The following morning, Mihmatini badgered us all into having breakfast together again: Neutemoc, the children and I. We were sipping some cacao laced with vanilla and spices when the young slave, Oyohuaca, came into the room. 'Acatl-tzin,' she said. 'There is a man outside to see you.'
The man outside turned out to be Yaotl, who smiled widely when I entered the courtyard, followed closely by Neutemoc. 'Acatl,' Yaotl said. 'I hear you've been having considerable success at the Imperial Court.'
'Ha ha,' I said, unwilling to start yet another war of words. 'Are you here to congratulate me, or to drop further obstacles into my path?'
'Neither,' Yaotl said. 'I bring you good news.' He checked himself. 'Well, 'good' in a certain meaning of the word, of course.' I was fighting a rising sense of frustration.
'Can you get to the point, instead of taunting me?'
'My my, we're in a bad mood today,' Yaotl said. 'Mistress Ceyaxochitl sent me. We've found Priestess Eleuia's body floating near Chapultepec.'
As expected, Neutemoc accompanied us. Yaotl made no comment; he spoke with me as if Neutemoc were not there.
Chapultepec was a small town at the end of the Tlacopan causeway, west of Tenochtitlan. Sitting on the banks of the lake, the town comprised mostly peasants working the fields of the Floating Gardens, and a sizeable community of fishermen. It was with one of those – a grizzled man in just a loincloth, his face deeply tanned by the sun – that Ceyaxochitl was speaking. She and the fishermen stood by the edge of the lake. I couldn't see Eleuia's body at first; but then I made out the white shape floating in the fisherman's net.
'You see,' the fisherman was saying, 'I get up this morning and go pull up the nets like I do all my life, except that they won't come up so easily. A big fish, is what I tell myself. A fish big enough to feed the whole family, sons and cousins and uncles and aunts.' He barely stopped between two sentences, obviously proud of his find.
Ceyaxochitl nodded from time to time, but didn't interrupt him.
'So I pull harder and harder, and when the net finally surfaces, there's this white thing in it. A fish, I still tell myself, but then I see her hair trailing behind her, and then I continue pulling, I see her face and I know I have to tell someone…' His voice trailed off.
'You did well,' Ceyaxochitl said. 'Ah, Acatl. You see what we have.' The fisherman, curtly dismissed, stepped away from us.
'Not yet,' I said. I walked closer to the net. Neutemoc was standing behind me, frozen in shock. 'Can we get it out of the water?' I asked.
'I was waiting to know if you could see anything,' Ceyaxochitl said.
I extended my priest-senses, but felt only the everyday setting: the wide expanse of the lake, the peasants tilling the fields, the anchor of the earth beneath us. I shook my head. 'Easier to see if you're on dry land.' As Neutemoc and Yaotl started hauling the body of the net, I asked her, 'I thought you'd be at the Imperial Palace?'
Ceyaxochitl's eyes were on the muddy banks of the lake. Further away, boats ferried peasants with hoes and baskets from the town to the Floating Gardens. At last Ceyaxochitl said, so softly that no one but I could have heard, 'There isn't much that can be done any more.'
No wonder the noblemen had been so numerous at the Imperial Audience. The succession of Revered Speaker Axayacatl-tzin grew closer and closer, and Tizoc-tzin would be in a prime position to claim it. 'How long?' I asked.
'A few months, if the Southern Hummingbird's protection holds. In reality… considerably less, I'd say.'
'I see.' Neutemoc and Yaotl were laying the body on the bank; I went closer to take a better look at it.
In life, Eleuia might have been strong and alluring, drawing men to her as peccaries will draw jaguars. In death, she was small and pathetic, her beauty extinguished. The lake's currents had torn her clothes off: her skin was as white as the new moon, and clammy, as unsettling as the touch of a Haunting Mother. Multiple bruises had formed on her arms and legs. Algae had twined with her hair, and her face… Her face was the worst: empty eye- sockets gazed at me, still encrusted with dried blood. Small scratches, like those made by tiny claws, spread around the place where the eyes should have been.
I didn't need to take a look at her hands to know what kind of claws had pawed at her eyes, probing until they detached. 'An ahuizotl?' I asked Ceyaxochitl.
She nodded. 'Yes. Her fingernails are also missing.'
I closed my eyes, remembering the monster that had tracked me across the canals. Too many coincidences. What was Chalchiutlicue's part in this?
I looked at the body again. The last thing we knew about Eleuia was that Huei's mysterious allies had taken her. They might have released her, although it sounded unlikely, and I didn't think Eleuia would have gone to the town of Chapultepec. She'd have tried to go back to her temple.
Which left the second option: she had been dead by the time she entered the water, and the ahuizotl had only feasted on a corpse.
I could have cast the same spell as before, back in the calmecac, to see if Mictlan's gates had opened on the lake-banks – but that spell worked best in confined spaces. Here, sunlight and the passage of numerous fishermen and peasants would lessen the traces of Mictlan's magic. The results would be misleading at best. No, better to take the easier choice and examine the body. There would be time for spells later, if the examination wasn't conclusive.
'I need to make sure what she died of. We'll take the body back to my temple,' I said. 'It will be quieter for a full examination.'
Neutemoc bent, stiffly, to lift Eleuia's left hand. He stared at the wrinkled skin of her hands, at the incongruously pale skin revealed by the absent fingernails. His face was rigid, washed of all emotion.
'We leave this earth,' he whispered, softly, slowly: the beginning of a hymn to the dead. 'We leave the flowers and the songs, and the maize bending in the wind. Down into the darkness we must go, leaving behind the marigolds and the cedar trees…'
I hoped Eleuia had indeed drowned. Drowned men and women went, not into the oblivion of Mictlan, but into Tlalocan, the Blessed Land of the Drowned: a place where flowers blossomed all year round, and where maize never lacked; where Father would be, tilling the eternal fields, blissfully unaware of me. I prayed that Eleuia, who had suffered so much during the Great Famine, would at least have this consolation.
To us, the living, would be left the task of finding out what had happened to her.
