I was his lordship’s slave. Aztec law looked remarkably kindly upon slaves, because we were the creatures of Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, the most powerful and dangerous god of them all.
Tezcatlipoca was the lord of chance, of unlooked-for good fortune and unforeseen calamity. He was known as the Mocker for his capriciousness, as Him Whose Slaves We Are for his arbitrary toying with human lives, as the Enemy on both hands. Gamblers at the Patolli-mat and the Ball-court feared and courted him, and he was naturally the foe of the rich and the friend of those with nothing to lose — and who had less to lose than a slave, another man’s possession?
In a perverse way, it was the Smoking Mirror’s patronage of slaves that explained my present predicament.
I had done more than enough to exhaust Lord Feathered in Black’s patience. I had run away more than once, disobeyed him, connived with those he saw as his enemies, even assaulted members of his household. If ever a master had reason to ill- treat a slave, he had, but neither human nor divine law allowed anything beyond a beating. The very worst thing he could do to me, and then only after having three occasions to admonish me formally, before witnesses, was to sell me. And that, I had foolishly hoped when we finally confronted each other after my last escapade, might just be enough to save me.
He had been sitting in the middle of a courtyard, on a high-
backed cane chair placed there for him by his servants: an ancient man, whose sunken cheeks and swollen, liver-spotted hands belied the bright, feral gleam in his eyes as he surveyed me. He was dressed in a long cotton cloak, embroidered with butterflies, in a design repeated on the dangling tassels of his breechcloth and echoed in the little jewelled ornaments on his earplugs, labret and sandals, every item chosen to mark him out as a great lord. Around him stood a squad of warriors, huge men, every one of them clad from head to toe in green cotton and with his hair piled high on top of his head and cascading down his back in the style of Otomies, the fiercest and most pitiless of Aztec warriors. Between two of the Otomies, not held by them physically but plainly having no more chance of escape than a mouse caught between the paws of a jaguar, stood the courtyard’s owner, a rich merchant, and his daughter. Their names were Icnoyo — ‘Kindly’ — and Oceloxochitl, or ‘Tiger Lily’. The woman and I had been lovers once, for a very short while. As I looked at her now, seeming very small and far away across her father’s courtyard, my feelings were a strange blend of pity and resentment at the hold she still had over me. My master had known taking her hostage would bring me to him.
‘You have to let them go,’ I said. I had decided, when I walked through the entrance to the courtyard, that I was not going to prostrate myself before him, as I normally would. If I were to survive this meeting it could only be as his equal, not as his possession.
The old man regarded me steadily, his eyes unblinking and betraying no hint of surprise at my insolence. ‘Let them go, Yaotl? What do you mean?’
‘They are merchants. Even if they had done anything wrong, it would be for their own courts to try them. You have no authority here…’
The old man said nothing. The thinnest of smiles barely touched the corners of his mouth before one of his henchmen delivered his answer for him, and I was on my knees with my hands in the dust in front of me, choking and gasping for breath as I fought to recover from the blow between my shoulder blades that had felled me.
I half turned to look at my assailant. A single eye glared back at me. I felt sick at the sight of it, and of the face it nesded in: a wreck of a face, half of it reduced by a sword cut years before to a featureless glistening slab of scar tissue.
The captain of the Otomies grinned mirthlessly back at me.
‘That’s where you belong in the presence of your betters, you scum — on your knees! My lord, why don’t I cut his legs off so we don’t have to remind him again?’
I twisted my head anxiously around to look at my master again. He was stroking his chin thoughtfully, as though considering the captain’s idea.
‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ he murmured. ‘As for the merchant and his daughter — really, Yaod, you surprise me. Let them go? From their own house, where they were kind enough to receive me and my friends as their guests? What an idea! Of course, if Kindly here were to tell me I was no longer welcome…’
He did not deign to look around. If he had he would have seen the woman start forward, as if to protest, only to be halted by her father kicking her ankle. Already hunched over with age, he had his eyes so downcast that he seemed on the verge of toppling over. No doubt he would have kneeled, if only he had been able to bend his knees far enough. ‘Of course, my lord, whatever meagre hospitality my pitiful household can extend to you is yours…’
‘Shut up,’ said Lord Feathered in Black.
‘Thank you, my lord.’
‘So much for the merchant, slave,’ my master said to me. ‘What do
