Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  ‘Sorry,’ I said mildly. ‘The other room, then.’ I turned back, towards the room that led through to the street, and added, because I felt I ought to add something, ‘I didn’t know.’

  I barely heard her let out a long breath, like a sigh of relief, and then she was by my side, hurrying as I was to get in out of the rain. ‘No, it’s my fault.’ Her tone had changed again. The moment of tension had gone now, releasing in its wake a flood of words as hasty as a small bird’s chirping. ‘It’s just that that room … well, it’s a terrible mess. Much worse than this courtyard. It was my brother-in-law’s room, the one he shared with Marigold. He never let us clean it, you see, and there are things in there I wouldn’t want anyone to see. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘Um, yes,’ I said, with a quick glance over my shoulder. The already sodden cloth over the doorway flapped lethargically under the beating it was getting from the heavens. I did not understand what she meant, except that beyond that scrap of material lay something she would fight to keep me from seeing. Perhaps whatever Idle had kept in there was enough to spell disaster for the remaining members of his household if it were found. I was going to get to the bottom of that later, I decided, but I had other questions for now.

  ‘Tell me about Idle and Marigold.’ As we ducked into the shelter of the house’s front room, I had to raise my voice to make it heard over the rain hammering on the thin stucco roof. ‘What makes you so sure she’d have killed her husband?’

  She rolled her eyes as if in despair at my ignorance. It was the kind of gesture I might have seen on the face of one of my teachers at the House of Tears while he explained to me, for the third time, that the plant for curing leeches was Amolli, not Yiamolli, which was good only for dandruff. ‘What do you think? It wasn’t just drink and mushrooms and gambling with him. He couldn’t keep his hands off the girls – or any other bit of him, for that matter! For some reason she managed to turn a blind eye to it. I suppose she was flattered when Idle started courting her and didn’t want to believe what she must have been able to see for herself. Getting married didn’t change him – it never does. He tried it on with half the women in Angry’s household before he came here. Maybe that had something to do with why Marigold wanted to bring us all here, to get him away from temptation. If that was it, it didn’t work! Almost the first thing he did after we arrived was to proposition me!’ Her voice became shrill with outrage and she had to pause and take a couple of breaths before going on. ‘Of course, I told him what would happen if he didn’t behave himself.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But what I think is, Marigold caught him with some local lass. That wouldn’t have been so very difficult for him, you see. He’s been boasting so much about his connections with the featherworkers over the years that he’s made himself quite famous, in a pathetic, parochial sort of way And it’s not as if the men around here … Well,’ she concluded primly, ‘it’s a pretty rough sort of place.’

  ‘So you think Marigold finally had enough.’

  ‘I think she had too good a chance to miss! She found out about the costume, somehow, and suddenly there was her opportunity – to get rid of her bastard of a husband and get all the money she could ever need, in one go!’

  I frowned. ‘Angry told me he thought she was pregnant. Would she really kill her child’s father?’

  Butterfly laughed.

  ‘Only a man would ask that!’

  3

  The shower did not last long. The sky was brightening already by the time Butterfly had finished speaking, and a few shafts of sunlight were falling on the cloth over the doorway, converting its darkness into a dirty mottled brown.

  She got up and glanced through the doorway. ‘It’s stopping.’

  I could still hear tapping and creaking sounds from above me. I wondered how well made the roof was, although a brief, anxious look up at it showed no suspicious cracks or bulges. I tried to remember whether any trees had spread their branches directly overhead, to take over shedding water when the clouds had finished.

  ‘You may as well go.’ She tried to sound regretful even as she reinforced her words by crossing the room to look out of the street entrance. ‘I doubt if Skinny will be back today at all. He was meant to be going to Tlatelolco market, but he said something about seeing some friends in Amantlan as well.’

  I was tempted to argue, but there seemed little point. I had a lot of questions, some of whose answers, I thought, must lie in this house, but I could see I was not going to get them by pestering Skinny’s wife. I believed practically nothing she had told me. I was convinced that the key to everything – the whereabouts of the costume, the identity of Idle’s killer and whatever had become of my son – lay in the room across the courtyard. If she was not going to show me what was in there then I would have to find out for myself.

  All the same, I could not help admiring her, not just for the elegant silhouette she made as I watched her in the doorway but for her command of herself. There was no way I was going to get her to tell me anything she had not already decided I should know.

  Besides, those curious, alarming sounds were still coming from the roof. They were not loud and the woman seemed too intent on ushering me quickly out of her house to notice them, but they were undeniably real. I wondered whether the moisture had got into the beams and swollen them, or whether there was some other explanation.

  As I left the house, I looked around me quickly. Directly to my front, running alongside the path I stood on, ran a narrow canal. At its end I saw the labourers I had noticed when I had first come here, still toiling over the plot whose edges they were reinforcing. They had finished their joyful, rhythmic hurling of hammerheads against wooden piles and were were now silently engaged in the back-breaking work of heaving rocks and tumbling them into place to form the foundations of their artificial island.

  Skinny’s house abutted straight on to the deserted property on its right-hand side, a poor-looking thatched hovel surrounded by tall, dripping weeds. Around the corner on the other side was a little open space. A stumpy-looking willow grew there, one or two of its polled branches ending just short of the edge of the roof, so that I could see they had not been dripping on it.

  After a quick glance in both directions I decided to go for the willow.

  Keeping my back pressed against the outside wall of the house, I edged towards it, slithering around the corner like a snake winding itself around a rock. I put myself between the house and the willow’s trunk and looked up.

  A branch made a fork in the wood right over my head. It was perfectly placed, and so was I. When I heard the scraping noise from the roof I moved without even waiting for the foot to appear.

  I leapt upward and had the ankle in my grasp before whoever was up there had got so much as a toehold on the branch. I did not need to pull. I just let my weight drag us both down, and with a shocked howl my victim tumbled from his perch and crashed in a heap at my feet.

  He was up in an instant, snarling at me like a cornered ocelot, too furious for a moment even to think about running away. This was just as well as I could see straight away that he was a youngster and I would have had trouble catching him. I took the opportunity to lunge towards him, to seize him by the arm or the hair and get him on the ground and subdued, but two things made me stop with my arm hanging in midair.

  The first was that the fight went out of him. As he stared at his assailant I saw his eyes widen and his jaw drop and his hands, which were raised and clawed for self-defence, fell limply to his side. An instant later he was on his knees in the mud with his head bowed, whimpering with fright. It took me a moment to realize what had happened and then I nearly ruined it by laughing. Probably for the last time, my pathetic disguise had worked, and the fake aura of a priest had overcome him.

  The second thing that stayed my hand was that I recognized the lad.

  I could not have said who I might have expected to find skulking around on Skinny’s roof, but one of
the last names to occur to me would have been that of Angry the featherworker’s nephew, Crayfish.

  ‘You’d better tell me what you thought you were doing,’ I said sternly.

  ‘Please, sir,’ the boy snivelled, his face averted so that he seemed to be talking to my feet, ‘I didn’t mean any harm. I was just looking for … just looking for …’ He was a poor liar. In his place I would have worked out my story in advance.

  I looked down at him speculatively. The temptation to carry on acting as a priest and bully the lad into confessing everything was strong, but I knew it was not going to work. Once the shock of being plucked from the roof had worn off he would have no more difficulty in recognizing me than Butterfly had. Besides, I was not anxious to draw a crowd, and the sight of him cowering on the floor might well do just that.

  ‘“You were just looking for”,’ I repeated. ‘Fine. Up you get. You can explain it all on the way back to Amantlan. And mind you do if you don’t want me telling your uncle where I found you!’

  That made him stare. ‘My uncle? How do you know … Oh!’

  I reached down and seized his arm, not roughly but firmly enough to get him on his feet. ‘Now each of us knows who he’s talking to, shall we go?’ I turned to leave, keeping hold of the boy with my arm outstretched in case he was tempted to fight me after all.

  He hesitated, biting his lip, his head darting about as if looking for somewhere to run. ‘I don’t understand. You were at our house – why are you dressed like that? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just move,’ I hissed, ‘unless you want us both to get caught!’

  His eyes widened again at that. Then he seemed to relax, as though catching the sense that I might, after all, be a fellow conspirator.

  ‘You promise you won’t tell my uncle?’

  I made a threatening noise and tugged his arm. He started walking.

  ‘Are you going to let go of me?’

  I did. ‘Just remember where I’ll go if you try to run away. Now, are you going to tell me what you were up to? The truth, mind.’

  ‘I was looking for Marigold.’

  He was still a growing boy. As we walked the top of his head came to the level of my chin, but he was watching the ground in front of him, so that he seemed shorter. As I looked down at him I wondered how old he was: eleven or twelve, perhaps. I had thought him older when I had met him before, in his uncle’s presence, when he had seemed to show the sort of care for the older man that I might have expected of a wife or an elder sister. Angry’s wife was dead, however. I wondered how great a void Crayfish’s cousin had left in her father’s household.

  I also remembered another young man who had seemed to me old beyond his years. My son was older than this boy, but not by much. I had not seen him grow up, and suddenly the vision I had of us walking and talking together like this, as we never had, brought tears to my eyes and made me break my stride.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I swallowed once, blinked a few times and turned back to Crayfish. ‘You were fond of your cousin.’

  ‘We all were.’ The boy sighed. ‘After my aunt died she took over the household. She cared for the idols – she loved doing that – and made the tortillas and swept and made clothes for my uncle, just the way a wife would have. She was kind to me. She looked after me when I first came to my uncle’s house. She was really more like a sister to me than a cousin – even after she met him.’

  There was no need to ask who he meant. ‘You know Idle’s dead.’

  ‘Good riddance!’ the boy spat.

  ‘Careful what you say, lad,’ I cautioned him quietly. ‘People might think you had something to do with it!’

  ‘Me and everyone else he ever met!’ he cried with spirit. ‘The only person I ever knew with a good word to say about him was his wife! Only the gods know what she saw in him.’

  ‘Did you hear any of what Skinny’s wife said to me?’ I asked. ‘She thought your cousin killed her husband because he was …’ I wondered how worldly the youngster was. ‘He was treating her badly.’

  ‘Screwing around, you mean.’

  I rolled my eyes in disbelief, wondering whether all young boys were like this and my upbringing had been unusually sheltered.

  ‘I didn’t hear what she said. I don’t believe it. I know her – even if she’d finally realized what her husband was like, she’d never commit murder. It would be a crime!’

  ‘Obviously,’ I said drily, but I understood. He thought someone as pious as his cousin incapable of any transgression. ‘But the best of people can do terrible things when they’re desperate.’

  ‘Anyway, why would she need to kill him? She could just have gone back to her father. Uncle Angry would have taken her back, and she knew it. They’d have divorced eventually, and that would have been that. Why would she risk killing him and getting caught? What would have happened to her then?’

  I cast my mind back to the law I had been taught in the House of Tears. ‘If she wasn’t put to death she’d probably have been handed over to Butterfly as a slave.’

  ‘So she’d be worse off than ever!’

  ‘Someone would have to find her first.’ I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I take it she and Butterfly didn’t get on?’

  The youth grimaced. ‘It didn’t help that Marigold’s husband kept making eyes at his sister-in-law – who didn’t do anything to put him off! And Butterfly would go making snide comments about the idols, which upset my cousin.’

  ‘She may not have been too happy about your cousin’s cosy chats with her husband either,’ I reminded him.

  ‘I’m sure they weren’t doing anything wrong!’ he said hastily. ‘It’s just that, well, I think Marigold told him things he needed to hear. Do you know what I mean? About how important his work was, how much the gods valued it. Butterfly wouldn’t have understood any of that.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know what to say about Butterfly She seemed to look after her husband well enough, but none of us ever liked her much. My uncle seems to think she’s up to no good, but I can’t get him to say what.’

  ‘He didn’t know you were going to Atecocolecan.’

  ‘No. He thinks I’m meeting a friend who’s at the House of Tears, another featherworker’s boy.’ I suspected he meant Stammerer. ‘Going to Idle’s house was my idea, just to see if I could find anything out. To tell you the truth, Uncle Angry has hardly spoken to me in the last couple of days. He’s been hiding in his workshop, not talking to anyone, not letting anyone in, only coming out for his meals. I know he’s brooding over Marigold. It would help him so much if I could find out where she was.’

  Crayfish and I parted company at the border of Amantlan. Just before he set off home, he suggested I lose my disguise. He told me my soot was starting to flake off. When I looked down I saw that my hands and legs were beginning to look grimy rather than sinister and I was shedding flecks of dark ash the way fruit trees shed blossom in the spring.

  Deciding to take the boy’s advice, I looked for a secluded spot, a quiet, narrow canal where I could wash unobserved. Thinking I had found just the place, I turned a corner, only to discover that someone else had had the same idea.

  He had just finished relieving himself into the water and was straightening his clothes. He was dressed from neck to ankle in green cotton, and his feet were clad in broad sandals with over-long straps. A sword and a shield lay beside him, and his hair stood up upon his head and flowed in a dark mane down the back of his neck. He had his back to me, but before he turned around I knew who he was: an Otomi warrior.

  I stood quite still while he looked me over. I wanted to run, but all my legs seemed able to do was tremble violently, and I knew I would be caught before I had gone five paces. All I could do was trust in my disguise.

  I recognized him as one of the captain’s entourage. I was thankful that he was not the captain himself, or Fox, either of whom I was sure would have recognized me. I wondered where his monstrous, one-eyed chief was.
/>
  ‘What are you doing here?’ the warrior demanded eventually

  I remembered to disguise my voice, mumbling the way priests sometimes did, owing to having drawn so much blood from their tongues. ‘The same as you, by the look of it.’

  He bent down to pick up his sword and shield. ‘There isn’t a latrine near here. It always feels better to go in the canals in this part of the city, anyway!’ He was obviously from Tenochtitlan, besides having a warrior’s contempt for the merchants and craftsmen who lived in the surrounding houses. He looked at my robes. ‘What’s a priest of Huitzilopochtli doing in Tlatelolco?’

  ‘Official business,’ I said casually. ‘I might ask you the same question, though.’

  He made an impatient gesture with his sword. ‘We’re looking for a couple of runaways – a boy and an escaped slave. Seen anything like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, report it if you do. My captain is very keen to get hold of the slave in particular. He led us a merry dance over in Tlacopan, and he’s going to be wearing his own guts for a breechcloth when we find him!’ Suddenly he was looking at me intently. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

  I gulped. ‘I don’t think so. I serve the god at his great temple in the Heart of the World – maybe you’ve seen me at a festival.’

  He frowned. ‘No, it’s not that. I don’t know, your face just looks familiar, that’s all.’

  I summoned up a nervous laugh. ‘Hard to say under all this black stuff, isn’t it?’

  He peered at me for a long moment, while I fought to control my terror. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

  ‘Can’t stand here all day,’ he said briskly, stepping around me. ‘Got to get after those bastards. It’s a year’s supply of tobacco for the man who catches them!’