Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

I was not going to let that happen. I felt myself begin to relax as I resolved to turn around and walk away while both of us could still stand.

I heard a loud cough from the direction of the gateway.

‘Excuse me.’ It was Imacaxtli, the parish priest. ‘May I come in?’

Imacaxtli was an institution in Toltenco. He had served our little temple on top of its stumpy pyramid for as long as I could remember. He had watched me and my brothers and sisters grow up, and I suspected he had been instrumental in getting me into the Priest House, something for which it had taken me a long time to forgive him. Now, watching his bent figure and wizened features as he stood, strangely diffident, onmy parents’ threshold, I wondered what this old man thought of his position. Did he hanker after the honour and glory to be found at the top of the Great Pyramid, or would he rather serve in a place where he knew everybody’s business and everybody knew him?

‘Of course!’ my mother gushed. ‘Please, you’ve come a long way, you must be out of breath. Have a rest, have something to eat.’ The formal greeting sounded faintly absurd when addressed to someone who lived only two streets away.

‘Not at all, not at all. Now, who do we have here — why, it’s Yaotl, isn’t it?’ He walked straight up to me. ‘I haven’t seen you since … now, let me think …’

‘I was just going,’ I said hastily.

‘Oh no you aren’t,’ my father snapped, seizing my arm in a painfully tight grip.

‘But you said …’

‘You’ve probably done enough to offend the gods already,’ he snarled. He looked at my mother. ‘Not to mention her. So you can bloody well stay for the sacrifice.’

‘You don’t understand. I have to …’

‘I know perfectly well what you have to do. You’re going to need all the favours the gods can spare you, and you won’t help yourself by running out now. So you stay for the sacrifice,’ he repeated, in a low but determined voice, ‘and then you go and find your son!’

While the priest inspected the little dough figures they had made, my mother, Jade and Honey looked on, as proud and anxious as parents presenting their children for the first time to the masters at a House of Youth.

‘These are beautiful,’ the old man said. ‘You have all done very well. The gods are honoured to have such devoted servants.’

‘We did our best,’ my mother simpered. A slight flush coloured her cheeks. ‘We know what is right in this household, and try to live by it.’ She glanced reproachfully at me for a moment before turning back to the priest. ‘Here is the weaving-stick.’

The priest took the implement she handed him, murmuring a few words of thanks as he turned it over in his hands. It was nothing more than one of the flat, curved weaving-sticks that all Aztec women learned to use as little girls, but once a year, in those households that observed the festival of the Coming Down of Water, it served another purpose.

Bending down, he picked Tlaloc up from his tiny reed mat, looked lovingly into the god’s shiny little bean eyes for a moment, and then drove the weaving-stick into his breast.

He twisted the stick this way and that, not so hard as to break the figure up, but with the kind of ferocious expression that I had seen on the faces of Fire Priests digging the hearts out of real, living men and women on the sacrificial stone. He bent the god’s head back until it was at an angle that would have snapped a human being’s neck. Then he put the stick down and pulled a tiny lump of dough out of the figure’s chest. He held his prize up towards the East, presenting it triumphantly to the rising Sun, before dropping it into the god’s own tiny bowl of sacred wine, just as the Fire Priest would have cast his victim’s still-beating heart into the Eagle Vessel.

He did the same to each of the other little statues, one by one, until all the gods were dead and their decapitated, eviscerated bodies lay in the courtyard among their offerings, while their hearts floated and softened in their own bowls of sacred wine. Then he gathered up the bowls and the plates with the tiny tamales and the paper clothes that had adorned the gods, and threw them all on the bonfire.

My family cheered. The ritual had been performed flawlessly, and no doubt they were relieved that the fast was over and the guests were about to arrive and there would be food and drink in plenty.

‘Thank you!’ my mother cried. ‘You don’t know what it means to us, having this ceremony performed here.’

‘My pleasure,’ said the old man. He was already gathering up the reed mats, the little instruments and the remains of the dough figures, all of which would go back to the temple with him. The mats and the instruments were too expensive to burn every year, while the dough was the delicious kind, flavoured with honey, that we made sweets out of, and was part of his payment for performing the rite. ‘My best wishes for the rest of the day’

As the first of the guests began to flow through the doorway, bringing with them their offerings, ears of corn, grains of dried maize and paper banners for the children to hang on the pole in the middle of the courtyard, he suddenly turned to me.

‘You too, Cemiquiztli Yaotl. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

He left then, with his offerings gathered in the folds of his cloak, and me staring dumbly after him.

My mother gave me my cloak back. I might need it, she told me.

‘I’m only going to Tlatelolco, not the summit of Mount Popocatepetl,’ I pointed out. ‘Anyway, it’s day now, it’s starting to warm up — the time I’d have needed it was last night! Look, I told you, it’s yours …’

‘Well then, bring it back when you’ve finished with it.’

I winced. For all my confidence that I had solved the mystery of Kindly’s featherwork, I knew full well that there was no guarantee I would ever be back. Being able to satisfy theEmperor was one thing, but the Chief Minister was another matter, and his demand was one I could never give into. So Montezuma probably would not have me killed, but unless he exerted himself to save me from my master I might yet die.

‘Look, Mother, I might not see you again …’

‘Oh, nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘You always come back. Now go and do what you have to, and if you could manage not to get that cloak too dirty, I’d appreciate it.’

She turned away quickly. I began to stretch a hand towards her, but I hesitated too long, and she was out of reach, lost among the crowd of her guests.

I headed for the doorway, but Handy was in the way

‘What about me, then?’ he asked plaintively.

‘What?’

‘What about me? Look, I know what you’re about. You’re going to warn your son old Black Feathers is after his blood, and once you’re sure he’s safely out of the city, you’ll go to ground or run away yourself. Well, fine, I’d do the same, but where does it leave me? The old bastard’s bound to blame me if you get away — and I can’t run. I’ve a family to think of.’

I looked at him blankly. ‘Um, right.’ His dilemma had never occurred to me. ‘You have, yes. Er, well, can’t you just tell him you couldn’t stop me? No, I suppose not.’ Handy stood a head taller than me and had muscles conditioned by his time in the army and years of hard work in the fields and on the city’s building sites. He could have picked me up and carried me back to the Chief Minister’s palace if he had wanted to.

Glutton, Amaxtli and Jade came up to us. ‘Come to see you on your way,’ Jade said. ‘We wanted to make sure you were really going! What’s up?’

‘Handy’s worried he’ll get the blame if I manage to find Nimble and help him escape,’ I explained.