Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

I remembered how I had left him, surrounded by a hostile crowd of Tepanecs. ‘You look a bit rough,’ I said. ‘Been in a fight?’

‘Yaotl,’ my master said evenly, ‘shut up.’

As I swivelled my head towards him I heard him admonish his steward. ‘When your advice is needed I will tell you. In the meantime, perhaps you would care to show the captain and his men where they can rest, and find them some food. Now, as for you …’

The old man’s high-backed, fur-covered wicker chair had been placed in one of his favourite places, on the raised patio on the roof of his palace, beneath the magnolia tree that hisfather had planted. From here he could look towards the Sacred Precinct of Tenochtitlan, the Heart of the World, its temples soaring towards the sky just beyond the canal at the front of his palace. He was looking that way now, probably indulging himself with a vision of me being dragged up the steps of a pyramid towards the sacrificial stone at the top.

I squinted painfully, forcing my eyes to focus on his face so that I could try to judge his mood now. To look a great lord in the eyes was the kind of impudence that would normally have got me a severe beating, but I felt as if I had had so many of those lately that it scarcely mattered. The back and front of my skull were still competing over which hurt most, but the bruises the Otomi’s finger had raised on my neck were catching them up fast.

His Lordship was dressed casually, for him, in a pale green cape with a border of shells, a matching breechcloth with golden tassels at its ends and real shells dangling from his ears. A mother-of-pearl lip-plug completed the ensemble. I thought it a little vulgar but I knew he would change if he wanted to go out anywhere and he would almost certainly never wear any of it again. The plumes in his hair were only heron, but they were the longest, whitest heron feathers you could get.

He looked me over slowly. His fingers, long swollen and crippled by arthritis, lay in his lap. He had no tobacco tube or chocolate bowl by him, but the moment he needed either he would have it almost before he could ask. All I wanted then was a drink of water, but I did not expect any graceful serving girl to slip a gourd into my hands at the merest gesture.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he began heavily, ‘that there’s much point in my asking you for an explanation, is there?’

I swallowed. ‘My Lord, I …’

‘I could ask you to give me a good reason why I shouldn’t just take the Otomi up on his suggestion. I gather he has atalent for dentistry that any curer would envy’ I shuddered at the memory of what I had seen in Tlacopan. ‘But what’s the point? You’ll only lie to me, and anyway, I know perfectly well what you’ve been up to. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do instead.’

I tensed, feeling my mouth go dry with fear as I waited to learn my fate. A flicker of something that may have been amusement crossed my master’s face, and he moved a cracked, leathery hand once in a barely perceptible gesture.

A moment later a girl was at his side, presenting him with a steaming bowl. The aroma of chocolate and vanilla filled my nostrils, and a sudden sharp pain in my stomach reminded me how long it was since I had eaten or drunk. As his Lordship sipped delicately at his drink I tried to take my mind off my fear by wondering how they managed to serve him freshly whipped chocolate at just the right temperature so quickly. I supposed a drink must be kept just outside the room, to be poured away and replaced if it was not called for, but what if he had wanted a different flavouring — honey or green maize or pimentos instead of vanilla?

I got so absorbed in this nonsense that it took me a moment to realize that my master had started speaking again.

‘Of course, you have run away Whatever happens, you know I can’t overlook that. I shall have to admonish you. That will be for the second time. Once more and you know what will happen.’ Of course I knew: I could lawfully be sold, and having been marked out as obviously useless, could expect to be bought for only one purpose.

But at that moment the prospect of being sacrificed barely entered my thoughts. All I could understand was that I was being reprieved. My master was giving me another chance.

I swallowed, I gaped, and then I fell to my knees, less out ofgratitude and deference than because my legs had buckled. I flopped forward in front of his Lordship, prostrating myself, with my arms flung out towards him.

‘My Lord! Thank you! I …’

My words ended in a scream as something hard slammed into the top of my head. I heard a crack like a fir branch full of sap bursting in a fire, and there were pieces of pottery on the floor and scalding liquid all over my head and neck. Unlike most Aztecs, my master liked his chocolate piping hot, and the contents of his bowl seared the tender, bruised flesh of my scalp, making tears spring to my eyes and my hands snatch convulsively at my hair.

‘Don’t start thanking me, you worm! Why do you think I didn’t just give you to my steward and the captain and let them take turns breaking every bone in your body, one by one? Eh? Look at me!’

I raised my head towards my master. A pathetic sight he must have thought me, with fragments of pottery in my hair and chocolate running down my face and over my eyes, forcing me to blink.

‘I’m going to let you live — for now — on one condition.’ Disgust twisted his mouth, as though I were the corpse of some verminous thing found rotting in one of his storehouses. ‘You tell me where the boy is.’

‘The … the boy?’

He leaned towards me slightly, probably as far as his ancient back would allow. ‘The boy, Yaotl. Don’t play dumb. You know who I mean. Shining Light’s accomplice, the one I want for cheating and humiliating me. Your son, Nimble!’

‘My son? How can you … How …?’

‘How do I know? How do you think? His boyfriend’s mother told me.’

‘Lily?’ I asked, incredulously. I remembered Upright tellingme how she had gone to Lord Feathered in Black after I had escaped.

‘Yes, Lily. He only had one mother, as far as I know. And she told me everything you told her. So I know what her son did, and what your son did.’ Suddenly his Lordship laughed, a cackling sound followed by several dry, shallow wheezes. ‘Have you any idea how much that woman hates you? She thinks your boy led hers astray! That’s why she was bringing you back to me. She thought you’d get what you deserved here. If you didn’t, she told me, she’d take your skin off you with her fingernails!’

I said nothing but my mind was in turmoil. I understood, now, how the Otomi I had met by the canal the day before had known who he was looking for. After she had snatched me from Howling Monkey’s house Lily must have come straight here and passed on everything I had told her. But had I told her that much?

I tried to remember what I had said to the tense, bitter woman sitting opposite me in the canoe. I had not intended to mention Nimble. Where had I gone wrong?

‘I know what you were up to in Tlatelolco.’ The Chief Minister’s voice had become soft, and years of experience told me that there was no more dangerous sound in the World. ‘You were looking for him, weren’t you? You convinced that meathead of an Otomi to go blundering into Tlacopan after him and then went to Tlatelolco because somehow you knew that was where he’d really gone. So where is he, Yaotl?’

I looked down and squeezed my eyes shut against the tears that threatened to overwhelm them. ‘My Lord, I don’t know,’ I muttered truthfully. Then I took a deep breath and looked up again, straight into my master’s startlingly clear brown eyes. ‘But you may as well send for the captain now, because even if I did know, I couldn’t tell you.’