‘You mean this place?’ To my surprise, my opponent seemed to take me seriously. The weather-beaten face that the elderly merchant turned towards me wore a frown. ‘I shouldn’t count on it if I were you. There’s a reason why they use this game to foretell the future. Anything can happen! And remember, none of this is really ours. What the god or even the king gives us can be taken away, just like… that!’ To illustrate his point he threw all the beans in the air.
We tracked them with our eyes as they dropped to the floor. They bounced and spun across the marble and for a few moments it was not clear what they were going to do. Even after they had come to rest, it was hard to take in what had happened. Then we both stared at them in shocked silence.
We saw the dark sides of two beans and the white side of a third, but it was the fourth that we both noticed, for it lay poised on its edge.
I had never seen such a thing before. It was so rare that if it happened during the course of a game, the player whose throw it was would win all the stakes.
Eventually I said weakly: ‘I see what you mean!’
The old man’s response was a whispered curse. ‘Well, bugger me! How come that never happens when I’m playing for serious money?’
Then the girl announced that the chocolate was ready. At the same time, a soft footstep just behind me told me that my opponent’s daughter had come out to join us.
2
The chocolate was perfect: neither too warm nor too cold, the froth whipped up until it would tremble but not break under my breath, the flavouring delicate, hinting at vanilla and honey and little marigold flowers. Yet when I sipped it that evening it seemed to have lost a little of its savour.
Icnoyo, the old merchant whose name meant ‘Kindly’, was telling his daughter about his last throw. The beans still lay where they had fallen, although the one that had landed on its edge had eventually toppled over. ‘Can you believe it? I was just trying to remind Yaotl here how unpredictable life is and what happens? In all the years I’ve been playing this game I’ve never seen anything like it!’
The woman sipped her chocolate while she thought about her reply. Watching her was part of what had darkened my mood. Her name was Oceloxochitl – ‘Tiger Lily’ – and her handsome face and the hands that held her cocoa bowl might have made her father’s point for him, if she had arrived a few moments before she did. Not all the lines that creased her forehead had been put there by age, although she was, like me, well into her middle years. Pain had etched some of them, stretched the skin a little more tightly over her high cheekbones and added a few extra streaks of grey to her dark hair. And she held the vessel clamped between her wrists because her bandaged fingers were still too tender to be of any use, and she was too proud or stubborn to let anyone else hold it for her.
The men who had hurt her, just a few days before, had been acting in the name of Cacamatzin, ‘Lord Maize Ear’, the king of Tetzcoco. But they had not been obeying his orders, and it had been the king who had rescued Lily, and me, from them. The lordly residence we were now living in belonged to him; it was near his retreat, on the beautiful wooded hill called Tetzcotzinco, overlooking the great lake that dominated the valley of Mexico. So we were drinking the king’s chocolate, prepared by his servants, and as Kindly had pointed out to me, none of it was ours.
This was doubly true for me. My relationship with Lily and her father was a complex one. The woman and I were connected by loss – mine, of someone I barely recalled, years before; Lily’s sharper, more immediate and irreparable: the loss of her son. What we knew of one another’s suffering had thrown us together, and the repercussions of it, unexpected, hideously violent and culminating in the wounds she was still recovering from, had made us inseparable.
We had briefly been lovers and we both knew we might be again. However, I was still a slave. Lily had bought me out of a marketplace in Mexico, the great capital city of the Aztecs, where we both came from, to save me from a particularly hideous form of human sacrifice. The man who had put me up for sale, my former master, was Tlilpotonqui, lord Feathered In Black, who just happened to be the Aztec chief minister, the most powerful man in the world after the emperor Montezuma himself, and for reasons of his own he had been very much looking forward to watching my death throes. So Lily and her father, the old merchant, had brought me to lord Maize Ear’s kingdom to escape lord Feathered In Black’s fury.
As I thought about the dangers and torments that had befallen us, it occurred to me that here was a fine example indeed of the whimsical god of chance up to his usual tricks. All our lives had been imperilled and preserved so many times lately that I had lost count, and now even my status was in doubt. You could usually tell an Aztec’s rank and occupation merely by looking at him: cotton and feathers for a lord; black-painted skin and unkempt hair for a priest; the soldier’s mantle, breechcloth and jewellery, the emblems whose design told you exactly how many war captives he had taken. But if that soothsayer really had looked into my future and seen a vision of me now, there was no telling what he might have made of it. Did I look like a modestly dressed lord, or merely like a
