Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘Of course, there wasn’t much for us to do once we knew whose slave you were. He’s got enough men of his own tosend running around after you without needing any help from us. If we’d wanted to get you for doing Idle, we reckoned we might as well wait and see what was left after they’d finished with you.’ He gave me what may have been a pitying look. ‘And from the look of some of them, you’re bloody lucky we found you first!’

I wondered what had possessed Lily to go to my master, but I had more urgent worries on my mind now. ‘So where are you taking me now?’ I asked in a low voice. ‘Back to Lord Feathered in Black?’ I could guess what would happen after that. My master would gloat over me for a while and then hand me over to the captain’s tender mercies.

‘Oh no. Not now You’re going to the Governor.’

‘Itzcohuatzin? Why him?’

‘Why do you think? I told you Skinny was a mistake. As soon as we knew who the dead man was, every parish policeman in Tlatelolco was told to bring whoever did it to the Governor. Now I don’t know whether Lord Feathered in Black has any other ideas, seeing as you’re his slave, but since I’ve had no orders to the contrary, it’s to the Governor you’re going.’

‘What happened to Skinny?’ I asked.

Shield groaned. ‘Here we go again!’

Upright snorted. ‘You might tell us. We know you attacked him on the Pochtlan side of the canal, right near the bridge with Amantlan. Why so close to where we found his brother? I suppose you were unlucky, though. I don’t reckon you hit him hard enough to have killed him outright, but of course he drowned. You could have pulled him out, though.’

‘Maybe he thought he was doing him a favour, letting the poor bugger die like that,’ Shield suggested. People who died by water were spared the terrors and misery of the Land of the Dead; instead they were destined to spend the afterlife inTlalocan, the rain-god’s paradise, where the seasons never let you down and there was always plenty to eat.

‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said, for the sake of saying it.

‘Well, you can tell that to the Governor and whoever else asks you,’ Upright said indifferently. ‘I’m curious, though. Why’d you do it? What were Idle and Skinny to you?’

‘He fancied getting up the widow’s skirt!’

Shield’s crude jibe jolted some memory, a dream I thought I had once had, or rather a nightmare, and suddenly I was in a dark, cramped space, and a great snake was wrapping its coils around me, its woman’s voice cooing softly in my ear, saying things that should have been beautiful and arousing and were all the more grotesque and sickening because of it.

I struggled. I tried to cry out, to stand up, to flee, and then there was a massive hand on my shoulder, driving me back down into the bottom of the boat.

‘Don’t even think about it!’ Shield snarled.

I sat, shivering, while Upright looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Interesting,’ he said at last.

‘Look,’ I said, mustering all my self-control to keep my voice steady, ‘I didn’t kill Skinny because I wanted his wife or for any reason. I didn’t kill Idle. I was asked by Kindly the merchant to look for some property of his that he thought they had. That’s why I was at their house.’

Why had I found Shield’s words so disturbing? More of the visions of gods and serpents that I had had in the night were coming back to me. I wondered why the images were so enduring. Dreams, even those induced by the seeds of the Morning Glory plant, were fragile, evanescent things, usually dispersing like mist as soon as the Sun came up, but these would not go away. They were like the memory of a real event rather than something I had had to travel to the land of dreams to see.

‘We know why you were at their house.’ Shield’s voice, outlining his theory, dragged me back to the present. ‘You’d got rid of Idle and Skinny so there wouldn’t be anyone to get between you and Skinny’s wife. I bet you also got her sister-in-law out of the way too, didn’t you? We haven’t found her body yet, but we will. So now you thought you had everything nicely set up and it was time to go and enjoy yourself.’ He gave a raucous laugh. ‘You must have been really looking forward to that. I’ve seen Butterfly!’

Upright looked at me again. ‘Why’d you bring up Kindly again? We know you aren’t his slave. What’s this lost property you were talking about? Why would you have been looking for it?’

I thought quickly. There was one thing I knew I could never reveal to the policemen or anyone else, my search for my son, because I could not risk giving anything away that might help Lord Feathered in Black to guess who he really was or that he was still in the city That was my secret, I decided, but other people’s, including Kindly’s, were none of my business.

‘I was running away. I needed cash — something I could carry, like a few quills of gold dust or some copper axe heads. The merchant said he’d pay me quickly if I did this job for him. He’d bought some featherwork from Skinny and … well, we were pretty sure he’d stolen it back again. Skinny himself told me he knew nothing about it but I didn’t believe him, so I went back to look for myself.’

‘Balls,’ muttered Shield.

Upright curled his lip. ‘Well, either way, the Governor will have to make up his own mind about you. We’re nearly at his palace.’

I looked up in surprise. I had not noticed how far we had come, but there was no mistaking the shape of Tlatelolco’s great pyramid towering over the buildings in front of it. TheGovernor’s palace faced the sacred precinct at its base, imitating the palaces of the Emperors in Tenochtitlan. Also next to the sacred precinct was the world’s largest marketplace, a huge open space surrounded by colonnaded walls where up to sixty thousand people came every day to buy, sell, cheat, steal or just pass the time. I could hear them from here, the constant background rumble of an uncountable number of unraised voices.

The canal we were on now was a wide one, as were the ones it crossed, and the large, blank-faced buildings and sturdy landing-stages around us told me that this must be where the merchants unloaded and stored goods ready for the market.

‘Not the most direct route,’ Upright explained. He was looking forward to getting rid of me and passing the responsibility on to someone more senior, and his sense of relief made him positively chatty ‘But it’s easily the quickest. Hardly anyone uses these canals except merchants going to their warehouses, and they only travel at night. At this time of day, everywhere else will be jammed solid.’

Sure enough, it was quiet, with no traffic beside our canoe and little sign of life apart from a few weary-looking sedges growing up between the wooden reinforcing posts at the canal’s edge.

We were not quite alone, however.

Shield saw him at the same time as I did: a lone figure standing beside one of the warehouses, in the centre of the path running between it and the canal, with his legs braced slightly apart and his head turning slowly from side to side, as though scanning the area around him. ‘What’s he up to?’ Shield asked suspiciously. ‘Doesn’t look like a porter or a merchant — off he goes!’

The stranger had vanished around a corner, leaving only a blurred impression of a cloak flapping behind him as he ran. I blinked, thinking he must be extremely fleet to have coveredthe distance that quickly. ‘I thought he looked more like a warrior,’ I said slowly, suddenly filled with foreboding.

‘Around here?’ Upright replied. ‘I doubt it. Some of the merchants hire muscle to guard their property, sometimes. He was probably one of them.’

‘More likely a lookout man for a robbery,’ his colleague suggested. ‘Once we’ve dropped our little friend here off we ought to come back and check.’