Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘I could,’ I said. ‘I might, except he isn’t here.’

He sighed. ‘We might have been friends, partners, instead of rivals, if it hadn’t been for … well, never mind. Look, I’ll show you something.’ He turned to Crayfish. ‘This is my nephew,’ he said, by way of introduction, before adding, to the boy: ‘Go and fetch me one of the dahlias, will you?’

‘Dahlias?’ I echoed, confused. The last dahlia I had seen had been killed off by frost at the end of autumn. Why would the featherworker want one now, anyway?

When the boy came back, I understood. He was carrying a picture of a flower.

It was a mosaic, made entirely of feathers: red feathers, on a background of black feathers. As Angry handed it to me, I admired the way it captured and reflected the light. The bloom in its centre had been built up in layers, to give it a depth of colour that a real flower could barely have surpassed. If there had been any bees around at this time of year, I thought, they would be swarming over it.

‘See this?’

‘It’s beautiful.’ I imagined a single bloom dropped on the lake, an offering perhaps to Chalchihuitlicue, the goddess who presided over the waters. I saw this flower drifting about the city at night, on its bed of water as deep and dark as the dense, shimmering black feathers — from a grackle or some other species of crow — and sinking slowly into it as it became waterlogged, until it silently vanished.

The picture was snatched from my grasp and thrown to the floor.

‘“Beautiful!”’ Angry spat the word contemptuously back at me. ‘Of course it’s beautiful! It’s just as beautiful as every other picture of a sodding dahlia that’s come out of this workshop in the last thirty years. And you know why?’ He whirled around, almost turning a full circle as he threw an arm out to encompass his courtyard. ‘Because of Crayfish here and all the rest of my little army. Because everybody does one job, carding cotton, tracing patterns, mixing glue, hardening feathers, whatever, one job, the same, day in, day out, until they get so good at it they never even have to think about what they’re doing. Not a real craftsman among us, but we can turn out anything you want — shirts, skirts, shields, fans, mosaics — anything, as long as it doesn’t have to be unique, original, something none of your friends will ever have seen before.’ He glared at me. He seemed to be daring me to ask the obvious question, and so I did.

‘What if it does?’

‘What if it does what?’

‘Have to be unique, original, or whatever?’

He looked away. He was silent so long that I thought he had not heard me, even though I was standing only a couple of hands’ breadths from him, but then I caught his almost inaudible reply.

‘Then you go to Skinny, of course.’

He stood with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed, as motionless as a tree stump, and his eyes were pale slivers against the dark flesh of his face. He was a larger man than I was in every way, and stood a head taller than I did, but I felt that to meet those eyes I would have to squat.

In the long silence that followed, I noticed that many of those sitting around me were making as if to go, laying aside their feathers, bone spreaders, paper and copper knives and creeping towards the exit from the courtyard with a furtive air and the bow-legged, hunchbacked gait people adopt when they are in plain sight and wish they were not. They did not want their employer to see them leaving, even though the sky was darkening and there was a chill in the air. I guessed that Angry drove his workers hard, but now he seemed oblivious to them.

‘Uncle …’ ventured Crayfish eventually, stretching out a hand which was brushed aside.

‘It’s getting late,’ the big man muttered. ‘It’ll be dark soon. I’m going indoors.’

He turned and stalked off. I looked at the youth standing next to me, who sighed. ‘Come on’, he said.

I let him lead me towards the back of the courtyard and the kitchen, where I knew I would find the Old, Old God watching over three hearthstones surrounding a low fire.

The embers lit up Crayfish’s face as he prodded them into life. The sight reminded me of sunlight falling on the bare hills beyond the mountains that ringed our valley, his cheeks, brow and nose picked out like the high places by an orange glow, while his mouth and eyes lay in shadows as dark as the deepest valley. The effect was to make him look much older than he was, and oppressed by his cares.

It was strange to watch a boy cooking, but with his aunt dead and his cousin gone, evidently there was no woman in the house to do it. Once the fire was going he set an earthenware pot on it, standing it over the flames on a tripod, and soon the room was filled with the appetizing smells of burning charcoal and maize gruel being warmed through.

Angry sat by the fire too, staring into it, letting the flames catch his eyes and make them glitter.

‘You have to understand,’ he began, while his nephew stirred the gruel with one hand and steadied the pot with the other, ‘that most featherworkers don’t live in Amantlan any more — not if they’re any good, at least. Now I’m different,’ he added unselfconsciously. ‘So’s Skinny, for that matter. We’re private featherworkers, and always will be, but these days most of the best ones, especially the young ones, get taken into the Palace. Our youngsters go to the Priest House as part of their training. It’s so that they understand the pictures they’remaking: who’s in them and the stories behind them. Crayfish here is going later this year.’ His nephew tested the gruel for warmth with his finger and went on stirring it. ‘The Emperor’s scouts come to the Priest House and pick the most talented ones out. They get lodged, fed, paid well, and they work for the Emperor, making fans and costumes and decorations for him to use as gifts or rewards for the valiant warriors. Isn’t that stuff ready yet?’

As Crayfish reached behind him for three bowls I asked his uncle why he and Skinny were different.

The young man dipped a bowl in the porridge and passed it to me, after first sprinkling a little of the contents on to the fire, for the god. I accepted it gratefully, my stomach reminding me sharply that I had last attended to it before dawn, and then had promptly thrown up. While his uncle lifted his own bowl to his lips, Crayfish answered for him.

‘My uncle could have gone to the Palace, but he wouldn’t.’

I almost choked on my porridge. ‘What?’

‘It’s hot,’ Crayfish warned me belatedly. ‘Do you want some salt or dried chillies?’

‘No, thanks.’ I turned to Angry. ‘You turned the Emperor down?’

He regarded me through the steam rising from his bowl of gruel. When he spoke the steam vanished, blown away like cobwebs. ‘The way I work wouldn’t have suited them,’ he said shortly.

‘And Skinny? Did he turn the Emperor down too?’

‘Skinny and I were the best featherworkers we had. Of course, we were great rivals, forever trying to outdo one another. I made the best feather mosaics ever.’ The big man’s tone as he said this was matter-of-fact, without a hint of conceit. ‘Some of them looked so real you would have sworn they were real flowers and birds and maize cobs and fish and people,not pictures at all. Skinny used to make fans and costumes and insignia for warriors to wear on their backs. He didn’t use glue much, he usually went for the frame and thread method, but he did incredible things — I can show you a fan of his that looks like water when a stone hits it, the feathers flying outward and the whole thing looking as if it’s about to burst.’

‘So what happened?’