by Simon Levack
I let out a long, shuddering breath, and looked down, feeling a chill about my loins. I realized wryly that I no longer needed the latrine after all.
I discarded my breechcloth, replacing it with a strip of maguey fibre ripped from the bottom of my old cloak. Then, feeling naked and chilly but with my modesty still essentially preserved, I crossed the bridge again and went to meet the old man who had sent me the knife.
Kindly’s was the only house in Pochtlan that I knew well. Until recently he had lived here with Lily and Shining Light. Lily had lost her husband many years before on a trading venture. Since then she had run the household more or less alone. Her son had grown up, despite all her care, into a dissolute monster, and her father, the household’s nominal head, was an old man close to senility who made full use of the licence the law gave him to drink all the sacred wine he could hold.
Once, briefly, Lily and I had slaked each other’s despair and loneliness. The moment had passed, swept away like leaves on a flooding river by a tide of feelings – her care for her son, mine for my own survival – but it had left its mark. Now I found it hard to approach this house without thinking of its mistress as she had been then, and afterwards: coolly courageous in her determination to find her worthless boy, utterly broken in her grief over his body.
I swallowed once. I had no need to be nervous, I told myself. I was not entering this house as a trespasser, as I had once before. I had been summoned here. I gripped the bronze knife and stepped over the threshold, with my head darting to left and right as if I expected to be ambushed.
Nothing moved in the shadows around me. I allowed myself to relax, until a querulous old man’s voice snapped at me out of the darkness.
‘There you are! Took your bloody time, didn’t you?’
I started. After everything I had seen and done that day, culminating in the apparition on the bridge, it was as much as I could do not to turn and run. I made myself stand still, while my breathing slowed and the pounding in my chest settled down to a normal rhythm, before I replied.
‘Kindly? Is that you?’
I was answered by a shuffling noise, a harsh growl as of someone clearing his throat and about to spit, and a shadowy movement that gradually became a little, bent figure coming into the starlight in the middle of the courtyard. It was hard to make his face out in the gloom, but even if I had not known his voice, I could have guessed who he was from the sour reek of his breath.
‘Of course it’s me. Who else would it be?’
‘What are you doing out here at this time of night?’ I demanded suspiciously. ‘Aren’t you cold?’
‘Freezing! But I don’t sleep much at night now. I heard you scampering about out here and thought I’d better take a look before you woke the rest of the household. You picked a funny time to call.’
‘You sent for me,’ I said shortly. ‘Your slave gave me this. I came as soon as I could.’
I held out the bronze knife. He waved it away.
‘I’m sorry it had to be so theatrical, but I needed to get your attention!’
I tucked the weapon back into the scrap of cloth tied around my waist. ‘You got it. Now what do you want from me?’
I heard shuffling footsteps moving slowly away.
‘Come into the kitchen.’
I followed the old man into the most important room in the house: the kitchen, the room with the hearth, whose flickering yellow flames cast deep shadows across the faces of the idols surrounding it, throwing them into stark, grotesque relief.
I had looked into this room once before, but a few things had changed. The long, tall merchant’s staff that had stood in one corner, propped up and wrapped in bloodied strips of paper – offerings against its owner’s safe return, from whatever remote corner of the World his calling might send him to – was missing. Then I remembered that the staff had belonged to Shining Light and his mother would have had it burned with his remains. Where it had stood were neat piles of goods: tobacco tubes, cocoa beans and spices, cups and plates, enough wood for a huge fire. They must have been bought for the young man’s wake.
‘Where’s Lily?’ My question came out as a croak, because my mouth had suddenly gone dry at the thought that I might see her again, that she might be sleeping or stirring just a few paces away.
‘Away,’ he said shortly. ‘Now we’ve got our merchandise back, we need to shift some of it quickly, to get some capital back into the business. She’s in Tetzcoco, for the market. She went straight there, as soon as she’d finished washing her son’s body.’
I sighed, although whether it was with disappointment or relief I could not have said myself.
‘Now, there are things I have to show you.’
The old man was pushing something into the fire. A moment later the room was filled with the bright flames and acrid, resinous fumes of a pine torch.
‘Follow me.’
He led the way slowly across the courtyard: a little man, lurching along, with the flickering torchlight catching his silver hair, and his head bowed like a hunchback’s.
As I fell into step behind him, a sharp cry sounded from somewhere near by.
It was stifled in an instant, as if someone had clapped a hand over the caller’s mouth, but it seemed to hang in the air: a shout of pain or terror, the sort of sound a very young child might make waking from a nightmare. However, the voice that uttered it had not been a child’s.
‘What was that?’ I asked in a hushed voice.
The old man did not break his stride. He had turned his head sharply in the direction of the cry but his only response was the sharp hiss of an indrawn breath, a sound of irritation rather than fear.
‘Nothing,’ he snapped, hurrying on.
I looked over my shoulder, towards where the sound had come from. I stared at the opposite corner of the courtyard, where doorways were pools of absolute blackness opening out into the surrounding gloom. Peering at them told me nothing. ‘It must have been something. Listen, I saw something tonight …’
Kindly did not answer me, and when I turned back towards him I saw that he had gone, but the light of his torch flickered inside a nearby room and spilled out of the doorway, as faint as moonlight reflected off the surface of a canal.
I followed him.
‘What’s this all about?’
The old man carefully set the torch into a bracket on the wall. Then he gestured silently at something in the middle of the room.
I looked around me briefly. I had been in here before, and recognized the peculiar decorations. The walls and ceiling in one half of the room were immaculately whitewashed and adorned with neatly executed, if not elaborate, paintings of the gods. By contrast the rear of the room had been left bare, covered only with a thin, uneven coating of brown plaster. There had once been a false wall dividing the two halves of the room, as there often was in merchants’ houses, to conceal hoarded wealth.
Now the room was empty except for a wicker chest in the middle of the floor. There were some brown stains around it.
The chest lay open. I walked towards it and stooped to look inside.
‘It’s an empty box.’ I straightened up and faced Kindly. ‘Stop playing games with me, old man. I want to know about this!’ I brandished the knife in front of his face. ‘Why did you send it to me?’
‘Just look again.’
The lid was not merely open. Someone had wrenched it off, ripping its leather hinges. One side of the box was crushed and bent, as if it had been kicked or thrown, and some of the reeds it had been woven from were torn. When I looked at it more closely, I saw that it was soiled: something had splashed on to it, the same brown stuff that had stained the floor, and although it was not sticky any more I had no difficulty, even in the poor flickering light of Kindly’s torch, in recognizing blood.
Then I looked in the box again and saw that it was not empty after all. Something lay in the bottom, curled against its sides in a smooth, perfect curve, as still and natural as a snake conte
ntedly sleeping off a meal. It was a frail thing, hard to spot in the deep shadows cast by the box’s sides, although I recognized it as soon as I knew it was there.
I reached inside the box, fingered the thing, stroked it reverently and gently lifted it out. As I held it up to the light it uncurled itself to its full length, greater than one of my arms. It seemed to glow in the torchlight, shimmering as my breath disturbed it, its colours changing from green to blue to turquoise to something else that was none of them and all three at the same time.
‘A quetzal tail feather,’ I breathed. I could not remember having handled anything so precious. For an Aztec this represented true wealth, far more than gold or shiny stones. It was beautiful, iridescent, and the colour of the young maize stalks on which our hopes rested every summer; it was hard to get, for it had to be plucked intact from the living bird; and it was fragile, like life itself.
And I had seen others just like it only that night. I stared at Kindly in disbelief. Surely, I thought, it must be coincidence. How could this old man be connected with the apparition that had confronted me on the bridge? ‘Where did this come from?’
‘Off the arse of one of those funny-looking birds that fly around in the forests down in the South, of course. Where do you think? It’s not where it came from that I care about – it’s where the rest of it went!’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Look at the base of the feather.’
Instead of a sharp quill, the plume ended in a jagged stump. ‘It’s been broken. It looks as if it was torn off something.’
‘It was.’ The old man sighed wearily. ‘Didn’t you think that was rather a big box to hold one feather, even a very special one? Until the night before last there was some important property of mine in there – more or less all I had, at least until you found that boat with all the stuff my grandson stole from us. Now this is all that’s left.’
‘This wasn’t one of a bundle of loose feathers,’ I said. ‘It was broken off a finished work.’ I looked at the old man suspiciously. ‘What was it, a fan, a banner, a costume?’
‘Something like that,’ he mumbled, as though he felt embarrassed.
‘How did it get broken?’
His shoulders sagged even more than usual. ‘Someone stole it – all but this feather!’
‘When?’
‘Two nights ago. The night we held the banquet.’
‘But your house was full of people – lords, merchants, warriors …’ I had been at that banquet, attending my master, who had been among the guests.
‘Yes, exactly. Full of lords, merchants and warriors, most of them out of their heads on sacred mushrooms. What better time to for someone to sneak in and steal a priceless work of art, eh?’
Another voice interrupted him: the one that had sounded across the courtyard earlier.
‘There it is again,’ I said, but the old man’s reaction was the same as before, his head turned sharply aside and a look of annoyance on his face.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered nonchalantly. ‘Probably an urban fox. We get them around here, rummaging around in people’s middens. If the parish police did their job it wouldn’t happen.’
‘Didn’t sound like a fox to me,’ I began, but he had already changed the subject.
‘Now, whoever stole this piece must have got in here very late – not long before dawn, in fact.’ Kindly spoke briskly. ‘We had guards on the doorway. We didn’t release them until long after midnight, when everyone had either left or gone to sleep. You were long gone. I didn’t notice anything was amiss until the morning.’
‘And what did you find then?’
‘Why, just exactly what you see. Nothing but this one feather and the box it was stored in!’
‘So what was it?’
The old man squinted at me thoughtfully. He cleared his throat noisily. He seemed reluctant to speak, and his silence endured until I could not stand it any longer.
‘Look,’ I snapped, ‘you brought me here so that you could show me something. I came all the way from the western shore of the lake, at no small risk to my own life, let me tell you, especially if my master and his steward get to know where I’ve gone. Now I’m tired and hungry and very tempted to go and throw myself at my master’s feet and beg his pardon just for the sake of a few hours curled up on my own sleeping-mat. So if you want me to know what was in that box, then tell me now. Otherwise I’m going!’
Kindly let out a deep sigh that tailed off into a dry rattle. ‘All right,’ he said wearily. ‘But this is a secret, do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed doubtfully.
‘You’ve heard of Pitzauhqui?’
‘Pitzauhqui? The craftsman?’ Of course I had heard of him. He was famous, although he had obviously not shown much potential as a child, since his name meant ‘Skinny’.
‘Who else?’ He clucked in exasperation. ‘Skinny, the featherworker.’
‘You’re not serious?’ I stared down at him. ‘It’s really by him? Why, it must be worth … it must be priceless! How did you get your hands on it?’
If feathers were our most precious commodity, featherwork was our most elevated art form. To the skill of the scribe or the embroiderer were added the dexterity and judgement of the featherworker who chose, trimmed and placed feathers whose shape and natural colour could bring to vivid life the most extravagant design. Featherworkers created mosaics, costumes, fans whose plumes seemed to radiate from their settings like petals from the heart of a flower. A skilled practitioner of the craft was a man of standing, not as high as a warrior’s but as high as a merchant’s and with none of the envy and bitterness that attended a merchant’s wealth. The featherworkers made the most of this status: like most craftsmen, they passed their skills down from father to son and mother to daughter. I did not know either the featherworkers or their parish, Amantlan, very well: the Amanteca, as they were called, guarded their secrets jealously.
Among the featherworkers there were perhaps a couple of craftsmen as renowned as Skinny, whose skill was such that he was said to be a sorcerer, with the power to make the plumes fly into place and even change colour at a word of command. I had seen one of his pieces once. It was a small thing, just a fan made of roseate spoonbill feathers, but I had never forgotten it. The craftsman had contrived to set and layer the plumes so that no two caught the light in the same way. They were all red, but just to glance at them was to see so many colours: orange, chocolate, scarlet, a pink that put me in mind of a magnolia in flower, and blood at every stage from freshly spilled to three days old and cracking.
Skinny’s work was legendary, and would command whatever price the seller asked. I could not begin to guess how Kindly had been able to afford one of his pieces or who might have been so desperate as to sell it to him. All the same, if I had had to guess, the last name that would have occurred to me was the one Kindly gave, answering my question.
‘I got it from Skinny himself.’
‘I thought he was dead.’
‘I can assure you he isn’t.’
I stared at the feather in my hands: it was waving wildly, picking up my own agitation, and as it caught the torchlight its blue and green colours chased each other like waves along its length from stem to tip. I looked at the broken end, and tried to imagine the work of art it had been wrenched from. I thought of the man who had made it, and felt something like awe at the thought that the feather I was holding had been part of it, that the great craftsman himself had selected it, handled it and found it its rightful place, gluing it there with turkey fat that he applied himself because no one else could be trusted to do it properly.
‘I heard that he never replaced a feather. He always chose the perfect plume and placed it perfectly, first time. My master tried to commission something from him and couldn’t get it – and people don’t usually say “No” to the Chief Minister! That’s why I thought he was dead. He hasn’t been heard from in years, anyway, and there was a rumour that he’d gone out of h
is head on sacred mushrooms.’ I frowned at the old man suspiciously. ‘How do you know it was really something of his?’
‘I told you, he gave it to me himself!’
I bent down and carefully laid the feather back in the bottom of its box. It weighed nothing, and I was afraid that if I just dropped it it would blow away. It might even drift up into the torch flame and be ruined, and that would never do. I felt an urge to preserve the thing, against the day when it might be reunited with the rest of whatever peerless creation it had once been part of.
I did not stand up again at once, because I wanted to think. I stared into the dark space inside the box and thought about what I was going to do next. I knew what I ought to do: turn around, walk straight past Kindly and step out of the room, out of the courtyard and into the night. I did not know where I might go after that, but I could already see that the alternative was likely to bring even more trouble down on my head than I was already in.
However, I had my son’s knife. It had been sent to me for a reason, and until I found out what the reason was, I could never rest. And so, in spite of everything, I stood up and faced the old man and asked him the question he knew I had to ask, to which I already knew the answer.
‘So somebody stole a piece of featherwork from you. I’m sorry to hear about it, but what’s it got to do with me?’
Kindly looked at his feet. At least he had the good grace to appear embarrassed.
‘Well,’ he mumbled, ‘you see, I rather hoped you might find it for me.’
‘And why would I do any such thing?’
He looked up again. In the torchlight his eyes glinted like polished jade. He pursed his lips, as if in thought, before answering: ‘Because … It’s like this, Yaotl. The featherwork wasn’t the only thing in that box. There was something else – something I left in here for safe-keeping because, to be honest, I couldn’t decide where else to put it.’ He nodded towards the angular shape on my hip. ‘I’d wrapped the knife up in several thicknesses of maguey fibre cloth to stop any blood getting on the costume. It was just a shapeless lump of material, but someone found it and took the trouble to unwrap it.’