The people who lived here were not, strictly speaking, Aztecs, although they shared our ancestry and spoke our language and we considered them our allies. They were Acolhuans, whose ancestors had emerged from the Seven Caves before ours had, and had come South into the valley to found their city at a time when Mexico was nothing more than a couple of boggy islands in the middle of a salt lake. Over the years much of the eastern side of the valley, as well as large tracts of land outside it, as far as the Texcalan frontier beyond the mountains, had fallen under Tetzcoco’s sway. At length the Acolhuans had come to blows with another nation from the western side of the lake, the Tepanecs; the struggle had brought both contenders low, allowing us Aztecs, safe in the fortress-city my forefathers had built on those two boggy islands, to triumph over both of them. Since then, Tetzcoco had been Mexico’s ally, but it was an unequal relationship. It said much for Tetzcoco’s standing with its mighty neighbour that King Maize Ear was the nephew of our Emperor, Montezuma. Just before he had died, Maize Ear’s father. Hungry Child, was said to have given up all thought of war or conquest, contenting himself to be the ruler of a people who thought themselves the most cultivated and refined in the World.
Looking over the heads of the people, I saw the long, low wall of the palace at the back of our lodgings, the one Kindly had described as having belonged to Lord Prince of Willows.
Your father said it was a quiet place. It looks more than that. It’s all overgrown, and those trees don’t look as if they’ve been pruned in years.’ A few boughs even bore wizened fruit, long since destroyed by frost.
I don’t suppose they have,’ Lily answered. ‘The place has been deserted for ten years at least. Don’t you know the story?’
‘No.’
‘Its typically Tetzcocan. Prince of Willows was the son of Hungry Child, his favourite. He’d probably have succeeded him if he’d lived. He made the mistake of getting too friendly! with one of his father’s concubines.’
‘Ah, I see. Why is that typically Tetzcocan, though? That sort of thing could happen anywhere — son making eyes at father’s mistress, the old man getting suspicious…’
‘Because you don’t see at all! It’s not as if anyone ever caught the two of them sharing the same sleeping mat. From what I’ve heard, they really were just swapping poems. The girl was talented that way, apparently, so much so they called her “the Lady of Tollan”.’ Tollan was the legendary home of the Toltecs, the ancient god-like race we credited with inventing and perfecting every art form from poetry to architecture, a people so clever that not only could they cultivate cotton up in the mountains but they made it grow in different colours so as to be spared the effort of dyeing it.
‘Maybe the young man touched a raw nerve,’ I suggested! ‘They do pride themselves on their poetry here, don’t they?’!
‘I’m sure there was more to it than that,’ Lily asserted. ‘A raw nerve, yes — but considering what happened, this girl obviously meant a lot more to the King than most of his other wives and concubines did. After all, he had thousands to choose from any time he wanted, so whatever it was that made her so important, it can’t have been just sex!’ Her frankness surprised me, but she followed the remark with what may have been a wistful sigh. ‘Maybe he really wanted her for her mind!’
A thoughtful pause followed while I tried to think of an answer to that. However, Lily beat me to it: ‘But I was telling! you what the really stupid — I mean the really Tetzcocan " thing about it was. When the King wanted to try his son for treason, he wouldn’t preside over the trial himself. He claimed he wanted the court to be impartial. That’s what they do around here, you see: everybody has to get a fair trial, even the son of a king. They can’t see that rich and powerful men can’t be tried fairly, because too many people stand to gain from either letting them go or disposing of them once and for all. And when the judges found the lad guilty, on what sort of evidence I don’t know, Hungry Child wouldn’t intervene to pardon him, because he wouldn’t have it thought that his son was above the law.
‘I heard the King had had it in mind to exile Prince of Willows, but they garrotted him instead. His father was so grief-stricken that he had his house walled up and forbade anyone from going in there ever again on pain of death.’
‘Oh.’ I was beginning to get the idea that Tetzcoco was a strange place. ‘What happened to the lady?’
She frowned in puzzlement for a moment, as though the question had never occurred to her. Then she gave a bitter laugh. ‘Do you know. I’ve no idea? Come to that, I can’t even tell you her name! But what do you think? What always happens to the woman in these cases? She was strangled, I expect, or maybe her head was crushed between
