Shadow of the Lords (22 page)

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Authors: Simon Levack

BOOK: Shadow of the Lords
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‘Angry's a mosaic man, probably the best maker of screens and shields we ever had. Skinny mainly works with thread and frame. Warrior costumes, headdresses, fans, banners, and so on. Worked, I should say,' he added, correcting himself. ‘Skinny hasn't been heard from much in the last few years.'
‘Why's that?'
The man shuffled uncomfortably, obviously wondering whether he had said too much. ‘Steady on! You really expect me to share my devotee's problems with a stranger? Look, I don't how it is with the priests where you come from, but men and women come to me in confidence. I may not be quite like the priests of the Filth Goddess, hearing confessions and sworn to secrecy and all that, but if I'm to intercede with the god and make offerings then I have to know what the trouble is, and people have to be able to trust me. I don't know what you're about, but I think you're asking too much.'
I lowered my eyes. ‘Sorry,' I muttered. ‘You're absolutely right, of course. It's the same with us. I should have realized. It was just that when you said Skinny hadn't been heard of in years I was curious about what happened to him.'
He seemed to relax a little. ‘I suppose you would be. But what can I say? It was always difficult for him. Do you know – I don't think this is a secret – he isn't an
Amantecatl
by birth at all?' I raised my eyebrows in what I hoped was an expression of surprise. ‘He comes from some filthy bog at the northern edge of the city. He was adopted into one of our families.'
‘Is that usual?'
‘No, not at all. But his mother – sorry, his mother here, I mean – she was barren, and her husband had no one to pass on his craft to – no son, and as it happened no brothers or nephews either. He was in despair at one time because he thought his work was going to die with him, but then this lad turned up, with his ideal day sign and a god-given gift for craftsmanship.'
‘That was lucky,' I said sceptically.
‘It was. I gather it was some merchant who sorted it all out, because he happened to know both families. That's not uncommon between merchants and featherworkers – we're neighbours and do a lot of business together and go back a long way. A pity he couldn't have done something with Skinny's brother, too … well, never mind. I don't know what the connection with Skinny's real parents would have been.'
I kept my face very still. I could guess exactly what the connection might have been, and for that matter who the merchant was, but once more it would not have done to say so. ‘You said it was difficult for him?'
‘Skinny wasn't exactly a baby when he was adopted. He picked the craft up easily enough, but he struggled at the Priest House. A loner, had trouble mixing with the lads who'd grown up here and known all their lives what their future was going to be. Sensitive type. He took setbacks and criticism hard, especially after he came out of the House of Tears. It ended up that he wouldn't talk about his work or show it to anyone unless he thought it was perfect, and in the end I suppose it just got too much for him. He couldn't go on.'
‘Which meant he had nothing to live on, I suppose,' I commented.
‘True. He got more and more desperate. He tried everything. At one time I had him up here almost every day,
sacrificing to the god, pleading with him for inspiration. He was drinking a lot of sacred wine, although he knew the penalties, and he tried mushrooms, and he even got married!'
I just stared.
He looked up then. ‘Look, I don't know why I'm telling you this. If you're off back to Xochimilco or whatever desolate hole you say you come from, then I don't suppose it matters anyway But that's how desperate Skinny was. He never showed much interest in women – I don't mean to say he was interested in men or boys or anything else, in that way – he lived for what he did. But something made him think marrying that girl would help.'
‘You mean …' I had to choke back her name. So far as the priest was concerned I had never heard of Butterfly.
‘He came to me once, with tears in his eyes, and asked me if he was doing the right thing, if I thought the gods would restore his abilities to him. He thought maybe Tezcatlipoca resented him for spurning the chance to become a father.' Tezcatlipoca, the Lord of the Here and Now, was the god who chose whether to grace a woman's womb with children. ‘What I could say?' The priest laughed once, briefly, a sound like a small dog with a bone stuck in its throat. ‘I'm a priest – well, so are you. You know how much use we are where women are concerned!' I could only agree: my own experience with women, both when I really had been a priest and afterwards, had been less than happy
He sighed. ‘The girl's family had already hired a soothsayer to check that their birthdays were compatible, of course, as anybody would, so there wasn't much I could tell him about that. I just said treat her well and hope for the best. And told him not to let her know why he was marrying her, if he valued his sanity!'
‘And did it help?' I asked.
‘What, my advice? I doubt it!'
‘No, I mean the marriage – did it help him to work?'
‘Oh.' He pursed his lips thoughtfully ‘I suppose it must have done, in the end. Something did. I know he was working on something big the last time he came to see me, anyway. Some private commission.'
‘Who from?' I asked automatically, and regretted it instantly: from the parish priest's point of view this was clearly none of my business.
But he grinned in response. He could not resist answering my question, because it gave him a chance to utter the one name that he knew would register, even with a foreigner, because it was known and feared throughout the World.
‘Montezuma.'
A
fter I left the priest's lodging I stood in the plaza of his temple for a few moments, turning over in my mind everything I had seen and heard that morning and trying to decide what to do next.
I was tempted to go straight back to Pochtlan and spend the rest of the day scouring the parish's streets for any sign of my son, but I knew it would be futile. The Otomies were looking for us both. If Nimble stayed in plain sight for long enough for me to find him then the captain would be sure to get to him first. The only way I could hope to reach him was to trace his movements, starting on the night the costume was taken and the knife used. Reluctantly, I admitted to myself that Kindly had been right: I had to find his property, because it was the key to finding my son. That task would be easier now: thanks to the priest of Amantlan and his acolyte, I now knew for certain that Skinny had lied when he denied all knowledge of the costume, and that whoever had taken it was involved in Idle's murder. I resolved to confront the featherworker, overawe him in my disguise as a priest, and force him to admit the truth.
Fear gripped me as I set off for Atecocolecan, and I could not shrug it off. I could deal with Skinny and his wife, but now I knew there was someone else in the background whose terrible presence was going to overshadow everything I did until the work he had commissioned was returned to him.
Sweat broke out on my forehead, threatening to make my sooty disguise run as I thought about the most powerful man on Earth, a man who could end my life as quickly or slowly as he chose with a casual word: the Emperor of Mexico, Montezuma.
‘You stupid, greedy old bastard,' I muttered, imagining Kindly chortling over the costume he had bought. ‘What have you got us into now?'
 
If Butterfly was at all disconcerted by the sight of a strange priest in her doorway, asking for her husband, she did not show it.
‘He's not here,' she said shortly. ‘I don't know when he'll be back.'
Her hair was unbound, as it had been when I had seen her before. It fell over her shoulders and bare arms in dark, glossy waves, and had certainly been combed that morning. Her eyes shone and her skin had the pale yellow tinge of ochre. It looked so soft and deep that I felt a wild urge to stretch a hand towards her cheek just to see if its surface yielded to my touch. For a moment I was too taken aback to speak. A woman whose brother-in-law had died just three days before should be in deep mourning. I would have expected red-rimmed eyes and tangled, split and matted hair, not the glow of skilfully applied cosmetics.
‘What do you want?'
‘I have to talk to him about his brother.'
Suddenly she giggled. She took a step back, reaching for a door post for support as laughter threatened to overwhelm her. Her teeth flashed at me. They were as perfectly white as when they had first broken through her gums.
‘I know your name! You're that slave, Joker, who was here a couple of days ago! You're from what's-his-name, the
merchant, Kindly.' She puckered her forehead with the innocent curiosity of a little girl asking her mother how it was that embroidery threads came in so many colours. ‘Why are you dressed like a priest?'
I wanted to swear. My disguise obviously fooled no one who had met me even once before. I toyed with the idea of simply running away, hoping to get clean out of the city before she raised a hue and cry, but then I forced myself to think.
If the girl had thought I had killed her brother-in-law, she would be screaming her throat raw, not laughing. Probably, I reasoned, nobody had bothered to tell her I was suspected of the murder. There were some households – my parents' was one, and I had no doubt that Lily's was another – where you kept the women in the dark at your peril. In most, though, a woman's world was bounded by the walls of her courtyard and her interests and knowledge were expected to begin and end there. There was no reason to suppose that Butterfly, a young girl whose husband had apparently only married her because of some whimsical notion that she would bring him inspiration, would be let into men's talk.
‘It's a long story,' I began lamely.
‘Oh, well, you'd better come in, then. I love stories!' She swung on the doorframe, tilting her body forward so that her breasts pressed against the fabric of her blouse. ‘I'm sure yours will be fascinating!' she added in a throaty voice, before detaching herself from the doorway. She spun around so that the hem of her skirt flared around her calves and tripped lightly back over her threshold.
I followed her through into the courtyard, feeling a little dazed. Having been a priest from childhood and then a slave, I was unused to this sort of invitation.
The place did not appear to have been swept since my previous visit. I looked briefly from the scattered maize cobs,
squash seeds and tortilla crumbs to the spotless beauty who presided over them and tried to make sense of it, but I could not.
‘Sorry it's a mess,' the woman said carelessly. ‘We keep meaning to do something with it, but with Idle's burial rites and everything, well, you know …'
I looked for a clean corner of the courtyard to squat in, despaired of finding one and then reasoned that it hardly mattered since my stolen mantle had not been clean in the first place. Lowering myself to the ground, I said: ‘Surely, at a time like this, it's all the more important to attend to the sweeping?' I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. There was no need to stay in character, and I thought I sounded sanctimonious.
She clucked impatiently. ‘You sound like my sister-in-law! Marigold was like that. The gods this, the gods that – well, just look at this place! I don't mind a few little statuettes round about, they can be nice, but you can't move for the things, and it's just as bad indoors.'
I gaped at her. For a moment I seemed to have mislaid all the words in my head, and then when I managed to muster a few I struggled to find the breath to say them. ‘You can't … you can't really …'
That drew a peal of laughter, swiftly hushed with a slim hand over her mouth. ‘I'm sorry! Have I shocked you?'
‘You don't fear the gods,' I gasped. This was unheard of. The gods ruled our world, not in the remote way of an emperor governing a subject town and saying who should be in charge of it and what tribute it should pay, but immediately and directly. We could drink because Chalchihuitlicue made water flow through the aqueduct. We ate because Tlaloc made rain fall on our fields and Cinteotl and Chicome Coatl made the maize cobs ripen. We did not freeze to death because our own
Huitzilopochtli made the Sun rise. We were born only because Tezcatlipoca put us in our mothers' wombs. Nobody could be expected to love the dangerous beings that governed our affairs. Sometimes desperation drove people to do things that the gods might disapprove of, and we expected to pay for them afterwards. Not to fear them, however, smacked of insanity.
She was still laughing. ‘Of course I'm afraid of the gods. If I want something I'll be up at the temple with flowers or quails or tobacco or whatever else the priests tell me to bring, and maybe it'll work or maybe not, but let's be realistic. The gods don't care about us, and we can't make them do what we want. I'm quite sure no god cares one way or the other whether this place is swept out or not. You know what I think? I think the only reason we're told sweeping is a sacred duty is because it's women's work and all our priests and rulers are men!'
I shivered. A cloud had passed over the Sun. Its shadow caught my eye and prompted me to look up at a sky that was rapidly filling up with grey. ‘Looks as if Tlaloc might have heard you,' I muttered. ‘It's going to rain soon.'
‘The roof doesn't leak. Now, you were going to tell me why you're dressed like that.'
I had had time to think of an answer to that one. ‘I had a row with my master. He wasn't happy that I came back empty handed, the last time I was here. In fact … well, it's not the first time, and he was on the point of having me sold as a sacrifice. So I ran away. You can see why I didn't want to be recognized.'
‘What are you doing back here, then? It's nothing to do with my brother-in-law at all, is it?'
‘I thought if I could get my master's stuff back for him anyway he might forgive me. I haven't got anywhere else to go, you see.'
Butterfly stood with her back to the wall of the room she and Skinny had emerged from during my previous visit, leaning nonchalantly against it next to the doorway, which was screened off as before by a cloth. There was something unwomanly about her pose. She had one leg drawn up so that the knee strained the thin fabric of her skirt and the foot rested against the plaster behind her. She plucked one-handed at a loose thread in the hem of her blouse as she looked down at me, her eyebrows raised speculatively.
‘What makes you think we can help? Skinny and I told you, we don't know anything about this costume your master's supposed to have bought, let alone what might have become of it.' She spoke mildly, like a young mother chiding a small child. ‘I'm sorry you didn't believe us.'
‘I didn't believe you because you were lying!' I snapped, suddenly goaded out of civility. ‘I have it on the best authority that the Emperor himself ordered Skinny to work on the raiment of Quetzalcoatl. The Emperor! Montezuma! Now, you didn't just happen to forget about him, did you?'
I had to admire the woman's composure. She looked at me steadily, her only reaction to my outburst being to form a silent ‘O' with her lips.
‘Are you going to tell me the truth, now?' I added. ‘Or should I take my enquiries up with the Palace?'
‘You wouldn't dare!' she sneered.
Since she was absolutely right, I tried something else. ‘Your brother-in-law was murdered – did you know?' I said brutally. ‘Whoever killed him has the costume. Doesn't that matter to you?'
‘I know about Idle,' she replied matter-of-factly ‘The parish police told us about it three days ago – just after you left here, actually. We'd reported him missing and they came on the off-chance that the body might be his. Skinny went to
Amantlan to see if he could identify it. I expect you know what he found. You heard his brother was cut to pieces and stuffed in … Oh, it's too nauseating to talk about! His face was unrecognizable, of course, even after they'd cleaned it up. I was surprised Skinny agreed even to look at it, but he thought it was his duty.'
‘How did he know it was his brother?'
‘They'd found a charm of his, a little figure of Tezcatlipoca. It was in his left hand. Idle always carried it with him for protection when he played Patolli.'
I remembered the object I had seen in the body's hand. Patolli was a game, a race around a cross-shaped board on which a vast fortune could easily be lost on a single bad throw of the beans we used to reckon moves. This was where Tezcatlipoca, the Enemy on Both Sides, belonged, rolling the beans one way or the other or, once in a lifetime, standing them on end out of sheer caprice, just so that he could amuse himself watching the consternation on the other players' faces as the man who had made the freakish throw gathered up their stakes and left with them.
‘So he was a gambler?'
‘And a lot else besides!'
‘What do you mean?'
‘You asked whether Idle's death mattered to me. Aren't you wondering why I'm not in mourning? Look!' She detached herself from the wall and stood with her back to me while she lifted her hair with both hands and let it fall, cascading over her shoulders as softly as falling oak leaves in autumn. When she turned back towards me her eyes blazed defiantly. ‘See? I washed it just this morning! And do you think we sacrificed a dog for him to take with him? No way! He can find his own way through the Nine Hells!'
‘What did he do?'
‘He brought us down to this, that's what!' Her gesture, a furious sweep of her arm, took in the courtyard, the house, and somehow the whole run-down district beyond the walls. ‘My husband's work went to pieces all over again, because of him.'
I looked nervously up at the sky, where dark clouds were swelling and swirling about each other in a stately dance. A downpour was going to begin at any moment. I thought anxiously of the thin coating of ash on my face. A real priest would have worn pitch, which was waterproof. What I had would turn into a mess of muddy grey streaks as soon as a few fat raindrops hit it, and that would be the end of my disguise.
‘His brother stopped him working?' I asked absently. ‘How did he do that?'
She hesitated. She took a couple of quick steps away from me and then a couple back and sighed, and then, at last, knelt in front of me, sweeping her skirt under her knees with a brisk gesture.
‘Skinny went to Amantlan when he was a boy. It was his fate, you understand? He had the right birthday, and he had the talent. He grew up there, with this old couple who were never going to have any children of their own. When my husband was the sort of age when most boys are out fishing or hunting frogs on the lake or larking about in the fields pretending to learn how to use a digging-stick, he was being taught how to mix glue and trim feathers. He went straight from there to the Priest House. I don't know if you can imagine what that place is like.'

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