Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

The second thing that stayed my hand was that I recognized the lad.

I could not have said who I might have expected to find skulking around on Skinny’s roof, but one of the last names to occur to me would have been that of Angry the featherworker’s nephew, Crayfish.

‘You’d better tell me what you thought you were doing,’ I said sternly.

‘Please, sir,’ the boy snivelled, his face averted so that he seemed to be talking to my feet, ‘I didn’t mean any harm. I was just looking for … just looking for …’ He was a poor liar. In his place I would have worked out my story in advance.

I looked down at him speculatively. The temptation to carry on acting as a priest and bully the lad into confessing everything was strong, but I knew it was not going to work. Once the shock of being plucked from the roof had worn off he would have no more difficulty in recognizing me than Butterfly had. Besides, I was not anxious to draw a crowd, and the sight of him cowering on the floor might well do just that.

‘“You were just looking for”,’ I repeated. ‘Fine. Up you get. You can explain it all on the way back to Amantlan. And mind you do if you don’t want me telling your uncle where I found you!’

That made him stare. ‘My uncle? How do you know … Oh!’

I reached down and seized his arm, not roughly but firmly enough to get him on his feet. ‘Now each of us knows who he’s talking to, shall we go?’ I turned to leave, keeping hold of the boy with my arm outstretched in case he was tempted to fight me after all.

He hesitated, biting his lip, his head darting about as if looking for somewhere to run. ‘I don’t understand. You were at our house — why are you dressed like that? What are you doing here?’

‘Just move,’ I hissed, ‘unless you want us both to get caught!’

His eyes widened again at that. Then he seemed to relax, as though catching the sense that I might, after all, be a fellow conspirator.

‘You promise you won’t tell my uncle?’

I made a threatening noise and tugged his arm. He started walking.

‘Are you going to let go of me?’

I did. ‘Just remember where I’ll go if you try to run away. Now, are you going to tell me what you were up to? The truth, mind.’

‘I was looking for Marigold.’

He was still a growing boy. As we walked the top of his head came to the level of my chin, but he was watching the ground in front of him, so that he seemed shorter. As I looked down at him I wondered how old he was: eleven or twelve, perhaps. I had thought him older when I had met him before, in his uncle’s presence, when he had seemed to show the sort of care for the older man that I might have expected of a wife or an elder sister. Angry’s wife was dead, however. I wondered how great a void Crayfish’s cousin had left in her father’s household.

I also remembered another young man who had seemed to me old beyond his years. My son was older than this boy, but not by much. I had not seen him grow up, and suddenly the vision I had of us walking and talking together like this, as we never had, brought tears to my eyes and made me break my stride.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’ I swallowed once, blinked a few times and turned back to Crayfish. ‘You were fond of your cousin.’

‘We all were.’ The boy sighed. ‘After my aunt died she took over the household. She cared for the idols — she loved doing that — and made the tortillas and swept and made clothes for my uncle, just the way a wife would have. She was kind to me. She looked after me when I first came to my uncle’s house. She was really more like a sister to me than a cousin — even after she met him.’

There was no need to ask who he meant. ‘You know Idle’s dead.’

‘Good riddance!’ the boy spat.

‘Careful what you say, lad,’ I cautioned him quietly. ‘People might think you had something to do with it!’

‘Me and everyone else he ever met!’ he cried with spirit. ‘The only person I ever knew with a good word to say about him was his wife! Only the gods know what she saw in him.’

‘Did you hear any of what Skinny’s wife said to me?’ I asked. ‘She thought your cousin killed her husband because he was …’ I wondered how worldly the youngster was. ‘He was treating her badly.’

‘Screwing around, you mean.’

I rolled my eyes in disbelief, wondering whether all young boys were like this and my upbringing had been unusually sheltered.

‘I didn’t hear what she said. I don’t believe it. I know her — even if she’d finally realized what her husband was like, she’d never commit murder. It would be a crime!’

‘Obviously,’ I said drily, but I understood. He thought someone as pious as his cousin incapable of any transgression. ‘But the best of people can do terrible things when they’re desperate.’

‘Anyway, why would she need to kill him? She could just have gone back to her father. Uncle Angry would have taken her back, and she knew it. They’d have divorced eventually, and that would have been that. Why would she risk killing him and getting caught? What would have happened to her then?’

I cast my mind back to the law I had been taught in the House of Tears. ‘If she wasn’t put to death she’d probably have been handed over to Butterfly as a slave.’

‘So she’d be worse off than ever!’

‘Someone would have to find her first.’ I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I take it she and Butterfly didn’t get on?’

The youth grimaced. ‘It didn’t help that Marigold’s husband kept making eyes at his sister-in-law — who didn’t do anything to put him off! And Butterfly would go making snide comments about the idols, which upset my cousin.’

‘She may not have been too happy about your cousin’s cosy chats with her husband either,’ I reminded him.

‘I’m sure they weren’t doing anything wrong!’ he said hastily. ‘It’s just that, well, I think Marigold told him things he needed to hear. Do you know what I mean? About how important his work was, how much the gods valued it. Butterfly wouldn’t have understood any of that.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know what to say about Butterfly She seemed to look after her husband well enough, but none of us ever liked her much. My uncle seems to think she’s up to no good, but I can’t get him to say what.’

‘He didn’t know you were going to Atecocolecan.’

‘No. He thinks I’m meeting a friend who’s at the House of Tears, another featherworker’s boy.’ I suspected he meant Stammerer. ‘Going to Idle’s house was my idea, just to see if I could find anything out. To tell you the truth, Uncle Angry has hardly spoken to me in the last couple of days. He’s been hiding in his workshop, not talking to anyone, not letting anyone in, only coming out for his meals. I know he’s brooding over Marigold. It would help him so much if I could find out where she was.’

Crayfish and I parted company at the border of Amantlan. Just before he set off home, he suggested I lose my disguise. He told me my soot was starting to flake off. When I looked down I saw that my hands and legs were beginning to lookgrimy rather than sinister and I was shedding flecks of dark ash the way fruit trees shed blossom in the spring.

Deciding to take the boy’s advice, I looked for a secluded spot, a quiet, narrow canal where I could wash unobserved. Thinking I had found just the place, I turned a corner, only to discover that someone else had had the same idea.

He had just finished relieving himself into the water and was straightening his clothes. He was dressed from neck to ankle in green cotton, and his feet were clad in broad sandals with over-long straps. A sword and a shield lay beside him, and his hair stood up upon his head and flowed in a dark mane down the back of his neck. He had his back to me, but before he turned around I knew who he was: an Otomi warrior.