Lily set her cup down awkwardly before replying to her father. ‘I don’t understand why you were playing patolli with Yaotl in the first place, since he doesn’t have a cocoa bean to his name.’ Then she added, with a resigned sigh: ‘All right, Yaotl, just how much do you owe him?’
I glanced down at the tally I had drawn, with a piece of charcoal, on the stone floor next to me. ‘Um… five large cloaks, two small ones and seven bags of cocoa beans.’
She rolled her eyes in despair. ‘Don’t you ever learn?’
Kindly grinned. ‘I’m trying to teach him! Double or quits next time, Yaotl?’
‘Maybe.’ I looked uncertainly at Lily, who had not been sleeping well. ‘It’s getting late.’
‘It is,’ she confirmed. ‘I think we should finish the chocolate and go indoors before the raccoons and foxes come out.’
‘Suit yourselves,’ her father said. ‘I don’t think you’ll see a fox or a raccoon up here, though. Even a centipede would have trouble getting past the guards at the bottom of this hill.’ Lord Maize Ear lived in fear of assassination by one of his brothers, who had his own designs on the throne, and his retreat at Tetzcoctzinco was ringed day and night by fierce warriors. Lily and I both enjoyed the peace and quiet this gave us, though her father, who liked company, found it unnerving.
As I looked out over the edge of the patio in front of the palace and down the hill, however, I realised that our peace was about to be disturbed. ‘It looks as if somebody managed to get past the sentries, though. Who’s this coming up the hill? At this time of evening?’
‘Some flunky, I suppose,’ the old man suggested in a bored voice. ‘The royal chefs probably ran out of newts or something like that, so they had to send out for some in a hurry. It won’t be anything to do with us.’
Kindly’s eyes were too poor to see much in the gathering gloom, but his daughter craned her neck to follow my gaze. ‘Torches,’ she said. ‘And you’re wrong, father. Whoever that is down there, he’s more than a servant. Those men are carrying a litter! Yaotl, you don’t think…?’
Lily’s last words were spoken in a whisper, through a throat constricted by sudden terror, and when I stood up to stand by her, the hand I laid upon her arm for comfort was trembling.
Why we should both have been seized at that moment by the same sense of foreboding, I could not say. Perhaps it was something about the litter’s painfully slow progress up the slope, or the delicacy with which its bearers set it down in the forecourt of a small house set in the hillside below us, lowering their charge to the ground as gently as a mother laying her baby on his cradleboard.
My former master was a frail old man, who would demand that sort of care; but why should he be here?
‘Lord Feathered in Black doesn’t know where we are,’ I said. The tremor I felt through the thin material of her blouse reminded me how much effort she was putting into living from one day to the next, and how close she still was to falling into the abyss that surrounded her, the memory of what she had just been through. ‘And we’re the king’s guests, remember?’
‘He could have changed his mind.’
‘He made a promise, Lily. He ate earth.’ I tightened my grip on her shoulder, wondering whether kings considered themselves bound by a form of oath that I myself had violated on occasion.
I stared down the hill, but in the gloom it was impossible to identify the person in the litter, which was draped in cotton and bedecked with feathers. A few human shapes moved about: the thick shadows of the litter bearers, the slighter forms of attendants with flickering torches, and another, whose brisk, determined stride gave him, even in the dark and at a distance, the look of an officer.
My breath caught in my throat when I saw which way he was going, and I heard a startled gasp from Lily at the same time, for he was coming up the steps leading to our house.
I looked accusingly at Kindly. ‘“It won’t be anything to do with us,” you said.’
‘Can’t be right all the time,’ he murmured in a troubled voice.
‘“Some flunky,” you said. “Royal chefs run out of newts.”’ Fear made me fling the words at him. ‘I suppose this man’s here to borrow a cup of chocolate!’
Lily hissed: ‘Yaotl, that’s enough! We’ll know in a moment.’
The lone man reached the top step and skirted the small pond at the front of our residence. His long cloak, glittering labret and earplugs and piled-up hair seemed to confirm my first impression of him: here was a veteran warrior, whose valour in combat had earned him much wealth and prestige in his own right. Only a king or a great lord could have sent such a man on an errand. I knew where the king of Tetzcoco was now: in his palace at the summit of the hill, and not being carried around in a litter like a cripple. If any other great lord had business with us, it was unlikely to be good news.
Still, as Lily had remarked, we would know in a moment. The officer stood on the edge of the pond, glancing at each of us in turn as though unsure which of us to address. Finally, with his eyes on the floor in front of him, he gave an embarrassed cough and began: ‘My lords…’
I gaped at him. I wondered briefly who he thought we were, before blurting out: ‘Oh, it’s all right, he’s got the wrong house. No lords here!’
Lily silenced me with a bony elbow in the ribs. Stepping forward, she greeted the stranger graciously, with the customary words: ‘You have expended breath to get here, you are tired, you
