[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

by Simon Levack

  So did Kite. He looked away to conceal a scowl. ‘Have it your way, then,’ he signed. ‘Spotted Eagle and I will have to go alone. It’ll be more dangerous for just the two of us, but...’

  Reluctantly, I drew away from Lily. ‘All right,’ I said, between clenched teeth. ‘I’ll come. But I’ll need a sword. And can’t you at least rustle up some more men?’

  ‘Yaotl!’ Lily cried. ‘You can’t! They’ll kill you!’

  I forced myself to look at her face, to see how her eyes suddenly misted over with shocked, angry tears. ‘No, they won’t.’ I was not sure myself which of us I was trying to convince.

  ‘What’s got into you? Just now you were all for running away!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said helplessly. ‘I just remembered what my mother said, about having made this mess and having to help clear it up. And you said I couldn’t keep running forever.’

  ‘I can’t fetch any more men,’ Kite said. ‘There’s no time. If there are any more of these prints, we need to find them before they’re cleaned up. But I’d already thought about arming you. Spotted Eagle’s bringing his father’s sword for you.... Speaking of which, here he is.’

  ‘Yaotl,’ Lily urged, ‘you can’t do this! I won’t let you!’

  I could not meet her eyes a second time. ‘You will, though,’ I muttered. ‘You know I have to... Spotted Eagle, what is that?’

  The young man hurried out of his father’s house. He looked different from when I had seen him before, although the change was subtle. The unblooded youth’s tuft of hair still marked the back of this head, and his cloak was still the plain one of a man who had yet to take a captive, but something about the lad himself was altered. The petulance that I had associated with him at first was gone, and even his grief seemed to have been submerged for the moment. A grin like a coyote’s was fixed on his face, and he moved with the brisk assurance of the hunter who has seen his prey.

  ‘Your sword, Yaotl.’ Answering my question, he presented the weapon to me with flourish. ‘Look after it! Father wants it back!’

  He pressed it into my hands. I felt my fingers close around the handle, without my willing it, as I stared at the thing and wondered whether I had made the right decision after all.

  I wondered what use Handy had put the sword to in the years since he had last wielded it in battle. Perhaps he had employed it as a digging stick, or to bang wooden pegs into the walls of his house, because it was grimy, and the blades set into the shaft bore dark stains whose origin I preferred not to guess at. The shaft itself had a deep split running along half its length, and the two rows of blades were like an old man’s teeth, because most were broken, loose and wobbly and many were missing altogether.

  Spotted Eagle caught some of my consternation. ‘It may not look much,’ he said in a hurt tone. ‘But it’s won a few fights, and you won’t find one better balanced.’

  I twisted it experimentally, trying to remember what a sword ought to feel like. Like all priests I had trained for a while in a House of Youth, and I had gone to war, but it had all been a long time ago. Still, the boy was not wrong: the handle ended in a heavy wooden knob that balanced the long, flat shaft perfectly. If I did not drop it or cut my own arm off with what was left of its edge, it would be better than nothing.

  I glanced at the young man’s own weapon, its blades forming a single, unbroken line along either side of its immaculately polished shaft, and said sardonically: ‘I’ll treat it like it was my own.’

  Lily took a step towards me. ‘Yaotl, please,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t order you not to go.’ Of course not; she had too much pride. ‘I’m asking you. You’ve done enough!’

  I jerked my head roughly in the direction of Handy’s house. ‘Look after them in there,’ I said hoarsely. ‘They need help. And don’t worry. The chances are we won’t find anything and we’ll be back before nightfall!’

  Spotted Eagle said: ‘Oh, I hope you’re wrong.’

  5

  As Kite had said, we followed the most direct route to the water’s edge. It was no great distance but the walk appeared to last an age. We kept halting while one or other of us squatted to peer at some mark on the canal path in front of us that would invariably turn out not to resemble a footprint, but it was not just that that slowed us down. We knew we were heading into peril; a greater peril perhaps than any of us had faced, since we did not know even whether our enemy was human. With every step I felt as though my feet had been glued to the ground. I supposed it might be like this for a sacrificial victim on the climb towards the summit of the great pyramid, where the fire priest and his flint knife awaited him. Even the bravest man could not know for certain what might lie beyond the moment when his heart was torn out: was it to be rebirth as one of the morning sun’s companions, as the priests told us; or nothing; or something worse than oblivion?

  These thoughts troubled me until the moment when I realised that there were no longer any houses on either side of us, but only greenery: tall reeds, and beyond them taller willow trees, planted in rows and carefully lopped so as to shore up the edges of the fields without denying the sun’s warmth to the crops. Ahead of us, the path narrowed and petered out, becoming a rough bank against which green water lapped sluggishly.

  From somewhere nearby, a crow cackled. Some larger bird, probably a heron, took flight, the splash of its exit from the water and the heavy beat of its wings coming to us muffled by the surrounding foliage. The air was laden with a smell like rotten turkey eggs floating in stale piss.

  Kite walked along the path as far as he could go without wading. He turned this way and that, brandishing his sword. ‘See anything?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ I called. I was still on dry land and intended to stay there. ‘I guess we were too late. Or this is the wrong place altogether. Since we didn’t find any footprints, we don’t know they were ever here, do we?’’

  Spotted Eagle was standing next to me. I saw him pouting like a child who has been told he has had all his ration of bread for the day. ‘We can’t go back empty handed,’ he objected. ‘Let’s at least look around.’

  My enthusiasm for a confrontation with my enemies was starting to wane, now that I was standing on the edge of their territory. The end of my broken sword drooped as I gazed vainly at the green walls around me and wondered what might be peering back at me, unseen, through the cracks in them.

  Kite took as step forward, planting his foot noisily into the thick, murky water. ‘We’d better look around. Can either of you suggest where?’ He spoke abruptly, making his frustration obvious.

  I watched the muck swirling ponderously around his ankles.

  The sight of it reminded me of something my brother had mentioned a few days before.

  When I looked up again, I saw the same willows and tall rushes as before, hiding everything else except the malodorous water and the clear blue sky. However, this time they looked different. I had lived here, briefly, in the time when I had lived by scraping scum off the surface of the lake. So if this was my enemy’s territory, then it had been mine too.

  I knew how life was lived in the marshes; what the necessities were, and where they were to be found. Perhaps sorcerers and their tame monsters had different needs from those of men, but I doubted it. As I thought about it further, I saw one need that a dancer with dead woman’s forearm might have that was unlike a normal man’s. Then I remembered a conversation in Atlixco marketplace and saw how that need might have been met, out here at the waterlogged edge of the city.

  I clutched the sword more tightly. If you are here for a fight, Yaotl, then get it over with, I told myself. Aloud I said: ‘I can tell you where to go, but Spotted Eagle will have to show us how to get there.’

  We splashed through mud that clung to our calves and ankles, clambered over slimy banks, and picked our way gingerly over fields that smelled as though they had been manured recently.

  Eventually we found ourselves at the edge of one particular square plot, a
pile of neglected, churned-up mud with a tumbledown shelter at one corner.

  Kite, Spotted Eagle and I stood waist-deep in the waters of a narrow channel, each cowering behind a different willow, and peeped cautiously around the narrow tree trunks. ‘You’re sure this is the place?’ I said in a loud whisper.

  ‘Of course.’ Spotted Eagle sounded unhappy. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t know my father’s plot? Though it doesn’t look like it did last time I saw it.’

  ‘I’d say it hasn’t been touched in years,’ muttered Kite.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ I repeated what Quail, the fisherman, had told me the previous day, when he had mentioned seeing somebody working here. ‘And look at the shelter.’

  It was the only building in sight, a crude round hut with a thatched roof. The thatch was ragged and threadbare at best and in places great dark rents were visible. However, some effort seemed to have been made to fill the holes in with crude patches made of the broad, flat leaves of maguey plants. It would not remain habitable for long, at least in the rainy season, but then, I knew it was not intended to.

  The hut, where Handy stored his tools and anything else he needed from day to day, had been fixed up to meet the most basic need of any dweller in the marshes: somewhere more or less dry to lay his head.

  I heard a catch in Spotted Eagle’s voice. ‘Are they there now?’

  Kite observed: ‘There’s no smoke.’

  ‘Around here, that proves nothing,’ I pointed out. ‘How easy do you think it is to start a fire in this muck?’

  ‘I don’t understand how it’s got into this state,’ Spotted Eagle complained. ‘The field looks like a herd of wild pigs has been rooting around in it! How could my father have let it go like this? And what happened to that neighbour Quail mentioned? I can’t imagine who that would have been – most men are too busy minding their own plots to worry about ours.’

  The set of the young man’s jaw and the firmness with which he gripped his sword belied the pain and disappointment in his voice. I took a deep breath before I spoke again, knowing that the disappointment at least would be short lived: he was about to find out that there was much worse to come. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but Quail was mistaken. The man he saw wasn’t digging over the soil. He was burying something.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Spotted Eagle asked.

  Kite interrupted me before I could reply. ‘We’d better go and look,’ he said briskly, ‘but I want this area scouted first. Spotted Eagle, you circle the plot from the left. Keep out of sight and keep quiet. If you see anything you don’t like, then first, you run away, and second, you yell. Otherwise we meet up by the shack in the corner. Got that? Go!’

  For a moment the young man merely stared at the policeman; but the tone of command, so much like what he must have heard many times from his instructors at the House of Youth, proved irresistible. Without a word he turned and began wading along the edge of his father’s field, moving slowly so as to make as little noise as possible, while his head darted from side to side in search of an ambush.

  ‘He’s a good lad,’ Kite murmured.

  ‘Are you sure he’ll be safe?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘If I didn’t think so, I’d have gone myself, but anyway, the boy needs to face up to his first real fight sooner or later. Now, come on. Let’s get this over with.’

  I had thought he meant to circle the field in the opposite direction from the one Snake had taken, intending to meet up with the boy as he had ordered. Instead he threw his sword onto the patch of mud in front of us and scrambled out of the water to collect it. ‘I want to do this before the lad realises what we’re doing. Now where do we need to dig?’ he asked, as he beckoned me to follow him.

  Between the willows, the edges of the plot were sheer, reinforced with wooden stakes that were slimy to the touch and difficult to get a purchase on. Eventually, however, Kite and I stood together, our feet slowly sinking into the mud.

  The policeman repeated his question. ‘Where, Yaotl?’

  I noticed an area beside Handy’s little thatched hut where the ground appeared particularly badly churned, the mud and silt heaped up in a low mound.

  ‘You’ll find Spotted Eagle’s mother in there, I should think.’

  Kite grimaced, hesitated, and then appeared to make up his mind. His feet made slurping noises in the mud as he strode towards the place I had indicated. When he got there he drove the flat end of his sword into the ground like a shovel.

  ‘Come on,’ he barked, as he threw as mass of black muck away from him. ‘Hurry up! We don’t have long.’

  I bounded towards him and joined in. It was not long before we had a shallow hole, and not long after that before I felt my own improvised tool strike something other than liquid mud. I paused then to look at the policeman.

  His face was ghastly. ‘You’ve found her, haven’t you?’ he asked me under his breath.

  ‘The boy will be here in a moment,’ I said. ‘What are you going to say to him?’

  He leaned on his sword and looked down. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I just wanted to know before he did. For some reason I thought that might make it easier for him.’

  By the time Spotted Eagle had appeared, forcing his way between the rushes close to the little shelter, we had scraped enough of the mud away to leave no room to doubt what we had found.

  Partly exposed, curled up at the bottom of the hole we had made, half-submerged in black, stinking water, lay the pale form of a human body. The dark, sodden remains of a woman’s skirt and blouse clung to it. Its features were unrecognisable, with all the bloated blandness of death.

  The dead woman lay just where I had thought we might find her. Her right arm ended in a stump at the elbow. Her head was crowned with a dark mass of dried blood instead of hair. There was no doubt that the corpse we had found was Star’s.

  The young man stood at the side of the shallow grave in silence. Neither Kite nor I could think of anything to say to him. Spotted Eagle did not need us to tell him what we had found.

  When at last Handy’s son found his voice, all he could say was: ‘So they brought her here.’

  I watched the sword swinging loosely from his fingers and wondered whether I had done the right thing by leading him and Kite here.

  ‘How did you know?’ the young man asked in a whisper.

  I looked at the policeman. He returned my gaze steadily.

  ‘It was a guess,’ I said truthfully. ‘I remembered from my own time living in the marshes that you have to have some sort of shelter and somewhere to sleep – somewhere to lie low, for that matter, because you wouldn’t be living here at all unless you were running away from something. But it’s not that easy: there are too many people making their living off the lake to make hiding an easy matter. And of course the sorcerer and the monster needed something more: they had to have somewhere to hide… this.’

  Spotted Eagle did not react.

  ‘They chose their ground well,’ I went on. ‘They knew this plot was likely to be neglected for a good while after Star’s death. Handy can’t have been here in days. Quail told me he’d seen someone else digging it over, but he didn’t see who it was very clearly. It just occurred to me that there might be another explanation.’

  ‘The thief,’ Spotted Eagle hissed. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Obviously not here.’ I looked towards the shelter. ‘We’ll take a look in there, see if we can find any clues inside.’

  ‘Don’t get any ideas, son,’ the policeman warned. ‘I understand how you must be feeling. But these are dangerous creatures we’re dealing with.’

  The young man looked at him resentfully from under lowered brows. ‘As if I didn’t know that,’ he mumbled. ‘But who are they?’ He glanced at the body before turning hastily away from it. He swallowed hard. We had all done very well not to be violently sick, I thought.

  ‘They took...’ Watching Spotted Eagle’s face, I picked my words carefully. ‘We need
to think about what they took. Cactus was right. The arm is a sorcerer’s charm. The hair is a warrior’s. Perhaps we are dealing with both.’

  ‘You told us the thing that followed you had a sword,’ Kite reminded me.

  ‘True. But if that was a warrior, he didn’t look like any I’ve ever seen.’

  Spotted Eagle drove the end of his sword into the ground angrily. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted. ‘It’s my mother’s hair and arm you’re talking about, not a couple of freshly-laundered breechcloths that someone’s pilfered while they were drying! Where are they now?’

  Kite looked as nonplussed as I felt. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. But at least we found the rest.’

  ‘We need to get her home,’ Spotted Eagle asserted. ‘Then we’ll look for the other things.’

  Merely thinking about descending into the hole to try to drag the body clear of the mud that still clung to it was enough to make me feel ill. ‘I suppose we do,’ I said. ‘Though we could do with some help.’

  ‘Or at least some tools,’ Kite suggested. ‘Are there any in your father’s shed?’

  ‘Spades, digging sticks,’ Spotted Eagle replied absently. ‘And I think there’s an old rabbit’s fur mantle in there too. He wears it when it’s very cold out here in the winter. I’ll show you.’ For a moment I did not think he was going to move from the graveside, but then he turned and dragged his feet ponderously towards the open entrance to the shelter. ‘He kept all sorts of junk in here...’ He vanished inside the decrepit little building.