Shadow of the Lords (23 page)

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Authors: Simon Levack

BOOK: Shadow of the Lords
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‘I know. This wouldn't have been a disguise, once.'
‘Really?' That made her raise her eyebrows. ‘How interesting! You must tell me all about it! But Skinny, now, he never forgot his time at the House of Tears. He didn't talk about it much to me, and it wasn't as if he surrounded himself with
idols, like his sister-in-law, but it was always there, at the back of his mind.'
‘You're telling me he never had any youth. He grew up under the influence of the featherworkers and then the priests. Let me guess what happened then. He met his brother, who showed him what he'd been missing all these years.'
She looked down, peering long and hard into her lap. It was as if she were searching for the loose thread she had been playing with earlier, as her fingers strayed towards it again.
‘He was working for Angry then,' she informed me in a low voice. ‘His work hadn't been going well. To be honest, it hadn't been going at all. He had nowhere else to go: the couple who adopted him were both dead and he had always refused to work with anyone else, so he was on his own. But it was hard for him. As hard as anything could be, throwing in his lot with his rival. I don't suppose he would have done it if he hadn't had me to support.' To my surprise she sniffed loudly, and brushed a hand swiftly across her face as though sweeping away a tear.
‘But he did it. He went to Angry, and Angry gave him work, and he just sat there meekly in the corner and got on with it, and I kept telling him that it didn't matter, that one day things would be better and he'd be able to make something of his own again – something to astound them all, the way he used to. It would have happened, you know. It would, except …' She ended there on a little choking sound, but I could guess the rest.
‘Except,' I suggested gently, ‘that his brother turned up.'
She looked up. Her eyes were not glistening but she blinked several times, as if something were pricking them behind their lids. ‘I don't know why he came when he did. He'd had nothing to do with Skinny and I'd never met him. I think it must
have been getting difficult for Idle here. He'd been neglecting the family plot.'
‘I guess he hadn't realized you'd fallen on hard times yourselves.'
That provoked a bitter laugh. ‘Of course not! And he wouldn't have believed it if we'd told him. My husband was a featherworker, so naturally he was rich.' She sighed. ‘Idle was the worst kind of beggar, the kind that thinks you owe him whatever he asks for because you've got it and he hasn't and you're family. In the end Skinny got so fed up with his demands for food and drink, and even cloth and cocoa beans that we knew he was going to use for gambling, that he made Angry take him on as hired help, as one of his conditions for going to work with him himself.'
‘And the arrangement didn't work.'
‘Skinny just found it impossible to work with his brother around. It would have been easy enough for him just to squat there all day stitching feathers on to a frame, but that bloody man just wouldn't leave him alone, always asking him to try some mushrooms or have a crafty nip of sacred wine or join his friends for a game of Patolli. For a man brought up the way my husband was, frustrated in his work and with nothing to look forward to but mindless toil in someone else's workshop, it must have been impossible to resist.'
‘Skinny came back here,' I recalled. ‘Whose idea was that? Did Angry throw him out, or what?' I dismissed that idea as soon as it occurred to me, remembering then that Idle had become more to Angry than a hired hand. By the time he left the craftsman's house, Skinny's brother was Angry's son-in-law
‘Oh, no. Throw his own daughter out? What kind of father would do that? Especially one like Angry. He used to go around as if the air she breathed was perfumed. No, he wouldn' t have thrown Idle and Marigold out. It was her idea: she
told her father the best thing for her and Idle was to get away. She persuaded him they should come back here. She said honest toil in the fields was what they needed – it was what Idle had been born to, it was what his father and grandfathers had done, and the only way of life for an Aztec was the one his ancestors had known, plying their trade or walking around up to his ankles in shit in their fields or whatever, and honouring their gods. Above all, honouring their bloody gods!'
I looked around at the statuettes peering down at us from their niches in the walls. ‘She was the devout one.'
‘Oh, wasn't she just! It was never going to work, but try telling her that. Try telling her her husband didn't know one end of a digging-stick from another and couldn't care less anyway So they ended up here, with nothing to live on except what her father gave her as a parting gift, and no means of earning a living.'
‘So how come you and Skinny followed them?'
It took her a little while to answer. She frowned and looked away, as if she were nervous about the weather too. I waited.
Eventually she said: ‘All right. You wanted the truth. You know most of it anyway'
‘It had something to do with the costume?' I prompted.
She sighed. ‘It was just before Idle and Marigold left. Skinny had disappeared. He slipped away, just before dawn, without telling anyone where he was going, and was gone all day I thought he'd gone on a binge, but Idle wasn't with him, and when he did come back he was stone cold sober. Excited, though – almost feverish.
‘He told me what had happened that night. He'd been summoned before the Emperor himself! Montezuma had told him what he wanted, and asked him lots of questions about how he'd set about the work. I don't think I'd ever seen Skinny so enthusiastic about anything – by the time he got home, he was
really fired up. It was … well, you know what it was. The biggest thing he'd ever done – probably the biggest thing any featherworker ever did.
‘But it had to be kept secret. Montezuma told him nobody, especially the other featherworkers, was allowed to know about it. Not even Angry, although Skinny was working for him.'
‘So you left.' It made sense: by returning to Atecocolecan Skinny could escape the prying eyes of his own employer and the rest of his fellow craftsmen. I doubted that the field hands and day-labourers of his home parish would take much notice of what he was up to. ‘And Skinny worked on the costume here, in the peace and quiet. All right, how did Kindly get hold of it?'
She laughed mirthlessly ‘How do you think? He stole it!'
I stared at her, speechless.
‘Your master lied to you, slave! He didn't buy it from us. He must have got wind of it somehow – maybe Angry found out and let something slip – and thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.'
‘No,' I protested, ‘that can't be right! Remember, he sent me here to buy it back from you …'
‘Because someone stole it from him! Funny, isn't it, a thief's house getting burgled? But your coming here was the first we knew of where the costume had gone. Now can you understand why we weren't exactly keen to talk about it?'
If what she said was true – that the work Montezuma had commissioned and sworn her husband to secrecy about had gone missing twice, once from his own house – then I had to agree that it was not something they would want the whole World to know.
‘What about Idle?' I asked. ‘And his wife? He's dead, and I know whoever has the costume is connected with that, and
she's missing …' I let my voice tail off as I worked out the answer to my own question.
‘Well, it's obvious, isn't it?' Butterfly sniffed. ‘He found out where it was and stole it from Kindly. Then Marigold killed him and fled. You want to find the raiment of the god? Find my sister-in-law!'
 
A peal of thunder sounded overhead. Tlaloc was making his presence felt.
I looked up at a sky that had turned the colour of slate. A large raindrop hit me in the eye. A moment later they were falling all around us. Little dark discs were forming and spreading in the dust at our feet and moisture was streaking and spattering the whitewashed walls.
‘Better go in,' I muttered, rising and automatically heading for the nearest room, the one I had seen Butterfly and Skinny emerge from on my previous visit.
The woman was there before I was, barring the doorway
‘No! Not in there! The other room – go in the other room. Please.'
I froze, astonished.
She had turned her face up towards mine and was staring at me, her eyes still unblinking despite the rain whose stinging blows I could feel even through the hair on top of my head. Her cheeks glowed with something more than make-up and her breathing was suddenly quick and shallow. Her teeth were bared and her fists clenched and there was something in her voice I had not heard before, the kind of tremor you hear from the throat of a person fighting to master rage or terror.
‘Sorry,' I said mildly. ‘The other room, then.' I turned back, towards the room that led through to the street, and added, because I felt I ought to add something, ‘I didn't know.'
I barely heard her let out a long breath, like a sigh of relief,
and then she was by my side, hurrying as I was to get in out of the rain. ‘No, it's my fault.' Her tone had changed again. The moment of tension had gone now, releasing in its wake a flood of words as hasty as a small bird's chirping. ‘It's just that that room … well, it's a terrible mess. Much worse than this courtyard. It was my brother-in-law's room, the one he shared with Marigold. He never let us clean it, you see, and there are things in there I wouldn't want anyone to see. Do you understand what I mean?'
‘Um, yes,' I said, with a quick glance over my shoulder. The already sodden cloth over the doorway flapped lethargically under the beating it was getting from the heavens. I did not understand what she meant, except that beyond that scrap of material lay something she would fight to keep me from seeing. Perhaps whatever Idle had kept in there was enough to spell disaster for the remaining members of his household if it were found. I was going to get to the bottom of that later, I decided, but I had other questions for now.
‘Tell me about Idle and Marigold.' As we ducked into the shelter of the house's front room, I had to raise my voice to make it heard over the rain hammering on the thin stucco roof. ‘What makes you so sure she'd have killed her husband?'
She rolled her eyes as if in despair at my ignorance. It was the kind of gesture I might have seen on the face of one of my teachers at the House of Tears while he explained to me, for the third time, that the plant for curing leeches was Amolli, not Yiamolli, which was good only for dandruff. ‘What do you think? It wasn't just drink and mushrooms and gambling with him. He couldn't keep his hands off the girls – or any other bit of him, for that matter! For some reason she managed to turn a blind eye to it. I suppose she was flattered when Idle started courting her and didn't want to believe what she must have been able to see for herself. Getting married didn't
change him – it never does. He tried it on with half the women in Angry's household before he came here. Maybe that had something to do with why Marigold wanted to bring us all here, to get him away from temptation. If that was it, it didn't work! Almost the first thing he did after we arrived was to proposition me!' Her voice became shrill with outrage and she had to pause and take a couple of breaths before going on. ‘Of course, I told him what would happen if he didn't behave himself.'
‘Naturally.'
‘But what I think is, Marigold caught him with some local lass. That wouldn't have been so very difficult for him, you see. He's been boasting so much about his connections with the featherworkers over the years that he's made himself quite famous, in a pathetic, parochial sort of way And it's not as if the men around here … Well,' she concluded primly, ‘it's a pretty rough sort of place.'
‘So you think Marigold finally had enough.'
‘I think she had too good a chance to miss! She found out about the costume, somehow, and suddenly there was her opportunity – to get rid of her bastard of a husband and get all the money she could ever need, in one go!'
I frowned. ‘Angry told me he thought she was pregnant. Would she really kill her child's father?'
Butterfly laughed.
‘Only a man would ask that!'
T
he shower did not last long. The sky was brightening already by the time Butterfly had finished speaking, and a few shafts of sunlight were falling on the cloth over the doorway, converting its darkness into a dirty mottled brown.
She got up and glanced through the doorway. ‘It's stopping.'
I could still hear tapping and creaking sounds from above me. I wondered how well made the roof was, although a brief, anxious look up at it showed no suspicious cracks or bulges. I tried to remember whether any trees had spread their branches directly overhead, to take over shedding water when the clouds had finished.
‘You may as well go.' She tried to sound regretful even as she reinforced her words by crossing the room to look out of the street entrance. ‘I doubt if Skinny will be back today at all. He was meant to be going to Tlatelolco market, but he said something about seeing some friends in Amantlan as well.'
I was tempted to argue, but there seemed little point. I had a lot of questions, some of whose answers, I thought, must lie in this house, but I could see I was not going to get them by pestering Skinny's wife. I believed practically nothing she had told me. I was convinced that the key to everything – the whereabouts of the costume, the identity of Idle's killer and whatever had become of my son – lay in the room across the
courtyard. If she was not going to show me what was in there then I would have to find out for myself.
All the same, I could not help admiring her, not just for the elegant silhouette she made as I watched her in the doorway but for her command of herself. There was no way I was going to get her to tell me anything she had not already decided I should know.
Besides, those curious, alarming sounds were still coming from the roof. They were not loud and the woman seemed too intent on ushering me quickly out of her house to notice them, but they were undeniably real. I wondered whether the moisture had got into the beams and swollen them, or whether there was some other explanation.
As I left the house, I looked around me quickly. Directly to my front, running alongside the path I stood on, ran a narrow canal. At its end I saw the labourers I had noticed when I had first come here, still toiling over the plot whose edges they were reinforcing. They had finished their joyful, rhythmic hurling of hammerheads against wooden piles and were were now silently engaged in the back-breaking work of heaving rocks and tumbling them into place to form the foundations of their artificial island.
Skinny's house abutted straight on to the deserted property on its right-hand side, a poor-looking thatched hovel surrounded by tall, dripping weeds. Around the corner on the other side was a little open space. A stumpy-looking willow grew there, one or two of its polled branches ending just short of the edge of the roof, so that I could see they had not been dripping on it.
After a quick glance in both directions I decided to go for the willow.
Keeping my back pressed against the outside wall of the house, I edged towards it, slithering around the corner like a
snake winding itself around a rock. I put myself between the house and the willow's trunk and looked up.
A branch made a fork in the wood right over my head. It was perfectly placed, and so was I. When I heard the scraping noise from the roof I moved without even waiting for the foot to appear.
I leapt upward and had the ankle in my grasp before whoever was up there had got so much as a toehold on the branch. I did not need to pull. I just let my weight drag us both down, and with a shocked howl my victim tumbled from his perch and crashed in a heap at my feet.
He was up in an instant, snarling at me like a cornered ocelot, too furious for a moment even to think about running away. This was just as well as I could see straight away that he was a youngster and I would have had trouble catching him. I took the opportunity to lunge towards him, to seize him by the arm or the hair and get him on the ground and subdued, but two things made me stop with my arm hanging in midair.
The first was that the fight went out of him. As he stared at his assailant I saw his eyes widen and his jaw drop and his hands, which were raised and clawed for self-defence, fell limply to his side. An instant later he was on his knees in the mud with his head bowed, whimpering with fright. It took me a moment to realize what had happened and then I nearly ruined it by laughing. Probably for the last time, my pathetic disguise had worked, and the fake aura of a priest had overcome him.
The second thing that stayed my hand was that I recognized the lad.
I could not have said who I might have expected to find skulking around on Skinny's roof, but one of the last names to occur to me would have been that of Angry the featherworker's nephew, Crayfish.
 
 
‘You'd better tell me what you thought you were doing,' I said sternly.
‘Please, sir,' the boy snivelled, his face averted so that he seemed to be talking to my feet, ‘I didn't mean any harm. I was just looking for … just looking for …' He was a poor liar. In his place I would have worked out my story in advance.
I looked down at him speculatively. The temptation to carry on acting as a priest and bully the lad into confessing everything was strong, but I knew it was not going to work. Once the shock of being plucked from the roof had worn off he would have no more difficulty in recognizing me than Butterfly had. Besides, I was not anxious to draw a crowd, and the sight of him cowering on the floor might well do just that.
‘“You were just looking for”,' I repeated. ‘Fine. Up you get. You can explain it all on the way back to Amantlan. And mind you do if you don't want me telling your uncle where I found you!'
That made him stare. ‘My uncle? How do you know … Oh!'
I reached down and seized his arm, not roughly but firmly enough to get him on his feet. ‘Now each of us knows who he's talking to, shall we go?' I turned to leave, keeping hold of the boy with my arm outstretched in case he was tempted to fight me after all.
He hesitated, biting his lip, his head darting about as if looking for somewhere to run. ‘I don't understand. You were at our house – why are you dressed like that? What are you doing here?'
‘Just move,' I hissed, ‘unless you want us both to get caught!'
His eyes widened again at that. Then he seemed to relax, as though catching the sense that I might, after all, be a fellow conspirator.
‘You promise you won't tell my uncle?'
I made a threatening noise and tugged his arm. He started walking.
‘Are you going to let go of me?'
I did. ‘Just remember where I'll go if you try to run away. Now, are you going to tell me what you were up to? The truth, mind.'
‘I was looking for Marigold.'
He was still a growing boy. As we walked the top of his head came to the level of my chin, but he was watching the ground in front of him, so that he seemed shorter. As I looked down at him I wondered how old he was: eleven or twelve, perhaps. I had thought him older when I had met him before, in his uncle's presence, when he had seemed to show the sort of care for the older man that I might have expected of a wife or an elder sister. Angry's wife was dead, however. I wondered how great a void Crayfish's cousin had left in her father's household.
I also remembered another young man who had seemed to me old beyond his years. My son was older than this boy, but not by much. I had not seen him grow up, and suddenly the vision I had of us walking and talking together like this, as we never had, brought tears to my eyes and made me break my stride.
‘What's the matter?'
‘Nothing.' I swallowed once, blinked a few times and turned back to Crayfish. ‘You were fond of your cousin.'
‘We all were.' The boy sighed. ‘After my aunt died she took over the household. She cared for the idols – she loved doing that – and made the tortillas and swept and made clothes for my uncle, just the way a wife would have. She was kind to me. She looked after me when I first came to my uncle's house. She was really more like a sister to me than a cousin – even after she met
him.'
There was no need to ask who he meant. ‘You know Idle's dead.'
‘Good riddance!' the boy spat.
‘Careful what you say, lad,' I cautioned him quietly. ‘People might think you had something to do with it!'
‘Me and everyone else he ever met!' he cried with spirit. ‘The only person I ever knew with a good word to say about him was his wife! Only the gods know what she saw in him.'
‘Did you hear any of what Skinny's wife said to me?' I asked. ‘She thought your cousin killed her husband because he was …' I wondered how worldly the youngster was. ‘He was treating her badly.'
‘Screwing around, you mean.'
I rolled my eyes in disbelief, wondering whether all young boys were like this and my upbringing had been unusually sheltered.
‘I didn't hear what she said. I don't believe it. I know her – even if she'd finally realized what her husband was like, she'd never commit murder. It would be a crime!'
‘Obviously,' I said drily, but I understood. He thought someone as pious as his cousin incapable of any transgression. ‘But the best of people can do terrible things when they're desperate.'
‘Anyway, why would she need to kill him? She could just have gone back to her father. Uncle Angry would have taken her back, and she knew it. They'd have divorced eventually, and that would have been that. Why would she risk killing him and getting caught? What would have happened to her then?'
I cast my mind back to the law I had been taught in the House of Tears. ‘If she wasn't put to death she'd probably have been handed over to Butterfly as a slave.'
‘So she'd be worse off than ever!'
‘Someone would have to find her first.' I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I take it she and Butterfly didn't get on?'
The youth grimaced. ‘It didn't help that Marigold's husband kept making eyes at his sister-in-law – who didn't do anything to put him off! And Butterfly would go making snide comments about the idols, which upset my cousin.'
‘She may not have been too happy about your cousin's cosy chats with her husband either,' I reminded him.
‘I'm sure they weren't doing anything wrong!' he said hastily. ‘It's just that, well, I think Marigold told him things he needed to hear. Do you know what I mean? About how important his work was, how much the gods valued it. Butterfly wouldn't have understood any of that.' He paused. ‘I don't know what to say about Butterfly She seemed to look after her husband well enough, but none of us ever liked her much. My uncle seems to think she's up to no good, but I can't get him to say what.'
‘He didn't know you were going to Atecocolecan.'
‘No. He thinks I'm meeting a friend who's at the House of Tears, another featherworker's boy.' I suspected he meant Stammerer. ‘Going to Idle's house was my idea, just to see if I could find anything out. To tell you the truth, Uncle Angry has hardly spoken to me in the last couple of days. He's been hiding in his workshop, not talking to anyone, not letting anyone in, only coming out for his meals. I know he's brooding over Marigold. It would help him so much if I could find out where she was.'
 
Crayfish and I parted company at the border of Amantlan. Just before he set off home, he suggested I lose my disguise. He told me my soot was starting to flake off. When I looked down I saw that my hands and legs were beginning to look
grimy rather than sinister and I was shedding flecks of dark ash the way fruit trees shed blossom in the spring.
Deciding to take the boy's advice, I looked for a secluded spot, a quiet, narrow canal where I could wash unobserved. Thinking I had found just the place, I turned a corner, only to discover that someone else had had the same idea.
He had just finished relieving himself into the water and was straightening his clothes. He was dressed from neck to ankle in green cotton, and his feet were clad in broad sandals with over-long straps. A sword and a shield lay beside him, and his hair stood up upon his head and flowed in a dark mane down the back of his neck. He had his back to me, but before he turned around I knew who he was: an Otomi warrior.
I stood quite still while he looked me over. I wanted to run, but all my legs seemed able to do was tremble violently, and I knew I would be caught before I had gone five paces. All I could do was trust in my disguise.
I recognized him as one of the captain's entourage. I was thankful that he was not the captain himself, or Fox, either of whom I was sure would have recognized me. I wondered where his monstrous, one-eyed chief was.
‘What are you doing here?' the warrior demanded eventually
I remembered to disguise my voice, mumbling the way priests sometimes did, owing to having drawn so much blood from their tongues. ‘The same as you, by the look of it.'

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