by Simon Levack
‘Help me, won’t you?’ he grunted as he hauled the sodden, helpless object towards the boat. I did not move. I thought I was doing enough by restraining myself from bashing the steward over the head with the paddle. Instead I looked around for whatever had attacked us. It took only a moment to find it.
‘Harpoon.’ Handy had seen it at the same time: a short hardwood spear projecting from the boat’s side, near the bow. Its flint tip was buried deep in the wood. ‘You were lucky, Yaotl – a hand’s breadth or so higher and that would have gone through your spleen!’
A length of rope trailed from the spear’s shaft. I tugged at it with my fingers, making the rope rise dripping from the water, and then dropped it suddenly when I realized that our assailant must be at the other end of it.
‘Who threw this?’ I whispered hoarsely. We were floating in plain sight of the bank and had made enough noise already to scare every bird on the western side of the lake, but I still felt the urge to be quiet.
‘I’d take a wild guess,’ retorted Handy drily, ‘and say it was the man standing over there among the rushes. It’s the throwing-stick and the rope he’s holding. They sort of give it away.’
I had not seen or heard him but that was hardly surprising. An Otomi’s favoured tactic when confronted by the enemy was to rush screaming towards him and drag him noisily to the earth by his hair, but that did not mean he would have forgotten all of his hunting skills. Perhaps he had been lying in wait for us all along or perhaps, as soon as he had heard us coming, he had crept towards the shoreline to greet us. Either way here he was, and I felt myself caught off guard.
He was tall and spare, without a sign of any excess flesh under his dark, weather-beaten skin. He wore only a breechcloth, his full warrior costume having presumably been discarded in favour of being able to move about without having it rustle on the ground behind him or against the tall plants on either side. He carried no sword, but that gave me no comfort. One look at his hairstyle – the tall column that crowned his forehead and the loose locks flowing extravagantly over the nape of his neck – assured me that he could probably have killed all of us with his bare hands.
Following Handy’s gaze, I took in the throwing-stick, a long plain length of wood with a notch at the end for the spear. The warrior had been hoping to catch his breakfast and we had got in his way.
He watched our antics in silence. While Handy hauled the spluttering, coughing steward over the side, I took up the paddle to propel us towards the bank.
Handy and I jumped into the water, tugged our feet out of the muck beneath it and waded ashore. The steward fell in, got to his knees and began to be violently sick.
Only when he had finished retching and stood up, pulling his waterlogged cloak around him in an effort to restore his dignity, did the Otomi deign to speak.
‘Who are you?’
‘Lord Feathered in Black is my master,’ the steward gasped, ‘and this is …’
‘I didn’t ask you!’ the stranger snarled. ‘I know perfectly well who you are and what your master wants. What’s he got to say?’ He nodded towards me.
‘I’m Yaotl,’ I said. ‘I’m the Chief Minister’s slave, and this here is a retainer of his, Handy. We were just looking for …’ Suddenly inspiration died on me like a plant withering for lack of water and manure, and I found I was left floundering helplessly. ‘Just looking for …’
‘A man and a boy?’
‘Have you found them?’ the steward asked eagerly. My stomach lurched fearfully at the thought that the Otomies might already have found their prey, or the boy at least, and my son might even now be on his way back to my master, trussed like a deer, shivering with pain from whatever the warriors had done to him and terror at the tortures the Chief Minister was intending to inflict.
‘No,’ the Otomi said sourly. He bent down and tugged sharply at his rope. The spear at the other end splashed into the water, making me wonder how much strength it took to pull it free with so little effort. ‘Not a trace of them. Spent the whole of yesterday wading through this muck. Nothing. The lads up in the hills behind us haven’t done any better, but at least they kept their feet dry!’ He scowled at each of us in turn as he reeled in his rope. ‘So old Black Feathers decided we needed some help, did he?’ There was no need to ask how much help he thought we were likely to be. ‘You’d better come with me. You can tell my captain why the duck he was going to have for breakfast is happily paddling away on the wrong side of the valley!’
The steward pursed his lips dubiously at the prospect of meeting a squad of hungry warriors. ‘We want to show you something first,’ he said hastily.
‘Really? What is it – a side of venison?’
‘Yaotl thinks he knows where the two you’re looking for went.’
The Otomi looked me up and down. ‘Experienced tracker, is he?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s just that …’
‘Only we could do with one. Look, we’re not used to this sneaking-about stuff, you see? Show me some Texcalan scumbag who thinks he’s hard enough to take me on and I’ll show you what I can do with him, but following a trail through the marshes isn’t my idea of fun, I can tell you!’
Handy, loyal as ever, took up the steward’s theme. ‘Well then, Yaotl here’s your man. He could track a bird through the air!’
‘Wait a moment!’ I cried, alarmed. I could see my plan to mislead both the steward and the Chief Minister’s warriors succeeding altogether too well. What would happen if they expected me to lead them to their quarry and found out that I had no more idea of where to start looking than they had?
The Otomi looked at me. ‘Quite right,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘we can’t just go running around on my say-so. We ought to go and see the boss first.’ With that, he turned and vanished into the rushes, leaving only a small gap between the tall, swaying plants as a clue to the direction he had gone in.
The steward looked at me. ‘What now?’ he asked in a disgusted tone.
‘Better get after him, I suppose,’ I said reluctantly.
‘Good idea, smartarse. Where did he go?’
‘Follow the smoke smell,’ Handy suggested.
It did not take us long to make our way along the trail of broken reeds and churned-up mud to the site where the Otomies had built their fire. Above the rustle of rushes and the slap of mud beneath our feet I could hear urgent, angry whispers being passed back and forth.
‘So what did you catch, Cuectli? A deer? A heron? A duck?’ The voice had an odd quality, as if the speaker were murmuring asides out of one half of his mouth only.
Cuectli, whose name meant ‘Fox’, responded with a sad sigh. ‘Only idiots.’
I could not quite catch the captain’s reply, but plainly it was not an encouraging one, as the next thing I heard was Fox’s voice singing my praises. ‘One of them’s a tracker, though. An expert. Claims he can follow a bird through the air!’
‘Let’s have a look at him, then!’
The next thing I knew I was being pulled through the tall plants into the clearing, there to stand face to face with one of the ugliest-looking individuals I have ever seen.
If I had needed a reminder of the type of man the Emperor liked to have in the vanguard of the army, in the front row of the battle line, one glance at this one would have been enough.
Unlike Fox, the captain was fully dressed. His torso, arms and legs were tightly wrapped in a suit of bright green cotton, which served only to emphasize the bulging muscles under it. His feet had been thrust into broad, flat sandals that put me in mind of paving slabs. He had bound up his grey-streaked hair in the same way as Fox. I could not see the insignia he would carry on his back when he went into battle – a tall, teardrop-shaped device, crowned with long green feathers, which would make him instantly recognizable to friend and terrified foe alike – or his round, feather-bordered shield, but I guessed they were both close at hand, carefully wrapped up to preserve them from the mud and damp. No doubt they would h
ave impeded his progress through the rushes, but in his case, I thought, they were hardly needed. He would have been fright—ening enough stark naked, because, even though I took all the details of his costume in and grasped their meaning without conscious thought, I forgot all about them when I saw his face.
Someone had taken a sword to it, many years before. Someone had cut through flesh and bone, from brow to jawline, and where the left side of his face should have been had left nothing but a glistening slab of scar tissue.
How had he survived a wound like that? I felt a chill when I realized that he must have won the fight in which he got it, since otherwise he would be dead, his heart torn from his breast at the summit of a pyramid in Texcala or Huexotzinco. Perhaps his partner had saved his life, for Otomies always fought in pairs. What was left of his lower lip sagged under the weight of a human wrist-bone that dangled from it, and I suspected that this had belonged to the man who gave him the wound.
Behind him, his comrades were trying to build a fire out of reeds and some kindling they had brought with them. The ground was too damp and all they were getting was clouds of thin smoke, which would be doing nothing to sweeten their tempers, especially once they realized they had nothing to cook on it anyway. Some of the warriors were dressed like their captain, while others wore only their breechcloths. I wondered briefly why any of them had bothered to put their uniforms on, since they were not going to war, but then I realized that the answer was all too obvious. It must be so long since any of these blood-glutted veterans had met anyone equal to him in battle that a fight scarcely meant anything to them any more. Their business was killing and maiming men who were already paralysed with fear. That was what they had come here to do, and they had dressed accordingly. And they were hunting my son.
The captain interrupted my thoughts in the crudest manner possible, by stretching out an arm, seizing my jaw and dragging my face close to his. He tilted my chin up towards his face and let his sole eye rove lewdly over my features.
‘Name?’ he snarled.
I should have been meek, but his examination reminded me of the slave market, of strangers looking into my mouth, feeling my muscles and measuring my worth in lengths of cloth and bags of cocoa beans, and I could not help answering him back.
‘I can’t tell you when you’re holding my jaw,’ I pointed out unintelligibly.
‘What?’
Fox said: ‘I think he wants you to let go.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Suddenly the pressure on both sides of my face doubled, forcing my mouth open and stretching the skin of my cheeks over my teeth. It was impossible to scream but the pain made me squirm. My head was wrenched from side to side so hard that the motion made me dizzy, and then the captain shoved me backward and let go, making my knees buckle and sending me sprawling on to the ground. My head hit Handy’s chest on the way down, driving the breath from his lungs with a loud grunt.
‘Funny man,’ the captain sneered. I rubbed my jaw as I glared resentfully up at him.
‘I think his name’s Yaotl,’ Fox offered.
‘“The Enemy”, eh? Well, he’s the first enemy we’ve seen today What about it, lads? Do we show the runt what it feels like to meet the Otomies?’
There was a stirring among the shadowy figures behind him. I sat up quickly, knowing the captain’s followers would tear me to pieces on command.
‘I’m the Chief Minister’s slave. I was sent here after the same two men you’re looking for. We’re all here to do the same job and we’re none of us here because we want to be …’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that! Nice and quiet here – no one about – we could have some fun. How about a game where you all pretend to run away and we hunt you down like wild pigs?’
‘No …Ya …Yaotl’s right.’
To my amazement, it was the steward who spoke up. His voice shook so much that I could barely make out the words, but plainly his fear of being caught up in the Otomi’s sadistic fantasy was enough to loosen his tongue.
‘Lord Feathered in Black sent us. Yaotl can tell you where the man and the boy went – can’t you, Yaotl?’
I got up slowly, too nervous myself to appreciate the wheedling note in the steward’s words to me. I spat blood out of my mouth, carefully avoiding the Otomi’s feet.
‘I think so,’ I said slowly. ‘I saw where they landed. I can try to pick up the trail from there.’
The captain turned his eye on Fox. ‘What’s he talking about?’
‘I expect he means that spot where the ground’s all churned up – where we thought someone must have run a canoe ashore, going quite fast.’ He gave me a hard stare. He was right, of course, and I tried to hide my dismay. These men were going to be more difficult to fool than I had thought, and the consequences if they thought I was leading them astray on purpose did not bear thinking about. ‘We checked that place out yesterday,’ Fox added, ‘and there’s nothing. Someone ran off into the rushes, all right, but there’s only one set of prints and they disappear as soon as you get up into the fields. What makes you think you’re going to find anything else?’
‘Yaotl’s an expert tracker,’ my master’s steward put in maliciously. He had little idea what we were looking for but would be happy to let me take the blame for not finding it.
I had no choice but to play along with this. Even if it cost me my life, I had to keep these brutal killers from picking up my son’s trail.
‘Let’s at least go and have a look.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not as if any of us has anything better to do!’
2
‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on now, Yaotl?’
Handy and I were pushing the canoe ashore. We and the steward had gone by water to the place I had pointed out earlier, where churned-up mud and trampled rushes showed that someone had landed a boat. The Otomies had been happy to walk; I could hear them approaching us, crashing through the reeds, their joyful shouts accompanied by the flapping and splashing of birds and animals scared from their nests and hiding places. The steward had gone on ahead, keen to get his feet on relatively dry land. Since I could no longer hear his teeth chattering I judged he must be out of earshot, provided we whispered.
‘We have to lose those bastards.’
‘Well, I agree with that. What do you want to bring them here for, though? Isn’t this where old Black Feathers’ own boat ended up? The Otomies are right, you know – one man went up this trail, not two. We both saw what happened – your master’s boatman grounded his canoe on purpose and ran away. You don’t have to be a skilled tracker to work out which way he went, but it’s not him we’re looking for, is it? So what’s the idea?’
I had no choice but to let Handy into my confidence. In any event he had seen enough of what had happened two nights before to piece the rest together for himself.
‘We’re not looking for two men. We’re only looking for one, and he’s not who you think he is.’
Handy and I grasped the canoe’s slippery sides and heaved it in among the rushes. We leaned over it, breathing heavily, and stared at each other. The big commoner’s face looked troubled, his brows pinched together in a frown, but then abruptly it relaxed.
‘I see,’ he said heavily.
‘You do?’
‘No, not really. But nothing with you is ever straightforward, I’ve learned that much! Who are we really looking for, then?’
I told him quickly.
‘So your master thinks he’s looking for two men, but actually one of them never existed and the other one is really your son, and you want to convince the Otomies that these two imaginary characters went this way so that they don’t pick up Nimble’s trail and find out where he really went – have I got it?’
‘More or less.’
‘And then you have to lose them afterwards – before they find out you’ve been lying to them?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the knife …’
‘Nimble’s knife, yes. I have to find out why Kind
ly sent it to me.
He stood up. ‘Well, you’ve excelled yourself this time! How are you going to do all this?’
‘I don’t know, but I’ve got to manage it somehow. You can see how important this is. If the Otomies get to Nimble first, either they’ll kill him or they’ll make him wish he was dead already. You understand – you’ve got sons yourself.’
‘Yes, and I’d like to live long enough to see them again!’ Handy looked sick. ‘On the other hand, I suppose we’re stuck with these lunatics, at least until they think they’ve found what they’re after. All right, show off your hunting skills! Just remember who’s going to get the blame when it all goes wrong!’
I was spared having to decide whether to thank him for that or not by the sight and sound of the steward as he burst out of the rushes, panting like a man running from a pack of coyotes. A moment later his pursuers appeared: two breechcloth-clad Otomies, whooping like excited children as they closed on their prey. They would probably have thrown themselves on him if the grotesque features of their captain had not appeared behind them, his voice barking at them to come to order.
He strode towards us, his green-clad arms and legs swinging carelessly, keeping up with his men with no apparent effort. He still carried no shield, but I noticed that he was armed now. From his right hand dangled the most evil-looking sword I had ever seen. Instead of a flat shaft edged with obsidian, this was a long round club whose blades stuck out four ways. I felt sick when I saw it. You could not cut cleanly through anything with a weapon like that: it had been made to crush bones and shred flesh, to maim, not to kill.
As Fox and the other warriors stumbled into view behind him, he turned his eye on me.
‘Well?’ he rasped.
‘A footprint.’
‘I can see that.’
I knelt in the mud with the captain standing over me. I could feel his breath on my neck.
‘Barefoot,’ I said.