Sideways In Crime

by Sideways In Crime v2 lit

  “I need money. Please?” The Irishman twisted his hands together, his expression invisible in the dim light. “I’m in trouble, Gerard. I need to go north. Right now.”

  “Did you get drunk again? I warned you.” Wide awake now, I tossed my quilt aside. “The Ciuacoatl cuts foreigners some slack, but you’re going to end up a slave if you don’t...”

  “Just loan me the money. Whatever you can.” He cut me off, his young face haggard in the faint light. “I’ll pay you back. I promise.”

  “I’ll help you out. Of course. But tell me what’s going on.” I scrambled to my feet, knelt in front of my petlacalli, throwing back the wicker lid and digging through my stored clothes. “Maybe I can do something?”

  “You can’t.” His voice was flat and emotionless. “I’m heading up to Columbia. The Spaniards will hand an Englishman over to the Aztecs in a heartbeat, but I can catch a Hudson’s Bay trader heading up the coast. If anyone asks, you haven’t seen me, okay?”

  “Here.” I handed him three gold quachtli. “I wish you’d tell me what happened.”

  He shook his head, darted to the door of my one-room house. Paused there and looked back, a black outline against the gray light. “I didn’t do it, Gerard.” And then he was gone, the soft slap of his sandals fading in the distance.

  I stared after him, worried. I had taken the young poet under my wing when he had first arrived here from St. Augustine, the eastern capital of New Spain. He was a dreamer, that one. I don’t know how he had survived this long on his wanderings. The first flat claps from the wooden gongs atop the Temple of the Sun shattered the quiet. A moment later, the conch shells trumpeted the start of the day from the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. Frowning, I folded my cotton quilt and left it neatly on my mat, which would annoy Ten Reed, my slave. A warrior before he had been accused of murder, he took his current slave status as seriously as he had taken his warrior career. I was not supposed to fold things.

  What had Avery done? I couldn’t imagine. I said a small prayer to Tezcatlipoca, the local god of night and youth, to keep the dreamer safe and shivered in the chilly dawn air. Xitllali, the chocolatl vendor would have her brazier burning by now. I needed chocolate with some of those kava beans imported from the Byzantines. I pulled on cotton pants and wrapped my tilmatli around me, fastening it with one of the imported brooches that were all the rage now, and stepped into the bustle of a Tenochtitlan morning.

  My assigned house was in the huge palace complex and bordered one of The Quetzal’s gardens--this one planted in Hot Land species and full of the big, noisy red and blue birds from the Mayan jungles.

  So even if they didn’t bang gongs in the morning, nobody would sleep in around here. But my teaching time with The Quetzal’s daughter, Malinal, was early anyway. I headed for the chocolatl vendor’s stand just outside the palace’s southern gate past the street sweepers with their reed brooms, their hair braided in the sweepers’ knot and woven with blue to honor their favorite god Ometeotl. Xitllali was already frothing a bowl for me as I turned the corner into the wide main thoroughfare, smoke from her brazier sharp in the cool morning air. Her booth bordered the canal, not far from the public latrine barges gathering their loads of night soil. The location assured her a brisk morning business and strands of jade beads around her neck attested to her success.

  “The Spaniards are banging their shutters again.” She grinned and handed me the bowl. “Ahexoti says they light up two hands’ worth of lamps every night. If they slept when it was dark, they would get up early, eh?” She slipped the small quachtli I handed her into the bag beneath her long blouse and winked.

  “They’re just angry because the high priest wouldn’t give up their captain is all. Ah, that’s good.” She had not only mixed in some of the Byzantine kava beans, but also some hot chili. Europe couldn’t get past the ritual sacrifice thing although the Sioux nation understood it completely. Usually, after a certain amount of negotiation and “gifts,” the priests would give up foreign transgressors to their consulate, but in this case, a high-ranking Spanish official had lost his temper while he was drunk and had stabbed a feather-mosaic artist in front of witnesses. Someone of his rank was just too valuable a treat for the bloodthirsty Aztec gods. And for all their bloody reputation, the Aztecs did not tolerate crime, especially not murder. Rumor was that the Spanish delegation had appealed to the Chinese Ambassador, but the Chinese Ambassador had refused to meet with them.

  Which probably had a lot to do with the current trade squabble between China and Spain over the North African trade routes. World politics were never dull. And the city on the lake was a good place to hear it all. The Aztecs loved gossip as much as they loved blood. I leaned against the huge, carved doorposts of the palace’s east gate and watched the bearers trotting across the huge central square bent into their forehead straps, balancing huge loads on their backs as they dodged pedestrians and street sweepers. Oh, you saw more and more of the wheeled carts and rickshaws introduced by the Chinese, and many of the nobles owned horses now, but the Brotherhood of Bearers still carried most cargo. Although The Quetzal was listening seriously to news of the fire-fueled engine that had supposedly carried a thousand pounds on its back, over in the Germanic Federation. I finished the last of my spicy chocolatl. I doubted a steam engine would ever run along the Ixtapalapan causeway here. The Brotherhood of Bearers had way too much power.

  The lake mist was rising, thickened with the smoke from the cooking braziers and the big central market was already in full swing. I crossed the square to where the vendors’ stalls formed a miniature city, picking my way through the narrow alleys between the stalls past cages of bright birds, bundles of feathers, gobbling turkeys with their feet bound, piles of cinnamon bark and vanilla beans brought up from the Hot Lands, exotic woods, making my way to the street of flowers where I bought a fat bunch of yellow sunflowers.

  Malinal, The Quetzal’s favorite daughter, had a suite of three rooms that opened into his favorite garden, the one with a waterfall fed by the aqueduct from Chapultepec that splashed into a mosaic-tiled pool. We always had our lessons beside the pool unless it was raining. She was waiting for me as usual, sitting on her mat beside the low table carved from dark African wood, dressed in a white cotton blouse and skirt hemmed with intricate feather work in blue, red, and green. She raised her finely drawn eyebrows, her dark eyes sparkling as she eyed my armful of yellow blossoms.

  “Tell me the story of these flowers.” She smiled up at me and for a moment, my wife, Spring Wind Song, looked from her eyes.

  I had to make a fuss over arranging the blossoms on the table until I could speak normally. “There is no story.” I managed a smile as I sat down on my mat, arranging my tilmatli over my thighs because it was still cool here in the breath of the waterfall. “They were my wife’s favorite flower and this is her birthday.”

  “I am honored.” She paused for a moment, those dark eyes so like Song’s fixed on my face. “It is a deep love that lasts three hands of years beyond death.”

  “Seventeen years,” I said automatically, in English.

  She bent her head, her jade earrings tinkling slightly with her movement. “So what is our lesson to be today, Teacher of Foreign Thought?” She shifted smoothly into English.

  I was still worrying about Avery and my nebulous plan for today’s lesson had taken flight like a white heron from the lake. “Why don’t you begin with a question?”

  “Why is sacrifice to the gods so terrible to the French when it is considered honorable to cut the bowels from a man on a battlefield and leave him to die in the sun?” Her dark eyes bored into me. “That death has no more meaning than cutting the throat of a hare for the pot. It devalues the warrior. According to the Ambassador from France, three hundred warriors died like that in their latest battle with England.”

  I sighed. “So what did the Ambassador from France say at the state dinner last night that stung, oh feathered daughter?”

  “He said nothing to me.�
�� She lifted one shoulder in a delicate shrug, then frowned. “My maid told me after that he had brought an application for marriage from the king of France on behalf of his youngest son. For me, of course. He was... condescending. And he was not pleased with my father’s answer to him.” She tilted her head. “At dinner that night he stared at me and then he left the table. I saw... pity in his face, Gerard. I feel... insulted.” Her dark eyes were deep as pools and old as I was, young as she was, I felt as if I teetered on the brink, as if I could fall in. And drown.

  “How could he pity me? How dare he?”

  “He doesn’t understand.” I had a hard time getting the words out. “It is hard... for someone who is not of your race to understand your choice. He believed you are a victim, that this is not really your choice.”

  “You don’t understand it either.” Her voice was gentle. “Even after all your years here.”

  “It’s hard.” I fixed my eyes on the water that sparkled like Arabian diamond as it shattered on the rocks above the mosaic pool. “It’s hard to... teach you, to see your brilliance and know that in less than a year...”

  “How could I be less than the best I can be, when I go before the gods?” She lifted a carved pendant of rosy jade that she wore around her neck. “I can smash this jade with a hammer; the earth could shake down the very Temple of the Sun tomorrow. There is no certainty in life; all is ephemeral. What offering can we give the gods that has any real meaning? Gold, jade, even diamonds.” She took the delicate golden chain from around her neck, held it out. “Nothing has any permanent value.” With a flick of her wrist, she tossed the necklace into the pool. The gold caught the sunlight, delicate as a spider web as it sparkled, then plopped into the water, leaving tiny, widening rings behind it. “What gift can one give the gods save the enduring ephemera of the human soul?”

  I just shook my head. I did understand--intellectually at least. I had seen the barbarity on the battlefields as a boy when the Sioux Nation repulsed the land-hungry settlers of New Britannia. Barbarity had been about equal on both sides. And the Choctaw had been largely destroyed, whole villages massacred to the last infant. War, for the Three Peoples was mostly about taking prisoners. Some were sacrificed, others bartered back. But when I watched the bright sparkle in Malinal’s eyes as she recounted the conversation at a state dinner and deftly dissected the political undercurrents... I didn’t understand her choice at all.

  Two slaves bustled in, carrying a tray of food and dishes. Startled I looked up at the climbing sun. Mid-morning already. I nodded thanks as one slave set a bowl of atolli, sweet maize porridge, on the table beside a plate of sliced melon. Compared to the table of the factor of Hudson Bay Company or the minister of New Britannia, The Quetzal’s Chinese porcelain dishes and the food they held were simple. The Aztecs had never acquired a taste for ostentation, although they had decorated the guest quarters more to European standards of luxury at my suggestion. Europeans did not sleep well on mats, even thick ones like mine, which made Ten Reed curl his lip.

  “This is Ixchac’s last day of servitude.” Malinal smiled up at the tall, skinny man with streaks of gray in his hair. “I thank you for your service.”

  The older slave bowed, grinning and carried the empty tray from the garden. The Aztec penal system was a practical one. Nearly all transgressions earned you time as a slave, longer or shorter, depending on the severity of your crime. The most severe crimes made you the gods’ meat. The legal slaves were auctioned every week in a small court in the central market. When I had first come to live in Tenochtitlan, I had been amazed at how well the system worked. A slave could accuse a master of abuse and the master could be... and often was... punished. Slaves were rarely confined in any way and simply paid off their legal debt. At the end of that time, a grateful and generous master or mistress might reward the freed slave with a gift. Or they might not. The system was hardly perfect and ugly incidents occurred, but I often thought that the system worked better than the stocks and whipping post in New Britannia or New Spain’s barbarous punishments left over from their Inquisition.

  As the slaves reached the garden gate, they both stepped backward off the path, bowing, fist to forehead.

  The Quetzal walked in. Dressed in the antique maxtlatl knotted about his loins, draped with a short, formal cloak of exquisite feather-mosaic work, his sandals ornamented with jade, he nodded as both Malinal and I stood and bowed.

  “Father.” Malinal held out her hands. “I thought you were meeting with the trade delegation from Palenque this morning.”

  “They are examining the small model of the fire-horse that we’ve received from our delegation in England.” He smiled. “You know the Maya. They love machines.”

  “I should go,” I said.

  “No.” He lifted a hand. “I came looking for you.”

  I spread my hands and bowed again. It’s hard not to be impressed by The Quetzal. He must be pushing sixty but he has welded the southern half of the twin-continents into a power that not even the Europeans with all their navies can challenge. Of course the Chinese and their gunpowder back him, but even there, he has managed to keep that alliance a partnership of equals--no mean feat. Once Avery told me that if the Chinese hadn’t arrived here first and given the Three Peoples guns, Europe would have overrun the entire twin-continent. I find that hard to believe.

  “I have heard of your interference in legal matters in the past.” He was staring at me, his dark eyes as readable as chips of obsidian. “Most notably, of course, you proved the innocence of that young Mayan diplomat when he was accused of murder, and I have also heard that the slave who tends you does so of his own choice, in payment for exonerating him when he was accused of killing the aurianime he had hired for a night’s entertainment. It appears that you have favor with Tezcatlipoca. He gives you clearer eyes than most, eh?”

  “I am only a searcher after truth,” I told him. “Tezcatlipoca doesn’t whisper in my ear... at least not that I understand.”

  “The gods find many ways to speak when they choose to do so.” The Quetzal waved a dismissive hand, the thick bracelet of gold on his wrist winking in the sunlight. “I have a truth for you to find.” His obsidian eyes pinned me. “In the dark hours of the night, the first son of the Chinese consul was killed, without honor. He had a visitor that evening, the watchman attests to it. That visitor was just captured as he tried to escape the city.”

  “The truth seems very obvious here,” I murmured.

  “It does, does it not?” The Quetzal smiled, but his eyes were thoughtful. “A foreigner did this. I am disgraced, that I could not protect a guest in my city from an outside assassin.” He paused, his strong lips curving downward until his face resembled one of the faces of the old warrior-kings carved on the ball court walls. “I want to be assured of the truth. Can you do that for me?”

  “I can certainly try.”

  “I did not ask you to try.” Those obsidian eyes bored into me.

  “I can only do the best that I can.” I forced myself not to look away. “To guarantee otherwise would be to imply fraud.”

  He frowned at me for a moment longer, and that look made my guts squirm. He was The Quetzal. He could assign me a starring role in the next sacrifice on the Sun Temple’s steps with a snap of his fingers. The moment stretched between us, then he jerked his chin in a brief nod. “I will assign you whatever assistance you require. What do you need?”

  “I would like the place of the killing to be guarded. So that none can enter.” I frowned. “And I would like to speak to the accused. Or has he been given to the Chinese?” If that was the case, it was probably too late to do much. They would wring a confession out of him for sure. The Chinese could be as barbaric as the Spaniards that way, if more subtly. But The Quetzal nodded. “One of my personal guards has secured the room. The accused man is being held in the Hall of Justice.” He lifted a hand and a slave in a loincloth ornamented with a jade tassel appeared in the doorway.

  I follo
wed the slave into the complex of main buildings near the palace gates. The lower floors were used for civic business and the courts. The upper floors housed The Quetzal’s extended family. As we entered the ancient stone building that held the Hall of Justice, the slave offered a small scroll to the doorkeeper. He took the scroll and bustled away, his sandals slapping briskly on the beaten-earth floor. I had been here many times, for many reasons. The age of the place leaned on me like a weight. It had been standing before the first Chinese ship appeared on the horizon. Not one hint of modernity ornamented the whitewashed walls and earthen floors, no kiln-fired tile, no colorful silk hangings, even the tilmatli of the ministers and judges were knotted in the old style rather than fastened with the new brooches. Resinous ocotl flickered and smoked on the walls. No whale oil lamps here and not one tiny shard of the glass that was the new fad in the city.

  A minister bustled up, his hair shaved at the forehead and twisted into the intricate knot that denoted high rank. He frowned at me, then handed back The Quetzal’s scroll and gestured me to follow him. The cells for holding prisoners were in the bowels of the building, lit only by narrow slits high up in the outer wall. As the heavy wooden door creaked open, I made out a slender man face down on the thin mat. An earthenware pot for night soil stood in one corner and a water-gourd sat precisely in the middle of the floor. The wretch on the mat lifted his head, blinking as the rush light pierced the gloom.

  “Avery!”

  He scrambled to his knees, staring up at me, his face haggard. “Gerard? Are they going to let me go?”

  He was so afraid. I knelt beside him, put a hand on his shoulder. He was shivering and the building was still cool with night’s chill. His cloak, bordered with elegant feather mosaic work, lay in a heap on the floor. I picked it up, draped it around his shoulders. “Avery, what happened? The Quetzal has asked me to find out the truth.”