by Simon Levack
“I think you know. You said it yourself: you’ve drunk the obsidian wine, the stuff they give captives before they die!”
I could feel the stuff reaching my belly, hot and indigestible, like a tortilla snatched straight from the griddle. I had to get rid of it before it started to spread through my veins, and the mixture of sacred wine and sacred mushrooms loosened my soul and deprived me of my will. I struggled furiously, contracting my stomach muscles and gulping air in the hope of making myself sick and expelling the poison.
“Not that I made you drink it because I’m going to kill you, Yaotl.” Curling Mist spoke in a throaty whisper. “I’d rather have you fully conscious. I want you to know exactly what’s happening to you, I don’t want you to miss a thing …”
I could feel myself weakening, the weight on my chest turning from a rock to a boulder, my head spinning, the tips of my fingers starting to tingle. Was it the drug or lack of breath which was doing this? Saliva filled my mouth and I swallowed it, bolting it down with more air as I fought to clear my stomach.
“But I made a promise, see? I told Nimble I wouldn’t kill you until you’d told us what he wanted to know. So I’ve given you something to get your tongue working. In a moment you won’t be able to help yourself.”
I bit my tongue to add blood to the fluid and air I was forcing into my stomach. The voice came to me over the roaring in my ears like the voice of a god speaking from the back of a cave.
“Do you remember the Priest House, Yaotl? Do you remember Young Warrior, and the girl in the market? You’re going to tell me all about her—what you did with her, everything!”
The mushrooms were beginning to work. I thought I heard footsteps and voices, a long way away, and someone calling my name: “Yaotl! What is it? What’s happening?”
I opened my mouth.
The twisting in my belly caught me by surprise, doubling me up with such force that the hand was thrown from my chest, and out of my mouth the poison, the sacred wine and the mushrooms and everything else poured in a jet that caught the other man just as he was struggling to keep his own balance.
As he cursed me I used the last of my strength to roll over and cry out, in a strangled voice, “Help! Help! Murder!”
Constant must have been waiting outside. I wanted to call out a warning but had no breath left to do it. My enemy hurled himself at the slave, barged him out of the way and raced into the courtyard, but I knew from Constant’s cry that he had hit him with something more than his fists.
I staggered outside, my feet catching on Constant’s prone body and splashing through his blood.
“Help! Murder!” I croaked again. “Stop that man!”
The floor of the courtyard rose and fell beneath me as I blundered drunkenly across it, until finally I lost my footing and the ground came up and hit me in the face.
I lay there, with the sun-heated ground hard against my cheek and my voice still bleating vaguely about murder, until it occurred to me that no one was responding.
I got to my knees and looked around.
Kindly had left his seat by the wall and was bending over Constant. Without looking round he said: “Forget it. You were much too slow. He’s long gone.”
I stood up. My stomach heaved. The walls seemed to rush in toward me and then recede equally fast. I took a couple of steps toward the fig tree and leaned on it gratefully.
“Didn’t you try to stop him?”
“You must be joking!” He straightened up, putting a gnarled hand to the small of his back. “I’d be as dead as he is.” He prodded Constant with his toe. “That’s if I could have got near the man in the first place, and there was no chance of that.”
I stepped cautiously over to the body.
“Did you get a good look at him, at least?”
“With eyes like mine? I haven’t had a good look at anything in years. Besides, I was listening to you howling and watching Constant’s blood running away. I can’t be everywhere.”
“You didn’t see him at all?”
He sighed impatiently. “Tall man, long untidy hair, face blacked up, puke all over his cloak. Is that enough?”
I looked at the body curled up at our feet. “I’m sorry,” I added belatedly.
“So am I,” said Kindly. “He may have been a bit of an old woman but he had his uses. You knew where you were with him.” He tried bending down toward the body again, groaned, thought better of it and stood up. “My daughter will miss him. Look, make yourself useful and turn him over for me, will you?”
I obliged, although my head was still swimming. It took a little effort as the dead man was stuck to the floor with congealing blood. As he flopped over on to his back I heard Kindly give a triumphant growl.
“Thought so! What do you think of that?”
He did not have to show me what he meant. A knife jutted from under Constant’s second rib. To pull it free I had to jerk it up and down, feeling it scrape against bone as I did so. When it finally sprang out, like a decayed tooth from its socket, I saw that its blade was like nothing else in Mexico: a long glittering sliver of brown metal.
I held it up, grasping it gingerly between thumb and forefinger, and shivered. I knew this blade well: it had been held against my neck all through the long canoe journey from this house to the cove where I had seen the bird. It had come out at the marketplace, too, and on both occasions it had only been Nimble’s defiance of Curling Mist which had stopped it from being used. This time, I reflected sadly, the boy had not been around to prevent it.
“It’s bronze,” said Kindly. “It’s like copper, only much harder. The only people who know how to make it are the Tarascans—it’s a secret they don’t share with anyone. They won’t even trade the stuff, it’s so precious.”
“So it’s come a long way.” I put the knife down next to the body. “That man was no Tarascan, though.”
Constant’s eyes were wide open. As I looked at him I thought that even by Aztec standards I had seen a lot of dead people lately.
“That should have been me, shouldn’t it?” I said.
“It should,” said Kindly regretfully. “He was coming to help you, you know. He heard something amiss, so he went to investigate. He’d just got to the doorway when that madman came out, stabbed him and ran off. Constant was just in his way.”
I could hardly see the wound, despite all the blood. “He knew what he was about, didn’t he? Straight for the heart.”
“I need a drink.” The old man began walking slowly back to his place by the wall. A gourd lay there where he had dropped it.
I limped after him, to stand over him while he threw the liquid into the back of his throat and gasped with relief. He did not offer me any. I did not mind that in the least: after what had just happened, the thought of sacred wine made my stomach turn over.
At last, pulling the gourd from his lips with a sucking noise, he turned to look at me again, through eyes narrowed with disgust.
“So who was that man? I take it he wasn’t a doctor.”
“He was your grandson’s associate, Curling Mist.”
“Curling Mist?” He looked speculatively at his gourd, no doubt realizing for the first time that there was nobody to replenish it for him now. “Curling Mist? Here? Why?”
“Your daughter sent him,” I told him grimly. “So what he told Constant was half true. She told him where he could find me—and I don’t suppose for a moment she thought he was coming here to cure me of anything!”
I looked around me at the immaculately swept courtyard, all silence, cleanliness and order apart from a body lying in a pool of blackening blood in one corner. I did not know what to do. My bones still ached from the beating I had had, my head still swam from the sacred wine I had drunk, and I had nowhere to go. I knew only that if I stayed here I would be killed.
“I’m going,” I informed Kindly curtly.
“Wait!”
The urgency in his voice brought me up short. “What is it?” I asked suspici
ously.
He waved his empty gourd toward Constant’s body. “Aren’t you going to clean up the mess? Someone will have to explain this!”
I started walking again. “You merchants police your own affairs, don’t you? Sort it out among yourselves. Only don’t involve me!”
I left, almost believing that could be the end of the matter.
2
With nothing to give to a boatman I made my way through the city on foot, keeping well away from anywhere I might be recognized. Fortunately I left Pochtlan at the hottest part of the day, when there were few people about. At last I stood beside the canal that trickled past one wall of the yard, staring at the little house I had grown up in and wondering whether it had been worth the journey.
With the Chief Minister presumably looking for his errant slave, it would not be safe to stay at my old home, and I had certainly not come for sentimental reasons. I was not here for a rest either, although my bones and muscles throbbed, my stomach still felt as if it had been kicked and my head did not belong on my shoulders.
It was not as if I expected to be made welcome anyway.
I had no choice, however. I had tried seeking out Shining Light and his allies and the attempt had nearly cost me my life and left me feeling betrayed and humiliated. I believed Lily’s fear for her son was genuine, and that whatever their relationship may have been before, Curling Mist was now using Shining Light to make his mother do his bidding, just as he had earlier tried using the sorcerers to force my master to hand me over. I also knew, especially after Curling Mist’s attack on me, that Nimble had wanted to know about my affair with Maize Flower and Curling Mist wanted to kill me. None of this information had gotten me any nearer finding the sorcerers, however.
Now I had another confrontation in mind, one which might prove as dangerous as the one I had just survived. I was going to look for my elder brother, to challenge him with his complicity in the killings in Coyoacan, and demand to know just what it was about the Chief Minister and the sorcerers that he knew but had held back from me.
I dared not go near my brother’s quarters at the palace, for fear of being seen by my master or his servants. The only other option was to come home.
I watched an old woman emerge from the yard to empty a clay pot briskly into the canal. She had hair the color of ash, skin like old paper and arms and legs so thin they looked as if a child could snap them. Clad in an old blue skirt and blouse and limping on swollen joints, she looked frail and pitiable, although in reality she was neither.
She shot a curious glance at me before turning back into the house but showed no sign of knowing who I was.
“Mother?”
She was almost inside the yard before she stopped to glance over her shoulder.
“What do you want?” She might have been talking to a stranger, and an unwelcome one at that.
“You know who I am.” I started toward her. She half turned in my direction but took another step into the yard.
“Do I?” she replied coldly. “I don’t know. You look a bit like my youngest son, Yaotl the drunkard, but you can’t be him. He’s a slave in the Chief Minister’s household.” She spat the word “slave” at me as though a fly had landed on her tongue, but made no move to stop me as I walked toward the entrance to the house.
Halting nervously on the threshold, I asked her where my father was.
“Chapultepec,” she informed me grudgingly, “along with your brothers—except Lion, of course. They were called up to work on the aqueduct—good, honest toil!” This was her way of reminding me that I was exempt from being conscripted into a work gang, as any commoner might be, only because I was a slave and my labor belonged to my master. “I don’t expect them back tonight—now, isn’t that lucky for you?” she added with a sneer.
So I would not have to see my father, after all. What I had to do here was going to be fraught enough as it was, without the furious recriminations that would have been bound to accompany such a meeting. I felt a surge of relief, barely tempered by my mother’s adding: “They took the last of today’s tortillas with them in their lunch bags when they left this morning, so you needn’t think you’re going to be fed!”
“Yaotl!” My sister, Precious Jade, was making paper in the yard, using a wooden beater on strips of fig-tree bark stretched over a stone. “What are you doing here?”
“Thanks for the welcome,” I replied sullenly. “I’ve walked a long way, you know. I need a rest.”
“You smell revolting and you look as if you’ve been in a fight.” She sniffed elaborately.
I sat down facing her. “It’s a long story, Jade,” I said wearily. “I’m too tired to tell it now, though.”
My mother emerged from the house carrying a copper mirror that had hung on one of the walls since I was a baby and a bowl of rich maize gruel. The smell reminded me how thoroughly I had emptied my stomach a few hours before. “I was going to give it to the dogs,” she said, “but since you’re here you might as well eat it. I don’t suppose slaves eat very well.”
As I gobbled the porridge my sister said: “I hope that doesn’t go the same way as your last meal. Or had you given up solid food?”
“Give it a rest, Jade,” I mumbled between gulps. “I haven’t had a drink in years.” I told myself that Kindly’s gourds had not counted, because I had been sick, and of course the drink Curling Mist had forced on me had not counted either.
All the same, there was no denying that it had been real sacred wine that had passed my lips and warmed my belly. I seized on the memory of that last mouthful, the gourd jammed against my lips, the bitterness of the mushrooms underlying the sacred wine’s sour taste, and told myself that was what it was really like, and I never wanted to touch the stuff again.
I felt my stomach contract and hurriedly pushed the bowl away.
“What’s the matter?” asked my mother. “Don’t you like it?”
“Not used to home cooking,” my sister suggested. “He’s been living on delicacies from the Chief Minister’s table. Good, wholesome food makes him throw up … Why don’t you give him the mirror, Mother? Show him what he’s become!”
“Look, I’m just full, that’s all …” I heard my own voice tail off as the mirror was dangled in front of me.
The eyes, with their deep brown irises shifting from side to side, I could accept as my own, even if their lids were heavier than I remembered. It was the blue-black marks around them, the swollen and bent nose, the shapeless ears and the thought of whatever lay under my cloak that I had not dared look at which scared me.
“All right,” I breathed, “so I’m no beauty. So there was a fight. It wasn’t my fault!”
“I’m surprised you can remember anything about it,” snapped my sister.
“So how did you look, the last time Amaxtli hit you?” I retorted viciously. My brother-in-law could be as free with his fists as my sister was with her tongue.
“That’s enough!” My mother had had years of practice at putting down our arguments. “Yaotl, I hope you didn’t come here just to start a row. What do you want?”
“I need to speak to Lion.”
My mother and my sister looked at each other. My mother said, in what for her was a subdued voice: “You’re in trouble again, aren’t you? Is it that serious?”
“My life is in danger.”
“It would have to be more serious than that!” said Jade.
“Look, will you help me, or what?”
“We will send a message to him,” said my mother stiffly. “Whether he’ll come is another matter. He doesn’t love you, Yaotl.”
“I know that.”
My sister said: “In the meantime, you can clean yourself up. Have a bath. Yes, actually that’s a good idea—have a bath. It will get you out of our sight for a while!”
I looked at the dome-shaped bathhouse, at the soot stain against one wall and the hearthstones that showed where the fire was built up to heat the interior. I thought about shedding my f
ilthy clothes, the dust of the city and the strange face I had taken on—the face of a fugitive—and exchanging them for the dark, private, steamy world of a sweat bath.
“Who’s going to make the fire up?” I asked, dubiously.
“I will,” said Jade firmly. “Don’t worry—it will be nice and hot. Trust me!”
It is always a mistake to fall asleep in a sweat bath.
I awoke from a sleep of sheer exhaustion into a nightmare: a hot, dark, airless, cramped space with something yanking my ankle as ferociously as a dog tugging at a bone or the water monster dragging a doomed sailor down to his death. I howled. I called on the gods, the Emperor and my mother to save me. I kicked out, my hands reached vainly for the smooth wall enclosing me, and I hit my head on the entrance to the bathhouse.
The afternoon sky drenched my eyes with daylight, but when I squeezed them shut I saw little sparks twinkling like stars.
“What’s up with him?” demanded the voice I had come to hear and had been dreading.
“You probably woke him up,” Jade replied.
“Maybe he was having a nightmare,” my mother suggested.
“I hope not,” said Lion sourly. “I’d have hated to interrupt … Are you with us yet, you lazy toad?”
I sat up. The yard spun around me. I shook my head to clear it and wished I had not as my ears started to ring.
“I was having a bath,” I said unnecessarily. I stared at my brother. There was something wrong with his appearance. I closed my eyes, thinking in my befuddled state that I might be imagining things, but when I opened them again he was still there and still looked the same.
“Why are you dressed like that?” I asked.
He had shed the long yellow cotton mantle of the Guardian of the Waterfront for a cloak of maguey cloth that barely covered his knees. His hair fell down his back, loosely tied with a piece of cord instead of his customary white ribbons. Plain bone keepers had replaced his ornate lip-plugs and earplugs, and his face was unpainted. His feet were bare. It was my brother, but not as I had known him for years, and the moment I registered this I realized that scarcely anyone else in the city would recognize him now. I knew he must feel this keenly. Unless he was calling on the Emperor, when dressing down was obligatory, it was unthinkable for a man of my brother’s rank to shed his hard-won regalia—all the more so when he had been born a commoner.