Simon Levack - Shadow of the Lords

‘Listen!’ my brother cried. Mamiztli — ‘the Mountain Lion’ — was staring across the lake towards the island and city of Mexico. ‘Yaotl, what was that noise?’

‘Daybreak’, I said shortly.

For the first time in an eventful night, I noticed that the water surrounding us was no longer black. The lake’s surface had caught the deep blue of an early morning sky. It was going to be a crisp winter’s day, hailed by a yellow-white radiance spreading through the thin haze that veiled the eastern horizon. Mist blanketed the mountains surrounding the valley, and swirled around the countless temples in front of them, softening their harsh, angular forms.

Birds twittered and flapped among the sedges at the water’s edge, but the sound my brother had drawn my attention to had come from one of the temples, and as we gazed towards its source it came again, drifting lazily towards us over the still water: the call of a trumpet, hailing the dawn.

Another followed it, and soon the air around us was alive with them, both from the city itself and the many little towns behind us on the lake’s western shore, until it felt as if the boat we stood on was the only place on Earth where priests were not blowing lustily into conch-shells. It was strange to hear them from a distance, over the water. Perhaps that was why my brother had not recognized their sound. It felt as if they werecalling to us alone, instead of proclaiming to the World at large their relief and delight that the Sun had come up one more time, and that today at least he would not desert his people.

For us, every morning was a struggle whose outcome could never be known in advance. Every time the Sun rose, he reenacted the birth of our War-God, Huitzilopochtli, and his terrible battle with his half-sister, the Moon Goddess, and his half-brothers, the Stars. Like the War-God, the Sun always won, but we could never escape the thought that he might not, and that we owed every day to the favour of the gods.

I shivered, and it was not from the chill of the early morning air. After such a night as had just passed, I could well believe that nothing, not even the Sun’s rising in the morning, was certain. I had come out expecting to face an old enemy and found instead my own child, a son I had never known I had, and then watched him slip away and vanish, as fugitive as a fiery spirit on the lake.

As the last of the trumpet calls died away I felt an urge to do something that, in the days when I had been a priest, I had done out of habit: to offer the gods my blood, the nourishment the Sun needed for his day’s journey.

Finding a sharp edge was easy. There were several slivers of obsidian scattered around my feet. They had been struck off blades set into the wooden shaft of a sword, at the moment when it had been driven into a man’s skull. A weeping woman crouched over his prone body. I stepped delicately around her, avoiding the corpse and the other things — some of them human, none of them alive — that were scattered around it. I stooped to pick up one of the hard, glittering shards with one scrawny hand while the other reached up to my temple to tug a mass of long, tangled hair out of the way. Then I quickly cut into one of my earlobes.

With no bowl or paper to collect the blood, I let the warm fluid run down my hollow cheek and the side of my bony jaw, staining and matting the grey-streaked hair that lay over them. I stood and looked towards the city and the glowing sky beyond it and offered up a wordless prayer, remembering how it had once been every morning, the smell of incense and the vain fluttering of the quails we had sacrificed and our voices appealing to the Sun to do his work.

The woman’s brittle voice shattered my reverie.

‘Haven’t you spilled enough blood for one night?’

The woman’s name was Oceloxochitl, which meant Tiger Lily. The dead man was her son, a young merchant named Ocotl — the word for a pine torch or, as we thought of it, a Shining Light. A more vicious, treacherous, murderous youth would have been hard to find, although you would not have known it from the way his mother wept over his body, cradling it and shaking it as if to try to wake him up again, while his blood soaked her skirt, blouse and mantle and trickled along her bare arms.

‘I didn’t kill him, Lily,’ I said. ‘I told you how it was.’ I appealed to my brother. ‘Lion, you were here too.’

Lion’s name normally suited him. He was a big, muscular man, every inch a warrior, but this morning he looked anything but fierce. He avoided my eyes, fixing his own on the city taking shape in the mist. He scowled. He hated lies and told them badly.

‘It all happened like you said, Yaotl,’ he said mechanically. ‘What do you want me to say? Momaimati here …’

‘Don’t involve me,’ growled the fourth person on the boat, a stolid commoner whose name meant One Skilled with His Hands or, in other words, ‘Handy’. ‘I didn’t see anything.’

Which was true, if unhelpful. I looked desperately down atthe bereaved mother, wondering what I could say to her now. The anguished face she turned up towards me had had twenty years’ worth of lines etched on it in a single night. I had seen it looking very different once, very close and flushed with passion, black hair with its intriguing silver strands flowing from it like a spray of feathers from a fan as I pressed her down on a sleeping-mat. A lot had happened to us both since then, but I could not help wishing for something — some word of comfort, if not from me then from anyone else — that could make a start at smoothing away those lines. I watched as her hand strayed automatically towards the young man’s blood-matted hair, before drawing back sharply as it brushed the blades set into the sword’s flat shaft. My own fingers twitched in sympathy. I was about to lean forward, to reach out to her, even though I knew I would almost certainly be rebuffed, when another voice made me freeze.

It was the voice of an ancient man, hoarse with exhaustion and strain, but still clear and powerful. My master, Lord Feathered in Black, had not attempted to climb out of the canoe he had arrived in, and was still reclining in its stern, looking up at us as his craft bobbed gently beside the much larger boat I stood on.

‘In case you’ve all forgotten,’ he snarled, ‘the man and the boy who did all this are still out there.’ His glance swept over the carnage on the bigger craft. ‘I want them alive and conscious. They’re not getting away with what they’ve done, do you hear? I’ll make an example of them. As soon as we get back to the city I’m sending warriors out here to start searching. Handy and Yaotl, you’re to wait here, with the boat, until they arrive.’

Handy was a retainer of my master’s — not a slave, but a common man who hired himself out by the day. I had no thought for his position now, though. All I could see was whatmy master was telling me to do. Then I imagined myself in the midst of his hunting party, and pictured its quarry, seeing the terrified, stricken face of a young man whose real identity the Chief Minister could never have guessed at.

‘My Lord! I can’t! You can’t ask me …’

For a moment my master was speechless.

‘“Can’t”?’ He was shrill with indignation. ‘What do you mean, “can’t”? Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t do, slave?’

At that sharp reminder of what I was, I recollected myself, feeling like a man running blindly towards a cliff-edge who realizes only just in time what is in front of him.

‘I … I am sorry, my Lord. I didn’t mean to be impertinent. It’s just that …’