I found myself gasping for breath, suddenly realizing I had not dared to breathe since picking up the brick.
Quickly, I checked Hunter’s pulse, and then lifted one of his eyelids to make sure. He was unconscious but still very much alive. I had to decide what to do next in a hurry. It would not be long before he woke up, and I did not want to be around when that happened.
I contemplated going back into the house, to search it, but I decided against it. There was no time, and if I left through the street doorway, the trail of bloody footprints I would leave would be as plain as a glyph saying: ‘Yaotl went this way.’
I decided to copy the killer. I scrambled over the wall, muttering ‘Sorry’ as I planted a foot on Hunters back to boost myself up, and dropped down on to the hillside. I scrambled and slithered through the bushes as fast as I could while taking care not to cut myself on any of the rubbish strewn among them. Then I splashed along the stream-bed until the house with the broken courtyard wall was well out of sight.
By the time I had regained the road back into Tetzcoco, I was exhausted. Still, I forced myself to carry on. I told myself I had to get help.
There was only one man in Tetzcoco I could think of turning to. I only hoped he was sober enough to be of any use.
6
‘What we need,’ Kindly said, a few moments before exhaustion and pain finally overcame me and I fell asleep, ‘is a lawyer.’
The old man had certainly been drinking, but as usual with him it barely showed. As I had babbled my way through the story of what had happened to his daughter and me, he took occasional nips at a drinking-gourd, but his head nodded only to acknowledge what I was telling him. He had offered me the gourd the moment I staggered into our room and he saw what state I was in, but I was so weak and thirsty by then that all I wanted was water.
‘I wonder if Itznenepilh is still practising?’ he mused. He took one more swig before hauling himself reluctantly to his feet. ‘I suppose it’s no use telling you to go and look for him, is it? Thought not.’ He managed to make it sound as if it were my fault. ‘This won’t be cheap, either. Let me warn you, Yaotl, no matter how grown up your children think they are, you never stop paying for them!’
I managed a grunt in reply, but by the time he was out of the door I was unconscious. When I awoke, there were two other men in the room.
One was Kindly. The other was a stranger, a tall, fleshy man whom I took to be the lawyer, Itznenepilli. It was an appropriate name: it meant ‘Obsidian Tongue’.
It took me a little while to take in his appearance and work out what I found incongruous about it. His cloak and breech-cloth were not made of cotton, and that marked him out as a commoner. However, they looked more expensive than any commoners garb I had ever seen. They were finely woven of something like sisal; the cloak and the trailing ends of the breechcloth were almost long enough to amount to an offence, and the flowers embroidered on them were exquisite, their colour so rich they looked better than real. As a commoner within the city limits, he wore no sandals, but his toenails had been neatly trimmed, the backs of his heels had a fresh, pink tinge, as if their calluses had been carefully rubbed away, and his short, immaculate hair had the unnatural blackness of the indigo dye used by some women. Everything about this man’s extraordinary appearance spoke of somebody determined to do everything the law allowed to rise above his status.
He was holding Kindly’s drinking-gourd. I might have expected him to take a decorous sip and swirl the liquid appreciatively around his mouth, savouring it before swallowing it, but instead he downed an enormous draught, sighing in satisfaction when he had finished. He did not offer the gourd back to its owner.
‘Not bad. Now, as I was saying…’
I sat up with a groan. Much of the stiffness in my joints, which had showed signs of easing during the long walk to Hare’s house, was coming back. ‘You must be the lawyer,’ I said.
He ignored me. ‘In a case of this kind, I have to ask for my fees in advance. I require twenty large cloaks a day. The case will be concluded in four days — it has to be, since the Useless Hays are nearly upon us — and so that comes to eighty large cloaks.’
I gasped. That was enough for an ordinary person to live on for four years.
‘I suppose it does,’ Kindly conceded grudgingly. ‘I thought I the usual arrangement was that if you won, you took a per- j centage of whatever was being fought over. Can’t we come to some agreement like that?’
The lawyer sighed. ‘I’d like to, but, frankly, in a criminal j case… well, people about to be executed are sometimes less than punctilious about settling their debts. I’m sure you know how it is. I’m really sorry.’ He gave a thin smile that told me exacdy how sorry he felt.
‘Lily isn’t going to be executed!’ I protested. ‘She didn’t have anything to do with the murder. She wasn’t even arrested for that, not really. It was a pretext. Look, let me tell you what Hunter told me…’
Obsidian Tongue stared at me as if I had just appeared out of nowhere. Then he turned to Kindly. ‘Who is this?’
Kindly said: ‘His name’s Yaotl. He’s Lily’s, er, slave.’
‘Ah, good! You can replenish this gourd for us, then,’ he said, waving the vessel in my direction.
