It was Teomitl who had spoken. For the first time since entering the room, his voice had the same cutting edge as Tizoc-tzin's. 'Brother, look at you. You disgrace yourself.'
'So says the man who follows him,' Tizoc-tzin snapped.
'So says the man who sees clearly,' Teomitl said. 'Do you truly wish to dismiss the High Priest for the Dead, at a time like this? What an auspicious way to start your reign.'
Tizoc-tzin did not move, but his whole stance hardened. 'You're young,' he said to Teomitl. 'You understand nothing of politics.'
'No,' Teomitl said. 'And I'm not sure I ever will.'
Tizoc grimaced. 'You'll have to. Can't you see?' His voice softened, no longer the ruler chastising his subjects. 'In less than a week, you'll be Master of the House of Darts. In a few dozen years…'
'The Revered Speaker is anointed by Huitzilpochtli,' Teomitl said, at last, and Tizoc-tzin, who believed more in men than in gods, grimaced. 'He leads us forth into battle, to extend the boundaries of the Mexica Empire from sea to sea. This isn't about politics.'
'You'd marry her, then?' Tizoc-tzin's lips had thinned to a slash across his face. 'The little peasants' daughter?'
If that was intended as a reconciliation – a shared moment of prejudice – it failed utterly. Teomitl's face froze, took on the cast of jade. I reached out and squeezed his arm hard enough to bruise. 'No, you fool,' I whispered.
'What I choose to do or not to do does not belong to you,' Teomitl said. 'Nothing has been decreed yet, brother.'
'It will not be long.' I wondered where Tizoc-tzin's confidence came from, when the council was so split, and one of his own followers had just been slaughtered?
'I thought you'd know,' Teomitl's voice could have frozen water, 'you who will dedicate yourself to the Southern Hummingbird, to the Smoking Mirror, the gods of all that is fluid and impermanent. Nothing in the Fifth World is ever certain.'
'Oh, you're mistaken.' Tizoc-tzin's smile, for once, was sincere, and quietly confident. 'Very much mistaken, brother.'
'Then we'll see, won't we?' Teomitl put his hands palms up; and then turned them towards the floor in a clink of jade and metal. 'How the dice fall. Meanwhile–'
Tizoc-tzin's gaze rested on me, dark and angry. 'Meanwhile, I will let things rest. But be assured, Acatl, I won't forget.'
Neither would I.
I came out of our interview with Tizoc-tzin shaking like reeds in the wind. Teomitl, who viewed all such displays as cowardice, appeared unmoved. It was only when he stopped in a small courtyard and just stood there, staring at the sky, that I knew he had not been unaffected.
'He's not a bad man,' he said.
Around us, the night was cold and heavy, the stars above pulsing softly, the owls hooting in the night, the faint smell of copal and scented sweatbaths. 'I'm not sure,' I said.
'You don't know him. He was always like this.' His hands clenched. 'He can't see the world through other people's eyes, but he knows his own faults, all too well.'
No, I didn't know Tizoc-tzin. But, somehow, I doubted that Teomitl, who was ten years his junior and had grown up in the seclusion of a priests' school, would know him any better. 'He's your brother,' I said. I'd do the same for any of mine. Heavens, I'd even defended my brother Neutemoc last year, even though I'd believed him to be as guilty as the evidence indicated. 'Your loyalty–'
'It's not about loyalty.' Teomitl paced in the courtyard, around a small basin decorated with coloured stones. His eyes were still on the sky. 'I know how he is.'
'You didn't grow up together–'
'No, of course not. But he's grooming me to be Master of the House of Darts in his stead.'
'That doesn't mean–'
'I'm not a fool!' He stabbed the empty air with his right hand.
'I never said you were.' I'd never seen him in such a state, and it worried me. Throughout the previous day, he'd gone into the palace, more or less picking quarrels with everyone he met. He seemed to have reverted to the prickly boy Ceyaxochitl had entrusted to me a year ago, one who had 'grown up like a wild flower', as she had said. It was as if all my teachings, all my exercises, had been for nothing. Was it Axayacatl-tzin's death? His brother had been Revered Speaker for most of Teomitl's life. It would be hard to admit the world was about to change irretrievably.
'You don't understand. I take his lessons, and I learn.' His voice was softer now, almost spent.
I asked the question he wanted me to ask. 'And what do you learn, Teomitl?'
'Not the lessons he wants to teach me.' He stopped pacing, and would not look at me. 'I learn that he stopped trusting others a long time ago. I learn that he has enemies and sycophants, but no friends. I learn,' and his voice was a whisper by now, 'that power took him and gnawed him from the inside out, and that he is but a frightened shell, that the only goal he can still dream of is to sit on Axayacatl's mat. Everything else tastes like ashes.'
I was silent for a while. 'That's what you learnt. But not what I see.' Not to mention that this gave him a motivation to influence the vote, perhaps to the point of using supernatural help to do it.
'Acatl-tzin–'
I had always been honest with him, and even when it came to this moment, I could not give him some comforting lie. 'No,' I said. 'I can only believe what I see.'
He looked at me for a while. His hands were still, preternaturally so. 'I see. I see.'
'Teomitl–'
'No, you're right. It's not that at all, and I am a fool. Good night, Acatl-tzin.'
