by Simon Levack
‘Come here,’ she said huskily.
In the instant he saw the woman Quetzalcoatl had seemed rooted to the floor. As her fingers stretched towards him, their tips brushing the hard skin of his jewelled mask, he seemed to waken. With a muffled cry he threw his arms out in front of him as if to push her away. He stepped back. The sole of one sandal trampled my ankle. I howled in pain and the god nearly fell over me. He stumbled, caught himself in time and backed towards the doorway.
‘What’s the matter?’ cried the woman. ‘Don’t you want to … Come back!’
He blundered into the edge of the doorway. For a moment he seemed a blind, billowing confusion of cloth and feathers and sparkling jewels, and then he was gone, his inarticulate cries echoing around the courtyard.
‘Wait!’ she screamed. Still naked, she ran after him. ‘Don’t go! Tell me what’s wrong!’
I forced myself to raise my head so that my ears could track her voice through the courtyard, and beyond it. I heard it dip as she ran through the other room and rise again as she reached the street outside, and I marvelled at how shrill and ugly it sounded, and how desperate she must have been to have run clear out of the house without anything on.
My head started to spin. I forced myself to concentrate, thinking I had to stay awake, I had to get up and get away before the woman came back, but the pain and the sick feeling were too strong for me, and I blacked out.
SIX MONKEY
1
I woke to an angry buzzing. It came from one side of my head and then the other, as though its source were moving in circles around my head, and it was only when it settled on my nose and made me sneeze that I realized that I was being inspected by a fly.
My eyes snapped open.
It took me a moment to recall where I was. My head was still full of the sights and sounds of the night, and the strange, disjointed dreams that had come upon me while I slept. I shook my head briskly, dislodging the fly and creating a spasm of pain at the back of my skull.
What had happened to me, and what had I seen? Vague images of the god Quetzalcoatl and a beautiful woman filled my head.
I remembered a tale of Topilztin, the infinitely wise and good last king of the Toltecs. He shared the attributes of Quetzalcoatl, the god whose high priest he was and whose name he bore. He had fallen prey to the malice of Tezcatlipoca, his divine patron’s enemy. Tezcatlipoca had visited him in the guise of an old woman, a healer, and urged sacred wine upon him, saying it was for the good of his soul. Try just a drop on the tip of your tongue, the old woman had wheedled. He had refused; he knew that the taste would lead to a drink, and a drink to another, and so on until his soul was drowned in the stuff and lost for good.
At last he had assented to having a drop of it placed on his forehead, and from that moment he was lost.
Gourd after gourd he had downed, and then he had called his sister to him and had her taste the stuff too, and then, in a drunken frenzy, they had lain together.
Afterwards, consumed with remorse, he had left the city of Tollan, fleeing to exile in the East, never to be seen again.
Did this, I wondered, give meaning to the vision I had seen? Until that day, Quetzalcoatl had been celibate as well as temperate. Had the god, tempted by what had brought the man down, chosen to run away rather than risk the same fate?
I had come looking for the raiment of Quetzalcoatl, convinced I would find it in this room. Instead, I had seen the god himself. Or had I seen a man dressed as the god? Had I seen Idle’s killer?
I began to understand Stammerer’s fear and anger when he had described what he had seen from the top of the pyramid in Amantlan. Perhaps I had seen a man wearing a costume, but there was a power invested in the raiment of a god that belonged to the god himself and must not be misused, and I had felt it.
Daylight fell as a bright oblong across the floor and bathed the rest of the room in twilight. Still, it was not easy to see. My vision was blurred and it took a conscious effort to get my eyes to focus. With some difficulty I managed to lift my head off the floor. It came away with a sticky, tearing noise and an instant of blinding agony I squeezed my eyes shut against the pain and slapped my palms against the floor to brace myself and stop myself falling back. I took several deep breaths until the throbbing and nausea had diminished and I felt able to move again.
‘Got to get out, Yaotl.’
I got to my knees and then, gingerly, to my feet, watching in puzzlement as several lengths of severed rope fell about me. Swaying a little, I looked down, noting the rope, the large patch of freshly dried blood where my head had been, and the fact that I was naked.
‘Where are my clothes?’
Fortunately I did not have to look far: my breechcloth and cloak had been discarded next to where I had lain. Something on top of them glittered. Ignoring the renewed dizziness that it caused, I bent towards it and recognized a small copper knife.
That explained how the ropes had been cut, I thought, as I tied the breechcloth. Once I had wrapped myself in the cloak and knotted it over my right shoulder I felt able to look around me and make some effort to piece together the things I could see and the vague, disjointed memories that they stirred up.
I noted the pile of rubbish by the back wall. I could see now that it had not grown out of a year’s worth of detritus thrown casually into a corner. Some effort had been made to sweep it all together. I stepped over to it and began sifting it experimentally.
As before, I was surprised by the number of feathers, and much else connected with the featherworkers’ craft: knives, needles, glue spreaders, and so on. As I stirred the rubbish with my fingers the air around me suddenly filled with feathers and I had to hold my breath to stop myself sneezing.
Something fell off the top of the pile as I disturbed it, a round, lightweight object that struck the floor with a hollow ringing noise and rolled a little way across it until it reached the opposite wall. When I picked it up I saw that it was a bowl. I put a finger inside it and found that its surface was moist, and a few hard little grains still adhered to its sides. By putting the finger cautiously to my tongue, I could tell that someone had been drinking an infusion of Morning Glory seeds.
I threw the bowl back on the heap and spat on the rubbish to get rid of the taste. I knew it from my time as a priest. We had drunk a little of it, on occasion, to induce visions, but we knew that if anyone had too much, the demons he saw would take both his soul and his life. I wondered how much I had had, and how many of the fantastic things I had seen and heard in the night had come out of that little bowl.
I surveyed the heap of rubbish again. This had been Idle’s and Marigold’s room, according to Butterfly, but it looked as if she and Skinny had taken advantage of their disappearance to dump all the debris from his workshop in here. It did not take me long to satisfy myself that there was nothing underneath the pile. If the costume had ever been hidden there, it was long gone.
There was little else to be seen in the room except a cheap, frayed sleeping-mat and an old cloak or blanket on the floor beside it. However, as I stood over them, I noticed something I could not see.
I sniffed the air and frowned.
By far the strongest smell in the room was the smoky, resinous odour of a pine torch that had been left to burn itself out. There were others that it did not quite mask.
Clinging to the air over the sleeping-mat were faint hints of musk and sweat and stale perfume. A woman had lain there most of the night. I gathered the discarded blanket up in my arms and buried my nose in it. Then I threw it away violently, because there was something familiar in the complex of smells that it bore, something horrifying, a reminder of things I did not want to think about. I thought of snakes, hissing and writhing and threatening me with their stifling coils.
Shuddering, I turned to go. Then I caught another smell.
This one was fainter than the others, but once I noticed it I could not avoid it. It was the smell I had noticed when I had first come into the r
oom, before I was knocked out, but now I remembered what it reminded me of all the things I instinctively shied away from, the smell of my worst nightmares – a mixture of putrefaction, decay, filth, piss and blood.
It was the stench of the Emperor’s prison, and for a moment my nose was filled with all the things that had assailed it in my time there, in my tiny, cramped, unlit cage, squatting, because there was no room to stand or lie down, and listening to the hoarse, rattling breaths of my neighbours while I waited for my turn to come.
I stumbled towards the doorway, gagging.
Something snagged my foot and sent me sprawling.
I scraped my knee painfully on the floor as I fell. The shock helped, reminding me that I was not in prison but free to blunder about and fall over things. I lay still for a moment while I repeated this to myself a few times, and then I turned to look at what had tripped me.
I realized it must be the same thing that I had stubbed my toe against in the night. It was a carved stone, one of a pair, because another, identical in style, lay next to it. When I picked them up I could see that they were two halves of the same piece. It had split, perhaps when someone had dropped it.
I rubbed my knee and then stood up, holding the broken sculpture. I could feel that when the pieces were fitted together there was a jagged surface left, where they must both have been joined to something else.
That gave me an idea. After a quick glance out of the doorway to make sure it was empty, I took the pieces out into the courtyard and carried them over to the broken plinth.
They fitted.
Holding the broken idol in place on its mounting, I was able to see it properly for the first time.
I knew it at once. It had a dog’s face, wrinkled and furrowed with age. Its ears were misshapen rags, covered with sores, and its hands and feet were shrivelled and bent, so that had it been an animated, breathing creature, it could have done nothing but lie in the dust, howling for release from its agony. It was Xolotl, who represented disease, deformity and those feared and ill-omened beings, twins, whose presence could bring disaster on a household by draining the life out of the fire in the hearth.
I put the idol’s two pieces on the floor carefully, so as not to make a sound. I wondered why it had been here: whether someone had been ill, or whether Marigold had acquired it because she felt she needed Xolotl to complete her collection. I wondered, too, why it had been desecrated so. Perhaps the god had been placated to get rid of an illness that had, in spite of everything, proved fatal. The smell in the room I had just left came to mind.
Or had Xolotl been venerated here for some other reason? It suddenly crossed my mind to wonder whether Skinny and his brother might have been twins, and what it might mean if they were. But if so, I thought, then why had the idol been broken?
I would have to think about that later. Now I had more pressing problems. The first was how to get out of the courtyard without having to go through the room leading to the street, where I might run into Butterfly or Skinny or both. Then I had to find a way of avoiding the Otomies. I tried not to think about what came after that. Kindly’s property and my son were still as elusive as ever.
I thought the best thing I could do would be to clamber up one of the walls and leave the way I had come in. A stout climbing plant, like a mature gourd vine, would do, just something to give my hands and feet some purchase.
I had a quick look at the walls at the back and sides of the courtyard but found nothing. I turned to the front, but could not see anything there either, because there was someone standing in the way.
He was tall. My eyes were on a level with his chest. As they travelled upward, I tried very hard not to believe what they were telling me. Unfortunately there was no mistaking the short, plain, functional cloak tied at the throat, the grim mouth with its lips pressed firmly together, and the hooded eyes, the piled-up hair and the sword whose handle projected over one shoulder, ready to be seized and brought into use in an instant.
I took a step back. ‘Up … Upright?’ I spluttered. ‘This … this isn’t your parish. What are you doing here?’
‘No. But it is theirs.’ The policeman jerked his head once across his shoulder to indicate the men behind them. At the same time all three of them stepped forward. One was his own deputy, Shield. The others, judging by their thickset forms and harsh faces, were policemen too: at a guess, the parish police of Atecocolecan.
‘I … I was just leaving,’ I said.
‘Quite right, you were.’
In one fluid movement Upright reached behind him, plucked his sword from its harness and had it poised over my head. Quick glances to the left and right told me his companions had done the same, and moreover that the two local men had stepped forward so that I was effectively surrounded.
‘Now, Yaotl, we can do this the easy way where you come with us on your feet, or we can do it the hard way …’
‘Where you have to carry me because I can’t walk with both legs broken. Right.’ I sighed. ‘Look, you don’t understand … No, wait, what did you call me?’
‘We don’t need to understand,’ growled the bear on my right. ‘Look, Upright, we’re here, it looks like you’ve got your man, why not just bash him over the head and get going? We’ve got work to do.’
‘But my name isn’t …’
‘We know perfectly well what your name is, you murdering little bastard! The woman went and reported you to the local lads here.’ Shield suddenly jabbed me with the blunt end of his sword, not hard enough to hurt but with enough force to make me stagger. ‘And this time there’s no wealthy widow to back your lies up with her own. You didn’t think my boss was joking, did you?’
‘No,’ I cried hastily, as the sunlight flashed off four sets of cruelly sharp obsidian blades. ‘No, but you said … you called me a murderer – I had nothing to do with Idle, I tell you. I swear it, I will eat earth …’
‘Idle?’ To my amazement Upright laughed. ‘You don’t think we still care about Idle, do you?’
‘You mean there’s someone else?’
‘Oh, this is pathetic!’
The end of the sword hit me just below the rib cage, knocking the breath out of me so that I could not cry in pain but only collapse, doubled over and gasping vainly for air.
I barely heard what Upright said next, but I managed to follow it somehow.
‘You’re such an idiot, Yaotl. If you’d stopped with Idle I don’t suppose anyone would really have given a toss. Certainly I wouldn’t. I gather his family might even have paid you for getting rid of him. But you had to go on, didn’t you? You didn’t seriously expect the Amanteca to overlook the death of someone like Skinny, did you?’
There was an argument over whether or not to search the house. Upright wanted to, but the local men wanted to leave and were not prepared to let the men from Pochtlan have the place to themselves. It was not a prolonged or heated discussion, since Upright and Shield were convinced they had got their man. It would be easier and more fun, they assured their colleagues, to get any evidence they needed by beating it out of me rather than breaking up the courtyard or rifling through wicker chests full of old skirts and breechcloths.
By the time this was settled I had got my breath back enough to be frog-marched through the empty front room to the canoe the two men had brought with them. At least, I told myself as I was bundled into the swaying craft, I would be spared the walk back.
Shield took up the pole. As he pushed us away from the shore he let his eyes linger on his two local colleagues as they turned their backs indifferently and walked away along the side of the canal.
‘Get a warm welcome around here, don’t you, boss?’
Upright grunted. ‘We wouldn’t like it if a couple of strangers turned up on our patch and started telling us what’s what.’ He leered at me. ‘Maybe we should have told them our suspect was from Tenochtitlan. They wouldn’t have minded then. Round here I don’t suppose they like Southerners any more than we do.’
The constable shot a warning glance at his deputy but it was too late to stop me from picking up his meaning. ‘You weren’t out looking for me, then?’ I asked innocently.
Upright looked suddenly sick. ‘Mind your own business!’
‘Only, if you weren’t, then who were you after? What made you connect me with whatever’s happened to Skinny?’
‘The fact that you did it!’ rumbled Shield dangerously. He was taking out his annoyance and embarrassment on the pole, stirring up the muck at the bottom of the canal and cleaving a dark wake through the weeds and scum on its surface. I hoped he might be furious enough to capsize us or run us hard aground and give me a chance to run, but he was too skilful for that.
‘We just came here to tell Skinny’s wife the bad news,’ his superior said. ‘Of course, we called on the local police on the way, and what did we find? The newly widowed Butterfly tearing her hair out and babbling about finding you, of all people, trying to burgle her house. Wouldn’t you say that’s a bit suspicious? Especially since you’ve never answered for what happened to Idle. And we know the story you and Lily came up with was a pack of lies.’
‘Did you ask Kindly about it?’ As soon as I posed the question I realized it was pointless. Whatever Kindly may have said scarcely mattered since the truth, at least about who I was, had come out anyway. I had a vision of the merchant’s daughter striding into Howling Monkey’s courtyard, her skirt flowing around her and the sound of her sandals striking the floor, and was suddenly aware of the risk she had taken and the fact that, for whatever reason, it had not come off. ‘And what about Lily?’ I asked, in a small voice.
‘What about her?’ Upright grimaced. ‘Like father, like daughter, aren’t they? And she had a son who was just as bad. If any of that family told me my own name I’d have to run home and ask my mother, to check!’ He laughed shortly. ‘Don’t worry, she set the record straight. After you did a runner – wasn’t I surprised when that happened! – she went and told your master what had happened.’