Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I began lamely.

  ‘Oh, well, you’d better come in, then. I love stories!’ She swung on the doorframe, tilting her body forward so that her breasts pressed against the fabric of her blouse. ‘I’m sure yours will be fascinating!’ she added in a throaty voice, before detaching herself from the doorway. She spun around so that the hem of her skirt flared around her calves and tripped lightly back over her threshold.

  I followed her through into the courtyard, feeling a little dazed. Having been a priest from childhood and then a slave, I was unused to this sort of invitation.

  The place did not appear to have been swept since my previous visit. I looked briefly from the scattered maize cobs, squash seeds and tortilla crumbs to the spotless beauty who presided over them and tried to make sense of it, but I could not.

  ‘Sorry it’s a mess,’ the woman said carelessly. ‘We keep meaning to do something with it, but with Idle’s burial rites and everything, well, you know …’

  I looked for a clean corner of the courtyard to squat in, despaired of finding one and then reasoned that it hardly mattered since my stolen mantle had not been clean in the first place. Lowering myself to the ground, I said: ‘Surely, at a time like this, it’s all the more important to attend to the sweeping?’ I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. There was no need to stay in character, and I thought I sounded sanctimonious.

  She clucked impatiently. ‘You sound like my sister-in-law! Marigold was like that. The gods this, the gods that – well, just look at this place! I don’t mind a few little statuettes round about, they can be nice, but you can’t move for the things, and it’s just as bad indoors.’

  I gaped at her. For a moment I seemed to have mislaid all the words in my head, and then when I managed to muster a few I struggled to find the breath to say them. ‘You can’t … you can’t really …’

  That drew a peal of laughter, swiftly hushed with a slim hand over her mouth. ‘I’m sorry! Have I shocked you?’

  ‘You don’t fear the gods,’ I gasped. This was unheard of. The gods ruled our world, not in the remote way of an emperor governing a subject town and saying who should be in charge of it and what tribute it should pay, but immediately and directly. We could drink because Chalchihuitlicue made water flow through the aqueduct. We ate because Tlaloc made rain fall on our fields and Cinteotl and Chicome Coatl made the maize cobs ripen. We did not freeze to death because our own Huitzilopochtli made the Sun rise. We were born only because Tezcatlipoca put us in our mothers’ wombs. Nobody could be expected to love the dangerous beings that governed our affairs. Sometimes desperation drove people to do things that the gods might disapprove of, and we expected to pay for them afterwards. Not to fear them, however, smacked of insanity.

  She was still laughing. ‘Of course I’m afraid of the gods. If I want something I’ll be up at the temple with flowers or quails or tobacco or whatever else the priests tell me to bring, and maybe it’ll work or maybe not, but let’s be realistic. The gods don’t care about us, and we can’t make them do what we want. I’m quite sure no god cares one way or the other whether this place is swept out or not. You know what I think? I think the only reason we’re told sweeping is a sacred duty is because it’s women’s work and all our priests and rulers are men!’

  I shivered. A cloud had passed over the Sun. Its shadow caught my eye and prompted me to look up at a sky that was rapidly filling up with grey. ‘Looks as if Tlaloc might have heard you,’ I muttered. ‘It’s going to rain soon.’

  ‘The roof doesn’t leak. Now, you were going to tell me why you’re dressed like that.’

  I had had time to think of an answer to that one. ‘I had a row with my master. He wasn’t happy that I came back empty handed, the last time I was here. In fact … well, it’s not the first time, and he was on the point of having me sold as a sacrifice. So I ran away. You can see why I didn’t want to be recognized.’

  ‘What are you doing back here, then? It’s nothing to do with my brother-in-law at all, is it?’

  ‘I thought if I could get my master’s stuff back for him anyway he might forgive me. I haven’t got anywhere else to go, you see.’

  Butterfly stood with her back to the wall of the room she and Skinny had emerged from during my previous visit, leaning nonchalantly against it next to the doorway, which was screened off as before by a cloth. There was something unwomanly about her pose. She had one leg drawn up so that the knee strained the thin fabric of her skirt and the foot rested against the plaster behind her. She plucked one-handed at a loose thread in the hem of her blouse as she looked down at me, her eyebrows raised speculatively.

  ‘What makes you think we can help? Skinny and I told you, we don’t know anything about this costume your master’s supposed to have bought, let alone what might have become of it.’ She spoke mildly, like a young mother chiding a small child. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t believe us.’

  ‘I didn’t believe you because you were lying!’ I snapped, suddenly goaded out of civility. ‘I have it on the best authority that the Emperor himself ordered Skinny to work on the raiment of Quetzalcoatl. The Emperor! Montezuma! Now, you didn’t just happen to forget about him, did you?’

  I had to admire the woman’s composure. She looked at me steadily, her only reaction to my outburst being to form a silent ‘O’ with her lips.

  ‘Are you going to tell me the truth, now?’ I added. ‘Or should I take my enquiries up with the Palace?’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare!’ she sneered.

  Since she was absolutely right, I tried something else. ‘Your brother-in-law was murdered – did you know?’ I said brutally. ‘Whoever killed him has the costume. Doesn’t that matter to you?’

  ‘I know about Idle,’ she replied matter-of-factly ‘The parish police told us about it three days ago – just after you left here, actually. We’d reported him missing and they came on the off-chance that the body might be his. Skinny went to Amantlan to see if he could identify it. I expect you know what he found. You heard his brother was cut to pieces and stuffed in … Oh, it’s too nauseating to talk about! His face was unrecognizable, of course, even after they’d cleaned it up. I was surprised Skinny agreed even to look at it, but he thought it was his duty.’

  ‘How did he know it was his brother?’

  ‘They’d found a charm of his, a little figure of Tezcatlipoca. It was in his left hand. Idle always carried it with him for protection when he played Patolli.’

  I remembered the object I had seen in the body’s hand. Patolli was a game, a race around a cross-shaped board on which a vast fortune could easily be lost on a single bad throw of the beans we used to reckon moves. This was where Tezcatlipoca, the Enemy on Both Sides, belonged, rolling the beans one way or the other or, once in a lifetime, standing them on end out of sheer caprice, just so that he could amuse himself watching the consternation on the other players’ faces as the man who had made the freakish throw gathered up their stakes and left with them.

  ‘So he was a gambler?’

  ‘And a lot else besides!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You asked whether Idle’s death mattered to me. Aren’t you wondering why I’m not in mourning? Look!’ She detached herself from the wall and stood with her back to me while she lifted her hair with both hands and let it fall, cascading over her shoulders as softly as falling oak leaves in autumn. When she turned back towards me her eyes blazed defiantly. ‘See? I washed it just this morning! And do you think we sacrificed a dog for him to take with him? No way! He can find his own way through the Nine Hells!’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He brought us down to this, that’s what!’ Her gesture, a furious sweep of her arm, took in the courtyard, the house, and somehow the whole run-down district beyond the walls. ‘My husband’s work went to pieces all over again, because of him.’

  I looked nervously up at the sky, where dark clouds were swelling and swirling
about each other in a stately dance. A downpour was going to begin at any moment. I thought anxiously of the thin coating of ash on my face. A real priest would have worn pitch, which was waterproof. What I had would turn into a mess of muddy grey streaks as soon as a few fat raindrops hit it, and that would be the end of my disguise.

  ‘His brother stopped him working?’ I asked absently. ‘How did he do that?’

  She hesitated. She took a couple of quick steps away from me and then a couple back and sighed, and then, at last, knelt in front of me, sweeping her skirt under her knees with a brisk gesture.

  ‘Skinny went to Amantlan when he was a boy. It was his fate, you understand? He had the right birthday, and he had the talent. He grew up there, with this old couple who were never going to have any children of their own. When my husband was the sort of age when most boys are out fishing or hunting frogs on the lake or larking about in the fields pretending to learn how to use a digging-stick, he was being taught how to mix glue and trim feathers. He went straight from there to the Priest House. I don’t know if you can imagine what that place is like.’

  ‘I know. This wouldn’t have been a disguise, once.’

  ‘Really?’ That made her raise her eyebrows. ‘How interesting! You must tell me all about it! But Skinny, now, he never forgot his time at the House of Tears. He didn’t talk about it much to me, and it wasn’t as if he surrounded himself with idols, like his sister-in-law, but it was always there, at the back of his mind.’

  ‘You’re telling me he never had any youth. He grew up under the influence of the featherworkers and then the priests. Let me guess what happened then. He met his brother, who showed him what he’d been missing all these years.’

  She looked down, peering long and hard into her lap. It was as if she were searching for the loose thread she had been playing with earlier, as her fingers strayed towards it again.

  ‘He was working for Angry then,’ she informed me in a low voice. ‘His work hadn’t been going well. To be honest, it hadn’t been going at all. He had nowhere else to go: the couple who adopted him were both dead and he had always refused to work with anyone else, so he was on his own. But it was hard for him. As hard as anything could be, throwing in his lot with his rival. I don’t suppose he would have done it if he hadn’t had me to support.’ To my surprise she sniffed loudly, and brushed a hand swiftly across her face as though sweeping away a tear.

  ‘But he did it. He went to Angry, and Angry gave him work, and he just sat there meekly in the corner and got on with it, and I kept telling him that it didn’t matter, that one day things would be better and he’d be able to make something of his own again – something to astound them all, the way he used to. It would have happened, you know. It would, except …’ She ended there on a little choking sound, but I could guess the rest.

  ‘Except,’ I suggested gently, ‘that his brother turned up.’

  She looked up. Her eyes were not glistening but she blinked several times, as if something were pricking them behind their lids. ‘I don’t know why he came when he did. He’d had nothing to do with Skinny and I’d never met him. I think it must have been getting difficult for Idle here. He’d been neglecting the family plot.’

  ‘I guess he hadn’t realized you’d fallen on hard times yourselves.’

  That provoked a bitter laugh. ‘Of course not! And he wouldn’t have believed it if we’d told him. My husband was a featherworker, so naturally he was rich.’ She sighed. ‘Idle was the worst kind of beggar, the kind that thinks you owe him whatever he asks for because you’ve got it and he hasn’t and you’re family. In the end Skinny got so fed up with his demands for food and drink, and even cloth and cocoa beans that we knew he was going to use for gambling, that he made Angry take him on as hired help, as one of his conditions for going to work with him himself.’

  ‘And the arrangement didn’t work.’

  ‘Skinny just found it impossible to work with his brother around. It would have been easy enough for him just to squat there all day stitching feathers on to a frame, but that bloody man just wouldn’t leave him alone, always asking him to try some mushrooms or have a crafty nip of sacred wine or join his friends for a game of Patolli. For a man brought up the way my husband was, frustrated in his work and with nothing to look forward to but mindless toil in someone else’s workshop, it must have been impossible to resist.’

  ‘Skinny came back here,’ I recalled. ‘Whose idea was that? Did Angry throw him out, or what?’ I dismissed that idea as soon as it occurred to me, remembering then that Idle had become more to Angry than a hired hand. By the time he left the craftsman’s house, Skinny’s brother was Angry’s son-in-law

  ‘Oh, no. Throw his own daughter out? What kind of father would do that? Especially one like Angry. He used to go around as if the air she breathed was perfumed. No, he wouldn’ t have thrown Idle and Marigold out. It was her idea: she told her father the best thing for her and Idle was to get away. She persuaded him they should come back here. She said honest toil in the fields was what they needed – it was what Idle had been born to, it was what his father and grandfathers had done, and the only way of life for an Aztec was the one his ancestors had known, plying their trade or walking around up to his ankles in shit in their fields or whatever, and honouring their gods. Above all, honouring their bloody gods!’

  I looked around at the statuettes peering down at us from their niches in the walls. ‘She was the devout one.’

  ‘Oh, wasn’t she just! It was never going to work, but try telling her that. Try telling her her husband didn’t know one end of a digging-stick from another and couldn’t care less anyway So they ended up here, with nothing to live on except what her father gave her as a parting gift, and no means of earning a living.’

  ‘So how come you and Skinny followed them?’

  It took her a little while to answer. She frowned and looked away, as if she were nervous about the weather too. I waited.

  Eventually she said: ‘All right. You wanted the truth. You know most of it anyway’

  ‘It had something to do with the costume?’ I prompted.

  She sighed. ‘It was just before Idle and Marigold left. Skinny had disappeared. He slipped away, just before dawn, without telling anyone where he was going, and was gone all day I thought he’d gone on a binge, but Idle wasn’t with him, and when he did come back he was stone cold sober. Excited, though – almost feverish.

  ‘He told me what had happened that night. He’d been summoned before the Emperor himself! Montezuma had told him what he wanted, and asked him lots of questions about how he’d set about the work. I don’t think I’d ever seen Skinny so enthusiastic about anything – by the time he got home, he was really fired up. It was … well, you know what it was. The biggest thing he’d ever done – probably the biggest thing any featherworker ever did.

  ‘But it had to be kept secret. Montezuma told him nobody, especially the other featherworkers, was allowed to know about it. Not even Angry, although Skinny was working for him.’

  ‘So you left.’ It made sense: by returning to Atecocolecan Skinny could escape the prying eyes of his own employer and the rest of his fellow craftsmen. I doubted that the field hands and day-labourers of his home parish would take much notice of what he was up to. ‘And Skinny worked on the costume here, in the peace and quiet. All right, how did Kindly get hold of it?’

  She laughed mirthlessly ‘How do you think? He stole it!’

  I stared at her, speechless.

  ‘Your master lied to you, slave! He didn’t buy it from us. He must have got wind of it somehow – maybe Angry found out and let something slip – and thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.’

  ‘No,’ I protested, ‘that can’t be right! Remember, he sent me here to buy it back from you …’

  ‘Because someone stole it from him! Funny, isn’t it, a thief’s house getting burgled? But your coming here was the first we knew of where the costume had gone. Now can you und
erstand why we weren’t exactly keen to talk about it?’

  If what she said was true – that the work Montezuma had commissioned and sworn her husband to secrecy about had gone missing twice, once from his own house – then I had to agree that it was not something they would want the whole World to know.

  ‘What about Idle?’ I asked. ‘And his wife? He’s dead, and I know whoever has the costume is connected with that, and she’s missing …’ I let my voice tail off as I worked out the answer to my own question.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Butterfly sniffed. ‘He found out where it was and stole it from Kindly. Then Marigold killed him and fled. You want to find the raiment of the god? Find my sister-in-law!’

  A peal of thunder sounded overhead. Tlaloc was making his presence felt.

  I looked up at a sky that had turned the colour of slate. A large raindrop hit me in the eye. A moment later they were falling all around us. Little dark discs were forming and spreading in the dust at our feet and moisture was streaking and spattering the whitewashed walls.

  ‘Better go in,’ I muttered, rising and automatically heading for the nearest room, the one I had seen Butterfly and Skinny emerge from on my previous visit.

  The woman was there before I was, barring the doorway

  ‘No! Not in there! The other room – go in the other room. Please.’

  I froze, astonished.

  She had turned her face up towards mine and was staring at me, her eyes still unblinking despite the rain whose stinging blows I could feel even through the hair on top of my head. Her cheeks glowed with something more than make-up and her breathing was suddenly quick and shallow. Her teeth were bared and her fists clenched and there was something in her voice I had not heard before, the kind of tremor you hear from the throat of a person fighting to master rage or terror.