I giggled hysterically. ‘We’ve got pots full of newts!’
‘Yaotl, shut up!’ my mistress cried, exasperated.
The soldier’s astounded gaze swung from one to the other of us like a spectator’s at a ball game, but at the mention of my name it came to rest on me. ‘Yaotl,’ he repeated.
I looked wildly around as though another Yaotl might have appeared out of the shadows beside me. ‘It’s a common enough name,’ I said defensively.
‘My lord…’ he began again.
‘No, look, there must be some mistake,’ I protested, but I fell silent as I took in the expression on the man’s face. For all his warrior’s strength and vigour, his cheeks were hollow and his eyes darted about in their sockets as though looking for a means of escape. Something had terrified him, I realised suddenly: something he had seen very recently, perhaps this very evening.
I became aware that he was still speaking. I had not been paying attention: it had been some long, formal pronouncement, delivered in a monotone.
Kindly answered: ‘An invitation? To what, though?’
‘Lord Maize Ear, the Great Chichimec, lord of the Acolhuans…’
‘The king, yes. Spare us all his titles, he’s a friend of mine,’ the old man lied outrageously. ‘What about him?’
The officer looked wretched, his tension evident from the sweat glistening on his forehead. What frightened him was the possibility that we would not respond to his message as we were meant to, and he, the messenger, would get the blame. Kindly knew this and was making the most of it. I wondered if Lily’s father had sensed that there was more to the man’s fear than that, however.
He stammered: ‘Although my master’s house is mean, and he can offer but poor food…’
‘You mean the king? Rubbish, he lives in a palace, of course. Mind you, if he’s run out of newts again…’
‘Father!’ Lily snapped. ‘Will you let the poor man finish?’ She turned to the officer and smiled weakly at him. ‘Forgive us,’ she said gently. ‘We haven’t been the king’s guests for long, and this is all new to us. He wants to see us, is that right? Just tell us when and where.’
The man seemed to gain a couple of fingers’ breadths in height, like a porter straightening his back after untying his tump-line and dropping his burden on the ground. His formal manner vanished. ‘Up the hill.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the king’s palace at the summit. ‘Be there at dawn tomorrow.’
‘Then please tell his lordship we will come…’ Lily began, but in my agitation I could not restrain myself from speaking across her.
‘You didn’t come straight here from Maize Ear’s palace, though, did you? You came from down there.’ I gestured towards the house where we had seen the litter taken. ‘So if this invitation is from the king, it includes someone else. Whoever it is, you asked him first, then you came to us. And I’m guessing as well that whatever it is that’s put the wind up you, it’s something more than whatever lord Maize Ear will say if he doesn’t see our faces beaming at him over breakfast. So just who is this scary person? Who are we calling on tomorrow – besides your king?’
He took a step backward, until one of his heels was over the water: any farther and he would have been in. No doubt he was not used to hearing slaves speaking like that. But he had an answer for me: a name. It was the one name guaranteed to silence me.
‘Lord Feathered in Black.’ His voice shook with awe. ‘The chief minister of the Aztecs is here to see you.’
3
‘But what does he want?’
I paced up and down in my agitation, my bare feet slapping the stuccoed floor of the small room Lily and I had retired to. The king’s expensive feather and cotton wall-hangings deadened the sound they made, and for some reason I found that irritating, so I brought my soles down on the floor still harder until they hurt. This did not make me feel any better.
My owner and I shared a sleeping mat. We had not slept apart since we had come to Tetzcotzinco, not since the night, a few days and a lifetime ago, when we had been thrown into a cell in the dark prison in the heart of king Maize Ear’s palace. In all that time we had not made love once, although we both knew, without either of us mentioning the fact, that this was likely to come. What we shared now was need. Lily had to know that when she fled from sleep, shrieking and thrashing about in her efforts to escape the monsters that haunted her dreams, I would be there.
I had never been given to flattering myself. I was a scrawny slave, and not a very reliable one at that, besides being a failed priest. My long hair was going grey and fast receding away from my forehead. As a man I had nothing to recommend me except this: I was a man, I was here, I was real, and she never had to tell me who or what she was dreaming about, because I already knew.
It had been possible to believe we had a future together, or at least pretend to believe it, so long as we were safely hidden. But now lord Feathered in Black was here.
Tetzcoco was an independent kingdom, and its king had offered us his protection. However, everyone knew lord Maize Ear owed his position to his uncle, the Aztec emperor Montezuma. My former master, besides being Montezuma’s cousin, was also the emperor’s chief minister. If he told the king to hand Lily, Kindly and me over to him, it would be hard for Maize Ear to refuse.
Lily looked up at me from the sleeping mat. ‘It’s obvious what he wants.’ Her voice shook. ‘He wants to finish what the king’s servants
