Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘What’s this?’

There was no answer.

When I looked up again the slave had vanished.

I looked wildly about me. I took a deep breath, ready to call out, but stopped myself, and stood and listened instead.

The only sound was the soft pad-pad-pad of bare feet running away along the road by the canal.

I perched on the bottom tier of the stairway leading from the canal up to my master’s house and stared at the thing in my hand.

The sound of the drums still came to me, but now the musicians my master had hired were competing with those in other nearby houses, so that from where I sat the whole city seemed to echo with their rhythm. Every great house would be full of people praying and making offerings to Tezcatlipoca. For those who did not live in great houses or who could not get themselves invited to them, the priests in all the temples would be intoning hymns to Him Whose Slaves We Are. Everyone, from the most celebrated warrior and the richest merchant to the meanest serf shivering on his waterlogged plot out on the lake, would be demanding the god’s favour. The poor man would pray for the stroke of fortune that would make him instantly rich. The rich man would ask the god to stay his hand and let him keep what he had.

Almost alone in the city, I asked for nothing. I had nothing worth keeping, and I had seen too much ever to believe that the god could not make things worse if he chose.

The only thing I did have was a sodden cloth-wrapped bundle. As I hefted it an unpleasant thought occurred to me about why it might be so damp. Then, when I brought the thing up to my nose for a cautious sniff, I almost threw it away in disgust. There is something about the smell of human blood that retains the power to appal even the most accustomed of butchers.

Gingerly, with the bundle held at arm’s length, I started picking at its wrapping. As the thin, cheap cloth started to come away in shreds, I promised myself I would throw the nasty thing in the canal and wash my hands the moment I found out what it was.

My fingers, numb with cold and damp, seemed to move more and more slowly the closer they got to the middle of the parcel. There was something about its weight, tugging at my hand like a doomed fish being brought up in a net, about itsshape, sleek and full of purpose, about its unemphatic gleam, which I knew well enough to fear.

Then it lay in my hand, with the remains of its cloth binding littering the ground around me like the discarded skins of snakes.

My first impulse was to drop the thing. My second was to wrap my hand around it and clasp it to my chest in a fierce embrace and never let go. My third was to be violently sick.

In the event I did none of those things. I just sat by the canal and stared at what lay in my hand, a bronze knife sticky with congealing blood, and tried to grasp its meaning.

I knew this knife. I had been threatened with it more than once. The last time I had seen it, its blade had been buried in the breast of Kindly’s old slave, Nochehuatl. That had been five days ago, and it explained how the merchant had come by the weapon, although I realized with a thrill of horror that some of the blood that coated it now was fresher than the dead slave’s would be.

It was a grisly token, but it was more than that. The knife had been the only thing my son owned, his sole memento of his upbringing as an exile among the Tarascans, the barbarians beyond the mountains in the West who alone knew how to make and work bronze.

Why had the old merchant sent it to me now? Was he trying to tell me that my son had come back to claim it?

‘ Come on. Wake up!’

It was dark and bitterly cold. How typical of my master, I thought, to treat me to a new cloak that was too thin to keep out the cold. Then I realized that there was no cloak over me and I was lying shivering on my sleeping-mat in nothing but my breechcloth.

I must have thrown my cloak off in my sleep, I thought, rolling over and groping for it. My fingers found the rough leather of a sandal, and then the calloused skin of the foot in it just at the moment when the foot left the floor and flew towards my ribs.

It was more of a sharp poke than a blow. I managed to bite back my cry. I realized who the foot must belong to and did not want to give the Prick the satisfaction of hearing me howl.

‘Move yourself!’ he snapped.

I sat up. ‘Where’s my cloak?’

‘Here. This is yours.’

A heap of cloth was thrown at me out of the darkness. I thought there was something wrong when I unravelled it. It seemed too rough, was frayed at the edges, and smelled.

‘What’s this? Where’s my new one?’ I regretted the question straight away.

The steward laughed. ‘It’s not One Death any more, slave.You didn’t think his Lordship was going to let you keep a brand-new cloak, did you?’

The steward and I passed through a maze of canals out on to the open lake, with me, naturally, plying the paddle of our canoe.

From all around us came the sounds of a city emerging gradually into wakefulness. The dying echoes of the pre-dawn trumpets fell from the temples, drifting through the streets like fog on a still day. From the houses on all sides we heard the swishing noise of courtyards being swept and the gentle splashing sounds made by the women as they laved the faces of household idols. I may have imagined it but I thought I heard an unusual note in these sacred rituals this morning, as though some of the brooms were being wielded more vigorously, the little statues being dowsed more liberally, than usual. I wondered whether rumours of Quetzalcoatl’s appearance had something to do with it.

Life went on, however. Along with the other sounds came the wholesome slap of maize dough being thrown on a griddle. A couple of times I heard a baby crying and a woman’s voice cooing softly in response. From somewhere nearby came a coarse oath, as a man set out for the fields or the marketplace, realized he had forgotten his lunch and turned back to get it.

Far away in the East, the souls of dead warriors would be practising their songs and dance-steps as they waited to escort the Sun through the sky. Of course, you could never hear their voices and stamping feet, but the sounds they made seemed to my mind to grow and swell beneath the chatter of the Aztecs around us in the way you hear the hum of a hive beneath the buzz of one or two stray bees.

A man who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone spent four years in the Sun’s entourage; after that, we believed, he was reborn as a hummingbird or a butterfly.

‘Now will the Sun rise

Now will the day dawn

Let all the various firebirds

Sip nectar where the flowers stand erect.’

‘What’s that? What are you talking about? What do you think you are, some sort of poet?’

My son’s bronze knife lay concealed in the folds of my breechcloth, an uncomfortable weight knocking against my hip. The impulse to whip it out and shut the steward up for good was almost overwhelming. I restrained myself, though. What would I do afterwards? I had come face to face with this truth before: if I ran away now, I would not be safe anywhere in Mexico, and in a world full of our enemies, no Aztec was truly safe anywhere else.

One day soon, I realized, thinking about the beatings and humiliations I had suffered at the Prick’s hands and about the young man old Black Feathers had ordered me to look for, I might have to raise my hand against my master and his servants, but until then I was better off just doing what I was told. I could not let anything jeopardize the goal I had set myself: to find out why Kindly had sent me the knife.

Besides, I had an answer for the steward.