Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

He glanced over his shoulder, considering the distance to the shore of the lake. ‘If I can get to the causeway, I can be back in the city by nightfall,’ he said, ‘but I still don’t understand …’

‘Go on, then!’ I urged him. ‘There’s no time to lose!’

He gave the pitiful creature on the ground one lingeringglance, just as the captain took a step towards it and raised his knife again. Then Handy reached out, slapped me once on the arm, and ran.

‘Where’s he going?’ snapped Fox.

‘Thought he saw something,’ I said. ‘Might have been the boy. He’ll be back in a moment.’

‘Ah!’ The captain bent towards his victim. ‘Did you hear that? Now we can really start to have some fun!’

Then he drove the knife one more time into the already ruined mouth. The boatman let out a bubbling scream and writhed and jerked like a stranded fish.

‘How did this happen?’ I asked quietly.

Standing next to me was a young man. His head was shaved, and I guessed that meant that he had lost the tuft of hair that he would have borne throughout his years at the House of Youth, or wherever boys from Tlacopan did their training. So he had been to war and taken a captive, but judging by his nervousness and the way his eyes followed the captain, constantly flicking from the man’s villainous face to the flint knife and back again, he was no seasoned veteran.

‘Someone told me they found the man hiding in a granary,’ he said. ‘They could tell he was an Aztec, of course, so they had him locked up in the palace and sent a messenger to Mexico. Then the Otomi came. He said the Aztec Chief Minister had sent him. He ordered us to hand over any Aztec runaways to him, so we brought the man out.’

‘And you let him get away with it?’ I said, raising my voice provocatively.

I glanced quickly at the men in the middle of the crowd but they were concentrating on the boatman, who was coughing and spitting blood and fragments of teeth out on the ground. How long did I have before he started to speak?

‘What kind of warriors do you have here, anyway? Twomen start terrorizing your women and children and breaking up your marketplace, and you just do what they tell you? Didn’t anyone think to stop them, or ask them why they were doing this?’

Fox looked up, frowning, and took a step towards his captain, as if he wanted to warn him of something. He must have heard me, I thought desperately, but then the boatman reached up to grab the hem of the captain’s cloak, tugging at it as if he were trying to haul himself upright, and I realized that he was trying to speak as well and that whatever time I had was fast running out.

‘Call yourselves men?’ I cried out at last, letting as many of the crowd as possible hear the scorn and incredulity in my voice, and no longer caring whether or not the captain, Fox and the steward realized what I was up to. ‘Why, it’s no wonder we Aztecs rule the whole World!’

‘No wonder at all, when your Emperor keeps our King as a hostage in his palace and all our seasoned warriors are sent abroad while yours squat at home with nothing to do except drink chocolate and torture their neighbours!’

I turned, as did the men around me, to look at the speaker.

He was a priest. I could tell that immediately, by looking at his face, which was stained black with soot, streaked with blood drawn from his earlobes, and framed by a mass of lank, tangled hair. He wore a long robe, of cotton rather than maguey fibre, and the tobacco pouch that hung from his neck was no mere shapeless bag but a miniature jaguar, complete with jaws, four paws and a tail, exquisitely fashioned from real ocelot skin. He must, I realized, be a man of some standing. Perhaps he was from the city’s chief temple. I looked up at the summit of the pyramid that loomed over the sacred precinct and the marketplace and understood: he had been standing up there, watching the captain’s and Fox’s activities, and havingseen the disturbance in the marketplace and realized that nothing was being done to quell it, he had come down to take a hand.

I looked at him and laughed deliberately. I was still trying to sound scornful; moreover I wanted to keep the relief out of my voice.

‘Tell me, O Wise One,’ I said sarcastically, ‘just how many Tepanecs does it take to subdue two Aztecs, then?’

‘Here …!’ One of the young men next to me put a hand on my arm, warning me to show more respect, but the priest quelled us both with a look.

‘One,’ he assured me, before stepping through the crowd into the space at its centre.

He walked straight up to the captain. The Otomi glared at him with his sole eye.

‘What’s the meaning of this?’ demanded the priest.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘A servant of Tezcatlipoca.’

The captain’s answer was to stoop briefly to pick up his cruel-looking sword and then bring himself up to his full height, with the weapon raised so that its blades flashed in the evening sunlight.

‘A servant of Tezcatlipoca, eh? Well, the warriors of Huitzilopochtli tell you to mind your own business!’ he roared, shoving the priest in the chest with his free hand.

It was not a hard blow, merely a warning. The Tepanec stumbled back but kept his balance. Nonetheless, it was too much for the spectators. Men surged forward, baying and growling. Elbows and knees barged me aside, almost knocking me over as the youths around me, their pride wounded by my taunts, rushed in to defend their priest.

For a moment there was so much shouting and scuffling that I could not work out what was going on. I heard hoarse cries,the thump and slap of feet and fists striking flesh and the sharper sound they made upon bone, and yelps of pain. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the flash of sunlight on the blades of the captain’s sword. A jet of red liquid shot through the air, droplets falling hot on my cheeks, and someone squealed in pain.

After that there came a long, despairing wail, a cry of sheer terror in a voice that reminded me of my master’s steward’s. Then, gradually, all became quiet again.

Standing on tiptoe, staring between heads and over hunched, tense shoulders, I was able to make out just enough to establish what had happened.

The Otomi had the priest by the throat. He seemed to have forgotten the boatman, at least for now. He was not holding his sword: someone must have managed to wrench it from his grasp.

Fox stood with his back pressed against his captain’s. If they were not a pair, they were prepared to fight as one now, defending each other to the death and taking as many of the enemy with them as they could. There was still a small space around them, no man daring to come within arm’s length.

The steward was easier to see because three of the Tepanecs were holding him up like a trophy. His eyes and mouth were wide open with terror.

‘Well?’ The captain’s voice was tense but steady. He jerked his terrible head towards the steward. ‘Never mind him. He’s nothing. Which of you is going to be first? You’ll have this priest’s blood on your hands!’

A kind of shudder went through the crowd, but nobody moved.

Then the priest spoke, his voice hoarse through being forced out past the Otomi’s almost lethal grip.

‘Nothing lives for ever on Earth,’ he gasped. ‘You can killme, and my ashes will be buried with a dog to guide me through the Nine Hells, and I’ll find my resting place in the Land of the Dead. But then you’ll just be torn to pieces, and the pieces dumped outside the city like garbage, for the vultures and coyotes to pick over. You’ll never rest, and your families will never be able to stop mourning you.’

The captain had no answer to that that I heard. I did not see the grip on the priest’s throat slacken, but I did not see any of the men around him move either.