The glitter vanished from her eyes as she shut them. There was a long pause, broken only by the splashing of our boatman’s oars as he took us among the reeds fringing Tetzcoco’s shoreline and by a loud snoring from Kindly, who had at long last fallen truly asleep in the bow. His daughter shot him a nervous glance before she answered me.
‘Yaod, I honestly don’t know. Do you think I ought to hate you for what happened to my son?’
I could think of nothing to say.
‘Maybe I do hate you. Maybe I didn’t want you to be sacrificed so that I could go on hating you, rather than just hating what I remembered about you. Do you think that’s it? Sort of a way of punishing myself, because deep down I blame myself for what Shining Light turned into? Or did I want to see you again, just to find out whether I really hated you or not?’
I was not sure whether I was supposed to answer that or not. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said truthfully.
She sighed. ‘I don’t either. It just seemed wrong to do nothing, that’s all.’ Suddenly I saw her teeth flash white in a grin. Just don’t get any ideas, slave! You’re not exactly an object of desire at the moment!’
It hurt to laugh, but I could not help it. Lily was a fine-looking woman, for all that she was about my age and far from being a girl, but just then the only things my wasted, bruised body craved were a meal, sleep and a bath.
Lily had taken two rooms in a guesthouse reserved for merchants. It was a short walk there from the dock. The road took us past the landing stages and merchants’ warehouses by the lakeside and up a gentle slope among bare maize fields, towards where the centre of the town sprawled in its careless fashion around the King’s palace and the temples of the gods in the sacred plaza. Ordinarily I could have run all the way, but by the time we arrived I needed both Lily and her father to hold me up. The old man was not out of breath. He was less frail than he looked.
‘You’ll be able to get some rest here,’ he said, showing me, by the flickering light of a pine torch, a sleeping mat in the corner of the room we were to share. To my amazement, a clean rabbit’s fur blanket lay on top of the mat. ‘Nice and quiet, with Huexotzincatl’s palace just behind us.’
‘They go in for palaces here, don’t they? This room alone is about half as big as my parents’ entire house, including the courtyard.’
‘They can afford to spread themselves out: they’ve got the land. They’re not all squashed together on a little island like us But we re right by the palace district anyway. The present King’s grandfather, Lord Nezahualcoyotl, had his children’s houses built ? so they abutted on to his own. No doubt he wanted to keep an eye on them! His son, Nezahualpilli, did the same. Hence this place next door — Huexotzincatl was the last King’s eldest son.’ I Nezahualcoyotl and Nezahualpilli: Hungry Coyote and his! son, Hungry Child. I knew their names well, as every Aztet did. The father had been one of our leading allies in the wars to overthrow the tyranny of the King of Azcapotzalco, long before I was born, and he and his son had both been renowned builders, law-makers and poets. It was Hungry Coyote who had suggested building a dyke across the lake, separating the salt water from the fresh, and sparing Mexico from the floods that had regularly ravaged it.
Much more than that, I did not know. Huexotzincatl was a name that was vaguely familiar to me, although all I could remember about him, apart from the fact that Hungry Child had been his father, was that he had come to a bad end. His name simply meant ‘Man from Huexotzinco’, although, of course, he had not come from any such place. Since ‘Huexotzinco’ in turn meant ‘By the Place of the Willows’, I thought of him as Prince of Willows.
The present King, Cacamatzin, Lord Maize Ear, a young man of about twenty, had been on the throne less than three years, having ascended it shortly after Hungry Child died. I gathered that he had neither his father’s nor his grandfather’s stature. He was, however, a nephew of our Emperor, Montezuma, which presumably counted for more than his personal qualities.
‘If you’re up to it, we’ll take a look around tomorrow. I haven’t been here in years, but there’s plenty worth seeing. Did you know the great pyramid here is taller than our war-god Huitzilopochtli’s in Tenochtitlan? It’s dedicated to your old patron, Tezcadipoca. Or rather the Lord of the Near and the Nigh, as they call him in Tetzcoco.’
I looked at him a litde sharply. I was not sure whether the mention of the Smoking Mirror was meant to recall my status as a slave or the fact that I had served him as a priest. He ignored me, though, instead looking hopefully out into the guesthouse’s courtyard. ‘I wonder whether Lily’s found us any food. I could do with a drink as well.’
Lily appeared then, as if summoned, bearing two drinking- gourds. Almost before she was through the doorway her father Lad seized one, pulled out the maize cob stopper and taken a swig. Then he spat, with an expression of disgust.
‘This is water!’
Of course it is. Straight from the spring. I managed to get some filled tortillas as well. Amaranth greens or shrimp?’ she asked me as she offered me the other gourd. ‘First thing tomorrow, I hope we can go and look for Hare and get this business over with.’
‘First thing tomorrow,’ the old man grumbled, ‘I hope I can get a real drink.’
I did not have a quiet night, even though, as Kindly had anticipated, there was not
