Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

The steward looked at me. ‘What now?’ he asked in a disgusted tone.

‘Better get after him, I suppose,’ I said reluctantly.

‘Good idea, smartarse. Where did he go?’

‘Follow the smoke smell,’ Handy suggested.

It did not take us long to make our way along the trail of broken reeds and churned-up mud to the site where the Otomies had built their fire. Above the rustle of rushes and the slap of mud beneath our feet I could hear urgent, angry whispers being passed back and forth.

‘So what did you catch, Cuectli? A deer? A heron? A duck?’ The voice had an odd quality, as if the speaker were murmuring asides out of one half of his mouth only.

Cuectli, whose name meant ‘Fox’, responded with a sad sigh. ‘Only idiots.’

I could not quite catch the captain’s reply, but plainly it was not an encouraging one, as the next thing I heard was Fox’s voice singing my praises. ‘One of them’s a tracker, though. An expert. Claims he can follow a bird through the air!’

‘Let’s have a look at him, then!’

The next thing I knew I was being pulled through the tall plants into the clearing, there to stand face to face with one of the ugliest-looking individuals I have ever seen.

If I had needed a reminder of the type of man the Emperor liked to have in the vanguard of the army, in the front row of the battle line, one glance at this one would have been enough.

Unlike Fox, the captain was fully dressed. His torso, arms and legs were tightly wrapped in a suit of bright green cotton, which served only to emphasize the bulging muscles under it. His feet had been thrust into broad, flat sandals that put me in mind of paving slabs. He had bound up his grey-streaked hair in the same way as Fox. I could not see the insignia he would carry on his back when he went into battle — a tall, teardrop-shaped device, crowned with long green feathers, which would make him instantly recognizable to friend and terrified foe alike — or his round, feather-bordered shield, but I guessed they were both close at hand, carefully wrapped up to preserve them from the mud and damp. No doubt they would have impeded his progress through the rushes, but in his case, I thought, they were hardly needed. He would have been fright-ening enough stark naked, because, even though I took all the details of his costume in and grasped their meaning without conscious thought, I forgot all about them when I saw his face.

Someone had taken a sword to it, many years before. Someone had cut through flesh and bone, from brow to jawline, and where the left side of his face should have been had left nothing but a glistening slab of scar tissue.

How had he survived a wound like that? I felt a chill when I realized that he must have won the fight in which he got it, since otherwise he would be dead, his heart torn from his breast at the summit of a pyramid in Texcala or Huexotzinco. Perhaps his partner had saved his life, for Otomies alwaysfought in pairs. What was left of his lower lip sagged under the weight of a human wrist-bone that dangled from it, and I suspected that this had belonged to the man who gave him the wound.

Behind him, his comrades were trying to build a fire out of reeds and some kindling they had brought with them. The ground was too damp and all they were getting was clouds of thin smoke, which would be doing nothing to sweeten their tempers, especially once they realized they had nothing to cook on it anyway. Some of the warriors were dressed like their captain, while others wore only their breechcloths. I wondered briefly why any of them had bothered to put their uniforms on, since they were not going to war, but then I realized that the answer was all too obvious. It must be so long since any of these blood-glutted veterans had met anyone equal to him in battle that a fight scarcely meant anything to them any more. Their business was killing and maiming men who were already paralysed with fear. That was what they had come here to do, and they had dressed accordingly. And they were hunting my son.

The captain interrupted my thoughts in the crudest manner possible, by stretching out an arm, seizing my jaw and dragging my face close to his. He tilted my chin up towards his face and let his sole eye rove lewdly over my features.

‘Name?’ he snarled.

I should have been meek, but his examination reminded me of the slave market, of strangers looking into my mouth, feeling my muscles and measuring my worth in lengths of cloth and bags of cocoa beans, and I could not help answering him back.

‘I can’t tell you when you’re holding my jaw,’ I pointed out unintelligibly.

‘What?’

Fox said: ‘I think he wants you to let go.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Suddenly the pressure on both sides of my face doubled, forcing my mouth open and stretching the skin of my cheeks over my teeth. It was impossible to scream but the pain made me squirm. My head was wrenched from side to side so hard that the motion made me dizzy, and then the captain shoved me backward and let go, making my knees buckle and sending me sprawling on to the ground. My head hit Handy’s chest on the way down, driving the breath from his lungs with a loud grunt.

‘Funny man,’ the captain sneered. I rubbed my jaw as I glared resentfully up at him.

‘I think his name’s Yaotl,’ Fox offered.

‘“The Enemy”, eh? Well, he’s the first enemy we’ve seen today What about it, lads? Do we show the runt what it feels like to meet the Otomies?’

There was a stirring among the shadowy figures behind him. I sat up quickly, knowing the captain’s followers would tear me to pieces on command.

‘I’m the Chief Minister’s slave. I was sent here after the same two men you’re looking for. We’re all here to do the same job and we’re none of us here because we want to be …’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that! Nice and quiet here — no one about — we could have some fun. How about a game where you all pretend to run away and we hunt you down like wild pigs?’

‘No …Ya …Yaotl’s right.’

To my amazement, it was the steward who spoke up. His voice shook so much that I could barely make out the words, but plainly his fear of being caught up in the Otomi’s sadistic fantasy was enough to loosen his tongue.

‘Lord Feathered in Black sent us. Yaotl can tell you where the man and the boy went — can’t you, Yaotl?’

I got up slowly, too nervous myself to appreciate the wheedling note in the steward’s words to me. I spat blood out of my mouth, carefully avoiding the Otomi’s feet.

‘I think so,’ I said slowly. ‘I saw where they landed. I can try to pick up the trail from there.’

The captain turned his eye on Fox. ‘What’s he talking about?’

‘I expect he means that spot where the ground’s all churned up — where we thought someone must have run a canoe ashore, going quite fast.’ He gave me a hard stare. He was right, of course, and I tried to hide my dismay. These men were going to be more difficult to fool than I had thought, and the consequences if they thought I was leading them astray on purpose did not bear thinking about. ‘We checked that place out yesterday,’ Fox added, ‘and there’s nothing. Someone ran off into the rushes, all right, but there’s only one set of prints and they disappear as soon as you get up into the fields. What makes you think you’re going to find anything else?’

‘Yaotl’s an expert tracker,’ my master’s steward put in maliciously. He had little idea what we were looking for but would be happy to let me take the blame for not finding it.

I had no choice but to play along with this. Even if it cost me my life, I had to keep these brutal killers from picking up my son’s trail.

‘Let’s at least go and have a look.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not as if any of us has anything better to do!’