Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘He dried up. He tried all sorts of things to get himself working again — which to him must have meant making something every time that was better than his last effort. Nothing worked, of course. All he was doing by joining in with his rival, Angry, following his brother around into drinking and gambling dens and getting married, was taking his mind off the fact that the task he’d set himself was all but impossible.’

‘So what about this suit he was making, the one that was nicked from Kindly’s house?’ Handy asked.

‘Yes,’ my elder sister Jade added, ‘what was so special aboutit that Skinny suddenly managed to remember what he was supposed to be doing for a living?’

‘It may not have been the costume itself, although it was something special.’ Mindful of the Emperor’s threats, that was as much as I was going to say about Skinny’s last commission. ‘I think he finally managed to find what he’d been looking for for so long: a source of inspiration. I think he fell in love.’

Glutton frowned deeply. ‘He was married, Handy said. He and his wife …’

‘Forget his wife! It was his brother’s wife he fell for — Marigold!’

All of my family stared at me, wordlessly. I had lost them, I could tell, and I was not surprised. It had been a pure guess on my part, but it made sense to me.

‘Skinny spent a large part of his youth in the House of Tears, being taught by priests. All featherworkers’ children do. They don’t become priests themselves and I’m sure they’re spared the full rigours of a priest’s training, but at the sort of age they are when they’re there, all that sacred lore is bound to get under their skins. Judging by what his own wife told me, it made a big impact on Skinny And then, years later, when he was at his wits’ end, with his skills having deserted him, close to despair, who did he meet but the most devout woman in Mexico?

‘There are more idols in that house in Atecocolecan than there are in the Heart of the World. Marigold brought them with her when she dragged her husband back to his home parish. According to Butterfly, she thought the move would do him good, but I’m not sure it was Idle she was thinking about at all. I bet what she really wanted was to get him away from his brother. She was the sort to sacrifice herself for the sake of Skinny’s art, so he could go on honouring the gods.’

‘It didn’t work,’ my mother pointed out. ‘Skinny followed them.’

‘He couldn’t work on the costume in Angry’s house. It was too secret. Marigold may not have known that.’

‘Maybe he couldn’t bear to be away from her,’ Jade suggested.

‘That too. If I’m right, and she was his inspiration, then maybe he couldn’t work if they were apart. Angry told me Skinny’s work started going to pieces again around the time his brother married, and the two things may have been connected. Somehow he had got over it by the time he started working on the costume …’

‘I’ll say he got over it!’ Jade cried. ‘How do you think Marigold came to be pregnant?’

I stared at her. ‘You don’t think …? No, she’d never …’

‘Don’t be so simple, Yaotl! Nobody’s that pious! Besides, if she really thought sleeping with her brother-in-law would enable him to finish the work, I bet she’d do it. Don’t you think so, Mother?’

I was always amazed by my female relations’ ability to put the most prurient interpretation on anybody’s actions. All the same, my mother, perhaps catching the troubled look on Jade’s husband’s face, settled for a prim frown and a comment that there really was no way of knowing.

‘Well, anyway,’ I said, ‘Skinny got to work on the costume, and it went well — in fact, he finished it. Unfortunately, it was never delivered.’

‘He sold it to Kindly,’ Handy pointed out. ‘Why would he have done that?’

‘He didn’t. His brother did.’

‘Idle?’ Handy said. ‘No, that can’t be right. Kindly told you Skinny sold the thing to him. He wouldn’t have made a mistake over which brother he was dealing with. He’d known their family since they were little boys.’

‘Not quite,’ I corrected him. ‘He knew the family when they were little boys. I don’t suppose Kindly had much to do with the brothers after they grew up, particularly after their father died. Idle would have been too feckless to be any use to him and Skinny was in another line altogether. But even if he did come across them over the years, it would still have been an easy mistake to make. They were identical twins. I found an idol of Xolotl at Idle’s house. It had been knocked off its plinth and hidden. I thought maybe someone had been ill, and the idol desecrated after he died. But I’m sure Xolotl was worshipped because there were twins in the house. Maybe Skinny was angry with the god after his brother died, and broke the statue in a fit of pique.’

There was a long silence before Handy said: ‘Let me guess. Idle sold Kindly the costume, pretending to be his brother. Why? And what made Kindly buy it?’

‘Idle was a mushroom-head and a gambler with no money of his own. He saw something in his brother’s workshop that he thought he could barter with. And I don’t know how things were between the brothers just then. Maybe Jade was right about Skinny and Marigold. Perhaps his main motive wasn’t profit, but spite. As for Kindly, he may have wondered why the man he thought was Skinny was so keen to sell something so valuable, but he’s too greedy to turn down a bargain. He wasn’t about to ask any awkward questions.’

Jade, as shrewd as ever, told me what happened next. ‘The featherworker found out, and stole the goods back.’

‘That’s what must have happened,’ I agreed. ‘Skinny wouldn’t just have known what his handiwork was worth. He also knew — as I’m pretty sure Idle didn’t — who had commissioned it. And let’s just say he would have been seriously scared at the idea of having to explain that it was missing.

‘Skinny planned the theft well. He seems to have known where to look, and that there would be a lot of people about who’d be in no real state to recognize him or work out what he was doing or stop him doing it. He just had one piece of bad luck. There was one other person in the house who was wide awake and alert, because he was there for the same reason as our featherworker: my son, Nimble.’

At the mention of my son’s name, something rippled through my audience: a kind of restlessness, a shuffling of feet and one or two sighs. Even my father, who had ignored me ever since I had started speaking, looked up sharply. None of them had ever set eyes on Nimble, or even known of his existence until a few days before, but nobody could fail to respond to the idea of a long-lost grandson, nephew or cousin. Perhaps, I thought, they were all able to take one look at his father and feel sorry for the lad. It saddened me that they would probably never meet him.

‘He wanted to get his bronze knife back. He knew his …’ I looked at the eager faces around me and hastily amended what I had been about to say to avoid offending their sensibilities. ‘He knew his associate, Shining Light, had taken it to Kindly’s house and left it there. The knife wasn’t all he found, of course.

‘Only the gods know exactly what happened when our two thieves surprised each other. Obviously there was a fight: I saw the bloodstains, on the floor and in the courtyard outside, and on the knife itself, and I saw what looked like a knife wound on Skinny’s hand. I don’t suppose Nimble tried to stop Skinny taking the costume. He just wanted to grab the knife and run. Maybe Skinny found it first, and the fight started when Nimble tried to take it off him.

‘I’m afraid Nimble came off worse. In fact, for a while, afterI found the body at the bridge, I thought he’d died.’ A groan came from several throats. ‘It didn’t occur to me at the time that the blood I saw on the bridge couldn’t have anything to do with what I’d seen at Kindly’s house, because there was no trail connecting them.