Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘We’ve made good time, you know,’ I told the captain. ‘It won’t hurt to rest a while.’

He spared a glance for the steward, who had now made it on to his hands and knees, although the sound of his breathing reminded me of an angry rattlesnake. ‘And what then?’

‘You could send me on ahead,’ I suggested hopefully. By now, I thought, when the heat of the afternoon was over, the townspeople would have come out of their houses and the place would be bustling again. There would not be much of a crowd compared with the vast numbers that filled Mexico’s sacred precincts during a festival, but there should still be plenty of opportunities for an undistinguished-looking slave to slip quietly out of sight.

The captain snorted derisively. ‘No chance! You thinkyou’re leaving me in charge of this?’ His foot twitched in the steward’s direction again. ‘No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Fox and I will go on ahead. We’ll start making some discreet enquiries in the marketplace.’ The mobile half of his face grinned, showing a broken row of blackened teeth. Plainly he was looking forward to scaring information out of Tepanecs. I found this strangely reassuring: this man would have no trouble persuading people to talk, but getting them to tell the truth would be entirely beyond him.

‘You three will follow us. We’ll meet up in the sacred precinct, under that temple.’ He gestured with his ugly sword towards the tall pyramid beyond the trees. ‘Be there before nightfall.’ Then, waving the weapon in my direction, he added softly: ‘I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you’re not!’

Handy and I watched the two warriors as they trotted away to bring terror and uproar to Tlacopan.

The big commoner let out a long sigh. ‘It’s a relief to get rid of those two, isn’t it? If that captain of theirs had made us run any further I’d be in the same state as him!’

We both glanced behind us, towards where the steward was slowly getting to his feet.

‘He probably runs twice around the lake before dawn,’ I said, with a nod towards the cloud of dust the warriors had kicked up. ‘Now, I don’t know about you, Handy, but I think I’m getting too old for this sort of sport! Why don’t we rest here for a while and then see if the Tepanecs can find us something to eat?’

I gathered from the smile that began to form on Handy’s face that he had no more enthusiasm for what we were up to than I did. ‘Now there’s an idea,’ he replied. ‘Come to think of it, one of my brothers-in-law was here once, and he told me there was an old woman in the corner of the marketplacewho sold the best gophers in chilli sauce he’d ever tasted.’

The hopeful look on his face froze at the sound of the steward’s voice.

‘Rest? Eat? What are you two talking about?’

The Prick was breathing heavily and his face was still dark, but he was on his feet and no longer the wreck of a man the Otomi captain had been kicking a little while earlier. As he glowered impatiently at us both I realized that he must have feigned his exhaustion, at least in part. His was not the sort of pride that would flinch at a childish trick like that. He had felt humiliated and belittled by the Otomi, but had been prepared to suffer a little more abuse just to get rid of him. Now his tormentor was gone, and he was his own man again, and free to show it in the only way he knew how.

‘Thought you were going to bunk off, did you, Yaotl? Thought you’d have a nice, quiet afternoon, taking your ease in the shade of the fruit trees before a gentle stroll into Tlacopan and maybe a light snack to round off the day? Is that what you thought?’ He took two steps towards me and thrust his face close to mine. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see his fists balling, as if he was about to hit me, although they remained at his sides, no doubt because Handy was there. The commoner was not my master’s possession, and if he chose to intervene the steward could not be sure of winning either the fight or the court case that would follow.

‘We’ll see what Lord Feathered in Black has to say about your idea of obedience later,’ the steward crooned, ‘but first I think we’d better make a start, hadn’t we? Why don’t we go to the market, like your friend here said, and try asking a few questions?’

I hung my head submissively. ‘All right,’ I mumbled, ‘you’re in charge.’

I comforted myself by reflecting that the steward had nomore chance than the Otomies of getting a useful answer out of anyone here. On the other hand, I thought gloomily, as I trudged after him along the road leading into the centre of the town, I still had no idea how I was going to get away.

Get away I must, though. As I walked, my son’s knife bounced against my hip, reminding me that I had urgent business elsewhere.

To an Aztec born and raised in Mexico, Tlacopan was a strange place.

Mexico was a city of whitewashed adobe houses and courtyards, more than anyone had ever been able to count, crammed together so tightly that from the outside it was hard to tell one from another, and almost every one of them was served by a canal. We spent so much of our lives on the water that some of our children learned to paddle a canoe before they could walk. Apart from the great, broad avenues that spread out from the Heart of the World in each of the Four Directions, most of our roads were narrow paths. Our fields lay on the outskirts of the city, on artificial islands made of mud dredged from the bottom of the lake, and they throbbed with activity all year round because their permanently damp soil could bear fruit even at the height of the dry season.

How different were the towns on the mainland! We found ourselves sauntering along wide, dusty streets, between expansive plots that would be full of maize, amaranth, beans, squash, sage or chillies by the end of summer but which now lay largely empty. In the middle of each plot stood a house, its walls stouter than we were used to, since the people here had no bridges they could pull up in the event of an attack.

‘What’s that smell?’ Handy wrinkled his nose. ‘Don’t they empty their privies around here?’

‘What do you expect?’ the steward rasped. ‘Barbarian scum!’

‘They can’t help it,’ I said indulgently. ‘They don’t have boats to take it away, like us. They have to spread it straight on to the fields or carry it all the way down to the lake.’

The steward made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat.

I found myself looking anxiously at the few people we passed, and then at my companions, in case the steward’s obvious contempt for the locals somehow showed. I need not have worried, however, since after a day wandering around in the marshes, we looked less like the all-conquering masters of the One World than a little party of bedraggled peasants.

‘I suppose the market must be near the sacred precinct,’ the steward said. ‘So we’ll make for that pyramid.’ He gestured towards the tallest building in Tlacopan, which now reared up above the trees in front of us. We would be in its shadow soon.

‘And what then?’ Handy asked.

‘We do what we were told, of course — ask around, find out if the man and boy have been seen. It wouldn’t hurt to get to them before the Otomi does!’

Handy looked enquiringly at me. I returned his gaze impassively. So far as I knew my son had never been near Tlacopan. If the steward wanted to waste his time searching for him here, that was fine by me.

‘Let’s go, then,’ I said. ‘We might even find your old woman and her gophers on the way!’

The pyramid loomed ever taller as we approached it. Soon we found ourselves looking up at it between the branches of the trees around us, its bulk like a great shadow thrown across half the sky, blotting out the Sun.