Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

“This man’s a friend of yours!” the steward objected. “You just want to get him off and put me in that cage instead!”

It was a tempting thought, but all I said was: “Then leave the guard here. He’ll tell you if we start hatching any conspiracies.”

“This had better be good,” I told the man crouching on the other side of the bars, “otherwise Huitztic’s likely to talk the old man into having me move in there with you.”

The steward had stormed off, declaring that he was going to see what the chief minister had to say about this, and that he would be back.

Fire Snake peered up at me miserably. “But he’s the man who set this thing up! You’ve got to help me, Yaotl!”

I glanced uneasily at the guard, who was pacing about the hall, snarling at his other charges as if it would help him keep them in order. I suspected he was wondering whether it would not after all have been wiser to have looked the other way while Huitztic beat a confession out of his prisoner.

“Old Black Feathers sent me here for a reason,” I replied, speaking half to myself. “If he wanted you roasted over a slow fire for what happened to his great-nephew, then you’d be cooking already. I think I’m here because he doesn’t know what happened himself and he doesn’t believe what he’s been told about it.”

“So you think I’ve got a chance?” he demanded eagerly, his hands gripping the bars.

“Only if you tell me the truth. I can’t convince the old man otherwise. Did you put the poison in that straw?”

“No!”

“How did it get there then?”

“Huitztic must have done it!”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” I said a little testily. “It’s just your word against his. Who’s the chief minister going to believe, you or his own steward?” And more to the point, I thought, what would the steward do to me if I accused him without evidence?

Fire Snake looked at the floor. “I don’t know what happened,” he admitted. “That straw was clean when I gave it to the steward. I remember holding it up to the light, to check it had been bored right through. There was nothing there.”

“Why did you agree to help Heron cheat? Two Rabbit was right — you were making a mockery of the ceremony. Did you expect the gods to be happy about that?”

“Lord Feathered in Black isn’t afraid of the gods,” he muttered. “His steward made it pretty clear what would happen to me and my family if I didn’t cooperate. He even had the cheek to suggest I make whatever sacrifices were needed to assuage the gods’ anger afterwards!” The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable, and for the first time I felt a pang of sympathy for him.

“I know what it looks like,” he added wretchedly. “I was there when they tested all those jars, right up until the last slave started snoring and they took me away. If any of the sacred wine was poisoned, it was only the jar Heron drank out of, and how could anyone have known which one that would be? It has to have been the tube, but I wasn’t the one who put the stuff in it.”

“There’s no way he could have taken the stuff before the dance? Or during it?”

“No chance. Someone would have noticed him munching on mushrooms between dance movements, and if he’d had them before it started he wouldn’t have been standing up by the end.”

“Then somebody must have poisoned the sacred wine,” I said. I had been stooping over the cage. Now I stood up briskly. “It has to have been one or the other, doesn’t it? The straw or the pot. Did you see anybody else doing anything to the pot Heron drank from?”

“No, but there were so any of them clambering over each other and pushing each other out of the way it was hard to see anything clearly.”

I imagined the climax of the ceremony: fifty-two clay pots in the middle of a violent, heaving mass of eager young men. Even if one of them had been able to guess which jar Heron would drink out of, how had he managed to slip the poison into it without anyone noticing?

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the guard moving purposefully towards us. Our conversation was almost over. As I turned to leave, however, one last thought struck me. “Could Heron have told anyone about the edge you and Huitztic had given him? Someone with a motive to interfere?”

Fire Snake uttered a gasp of laughter. “I can think of three hundred and ninety-nine men who had a motive!” he said. “Four hundred if you count Two Rabbit.”

“Why him?”

“You heard him just now. He thinks the gods have been mocked and he’s been made a fool of. And he blames me. He’s never liked me, says I’m too ambitious.”

“Heron’s hardly likely to have told Two Rabbit what he was planning, though, is he?”

Fire Snake scowled for a moment, as if in disappointment. “I suppose not. He could have boasted about it to someone else, though.”

“Who would that be — one of the other young men? One of his rivals in the competition? I don’t think so. Is there anyone else?”

“I don’t know... I think he has a girl. But I don’t know where you’d find her.”

A cough at my shoulder told me it was time to move on.

I crept furtively about my master’s palace, peering cautiously in before I would look into a room, keeping to the shadows as I skirted the edges of courtyards, taking cover when I needed to behind acacia bushes, yucca plants from the lowlands, and other greenery. I did not want the steward to see me until I had reported to the chief minister, and I would not be ready to do that until after I had spoken to Heron. I assumed he was still at the palace, since I suspected that even if he had recovered consciousness, he was unlikely to be in fit state to go wandering off for a while yet. I wondered whether he would cooperate if I asked him whom he had told about the trick. If he did not, then I had no idea what I would do. I did not seem to have learned anything useful from Fire Snake.

I wondered about the girl the priest had mentioned. A young man like Heron, with his noble connections and fresh from his first triumph on the battlefield, might have his pick of the girls from the pleasure houses. From what I had heard, though, it sounded as though he had a more settled arrangement than that. If she knew about the young man’s attempt to cheat the gods, I had to find out; and then I would need to know whom she might have told the secret to.

I was padding as silently as I could along a dark colonnade when a sudden sound stopped me in my tracks: a loud groan, a cry of pain.

The noise appeared to be coming from a nearby courtyard. As I crept towards it, I heard it again, but this time it was shut off abruptly, and replaced by something quite different: a woman’s voice, hissing furiously: “It’s no use moaning and expecting me to feel sorry for you. What happened was your own fault!”

“How do you make that out? I didn’t put mushroom powder in that jar myself, did I?”

I grinned. It seemed as though I need look no further for Heron or his girl.

“If you hadn’t tried to cheat, it wouldn’t have happened!”

“How was I supposed to win if I didn’t cheat? And please don’t shout, Precious Flower.”

The girl had not raised her voice above a whisper, but clearly the sacred wine and the mushrooms had not quite worn off, so it probably sounded to Heron as though a Master of Youths were shouting orders into his ear. I peeped around the corner to watch them. He lay stretched out on a stone bench with a cloth over his head. The girl, a tall, slim beauty in a fine cotton blouse and skirt, stood over him with her arms folded. Her hair was loose, like a pleasure girl’s, but there was no red stain around her mouth and no sign of the yellow ochre that pleasure girls wore to lighten their skins.