Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘Of course it’s me. Who else would it be?’

‘What are you doing out here at this time of night?’ I demanded suspiciously. ‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘Freezing! But I don’t sleep much at night now. I heard you scampering about out here and thought I’d better take a look before you woke the rest of the household. You picked a funny time to call.’

‘You sent for me,’ I said shortly. ‘Your slave gave me this. I came as soon as I could.’

I held out the bronze knife. He waved it away.

‘I’m sorry it had to be so theatrical, but I needed to get your attention!’

I tucked the weapon back into the scrap of cloth tied around my waist. ‘You got it. Now what do you want from me?’

I heard shuffling footsteps moving slowly away.

‘Come into the kitchen.’

I followed the old man into the most important room in the house: the kitchen, the room with the hearth, whose flickering yellow flames cast deep shadows across the faces of the idols surrounding it, throwing them into stark, grotesque relief.

I had looked into this room once before, but a few things had changed. The long, tall merchant’s staff that had stood in one corner, propped up and wrapped in bloodied strips of paper — offerings against its owner’s safe return, from whatever remote corner of the World his calling might send him to — was missing. Then I remembered that the staff had belonged to Shining Light and his mother would have had it burned with his remains. Where it had stood were neat piles of goods: tobacco tubes, cocoa beans and spices, cups and plates, enough wood for a huge fire. They must have been bought for the young man’s wake.

‘Where’s Lily?’ My question came out as a croak, because my mouth had suddenly gone dry at the thought that I might see her again, that she might be sleeping or stirring just a few paces away.

‘Away,’ he said shortly. ‘Now we’ve got our merchandise back, we need to shift some of it quickly, to get some capital back into the business. She’s in Tetzcoco, for the market. She went straight there, as soon as she’d finished washing her son’s body.’

I sighed, although whether it was with disappointment or relief I could not have said myself.

‘Now, there are things I have to show you.’

The old man was pushing something into the fire. A moment later the room was filled with the bright flames and acrid, resinous fumes of a pine torch.

‘Follow me.’

He led the way slowly across the courtyard: a little man, lurching along, with the flickering torchlight catching his silver hair, and his head bowed like a hunchback’s.

As I fell into step behind him, a sharp cry sounded from somewhere near by.

It was stifled in an instant, as if someone had clapped a hand over the caller’s mouth, but it seemed to hang in the air: a shout of pain or terror, the sort of sound a very young child might make waking from a nightmare. However, the voice that uttered it had not been a child’s.

‘What was that?’ I asked in a hushed voice.

The old man did not break his stride. He had turned his head sharply in the direction of the cry but his only response was the sharp hiss of an indrawn breath, a sound of irritation rather than fear.

‘Nothing,’ he snapped, hurrying on.

I looked over my shoulder, towards where the sound had come from. I stared at the opposite corner of the courtyard, where doorways were pools of absolute blackness opening out into the surrounding gloom. Peering at them told me nothing. ‘It must have been something. Listen, I saw something tonight …’

Kindly did not answer me, and when I turned back towards him I saw that he had gone, but the light of his torch flickered inside a nearby room and spilled out of the doorway, as faint as moonlight reflected off the surface of a canal.

I followed him.

‘What’s this all about?’

The old man carefully set the torch into a bracket on the wall. Then he gestured silently at something in the middle of the room.

I looked around me briefly. I had been in here before, andrecognized the peculiar decorations. The walls and ceiling in one half of the room were immaculately whitewashed and adorned with neatly executed, if not elaborate, paintings of the gods. By contrast the rear of the room had been left bare, covered only with a thin, uneven coating of brown plaster. There had once been a false wall dividing the two halves of the room, as there often was in merchants’ houses, to conceal hoarded wealth.

Now the room was empty except for a wicker chest in the middle of the floor. There were some brown stains around it.

The chest lay open. I walked towards it and stooped to look inside.

‘It’s an empty box.’ I straightened up and faced Kindly. ‘Stop playing games with me, old man. I want to know about this!’ I brandished the knife in front of his face. ‘Why did you send it to me?’

‘Just look again.’

The lid was not merely open. Someone had wrenched it off, ripping its leather hinges. One side of the box was crushed and bent, as if it had been kicked or thrown, and some of the reeds it had been woven from were torn. When I looked at it more closely, I saw that it was soiled: something had splashed on to it, the same brown stuff that had stained the floor, and although it was not sticky any more I had no difficulty, even in the poor flickering light of Kindly’s torch, in recognizing blood.

Then I looked in the box again and saw that it was not empty after all. Something lay in the bottom, curled against its sides in a smooth, perfect curve, as still and natural as a snake contentedly sleeping off a meal. It was a frail thing, hard to spot in the deep shadows cast by the box’s sides, although I recognized it as soon as I knew it was there.

I reached inside the box, fingered the thing, stroked itreverently and gently lifted it out. As I held it up to the light it uncurled itself to its full length, greater than one of my arms. It seemed to glow in the torchlight, shimmering as my breath disturbed it, its colours changing from green to blue to turquoise to something else that was none of them and all three at the same time.

‘A quetzal tail feather,’ I breathed. I could not remember having handled anything so precious. For an Aztec this represented true wealth, far more than gold or shiny stones. It was beautiful, iridescent, and the colour of the young maize stalks on which our hopes rested every summer; it was hard to get, for it had to be plucked intact from the living bird; and it was fragile, like life itself.

And I had seen others just like it only that night. I stared at Kindly in disbelief. Surely, I thought, it must be coincidence. How could this old man be connected with the apparition that had confronted me on the bridge? ‘Where did this come from?’

‘Off the arse of one of those funny-looking birds that fly around in the forests down in the South, of course. Where do you think? It’s not where it came from that I care about — it’s where the rest of it went!’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Look at the base of the feather.’

Instead of a sharp quill, the plume ended in a jagged stump. ‘It’s been broken. It looks as if it was torn off something.’

‘It was.’ The old man sighed wearily. ‘Didn’t you think that was rather a big box to hold one feather, even a very special one? Until the night before last there was some important property of mine in there — more or less all I had, at least until you found that boat with all the stuff my grandson stole from us. Now this is all that’s left.’

‘This wasn’t one of a bundle of loose feathers,’ I said. ‘It wasbroken off a finished work.’ I looked at the old man suspiciously. ‘What was it, a fan, a banner, a costume?’