‘What are you doing here, then?’ He held Lily as firmly as ever. I forced myself not to look at her.
‘Looking for work, seeing the world. You want to try living in a frontier town surrounded by soldiers and savages. It’s no fun at all. I heard Tetzcoco was the centre of civilization, so I came here. Beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered,’ I added sincerely. ‘I feel as if I’ve been on the road for ever, and I’m tired and hungry.’ Then I said, as if it were an afterthought: ‘Was it the woman doing all the screaming? Who’s she?’
‘Mind your own business,’ Hunter snapped.
The other warrior frowned at me. ‘What’s your name, then?’
‘Yaotl.’ There seemed no reason to he: it was a common enough name and there was, I thought, no likelihood that anyone in Tetzcoco knew me. Then I remembered the Texcalan lying dead on the floor, and wondered how true that was.
He turned to Lily. ‘Do you know this man?’ he demanded.
I held my breath while the woman looked at me. She stared, as if she had been unaware of my presence until it was pointed out to her. Then, at last, she said quietly: ‘I’ve never seen him before.’
‘Just like you’ve never seen this before, either, I suppose?’ He prodded the corpse with his foot.
‘No! I don’t even know who he is. Where’s the man who lives in this house? What have you done with him?’
The man ignored the question. He grinned at her and 'vaved the thing he was holding in front of her face. It was not a knife, I realized, but a wooden spike, its blunt end splintered 35 if it had been snapped off something else. It was black with dried blood.
‘And what about this, then?’||
‘You tell me,’ Lily snapped defiantly. ‘I’ve never seen that before, either.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Visiting a friend.’
He laughed. ‘He can’t be a very close friend. I heard you were in the marketplace a few days ago, asking directions to his house.’
That drew a faint gasp from Lily, and I wondered how he had known about it. Were Lily’s enquiries what had drawn the men here? With a thrill of fear I remembered what she had said a few days before: Tetzcoco was not a safe place in which to be caught carrying secret messages, or even associating with their bearers. I began to reappraise the two men, realizing that : they might not be policemen after all, but something more sinister.
To divert them from questioning Lily further, I said: ‘It stinks in here. Do you mind if I go outside?’
‘Stay there! I’ll deal with you in a moment.’
‘We could all go out, then. Why don’t you drag the body out into the courtyard? Then we — I mean you — can get a proper look at it.’
The man holding the spike scowled at me. ‘What’s it to do with you?’ he asked pointedly.
‘Nothing. But you can’t stumble over a corpse in the middle of a room full of blood and not be a bit curious, can you?’ Or, in my case, extremely curious. I stared at the Texcalan’s ruined face, silently wondering how he could possibly have come to be here.
Unexpectedly, Hunter supported me. ‘He’s got a point, Tecuancoatl. It does stink in here.’ So now I knew his chief’s name: ‘Rattlesnake.’
Rattlesnake scowled. ‘All right, we’ll go into the courtyard. But we’re not moving the body. We don’t need to look at it any more. He was stabbed with this—’ he made a violent gesture with the spike ‘—and that’s that! Bring the woman.’
As we all stepped outside I looked quickly around, taking in as much of my surroundings as I could at a glance.
The house had only one room, whose furnishings consisted of nothing but a sleeping mat and a large wicker chest. The chest lay open and empty. The whole place spoke of an occupant who had left in a hurry, emptying out the contents of his chest but for some reason forgetting to take his sleeping mat. There was a second doorway at the back of the room, leading to a small, bare yard surrounded by a low wall. The courtyard proved to be as bare of ornament as the interior. There were not even the customary images of the gods that no home in Mexico, or for that matter Tetzcoco, would be without. I assumed from this that the house had never been anything more than a temporary lodging. That would make sense if it was used mainly by merchants, because a merchant’s god, Yacatecuhth, Lord of the Vanguard, was represented by his travelling staff, and while on their travels they needed no other idols. The low wall was made of the same flimsy stuff as the building, and one corner was broken down.
Once outside, Rattlesnake turned to look at Lily and me. Now, let’s try again, shall we? Why don’t you try telling me what happened to our friend in there?’
‘You do realize,’ I replied, keeping my tone as casual as I could, ‘that there’s no way the woman could have had anything to do with this?’
Rattlesnake glared at me. ‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Well — look, I’m sorry to butt in like this. I know it’s none of my business — for one thing, that man’s been dead for days.’
‘About two or three, I’d say,’ Hunter said.
‘Well, there you are. So she didn’t just come along and somehow murder him this morning, did she? I mean, apart from anything else, he looked like a big, beefy warrior. Does she look as if she’d have the
