Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  For the moment, at least, she was right.

  The cloth had been hung over the doorway again. I had just got a corner of it between my thumb and forefinger when a strong, harsh voice called out, ‘Stay there!’

  Angry strode through the entrance to the courtyard. A sword swung from one massive fist, an old one, with some of its blades missing, obviously not used in years but still deadly. His nephew trotted behind him with the nervous air of a small dog unsure whether it was about to be petted or put in a cooking pot.

  Nimble was not with them. I realized they must have been on their way here already, even before I had sent him to fetch the featherworker.

  I dropped both the door covering and Butterfly’s arm. The woman sprang away from me, and then hit me, slapping me across the face with enough force to send me staggering into the door post.

  In two steps Angry was next to me, with the sword poised under my chin. ‘Move away from her,’ the old man growled, ‘or I’ll cut your throat. Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked about him. ‘I don’t believe you’re that stupid.’ He turned to his nephew, who was looking at each of us in turn with a baffled expression that made it plain he had no idea what all this was about. ‘Crayfish, go out and watch the street. Yell the moment you see anything!’

  ‘But, Uncle …’

  ‘Shut up and do as you’re told!’ the big man roared, and the sword twitched in time with his words. The boy jumped, and then, without a word, turned and ran through the front room and out of the house.

  His uncle turned back to Butterfly and me. For a moment he seemed unsure of what to say, or, perhaps, which of us to say it to. When he spoke his voice was surprisingly soft.

  ‘You know why I’m here.’

  Butterfly said nothing.

  ‘I heard a rumour in the marketplace, and I checked with the parish police. They told me Skinny was dead. Discovered floating in a canal, yesterday morning. They found nothing with the body – nothing. I came here the moment I heard.’

  The woman maintained her silence. A hint of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. She seemed to be enjoying herself. I knew why: she had something the featherworker wanted, and that gave her power over him.

  ‘Now, where’s my daughter?’

  Still Butterfly had nothing to say. I jerked my head in the direction of the second room, the one she had tried to keep me out of. ‘In there,’ I said.

  Angry’s jaw dropped. Then, without a word, he reached towards me with his empty hand, seized the knot of my cloak and yanked me towards him until my face was pressed against his and I could smell his breath.

  ‘I don’t have to cut your throat straight away,’ he hissed. ‘Do you think I don’t know how to use this sword? I could skin you alive. Any more jokes about my daughter and I’ll make a start right here!’

  ‘Angry,’ I gasped, ‘I’m not joking!’

  ‘I’ve been in that room! There’s nothing there but garbage!’

  ‘I’m telling you, I know where she is!’

  ‘Angry,’ Butterfly said, in her most reasonable tone of voice, ‘this is a stupid charade. You’ll get your daughter back, but listen to me – there’s something we have to do first. The costume is missing! We have to find it now. What do you think Montezuma will do to us if we don’t? We daren’t waste any more time on this slave. He knows too much anyway Just kill him!’

  Helpless in the big man’s grip, I could not react, but my mind was reeling. If the costume was missing, how was I going to get it back to the Emperor?

  For a moment Angry seemed to have no idea what to do. He and Butterfly were not friends. Only terror, desperation and blackmail had made them temporary allies, and it would not take much to set them at one another’s throats.

  ‘Missing? But Idle …’

  ‘It’s like the police told you – there was nothing with the body! Now get rid of the slave, and then we have to talk.’

  Droplets of sweat glistened on the featherworker’s forehead. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his sword blades flashing in the sunlight as the weapon shook in his hand. The grip on my cloak tightened convulsively, and then loosened a little.

  ‘No,’ he muttered, ‘I want to find out what he knows.’

  He shoved me away from him, at the same time raising the sword. He could have struck down either me or Butterfly in an instant, but instead he gestured with the weapon towards the forbidden doorway. ‘In there, you say? Go on, then, both of you. If you’re lying, slave, you know what to expect!’

  We crammed ourselves into the room, which was so much smaller than it looked from the outside. I looked around me quickly, wondering whether Angry was really so stupid that he could not see what I could, before reminding myself that I had missed it myself at first. The unpleasant mixture of smells still hung in the air, the nastiest of them, the blend of blood and putrescence, stronger than ever. Even that was not enough to tell the featherworker what he so badly wanted to know.

  ‘Angry, listen, the costume …’

  ‘Shut your mouth, woman!’ He waved the sword in front of my face. ‘Now you, talk, before I cut your nose off!’

  I opened my mouth to speak, but hesitated. I could tell him what he wanted to know straight away. I wanted to, out of revulsion for what Butterfly had done, and pity for her victim, but I did not know what the featherworker would do after he had learned the truth. Would he just kill both me and the woman out of hand?

  Too clever by half again, Yaotl, I told myself. I had sought this confrontation, but it had got out of my control. I had hoped to face Angry with Lion and a squad of warriors beside me. The featherworker had thwarted me by arriving early. All I could do now was to spin this out for as long as I could, and pray that Partridge had convinced my brother of his mission’s urgency.

  I looked at the wall beyond the pile of rubbish. Angry followed my glance but its significance seemed lost on him. ‘You remember the first time I came here, don’t you, Butterfly? I met you and your husband, Skinny, and asked you if you knew anything about Kindly’s featherwork. Of course, you told me you didn’t, and that Skinny’s workshop was closed.’

  ‘It’s true. It was. Look around you – this is all garbage, it’ll be gone as soon as I can get around to clearing it out.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said hastily. ‘I believe you!’ I could not help smiling at my next thought. ‘It’s funny, though. If you’ve spent your whole life telling lies you forget how easy it is to be fooled by the truth. I assumed you were lying about Skinny’s ’s workshop being closed, but strictly speaking you weren’t. It was bound to be closed, since he was dead.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Don’t be stupid! You met him!’

  ‘No, I met his brother.’

  Her expression froze. ‘Angry,’ she said deliberately, ‘I told you he knew too much! You’ve got to kill him. Do it now!’

  I flinched as the sword jerked towards my cheek.

  ‘I’ll kill him after he tells me about my daughter,’ the man growled. ‘You hear that? You’re going to die, but how I do it depends on whether you tell me the truth. Fast or slow, it’s your choice. Now get on with it!’

  I spoke quickly. ‘Idle stole the costume from Kindly’s house and killed his brother. He’d planned the murder all along, of course. When Skinny asked the merchant to look after the costume, Idle probably realized his brother was on to him, and that would have made killing him more urgent. It was such a simple, obvious thing to do. Get his hands on the single most valuable piece that would ever come into his twin brother’s workshop, get him out of the way, take his place and collect his money from the Emperor. It would never occur to Montezuma that there was anything wrong, provided the costume was delivered in pristine condition. And who would have seen through the deception, out here in Atecocolecan, where Skinny hadn’t been seen in years?’

  ‘What’s this got to do with Marigold?’ rasped Angry.

  ‘Everything,’ I said, as
coolly as I could, ‘because she would have seen through it.’ I looked at Butterfly. ‘And so, naturally, would she. But you were in it from the beginning, weren’t you? And after the murder, you helped Idle hide the body.’

  ‘Who told you they were twins?’ Butterfly snapped.

  ‘Nobody But I found an idol of the god of twins in this room. I misread it: I thought someone must have been praying to Xolotl to relieve sickness. That was stupid of me, wasn’t it? I should have realized there was a reason why Idle was so eager to identify his brother’s body, and even provide his own charm as the evidence. Come to think of it, why else would the killer have gone to so much trouble to dispose of it in such a way that nobody would be willing to examine it too closely?

  ‘You tried to throw me off the scent by hiding the idol. That was silly of you, you know – I might have overlooked it if it had been with the others!’ I turned to Angry then. ‘But it was what you said that really put me on to the trick.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ His voice was a threatening rumble, like a sleeping volcano’s.

  ‘When’s your son-in-law’s birthday?’

  ‘Seven Flower,’ he rapped out, automatically. ‘If you think I’m playing some kind of guessing game with you …’

  Keeping my voice as even as possible, I went on: ‘When I talked to you and Crayfish at your house, you told me you didn’t know when it was and didn’t care. But of course you knew! Before your daughter and Idle got married, you’d have hired a soothsayer to check that their birthdays were compatible, as anybody would.’ Unconsciously I echoed the words the priest at Amantlan had spoken to me when he told me about Skinny’s wedding to Butterfly. ‘If I’d picked up on it at the time I’d have realized you were lying to me for a reason. You didn’t want to tell me when Idle was born, because then I’d have known he and Skinny were twins. When I finally got my head around that, I could see what had happened, and how you were involved, and why. And that’s how I know where your daughter is.’

  ‘I knew I should have killed you after I knocked you out.’ Butterfly sighed. ‘Couldn’t resist it, though. You looked so tempting, lying there …’

  ‘Shut up,’ Angry hissed. ‘You,’ he said to me, ‘get on with it!’

  Where was my brother? I strained to catch some sound from outside. Occasionally a muffled thump would come from the work gang labouring behind the house. I had not noticed the noise to begin with but it seemed to be getting louder, and occasionally the walls would shake a little.

  ‘You got involved because your son-in-law’s plan went wrong. He had to be able to deliver the featherwork in the same state as it would have been in if Skinny had just finished it. The trouble is, it wasn’t. He was surprised while he was trying to steal it, by my son, of all people, and it got damaged in the fight. I know he left at least one feather behind because Kindly showed it to me. So he had a big problem. He knew nothing about featherwork himself, and there was no way he could fix it. He needed a featherworker to sort it out. His brother was dead by then, so he came to you.’

  ‘What’s that noise?’ the woman cried suddenly.

  I could not decide whether she had been reacting to something real or just wanted to change the subject. Surely the sound of hammer-blows outside was getting louder, coming closer?

  Were those dust motes I could see dancing before my eyes?

  ‘But you wouldn’t cooperate, would you? I’m not surprised – it must have been galling enough to learn that Skinny had landed such an important commission when he was supposed to be working for you, but then to be asked to finish it so your despised son-in-law could take the credit in your rival’s name – that was too much.’

  ‘I told that slug Idle where to go,’ the big man confirmed. ‘So he came back the next night with … with …’ He faltered before going on, in a small voice: ‘He told me to get on with it if I wanted to see my daughter again.’

  The sound from outside was becoming undeniable, thuds and crashes and muffled cries and a shaking that I could feel through the floor.

  ‘What are they doing out there?’ Angry cried, momentarily distracted. ‘Are they trying to knock the house down, or what?’

  ‘So I was right!’ Despite my fear it was hard to keep my glee at my own cleverness out of my voice. ‘Idle and Butterfly were holding her hostage, weren’t they? And you lied to me because you were afraid that, if I knew the brothers were twins, I might work out what Idle had done and manage to recover the costume for Kindly. And there would go your daughter’s ransom.’

  Angry’s response was a howl of anguish: ‘So where is she, then?’

  Butterfly screamed.

  Suddenly she, Angry and his sword all vanished in a thick cloud of white dust and I was on the floor. From somewhere very close came a crash so loud that I did not so much hear it as feel it, as if the ground had grown legs and kicked me hard in the small of the back, and then the World exploded into a frenzy of flying masonry chips and plaster.

  The dust around me glowed as light poured into the room. Men shouted and cursed. Pieces of timber and fragments of what had been the back wall of the house creaked, cracked and clattered as they fell. A woman shrieked.

  I got to my feet, coughing and sneezing and spitting dust. I staggered blindly towards where I thought the doorway must be, away from the light, and into the courtyard of the house.

  Voices were all around me, all talking at once, yelling orders or demanding answers to questions I could not make out, or merely swearing. There was a lot of swearing.

  As the dust cleared in the open air I began to take in the scene around me. The courtyard was full. Soldiers stood all around, swords drawn in a gesture of battle readiness that their owners’ baffled expressions made a nonsense of. My brother’s bodyguards’ eyes swivelled left and right as they looked for someone who could give them orders, or anything that might give them a clue as to what they were meant to do now. One or two recognized me and looked at me expectantly, as if they thought I could sort this out for them.

  I saw my son, standing among the warriors. I realized he must have come here as soon as he found out that Angry and his nephew had already left. Crayfish was next to him, held in the unbreakable grip of a huge armed man.

  ‘Nimble …’ I croaked. Then, at last, from behind me, I heard the one voice I had been longing to hear since I had arrived at the house that morning.

  ‘Yaotl? Anybody seen my brother? He’d better have a bloody good explanation for all this … Ah! Right, you come here. I want you to see what we’ve found. You won’t believe it!’

  Dust billowed out of the doorway into the ruined back room. Through the cloud strolled Lion, coated in the stuff from head to foot so that he looked like a chalk-whitened captive on the way to his one and only meeting with the Fire Priest’s flint knife. A large flat piece of plaster decorated the top of his head. A hammer swung easily from his right hand.

  Behind him, moving as slowly as cripples, came two of his warriors. They were supporting a woman between them. They had to support her because, judging by the way her head hung and her feet dragged apathetically across the ground, she would not have been able to stand unaided, let alone walk. At first I thought she was unconscious, but she was clutching something in both arms. I could not see what it was, because it was swaddled in cloth that had evidently been torn from her skirt. Both the bundle and the woman were caked in dried blood.

  My sigh of relief turned into a groan of horror when I guessed what the cloth concealed.

  ‘Found her in that hidden room at the back, behind the false wall,’ my brother was saying. ‘Lucky the wall didn’t fall on her. Poor creature! You wouldn’t keep a dog like that … What is it?’

  I struggled to find my voice. ‘What’s she carrying?’

  Lion turned and walked over to her. ‘Here, let me look …’ The woman made no sound, but my worst fears were confirmed by the way she recoiled, snatching the little bundle out of my brother’s reach, and the look of revulsion and disgust
that crossed his face as he glimpsed what lay inside the pathetic wrappings.

  A loud moan and a bout of convulsive sobbing burst out behind me.

  Marigold, Angry’s daughter, turned away, hiding her face and her burden from us all. But her father and her cousin had both seen as much as I had.

  I hoped the child had not been born alive. In any event his soul would be happy now, sucking at the heavenly milk-tree until it was his turn to be born again; but there had been enough anguish here, without adding his suffering to it.

  3

  The warriors found a sleeping-mat in the front room of the house and lowered the silent woman on to it with surprising gentleness. They kept away from her bundle, on Lion’s instructions. She lay down passively, seemingly oblivious to their attentions.

  One of my brother’s men ran to fetch her a doctor while the others stood up to watch as Angry and Butterfly were led out into the courtyard, surrounded by more warriors and a small crowd of curious labourers.

  ‘We only brought the one hammer,’ my brother explained, ‘and they were so sick of driving piles into the lake bed that they were happy to help.’

  ‘Watch Angry,’ I warned. ‘When he gets over the shock …’ I was almost too late. The featherworker suddenly roared like a trapped animal, and then, as a trapped animal sometimes will, he found a reserve of strength that was probably unknown even to himself, and burst free.

  As the warrior holding him stumbled, he threw himself first forward, towards his daughter, then sideways, then back, turning and barging his bemused guard out of the way as he went for Butterfly.

  ‘Stop him!’ my brother bellowed.

  Butterfly’s guard was faster than Angry’s had been. Shoving her aside, he lunged at the berserk old man. They crashed into one another, and for a moment the force of the impact locked their bodies together, still and upright, until they both collapsed. The collision winded the guard, who flopped and gasped for breath where he lay. Angry screamed hoarsely and tried to rise, but by now his own guard had recovered and others were running towards him, and they buried him under a pile of muscular bodies.