As Lily and I respectively walked and limped towards Huexotla, I began to notice something curious about the demeanour of many of the people around me. The foreigners seemed normal, acting as foreigners always do, craning their necks and staring open-mouthed every time they saw a lord being carried in a litter or any building taller than a single- storey house. However, the locals, the ones who looked and dressed like Aztecs, often had a nervous, furtive air about fhem. They seemed prone to glancing frequently over their shoulders, taking quick, nervous steps and bowing their heads as if they did not want to be noticed.
I was about to draw Lily’s attention to this when she I announced that we had arrived.
I stopped, collapsing with relief in the shade of a stout larch I growing by the roadside. ‘That was a long walk. Are you sure this is the place?’ It was not prepossessing. The road was lined on both sides with small dwellings, none of them substantial, I could not see any stone houses: the favoured materials in this part of the town seemed to be mud bricks or wattle and daub, faced with cracked, hastily whitewashed adobe. The houses mostly stood apart from one another, rather than being crammed together like the houses in Mexico, but that was not necessarily a good thing. Some of them looked as if they would benefit from having something to lean against, and the spaces between them were mostly filled with foul slops and trash: gnawed bones, maize husks, broken pots, cracked and worn obsidian flakes. Elsewhere, trees mingled haphazardly with the houses, and here and there were patches of tall grass and netdes and overgrown bushes. There seemed to be nobody about.
‘He can’t be a very prosperous merchant,’ I observed.
‘He will be when he’s got what I’ve brought for him,’ Lily said drily. ‘Let’s get this over with. You stay here.’
I stared at her in astonishment. ‘I thought you needed me. That’s why I’ve walked all this way. What do you want me to do out here, anyway?’
‘Keep watch,’ she replied mysteriously. She walked up to the entrance to one of the houses, a dark doorway with no screen or cloth covering it. Lumps of brick hung from a rope attached to the lintel. She ratded them with a swift tug.
Nothing happened.
‘Not at home, then,’ I said, after she had tried again. ‘Are you sure this is the right house?’
‘Quite sure. I had someone describe it to me.’
I could not see much difference between this hovel and its neighbours, but before I could say so the woman said abruptly: ‘Well, I haven’t come all this way for nothing. I’m going inside.’
She walked through the doorway. ‘Hare! Where are you?’
Nobody answered.
I hesitated, unsure whether to get up from my seat under the tree and follow her, when suddenly the silence inside the house was split by a shriek.
I was on my feet and running across the street before the sound had died away.
I burst through the doorway, stumbling to a halt just in time to avoid falling over a large object on the floor. I barely spared it a glance as I looked quickly at the people around me.
There were too many people in the room.
A man stood behind Lily, holding her firmly by her upper arms. A second stood in front of her. He was holding something, which he had been examining at the moment when I made my entrance. It looked like a knife. They both had the look of warriors, with thickset bodies, pillar-of-stone hairstyles and grim, purposeful expressions.
The third man was the thing I had almost tripped over. When I looked down at it again, I saw that his body lay sprawled in the centre of the room, and the floor around it was black with his blood. The inside of the house reeked of gore, a smell that recalled many a human sacrifice and countless offerings of my own Precious Water of Life. I knew it well enough to be able to judge that the blood had been shed a few days before. There was a long, gaping gash in the side of the dead man’s neck.
My first thought was that this must be Hare, but then I looked at the corpse’s face and the shock of recognition almost had me turning and bolting through the doorway in terror.
When I had last seen this man, he and I had just been untied from the same collar in Tlatelolco. He was the Texcalan with the torn lip and earlobes.
‘Look, Amimitl! Here’s another one. What are you doing here?’
The speaker was the warrior standing in front of Lily. He had taken his eyes off the object in his fingers and was watching me keenly.
‘I…’ I stopped myself just in time. What if I told the truth and admitted to being Lily’s slave? She had walked into what looked very much like a trap. Instead of Hare and his message7 she had found a corpse and two warriors, both of whom, I realized with a growing sense of foreboding, had the air of policemen. If they were going to accuse Lily of being responsible for killing the Texcalan, then it would do neither of us any good for me to be taken up for the crime as well, as her accomplice.
I could only hope that Lily would reach the same conclusion as I had, and as quickly. She was staring at me, silent and open-mouthed. She trembled slightly, and her breathing was! quick and shallow.
‘I was just having a nap out there when I heard the scream.! I’m sorry, do you want me to go?’
The man holding Lily — the one called Amimitl, which meant ‘Hunter’ — said: ‘He sounds like an Aztec, Chief.’
‘She does too,’ his comrade remarked.
‘I’m not an Aztec,’ I said hastily. ‘I’m from Oztoma. It’s an Aztec colony. So I may sound as
