by Simon Levack
“My Lord—he told me to look for them. I have to go to the Cuauhcalco Prison. What do I do if he asks about my progress? I can’t tell him you’ve told me not to obey him—he’ll have us both strangled!”
“Then you’d better do as he says. Whatever my cousin may have told you, I don’t have those men. No matter: the Emperor will get them back—but through me, and in my own good time, so that he knows I can’t be trifled with. And that young merchant is going to be made to regret what he has done!”
My master leaned toward me then, planting his trembling bony hands on his knees.
“You will find the sorcerers, Yaotl, and bring them to me—to me personally, do you understand? To me and no one else—not even the Emperor! And before you get any clever ideas about running to Montezuma the moment you set eyes on them, just listen to this.
“I know Montezuma will have told you that when you catch up with the sorcerers you’re to take them straight to him because he’ll have you strangled if you don’t. So hear me now, slave: if I learn you’ve been anywhere near the Emperor before those men are safely in my hands, I’ll have you flayed alive!”
9
I spent much of the night prowling around my master’s courtyard, listening to the sounds made by a city stirring in its sleep: the conch-shell trumpet wailing at midnight, a distant answering call from a priest patrolling the city’s bounds, the cry of some creature disturbed on the lake. From time to time the lads from one of the Houses of Youth would break into song, so that the sound would carry across the water and convince our neighbors that we Aztecs never slept.
Then the stars started to disappear, one by one, and the first drops of the winter rain began to fall around me. I went indoors, treading softly to avoid disturbing my room’s other occupant, and huddled on my sleeping mat with my cloak wrapped around me.
My mind would not rest. It kept revisiting the evening’s events.
My master plainly knew more than he ought to about the Emperor’s missing sorcerers; and the Emperor was not fooled. As Montezuma had said to me himself, there were things he had not been told. However, it seemed that he could not move openly against his Chief Minister without evidence.
I was under no illusions about why I had been picked as the man to get him that evidence. “You are spoken of most highly,” Montezuma had said, but what he really wanted was a spy in Lord Feathered in Black’s household: someone who was in no position to deny him whatever he demanded. I wondered, though, where he had got my name from.
It was not hard to guess why Montezuma thought my master was playing him false. Having heard from his own lips how fearful he was for the future and how little he trusted his advisers, I could put myself in the Emperor’s place and imagine the questions he would ask himself. “I rounded up these sorcerers to consult them about my future,” he would have thought, “whether my rule would persist, whether I would live or die. Now they have vanished from a place nobody has ever escaped from. Who might have an interest in what they have to say? Who else, but my rivals for the throne?
“So what do I, the Emperor of the Mexicans, do about it? Of course, I ask my trusty chief minister to investigate. But for reasons that he cannot or will not explain, Lord Feathered in Black fails to find the missing sorcerers. And the next thing I hear is that a Bathed Slave has died uttering what sounds suspiciously like a prophecy—just the sort of thing a sorcerer might be expected to come out with. And who was sent to assist at the sacrifice? None other than the Chief Minister’s own slave—Yaotl!”
What else could the Emperor be expected to conclude, other than that my master knew all along where his sorcerers were, deliberately failed to account for them when he was ordered to look for them, and then made sure that his slave was on hand to hear and report whatever one of them might say in his last moments?
Had I been Montezuma, I grudgingly admitted to myself, I would probably have concluded that the Chief Minister was up to no good too. But why? What could Lord Feathered in Black possibly have to gain by deceiving the Emperor in such a complicated fashion?
I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Somewhere above it were the Chief Minister’s sleeping quarters. “What’s this all about?” I muttered. “Are you just trying to show you’re cleverer than the Emperor?”
“If you can’t sleep,” grumbled a voice out of the darkness, “then you can come here and turn me over before I get fucking bedsores.”
Talking to myself, I had woken my roommate up.
Patiyoh was his name—or rather, it was the name he had been known by for as long as I had dwelled in my master’s household. I was sure it was old Black Feathers’ idea of a joke, for it meant “costly.” He had once been a useful slave, but he had been crippled by a stroke years before, and now all he did was lie on his sleeping mat, consuming his master’s food and doing no work in return. He was safe enough as long as he gave his master no cause for complaint. A few of his fellow slaves, including me, kept him alive by small kindnesses, such as changing his soiled breechcloth from time to time and carrying him out into a secluded corner of the courtyard when the weather was good. The others did it because they knew they might one day find themselves in Costly’s position. I had my own reasons to feel indebted to the old man.
Seizing him by his bony shoulders and rolling him on his side took little effort. As I crawled back onto my own sleeping mat, however, I learned I was not going to get away that lightly.
“So, what’s old Black Feathers done to you now?”
“Never mind,” I mumbled. “Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t,” he said petulantly, “not since you woke me up. Now the floor under this mat is as hard as stone, and it’s not as if I can toss and turn until I get to sleep, so you’ll just have to keep talking to me, won’t you? Or have you forgotten what you owe me?”
“No.” I sighed. “I haven’t forgotten.”
What I owed this crippled old man was nothing less than my life. When I had come into our master’s household—after the Chief Minister had snapped me up as a bargain in the marketplace—I had been helplessly in the grip of the Four Hundred Rabbits, the gods of the sacred wine. The twenty cloaks my master had paid me for my liberty had gone on the roughest, sourest and cheapest drink I could get. When the money had run out and I had given myself up to servitude, in accordance with the bargain my master and I had struck, I still had no thought beyond the next gourd. It was Costly who had seen me through it, whose wasted, bony arms had held me as I had shivered and struggled and cried out for just a drop, just a taste of fermented maguey sap on my tongue.
I could never forget what he had done for me. He would never let me.
I told him of everything I had seen and heard that evening. It took a long time, but the old man was still awake at the end.
“So old Black Feathers was banging on about his father again? You amaze me. I’ve known our beloved Chief Minister a lot longer than you have, young man, and if I had a bag of cocoa beans for every time I’ve heard one of those jealous tirades about his father, I could have bought my freedom years ago.”
“But Lord Tlacaelel’s been dead nearly forty years.”
“Yes, and his son’s never moved out of his shadow. Not surprising, is it? Four emperors deferred to Tlacaelel. He was their equal. Montezuma treats his son like a servant—even though one of his wives is old Black Feathers’ daughter! How often do you suppose our master has to listen to tales of his father’s exploits in war—or even worse, gets asked to tell them himself? And every time he visits that great big palace next to the Heart of the World he must tell himself: ‘If only my father hadn’t turned down the throne, all this would be mine!’”
“Our master’s jealousy isn’t really my problem,” I reminded Costly as I squirmed into a less uncomfortable position under my cloak. “It’s the sorcerers I have to worry about.”
“Don’t you think there’s a connection? What was it he told you—he wanted something that wasn’t his father’s?”
�
�True, but he also said the Emperor was afraid of him.”
“Why? He’s too old to be any threat. If Montezuma died tomorrow the throne would go to his brother, Cuitlahuac. Our Chief Minister and our Emperor both know that.” The old slave sucked noisily on his bare gums. “I’d lay odds old Black Feathers was lying to you.”
“He would,” I said dryly. “I’m meant to be spying on him, remember?”
The old slave persisted as I rolled over on my mat. “Whatever’s happened to these sorcerers, it’s not just because of some feud between old Black Feathers and Montezuma. It’s got to do with something our master wants—something his father never had. Now what might that be, I wonder?”
ONE REED
1
I did not want to go to the prison, but since I seemed to have no choice, I steeled myself to visit it.
Rainwater had pooled on the flat roof and dripped into the wooden cages that lined the walls. The rushes strewn on the floor had absorbed all the moisture they could and now floated uselessly in shallow puddles. The floor was crisscrossed by thin streams of liquid stained with filth from the overflowing pots the prisoners were given to relieve themselves in. The only light came through tiny apertures set high in the walls: not enough to show you where you were putting your feet, but enough to reveal the misery on the faces of the prison’s handful of desperate inmates.
Each prisoner huddled naked on the floor of his cage. There was a sameness about them, each one alone, unable or unwilling to speak to his neighbors, surrounded by the smell of his own and others’ ordure—reduced to everything an Aztec was not.
“They’re drunks, mostly.” The Emperor’s majordomo dismissed most of the wretches in his care with a single word. “Don’t feel too sorry for them, they’ve only themselves to blame. And these are the worst offenders—the ones their own parishes couldn’t handle. Still, you’d know all this, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
My tone must have been too sharp, as he gave me a curious look. “I thought you were Lord Feathered in Black’s man. He is the Chief Justice, isn’t he, after all?”
“Oh … yes, yes, of course …”
“We had some more interesting characters,” the major-domo went on. “But you know all about the sorcerers, of course.”
“The men who escaped? They really were sorcerers, then?” I asked innocently.
“They must have been, to get out of this place. Turned themselves into birds and flew out through the windows.”
Having seen the windows, I thought nothing much bigger than a hummingbird could have got through any of them, but I kept this to myself.
“That’s what I came to talk to you about,” I said. “Lord Montezuma wanted me to see where the sorcerers had got away from, so that I could see what manner of men we are dealing with. He would want me to eliminate all the mundane explanations first, though.”
“Lord Montezuma?” He sounded surprised, and when he stared at me his eyes were pale discs in the prison’s gloom. “The Emperor sent you? But I thought you said you were the Chief Minister’s man?”
“The Emperor asked the Chief Minister to find out what happened,” I explained, “and then he asked me.”
“He asked you himself?”
“Yes.”
The man looked at his feet. His toes turned over some rushes. I wondered why he seemed to be prevaricating; after all, I could hardly be the first person to ask him these questions. What difference did it make who had sent me? To encourage him, I added, “And so when I ask you a question, it’s as if Lord Montezuma were asking it, except I personally don’t have the power to have you dismembered if you don’t tell me what I want to know. Now, are you going to answer me, or do I have to tell the Emperor you won’t cooperate?”
The majordomo let out a theatrical sigh. “All right. I suppose it can’t hurt if I run through the whole story from the beginning. These men—they’d been rounded up from all over the place, fingered by the headmen of their villages, I think, and brought in by order of the Emperor. He interrogated them personally.”
“What about?”
“What do you think?” The man lowered his voice to an awed whisper. “The omens! It sounded to me as if the Emperor was afraid of some huge disaster, and just wanted some sorcerers to look into the future and give him a straight answer about it. That’s why he had them rounded up, I think, so that he could consult them without the whole city knowing what they were talking about. He was asking them whether they’d had any visions.”
“And had they?”
“Of course not! If they had been able to predict the sort of catastrophe the Emperor had in mind they would have been fools to own up to it. How do you tell an emperor his realm is about to perish? They just kept saying they’d seen nothing. In the end Montezuma ran out of patience, had them thrown in here and sent me along the next day to question them.”
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing! All they’d tell me was that whatever was going to happen would happen and that a great mystery would come to pass—not exactly helpful. Montezuma was so angry that he kept them in here on starvation rations and then sent me back to interrogate them again. But that was when …”
The majordomo licked his lips. His voice seemed to have dried up and he had to clear his throat before continuing.
“We had a double guard on the place, because the Emperor was so troubled about these men. The guards were all men I’d known for years, men I’d trust with my children’s lives, and none of them saw a thing. They’d all gone—flown away like … well, like bloody birds!”
“How did you explain that to the Emperor?”
“How do you think? I had to go and tell him his most important prisoners, the ones he’d taken a particular interest in, had vanished into thin air. What would you have done?”
“I suppose I would have either run very far away or groveled a lot.”
“Yes, well, I just told him he might as well have me cut to pieces there and then, because there was no sign of his prisoners and none of my guards had seen or heard a thing. I thought I was a dead man. He’s had people disemboweled and their wives and children strangled for less, but I got away with it somehow.” He paused thoughtfully. “It’s not as if he wasn’t angry, mind you. If he ever catches those men, he’s going to make them suffer—and anyone else who gets the blame for their disappearance. But I was lucky. It never seemed to occur to him that it might be my fault—not that it was, of course!”
I eyed him skeptically. “So what did the Emperor think had happened?”
“That they’d used magic to escape, of course.”
So the Emperor had done as any Aztec would in his position. If you needed the favor of the gods, you might go to a priest, but sometimes that was not enough. Perhaps the war-god and the rain-god at the summits of their pyramids seemed too remote from the affairs of men. Perhaps what troubled you was the work of some malignant spirit whose name you did not even know. Then, if you had a dream that needed interpreting, or were about to set off on a long journey or try planting your beans too late in the season, you would go to a sorcerer.
Sorcery came at a price, however. It meant dealing with strange, unnerving creatures who could easily do you more harm than good. If the sorcerers Montezuma had questioned were genuine then they may have been able to tell him what the future held. Obviously he believed they had not dared to and had used their powers to escape him.
And the more convinced he was that they had seen his future, the more desperate he would be to get them back.
I examined the nearest empty cage. “Let’s leave magic aside, for the moment. If I were shut up in here, how would I get out?”
“You wouldn’t!”
“No, but just suppose I were to try it.”
He sighed. “Oh, all right. To begin with, there’s no door. You’d have been dropped in through the trapdoor on the roof—see it? Once you were inside we’d have weighed it down with a stone slab and no w
ay would you get it open. Don’t even think about pushing it out of the way—we won’t stop you, but trust me, it won’t budge.” He gave me a nasty grin. “Shall I shut you in and let you try it for yourself?”
“No!” I stepped hastily away from the cage. I could still remember the wood creaking under the weight of that stone slab. “I’ll take your word for it. So I’d have to have someone open the trapdoor from outside.”
The majordomo looked suspiciously at his inmates, a couple of whom had lifted their heads and seemed to be taking an unwelcome interest in our conversation. He raised his voice deliberately. “Forget it! To begin with your accomplice would have to get in past my guards—and I’ve told you, they were doubled up that night. He’d have to find the right cage, open it and let you out, and do all this without being spotted. What’s more, he’d need help shifting that stone. Then he and his mate would have to sneak you out, again past my guards, who wouldn’t have missed them going in in the first place! There’s only one way in or out of here, you know, and you’ve seen how small the windows are. Oh, and on this occasion, he’d have had to do the same trick five times.” He looked about him smugly, as though he had forgotten that in spite of everything a number of his prisoners had managed to slip away. “I tell you, it couldn’t be done!”
“Who’s allowed in here, besides your guards?”
“Nobody! Apart from the judges, of course, if they want to question the prisoners—and the work details who come in to clean up when it’s their parish’s turn at the job.”
I could not help grimacing. Forced labor was a part of the common man’s lot and most would cheerfully tackle dredging a canal or hauling stone to the site of a new public building, but for a people who liked to keep themselves clean, mucking out the prison would be a different matter. “I suppose you’re going to tell me they’re always escorted?”
“All the time! We count them in, we watch them and we count them out again. Face it, there are only three ways out of here. The rats eat you, the judges let you out, or …” He lowered his voice again. “Or you use sorcery! That’s what we told the Emperor, and he believes us!”