Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

I stood quite still while he looked me over. I wanted to run, but all my legs seemed able to do was tremble violently, and I knew I would be caught before I had gone five paces. All I could do was trust in my disguise.

I recognized him as one of the captain’s entourage. I was thankful that he was not the captain himself, or Fox, either of whom I was sure would have recognized me. I wondered where his monstrous, one-eyed chief was.

‘What are you doing here?’ the warrior demanded eventually

I remembered to disguise my voice, mumbling the way priests sometimes did, owing to having drawn so much blood from their tongues. ‘The same as you, by the look of it.’

He bent down to pick up his sword and shield. ‘There isn’t a latrine near here. It always feels better to go in the canals in this part of the city, anyway!’ He was obviously from Tenochtitlan, besides having a warrior’s contempt for the merchants and craftsmen who lived in the surrounding houses. Helooked at my robes. ‘What’s a priest of Huitzilopochtli doing in Tlatelolco?’

‘Official business,’ I said casually. ‘I might ask you the same question, though.’

He made an impatient gesture with his sword. ‘We’re looking for a couple of runaways — a boy and an escaped slave. Seen anything like that?’

‘No.’

‘Well, report it if you do. My captain is very keen to get hold of the slave in particular. He led us a merry dance over in Tlacopan, and he’s going to be wearing his own guts for a breechcloth when we find him!’ Suddenly he was looking at me intently. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

I gulped. ‘I don’t think so. I serve the god at his great temple in the Heart of the World — maybe you’ve seen me at a festival.’

He frowned. ‘No, it’s not that. I don’t know, your face just looks familiar, that’s all.’

I summoned up a nervous laugh. ‘Hard to say under all this black stuff, isn’t it?’

He peered at me for a long moment, while I fought to control my terror. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

‘Can’t stand here all day,’ he said briskly, stepping around me. ‘Got to get after those bastards. It’s a year’s supply of tobacco for the man who catches them!’

Then he was gone, and I was on my knees at the water’s edge, being violently sick.

It was only when the last uncontrollable spasm had passed through me and I squatted, gasping and shivering, by the canal that the full import of what the Otomi had said began to sink in.

He had told me he and his comrades were looking for a slave — me — and a boy. But when I had left him in Tlacopan,the captain had still been convinced that he was pursuing a third person. The boatman he had been torturing would not have known any better.

So how had the Otomies learned the truth?

I stayed where I was for the remainder of the afternoon, trying to rest. Once night had fallen, I finally abandoned my disguise, washing the soot off in the canal and hiding the cloak behind a patch of nettles. Then I made my way back to the house in Atecocolecan.

I scrambled up the willow that had got Crayfish on to the roof earlier in the day and crawled around the edge, as the boy must have done, for fear of falling through the insubstantial plaster in the middle. Then I paused, looking around me and hesitating while I thought about what I intended to do. The sky overhead was brilliant with stars, although luckily the moon had not risen yet. When I looked over my shoulder I could see the faint, flickering light of the brazier at the top of the parish temple, but it was too far away to shed any light on me. There was no sound except the wind stirring the willow by the house and the trees and rushes that lined the parish’s plots out on the lake.

What I intended to do here was to find Kindly’s featherwork for him, because it was the only thing I could think of that might lead me to where my son was. I was convinced that the place to look for it was the room Idle had shared with Marigold. There was something concealed in that room, I was certain of that: why else would Butterfly have been so desperate to keep me out of it?

As I shifted my weight and prepared to drop into the courtyard as quietly as I could, sudden dread made my stomach cramp painfully. What I was about to do, trespassing in a house at night, was a serious crime, but it was not that which frightenedme. I had committed capital crimes before and got away with it, one way or another. What terrified me was the conviction that whatever Idle had died for, it had something to do with what I had come here to find, and whoever had killed him would not hesitate to kill again.

I took a deep breath and jumped.

As soon as my feet were on the ground I darted into the shadows. From there, after a quick look around me to ensure I was alone, I crept towards the forbidden doorway I had to hold my breath as I lifted a corner of the cloth that covered it, in case I missed any sound that might betray the presence of someone in the room: a cough or a footstep, a grunt or a snore or the faint rustle of someone turning over under a blanket. Butterfly had told me that this had been Idle’s and Marigold’s room, and I assumed from this that it was unoccupied, but if Skinny and his wife had moved into it since the afternoon then I intended to be out of the front doorway before they could stir.

Hearing nothing, I slipped into the room and let the cloth fall back behind me.

Now there was no light whatever. I would have to do all my searching by touch. I cursed under my breath. The last thing I needed to be doing now was blundering about in a strange room with my hands groping the air in front of me in the hope that one of them would connect with something important, but I had no choice.

I took a single step forward, and a moment later was in agony, with my tongue clamped between my teeth to stop me screaming and my legs buckling with pain and shock.

I had stubbed my toe.

Tears sprang to my eyes as I tried to work out what I had walked into. Whimpering, I dropped to one knee, curling the leg with the injured foot protectively under me as I felt for thething. It was a piece of rock, rough hewn and jagged, or so I thought until I managed to turn it over and discovered that parts of it had been polished smooth. As I ran my fingers over its curves and ridges I realised that it was a carving, although there was no way of telling by touch what it was meant to be.

‘I wonder how this got broken?’ I mused. ‘Maybe some other clumsy moron bumped into it before me.’

I got up, grimacing as my sore toe touched the floor. Edging around the place where I had left the stone, I found another piece, as rough as the first, when my heel brushed against it.

Butterfly had not lied when she said the place was a mess. Working my way along the room towards the back of the house, I soon found a pile of rubbish. Somebody appeared to have made a loose heap of all Idle’s possessions and just left it in the middle of the floor. Fishing around in it with my hands, I found stale tortilla crusts, broken pottery, cloth, thread, something sharp that I thought must be an obsidian razor and feathers. There was a surprising number of feathers.

The pile spilled across the whole width of the room, so that I had to clamber over it to find out what lay beyond it. I started nervously as something fell off the top of it, and rolled across the floor with a loud clatter. I froze for a moment but heard no other sound.

The room turned out to be smaller than it had looked from the outside because I found the rear wall of the house immediately beyond the heap.

I ran my hands over it briefly. There seemed to be no shelves or niches, just plain plaster. The surface had a rough feel as though it had been hastily finished. There was a draught around my feet, which made me think mice from the fields behind the house must have eaten their way through the adobe from the outside.