The last time Lily had met Lion, my brother’s sword had been sticking out of her son’s skull. They were not the best of friends.
The fleeting smile was gone from his face, but I could see it threatening to break out again as he murmured: ‘I was the other bidder. My man didn’t realize…’
‘You!’ she screamed. For a moment I thought she was going to fly at him, tear him with her fingernails or bite his nose off, but instead she stamped her bare foot on the ground in frustration and turned on her slave again. ‘You moron! You had me bidding against Yaotl’s own brother!’
Partridge’s wail of protest was cut off by the stern voice of the man in charge of the police. ‘All right, that’s enough. Are you saying you own this, madam?’ By ‘this’ he plainly meant the three of us still lashed to the pole.
Yes,’ she sighed wearily.
Then move it along. It’s causing a disturbance! Come on, break it up!’ he called out aloud, and I realized he was addressing the second small crowd to have gathered around me that day. ‘Go on, all of you. We’ve all got business to attend to!’
‘We’d better get to that canoe,’ Lily told her servant, her voice calmer now but still tense. ‘Cut them loose and bring Yaotl with you. And hurry up! We’ve wasted enough time. Cihtli isn’t going to hang around in Tetzcoco for ever.’
‘Cihtli’ meant ‘Hare’. Who was Hare, I wondered, and did this mean we were going to Tetzcoco? But then I saw something that drove the questions from my mind and wiped out all sense of relief at my deliverance.
The crowd around us was scattering, as the bailiff had ordered. Only one man remained in his place, with his eyes fixed on me. He was a tall man with muscles that bulged so far they seemed about to split the seams in his green uniform, and he wore his hair piled up on top of his head and flowing over his shoulders in a style I was unlikely ever to forget.
The Otomi did nothing and said nothing. He just grinned at me, and that was enough. His meaning would not have been plainer if he had said the words aloud: ‘We’ll get you yet. Just you wait and see.’
Partridge’s nervous fingers were not up to untying us. Every time Lily shouted at him his hands jerked convulsively, and at one point I was afraid he was going to strangle me by mistake. Eventually my brother pushed him aside and, using a sword borrowed from one of his men, began sawing at the rope with its obsidian blade.
‘Yaotl,’ he muttered, ‘you know what I was saying earlier…’
‘I suppose you’re not sorry any more,’ I said, rubbing my neck.
‘I don’t know.’ He glanced at Lily, who glared back at both of us. ‘I’m not sure I wouldn’t sooner be sacrificed than have her as my mistress!’ He raised his voice. ‘Now, what about these two?’
‘Let them go,’ the woman said shortly. ‘They’re no use to me.’
The two men still lashed to the slave-collar watched sullenly while their bonds were cut. ‘You two had better bugger off back to Texcala, or wherever you come from,’ Lion advised them.
As soon as they were free, the one with the torn lip did a strange thing. He sat down, put his disfigured face in his hands and began to weep quietly.
‘What’s up with him?’
The one-armed warrior stared at my brother as though he thought the question stupid. ‘What do you think?’ he sneered. ‘He wanted to be sacrificed! He was looking forward to a flowery death and his spirit joining the Sun in the sky every morning. What do you think he’s got waiting for him at home, in that state?’
Lion looked from one of them to the other, took a step towards the weeping warrior, and then thought better of whatever he was going to say. ‘Well, maybe I’ll see you on some battlefield somewhere,’ he mumbled.
‘Not if we see you first, Aztec!’
Lion turned to me. ‘You’d better get out of here before old Black Feathers finds out what’s happened!’
You saw the Otomi, then?’ The green-clad warrior had vanished, presumably gone to tell my master what had happened. I could imagine the old man’s rage when he learned about it. It would not be long before he started plotting his revenge.
Where’s my son?’ I asked suddenly.
‘Don’t worry about Nimble. He’s long gone. He didn’t want to leave you — I practically had to drive him out of the city with the flat of a sword — but he’s as safe as can be now.’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Just look out for yourself! It’s what you’re good at, after all!’
As the exhilaration of being alive and out of my cage wore off, the pain of my bruises and the weakness of my atrophied limbs started to make themselves felt again. Even without the collar — especially without the collar, and two tall men dragging me upright by the throat — it was an effort to stand, let alone walk. Somehow I made it as far as the canal. I stumbled over the side of Lily’s boat and fell, groaning, into the bottom.
Lily was less than sympathetic. ‘I suppose you can’t pole the canoe?’
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ a gruff voice responded. ‘He’d fall in the water if he tried. If you insist on sending Partridge home then it’s going to be up to you.’
I looked up, surprised to recognize the speaker as Lily’s father. The old man was slumped in the bow of the boat. He was snugly wrapped in an ancient, patched leather cloak. It had the same colour and texture as his skin. He looked like someone about to embark on a long journey. His staff, a pole the height of a man, wrapped in strips of paper spotted with rubber and blood, was propped between his knees.
‘What are you doing here?’ I
