by Simon Levack
“What? Where?” The weight vanished from my back as my assailant leaped to his feet. I got up and ran blindly, before he had time to turn on me again with the knife.
“I can’t see her—you’re lying! You idiot, he’s getting away!”
I heard Curling Mist’s sandaled feet slap the Earth as he gave chase, but I had too long a start on him.
So he gave up the pursuit and thought of something else.
“Stop!” he cried. “Stop, thief!”
I looked up just in time to see two tall, muscle-bound figures emerging into the aisle in front of me. They both halted at once, staring at the scene in front of them while they made up their minds what to do. Then they too started running.
I skidded to a halt so fast I scraped skin off my bare heel. I had a knife-wielding madman at my back, crying “Thief.” Bearing down on me were two of the market police, whose work included arresting thieves. I had no time to think about what I was doing: if I had, I would not have been so stupid.
I tried to leap across a mat full of jewels and feathers into the next aisle. I thought I could run, then, get clear of the marketplace and keep running until I found a place to hide. All I did was land on my face and scatter precious stones around me like spilled corn.
I scrabbled desperately there while an old woman’s voice screamed into my ears and blows rained down on my back and head. The blows were still falling as I was hauled to my feet, some of them now catching me in the side, under my ribs, and driving the wind out of me as my arms were wrenched out of the way. The old woman screamed some more obscenities and then something as heavy as a wall hit the side of my head, and I passed out.
SIX KNIFE
1
A woman’s voice said: “Don’t move.”
I was not about to try. It seemed to me that I had made the effort once, a long time ago, but pain and nausea and a sinister scraping sound from somewhere inside my body had made me stop.
Besides, I knew I was going to die soon. Why bother moving, when it could not help? I considered giving up breathing, because it hurt my ribs and achieved nothing except to prolong the pain, but I kept forgetting. I would be about to pass out when a bright shaft of pain like an obsidian knife stung me awake.
“Take it easy!” It was the woman’s voice again. A weight was laid on my shoulder, pressing it gently but firmly to the ground.
“Can you open your mouth?”
“Mmmph?”
I could not speak because my lips were numb and the tongue behind them was swollen through having had my teeth driven through it.
“Try to drink this.”
I could not see what she was offering me because my eyelids were bruised, pulpy masses that had gummed themselves shut.
“It will help your ribs.”
Liquid trickled onto my mouth. Some ran over my cheeks and down my chin. It was as sour as vomit and burned my throat.
I coughed. The pain of coughing made me gasp.
“Have a little more,” said the deep, seductive voice.
I was too feeble to fend her off or stop her pouring more of her fetid brew into me. I was too feeble even to retch.
“Sleep, now,” she said.
I slept.
I woke up.
I could open my eyes a little. All I could see were vague shapes, shadows and pools of light blurring into one another, and everything tinged with red. It was hard to make any sense of what I was looking at until I thought of closing one eye. Then the world stopped spinning long enough for me to work out that I was indoors somewhere and that from the way the shadows fell it must be either late afternoon or early morning.
Pain sliced through my skull, forcing me to shut both eyes again. I moaned.
Someone moved nearby: my ears, although they were singing, picked up the slightest noise, such as a maize ear being dropped in the street outside, or somebody’s joints creaking as he stood up. A hand at the back of my neck lifted my head, while another laid something warm over my brow, a thick paste that stung when it was pressed into place. I moaned again. As the stinging subsided I felt brisk, efficient fingers tying on a bandage.
“Can you speak?” It was the woman’s voice again.
“Mmmph?”
“It’s all right. Rest. You’re safe here.”
When I woke up again I was alone in a small room with only an evil smell for company.
I lay on my back in the middle of the floor, staring at the ceiling. I could just about unglue my eyes now, although there was little to see but gray plaster. When I turned my head to look at a wall I saw more of the same, apart from a couple of large irregular smudges. I remembered the light drizzle there had been recently and thought of damp. They were going to have to renew the thatch on the roof before the real rains began in the summer, I told myself, while I turned my head the other way.
Opposite the smudged wall was an odd pattern of little lights, like stars but more regularly spaced and less distinct. I frowned as I tried to make them out. I blinked and stared at them, and gradually they became two identical sets of lights placed side by side, and in the space between them was a pain like a wooden peg being driven into my skull. My stomach lurched.
My head rolled back of its own accord, leaving me staring at the ceiling again. I shut my eyes and swallowed convulsively, to stop the gorge rising in my throat, and I lay still, in darkness, until the agony and nausea subsided.
I waited until all I was left with were a dull throbbing in my head—a familiar pain that I seemed to have had always, its regular beat almost reassuring, as though I needed it to remind me I was still alive—and aching ribs that protested every time I drew breath.
The smell worried me. Even the poorest houses in Mexico, one-roomed hovels perched on stilts over the marshes on the fringes of the city, were cleaned every day, but this room stank like a dog left for dead in a badly kept latrine.
I decided not to move my head again, but to try looking at my surroundings out of the corners of my eyes, the way a rich man looks at a beggar. That seemed to help. I could see no furniture of any kind, but I now knew what the little lights were. When I was not seeing double, there was just one set of them. They were daylight showing through the gaps in a wicker screen. They were the room’s only illumination, just enough to paint everything around me a washed-out gray color.
The lights were all equally bright. That meant the Sun was not shining straight on the doorway. I wondered how far it had moved round and then realized I did not even know what day it was.
I let out a soft moan as a fresh wave of sickness rolled sluggishly over my stomach.
Where was I and how long had I been here?
The appalling truth began to take shape in my befuddled mind even before I glanced at the wall opposite the doorway and realized that what I had taken for dark smudges were really paintings, their colors turned to shades of gray in the gloom, but still recognizable if you knew them. They were Two Lord and Two Lady. I had last seen them in this room the day I had come looking for news of Shining Light, when the young merchant’s mother had received me as graciously as she could and told me her son had gone into exile.
Then I realized that a voice I vaguely remembered hearing, crooning softly at me while my wounds were dressed and vile medicine was poured into me, had been Lily’s.
I tried to sit up then. What stopped me was not the sudden, crippling pain or the sensation of broken bones grinding against each other, but the fact that I had been strapped to a board, so tightly that I could scarcely inflate my lungs.
I flopped back on the board with a gasp. I was trapped and at the mercy of my enemies.
I had set out wanting a killer to come for me, and meaning to use the merchant’s mother to bring it about, but not like this—when I was wounded and as helpless as a newborn.
And the bad smell, I realized with a shudder, was my own.
Pain and despair made me groan aloud.
In answer came footsteps in the courtyard outside, the scr
aping sound of the screen being pulled aside and a tide of light that flooded the room, washing their gray pallor from the faces of the gods.
“What’s going on?” I tried to say. What came out was: “Mmmph?”
The only response was a grunt of effort as I was picked up, sleeping mat and all, and carried through the doorway. My bearers took me through the afternoon sunshine into a shady place, where they propped my board against a wall.
When the feeling that the blood inside my head was sloshing violently back and forth had begun to ease off, I looked around cautiously.
Lily’s father was sitting in the middle of the courtyard with his back to the trunk of an old fig tree, watching me balefully.
“I hope you appreciate that you’re in my place.”
“Mmmph?”
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up. My hearing isn’t what it was.”
I tried again, eventually managing something that sounded more like “What—am—I—doing—here?”
“Well, they had to move you out of the room, so they could clean it. It looks as if my daughter’s looked after you all right, but I’m told you’ve left dried blood and piss and the gods know what else all over the place. And I suppose they had to get you upright as well, or else you’d have got pneumonia.”
A man and a woman crossed the courtyard, he carrying a bowl of water and she a broom. The man was Constant, the servant I had met before. Judging by his expression, he was no better disposed toward me now than he had been then.
I made a noise that must have sounded like a question.
“I don’t know,” the old man said, “but they seem to have given you a good working over. Lucky for you Lily went to the market instead of coming straight back here.”
“Lily?” I gurgled. “The market?”
“Why, yes—don’t you remember?” He looked me up and down. “Maybe you don’t. Well, what she told me was, after she’d finished her business at the ball court—where you went looking for her, remember?—she had someone to see at the market. Then she saw a fight going on near one of our pitches: you and a priest. You were on the ground and the priest had a knife, but then something distracted him and you managed to run away. You didn’t get very far.”
His casual words brought the whole thing back—the black-faced man chasing me with his cries of “Thief,” the police heading me off, the blows driven into me from all sides as I was hauled to my feet. I felt as if the ground were sinking under me and my eyes began to roll.
A look of alarm crossed the old man’s face. He snatched up the gourd beside him. “Constant! Quick, the man needs a drink!”
“What happened to the priest?” I gasped weakly.
The male servant who had been cleaning my room emerged, saw the gourd Lily’s father was proffering, and slouched sullenly toward him.
“Give him a mouthful of this, it’ll pick him up,” the old man ordered. “The priest? He ran off, apparently. My daughter said she ran up to the stall he’d been standing by, to ask him what he was shouting about, but he vanished into the crowd before she got there. By then everybody was too busy watching you being beaten up to be able to tell her where he’d gone.” He grinned pitilessly. “You don’t know how lucky you were. The police were all for hauling what was left of you straight off to the courthouse, where they’d probably have had you clubbed to death on the spot. Fortunately my daughter managed to convince them that you hadn’t actually stolen anything, so they let you off with a beating.”
Without a word the servant snatched the gourd from the old man, walked over to me and pressed its opening against my battered lips.
It was sacred wine.
I had once sworn never to touch the stuff again. On the other hand, at that time I had not been beaten unconscious, unaccountably rescued and cared for by a woman I thought of as my enemy, and then strapped to a board and stood up in the corner of someone’s courtyard like a trophy.
I shut my eyes and swallowed the drink as gratefully as a baby devouring his mother’s milk.
“Are you awake?”
The room was dark. I shared it with shadows that moved around me like coyotes prowling around a wounded deer.
“Yaotl?”
I rolled my eyes toward the voice.
The shadows were moving because someone was carrying a torch around the room. As the dark figure lifted it into a bracket in the wall, they stopped, settling down in the corners, suddenly as tame as little potbellied dogs.
“You must be hungry: you haven’t eaten for days. You must try some of this.”
It was only as she knelt beside me, tipping a tortoiseshell bowl toward my lips, that I recognized the void in my belly and realized how long it had been empty of anything except the old man’s sacred wine. The thought made my stomach heave.
Lily was feeding me maize gruel, insubstantial stuff, unseasoned except for a little salt, but as it oozed down my throat my head jerked forward out of her hand and I spewed gruel and sacred wine and thin sour juices down my chin and onto my chest.
She snatched the bowl away but kept her hand behind my head, supporting me until the retching stopped.
“It’s all right,” she cooed. “It’s all right. Relax. We’ll try some more later.”
Putting the bowl down, she gently let my head fall back, and stroked my forehead while my breathing gradually slowed.
I closed my eyes. I did not want to sleep. I wanted to get up and get out, away from the ministrations of this disquietingly kind woman, whose son and his friends were killers who wanted to mingle my blood with that of their other victims, but I was too tired. If I could just rest for a moment, I thought, I could gather my strength until the woman left me alone, and then think of a way out of here.
I must have slept a little.
Perhaps I merely dozed, but it must have looked like sleep to her.
With her hand still resting on my forehead, she was whispering: “My boy. Oh, my poor boy,” in a voice now choked with tears.
SEVEN RAIN
1
The following day, I felt somewhat better. Lily’s servants untied me from the board I had been lying on, and the woman herself brought me another bowl of gruel, which I managed to drink from unaided. She told me how she had had me brought to her house, about the doctor who had attended me twice after I had arrived, and how many days had passed since then. I had arrived on Four Vulture; I had been unconscious or delirious or too weak to speak for a whole day; and today was Seven Rain. Finally she helped me to stagger out into the courtyard, where a mat had been placed for me.
I watched her pacing nervously back and forth in front of me, the hem of her skirt flaring about her ankles as she turned. For a while neither of us spoke, as though each was waiting for the other to break the silence. Finally, I nerved myself to ask the question that had been preying on my mind.
“Why did you save my life, Lily?”
The woman looked as if she was trying to make up her mind about something. She had her eyes fixed on a point somewhere above my head and her toes kept twitching as if she were about to take to her heels. One hand plucked absently at a loose thread on her blouse.
I persisted. “What were you doing at the market? You were sitting next to Curling Mist’s boy, Nimble, at the ball court, but you left early. I followed him into the marketplace but lost him, so I thought I would look for you, or news of you, instead. I got as far as your family’s pitch and was attacked by Curling Mist himself. Now it turns out that you were there too. Why? What are Curling Mist and Nimble to you?” It was a longer speech than I had set out to make and the last two words came out in a painful croak.
There was a long silence, and at the end of it a barely audible snap as the thread the woman had been tugging at gave way.
“Curling Mist?” She whispered the name to herself. “I don’t understand. The man you were fighting with was a priest.”
“It’s a disguise. He and the boy were there together. So were you, but why?”
&
nbsp; I looked directly into Lily’s face. Her eyes were narrowed, although whether in anger or disquiet or puzzlement I could not tell.
“Is that all you want to know?” she asked quietly.
“Well, no,” I replied. “What I really want to know is …”
What was I doing here? That was what I wanted to ask, but I was not given the chance.
Lily flared. “How dare you question me in my own house! Do you know what I’ve done for you? I had to talk the police out of throwing you in the canal, among the manure boats. I had to pay off the owner of the pitch you demolished. I had to send a runner to tell Constant and a couple of bearers to come and get you. I’ve sat over you for two days and cleaned you up and endured your stench and paid for the best doctor, and what thanks do I get? Who are you, to pry into my business? What were you doing following me around anyway?” She had begun pacing again; now, as though the question had only just occurred to her, she broke her stride, pausing thoughtfully for a moment before rounding on me again.
She bent toward the mat I lay on, put her face close to mine and hissed dangerously: “Tell me why you were looking for me. Tell me now, or I’ll have you thrown out of my house!”
I tried to scuttle away from her like a scorpion retreating into a crack in a wall, but it still hurt too much to move. If I needed a reminder that I was still helpless, that was it.
“I wanted to give you a message,” I said weakly.
“What message?”
“It’s for your son—or for Curling Mist, or his boy. But …”
“You know my son’s not here,” she said coldly, straightening up and moving away. “I told you the first time we met, he’s gone away.”
“I didn’t think he had, though. I thought he and Curling Mist and Nimble were still in touch. I thought you were taking messages between them. Wasn’t that what you and the boy were doing at the ball court?”