Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  ‘Maybe I would. If it’s so urgent why didn’t his daughter tell me about it last night, or this morning? He forgets what I am. I might have been able to do something about it today, if I’d known what he wanted, but it’s no good now. I think my master has other plans for me.’ I sighed regretfully. Now I was getting over the shock I could feel my interest being piqued. What sort of cryptic message could Kindly’s slave be bearing?

  ‘Hold your hand out.’

  Partridge’s voice abruptly dropped to an urgent whisper. Without thinking I did as he asked, and in the darkness I felt rather than saw the heavy cloth-wrapped bundle that fell into my palm. When I looked down I noticed that it was darker than the skin of my hand, and that was also when I registered that it was damp.

  ‘What’s this?’

  There was no answer.

  When I looked up again the slave had vanished.

  I looked wildly about me. I took a deep breath, ready to call out, but stopped myself, and stood and listened instead.

  The only sound was the soft pad-pad-pad of bare feet running away along the road by the canal.

  I perched on the bottom tier of the stairway leading from the canal up to my master’s house and stared at the thing in my hand.

  The sound of the drums still came to me, but now the musicians my master had hired were competing with those in other nearby houses, so that from where I sat the whole city seemed to echo with their rhythm. Every great house would be full of people praying and making offerings to Tezcatlipoca. For those who did not live in great houses or who could not get themselves invited to them, the priests in all the temples would be intoning hymns to Him Whose Slaves We Are. Everyone, from the most celebrated warrior and the richest merchant to the meanest serf shivering on his waterlogged plot out on the lake, would be demanding the god’s favour. The poor man would pray for the stroke of fortune that would make him instantly rich. The rich man would ask the god to stay his hand and let him keep what he had.

  Almost alone in the city, I asked for nothing. I had nothing worth keeping, and I had seen too much ever to believe that the god could not make things worse if he chose.

  The only thing I did have was a sodden cloth-wrapped bundle. As I hefted it an unpleasant thought occurred to me about why it might be so damp. Then, when I brought the thing up to my nose for a cautious sniff, I almost threw it away in disgust. There is something about the smell of human blood that retains the power to appal even the most accustomed of butchers.

  Gingerly, with the bundle held at arm’s length, I started picking at its wrapping. As the thin, cheap cloth started to come away in shreds, I promised myself I would throw the nasty thing in the canal and wash my hands the moment I found out what it was.

  My fingers, numb with cold and damp, seemed to move more and more slowly the closer they got to the middle of the parcel. There was something about its weight, tugging at my hand like a doomed fish being brought up in a net, about its shape, sleek and full of purpose, about its unemphatic gleam, which I knew well enough to fear.

  Then it lay in my hand, with the remains of its cloth binding littering the ground around me like the discarded skins of snakes.

  My first impulse was to drop the thing. My second was to wrap my hand around it and clasp it to my chest in a fierce embrace and never let go. My third was to be violently sick.

  In the event I did none of those things. I just sat by the canal and stared at what lay in my hand, a bronze knife sticky with congealing blood, and tried to grasp its meaning.

  I knew this knife. I had been threatened with it more than once. The last time I had seen it, its blade had been buried in the breast of Kindly’s old slave, Nochehuatl. That had been five days ago, and it explained how the merchant had come by the weapon, although I realized with a thrill of horror that some of the blood that coated it now was fresher than the dead slave’s would be.

  It was a grisly token, but it was more than that. The knife had been the only thing my son owned, his sole memento of his upbringing as an exile among the Tarascans, the barbarians beyond the mountains in the West who alone knew how to make and work bronze.

  Why had the old merchant sent it to me now? Was he trying to tell me that my son had come back to claim it?

  TWO DEER

  1

  ‘Come on. Wake up!’

  It was dark and bitterly cold. How typical of my master, I thought, to treat me to a new cloak that was too thin to keep out the cold. Then I realized that there was no cloak over me and I was lying shivering on my sleeping-mat in nothing but my breechcloth.

  I must have thrown my cloak off in my sleep, I thought, rolling over and groping for it. My fingers found the rough leather of a sandal, and then the calloused skin of the foot in it just at the moment when the foot left the floor and flew towards my ribs.

  It was more of a sharp poke than a blow. I managed to bite back my cry. I realized who the foot must belong to and did not want to give the Prick the satisfaction of hearing me howl.

  ‘Move yourself!’ he snapped.

  I sat up. ‘Where’s my cloak?’

  ‘Here. This is yours.’

  A heap of cloth was thrown at me out of the darkness. I thought there was something wrong when I unravelled it. It seemed too rough, was frayed at the edges, and smelled.

  ‘What’s this? Where’s my new one?’ I regretted the question straight away.

  The steward laughed. ‘It’s not One Death any more, slave. You didn’t think his Lordship was going to let you keep a brand-new cloak, did you?’

  The steward and I passed through a maze of canals out on to the open lake, with me, naturally, plying the paddle of our canoe.

  From all around us came the sounds of a city emerging gradually into wakefulness. The dying echoes of the pre-dawn trumpets fell from the temples, drifting through the streets like fog on a still day. From the houses on all sides we heard the swishing noise of courtyards being swept and the gentle splashing sounds made by the women as they laved the faces of household idols. I may have imagined it but I thought I heard an unusual note in these sacred rituals this morning, as though some of the brooms were being wielded more vigorously, the little statues being dowsed more liberally, than usual. I wondered whether rumours of Quetzalcoatl’s appearance had something to do with it.

  Life went on, however. Along with the other sounds came the wholesome slap of maize dough being thrown on a griddle. A couple of times I heard a baby crying and a woman’s voice cooing softly in response. From somewhere nearby came a coarse oath, as a man set out for the fields or the marketplace, realized he had forgotten his lunch and turned back to get it.

  Far away in the East, the souls of dead warriors would be practising their songs and dance-steps as they waited to escort the Sun through the sky. Of course, you could never hear their voices and stamping feet, but the sounds they made seemed to my mind to grow and swell beneath the chatter of the Aztecs around us in the way you hear the hum of a hive beneath the buzz of one or two stray bees.

  A man who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone spent four years in the Sun’s entourage; after that, we believed, he was reborn as a hummingbird or a butterfly.

  ‘Now will the Sun rise

  Now will the day dawn

  Let all the various firebirds

  Sip nectar where the flowers stand erect.’

  ‘What’s that? What are you talking about? What do you think you are, some sort of poet?’

  My son’s bronze knife lay concealed in the folds of my breechcloth, an uncomfortable weight knocking against my hip. The impulse to whip it out and shut the steward up for good was almost overwhelming. I restrained myself, though. What would I do afterwards? I had come face to face with this truth before: if I ran away now, I would not be safe anywhere in Mexico, and in a world full of our enemies, no Aztec was truly safe anywhere else.

  One day soon, I realized, thinking about the beatings and humiliations I had suffered at the Prick’s hands and about the
young man old Black Feathers had ordered me to look for, I might have to raise my hand against my master and his servants, but until then I was better off just doing what I was told. I could not let anything jeopardize the goal I had set myself: to find out why Kindly had sent me the knife.

  Besides, I had an answer for the steward.

  ‘It’s a hymn,’ I said reprovingly. ‘Don’t you know it? It’s the one we sing to the Maize God every eight years …’

  ‘Used to sing, in your case,’ he sneered. All the same he looked uncomfortable, as if caught in some impious act. He huddled beneath his cloak and kept his eyes fixed on the water around us.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. The waterway had broadened and the close-packed houses had given way to small one-room huts half hidden by sedge and willow.

  ‘Back to the merchant’s boat. We’ll pick up Handy …’

  ‘You don’t mean to say he’s still there?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about him – he’s being well paid!’ The steward laughed harshly. ‘Then we go after our fugitives. Lord Feathered in Black reckons they won’t have got very far. He thinks they’ll have holed up somewhere near the lake shore yesterday. They’ll have realized we had men out looking for them and they’ll have wanted to rest and keep under cover in daylight. They may have moved last night, but if we can pick up their trail and move more quickly than they can, we’ll have them!’

  ‘What if we can’t?’ I asked naively.

  The steward leaned towards me so that his face was uncomfortably close to mine and I could smell the chillies and cheap tobacco on his breath.

  ‘If we can’t,’ he snarled, ‘then I’ll make sure old Black Feathers knows whose fault it is, and no doubt he’ll do to you what he’d do to those two if he could catch them. I think an arrow through the balls was what he had in mind!’

  The merchant’s boat was as we had left it, except that the bodies that had lain on its deck had gone.

  ‘Shining Light’s mother sent a boat to pick him up,’ Handy explained when the steward and I hailed him from the canoe.

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Over the side. Some warriors came out yesterday morning. Tied rocks to their feet and threw them in. Very efficient about it, too – they even brought the rocks with them.’

  ‘Warriors?’

  ‘Otomies. Real hard bastards.’

  ‘Otomies? Are they still here?’ the steward asked quickly, glancing nervously at the boat, which was plainly unoccupied except by Handy.

  ‘Yes, they’re bobbing about under the water and breathing through straws,’ Handy snapped. ‘Of course they’re not here! They paddled their boat over to the mainland. I didn’t feel like asking them to take me with them!’

  I understood his annoyance. It was born of fear.

  The Otomies are a race of savages who live in the high, dry, cold lands to the north of the valley of Mexico. They are renowned for being brave, strong and stupid, and for painting their bodies blue. We used to make jokes about them: ‘A real Otomi, a miserable Otomi, a green-head, a thick-head, a big tuft of hair over the back of the head, an Otomi blockhead …’ The joke was that you could say all that to one of these foreign dimwits in a conversational tone and he would nod and smile as if you were asking after his grandmother.

  ‘Otomi’ was also the name of some of our most ferocious warriors, the army’s elite, berserkers sworn never to take a step backward in battle – and if that sounds reasonable, then you try wrestling a big Texcalan nobleman to the ground without losing your footing once, and see how long you last. These psychopaths resembled their barbarian namesakes in every respect except the blue paint, and the fact that you did not make jokes about them, not if you valued your life.

  I had to quell a sudden feeling of panic as I realized they must be engaged in the same search we were. If they got to my son before I did, I thought, he would not stand a chance. If the Chief Minister wanted him alive they would probably cut one of his feet off to stop him running away and then keep the foot as a souvenir.

  ‘The mainland?’ said the steward, biting his lip. ‘We need to get over there.’ He was as nervous about meeting the Otomies as Handy and I were. After all, as a mere three-captive warrior, he was almost as far beneath their contempt. The moment I realized this, I caught the earliest glimmer of a plan, as faint and elusive as the first star in the evening sky.

  ‘We need to get after them,’ I said briskly. ‘If they’re hunting the same people we are, we ought to be joining forces, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know …’

  ‘I’d rather go back to the city,’ Handy grumbled. ‘You haven’t been stuck on this boat for a day and a half. Do you have any idea what my wife’s going to do to me when I finally get home?’

  ‘Old Black Feathers isn’t going to take kindly to anyone going home before we’ve looked for these two.’ I looked straight at the big commoner to make sure he grasped my meaning. ‘All we really have to do is find the Otomies and point them in the right direction …’

  “‘All we have to do”?’ the steward spluttered. ‘Are you mad? Look, we’re not talking about a bunch of little kids out looking for frogs and water-snakes in the marshes. Chasing a couple of runaways is one thing, but this is getting dangerous!’

  ‘And what’s our master going to do to us if we go back empty handed?’ One look at the steward’s face told me I had touched a nerve. Old Black Feathers could easily make life almost as unpleasant for him as for me. ‘Let’s face it, we’ve no chance of finding them by ourselves, and if we do, how are we going to get them back alive? If we find the soldiers and tell them where to start looking, they’re as likely as not to tell us to get lost – then we can go back to our master and tell him we’ve done our bit.’

  Handy seemed to make up his mind then, scrambling over the side of the merchant’s boat and making our canoe rock alarmingly.

  ‘You won’t have far to look for the warriors,’ the commoner said. ‘They camped just beyond that stand of bulrushes over there. They were singing half the night – kept me awake, not that I was about to complain! If our two runaways heard them I should think they’d have taken off pretty quickly.’ I thought so too, before remembering that there were not two runaways, only one, and I strongly suspected that he had not run anywhere. Besides, I realized that the singing must have been a feint: while some of the Otomies pretended to carouse noisily, serenading the creatures of the night with boastful warrior songs, others would be creeping quietly through the dense growth of reed and sedge at the shoreline, using the noise as cover. ‘I just want to know what you’re going to tell them.’

  As I dipped the paddle into the water and began to propel our overloaded, suddenly ungainly craft in the direction Handy had indicated, I gestured towards another place at the water’s edge, where I could make out a fresh disturbance in the mud and a short trail of flattened plants.

  ‘I’ll tell them to look over there,’ I said. ‘That’s where their quarry landed.’

  Handy followed my glance. Then he stared at me. He opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it again.

  The place I had pointed out was where my master’s boatman had grounded his canoe and run away, two nights before. Handy had witnessed the whole thing. I tried not to let the tension show on my face while he decided whether to mention it or not.

  ‘Over there,’ he said at length. ‘Right.’

  Before I could groan with relief the steward asked: ‘Why didn’t you tell our master this yesterday?’

  ‘It was too foggy yesterday morning. I couldn’t be sure.’ I turned quickly to Handy, hoping to change the subject. ‘What will happen to this boat?’

  ‘Lily and her father will send someone to fetch it, I expect. There’s enough merchandise left on it – bales of feathers, bags of cocoa beans – lots of stuff from the hot lands in the South – they won’t want to leave all that floating around in the middle of the lake!’

  ‘But if it
was dark when they escaped …’ Whatever else you might say about my master’s steward, he was persistent.

  ‘What’s that over there?’ I asked. ‘Looks like smoke to me.’

  A thin streak of smoke, the sort of thing you might expect to see rising from a pipe that had been packed too tightly, had appeared over the top of the rushes in front of us.

  ‘It is,’ Handy confirmed. He looked at me. ‘I think that’s from the fire the Otomies made.’

  We were very close to the bank now: so close that I could see the water below us changing colour, from dark blue to a cloudy green, and hear the buzzing noise of the flies and mosquitoes that lived in the shelter of the tall plants. Ducks paddled listlessly in and out of the reeds, their feet just visible below the water’s surface, little dark angular shapes making eddies in the scum around them.

  ‘Where do we go now?’ I began to ask, but the question died in my throat before I had finished asking it.

  Something whistled through the air. The boat shuddered. Handy, standing up in the bows, cried out in alarm. An instant later came a scream and a loud splash and suddenly there was no sign of the steward.

  I grabbed both sides of the canoe and clung to them as the vessel lurched from side to side. The water was in turmoil, with ducks streaking across its surface in all directions and a large shape floundering noisily about just under its surface.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I cried. ‘Where’s the steward?’

  ‘He jumped in.’ Handy dropped on to one knee and reached out over the water towards the submerged creature splashing about beside us. ‘Bet he can’t swim.’

  For a moment I hoped he was intending to shove the steward under and hold him there until his struggles stopped, but then a hand came up, groped blindly towards one of his arms and seized it with enough force to throttle a dog.