Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘As for Skinny — I don’t know whether he’d planned what he did next or whether it just occurred to him on the spur of the moment. Instead of carrying the costume home, he put it on. It didn’t slow him down any more wearing it than it would carrying it, and he knew that if he was dressed as a god anyone he met would run away rather than try to stop him. It worked so well he wore it again a couple of nights later, when I saw him. Then he was trying to scare people off while his accomplice disposed of his brother.’

The fire was burning down rapidly: it was little more than a pile of ash harbouring a few stunted flames, although there was still plenty of smoke. There was a chill in the air, even though the sky was brightening and the mountains were appearing in the East, their peaks and ridges dark and jagged against a pale pink background. The Sun would be up soon, heralding the end of the fast and the start of the festivities as well as, for me, the day I had to satisfy both my masters — the Chief Minister and the Emperor — or perish.

‘I think Skinny and Idle had their last argument when Skinny got home. He’d have been spoiling for a fight. He’d got involved in one brawl already that he hadn’t been ready for, and then had a terrifying journey home. Maybe Idle had words to say about how close Skinny and Marigold had been getting. It’s hardly surprising they came to blows. Idle died. I don’t know whether Skinny meant to kill him or whether things just got out of hand, but the next thing they knew, they had a body to dispose of.’

‘They?’ Glutton had been frowning in puzzlement for muchof the night, but he had been following the story well enough to ask the question.

‘Skinny, of course, and his wife, and for all I know Marigold. None of them had any reason to love Idle. For all I know they were all in it together.’

‘Why did they choose that latrine to dump the body in?’ Jade asked. ‘It was taking an incredible risk, carrying it all that way. Why not just bury it in the marshes at the back of the house?’

I frowned. She had a point. ‘They’re working on the chinampa plots up there,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they were afraid of someone finding it so close to the house. It would have been too easy to connect it with them.’

Jade’s husband thought he had spotted a flaw in my account. ‘I thought it was Skinny who identified the body after the police found it,’ he pointed out. ‘That doesn’t figure, if he’d hidden it in the first place.’

‘The police knew his brother was missing. There can’t be a lot of unidentified corpses in Amantlan at any one time. That’s why they came and asked him to help identify the body, and when he found his brother’s charm, he had to own up to who it was. It wouldn’t have mattered that much. There was nothing to connect him with the killing, after all.’

‘So the featherworker got his piece back, and killed his brother, and all the stories about people seeing visions of the god Quetzalcoatl were down to him.’ Handy was motioning with his fingers, as if he were trying to count off all the unsolved mysteries one by one. ‘All right, so what happened to him? And his … well, whatever was going on between them — to Marigold?’

‘Oh, that’s simple,’ I said airily. ‘Butterfly killed them both.’

‘What?’

‘Well, who else? She hated Marigold. Whether her relationship with Skinny was innocent or not, I’m pretty sure Ican guess what Butterfly made of it all. It was simple jealousy. She killed Marigold, probably shortly after Idle died, and later she killed her own husband. Perhaps he’d been fretting over where his girlfriend had got to, and it started to get on her nerves. I think she did it just before I went to her house the second time, when she told me Skinny had gone out. She didn’t make nearly as good a job of dumping the body as her husband had: she just left it floating in a canal and it was found almost immediately. That may be why she took more care over Marigold’s body. Nobody’s found that yet.’

‘You went to that house a third time.’ My mother’s unblinking stare and sneering tone told me Handy had told her what had happened the night I tried burgling the featherworker’s home.

I sighed. ‘I don’t know what to say about that. You know about the woman, and the god.’

‘Who was wearing the costume then?’ Jade asked. ‘Both brothers were dead, weren’t they?’

I looked at her seriously. ‘I don’t think there was a costume then. Maybe it was the Morning Glory seeds, or … I don’t know. But that time, I think it really was the god.’

Nobody had an answer to that. A long silence ensued. Even the crackling of the fire had ceased.

Eventually Handy asked, hesitantly: ‘So, where’s the featherwork?’

‘Butterfly’s house,’ I said quickly, relieved to have a question I could answer sensibly. ‘Where it had been all along. You see, there was one place I didn’t know about — although I should have realized it was there at the time …’

‘Featherwork?’ My father’s voice, heard for the first time since I had begun, silenced me and made everyone sit up. ‘Forget the featherwork, who cares about that? What aboutyour son?’ He looked at my mother. ‘Our grandson. Where is he? What are you going to do about him?’

‘Oh, that’s even simpler,’ I said.

Then I did one of the most stupid things I have ever done. I told him.

The young man with the trumpet seemed eager to be off as soon as the Sun came up. He could not decently leave until the parish priest arrived to perform the sacrifices and formally end the fast, and he even managed to sound a few half-hearted notes, but he kept staring at the eastern sky, as if willing the Sun to get a move on. Every so often he would look nervously at me, but I could hardly blame him for that. For a priest, accustomed to long fasts and sleepless nights, the office he had been expecting to perform at my parents’ house would have seemed like a holiday. The last thing he had needed was a madman turning up uninvited and throwing the whole carefully planned ritual into chaos.

Eventually, he got his wish. It was dawn, and the parish priest was at the doorway.

‘I’ll be on my way, then,’ the young man said, gathering up his conch-shell and his flute.

‘Won’t you stay?’ my mother cried, alarmed and upset. ‘There’s food and drink. You must be hungry.’

‘No, that’s all right,’ he said, although the food and drink were his due — payment for his role in the household’s celebrations. The other musicians and the singers shuffled anxiously, no doubt wondering whether they were going to have to go without as well. ‘The others can stay, but I’m not hungry, to be honest. Or thirsty. Have to go!’

He almost ran past his colleagues, whose faces had all broken into relieved grins, and past the parish priest, who turned and watched him go speechlessly from where he was waiting, just outside the gateway

‘This is all your fault,’ my mother hissed at me.

‘Why? I didn’t tell him his conch-shell sounded flat, or anything …’

‘Don’t try to be funny!’ my father snapped. ‘You know you upset him, falling asleep and talking all night when we’re supposed to be honouring the gods. These young priests, they can be very temperamental …’

‘Look, don’t tell me about priests. I was one, remember?’

‘I remember. I’m surprised you can, with all the sacred wine that’s been sloshing about inside you over the years …’

We were squaring up to one another, our chests puffed out like turkey cocks’, my father stooping slightly as he leaned forward on his good leg so that his face was just on a level with mine. At any moment, I thought, yesterday’s fight would resume, and either I would be driven bodily out of the house or I would have to do the old man some serious harm.