your messages. Why do you think I’m here? That’s not the point!’ Suddenly she kicked me, lashing out with a bare foot and catching my kneecap. I cried out in pain, and then she was in my arms, sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Yaotl, I’ve been so worried. I couldn’t sleep. Why didn’t you come?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I whispered into her hair. ‘But why are you here? Don’t you know how dangerous it is?’

  I looked up to catch Handy’s eye. After staring at us in mute astonishment for a moment he shook his head violently and said: ‘Er… Have I got this right? This is Lily? You are her slave, yes?’

  ‘That’s a long story too.’ I turned back to Lily. I was about to ask her again why she had left the safety of her own house to come here. However, I was distracted by the sound of running feet, the flat thump of sandals striking hard earth.

  Spotted Eagle came into sight, his face nearly black with the exertion of running all the way to the parish hall and back. He was barefoot, naturally, as a commoner in the city. The sound had been made by the man following him: Kite the policeman, wrapped in his long cloak and brandishing an obsidian-bladed sword as though he were expecting a fight. He skidded to a halt when they saw us.

  ‘Father!’ The young man went straight up to Handy before halting and staring at Lily.

  ‘What’s happened here, then?’ the policeman demanded. In answer, Handy gestured towards the thing on the ground.

  Spotted Eagle had told the policeman what to expect. It ought not to have come as a surprise, but he faltered, turning slightly pale, when he set eyes on the corpse.

  Beside me, Lily screamed. It was only long afterwards that it occurred to me that she had been so angry and delighted at the sight of me that she had failed to notice the dead man. I had to steady her now to prevent her from falling. She was as brave as any warrior, but what lay at her feet would have turned the stomach of the most accustomed butcher.

  Kite looked the body over. He asked whether anyone recognised the dead man. Nobody did. He asked Lily who she was and what she was doing here. He made both me and Handy give our own accounts of what had happened in the night, although all Handy could say was that he had been asleep. From the way he barked his questions it was obvious that, as I had predicted, he was not pleased. ‘So now I have another unidentified corpse, besides sorcerers, demons, thieves…’ He glanced at me and gestured towards Handy’s house. ‘You think they were trying to get in here?’

  ‘It looked that way.’

  ‘Why?’

  Handy said: ‘I was just about to ask Yaotl that myself, before you turned up.’

  The policeman had the answer to that. ‘They were after you, weren’t they?’ he said, looking at me. ‘You said the sorcerer – if that’s what the dancer was – called you by your name. So did whoever followed you the night before last.’

  Spotted Eagle’s features suddenly twisted into a look of revulsion. ‘You mean my mother’s body was stolen just so that someone could break into the house and kill this slave?’ He spat the words out disgustedly, but the energy that had been behind his attack on me of the previous morning had gone. All he could manage now was a half-hearted snarl. ‘So you did bring this on us, after all.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ I protested wearily, ‘and if I did, I don’t understand how. Maybe the otomi captain had something to do with it, but how could he have known where to find me, and so quickly? I’d only been here a day the first time I was attacked.’

  ‘I know.’

  We all turned to look at Lily. She had recovered somewhat from her earlier shock and was standing unsupported, but there was an audible tremor in her voice all the same. ‘It’s easy, isn’t it? The chief minister lied to you. He hasn’t lost control of the captain at all. They’re still working together. He knew you were likely to come here.’

  For some reason – no doubt because it was such an unpleasant idea – this had not occurred to me. It made perfect sense, of course. Why should I assume that my former master had suddenly forgotten his grudge against me?

  I tried in vain to protest: ‘No, he didn’t! Who’d have told him?’ But it carried no conviction. How like the vindictive old bastard, I thought, to lull me into a false sense of security by pretending he and the otomi had fallen out. Now my situation was more hopeless than ever, trapped between the two of them.

  Handy said: ‘His steward saw you yesterday.’

  Kite smiled humourlessly. ‘Well, that would solve my problem. All I have to do is hand you over to lord Feathered in Black!’

  Listening to these two was like being left by a roadside with a copper knife stuck in you, and having passers-by come and twist it this way and that for fun. ‘You can’t do that!’ I cried. ‘I’m a slave, remember? Lily, tell him he can’t do that!’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ she assured Kite. ‘I’ll take charge of my slave. If I take him back to Tlatelolco, whoever’s after him will follow us, surely? And I think we merchants can look after ourselves, otomi or no otomi!’

  They were brave words, but I could see from the pulse in her neck that Lily understood just
how dangerous that course of action might prove to be. Even the chief minister might hesitate to try his strength against that of the merchants, but the fact remained that lord Feathered in Black and the captain had once invaded the sanctuary of her house in Tlatelolco, and they might do so again. But I was denied the chance to say so.

  My reply, together with whatever else anyone might have been about to say, was choked off by the sound of a scream.

  Several moments passed before I recognised the woman who had just come through the gateway to Handy’s courtyard as his sister-in-law. She looked as though she had been struck down by some wasting sickness. Her hair hung lankly about her temples, its strands as tangled and ragged as if she had tried to tear them from her own scalp. He eyes were red, her cheeks hollow, and her skin was as grey as a stone.

  As I watched her stumble towards us, her sunken eyes fixed on the bloody mess on the ground in our midst, I realised that the sounds and smells of sweeping and cooking that normally echoed around an Aztec courtyard at daybreak had not been there this morning. Goose had not risen to do her customary tasks. She seemed to have forgotten about them.

  We men watched her in stupefied horror, appalled at the change that had come over this woman. It was Lily who reacted, pushing me and Spotted Eagle aside and running to her side. ‘What is it?’ she cried, unthinkingly stretching her bandaged hands towards her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Goose stared blankly at her.

  ‘Yaotl!’ my mistress snapped, ‘stop staring at us like a five year-old watching his parents on their sleeping mat! Come and help!’

  Torn from my reverie, I stepped over to them, taking Goose’s unresisting arm in mine. ‘We must go into the house,’ Lily told her firmly. ‘There’s food to prepare. Your children will be hungry.’

  We led the stumbling, snuffling woman back into Handy’s courtyard. Handy, Kite and Spotted Eagle were left to follow.

  2

  Goose kept apologising. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It was the shock, seeing him there. At first I thought...’ The words tailed off into a series of dry sobs.

  Lily had made her sit against a wall in Handy’s courtyard, ordering me to lower her gently to the ground under the astonished gaze of her children, nieces and nephews. The youngsters had not been allowed to stand and stare for long, because my mistress had orders for them too. She set the boys to sweeping, ignoring their protests at being given women’s work, while the girls were told to make the tortillas. Finally she sent Handy indoors to make sure nobody spilled any hot coals or kicked over a hearthstone, which would be the worst kind of bad luck.

  As the household bustled into life around us, Lily said gently: ‘You thought it was your husband?’

  Goose wiped her eyes with the knuckles of one hand. ‘Until I saw him.’

  ‘You’re sure it wasn’t him?’ I asked. ‘How can you know?’

  ‘I just know. Even after what’s been done to him, there’s no way that could be Flower Gatherer.’ She let out a sound that was something between a moan and a wail. ‘I was doing so well, until then, wasn’t I? I knew someone had to keep it all together, and it had to be a woman, and with Star gone, that left me. Lily, you understand, don’t you? I got so tired!’ I remembered how she had been the day before, prostrated upon the floor while her parents and her brother-in-law argued around her.

  ‘I know,’ Lily confirmed, with the authority of a woman who, at various times, had lost her husband and her son and seen her father degenerate into an idle, drunken old reprobate. ‘I know how hard it is.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Goose mumbled once more. ‘I should be stronger.’

  ‘Can we get anyone to help?’ Kite asked. The policeman had been hovering awkwardly nearby, having apparently run out of useful things to do after sending Spotted Eagle back to the parish hall to summon assistance removing the body from outside the house.

  Lily said: ‘Could someone fetch your parents? Your mother...’

  ‘No!’ Goose cried vehemently. ‘You can’t ask my mother. She’d bring my father, and then there's sure to be a fight.’

  ‘Over what?’

  Goose frowned at Lily, as though unsure whether the question was a serious one. She forgot momentarily that my mistress had not seen or heard the clashes between Handy and Jaguar. Hastily, I tried to explain: ‘Goose’s father seems to blame Handy for what happened to Star. I got the idea they don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on a lot of things.’

  ‘My father didn’t care much for either of our husbands – mine or my sister’s. Hers especially.’ She gave a watery smile. ‘Odd, isn’t it? Star made a better marriage that I did. Flower Gatherer was never anything but a labourer. Handy was a warrior – for a time, anyway. But I suppose they thought they’d made a mistake with him. They knew she could have done better.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  For some reason the question seemed to confuse her. Her face, that had been pale, darkened, and she looked away. ‘I don’t know,’ she muttered, almost inaudibly. ‘Maybe she ought to have married a rich merchant.’

  Lily, the daughter and widow of merchants, laughed shortly. ‘Believe me, girl, she was better off as she was!’

  ‘I don’t understand, though,’ I said. ‘Last night they were arguing about Red Macaw. And this big secret that Jaguar was about to blurt out before your mother stopped him.’

  Kite groaned and rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, that!’

  ‘Yes, that.’ Goose’s tone was earnest. She leaned forward, looking imploringly at the policeman. ‘You know we can’t talk about it. You know we can’t even say why, Kite. And you know we trust you.’

  He turned to me and Lily with an apologetic sigh. ‘True enough. One of the first things you learn as a parish policeman is what questions not to ask!’

  Avoiding Goose’s reproachful eyes, I said: ‘But it’s different now, surely? Red Macaw’s disappeared, Flower Gatherer’s disappeared, you’ve got monsters and what not tearing up the place and two unidentified corpses. Not to mention the theft of a woman’s body. Now when you know there’s a long-standing quarrel between one of your vanished men and the dead woman’s husband, how can you tell us you don’t want to know what it’s about?’

  For the first time since I had met him, Kite looked ill at ease. ‘I didn’t say I don’t want to know,’ he said defensively, ‘but you’ve got to understand – I have to look after these people, but I’ve got to live among them too.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask his mother?’

  We all three turned to look at the speaker.

  Snake, Handy’s son, the one aged about twelve, had been put in charge of sweeping the courtyard. He had not been making a particularly good job of it, largely because he was more intent on what the grown ups around him were saying than on the sacred duty of brushing the loose earth into the street outside. Now he leaned on his broom and repeated his suggestion. ‘Why don’t you ask Red Macaw’s mother? I bet she could tell you.’

  ‘We could do that,’ Kite said slowly. ‘You talk as if you know her.’

  The boy threw a fearful glance over his shoulder, looking towards the interior of the house, before approaching us and saying in a lowered voice: ‘Don’t tell my father.’

  Goose appeared paralysed. She merely stared at her nephew while Lily assured him: ‘We won’t, if you tell us why.’

  ‘You know what my father’s like about Red Macaw,’ Snake said warily. ‘I’m not supposed to know anything about him.’

  ‘But you know his mother?’ Lily said.

  ‘And I know where he lives.’

  ‘How? Did you follow him home?’

  The boy looked shamefaced then, lowering his eyes. ‘Not exactly. More the other way around, really.’

  ‘Snake, will you stop talking in riddles?’ I said, exasperated.

  ‘I’m not! I was coming back from the fields – my father farms a piece of parish land, a chinampa plot out on the lake, opposite Mixoacan island…’

  ‘Do we need to know where
your father grows his beans?’

  ‘Just let him get on with it, Yaotl,’ my mistress ordered.

  The boy went on: ‘This man called out to me, when I’d almost got home. I’d have taken no notice of him, but he was a three captive warrior, and I thought he might be the chief minister’s steward. I know father works for lord Feathered in Black sometimes.’

  I could not resist a brief chuckle at that. ‘You thought Red Macaw was Huitztic? I doubt he’d be flattered!’

  Kite said: ‘So what did he want?’

  ‘That first time? Not much. He just asked me how I was, how my mother was. He said he’d heard she was expecting another child.’

  ‘And when was this?’

  ‘Last year. Around the time of the Festival of the Sweeping of the Roads.’ Late in the previous Summer, in other words.

  ‘You’ve seen him since?’ Kite asked.

  ‘Sometimes. He’s often about in Atlixco, in the marketplace or by the canal, especially if he knows father isn’t around.’

  ‘Where did he hear about your mother’s pregnancy?’

  ‘It’s common knowledge in this parish. Anything like that is.’ I could accept that. News travelled fast in the crowded parishes of Mexico, and Handy and Star would have had no reason to keep this quiet. I wondered whether Red Macaw had been asking after them, and if so for how long he had been more-or-less discreetly probing into their affairs; and why, more to the point.

  ‘So he asked you how your parents were doing…’

  ‘Mother,’ the boy corrected the policeman. ‘He didn’t say anything about father.’

  ‘So he asked after your mother. What else?’

  ‘Lots of different things. What I was doing, when I was going to start at the House of Youth, that sort of thing. He said when I was old enough he’d show me some tricks with a sword.’