by Simon Levack
‘And used it, too.’ I took the knife out once more and examined it. It was valuable in itself, since it was made of bronze, that dull, hard metal that only the Tarascans in the West knew how to work and which was almost unknown in Mexico, but its material worth was not what Kindly had been thinking of.
‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You think whoever came here the other night knew the knife was in this room …’
‘In the house, at least. This was the only empty room, and the rest of the house was full of people, so it would have been the first place a thief would look anyway.’
‘And then, having taken the knife, he decided to lift this costume as well?’
‘It can’t have been that simple. For one thing, there was some sort of struggle over the costume, because that feather was broken off. For another …’
‘The knife was used.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you don’t know who was injured?’
His frown turned the lines on the old man’s face into ravines. ‘I don’t. Nobody in my household, and I think one of the guests would have complained if he’d woken up with stab wounds, don’t you? But there was a trail of blood from here out into the courtyard.’
‘There were two of them.’ In spite of myself I was curious. ‘What happened – did they fall out?’
‘It looks like it, doesn’t it? What else could it have been – two men burgling my house in the same night, both of whom just happened to know exactly what they were looking for and where to find it, and one of them deciding to stick a knife in the other? I think that sounds unlikely.’
‘Where did you find the knife?’
‘In the courtyard.’
I stared at the knife again. It occurred to me that it ought to be cleaned up, but then I thought that was not my task. It was my son’s. Mine was to return his knife to him.
‘What I thought,’ Kindly was saying, ‘was that maybe whichever of them stabbed the other changed his mind and carried his friend home. Of course, they had my property with them. And if you found either of our thieves, you see, then you’d find my property. But at least one of them came here looking for that knife. And you want to know who that was, and why, don’t you?’
‘So that’s why I’m here,’ I said dully. I kept looking at the weapon. Suddenly I was seeing it with fresh eyes. It was valuable, to be sure: but what might it be worth to someone who had never owned anything else?
My grip on the thing tightened until it shook and my knuckles turned white.
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ the old man said softly. ‘You’ll do anything to get this back to its owner.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Call it a lucky guess. Lily told me what happened on the lake, the other night, and all the things you’d said to her about yourself while you and she were … while you were here before. It wasn’t too difficult to work out that that boy must be yours. And if you thought he’d been here, instead of running away from the city and putting a safe distance between himself and the Chief Minister, you’d be desperate to find out where he was, and what he was up to.’
I remembered the effort and heartache it had cost me, learning that Nimble was my child. How had Kindly discovered it? I shivered at the thought that if this feeble-minded old man could manage to deduce the truth so easily, in spite of the lies I had told his daughter, others might be able to as well – my master among them.
‘So you think my son came looking for his knife,’ I replied in a low voice, ‘and that I’m bound to go looking for him, and if I find out what happened to him, I’m bound to find your precious featherwork.’
He clapped his hands together delightedly. ‘I knew you’d understand! Of course, I’ll pay you if you bring it back in one piece. When can you start?’
My jaw dropped so fast and so far that it hurt. ‘I don’t believe you! You somehow manage to get hold of a fabulously valuable piece of featherwork. You keep it here, in a house full of mushroomed-up warriors who everyone knows have no love for you merchants – not to mention the other merchants you invited as your guests, all of them rivals of yours who would cheerfully steal from you out of spite. Then when it gets stolen – big surprise, that! – you expect me to go and get it back from you? Are you mad?’
Anyone else might have accepted what I said. I might have expected a different man’s face to darken or turn pale, according to whether he felt embarrassed at his own foolishness or angry at my reproof, or perhaps to crumple dejectedly when he realized he was not getting his own way. Indeed, I watched Kindly’s face as I finished speaking, but I saw none of these things, and it quickly dawned on me that I was not going to.
The Kindly I had known was a broken old man, good for nothing except lounging against the wall of his courtyard, swilling sacred wine and talking idly with anyone who still had the patience to listen to him. The steady, unremitting stare with which he returned my gaze belonged on another, still older face than his: the face of a merchant who had once journeyed through hot lands, frozen lands and steamy swamps, who had seen friends die, his son-in-law among them, who had burned his fellow merchants’ travelling-staffs with their bodies and then fought and beaten the barbarians who had killed them. No words of mine were ever going to touch this old man.
‘You know I’m not,’ he said stonily. ‘And I know you’ll do what I’m asking, Yaotl, because it’s the only way you’ll find out what happened to your son.’
I was still gripping the knife. It would have been ridiculously easy to stretch out my arm and sink the blade in this vile old man’s chest. Nobody could have known my hand was behind it: nobody except Kindly himself knew I was there. For a moment there was nothing I would rather have done, but my arm seemed to have gone dead.
I dropped the arm with a sigh, letting the weapon dangle loosely from my limp fingers.
‘All right. You win, you old bastard. You’d better tell me just what this wonderful piece was. A headdress, a warrior’s back device, a mosaic?’
‘Oh, no. Nothing so mundane.’
‘Well, what, then?’
‘It was the raiment of a god.’
5
‘The raiment of a god.’
It was so obvious, I thought, and it explained so much. I cursed myself for an idiot, for the terror I had felt on the bridge, confronting what I had thought was an omen. ‘I bet I can guess which one.’
‘You’ve heard the stories, then.’
‘About the vision? I can do better than that, Kindly. I saw him myself!’
He stared at me. ‘You?’ he spluttered. ‘When?’
‘Just before I got here.’ Suddenly I felt the urge to laugh, remembering my own incredulity at hearing the featherworker’s account at my master’s house. Of course neither of us had seen a god. We had both met a man in a stolen costume, although what he was doing haunting the canal between Pochtlan and Amantlan, and how he had managed to vanish so completely, were still a mystery.
Kindly stared at me dumbly while I told him what had happened to me. ‘So it’s still in this parish,’ he muttered when I had finished. ‘Maybe it’ll be all right after all.’
‘Just how did you get hold of this thing? It must be worth …’ My voice tailed off as I tried vainly to imagine what you could barter for something so valuable.
He laughed. ‘It’s priceless, Yaotl! It’s not even as if Skinny was the only craftsman whose work went into it. Naturally as a featherworker he was the last to handle it, since the feathers are the most fragile part, but … well, you saw the mask? The serpent’s head? The scales are turquoises, and so’s the spear-thrower the god was given to carry.’
‘His sandals were made of obsidian,’ I recalled.
‘That’s right, and the front of his shield was striped with gold and seashells, and there was a bloody great emerald set into his cap that would have bought you twenty times over.’ I had to grit my teeth at this callous reference to my status. ‘I tell you, the lapidaries had a field day! But it’s the fea
thers you would really have noticed. I’ve never seen anything like them.’
‘Me neither.’ Nor, I remembered, had the featherworker I had spoken to at the Chief Minister’s house. ‘So how did you manage to get hold of this thing? For that matter, why? It surely wasn’t Skinny’s to sell!’
‘Skinny and I go back a long way, you see,’ he replied carelessly. ‘His father and some of his uncles used to work for me. Our families helped one another out, from time to time.’
I looked at him coolly I thought I could work out what came next. The featherworker obviously knew Kindly was broke, and that his grandson had made off with everything his family had. He obviously assumed the old merchant would do anything to make money, and if offered what looked like a bargain would snap it up with no questions asked. ‘I don’t suppose you stopped to think that maybe whoever originally commissioned this fabulous costume might want to get his hands on it?’
‘Of course I did! But we had our story ready’ He grinned ruefully. ‘We were going to say it had been stolen from his workshop.’
And no doubt, I thought, by the time the costume’s owner started making serious enquiries, it would already have been sold.
I thought about what Kindly had described to me, the fabulous wealth that the gold, the stones, the feathers, even the seashells, each one picked out and placed with such care in its setting, must represent, the unique craftsmanship that must show in every facet and every plume. I wondered where he could possibly hope to sell something like that, and who would dare buy anything that distinctive. Surely nobody in the city, or in any of the other towns in the valley of Mexico. Perhaps, I thought, Kindly had meant to send it abroad. I knew his family dealt in feathers, importing them from the hot lands in the South and the East, and that they must trade with the barbarians who lived there. Was he hoping to exchange the god’s costume for feathers, for working capital to replace what his grandson had taken?
I thought then that I understood what he had been up to. However dangerous it might have been, to Kindly it would have been worth everything he staked on the venture, to have the prospect of being able to trade in his own right again. For so long, he and his daughter had been impoverished, their business crippled by his grandson’s cheating. The sacred wine Kindly drank so freely may have dulled his judgement, but it had not blunted his pride. He had seen a chance to free himself, to exercise once again the independence that set his merchant class apart from the rest of us Aztecs, and he had seized it without a second’s thought.
How ironic it was that, with his grandson dead and the boat with all the family’s wealth on it recovered, that independence had become his and Lily’s for the taking, without his having to lift a finger.
‘So, to sum up,’ I said sourly, ‘you think I am going to go and look for this costume – or rather, for the man wearing it – in the hope that I might find out what became of my son on the way?’
‘That’s right,’ Kindly said blandly. ‘Of course, I’m sure we could negotiate a finder’s fee …’
‘Oh, don’t bother!’ I cried, suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of disgust. I had no choice in the matter, of course, as I had known full well from the moment I had been given my son’s knife, but I did not have to like it. ‘If you can think of a way of telling my master where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing that won’t get me killed out of hand, than I’ll settle for that!’
‘Really?’ he replied brightly. ‘Is that all? That’s a deal, then!’ Then, seeing my scowl, he added: ‘Oh, come on, Yaoti – I’m joking! Look, I don’t know what you’re going to tell your master, but I guess if you were really worried about that you’d be sitting obediently at the old man’s feet instead of squatting there talking to me. Let’s face it, each of us needs to find something and the chances are the things we both want are in the same place. I can’t very well go running around after them – I’m too old and too well known. So it has to be down to you. Now what about it?’
All my exhaustion, a day and most of a night of unceasing activity and strain, seemed to descend on me then, and I bowed my head, cradling it on my knees, within my folded arms. ‘All right. You win. I’ll look for your precious featherwork.’
‘Excellent!’ he chortled. ‘Now, I think we ought to seal our bargain with a drink, don’t you? There’s a gourd of sacred wine in the kitchen. I won’t be a moment.’
Before I could stammer out an answer the old man was out of the room and padding across the courtyard. A moment later he was back, thrusting a gourd full of sloshing liquid in my direction. I recoiled silently.
‘Oh, come on, Yaotl. You can’t pretend you’re not partial to a drop. This isn’t the usual rotgut, either. It’s pure maguey sap, not some rubbish made out of spit and honey!’
‘I don’t want it,’ I said, looking down.
He had pulled out the maize cob that served as the gourd’s stopper, letting out the sharp smell of the stuff inside. ‘Why not? Used to be meat and drink to you, this stuff, didn’t it? Oh, suit yourself.’
He tipped the gourd up to his own face. I found I could listen to the liquid inside it with more detachment than I would have thought I was capable of. Was this because what I was looking for was so important to me that it cut through the old craving? I clung to that thought: I told myself that if I ever felt that way again, so desperately in need of a drink that I would do anything to get one, steal, betray the people closest to me and abase myself in ways unthinkable to an Aztec, then perhaps I only had to remember that I had a son, and the yearning would pass.
Eventually I managed to say: ‘Just find me a blanket and a clean breechcloth and let me stay here for the night, won’t you?’
There was no answer.
After a moment or two I looked up, surprised.
Kindly had put the gourd down. He was shuffling his feet awkwardly, shifting his weight from side to side and sending nervous glances out through the doorway.
‘What’s the matter?’ I could barely keep my eyes open by now. In my imagination I was already swaddling my aching limbs in a rabbit’s-fur blanket, with my head cradled on my rolled-up cloak and no intention of waking up until long after daybreak, but a glance at the old man’s face was enough to dispel all that. I moaned, realizing that I was not likely to get any sleep that night after all, and feeling like a runner who has just topped what he thought was the last ridge before home only to see that, on the far side of the valley below him, there is a steeper slope than ever for him to climb.
‘I’m sorry, Yaotl.’ His tone was too distant and distracted to be apologetic. ‘I can’t let you stay here. This is the only empty room and I need it – all the stuff off that boat is coming back before dawn, you see, and it’ll have to go in here. You know we merchants always move our merchandise by night. I can lend you a blanket, though, and give you some water and something to eat.’
There was not much of the night left by the time I left Kindly’s house, with an old, patched blanket wrapped against my shoulders and my hands clutching a tortilla and a drinking-gourd that the old man had generously pressed into them at the last moment.
‘Do your best, Yaotl,’ he said, as he all but pushed me into the street. ‘I’m relying on you! And so’s your son!’
He seemed keen to be rid of me after I had declined his offer of a drink. I wondered about that, as I stood by the whitewashed stone wall of his house and watched its pale reflection catch ripples on the surface of the canal at my feet, making each one gleam fleetingly. I wondered about his air of distraction, of something like embarrassment. I wondered too about the odd cries I had heard. They seemed to come from close by, but I had not heard them again and there was nothing to see.
Then I sighed, telling myself that these were minor mysteries compared to the others I had got caught up in of late. Wrapping myself more tightly in the blanket, I turned and walked on, back towards the bridge that led across the canal to Amantlan. If I was going to look for old Kindly’s precious feathered costume, I thought, th
en I might as well start by talking to the man who had made it.
It was as I was padding back across the bridge that I first noticed the trail of blood.
It caught my eye as a thin dark smear, glistening with reflected starlight. I knelt and ran my finger through it and sniffed it. It was fresh.
I got up and looked back and forth along the short bridge. To my surprise the trail started about where I was standing, and ran on to the far shore. Had there been a fight here, with the wounded man staggering off in the direction of Amantlan? I looked down again. There were a few marks in the frost that coated the bridge’s planks. I could see my own footprints, melted into the frost by my bare soles. There were other, less distinct marks, streaks that might have marked the passage of something heavy, being dragged across the canal, and the bloody smear was in their midst. I could not see anything that suggested a struggle.
Frowning, I walked slowly over the bridge, following the trail until I saw where it was going to take me. That was when I hesitated, stopping to sniff the air, and feeling the first spasm of nausea as I realized what must lie beyond the wicker screen at the bridge’s far end, the one I had been making for when I thought I saw the god.
My sense of smell may have been more acute than most. As a priest, I had spent much of my life in darkness – in the niches at the backs of temples where the Sun’s rays were never allowed to penetrate, surveying the stars from the summit of a pyramid, or patrolling by night the hills around the lake our city stood on, seeing nothing but alive to the scents the wind brought, of pine and sage and briny water. His eyes sometimes mattered less to a priest than his nose, and the old instincts still served me when I needed them.