by Simon Levack
‘Better find out who he is, first.’
‘Oh, we’ll do that, boss! We’ll soak it out of him, it’ll be like getting blood out of a tunic after a fight – lots of cold water!’
The agonizingly tight grip on my ankles slackened suddenly and I fell, my face hitting the icy water just at the moment when Shield’s hands caught me and yanked me upward again with a nauseating lurch.
I came up twisting and swaying once more. The moment I stopped, my stomach emptied itself once more, sending water and whatever else it contained spewing out of my mouth into my nose and eyes, blinding me momentarily and sending a violent shudder through me that my tormentor obviously felt, because it made him laugh.
‘Shall we see if we need another rinse, or what?’ He dandled me like a baby, letting me fall towards the canal and snatching me up again before the surface touched me. ‘Perhaps you’d rather tell me your name!’
I groaned. ‘Joker,’ I managed to gasp.
He seemed to think about my answer for a long time before making his mind up about it.
‘So what?’ he said indifferently, and a moment later my head was under water again.
When he hauled me out there was a sneer in his voice. ‘That’s not a name that means very much to me. You’ll have to do better than that!’
Instead of dropping me in, he yanked me towards him. For a moment I felt myself swinging through space with the air whistling past my ears until my shoulders caught the wooden edge of the bridge with a sickening crack.
I screamed.
‘We can split your head open!’ Upright roared. ‘We can drown you and make it take all night! We can cut your balls off!’ he added gratuitously. ‘Now talk!’
I felt dizzy I could not see. The red darkness that had threatened to engulf me when I had a foot driving into my chest had come back. There was a roaring in my ears and I could feel my stomach heaving again even though it was empty. I could not tell the truth but to say nothing seemed a certain way to get myself killed.
I could think of only one thing to say: a name.
‘Kindly!’ I gasped.
The grip on my ankles slackened abruptly, although not enough to send me plunging into the canal again.
‘What did he say?’ Shield’s voice was suddenly hushed.
‘Kindly!’ I spluttered again. ‘The merchant! Kindly the merchant! I was going to see him! He’ll vouch for me!’
For a moment, as I hung upside down over the water, I did not know how the police were going to take what I had said. All I knew was that I was in danger of having my brains knocked out against the side of the bridge like a fish killed for bait.
Shield muttered slowly: ‘Kindly the merchant?’
A moment later I was swinging slowly through the air and being lowered, surprisingly gently, on to the surface of the bridge.
As my head made contact with the wood and the rest of me was laid down like a piece of cloth being measured out for cutting, I heard Upright add: ‘I don’t think I’d trust anybody that claimed to know that slippery old bugger! Still, if he says he can vouch for him, we had better check, hadn’t we? If he’s lying …’
I did not hear what would happen if I turned out to be lying, because that was when I passed out.
2
‘This knife.’ The speaker was an old man with a voice so feeble I had to strain to catch his words. ‘Bronze. Very rare. What I’d want to know is, how did he get hold of it?’
All of a sudden he seemed to be shouting so loudly that I wanted to scream and cover my ears. A man’s voice laughed as I squirmed. The sound of it came and went with the throbbing in my head. It was as if my ears were still full of water.
Something hit me on the shoulder. ‘Awake now, are we? Come on, get up!’
I lay face down on an earth floor. I rolled over, opening my eyes and promptly squeezing them shut against the glare of a clear morning sky.
‘Up!’
I pushed myself slowly into a sitting position, with my eyes still shut because I thought the World would be spinning around me and I did not want to have to watch it in case it started my stomach heaving again. I tried to swallow but my mouth and throat were as parched as a dead cactus in the dry season. I thought that was strange, considering that I had nearly drowned.
When I finally dared to look around me the first thing I noticed was that I was naked. With a hoarse croak of horror I pulled my knees up and spread a hand over my loins. That set off more laughter from the men watching me.
‘Told you he’d do that!’ It was Shield speaking. ‘All the trouble he’s in and the only thing he can think of is, where’s his breechcloth?’
I scowled at him resentfully. He stood to one side of me with his arms folded nonchalantly. When I turned my head towards the other side I saw Upright, who was squatting with a bowl between his knees. He surprised me by pushing the bowl towards me.
‘Have some water,’ he suggested. ‘We took those rags off you to make sure you weren’t hiding anything else. We probably did you a favour. They were about to fall to pieces anyway’
I took a cautious sip while I looked past the two men flanking me towards a third, the man whose voice I had first heard.
He knelt on a reed mat, with his old brown knees tucked under him in the style of a woman, no doubt because they were too stiff now for him to squat comfortably. He was a merchant. I could tell that much by his hair, which was long, falling loose and unadorned over his shouders. His cloak was short but finely woven, and even at a glance I could see how much trouble had been taken over its embroidery. Heavy bone plugs pulled at his lower lip and earlobes. The workmanship that had gone into carving them in the shapes of little fishes could not have come cheap.
This man had my son’s knife, grasping the hilt between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and balancing the point on the palm of the other.
I looked at Upright as I put his bowl down. ‘Where am I?’ I hissed. ‘Who’s that?’
Shield took one step forward and flicked a foot casually into the side of my neck. I flopped over, howling in pain.
‘You’re here to answer questions, not ask them! Understand?’
I picked myself up again, noticing a little smear of blood where my elbow had struck the ground. ‘I get the idea,’ I muttered.
‘I am Ozomatl,’ the old man informed me. ‘You are in my house and my parish. I expect you to show a bit of respect! If you’ve forgotten your manners, I’m sure Upright and Shield here will be happy to help you recall them!’
Ozomatl: I had heard the name, which meant ‘Howling Monkey’. I realized I had even seen him before, at Kindly’s ’s house. He was the man the merchants of Tlatelolco looked to as leader: the man whose voice carried most weight in deciding which trader would have the honour of buying, training and sacrificing a Bathed Slave at festival time, who had the ear of the military governor who ruled their part of the city, and who presided over the merchants’ councils and their courts. The merchants, both because of their wealth and because of the information they brought back from every corner of the World, were immensely powerful; so much so that even men such as my master and the Emperor had to listen to them. And Howling Monkey was the most powerful of the merchants.
His eyes roamed over the weapon in his fingers the way another man’s might have dwelt on a pretty girl. I had never considered how much the knife might be worth, because I had thought of it only as my son’s sole possession. Suddenly I saw it through the eyes of a merchant. Bronze was almost impossible to get in Mexico. The knife by itself must be worth a fortune, and if there were any chance that there might be more bronze where that had come from, any merchant would jump at it.
I licked my lips nervously. ‘You, er, you want to know where I got the knife? Listen, the man you need to ask …’
A sharp cuff to the side of my head silenced me. I looked up to see Shield glaring at me, with his hand raised for another blow. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I noticed the old man leaning tow
ards me, as if eager to hear whatever I had to say next. He said nothing, however, and was clearly willing to let his policemen speak for him.
‘Forget where it came from, you murdering little piece of coyote dung! You’re here to tell us what you did with it!’
I looked at Howling Monkey, the chief merchant, and then hastily back at Shield, in case he was on the point of hitting me again. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I was just looking after it. Murdering?’ Suddenly the import of his words seized me, shaking me like hands wrapped around my throat and leaving me just as unable to speak. ‘Murdering who?’ I squeaked, swallowing convulsively to hold my gorge down as I pictured my son’s face, lying in the latrine in Amantlan, amid pools and piles of ordure, surrounded by his own dismembered remains, his strong features collapsed, his clear young skin grey and streaked with mire.
A moment later I was whimpering in pain as Shield seized one of my ears, twisting it until he had forced my head around and could stare into my eyes.
‘I told you you’re not here to ask questions!’ he snarled. ‘Now stop whining and answer me! What did you do to Idle?’
‘Stop it!’ I squealed, pain and fear and self-disgust pushing me out of the reach of any sort of sensible restraint. ‘Do you think I’d kill my own child? Cut him up like a sacrificial victim? How could you …?’ Then the name he had given the dead man registered at last. ‘Wait a moment. What did you say? Idle?’
Relief and the abrupt release of tension do strange things. All of a sudden the savage, inimical face looming over mine took on a comic aspect. The deep lines in the puckered, frowning brow were like those of some constipated old man, straining over a pot. The narrow, grim slit of a mouth was a child’s drawing of unhappiness, a straight line with the edges turned down. The threatening growl in the back of the throat was the sort of noise my stomach made when I had not eaten for a day or so. I started giggling, and once I had started I could not stop.
‘Idle?’ Shield was still twisting my ear but for some reason it did not seem to hurt any more. ‘You mean Skinny’s brother? It was really him?’
‘Of course it was really him. Who did you think you’d killed?’ The big warrior pulled my head about as he shook with rage. ‘Think this is funny, do you? I’ll show you how funny it is!’
The hand holding my ear jerked sharply upward. Whimpering with pain, I was forced to scramble to my feet.
The blow was perfectly timed. I saw it coming when I was about halfway towards standing up, my body unfolded and exposed, unable either to straighten up or, with the tight grip on my ear, to collapse and roll away to safety I could only wait and watch while the fist described a short arc that ended in the pit of my stomach.
I tried to scream but all that came out was a high, almost voiceless whistling. I lurched forward, gasping in agony while I tried to tear myself away from the relentless grip on my ear and curl up around my wounded abdomen. I managed to totter a couple of steps before Shield let me go. He snatched his hand away from my ear as if it were red hot and watched as I pitched forward on to the hard floor.
‘Do you need to hear any more?’ he roared. ‘We found the knife on him. It’s covered with blood. Plainly he used it to kill the featherworker’s brother and cut the body up. He came back last night and we got him. And now here he is, laughing at you!’
With difficulty I hauled my face off the floor and raised my eyes towards the wealthy, powerful man staring at me from his reed mat.
‘You don’t understand!’ I gasped. ‘I was given the knife – Kindly gave me the knife! Why don’t you ask him, and ask him where I was the night before last?’
The old man peering down at me answered coldly: ‘We have. No doubt as soon as he wakes up and gets over his hangover he will tell us all about you. I expect we’ll give whatever he has to say as much weight at it deserves.’ From the stress he laid on ‘deserves’ I gathered that he expected anything that devious old man came up with to weigh about as much as a handful of turkey feathers. ‘But he isn’t here. You are. Now you heard Shield. The brother of a featherworker is dead. Merchants and featherworkers – and Pochtlan and Amantlan, their parishes – go back a very long way, and we look after one another. So when we catch you with the weapon that might have killed Idle and you yourself admit that you were here on the night the deed was done, what do you expect us to make of it?’
‘But I didn’t kill him!’ I protested. ‘All right, I admit I found the body – you’d have to have been blind and deaf with no sense of smell to miss it. I had the knife because Kindly gave it to me – that’s the truth!’
From where he stood next to me, Upright bent down to whisper confidingly in my ear. ‘So convince him. Think of this as a trial and him as the judge.’
‘You can’t try me! I wasn’t even in one of your parishes when these two picked me up.’ Shield growled threateningly. ‘I’m not one of yours, either. I don’t come from Tlatelolco, I’m a Tenochca. Do you have any idea what will happen to you all if you don’t let me go?’
From the knowing, shrewd look on Howling Monkey’s face, I gathered I had made a big mistake.
The next thing I knew I was staring at the sky, or rather squinting at it through eyes narrowed with pain as Shield seized me by the scalp and jerked my head backward. ‘Watch your tongue or I’ll cut it out of your head, you worthless little pool of dog piss!’
He threw my head forward until I was looking at the chief merchant once more.
‘Thank you, Shield,’ the old man said smoothly. ‘Of course, Joker may be right. We don’t know what will follow from anything we do to him, do we? I could ask you to cut his throat and throw him in the nearest canal. I could take him at his word and tell you to carry him back to Tenochtitlan – hand him over to the Emperor, perhaps, or maybe the Chief Minister?’
He grinned at me, his teeth bared like a flayed skull’s, as he watched the effect of his words flow over my face like floodwater, leaving devastation in its wake. I tried not to let my terror show but it was no good, and I could feel my eyes widening and my mouth growing slack at the threat of being handed back to my master. Howling Monkey surely could not know to whom I belonged, but he had obviously guessed that I was a runaway slave up to no good.
‘I can tell you don’t think that’s a good idea. Well then, you’d better help us out, hadn’t you?’
‘Put it another way,’ Shield hissed in my ear. ‘If you don’t tell him the truth, I’ll scalp you!’
I did not know what to do. What could I say that would satisfy these men, especially if their chief thought he already knew what I was and was merely playing with me? Perhaps I could pretend to be a slave of Kindly’s, and hope against hope that he would not disown me. Surely, I thought, he would not risk abandoning me where I might be forced to tell the World about the illicitly acquired merchandise he had asked me to find.
‘You really ought to tell him, you know.’ I gritted my teeth at the sound of Upright’s voice: his helpful advice was beginning to annoy me, especially since I knew he would be just as willing to skin me alive as his deputy was. I wondered how they decided which of them was to bully the suspect and which to befriend him. Did they throw a bean in the air and see which side up it landed or just take turns? ‘It’s going to come out anyway, in the end.’
I stared at Howling Monkey and swallowed nervously as I finally made up my mind what to say to him. I was going to be Kindly’s new slave, and then at least they would have a story that they would have to investigate, and in the time it took them to do that, I would try to think of something else, in case the old man failed to back me up.
‘I …’
‘You want to know who he is? I’ll tell you!’
The voice came from behind me, from the entrance to Howling Monkey’s house, and it rang across the broad space around me as loud and clear as a trumpet announcing the dawn. I recognized it, but could not believe my ears. I turned, scrambling on to one knee to get a better look, heedless of the risk that Shield would c
lout me for daring to get up without permission; in the event he was as fascinated by the newcomer as I was, and so were the other two. They all ignored me as their eyes tracked her uncertainly across the courtyard.
Lily had put on reed sandals to come out that morning. Their clattering as she strode towards the silent men had the sort of portentous, threatening note a warrior strives for when he beats his spear against his shield before a battle. They must have been the only sound any of us heard, because I was not breathing and I was sure that nobody else was either.
She looked magnificent. She had put on what must have been her finest clothes: a long shift over a matching skirt, in pale yellow and lilac in a jagged pattern like lightning bolts, both made of cotton, in brazen defiance of all convention and the law. Gold pendants hung from her earlobes, descending over her shoulders in sparkling cascades that were shot through with the green of jade or emerald. Her hair was unbound, as it must be while she was in mourning for her son, but she had not neglected it: it had been brushed until it billowed about her head and neck in a magnificent black and silver mane, waving in time to her steps.
She held her head up. Her eyes seemed to catch the sun and flare dangerously as she walked straight towards the chief merchant.
The woman acknowledged me with barely a glance. Suddenly recollecting myself, I hastily covered my groin with my hands again, but she had already looked away.
‘He’s mine,’ she snapped, standing over Howling Monkey with her arms folded, the way a priest at the House of Tears might have done when about to reproach a novice for forgetting the words to a hymn. ‘He’s a slave in my household. What is he doing here?’
Howling Monkey struggled to get to his feet. I noticed with some amusement that, even drawn up to his full height, the top of the old man’s head barely came up to the level of Lily’s chin. ‘He’s under arrest,’ he spluttered. ‘We were trying to decide what to do with him. He didn’t tell us he had anything to do with you.’