Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

The breechcloth-clad warrior looked uncertainly from one indentation to the other. ‘I see them,’ he said at last.

‘You’re an idiot!’ his captain roared suddenly. ‘Can’t you see how much deeper that one is? Obviously made by a man carrying someone else on his back. How many times did you goover this ground yesterday? A child could have spotted this. Even this slave saw it, almost the moment I did!’

Fox stepped back hastily, his eyes wide with terror. ‘Sir, I’m … I’m sorry, sir. I should have seen it … I just couldn’t see … I mean, why …’

‘You’re as blind as you are stupid, that’s why!’

The man swallowed nervously; but when he glanced at me, I saw that much of his terror was feigned. His eyes were clear and unblinking, and even though he quailed visibly before his captain’s sudden rages, I could see from the way he curled the corner of his mouth and his swift, shrewd appraisal as he looked me up and down that he was not the one in real danger here.

‘I couldn’t … Sir, I just couldn’t see why one of them would have been carrying the other.’

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ the captain shouted. He prodded me hard with his upraised foot. ‘You tell him, slave!’

I stood up carefully. ‘Could be any number of reasons. Perhaps one of them was lame. Twisted his ankle getting out of the boat, maybe.’

‘You see?’ The captain sneered.

Fox lowered his head.

‘Now take us up on to dry land, before we all get foot rot! I want to see this slave pick up the trail where you lost it!’

I stood aside as the line of warriors shouldered their way through the rushes. My master’s steward and Handy brought up the rear of the column. The steward passed me without a glance, casually swinging his elbow so that it all but connected with my chin. Behind him, Handy stopped by me for a moment.

‘I heard that,’ he muttered. ‘It’s crap, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it is,’ I whispered back. ‘If that idiot’s footprint is shallower than the other one it’s because he’s wearing sandalsand they spread his weight. Also the boatman was running, so of course his print was heavier. But it worked!’

‘Can’t wait to find out what your next trick is!’

‘Neither can I,’ I murmured ruefully, as I set off after the rest of the line.

Beyond the rushes the ground became firmer and started to slope steeply towards the wooded hill called Chapultepec.

The maize fields around the base of the hill were bare at this time of year. They formed short terraces, bordered by bushes and broad, low, fleshy-leaved maguey plants; apart from these and a few scattered huts there was nothing to obstruct our view of the countryside. I looked up at the hill, conscious that everyone else was staring at me.

‘No footprints at all,’ Fox said. ‘There was a frost two nights ago, and it’s exposed here, so the ground would have been too firm.’ He shot me a challenging look. ‘So where did they go next?’

I lowered my eyes. Fox was, as usual, right: the earth here offered neither a clue nor, which was more to the point, anything I could manufacture a clue out of. I thought about the trees on the hill above us. The idea of leading these men into the woods and losing them there was tempting, until I imagined myself treed among them, perched on a high bough, a helpless target for Fox’s throwing-stick and spear.

‘Your men have already searched the woods,’ I said to the captain. He grunted his agreement. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been the first place I’d have looked. Maybe they rested up there for the night, or maybe not — but either way they’d have moved on. Now the question is, where?’ I was aware of my fingers rubbing one of my torn earlobes, an old nervous habit. I was trying to look like a man concentrating fiercely, while in reality my mind had suddenly gone blank.

The man we were really following, my master’s errant boatman — where had he gone? Where would I have gone, in his position?

The captain grinned at me. ‘You’re going to tell us where — aren’t you?’

I glanced helplessly at Handy, just because his was the least unfriendly face I could see. The muscles of his jaw were oddly contorted: if our situation had not been so desperate, I might have thought he was trying not to laugh. Then he saw me looking at him. His expression froze for a moment. The corners of his mouth drooped dejectedly. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something, and, with his voice faltering only a little, he spoke up.

I might have wept with relief. He was my friend, after all. At the very least, however afraid he was of the Otomies and however annoyed he was with me for getting him involved with them, the stubborn commoner was probably more angry about being bullied by the captain.

‘They wouldn’t be out here at all,’ Handy said. ‘If they stayed in the open you’d hunt them down in no time. It wouldn’t take a squad of warriors much longer to flush them out of the trees if they tried hiding out on the hill. They both know what old Black Feathers is like, don’t they?’

‘They do.’ I picked up his train of thought. ‘They’d be expecting a regiment to come after them, and they’d know the warriors would chop the whole forest down if they had to before they stopped looking. So they can’t be hiding here.’ When I saw the solution, I had to suppress a grin: it was so elegant I almost believed it myself. ‘On the other hand, they can’t have run very far, can they? Not with one of them carrying the other. So …’

The captain twisted his sword threateningly. The shards of obsidian sunk in its shaft flashed as the sunlight caught them,and his own eyes glittered as he watched them. When he spoke he seemed to be talking to the weapon, as though reassuring it that it would have work to do yet.

‘So what you are telling me is that the men we’re after can’t be running away and they can’t be hiding either. What, then? They just vanished? Are they sorcerers? Did they turn themselves into moles and burrow into the soil? Are they down there now, laughing at us?’

He drove the blunt end of the shaft into the ground. It struck the earth with a ‘thump’ that seemed to reverberate in the open field’s empty silence, and when he let the weapon go, it stood upright unsupported.

‘Somebody,’ he reminded me, ‘is going to pay for all this. If these men are lost …’

‘They’re not sorcerers,’ I assured him hastily. ‘I didn’t say they weren’t hiding. I just said they would not be hiding out here.’ I glanced quickly at Handy again: he was looking at his feet, no doubt wondering whether he had been right to take my side.

I took a deep breath. I might live or die by my next few words. But I saw what I had to do. I could not fight the Otomies, nor could I run away from them. I had to take them somewhere where they could not hurt me no matter how angry and frustrated they got and where I would not need legs like a roadrunner’s to outpace them. I had to lure them on to my own ground. I thought wistfully of the city I could not see, out on the lake, hidden by the tall rushes. I imagined its vast, bustling crowds, its networks of narrow streets and canals, the baffling mazes of its marketplaces, the refined manners of its people, most of whom could admire a man like the captain from afar but would go out of their way to avoid talking to him. I could have lost the warriors there in no time.

My own city was beyond my reach, but there were others.

‘Where’s the nearest large town?’ I asked innocently.

The captain got Fox to draw a rough map in the dirt with the point of his harpoon.

‘Say this is Chapultepec,’ he began, digging a small hole.

‘Don’t bother putting the little villages in,’ I said helpfully. ‘They wouldn’t go near those. Everybody knows everybody else, so they’d spot strangers straight away, and they’d tell you about them as soon as you asked just to get rid of you. Telpochtli and the boy would know that.’ I knew there was no point in my trying to hide in a village either, for the same reason.