Shadow of the Lords

by Simon Levack

  ‘Lion, will you listen?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Please! Father, Uncle!’

  The tremor in Nimble’s voice made us both pause. I looked at him and understood, from his wide-eyed and fearful expression and the way his lower lip trembled, that he must be as afraid for Lily as I was. More so, perhaps, since she had nursed him back to health, treating him for a few days as if he had been her own.

  I stretched out a hand and put it on his shoulder, gripping it the more firmly as the knowledge of what I had to do became clearer, along with the certainty that this was the last I would ever see of him.

  ‘I’m sorry, son. You too, Lion.’ I turned back to my brother. ‘Nobody doubts your courage, or your men’s. But face it, you’re wrong: this isn’t a war. This is the middle of Mexico, not some frontier province. If you go charging in, half your men are going to get killed, at least, and even if you get Lily and her father out alive, the chances are old Black Feathers will twist the whole thing around afterwards so as to make it look as if it was you who started it. As you said yourself, as long as the right people get paid off …’

  ‘But what can we do?’ cried Nimble desperately.

  I looked silently into his face for a long time. I wanted to speak, but the words would not come, and I could not have forced them past the lump in my throat. Nonetheless he understood. I could tell as much from the way his eyes filmed over with tears and his lips parted, silently forming the word ‘No’.

  ‘It’s … it’s the only way,’ I whispered at last. Tears were clouding my own vision. I swatted them away furiously, not wanting to lose sight of him a moment before I had to.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ my brother demanded, his head darting from side to side as he stared at each of us in turn. ‘What’s the matter?’

  I forced myself to look away from my son and towards Lion, whose puzzled frown might have struck me as comic in other circumstances. ‘Lord Feathered in Black wanted me to tell him where Nimble was.’ I spoke deliberately, bringing the words out one at a time because I knew that if I did not, they would all come at once in a desperate, incoherent, unintelligible rush. ‘But he knows perfectly well that I wouldn’t betray my own son, no matter what he did. He hoped to catch one or both of us at Kindly’s house, but he missed us. So now he’ll be ready to work out his anger on whichever of us he can get his hands on. If I give myself myself up to him, he’ll let Kindly and Lily go. He’s taking too big a risk holding them not to. But Nimble – you have to run away. Now, before he sends the Otomies after you!’

  ‘You can’t go!’ the boy cried. ‘I’ll go instead!’

  ‘No – look, you don’t even exist, as far as the law’s concerned.’ Having been brought up among barbarians and crept back unnoticed into the city, Nimble had no parish and, apart from me, no family. ‘Even if you did, he could charge you with complicity in Shining Light’s crimes.’ I saw him wince at my brutal reminder of his dead lover and the vicious cycle of deceit and murder he had been drawn into. ‘I’m a slave, remember? There’s not much he can do to me, except sell me. He’ll have enough to do covering up his activities today, without breaking the law further by ill-treating a slave. Look, I’m not really taking a risk.’ The illogic of my own words was painfully plain to me, and I could see from the look in my son’s eyes that he saw it too, but my brother and the policeman took it up.

  ‘He’s got a point,’ Shield said. ‘The merchants will be all over him for what he’s doing now. If I were him, I’d be treading very carefully for a while.’

  ‘You’re young and your father isn’t,’ Lion said harshly. ‘You’ve got more to lose!’

  But what convinced Nimble in the end was not words but force. He suddenly bolted, springing forward and darting off in the direction of the merchant’s house, but Lion was ready for that. He caught him before he had gone two steps, and held him fast, ignoring his struggles, his cries and the knife waving impotently in the air in front of him.

  ‘If you’re going,’ Lion grunted at me, ‘I suggest you go. Now!’

  Nimble suddenly stopped writhing in his arms.

  I got one last look at him before my eyes misted over completely.

  ‘Sorry, son,’ I mumbled brokenly. ‘I wish I’d … Goodbye!’

  It was a short walk to the merchant’s house, but long enough.

  Twice I stopped, standing still in the middle of the street, while canoes sailed past on the canal beside me, their occupants going carelessly about their daily business, until I had mastered my fear enough to carry on. Both times I made myself imagine Lily at the Otomi captain’s mercy, the four-bladed sword at her throat.

  What are you worrying about? I asked myself, as I prepared to turn the last corner. The worst he can do is sell you. And the Emperor will have the raiment of the god back, he’ll be grateful for that …

  I could not make myself believe it.

  I was going to be sold for an offering to the gods. What then? I wondered. Would my flesh be charred and blistered and split in the Fire Sacrifice, or pierced and lacerated in the Arrow Sacrifice, when my blood would start from so many wounds at once it would fall like the rain the priests would pray for as I died?

  As I walked through the entrance to the merchant’s courtyard, the grins on the faces of the waiting warriors told their own story.

  The Aztec Calendar

  The Aztecs lived in a world governed by religion and magic, and their rituals and auguries were in turn ordered by the calendar.

  The solar year, which began in our February, was divided into eighteen twenty-day periods (often called ‘months’). Each month had its own religious observances associated with it; often these involved sacrifices, some of them human, to one or more of the many Aztec gods. At the end of the year were five ‘Useless Days’ that were considered profoundly unlucky.

  Parallel to this ran a divinatory calendar of 260 days divided into twenty groups of thirteen days (sometimes called ‘weeks’). The first day in the ‘week’ would bear the number 1 and one of twenty names – Reed, Jaguar, Eagle, Vulture, and so on. The second day would bear the number 2 and the next name in the sequence. On the fourteenth day the number would revert to 1 but the sequence of names continued seamlessly, with each combination of names and numbers repeating itself every 260 days.

  A year was named after the day in the divinatory calendar on which it began. For mathematical reasons these days could bear only one of four names – Reed, Flint Knife, House and Rabbit – combined with a number from 1 to 13. This produced a cycle of fifty-two years at the beginning and end of which the solar and divinatory calendars coincided. The Aztecs called this period a ‘Bundle of Years’.

  Every day in a Bundle of Years was the product of a unique combination of year, month and date in the divinatory calendar, and so had, for the Aztecs, its own individual character and religious and magical significance.

  The date on which the first chapter of this book opens is 23 December 1517; in other words, One Death, the fourteenth day of the Month of the Coming Down of Water, in the year Twelve House.

  A Note on Nahuatl

  The Aztec language, Nahuatl, is not difficult to pronounce, but is burdened with spellings based on sixteenth-century Castilian. The following note should help:

  Spelling Pronunciation

  c c as in ‘Cecil’ before e or i; k before a or o

  ch sh

  x sh

  hu, uh w

  qu k as in ‘kettle’ before e or i; ‘qu’ as in ‘quack’ before a

  tl as in English, but where ‘-tl’ occurs at the end of a word the ‘l’ is hardly sounded.

  The stress always falls on the penultimate syllable.

  I have used as few Nahuatl words as possible and favoured clarity at the expense of strict accuracy in choosing English equivalents. Hence, for example, I have rendered Huey Tlatoani as ‘Emperor’, Cihuacoatl as ‘Chief Minister’, calpolli as ‘parish’, octli as ‘sacred wine’ and maquahuitl as ‘
sword’, and have been similarly cavalier in choosing English replacements for most of the frequently recurring personal names. In referring to the Emperor at the time when this story is set I have used the most familiar form of his name, Montezuma, although Motecuhzoma would be more accurate. To avoid confusion I have called the people of Mexico-Tenochtitlan ‘Aztecs’ rather than ‘Mexicans’.

  The name of the principal character in the novel, Yaotl, is pronounced ‘YAH-ot’.

  Author’s Note

  The featherwork was the shadow of the lords and kings.

  Fray Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites

  Like its predecessor, Demon of the Air, this book is set in Central America in the early sixteenth century, shortly before the coming of the Europeans.

  At this time the region was dominated by the warlike nation we call the Aztecs. When they first appeared at some time in the thirteenth century they were just one of a number of nomadic tribes with a common language and history, but over the next two hundred years or so they fought their way to the top. Forced to settle on a desolate, marshy island in the middle of a briny lake, they turned it into a fortress, surrounded it with fertile fields built upon artificial islands, and used it as a base from which to cow most of their neighbours into submission.

  The Aztecs’ own name for themselves was Mexica; they gave this name to the city they founded, calling it Mexico. The southern part of the city was called Tenochtitlan, and the northern part Tlatelolco. Modern Mexico City stands on the same site.

  At its zenith, under Emperor Montezuma II, Aztec Mexico was probably the largest city in the world, outside Asia. It was the capital of an empire that stretched as far east and west as the coasts of the Caribbean and the Pacific and as far south as modern Guatemala. Like any city it was a crowded and colourful place, home to merchants, artisans, warriors, priests, lords, beggars and thieves.

  We are most familiar with the warriors and priests, owing to the Aztecs’ notorious practice of sacrificing prisoners of war, along with other victims. Nobody writing about the period can afford to ignore them, but in this book they yield centre stage to the merchants and artisans, and in particular the practitioners of an art form with no parallel elsewhere: featherwork.

  I was lucky enough to see a tiny example of the Aztec featherworkers’ craft at the exhibition at London’s Royal Academy between November 2002 and April 2003. Even after five hundred years, I was able to marvel at the painstaking care and exuberant sense of colour that had gone into producing it, and wonder what combination of inspiration, religious fervour and technique might have guided the maker’s hand.

  Some of the answers I dreamed up found their way into this novel – along, of course, with the usual mayhem …

  ALSO BY SIMON LEVACK

  Demon of the Air

  SHADOW OF THE LORDS. Copyright © 2005 by Simon Levack. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10010.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  eISBN 9781466807969

  First eBook Edition : December 2011

  Extracts from Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World by Miguel Leon-Portilla are reproduced by kind permission of the publishers, University of Oklahoma Press.

  Extracts from Bernadino de Sahagun, The Florentine Codex, A General History of the Things of New Spain, translated and edited by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, are reproduced by kind permission of the University of Utah Press and the School of American Research.

  First U.S. Edition: September 2006