Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  ‘I can see that too. What does it prove?’

  ‘The two we’re after weren’t wearing sandals.’

  ‘Most people don’t wear sandals. Not everyone who does would keep them on in this mire, either, if they didn’t want to spoil them.’ His own, along with the legs of his suit, were splattered with mud, and the ends of their long floppy straps were black from where they had been trailing in it. I assumed he did not mind as he could afford to throw them away. Successful warriors like him were richly rewarded.

  ‘When are you going to tell me something I can’t see for myself?’ he growled.

  That was when I saw where I had been going wrong, and how I might come out of this alive, after all.

  The captain wanted me to tell him about something he could not see. What did it matter if I could not see it either? I had only to lie convincingly and I had been doing that all my life.

  I tried to remember how the more patient and long-suffering of our instructors at the House of Tears might have behaved when confronted with a particularly doltish novice wilfully refusing to grasp the obvious – me, perhaps, craning my neck and squinting at the night sky and for the twentieth time getting the Celestial Marketplace mixed up with the Ball – Court of the Stars. Imitating him, I uttered a long, weary sigh. ‘Very well. Let’s look at this print again, shall we? Does anything strike you as odd?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lift your foot up.’

  The captain gave me a suspicious look but did as he was told. His leather-shod sole hung uncertainly in the air for a moment, making him look as if he had been frozen in the act of kicking me in the face.

  ‘Now, look at your own footprint. You’re not exactly little, are you? How come your footprint’s so much shallower than this one?’

  He put his foot down again. ‘Is it?’ He bent forward. ‘Hmm. I suppose so’, he added reluctantly. ‘What of it?’

  I had to bite my lip to stop myself breathing a loud sigh of relief. The difference in depth between the two prints, if there was any, was imperceptible, but if he convinced himself he could see it and accepted my explanation, I knew I might live through the rest of the morning, at least.

  ‘Well, obviously there was more weight on this foot.’

  ‘You mean whoever made this print was bigger than I am? Interesting.’ He stood upright again, rubbing his chin speculatively. ‘This could be more fun than I thought it was going to be!’

  I twisted my neck to look up at the towering, brawny figure. ‘That’s unlikely,’ I pointed out. ‘What I think is, this was made by two men. One of them was carrying the other!’

  With the Sun peering at me over his shoulder it was hard to make out the man’s expression. I found myself holding my breath while he thought about what I had said.

  The thoughtful silence went on and on. The muscles in my chest were taut and straining. I started to feel slightly dizzy. The longer I knelt in front of the captain, looking up at him, the more he seemed like a statue, a great, crudely carved block of granite about to topple over on to my head.

  ‘Fox!’

  I let my breath out in an explosive gasp as the line of men behind the captain stirred. Fox came forward.

  ‘See these prints? See the difference between them?’ The captain lifted his foot again.

  The breechcloth-clad warrior looked uncertainly from one indentation to the other. ‘I see them,’ he said at last.

  ‘You’re an idiot!’ his captain roared suddenly. ‘Can’t you see how much deeper that one is? Obviously made by a man carrying someone else on his back. How many times did you go over this ground yesterday? A child could have spotted this. Even this slave saw it, almost the moment I did!’

  Fox stepped back hastily, his eyes wide with terror. ‘Sir, I’m … I’m sorry, sir. I should have seen it … I just couldn’t see … I mean, why …’

  ‘You’re as blind as you are stupid, that’s why!’

  The man swallowed nervously; but when he glanced at me, I saw that much of his terror was feigned. His eyes were clear and unblinking, and even though he quailed visibly before his captain’s sudden rages, I could see from the way he curled the corner of his mouth and his swift, shrewd appraisal as he looked me up and down that he was not the one in real danger here.

  ‘I couldn’t … Sir, I just couldn’t see why one of them would have been carrying the other.’

  ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ the captain shouted. He prodded me hard with his upraised foot. ‘You tell him, slave!’

  I stood up carefully. ‘Could be any number of reasons. Perhaps one of them was lame. Twisted his ankle getting out of the boat, maybe.’

  ‘You see?’ The captain sneered.

  Fox lowered his head.

  ‘Now take us up on to dry land, before we all get foot rot! I want to see this slave pick up the trail where you lost it!’

  I stood aside as the line of warriors shouldered their way through the rushes. My master’s steward and Handy brought up the rear of the column. The steward passed me without a glance, casually swinging his elbow so that it all but connected with my chin. Behind him, Handy stopped by me for a moment.

  ‘I heard that,’ he muttered. ‘It’s crap, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I whispered back. ‘If that idiot’s footprint is shallower than the other one it’s because he’s wearing sandals and they spread his weight. Also the boatman was running, so of course his print was heavier. But it worked!’

  ‘Can’t wait to find out what your next trick is!’

  ‘Neither can I,’ I murmured ruefully, as I set off after the rest of the line.

  Beyond the rushes the ground became firmer and started to slope steeply towards the wooded hill called Chapultepec.

  The maize fields around the base of the hill were bare at this time of year. They formed short terraces, bordered by bushes and broad, low, fleshy-leaved maguey plants; apart from these and a few scattered huts there was nothing to obstruct our view of the countryside. I looked up at the hill, conscious that everyone else was staring at me.

  ‘No footprints at all,’ Fox said. ‘There was a frost two nights ago, and it’s exposed here, so the ground would have been too firm.’ He shot me a challenging look. ‘So where did they go next?’

  I lowered my eyes. Fox was, as usual, right: the earth here offered neither a clue nor, which was more to the point, anything I could manufacture a clue out of. I thought about the trees on the hill above us. The idea of leading these men into the woods and losing them there was tempting, until I imagined myself treed among them, perched on a high bough, a helpless target for Fox’s throwing-stick and spear.

  ‘Your men have already searched the woods,’ I said to the captain. He grunted his agreement. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been the first place I’d have looked. Maybe they rested up there for the night, or maybe not – but either way they’d have moved on. Now the question is, where?’ I was aware of my fingers rubbing one of my torn earlobes, an old nervous habit. I was trying to look like a man concentrating fiercely, while in reality my mind had suddenly gone blank.

  The man we were really following, my master’s errant boatman – where had he gone? Where would I have gone, in his position?

  The captain grinned at me. ‘You’re going to tell us where – aren’t you?’

  I glanced helplessly at Handy, just because his was the least unfriendly face I could see. The muscles of his jaw were oddly contorted: if our situation had not been so desperate, I might have thought he was trying not to laugh. Then he saw me looking at him. His expression froze for a moment. The corners of his mouth drooped dejectedly. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something, and, with his voice faltering only a little, he spoke up.

  I might have wept with relief. He was my friend, after all. At the very least, however afraid he was of the Otomies and however annoyed he was with me for getting him involved with them, the stubborn commoner was probably more angry about being bullied by the captain.<
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  ‘They wouldn’t be out here at all,’ Handy said. ‘If they stayed in the open you’d hunt them down in no time. It wouldn’t take a squad of warriors much longer to flush them out of the trees if they tried hiding out on the hill. They both know what old Black Feathers is like, don’t they?’

  ‘They do.’ I picked up his train of thought. ‘They’d be expecting a regiment to come after them, and they’d know the warriors would chop the whole forest down if they had to before they stopped looking. So they can’t be hiding here.’ When I saw the solution, I had to suppress a grin: it was so elegant I almost believed it myself. ‘On the other hand, they can’t have run very far, can they? Not with one of them carrying the other. So …’

  The captain twisted his sword threateningly. The shards of obsidian sunk in its shaft flashed as the sunlight caught them, and his own eyes glittered as he watched them. When he spoke he seemed to be talking to the weapon, as though reassuring it that it would have work to do yet.

  ‘So what you are telling me is that the men we’re after can’t be running away and they can’t be hiding either. What, then? They just vanished? Are they sorcerers? Did they turn themselves into moles and burrow into the soil? Are they down there now, laughing at us?’

  He drove the blunt end of the shaft into the ground. It struck the earth with a ‘thump’ that seemed to reverberate in the open field’s empty silence, and when he let the weapon go, it stood upright unsupported.

  ‘Somebody,’ he reminded me, ‘is going to pay for all this. If these men are lost …’

  ‘They’re not sorcerers,’ I assured him hastily. ‘I didn’t say they weren’t hiding. I just said they would not be hiding out here.’ I glanced quickly at Handy again: he was looking at his feet, no doubt wondering whether he had been right to take my side.

  I took a deep breath. I might live or die by my next few words. But I saw what I had to do. I could not fight the Otomies, nor could I run away from them. I had to take them somewhere where they could not hurt me no matter how angry and frustrated they got and where I would not need legs like a roadrunner’s to outpace them. I had to lure them on to my own ground. I thought wistfully of the city I could not see, out on the lake, hidden by the tall rushes. I imagined its vast, bustling crowds, its networks of narrow streets and canals, the baffling mazes of its marketplaces, the refined manners of its people, most of whom could admire a man like the captain from afar but would go out of their way to avoid talking to him. I could have lost the warriors there in no time.

  My own city was beyond my reach, but there were others.

  ‘Where’s the nearest large town?’ I asked innocently.

  The captain got Fox to draw a rough map in the dirt with the point of his harpoon.

  ‘Say this is Chapultepec,’ he began, digging a small hole.

  ‘Don’t bother putting the little villages in,’ I said helpfully. ‘They wouldn’t go near those. Everybody knows everybody else, so they’d spot strangers straight away, and they’d tell you about them as soon as you asked just to get rid of you. Telpochtli and the boy would know that.’ I knew there was no point in my trying to hide in a village either, for the same reason.

  Fox glowered at me. ‘Right. Here’s the lake …’

  ‘I think the shoreline should come out further west than that …’

  ‘Shut up. This is a map, not a work of bloody art. How far could they have gone? I need to know how big an area to cover.

  I thought about that: the bigger the better, as far as I was concerned, since it meant the Otomies would have to divide themselves between more towns. ‘Hard to say …’

  ‘You told us they rested up the first night and we know one of them was too lame to walk.’ The captain’s voice was subdued, for him. He was clearly thinking about how he was going to keep control over his men if he had to disperse them widely over the countryside. ‘Even if he was walking by yesterday morning he won’t have been going very fast. He won’t be up for a climb either, so we can forget anywhere very high up. They certainly haven’t left the valley.’

  Fox drove his harpoon repeatedly into the ground, reciting the name of a town with every blow. ‘Coyoacan, Mixcoa, Atlacuihuayan, Popotla, Tlacopan, Otoncalpolco, Azcatpotzalco …’

  ‘We have to search all of them?’ the captain asked in a disgusted voice.

  ‘I would,’ I said, ‘but if you go into any of them mob handed you’ll just attract attention and frighten your quarry off. Send a couple of men to each …’

  He looked at me suspiciously. ‘And if you were our runaways, which town would you pick?’

  ‘The biggest,’ I said honestly.

  ‘Right.’ He looked briefly down at Fox’s map. ‘You and I are off to Tlacopan, then. They,’ he added with a glance at Handy and the steward, ‘can come with us. So can Fox. The rest of you split up how you like: two to each town and a couple to stay here in reserve. Let’s go!’

  3

  So we set off for Tlacopan – the captain, Fox, Handy, the steward and I.

  It was going to take us the best part of the afternoon to reach it, but as I kept assuring my companions, it was the largest and most important town on the western side of the valley, and so easily the best prospect as our quarry’s hiding place.

  Most of the journey was undertaken in silence. We had little to say to each other in any case, and every reason to keep our voices down. Although we avoided towns and there were not many people about in the fields, no part of the valley was ever quite empty and there was always the possibility that rumours of our approach would run ahead of us. It did not help that we all so obviously came from the great city at the centre of the lake.

  The people who lived in these parts, the Tepanecs, were not barbarians. They spoke our language, and we thought of them as allies. Their ancestors had sprung from the womb of the World at the Seven Caves at the same time as ours. However, that did not mean they loved us.

  Once, long before, the Aztecs had been the subjects of a Tepanec city, Azcapotzalco, which in those days had been so populous that it was known as the Anthill. It had been my master’s father, the great Lord Tlacaelel, who had persuaded the Aztecs to rise against their masters, and when the revolt was over the city of Mexico had been freed and Azcapotzalco reduced to a small tributary town whose only claim to distinction was a big slave market.

  Only one Tepanec city had sided with the Aztecs in the revolt. As a result of its help, Tlacopan was grudgingly admitted into an alliance with Mexico, but the Aztecs did not treat the Tepanecs as equals. Tlacopan got the smallest share of the spoils of war, and our Emperor treated its king as a subject in all but name. There were plenty of people living on the western side of the lake who had grown up with stories from their fathers and grandfathers of how Tepanecs had once ruled the World and made even the Emperor of Mexico do their bidding. Who could blame them if, from time to time – such as when they visited Mexico during one of the great festivals, when the tribute was distributed, and saw how meagre their shares were in comparison with the Aztecs’ – they wondered how it might be if the old order were restored?

  ‘So watch what you say and who you say it to,’ growled the captain, reminding us all of this history. ‘These people won’t try to kill you on sight, but if they see a chance to put one over on you, they’ll grab it!’

  He set a brisk pace, driving us towards the town at a steady trot during the warmest part of the day. He barely broke into a sweat, despite being clad in quilted cotton from head to foot, and if Fox was finding the going any harder he was not about to show it. Handy, used to hard work in the fields in all weathers, ran on without complaint, the effort he was making showing only on his glistening brow and in the firm, determined set of his jaw.

  As for me, I had been trained to manage feats of endurance and bear great pain without a murmur. In my time as a priest, I had been pierced all over with maguey spines, had slit open my tongue and drawn ropes through it, had bathed naked in the lake at midnight and had fas
ted till I was faint with hunger. I ran now until my thighs and calves burned like raw flesh, my chest felt too weak even for shallow gasps and my tongue was a strip of dried meat dangling limply in my parched mouth, like a freshly skinned pelt hung up in the Sun. Then I kept running, with my discomfort set aside, my legs left to work by themselves, and the knowledge that when I was allowed to rest, that was when the real agony would set in.

  Not long afterwards, the steward fell over.

  ‘I don’t believe this!’ the captain roared. He turned back, still running, towards the gasping, twitching heap by the roadside. ‘Don’t either of you sit down!’ he warned Handy and me as he passed us. ‘We’ll be off again as soon as he’s back on his feet. What’s the matter with you?’

  Handy was doubled over, trying to massage some life back into his legs, while I kept mine straight in an effort to stop them buckling at the knee. ‘He hasn’t done this for a few years,’ I offered, between deep, painful breaths. ‘Not really part of his duties now.’

  ‘And he calls himself a warrior? Can’t stand a man who lets himself go soft. Come on, you, up!’

  I felt dizzy, as if I had taken a very mild dose of sacred mushrooms. It made the spectacle of the mighty, one-eyed warrior jabbing my master’s steward roughly with his foot seem all the more unreal. Part of me wanted to summon up the last of my breath to cheer the captain on and urge him to kick the fallen man harder. The rest of me felt something like awe. Here was my tormentor, the Chief Minister’s steward, a man who treated me worse than a dog, suddenly made another man’s helpless victim. The sight made me wonder what the Otomi might do to a mere slave, if he thought he had cause.

  ‘Can’t go on,’ the steward gasped. ‘Have to rest.’ When he looked up at the captain his face was puce.

  ‘Bugger.’ The captain pivoted sharply on one foot and kicked a stone across the road with the other, no doubt wishing it was the steward’s head. ‘Nearly there, too!’

  His brutal, ravaged face swung in my direction. I blinked the sweat out of my eyes and turned to follow his gaze.