The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Thanks a lot, Huitztic,” I grumbled. I glanced over my shoulder but the girl had fled. “We were getting along nicely there, too . . .”

  I hung back, preparing to dodge the kick that a remark like would normally provoke, but all the response I got was, “This is no time for jokes. His Lordship has something to show you.”

  That was restrained by the steward’s standards. Intrigued, I caught him up, and noticed that he was sweating. It was a cold, clear morning, when the frost lay late on the earth and the sky above the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan was a blue so bright it hurt the eyes, yet his brow was beaded with moisture, glittering in the sunshine.

  “In here.” He led me into a courtyard. “Your slave Yaotl, my Lord!” he announced in a loud whisper.

  The enclosure was dark, surrounded by high walls the Sun had yet to clear, and the only warmth and light in it came from a squat brazier at its centre. I paused, squinting into corners while my eyes adjusted and I tried to make out what it was I was meant to see.

  The feeble glow of the coals set off my master’s features perfectly, picking out every line and wrinkle in his gnarled old face, but making his bright, ferocious eyes shine. Lord Feathered in Black, the Chief Minister, Chief Justice and Chief Priest of the Aztecs, the second most powerful man in Mexico-Tenochtitlan and perhaps the most dangerous, did not trouble to greet me. Instead he leaned forward in the high-backed wicker chair that was an emblem of his rank, clutching his jaguar skin mantle around him, and snarled: “Look at the boy – the rabbit, here. Tell me what happened to him.”

  I followed his gaze and saw for the first time that there was a young man sprawled against the courtyard wall. His legs were splayed like an infant’s. In the poor light his skin looked sallow and unhealthy, and a trickle of saliva glittered like silver leaf on his chin. His eyes were open, but as I looked more closely I realized he saw nothing through them. Their pupils were huge black disks that stayed fixed on something far away when I passed a hand in front of them. His breath had a sour reek that I knew well. He had been drinking sacred wine. Perhaps he had been celebrating: I noticed that he was missing the single lock of hair that boys grew at the napes of their necks, and this was a sign that he had taken his first captive in battle, and could call himself a warrior.

  Why had my master called him “the Rabbit”?

  I felt a moment of panic as I struggled to answer his Lordship’s question. The old man was not renowned for his patience.

  It was the steward who saved me, unwittingly. With a sudden nervous giggle he called out: “Come on, Yaotl. What’s he taken? You’re the expert!”

  I stiffened indignantly at the taunt. Huitztic knew my past: how I had sold myself into Lord Feathered in Black’s service, trading my freedom for the sum of twenty large cloaks, enough to keep me in drink when I had nothing left but the breechcloth wrapped around my loins. He knew also what had first driven me to seek refuge in a gourd of sacred wine: the despair and humiliation of being expelled from the priesthood, years before. As a priest I had learned and experienced the use of every kind of leaf, herb, seed and root, everything a man could put into his body to turn him into a slobbering imbecile. The steward’s comment was a deliberate jibe, and it stung, but even as I bit back my retort I realized the oaf had given me the clue I needed.

  My master responded before I could. “Be quiet, you idiot,” he snapped. “You’re in enough trouble over this already! Yaotl, I want your answer before I have both of you strangled!”

  “He’s been drinking,” I said hastily. “That’s obvious, I can smell it. But it’s not just that. Sacred wine wouldn’t leave him like this. He’d just have been violently sick and then fallen asleep, and by now he’d have a sore head and a tongue like tree bark. Anyway, you didn’t send for me to tell you he’s got a hangover. He’s had something else – mushrooms, perhaps: the Food of the Gods. But I don’t understand . . .” I hesitated before turning to look at the grim-faced old man in the chair. “What’s he to you, my Lord? Why do you need to know what happened?”

  “Isn’t it enough that some prankster chose to break up the Dance of the Four Hundred Rabbits – a religious ceremony, and me the Chief Priest? But it just so happens that this young fool is my great-nephew. So I take what happened rather personally.”

  The Dance of the Four Hundred Rabbits! In the years since I had left the priesthood I had all but forgotten about it, but it came back to me now. And the young man had reeked of sacred wine, which could mean only one thing. “Your great-nephew won the contest?”

  The Chief Minister’s deathly features twisted into something resembling a smile. “His prize turned out to be more than he expected – as you have confirmed for me. Now you’ll find out the rest – how it happened, and who was responsible.” He cast a sideways glance at his steward, who squirmed grotesquely. “You and Huitztic will look into this together.”

  I had to repress a groan. Being made to investigate what sounded like a childish trick would be bad enough without having that vicious buffoon of a steward for company.

  “I will not be made a fool of.” I noticed with a thrill of dread that my master’s voice had dropped to a whisper, a sign of his rage. “I will not have my family made fools of. Somebody did this to young Heron here to spite me. After you’ve brought me his name, I’ll have him cursing the gods for ever letting him be born!”

  “What are you in trouble for?”

  We were barely out of earshot of Lord Feathered in Black. The moment we were dismissed, Huitztic strode on ahead as before with barely a backward glance. I hung back until I judged I was out of range of his fists before I dared mention the thing that had most intrigued me about the interview we had just had: the steward’s obvious fear and our master’s equally evident anger with him.

  I had miscalculated. The man spun on his heel and his long, powerful legs brought him back to me in two steps. Before I could react he had the knot of my cloak in his fist and was twisting it, tightening the rough cloth around my neck until I could feel my skin burning under it and was struggling to breathe.

  “Let’s get one thing clear, you little worm.” Spittle fl;ew into my face as he dragged it closer to his. “I am not the one in trouble. I only did what he told me to. It was Patecatl who let him down, not me, and I’m not going to let you talk the old man into believing otherwise. I’ll cut your tongue out if I catch you even thinking about it!”

  “Patecatl?” I managed to gasp. “You mean the priest?”

  “He’s already in prison. That’s where we’re going now – to see if they’ve sweated the truth out of him yet. Maybe you can think of some clever way of tricking him into giving it to us. If you can’t then you’d better just keep your mouth shut. Old Black Feathers may have told me I had to have you trailing around after me like a lost dog, but I don’t have to like it!” He let go with a snarl, thrusting me away from him so hard that I fell over backwards, my legs buckling under me.

  “The priest’s in prison?” I repeated, as I got up. I had to run to keep pace with him as he made off into the street outside our master’s palace. “What for, though? You may as well tell me what you think he did.”

  Huitztic ignored my suggestion until he was brought up short by one of the city’s countless canals. As he looked right and left for a boat that could take us to the prison, he apparently had second thoughts. Wrinkling his nose as though he had caught a whiff of the green water at his feet, he muttered: “All right. I may as well since we’ve got to see him together. But you remember what I said. I only did what I was told!”

  “So how do you think Heron managed to win the contest?” the steward asked, as he flopped angrily into the stern of the boat.

  “It wasn’t just luck, then?” I had already guessed that if the gods had willed the outcome, they had had some human help to arrange it.

  “Only if having one of the most powerful men in the World for your great-uncle counts as luck. Actually old Black Feathers can’t stand the young toad, but he
dotes on his niece – the boy’s mother – and she wants to see her son get to the top.”

  “And winning a contest like this won’t do the lad’s career any harm.” To be marked with the gods’ favour counted for almost as much as taking a captive in war. “So our master ordered you to give him a helping hand, is that it?”

  Huitztic gripped the boat’s sides so hard his knuckles turned white. “Me and the priest both. Young Heron had the only hollow drinking-tube sewn into the hem of his cloak, after I’d been to get it from Patecatl. Only I reckon it had more than a hole in it. How hard would it have been for him to prime it before he gave it to me?”

  I thought about it. “Not hard. Mushrooms, you could dry them, grind them into powder, and as long as you didn’t pack them in too tight I suppose the young man could have sucked it up with the sacred wine without noticing – at least until it started to work. Did anyone look at the tube afterwards?”

  “Sure. Heron was still clutching it when he was brought here. But the poison was all gone by then, of course.”

  “It would have been a lot simpler to put the stuff in the jar, wouldn’t it?”

  Huitztic sniggered. “You’re not so clever after all, are you? Which jar would you put it in, then?”

  I grasped his meaning: how could the poisoner have known which of the fifty-two vessels to dope? “All of them?”

  “No. Lord Feathered in Black let some of his serfs drink the rest of the jars dry. You missed an opportunity there! They could barely stand up afterwards, of course, but it was nothing like what happened to Heron.”

  I frowned. “The rest of the jars?”

  “Heron had polished off the jar he was drinking out of before the stuff started taking effect. So we can’t tell what may have been in it.”

  I was still puzzled. Cheating the gods was a fearful thing to do, but at least their vengeance was uncertain, and might be a long way off. I could not understand why a priest who had agreed to do that would go on to risk the immediate and all-too-certain consequences of angering Lord Feathered in Black.

  Perhaps I was about to find out; for the long stone wall of the prison now loomed above us.

  I knew the prison. I had been confined here once, awaiting punishment after my arrest for drunkenness. I had to halt on the threshold for a moment, clutching the doorway and shutting my eyes as the sights, sounds and smells came back to me in a rush: the lines of cramped wooden cages stretching away into the gloom; the stench of piss and fear and starvation; the shouting. At almost any time of the day or night, as I remembered, somebody would be raving, protesting his innocence or hurling abuse at the guards or calling for his mother, and when he fell silent others would take up the cry, screaming or crying and rattling the wooden bars of their cages hopelessly.

  Somebody was shouting now. The words seemed to run into one another as they echoed through the long hall, so that I could not make them all out.

  Huitztic shoved me from behind. “Get a move on, before I have them lock you up too!”

  I stumbled forward, almost colliding with the guard who had come to find out what we wanted. When we had told him he said: “Good thing you’re here. Maybe you can make him shut up.”

  My master’s steward laughed harshly. “Just bash him over the head! That ought to do it.”

  The guard, a stolid-looking man in a veteran warrior’s long cloak and embroidered breechcloth, hefted his cudgel and gave us a lopsided grin. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to have to explain to my chief why I laid out Two Rabbit.”

  I frowned. “I thought it was his deputy you had in here.”

  “It is. But the prisoner’s chief came to pay him a visit. And he’s the one shouting.”

  We hurried past the rows of cages, ignored or tracked obsessively by the wretches who squatted in them. At our approach the shouting seemed to reach a crescendo, before dying out abruptly as the tall, slender figure standing in front of one of the cages swung his gaunt face towards us.

  If he had not been making so much noise I might have missed him altogether. As a priest he was draped in black, and had stained his face and limbs with pitch, so that in the gloom there was little to see of him but his eyes, which were wide and startlingly pale.

  The guard stepped forward. “Now, Two Rabbit,” he urged, “there’s no need for this. You’ll start them all off, and that’ll bring my chief running, and I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  The priest turned back to the cage and kicked it hard enough to make the bars rattle. There was a rustle of movement in response, but with Two Rabbit between us I could not clearly see the occupant.

  “Hey!” the guard yelled. “Be careful, that’s government property!”

  “Do you know what this creature did?” the priest rasped. The words burst between his tightly compressed lips like steam from a green log thrown on a fire.

  Huitztic pushed himself forward. “We know exactly what he did!” he cried eagerly. “And my master’s going to see him punished for it!”

  “Your master?” The pale eyes narrowed. “But you’re lord Feathered in Black’s steward, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right, and the Chief Minister will . . .”

  We never found what the Chief Minister was going to do, because his steward’s words were drowned by the other man’s outraged howl. “Lord Feathered in Black! He’s as guilty as this vermin here. He ought to be in that cage with him!”

  “Now, steady on,” the guard said anxiously. “That’s dangerous talk.”

  “As dangerous as mocking the gods? As dangerous as making a laughing stock of their priests?” With a last, baleful glance at the cage, he moved, pushing past us before stalking out of the hall. “He won’t get away with it! Tell him that from me!”

  Huitztic said nothing. It was the man in the cage who spoke next.

  “Yaotl? Is that you?”

  Everybody appeared to be staring at me: Huitztic, the prison guard, even the desperate, hollow-eyed prisoners in the shadows around us. They all seemed to be saying: you know this person? And the tone in which they seemed to be saying it was not friendly.

  “You must remember me, Yaotl. We trained together.” With Two Rabbit gone, I could see his former deputy clearly now. Patecatl had pushed his hand between the bars of the cage in an imploring gesture.

  At first I could only gaze at him while I tried to work out where he might have seen me before. When the answer came to me I could only whisper: “Fire Snake?”

  “Yes!” the man cried eagerly, straining against the wooden bars until they creaked. “Fire Snake, that’s right! Your old pal. Listen, you’ve got to get me out of here.”

  Fire Snake: a name from my childhood, from the House of Tears, the harsh school for boys who would be priests. We had not known each other well or liked each other much, but if I had been where he was, I too might have looked upon any familiar face as a long-lost friend’s.

  Huitztic interrupted before I had a chance to reply. “‘Get you out of here’?” He took a step towards the cage and swung his foot at it, making the prisoner leap backwards as the wooden bars rattled for a second time.

  “Will you leave my bloody cage alone?” the guard yelled.

  Ignoring him, the steward went on ranting at the prisoner. “This slave isn’t going to get you out of anything! All he’s here for is to listen to you telling us how you poisoned Heron. Go on, how did you do it? How did those mushrooms get into that tube?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the man in the cage protested. “Anyway, I’m not telling you anything. It’s your fault I’m in here. You set me up!”

  “You’ll talk, or I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” Huitztic lunged at the cage, grasping the bars and shaking them impotently. “Let me at him! It’s time we got him out of there and knocked the truth out of him!”

  “You keep away,” the guard warned. “Nobody touches my prisoners without orders.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Huitztic spluttered. “Don’t you kn
ow I work for the Chief Minister?”

  “So do I,” the guard pointed out.

  Just then Fire Snake spoke up. “I’ll talk to Yaotl. No one else.”

  “Who asked you?” the steward snapped. “We’ll make you talk!”

  “How are you going to do that?” I enquired. “The guard won’t let you torture him.”

  The steward turned on the guard resentfully. “What kind of a prison are you running here, anyway?”

  “We usually just starve them,” the other man offered. “A few days without food loosens their tongues, and it’s much less messy than mutilation.”

  “We haven’t got a few days!”

  “I’ll talk to Yaotl,” the man in the cage offered quietly.

  “Why don’t you leave him to me?” I suggested. “Lord Feathered in Black told me to investigate this business, didn’t he? So let me do it.”

  “This man’s a friend of yours!” the steward objected. “You just want to get him off and put me in that cage instead!”

  It was a tempting thought, but all I said was: “Then leave the guard here. He’ll tell you if we start hatching any conspiracies.”

  “This had better be good,” I told the man crouching on the other side of the bars, “otherwise Huitztic’s likely to talk the old man into having me move in there with you.”

  The steward had stormed off, declaring that he was going to see what the Chief Minister had to say about this, and that he would be back.

  Fire Snake peered up at me miserably. “But he’s the man who set this thing up! You’ve got to help me, Yaotl!”

  I glanced uneasily at the guard, who was pacing about the hall, snarling at his other charges as if it would help him keep them in order. I suspected he was wondering whether it would not after all have been wiser to have looked the other way while Huitztic beat a confession out of his prisoner.

  “Old Black Feathers sent me here for a reason,” I replied, speaking half to myself. “If he wanted you roasted over a slow fire for what happened to his great-nephew, then you’d be cooking already. I think I’m here because he doesn’t know what happened himself and he doesn’t believe what he’s been told about it.”