Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  I fell into the water, suspended by one aching arm from the barge’s side. For a few moments I was dragged along, spluttering and choking and gasping for breath, until at last I managed to get a grip on the damp wood with my other hand.

  ‘Give me a lift up with your paddle!’ I cried.

  The boatman looked at me over the stern of his craft. He seemed oddly unsurprised. ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I’ll give you my cloak.’

  ‘It’s all wet.’

  ‘It’ll dry out. Are you going to get a better offer?’

  He thought about that for a moment, before dipping his paddle once in the water to push his boat along and then extending the dripping blade to me. ‘All right, but mind you don’t tear that cloak!’

  The bargeman left me at Copolco in the west of the city, from where it was easy to get to the causeway in time to blend in with the crowd streaming across the lake towards their homes in Tlacopan or Popotla or any of the other towns and villages dotting the shore. With my cloak carefully folded and tucked away in the one clean and dry spot on the barge, my breechcloth sodden and stained and my hair unkempt, I looked like any serf or slave or day-labourer returning home for the night.

  I was tempted to rest when I reached the western shore of the lake, to find some quiet spot where I could simply sit and bask in the blissful realization that the body I had found had not been my son’s. I wanted to laugh and weep for joy, but I could not spare the time. The Otomies might still be combing this countryside, looking for me, and I was convinced that if Nimble was still alive then he needed me and I had to get to him as quickly as I could. The only lead I had was still the costume. The task of finding that would not have been made any easier by Idle’s death, since I had assumed that he had it, but I had to try. That meant going back into Mexico. In any event my son must be in the city somewhere. I was certain he had gone back there to retrieve his knife.

  I knew he valued the weapon not for itself but for the last link it gave him with his former life, with the mother he had never known and with the man who had raised him and protected him out of love for her. I tried not to believe that he had killed Idle, either for the sake of the knife or for any other reason, but it made little difference.

  Now Lily had the knife. I wondered what Nimble would do if he knew that. Would he try to take it from her too? The thought made me shudder as I realized how easy it might be for her to lay a trap for him. The way she had treated me showed what an appetite she had for revenge. Her son and his lover had duped her cruelly, and it would not be surprising if she hated the young man for it.

  As I crossed the causeway, all of this passed through my mind, along with the practical problem I now faced: I was in danger not only from my master and the Otomies but also from the police in at least one parish, not to mention Lily. To return to the city, I concluded, I would need a disguise: a role I could slip into easily and convincingly What might that be?

  A sly grin spread across my face when I thought of the solution.

  Once on dry land I turned aside from the jostling crowd and made my way up through the forests and fields into the low hills that edged the valley, the foothills of the mist-covered mountains that walled off the civilized world from the barbarians outside. I avoided the terraced fields and the houses scattered among them, climbing up under cover of the trees where I could, until I was far enough away from the lake shore to be reasonably certain that no one would recognize me. After that I took less care, scrambling up the bank separating a plot from the one directly above it, walking straight across a field freshly sown with spring flowers, squeezing between the tall fleshy leaves of the maguey plants that edged the field and skirting the wood above it.

  Just beyond that I found what I had been looking for. The ground rose away from me towards the mountains. A track crossed it, a vague but clearly distinguishable line worn by generations of feet making their way between the woods on one side and the bare hillside with its cacti and clumps of coarse greenery on the other. About twenty paces in front of me and right in the middle of the track was a stain: a large round patch of dark grey ash that showed where many fires had been lit over the years.

  I breathed a sight of relief, knowing that my memory had not failed me and I had indeed found the place again after all these years.

  I did not think anyone would be using it now. All the same, I took the precaution of arming myself with a fallen branch from an ash tree before approaching the place. I brandished it in front of me like a club as I stepped out into the last of the evening sunlight, looking constantly from right to left.

  No one disturbed me as I stood over the place, or as I knelt down and, laying the branch aside, plunged both hands into the black ash and started rubbing it vigorously into my face.

  As soon as I was satisfied that my skin must be stained as black as a priest’s I sat on a tree stump a few paces off the track and looked around.

  A layer of cloud was rolling in, threatening to plunge the valley into darkness. The branches above and around me were vague dark shapes against a sky that was not much paler, as indistinct and threatening as the memory of a nightmare. Soon there would be no light at all.

  Far away, something howled, a long, anguished cry that stopped as sharply as the scream of a man falling from a cliff. From much nearer I heard a rustling sound that I could not identify, except that whatever made it must have been bigger than a shrew and smaller than a jaguar.

  Later, I knew, once the priests had sounded the midnight trumpet from the tops of the temples, an undeniably human noise would arise from the vast slumbering city at the centre of the valley floor and drift out across the lake and up to me in the hills: the sound of singing, as the boys and young men of the Houses of Youth raised their voices to show our neighbours and enemies that Aztecs never slept and were always alert. Until then, I had only the creatures of the night for company: weasels, centipedes, badgers, owls – every one of them, in Aztec eyes, a monster, a portent of death.

  I shivered. It was getting colder. The clouds overhead meant there would be no frost, for which I was thankful, although they threatened rain, which would be almost as unpleasant for a man stuck out of doors with no cloak. I tried to reassure myself. As a priest I had been trained to venture into the darkness, to face the horrors that would leave most of my fellow Aztecs petrified, and defeat them. I had fought the spirits that haunted the night air while patrolling these very hills, and had survived, and taken pride in having kept them from the men, women and children sleeping in the valley below. I knew they could be beaten, and besides, they were essential to my plan.

  I waited on my tree stump until my backside grew numb and the cold became so intense that I no longer had the energy to make my teeth chatter. I lost any sense of the passage of time. Unable to see the stars overhead, I had no idea how long it was until midnight, and then I found myself wondering whether I had passed out and missed the trumpets, for it would have been the easiest thing in the darkness for my eyes to close of their own accord for a few moments or half the night without my noticing.

  I sat bolt upright, jerking myself awake.

  There was a new noise among the rustlings and scamperings and snufflings filling the woods close by. I turned my head this way and that, listening intently to make sure I had heard it, and could catch it again. My wait was over.

  Something was moving towards me. It was large, and proceeded more purposefully and less furtively than an animal hunting by night. As I heard the steady but cautious tread approaching, pausing and then moving away as it moved along the track, I knew that my plan appeared to be working. What I was listening to was a priest, making his rounds in the hills circling the city, walking a path so well known that he could find his way along it in the dark. Soon he would stop to make an offering to the gods, burning a bundle of reeds and censing the air with copal resin.

  I walked slowly up the path behind the priest and stopped a few paces back from where I knew he would lay his reeds down
and reach for his fire stick: the patch of ash I had found before nightfall. I was close enough to hear the scratching noise it made as he whirled the stick around to strike sparks from it, while my hand tensed around the knobby lump of wood I had picked up to defend myself with.

  Suddenly the reeds flared into life, sending bright orange flames skyward, blindingly bright after the unrelieved darkness that had surrounded me since sunset, while the flames’ roar and crackle filled my ears.

  I turned aside, trying to blink away the ghostly green shapes that danced in front of my eyes. I forced myself to turn back again, to squint into the fire, knowing that reeds do not burn for long, and I had moments only in which to bring my plan off.

  The priest was clearly visible, or at least his shadow was, a dark shape hunched before his fire.

  I stepped forward slowly and trod on a large thorn.

  I howled. I yelped and shrieked like a demon, jumping up and down on my good foot while my improvised club swung madly through the air.

  The priest leapt to his feet with a shout of alarm. He spun around, brandishing his censer before him, and sending a sweet-smelling, choking cloud towards me.

  ‘Who are you?’ he cried. His voice trembled but he was a brave man and he was standing his ground. ‘What are you? Are you a man, or a demon, or a spirit, or a god?’

  I could not see his face with the firelight behind it. I hoped he could not see mine, although I was still hopping around so much that it cannot have been more than a blur.

  ‘I am Ehecatl!’ I cried. ‘The Lord of the Night Wind!’ I forced myself to stop hopping and planted the toes of my injured foot on the ground. I took another step forward, and walked into the cloud of incense. Suddenly to my troubles was added the urge to sneeze.

  ‘M-my Lord?’ The priest’s voice was that of a young man, terrified but determined to prove himself. I felt a twinge of remorse for what I had to do. I felt as if I were hearing myself, twenty years before, and wondered what he thought he was confronting: a god indeed, or the transfigured soul of a magician, out for a night of mayhem, or maybe just a man, desperate enough to be here on his own and for all he knew as frightened as he was.

  ‘Prostrate yourself!’ I cried, lurching forward on my good foot.

  He ignored my order, instead thrusting his censer towards me again and waving it about to send more waves of scent over me. Now the desire to sneeze was almost overwhelming and I had to clap my free hand over my nose and mouth as I swung my stick, catching the censer and sending it flying.

  The effect was dramatic. The priest howled, and a moment later I had my wish as he threw himself to the ground, cowering before me like a beaten warrior inviting his captor to seize his hair in the ritual gesture of victory and so set him on the road all warriors were meant to desire: the road that led to the temples of Mexico and a flowery death at the hands of the Fire Priest.

  His hair, greasy as priests’ hair often was, since they were not allowed to wash it during fasts, glistened in the firelight. I was glad there was so much of it, as it would cushion the blow and make what I had to do next so much easier.

  I brought the length of ash down on the top of his head with enough force to split the wood and send a jarring pain up my arm.

  My victim slumped silently on to the forest floor.

  I stood there for a moment, not daring to believe it had worked, until he had lain still at my feet for long enough to convince me. Then, with a long, loud groan, I collapsed next to him.

  4

  I lay beside the unconscious priest for a while, enjoying the heat from his fire until it began to diminish and I realized that if I did not exert myself by gathering some more fuel it would soon go out.

  When I tried to stand I remembered the thorn in my foot. I yelped, hopping about until I fell over again. I sat awkwardly, gritting my teeth as I delicately extracted the thing from my tender flesh. Holding it up to the fire, I heard myself grunt in surprised recognition. It was a long, thin cactus spine. My unwitting companion must have dropped it. It would have been an essential tool for him, for bloodletting, offering the gods one’s own precious water of life, which was as much a part of a priest’s life as sleeping and eating. I felt a twinge of envy as I looked down at the figure hunched by the fire, and then remorse as I bent my head to listen to his breathing and check that it was still smooth and even. I had been just like him, once.

  I got to my feet again and hobbled about, collecting sticks and laying them carefully across the smouldering reeds. The flames gradually built up again, the roar and crackle subsiding to the duller, steadier sound of a well-made fire. It would burn till morning, I judged, or almost; in any event, long enough to keep the coyotes and the cold at bay.

  I turned back to the felled priest.

  ‘Now,’ I said, as I proceeded to strip the man’s clothes from him, ‘I want you to understand that there’s a good reason for this.’ I lied. The less he understood the better. ‘After all,’ I added, as with some distaste I tugged at the loose ends of his breechcloth, ‘it won’t do you any good if you complain. Your friends will only think you’ve been at the sacred mushrooms!’

  Fortunately the only answer I got was a loud snore.

  I stripped my own breechcloth off and then, on impulse, tied it around the priest’s loins so that he was at least no worse dressed than I had been. It is no easy matter dressing an inert body, and it took longer than I would have expected, but having been so recently left naked I could all too easily feel for a man forced to stumble back to the city with his face burning and his hands locked together protectively over his private parts. It was going to be difficult enough for him to explain himself as it was.

  As I finished dressing myself in his clothes, pulling the cord of his tobacco pouch over my head and tying the ends of his black cloak over my right shoulder, I looked around me once more, squinting through the trees and up at the sky. I still had no clue as to how much time I had before dawn, and before the hunt resumed for my son. I could happily have wrapped the priest’s cloak around me, curled up and gone to sleep by the comforting warmth of the fire, but I could not risk losing the time, not to mention the chance that the man I had hit over the head might wake up before I did.

  I looked down at myself. My face itched under its coating of ash. My cloak fell about me like a black cloud. Suddenly, for the first time in many years, I felt that I belonged to the darkness, to the high, secret places the priests frequented, to the hills by night and the unlit niches at the backs of temples.

  There was something missing.

  It took me a moment to work out what it was, and then I knew, because I could still feel it, digging into my palm. When I opened my hand I could see it lying there, glistening faintly in the firelight: the maguey spine I had trodden on, with my own blood still drying on it.

  Then I understood what I had to do, and it was right, not merely to perfect my disguise, but to give his due to whatever god the priest had meant to sacrifice his blood to. Without hesitation I drove the spine into each of my earlobes in turn, twisting it until I could feel the liquid warmth of my blood flowing down my jawline.

  The pain was slight, nothing compared to the sensation that came over me in its wake: a strange contentment, as if I were making a kind of peace with the man I had once been. As I stared at the bloodied thorn in my palm I grasped the feeling and savoured it. For a morning, perhaps as much as a day, I could be a priest again, dedicated to the gods, my standing among the Aztecs secure and recognized, respected, even held in awe, by anyone I was likely to meet.

  I held the thorn up by my thumb and forefinger, watching it glisten in the firelight. I did not know whether the man lying at my feet had made his offering or not. I knew that he would have kept the thorn, intending to return it to the Priest House, where it, along with many others, would be stuck in a ball of straw and placed reverentially in a stone casket. That was not going to happen now but I did the best I could. I looked up at the utterly black sky, towards the t
hirteen heavens, and prayed to the god I knew best, the one I had been dedicated to from birth.

  ‘O Tezcatlipoca,’ I whispered. ‘O Lord, I was your servant once. Now I am again – for a little while. You know you could crush me like a beetle without an instant’s thought. I’m asking you to save it till tomorrow, do you understand? I’m your man today. I’ve given my blood to you. Don’t let me down now.’

  I could hear my voice faltering. I was only too aware that the god I was praying to loved nothing better than letting people down.

  I waved the thorn in a vaguely easterly direction, to scatter a drop or two of blood towards the Sun, on the assumption that he would be rising soon, and then, for good measure, threw it in the fire. The prone figure curled up beside it caught my eye. I looked down at him for a moment and then turned back towards the heavens.

  ‘Oh, and say a few words to whichever god this poor bugger serves, won’t you?’

  There being nothing more I could do for my victim, I left him and headed downhill, back towards the city.

  I had not gone more than a few paces before I began to feel a little less charitable towards the unwitting donor of my disguise. By the time I had come within sight of the lake and the unmistakable spectacle of my home city, the light of countless temple fires glowing steadily while their reflections danced on the surface of the water, I was cursing him.

  ‘Bastard!’ I muttered, my fingernails digging furiously inside my purloined breechcloth. ‘Lousy bastard! I hope the sodding coyotes chew your balls off!’

  The priest had been on a fast. I had no idea how long it had been since he had last washed, but it must have been many days. I could have sworn that some of his fleas were as large as small dogs, and they were clearly relishing their change of diet.

  I had half a mind to give up the pretence of being a priest there and then, to discard my stolen costume and throw myself, naked, into the lake, but I restrained myself, gritting my teeth against the relentless itching and telling myself that I had been trained to endure worse than this.