Exhausted as I was, I still found it strange to lie on a sleeping mat. It required an effort of will not to draw my knees up to my chest, and when I made the effort, expecting to luxuriate in my ability to stretch my legs out to their full length, the pain in my calves and thighs made me wince. I found I had sores on my buttocks and hips from crouching in the same position all day, and they hurt every time I tried to roll over. Finally, the palace behind the house may have been quiet, but my fellow lodger was not. Whether it was from a lifetime’s smoking tobacco, years of drinking sacred wine in seemingly suicidal quantities or sheer cussedness, I could not have said, but Lily’s father had the loudest and most persistent snore I have ever heard.
I doubt that any of that would have kept me awake, however. The thing that made me toss and turn before, eventually, giving up and going to lean against the doorway and look morosely out into the dark, empty courtyard was in my head.
I ought to have been elated to be where I was: freed from my cage and the certainty of a gruesome death, and for once in my life among people who, whether or not they saw themselves as my friends, were surely not my enemies. Over and over again I told myself that I had had more good fortune than I deserved, certainly far more than I would ever have dared ask the gods to grant. Not so long before, I would have resigned' myself to being for ever subject to the whim of a capricious, spiteful, callous old man and his nightmarish henchmen. Temporarily, at least, I had swapped my old quarters, a cramped, noisy, stinking space beside the kitchen of Lord Feathered in Black’s palace, for the spacious apartment I found myself in now, and what did it matter if I had to share it with an old man who snored?
I was still a slave, but that, I knew, ought not to matter. I had never expected my former master to grant me my freedom. In fact, I had sold myself to him thinking that I would never again be my own man, and welcoming the thought: it was a comfort to know that no one would ever again ask anything of me except obedience. And remembering that, I began to see what was wrong and why I was less than overjoyed now.
I had no idea what Lily intended to do with me. Judging by what she had told me that evening, she had very little notion herself. However, I could not see her bullying me the way she did Partridge. Too much had happened to both of us for that, and for all her talk of hating me I knew that she saw, as clearly as I did, what a tangle of feelings we were caught up in. We might end up hating each other, but for us to be nothing more than mistress and servant was inconceivable.
What, then, was my status? A slave was the meanest of persons, but he knew how much his master could lawfully ask of him, and was free of all tribute obligations so long as he obeyed. A commoner might be forced to go to war or join a labour gang working on some monumental building project, if foe Emperor or his parish required it, but otherwise he was free to follow his own occupation and take his own chances with the gods, and what he said counted for something, somewhere, even if it was just in his own household.
Status was almost everything to the Aztecs. We had laws that told us what clothes we might wear — cotton for a lord, Haaguey fibre for a commoner — whether we might wear sandals or must go barefoot, even how we wore our hair, because these things represented a man’s position in society to everyone who saw him. To look at my brother, for example, was to know precisely what his rank was and what he had done to earn it. There were many in Mexico who cherished their status more than their lives.
It seemed that night as if I had no standing among my people at all. It felt as if I was not quite a slave, not quite a commoner, not quite a former priest. It was as if I had forgotten my own name, and for one mad moment I found myself thinking I had been less unhappy in my cage, when, with the benefit of continual reminders from the Otomies, I had been in no doubt about exactly what and where I was.
In the end I shook myself from my reverie by reminding myself that there was one thing I did have, one thing that was worth more than name or rank. It was something I might never experience again, but which nobody had managed to take away from me, the one thing that I could hope to have even after my body had been burned or buried and my soul departed for the Place of the Fleshless.
As I rolled over on my sleeping mat, with sleep approaching! at last, I remembered I had a son.
5
In the event, I had to disappoint Kindly. By the next morning I was not up to touring the city or to anything else beyond lying on my sleeping mat, moaning pathetically and shivering as though I were freezing to death in spite of my blanket.
‘It’s not surprising,’ Kindly observed, in reply to Lily’s impatient demand to know what was the matter with me now. ‘He’s been penned up like a turkey on sale in the market for a month and a half and worked over pretty thoroughly too, if I’m any judge. He had a pretty strenuous day yesterday. You’re probably lucky to find him still alive at all.’
‘I’m not sure
