by Simon Levack
“I still don’t see why Young Warrior was prepared to kill the sorcerers and threaten your master to get you,” Lion said. “Was it really all over something that happened at the Priest House all those years ago?”
“What else can it be? For some reason he seems to blame me for what happened to him and the girl from the market.”
“Doesn’t make sense to me,” said Handy. “It wasn’t your fault they had to run away, was it?”
“No, and I can’t pretend to understand it either. I suppose Young Warrior started out being jealous, and over the years it must have become an obsession.”
“Besides,” the commoner added, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “I thought you priests were all supposed to be impotent—aren’t you supposed to stick so many cactus spines and obsidian razors into your parts that you can’t get it up anyway?”
This drew a short, harsh laugh from Lion. “No,” I said coldly. “We used to draw blood from our penises, but only the real fanatics went further than that. I certainly didn’t. I always thought Young Warrior might be the type to do it, but I guess he wasn’t.”
“Does it really matter what started all this?” my brother asked impatiently. “We have to decide what we’re going to do now. Which of them do we go after—Young Warrior or the Chief Minister?”
My brother could be alarmingly direct, especially when he had an end in sight or, as now when his pride had been wounded, a score to settle.
“Both of them,” I said. “We still need to get the sorcerers to the Emperor before we can denounce my master, and we need Young Warrior to lead us to the sorcerers.” I considered for a moment before going on. “I think we go back to Lily’s house now—you and me, Lion. It’s just possible she was able to tell Nimble enough to get her son released, but if she wasn’t, Young Warrior won’t be able to resist having another crack at me. That’s where you come in, brother. You can protect me if he tries another trick like yesterday’s … What’s the joke?”
A wintry smile had appeared on Lion’s face. “I was just remembering,” he said dryly, “how I told you not to expect me to save your worthless hide this time!”
I looked at him seriously. “You will, though, if you have to. You owe me. I went to Coyoacan for you. I found the boy.”
My brother’s face darkened, but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a sudden noise. An argument seemed to be going on outside the courtyard.
Handy cocked his head to one side for a moment, listening.
“It’s Snake,” he announced. “Why’s he making such a row?” He stood up and took a step toward the doorway. “Who’s he arguing with … Oh, shit!”
My brother was on his feet too, running for the women’s room. “Star! Quick, the maize bin!”
I was left alone with my head darting about like a turkey’s, looking for somewhere to run or hide. I thought briefly about the bathhouse, but I was too late to reach it in time and it would have been too obvious a hiding place anyway.
“Handy!” called a voice I knew only too well. “Congratulations! You’ve caught our runaway!”
I let my arms go limp at my sides as I watched an old adversary striding through the entrance to the courtyard toward me, with Snake plodding disconsolately at his heels.
It was my master’s steward.
2
I let the steward drive me out of the courtyard like a stray dog, submitting meekly to the blows falling on my shoulders and back. He was so pleased with himself for having caught me that he did not stop for whatever business had brought him to the house.
“That canoe there. Go on, move!” He propelled me toward the canal beside the house with a vicious shove. Floating there was the canoe he had obviously come in, a little two-man craft with a boatman in the stern. He looked up in alarm when he realized that he had a second passenger. Then he recognized me and his expression changed, first to wide-eyed amazement and then to a broad grin of pure joy.
My heart sank. The boatman was none other than Rabbit, my master’s litter bearer, the man Costly had fooled into taking his medicine while he was supposed to be watching me and whom I had last seen sprawled on the ground after I had hit him with a slave collar.
“In!” the steward roared from a hand’s breadth behind me.
He kicked me as I was stepping into the boat. I had one foot on the bank and one in the bottom of the canoe and his foot swung up between my legs. Pain exploded in my groin and shot up into my guts, driving the breath out of me in a high-pitched whistle. I crashed into the bottom of the boat, rocking it violently and sending spouts of water over the sides.
“You’ve got worse than that to come,” the Prick assured me.
Rabbit gripped the boat’s sides to steady himself. “I haven’t got room for both of you!”
“Oh yes you have,” the steward growled as he stepped over me into the canoe’s bow “Yaotl won’t take up much room lying there like that. If he’s any trouble, we can always chuck him overboard!”
“Where are you taking me?” I gasped.
“Why, home, of course. Lord Feathered in Black will be so glad to have you back. He’s missed you!”
“Pleased to hear it,” I croaked. There was one thing I urgently had to tell the steward, and then I did not care if I never spoke to him again. “Listen, you must want to know what I was doing at Handy’s house.”
“Oh, all in good time. Don’t spoil things by telling me everything at once, Yaoti—I’m looking forward to beating it out of you!”
“I’m still looking for the prisoners—the ones the Emperor and our master told me to find,” I said carefully. “The man Shining Light offered to the war-god at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, he was one of them. His Lordship knows this. I wanted to find out if Handy remembered anything about him.” At all costs I must not give the steward or my master any reason to go back to the commoner’s house, at least until Lion and Storm were safely out of the way.
“That’s very interesting,” the steward said insincerely.
“He didn’t know anything. In fact he didn’t want to speak to me at all.”
“Well, you can tell it all to Lord Feathered in Black. I’ll be sure not to cut your tongue out until afterward!”
The rest of the journey to my master’s house was uneventful. The steward taunted me but I ignored him. For all his bluster, I knew no words of his could hurt me. It was what my master might choose to do and say that I had to worry about, and I distracted myself from his steward’s infantile threats by trying to master my fear of what was to come. I kept telling myself that Lord Feathered in Black could do nothing more than admonish me, that that was the law, but the image of those charred bones at Coyoacan kept forcing itself into my mind. Had the woman and children thought they were safe before the soldiers came?
As the Chief Minister’s residence came into view, I noticed a small party standing at the foot of the stairway leading to my master’s apartments. Most of them were warriors, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw the man in their midst, whose escort they plainly were. For an instant I thought he was my brother, from his clothes, his hair and his demeanor, but then I remembered that I had left Lion at Handy’s house, and at the same time I noticed that the ribbons in his hair were red rather than white. He was the Keeper of the House of Darkness: another of the Constables, and one of the advisers who had attended Montezuma when I had been summoned before the Emperor.
He his eyes tracked us as Rabbit brought the canoe to the side of the canal, and as we scrambled ashore, each of us throwing ourselves at the man’s feet with a cry of “My Lord …”
“Enough!” he snapped, and our obeisances ended abruptly. For a moment there was silence. I looked up from the floor, puzzled, wondering why he was standing there wasting time on us rather than getting on with whatever business had brought him to the Chief Minister’s house.
His eyes met mine. “Well, Yaotl?” he barked suddenly. “Your master told me you were missing, but I assu
me you have been looking for the sorcerers, as the Emperor ordered?”
“Er … Yes, my Lord …”
“So where are they?”
I swallowed, but could not find any words.
“The Emperor is getting impatient. The sorcerers, Yaotl. You were told to bring them to him. Where are they?”
The Steward spoke then. “My Lord, Lord Feathered in Black is on the track of them,” he announced, “and his slave here …”
“Shut up.”
I struggled to come up with an answer that was close enough to the truth to be convincing but not so close that the Emperor would conclude I had let him down. “M-my Lord,” I stammered, “I’m very close to them. A man named Curling Mist has them, in a merchant’s warehouse.”
“Where is this warehouse?”
“That’s the one thing I can’t tell you yet, my Lord … But I’m close to it, very close …”
The man leaned toward me, until his face was so near mine I could see little bubbles of spittle at the side of his mouth, popping in time with his words. “‘Very close,’ eh?” He stood up and half turned to glance up the steps behind him, toward where my master must be waiting for me. “How much closer will you be when you get up there, I wonder?”
“I won’t tell Lord Feathered in Black any more than I’ve told you, my Lord! I can’t! It’s all I know!”
“So you say.” He looked at each of his escorting warriors in turn, and they looked back at him, as if expecting an order. I tensed, wondering just how impatient Montezuma was—impatient enough to have told the Keeper of the House of Darkness to end it all here, on my own master’s threshhold?
“We go back to the palace,” he told his guards. As they fell in he turned back to me.
“Consider this your last warning, slave. The Emperor is relying on you. You will find those men, and bring them to Lord Montezuma, or your life will be forfeit!”
Rabbit and the steward frogmarched me up the steps and dumped me unceremoniously at my master’s feet.
Lord Feathered in Black listened in silence to his steward’s account of the encounter at the foot of his stairway.
“The Keeper of the House of Darkness told me much the same thing,” he said to no one in particular, “although he was more polite about it. So my esteemed cousin still thinks I have his precious sorcerers! If only I did!” He sighed. “You two may go. Yaotl will remain.”
He said nothing to me while Rabbit and the steward backed out if his presence and hastened away down the steps. He sat in his high-backed reed chair, looking at me the way a man might look at a bowl of stew if he suspected the meat was rotten. I said nothing to him. What would have been the point?
As the silence endured, I reflected on what had just happened to me. I realized that my situation was now more desperate than ever. If I survived whatever punishment my master might have in store for me for running away, it would only be because he still expected me to recover the sorcerers for him. The purpose of the Keeper of the House of Darkness’s visit had obviously been to remind us both that the Emperor himself wanted them back. Even if I could find them, what was I to do then, if his Chief Minister was still intent on keeping them for himself?
A girl appeared at the edge of my vision, carefully stepped around the quivering mess on the floor and passed my master a clay smoking-tube. Its end was already lit, and as he drew deeply on it the room filled with the complex aromas of a rich man’s tobacco—the leaf itself, the resinous scent of liquid amber, bitumen and a hint of vanilla.
When he finally spoke, addressing me through a cloud of fragrant smoke, his voice was calm and steady—neither the bellow of his superficial rages nor the sinister hiss of his deadly ones.
“You must understand that a man in my position simply cannot afford to have his most valuable slave disappear the way you did. I would be a laughingstock. At the very least I am going to have to have you formally admonished, and you know what that means.”
I tried in vain not to stare at him in astonishment, until the smoke caught my eyes and forced me to squeeze them shut.
Formally admonished?
“Oh yes, my Lord,” I said hastily, scarcely able to believe what I had heard. It meant that I would be subjected to a ritual harangue about my shortcomings as a slave before at least two witnesses. This was not a fearsome punishment at all, except that the third time it happened I could be sold, and as a slave known to be habitually recalcitrant I would be bought for only one purpose: as a very cheap gift for the gods. But I had been expecting far worse: the prospect of a savage beating had seemed optimistic.
My joy and relief were quickly tempered by the thought that the old man would not be merciful without reason. I waited fearfully to hear what else he might have in mind.
“Good. Well, now we’ve got that distasteful subject out of the way, I want you to tell me what you’ve been doing since you ran away.”
I told him what I dared. I had been to the ball court in Tlatelolco, seen the boy there and been attacked by Curling Mist. I had been taken to the merchant’s house, and there Curling Mist had attacked me again. I did not say I had gone home to Toltenco. I could not deny having been to Handy’s house, of course, since the steward had found me there, but I explained that to my master the same way I had to his steward, by claiming I had wanted to talk to Handy about Shining Light’s Bathed Slave.
I realized that he probably did not believe I was telling him the whole truth, and that it did not really matter. Each of us was playing a part. He was pretending to be my genial, indulgent master and I was pretending to be his loyal slave. That would last while I kept up the act on my side and he still had a use for me.
He did not interrupt my story. At the end of it he sat in thoughtful silence, watching a perfect smoke ring curling and flattening out as it rose toward the ceiling before slipping like a ghost through a small opening high in the wall.
“Curling Mist,” he murmured at last. “You think he is really an old enemy of yours from your days in the Priest House—what did you say his name was, Young Warrior? And he’s the one who’s trying to use the sorcerers to blackmail me into giving you up to him?”
“My Lord, yes. Hasn’t he been sending you messages, demanding that you hand me over? There was one on the body we found floating in the canal.”
A puzzled frown creased my master’s forehead. “Curling Mist, sending me messages? I don’t think so.” He put the smoking-tube down beside him delicately. “Let me show you something.”
The Chief Minister of the Aztecs got slowly to his feet and made his way over to a small reed chest under the little window. As he bent toward it a shaft of sunlight caught his face, picking out in shadow every line that nearly forty years in office had etched into it.
“Ah! Here it is. I want you to look at this.”
As he lowered himself back onto his seat he held out a single sheet of paper.
“It’s a letter. Why, it’s from Shining Light!”
“Your merchant,” the Chief Minister confirmed. “Read on.”
“It’s been written in some haste, and not by a very practiced hand,” I continued. “But I think it says …” The words died in my throat as I read them.
“Your friend Handy gave it to my steward, on Two Jaguar—the day you visited the prison.”
“That was the day Shining Light was kidnapped—when his mother said he left the city.” I looked at the paper again. “But that doesn’t make sense—not if I read this correctly.”
My master had taken up the smoking-tube again and leaned back in his seat. I watched the lines on his face shift as the muscles under them relaxed, and for the first time in the years I had known him wondered how much pain he was in.
“I took it to mean this,” he said. “‘This is my price for the rest of the sorcerers. Give me Yaotl, and they are yours.’ Do you agree?”
“Yes. But if he’d gone …”
“If he’d gone into exile, as his mother was saying, then I would have had
to deliver you to his house, wouldn’t I? Which I duly did, the next day. I assumed his mother would take charge of you in his absence. In the event Curling Mist and his boy obviously tried to handle the thing themselves, and they made a mess of it, since you managed to escape.” He reached for the pipe again. “I have had other messages. The one you found on the corpse out there”—a slight turn of his head indicated the general location of the canal—“was one of them. But you think Curling Mist—or Young Warrior, if that’s who he really is—has the sorcerers, not Shining Light? That would mean the merchant was just carrying messages between me and Young Warrior. How amusing!” There was no laughter in his voice.
“I think their relationship is more complicated than that, my Lord. Shining Light and Young Warrior seem to have been lovers, and now Shining Light is Young Warrior’s prisoner. He has the merchant and his merchandise, as well as your sorcerers.”
“So you said. So where does he live, this Young Warrior?”
“You don’t know?”
“Of course not! What, you think the Chief Minister is going to be seen plucking at the hem of some small-time criminal’s cloak?” In his agitation he waved the smoking-tube about, sending flecks of ash flying from its end. “I have taken great care never to meet the man. It’s bad enough that I have to entertain that boy of his on occasion.”
“But if you are to find the sorcerers …”
“I could simply do what Shining Light or Curling Mist or Young Warrior or whoever has them asks me, and hand you over!”
There was a long silence. I wriggled nervously while the Chief Minister drew comfortably on his pipe. I wondered whether that meant the playacting was now over, and the steward would be told to finish what he had set out to do on the morning of Four Vulture, by trussing me up like a deer and delivering me to Young Warrior.
Eventually he took the clay tube out of his mouth. “Relax, Yaotl. If I wanted to exchange you for the sorcerers, would we be talking now? I would just have had my steward make the exchange, and that would be an end to it. But the truth is,” he went on, suddenly sounding older and wearier than ever, “I’m sick of being made a fool of. All this talk of godlike strangers from the East—well, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. You know what I mean?”