Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘Do your best, Yaotl,’ he said, as he all but pushed me into the street. ‘I’m relying on you! And so’s your son!’

He seemed keen to be rid of me after I had declined his offer of a drink. I wondered about that, as I stood by the whitewashed stone wall of his house and watched its pale reflection catch ripples on the surface of the canal at my feet, making each one gleam fleetingly. I wondered about his air of distraction, of something like embarrassment. I wondered too about the odd cries I had heard. They seemed to come from close by, but I had not heard them again and there was nothing to see.

Then I sighed, telling myself that these were minor mysteries compared to the others I had got caught up in of late. Wrapping myself more tightly in the blanket, I turned and walked on, back towards the bridge that led across the canal to Amantlan. If I was going to look for old Kindly’s precious feathered costume, I thought, then I might as well start by talking to the man who had made it.

It was as I was padding back across the bridge that I first noticed the trail of blood.

It caught my eye as a thin dark smear, glistening with reflected starlight. I knelt and ran my finger through it and sniffed it. It was fresh.

I got up and looked back and forth along the short bridge. To my surprise the trail started about where I was standing, and ran on to the far shore. Had there been a fight here, with the wounded man staggering off in the direction of Amantlan? I looked down again. There were a few marks in the frost that coated the bridge’s planks. I could see my own footprints, melted into the frost by my bare soles. There were other, less distinct marks, streaks that might have marked the passage of something heavy, being dragged across the canal, and the bloody smear was in their midst. I could not see anything that suggested a struggle.

Frowning, I walked slowly over the bridge, following the trail until I saw where it was going to take me. That was when I hesitated, stopping to sniff the air, and feeling the first spasm of nausea as I realized what must lie beyond the wicker screen at the bridge’s far end, the one I had been making for when I thought I saw the god.

My sense of smell may have been more acute than most. As a priest, I had spent much of my life in darkness — in the niches at the backs of temples where the Sun’s rays were never allowed to penetrate, surveying the stars from the summit of a pyramid, or patrolling by night the hills around the lake our city stood on, seeing nothing but alive to the scents the wind brought, of pine and sage and briny water. His eyes sometimes mattered less to a priest than his nose, and the old instincts still served me when I needed them.

I stood by the wicker screen. I watched as the foggy cloud my breath made dispersed in the cold, still night air, and then took a slow, deep, deliberate sniff.

I fought back the gorge rising in my throat as each of the smells pressed its claim to recognition. They were all foul: piss and ordure and, underlying the others but unmistakable, an odour no priest or former priest could ever forget — the reek of fresh human blood.

I looked down. There was no doubt that this was where the short trail I had followed led. The smell came from behind the screen, and there was nothing I could do now but go and look for its source.

I knew something of what I would find. There would be pots into which passers-by could relieve themselves, and which would be taken away by boat for sale in the markets as dyestuff or manure. Sure enough, I found several large, squat, plain clay vessels, their outsides streaked, spattered and darkly stained by years of careless use. I peered at the unsavoury things as closely as I could in the darkness, but could see nothing out of the ordinary. Then I took a step forward, and felt my stomach lurch.

My bare feet stuck to the ground.

I did not need to look down. The smell rising from all around me was enough to tell me what I was standing in. The space around the pots was awash with it. Enough blood had been spilt here to satisfy even Cihuacoatl, our most ravenous goddess, if it had been offered as a sacrifice.

My head spun. I was tempted to lean against the screen for support but stopped myself just in time, as the flimsy structure would surely have collapsed. I looked around wildly, probing each dark corner for some sign of a body, desperate to assure myself that the dead man had not ended up where I could see he almost certainly had.

Groaning, I accepted the evidence of my eyes and ventured towards the nearest pot. I pushed it nervously with the heel of my hand. It was too heavy to fall over, and merely rocked backon to its base. I tried to upset it again, failed again and finally, howling with frustration and disgust, got both my hands on its slippery rim and shoved.

I jumped back as a stream of vile sludge slopped across the ground at my feet. Mercifully, there was not enough light to see what colour it was, but there was no mistaking either its smell or the pale thing that flowed out on the dark, stinking stream. It was part of a human arm. The hand was turned up towards me, as if in supplication, although its fingers were closed around something, a small, hard, gleaming object, with an irregular shape, like a carving in jade or obsidian.

I bent towards the hand for a closer look, but at that point nausea finally got the better of me. I ran to the edge of the canal and vomited, voiding my almost empty stomach and heaving drily and painfully until I scarcely had the strength to draw breath. For a long time after that I just knelt by the water’s edge, watching the gathering pre-dawn light catch the ripples on its surface until the moisture in my own eyes turned them first into vague ghostly shapes and then into a feeble, pale flickering, like a blanket being shaken out on a dull day.

A long time passed after I had fled from the horror I found behind the screen, during which I did nothing but crouch wretchedly beside the canal. When my stomach had stopped heaving I wept, and when my tears had dried up I merely stared at the water.

I ought to have gone back, to tip up all the other pots and confront their secrets. I shifted my weight from my heels to the balls of my feet twice, meaning to get up and look behind the screen again, but both times I stayed where I was. I thought I could guess what had happened, and I could not bear to have it confirmed.

My son had gone to Kindly’s house, looking for his knife. Iwondered whether he had surprised another thief, whoever had stolen Kindly’s costume, or whether, as Kindly himself believed, the two of them had been in it together and had fallen out. One of them had stabbed the other, and the victim had ended up here. I looked back along the bridge and tried, in spite of myself, to visualize what had happened: the killer carrying the body as far as the middle of the bridge, perhaps, and then dropping it and dragging it the rest of the way before cutting it up and concealing it hastily in a public privy.

Could Nimble have done such a thing? I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the boy I had known all too briefly killing a man for the sake of a bronze knife and a feathered costume. It was difficult. Nimble had been the lover of a vicious, cold-blooded and sadistic murderer, but he was no killer himself. Yet the alternative explanation was worse: that it was my son’s body that lay in pieces, just a few paces away

I had to know.

Swallowing once, I forced myself to my feet, and then realized that the matter was out of my hands and my chance had been lost.

It was almost dawn and the city was coming to life. Canoes began gliding by, and one or two of their boatmen glanced curiously at the miserable creature standing by the canal, his face pale from retching, his eyes raw and his clothes reduced to rags. I knew that I had better move on quickly before somebody else discovered what I had seen and connected it with me.