I stood up, feeling at something of a disadvantage addressing Obsidian Tongue from a sitting position, and was surprised to find that he was in reality no taller than I. ‘Surely you want to know what I saw today?’
‘No,’ he replied shordy.
‘How come?’
He heaved a sigh, as though talking to me were an unpleasant task that he had to resign himself to. ‘Assuming your mistress’s father agrees to my terms, then I may, at some point, be interested in what you’ve got to say. But there would be procedural matters to undertake first. Anyway, if I’ve under-
stood correctly, what you saw at Hare’s house is likely to be peripheral to the main charge, at best.’
‘Peripheral?’ I squawked. I was so astonished I could barely speak coherendy enough to pronounce the word. ‘But…’ He was already talking to Kindly again, although the gourd remained hanging in the air between us. ‘Now, the first thing we need to do is make an application to transfer Lily’s trial to the Merchants’ Court in Tlatelolco.’
‘She’d get a fairer hearing from her own people,’ Kindly said eagerly. ‘Will it work?’
‘No. The Tlatelolco merchants have no jurisdiction here. But we should make the application anyway.’
1 began to feel giddy. I was convinced that this had nothing to do with pain and tiredness but everything to do with the fact that I could not believe my own ears. ‘If it won’t work, why do it?’
Obsidian Tongue was ignoring me again. ‘My fee for that application…’
‘Which won’t work…’
'… will be a further ten large cloaks. Kindly, we haven’t agreed that I’m going to take this case, and I regret to say that if this slave interrupts me again…’
‘All right,’ the merchant growled. ‘Yaotl, for my sake, shut up, will you? I’ll pay what you ask. It’s not as if I have any choice. Will you take gold quills in lieu? It would save me the trouble of exchanging them. Oh,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘that is your fee for representing Lily on both charges, isn’t it?’
‘Both charges?’ I asked.
‘Of course, both charges,’ the lawyer said reproachfully.
What sort of greedy person do you take me for?’
Under other circumstances I might have laughed, but I had something else to think of now. ‘Both charges?’ I asked again. Now that his fee was settled. Obsidian Tongue seemed to become a little more affable, even deigning to reply to me. ‘Why, yes. Both charges. You see, you may be right about the murder being a pretext. But there’s a much more serious accusation: conspiring against the King.’
‘The murder is straightforward enough. Hare is found . ..’
‘No, he isn’t,’ I said. ‘I told you, he was a Texcalan warrior. Lily bought him at the same time as me, but she let him go.’
Obsidian Tongue scowled in annoyance before taking another swig at the fresh gourd I had been sent out to buy. While carrying the sacred wine back to the guesthouse, I had been tempted to try a sip, just to see whether it still tasted as good as it had all those years ago, but I had refrained. I knew that one sip would lead to another, and I had to keep a clear head now. Somebody had to find a way of getting Lily out of prison and away from the threat of death hanging over her. Her father may have been less infirm than he pretended, but he clearly could not do it on his own, and Obsidian Tongue struck me as the sort who could be trusted up to the point at which he received his fee and no further.
Inevitably, I found myself wondering why I should care. Of course, I was Lily’s slave and could not expect to be treated very kindly if she were convicted of a crime against the state. But I was not known in Tetzcoco, and there was litde to stop me from running away and pursuing the goal I had mentioned to Lily on the lake — heading West, in the direction I presumed my son had taken. It was a forlorn hope, but it seemed to represent the only chance I had of seeing him again. I asked myself why I did not seize it and why, instead, I was frantically turning over one daft scheme after another to rescue the woman from wherever in the heart of Lord Maize Ear’s palace she was being held.
It was that tangle of feelings between us once again, made only more tortuous by her having saved me from the grisly fate Lord Feathered in Black and his associates had planned for me.
I was indebted to her for that, and for other things, and to run away now would be somehow to repudiate it all, and deny that anything had ever passed between us beyond a few sweaty moments on a sleeping mat. I felt that I owed myself more than that, besides whatever was due to Lily.
Besides, I reminded myself, Lily had once saved my son’s life too, and if I were ever to see him again how could I look him in the eye and tell him I had deserted her?
And so I had returned faithfully to Kindly and the lawyer with the gourd still full and the stopper firmly jammed into its hole.
Obsidian Tongue put the drink down and said: ‘It doesn’t really matter who the dead man was. The court will be told she was arrested at the scene of the crime. The simplest explanation is that she did it, and even the fairest of judges find simple explanations hard to resist. Still, we can make the most of what you saw, and she may get the benefit of the doubt.’
He had grudgingly agreed to pretend he found me worth speaking to directly, since Kindly had told him to and the old man was, after all, his client.
‘What you can’t help with is the charge of
