He raised his gaze, briefly, to the sky. 'You'd have stayed for hours arguing with the man.'
'No,' I said, stung. I knew how to handle such situations. 'I would merely have eased things a little.'
'Money eases things wonderfully,' Teomitl said. He gestured for me to climb aboard.
The boat rocked as I stepped into it. My body, remembering gestures from more than twenty years ago, adjusted itself to the motion.
'Money won't buy him a better life,' I said.
'No, but it will make the next months easier.' Teomitl held out his torch to me, and I took it in my free hand, without thinking. 'I'll row.'
I watched him manoeuvre the boat into the canal, shifting my weight from leg to leg to compensate for the rocking. He had this natural authority, I guessed: something that made him hard to ignore when he gave you a command.
He also, quite obviously, had never rowed in his life. The boat spun to and fro in a haphazard fashion, and the jade heart in my right hand shifted from beating to still to beating again, as he directed us towards the nearest Floating Garden.
'Which one?' he asked.
'I have no idea,' I said, annoyed, more because of the natural, insidious way he'd taken charge than because of his rowing. 'If you kept us on course, I'd have an easier time.'
'Not my fault,' Teomitl snapped. 'The thing won't stay still.'
'It's a boat. They rarely stay still, The Duality curse you! Where were you raised? In the mountains?' Tenochtitlan was built on an island; every street doubled as a canal, and it was almost impossible for a boy to grow up without ever seeing a boat.
In the unsteady light, I felt his exasperation more than I saw it. 'I'm doing my best, Tlaloc blind you! I'm just not used to this contraption.'
The least that could be said. I sighed; and instead of holding the jade heart steadily in front of me, attempted to keep it on an even orientation. Not obvious, with only the starlight to go by. It kept becoming motionless without warning; but slowly, step by step, I managed to direct Teomitl to one of the furthest islands.
The boat ran aground in a spectacular fashion, scattering dried, slashing pieces of reeds over my legs. Teomitl leapt on the shore and snatched the torch from me. He stared at me, once more daring me to mock him.
I wasn't in a mood to reproach him, for the heartbeat under my fingers was faster than it had been on shore. 'It's close,' I whispered.
'Where?' Teomitl asked.
'On this island.' I suddenly wondered why we were whispering. A beast of shadows would have hearing much keener than that of any jaguar on the prowl, and a sense of smell to match. It would sense me, a priest for the Dead, as it would sense the heart I carried in my hands. 'Come.'
This Floating Garden was, like most of them, a huge maize field. Dry husks crackled under my sandals, no matter how hard I strove to be silent.
The torchlight illuminated the small maize plants, poking out of the ground: it was the end of the dry season, and the maize had barely been replanted. In the night, the field seemed eerily desolate: every insect song echoed as if in the Great Temple, and every maize sapling rustle made me startle, and wonder if the beast wasn't going to leap at us.
The heartbeat grew faster still as we approached the hut at the end of the Floating Garden.
'In there?' Teomitl asked. 'Can't we draw it out?'
I wished we could. 'It's too canny for that. We'd just be wasting our time.'
'I see,' Teomitl said. 'What an adventure.' He didn't sound keen. I didn't feel so enthusiastic either. Inside the hut, we would have neither starlight nor moonlight, and fighting by torchlight was messy and ineffective. I looked up at the sky. The moon would rise soon, but we would be inside while it climbed into the sky. I didn't like that, but there wasn't much of a choice.
The heart went wild as I crossed the threshold. My hand dropped to the largest of my obsidian knives, and drew it from its sheath.
Nothing. No beast, leaping from the darkness to swipe at my chest. I released my hold on the knife; the hollow feeling in my stomach receded.
Teomitl stood on the threshold, his torch briefly illuminating the contents of the hut: walls of wattle-and- daub, embers dying on the hearth. And three bodies, face down on the ground, the sickening smell of rot and spilled entrails underlying that of churned mud.
The beat of the jade heart was frantic now, as if it didn't know where to start pointing.
I knelt by one of the bodies, lifted it to the wavering light: a man, his chest slashed open, and the heart missing. Of course. The beast of shadows had feasted on its preferred meal.
The other corpses were much the same, save that one of them was a woman. She could have been Eleuia. But I soon disabused myself: this woman was older than thirty-five, and wearing a rough cactus-fibre blouse and skirts, nothing like the clothes a priestess of high rank would have chosen.
'Acatl-tzin,' Teomitl said, sharply. 'There's something outside.'
The heart was still madly beating, but it was useless at such close quarters. The beast could be anywhere. I rose from my crouch, drawing one of my three obsidian knives from its sheath.
'Stay where you are,' I said.
A shadow passed across the threshold, knocking Teomitl offbalance. The torch fell: a brief, fiery arc before it was utterly extinguished. And in the interval before I gained my night vision, something huge bore me to the ground. Claws scrabbled at the clasp of my cloak – moving downwards, aiming for my heart.
NINE
