Merchants of Menace

by Joan Aiken

  The insistent hands of the other reached her, drew her, gently but firmly, across the threshold. In the background, the old woman still looked on with a secretive malignancy that might have been due solely to the wizened lines in her face.

  “Pase, pase,” the dark-haired girl was coaxing her. Step in. “Descansa.” Rest. She snapped her fingers with sudden, con­cealed authority behind her own back, and the old woman, seeming to understand the esoteric signal, sidled around to the side of them and out to the road for a moment, looked quickly up the road, then quickly down, picked up the bag standing there and drew it inside with her, leaning totteringly against its weight.

  Suddenly the thick wall-door had closed behind her and the blonde wayfarer was in, whether she wanted to be or not. The silence, the remoteness, was as if a thick, smothering velvet curtain had fallen all at once. Although the road had been empty, the diffuse, imponderable noises of the world had been out there somehow. Although this patio courtyard was unroofed and open to the same evening sky, and only a thick wall separated it from the outside, there was a stillness, a hush, as though it were a thousand miles away, or deep down within the earth.

  They led her, one on each side of her—the girl with the slightest of forward-guiding hands just above her waist, the old woman still struggling with the bag—along the red-tiled walk skirting the roses, in under the overhanging portico of the house proper, and in through one of the doorways. It had no door as such; only a curtain of wooden-beaded strings was its sole provision for privacy and isolation. These clicked and hissed when they were stirred.

  Within were cool plaster walls painted a pastel color halfway up, allowed to remain undyed the rest of the way; an equally cool tiled flooring; an iron bedstead; an ebony chair or two, stiff, tortuously hand-carved, with rush­ bottomed seats and backs. A serape of burning emerald and orange stripes, placed on the floor alongside the bed, served as a rug. A smaller one, of sapphire and cerise bands, affixed to the wall, served as the only decoration.

  They sat her down in one of the chairs, the baby still in her arms. Chata, after a moment’s hesitancy, summoned up a sort of defiant boldness, reached out and deliberately removed the small traveling hat from her head without asking permission. Her expressive eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed again, as they took in the exotic blonde hair in all its unhampered abundance.

  Her eyes now went to the child, but more as an afterthought than as if that were her primary interest, and she leaned forward and admired and played with him a little, as women do with a child, any women, of any race. Dabbing her finger at his chin, at his button of a nose, taking one of his little hands momentarily in hers, then relinquishing it again. There was something a trifle mechanical about her playing; there was no real feeling for the child at all.

  She said something to the old woman, and the latter came back after a short interval with milk in an earthenware bowl. “He’ll have to drink it with a nipple,” the young mother said. “He’s too tiny.” She handed him for a moment to Chata to hold for her, fumbled with her bag, opened it and got out his feeding bottle. She poured some of the milk into that, then recapped it and took him up to feed him.

  She had caught a curious look on Chata’s face in the moment or two she was holding him. As though she were studying the child closely; but not with melting fondness, with a completely detached, almost cold curiosity.

  They remained looking on for a few moments; then they slipped out and left her, the old woman first, Chata a mo­ment later, with a few murmured words and a half-gesture toward the mouth, that she sensed as meaning she was to come and have something to eat with them when she was ready.

  She fed him first, and then she turned back the covers and laid him down on the bed. She found two large-size safety­ pins in her bag and pinned the covers down tight on either side of him, so that he could not roll off and fall down. His eyes were already closed again, one tiny fist bent backward toward his head. She kissed him softly, with a smothered sob­—that was for the failure of the long pilgrimage that had brought her all this way—then tiptoed out.

  There was an aromatic odor of spicy cooking hovering disembodiedly about the patio, but just where it was originating from she couldn’t determine. Of the surrounding six doorways, three were pitch-black. From one there was a dim, smoldering red glow peering. From another a paler, yellow light was cast subduedly. She mistakenly went toward this.

  It was two doors down from the one from which she had just emerged. If they were together in there, they must be talking in whispers. She couldn’t hear a sound, not even the faintest murmur.

  It had grown darker now; it was full night already, with the swiftness of the mountainous latitudes. The square of sky over the patio was soft and dark as indigo velour, with mag­nificent stars like many-legged silver spiders festooned on its underside. Below them, the white roses gleamed phosphorescently in the starlight, with a magnesium-like glow. There was a tiny splash from the depths of the well as a pebble or grain of dislodged earth fell in.

  She made her way toward the yellow-ombre doorway. Her attention had been on other things: the starlight, the sheen of the roses; and she turned the doorway and entered the room too quickly, without stopping outside to look in first. She was already well over the threshold and in before she stopped short, frozen there, with a stilled intake of fright and an instinctive clutching of both hands toward her throat.

  The light came from two pairs of tapers. Between them rested a small bier that was perhaps only a trestled plank shrouded with a cloth. One pair stood at the head of it, one pair at the foot.

  On the bier lay a dead child. An infant, perhaps days younger than her own. In fine white robes. Gardenias and white rosebuds disposed about it in impromptu arrangement, to form a little nest or bower. On the wall was a religious image; under it in a red glass cup burned a holy light.

  The child lay there so still, as if waiting to be picked up and taken into its mother’s arms. Its tiny hands were folded on its breast.

  She drew a step closer, staring. A step closer, a step closer. Its hair was blond; fair, golden blond.

  There was horror lurking in this somewhere. She was suddenly terribly frightened. She took another step, and then an­other. She wasn’t moving her feet, something was drawing them.

  She was beside it now. The sickening, cloying odor of the gardenias was swirling about her head like a tide. The infant’s little eyes had been closed. She reached down gently, lifted an eyelid, then snatched her hand away. The baby’s eyes had been blue.

  Horror might have found her then, but it was given no time. She whirled suddenly, not in fright so much as mech­anistic nervousness, and Chata was standing motionless in full­ center of the doorway, looking in at her.

  The black head gave a toss of arrogance. “My child, yes. My little son.” And in the flowery language that can express itself as English never can, without the risk of being ridiculous: “The son of my heart.” For a moment her face crum­bled and a gust of violent emotion swept across it, instantly was gone again.

  But it hadn’t been grief, it had been almost maniacal rage. The rage of the savage who resents a loss, does not know how to accept it.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know—I didn’t mean to come in here—”

  “Come, there is some food for you,” Chata cut her short curtly. She turned on her heel and went down the shadowy arcade toward the other lighted doorway, the more distant one her self-invited guest should have sought out in the first place.

  The American went more slowly, turning in the murky afterglow beyond the threshold to look lingeringly back inside again: I will not think of this for a while. Later, I know, I must, but not now. That in this house where he said he lived there is a child lying dead whose hair is golden, whose eyes were blue.

  Chata had reappeared in the designated doorway through which she wanted her to follow, to mark it out for her, to hasten her coming. The American advanced toward it, and went in in turn.

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p; They squatted on the floor to eat, as the Japanese do. The old woman palmed it, and Chata palmed it in turn, to have her do likewise, and to show her where.

  She sank awkwardly down as they were, feeling her legs to be too long, but managing somehow to dispose of them with a fanned-out effect to the side. An earthenware bowl of rice and red beans was set down before her.

  She felt a little faint for a moment, for the need of food, as the aroma reached her, heavy and succulent. She wanted to crouch down over it, and up-end the entire bowl against her face, to get its entire contents in all at one time.

  The old woman handed her a tortilla, a round flat cake, paper-thin, of pestled maize, limp as a wet rag. She held it in her own hand helplessly, did not know what to do with it They had no eating utensils.

  The old woman took it back from her, deftly rolled it into a hollowed tube, returned it. She did with it as she saw them doing with theirs; held the bowl up closer to her mouth and scooped up the food in it by means of the tortilla.

  The food was unaccustomedly piquant; it prickled, baffled the tastebuds of her tongue. A freakish thought from nowhere suddenly flitted through her mind: I should be careful. If they wanted to poison me... And then: But why should they want to harm me? I’ve done them no harm; my being here certainly does them no harm.

  And because it held no solid substance, the thought misted away again.

  She was so exhausted, her eyes were already drooping closed before the meal was finished. She recovered with a start, and they had both been watching her fixedly. She could tell that by the way fluidity of motion set in again, as happens when people try to cover up the rigid intentness that has just preceded it. Each motion only started as she resumed her observation of it.

  “Tienes sueño,” Chata murmured. “¿Quieres acostarte?” And she motioned toward the doorway without looking at it herself.

  Somehow, the American understood the intention of the words by the fact of the gesture, and the fact that Chata had not risen from the floor herself, but remained squatting. She was not being told to leave the house, she was being told that she might remain within the house and go and lie down with her child if she needed to.

  She stumbled to her feet awkwardly, almost threatened to topple for a moment with fatigue. Then steadied herself.

  “Gracia.” She faltered. “Gracia, mucho.” Two pitiful words.

  They did not look at her. They were looking down at the emptied food bowls before them. They did not turn their eyes toward her as when somebody is departing from your presence. They kept them on the ground before them as if holding them leashed, waiting for the departure to have been completed.

  She draggingly made the turn of the doorway and left them behind her.

  The patio seemed to have brightened while she’d been away. It was bleached an almost dazzling white now, with the shadows of the roses and their leaves an equally intense black. Like splotches and drippings of ink beneath each separate component one. Or like a lace mantilla flung open upon a snowdrift.

  A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky-well above the patio.

  That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own in­stinct.

  Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc, and came back looking for them now. The primitive moon that had once looked down on terraced heathen cities and human sacrifices. The moon of Anahuac.

  Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky-well with its throbbing, not touching it on any side. Now the patio is a piebald place of black and white, burning in the downward-teeming light. Not a leaf moves, not a petal falls, in this fierce amal­gam.

  Now the lurid glow from within the brazero had dimmed, and is just a threaded crimson outline against contrasting surfaces, skipping the space in between. It traces, like a fine wire, two figures coifed with rebosos. One against the wall, inanimate, like one of the mummies of her race that used to be sat upright in the rock catacombs. Eyes alone move quick above the mouth-shrouded reboso.

  The other teetering slightly to and fro. Ever so slightly, in time to a whispering. A whispering that is like a steady sigh­ing in the night; a whispering that does not come through the muffling rebosos.

  The whispering stops. She raises something. A small stone.

  A whetstone. She spits. She returns it to the floor again. The whispering begins once more. The whispering that is not of the voice, but of a hungry panting in the night. A hissing thirst. The roses sleep pale upon the blackness of a dream. The haunted moon looks down, lonely for Montezuma and his nation, seeking across the land.

  The whispering stops now. The shrouded figure in the center of the room holds out something toward the one propped passive against the wall. Something slim, sharp, grip foremost. The wire-outline from the brazero-mouth finds it for a moment, runs around it like a current, flashes into a momentary high­light, a burnished blur, then runs off it again and leaves it to the darkness.

  The other takes it. Her hands go up briefly. The reboso falls away from her head, her shoulders. Two long plaits of dark glossy hair hang down revealed against the copper satin that is now her upper body. Her mouth opens slightly. She places the sharp thing crosswise to it. Her teeth fasten on it. Her hand leaves it there, rigid, immovable.

  Her hands execute a swift circling about her head. The two long plaits whip from sight, like snakes scampering to safety amidst rocks. She twines them, tucks them up.

  She rises slowly with the grace of unhurried flexibility, back continuing to the wall. She girds her skirt up high about her thighs and interlaces it between, so that it holds itself there. Unclothed now, save for a broad swathing about the waist and hips, knife in mouth, she begins to move. Sideward toward the entrance, like a ruddy flame coursing along the wall, with no trace behind it.

  Nothing is said. There is nothing to be said.

  Nothing was said before. Nothing needed to be said. Dark eyes understood dark eyes. Dark thoughts met dark thoughts and understood, without the need of a word.

  Nothing will be said after it is over. Never, not in a thousand days from now, not in a thousand months. Never again. The old gods never had a commandment not to kill. That was another God in another land. The gods of Anahuac de­manded the taking of human life, that was their nature. And who should know better than the gods what its real value is, for it is they who give it in the first place.

  The flame is at the doorway now, first erect, then writh­ing, the way a flame does. Then the figure goes down on hands and knees, low, crouching, for craft, for stealth, for the approach to kill. The big cats in the mountains do it this way, belly-flat, and the tribe of Montezuma did it this way too, half a thousand years ago. And the blood remembers what the heart has never learned. The approach to kill.

  On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes down to join its support, and is gone again to the rear. The moon is a caress on supple skin. The moon of Anahuac understands, the moon is in league, the moon will not betray.

  Slowly along the portico creeps the death-approach, now borax-white in archway-hemisphere, now clay-blue in slanted support-ephemera. The knife-blade winks, like a little haze­ puff of white dust, then the shadow hides it again.

  The roses dream, the well lies hushed, not a straggling grain topples into it to mar it. No sound, no sound at all. Along the wall crawls life, bringing an end to life.

  Past the opening where the death-tapers burn all night.
She doesn’t even turn her head as she passes. What is dead is gone. What is dead does not matter any more. There were no souls in Anahuac, just bodies that come to stir, then stop and stir no longer.

  What is dead does not matter any more. The love of a man, that is what matters to a woman. If she has not his child, she cannot hold his love. If she loses his child, then she must get another.

  And now the other entrance is coming nearer as the wraith­-like figure creeps on. Like smoke, like mist, Bickering along at the base of a wall. It seems to move of its own accord, sidling along the wall as if it were a black slab or panel traveling on hidden wheels or pulleys at the end of a draw­ cord. Coming nearer all the time, black, coffin-shaped, against the bluish-pale wall Growing taller, growing wider, growing greater.

  And then a sound, a small night sound, a futile, helpless sound—a child whimpers slightly in its sleep.

  But instantly the figure stops, crouched. Is as still as if it had never moved a moment ago, would never move again. Not a further ripple, not a fluctuation, not a belated muscular con­traction, not even the pulsing of breath. As the mountain lioness would stop as it stalked an alerted kill.

  The child whimpers troubledly again. It is having a dream perhaps. Something, someone, stirs. Not the child. A heavier, a larger body than the child. There is a faint rustling, as when someone turns against overlying covers.

  Then the sibilance of a soothing, bated voice, making a hushing sound. “Sh-h-h. Sh-h-h.” Vibrant with a light motion. The motion of rocking interfolded arms.

  A drowsy murmur of words, almost inchoate. “Sleep, darling. We’ll find your daddy soon.”

  The moon glares down patiently, remorselessly, waiting. The moon will wait. The night will wait.

  Seconds of time pass. Breathing sounds from within the doorway on the stillness now, in soft, slow, rhythmic waves. With little ripples in the space between each wave. Breathing of a mother, and elfin echo of her arm-cradled child. The shadow moves along the wall.