‘What is all that about?’ Kindly asked, watching the gourd the way a weasel watches a rabbit. ‘It makes no sense to me.’
‘It’s not intended to make sense,’ Obsidian Tongue replied loftily. ‘Lily was overheard talking to a lady from the palace named Mother of Light. I gather merely talking to this woman was enough to cast suspicion on Lily, but you tell me she was making arrangements for some sort of secret message to be passed to her. If this is what the judges are told, and they are satisfied that it is true, that’s all they will need to know. In fact, they will be very eager not to know any more than that.’
‘This is a peculiar place,’ Kindly rumbled. He made a sudden move to snatch the gourd but was too late: the lawyer had it halfway to his bps already.
‘I’d have to agree,’ Obsidian Tongue said sadly. It was the first hint of real emotion, other than irritation, that he had betrayed. ‘But you have to understand, Tetzcoco isn’t what it was, just a few years ago, in the time of Hungry Coyote and Hungry Child, when not even the King was above the law, and a judge who let himself be swayed by fear or greed could expect to be strangled. Those were the days!’ he cried, and I suspected the sacred wine was beginning to do its work as he went on: ‘I don’t really remember Hungry Coyote, of course, but my father told me stories about him. He told me the King once overheard a poor boy calling him harsh for not allowing the poor to take sticks and branches from the ground in the royal forest to use as firewood. Hungry Coyote promptly changed the law so that they could, provided they did not damage any growing tree or plant. And, of course, I remember Hungry Child’s reign. That was when to practise law! The truth was all we had to concern ourselves with, and it was a thing worth fighting for. Sometimes, when I was a young man, I would take a case for nothing, because I believed in it.’
‘Imagine,’ I said under my breath.
‘Not now. What’s the point, when the truth is manipulated by powerful men and the judges are for ever looking over their shoulders at their masters, seeking to fulfil their wishes?’
He was weeping by now, silent tears starting from his eyes. I found it hard to believe that any of this was real, and that it was not merely the sacred wine talking. On the other hand, I had to admit that I had never had that much regard for the truth.
‘Does any of this have anything to do with why Lily’s on trial or how we get her off?’ Kindly asked.
The lawyer sniffed loudly. ‘In a sense, it does. Do you understand what’s going on in Tetzcoco at the moment?’
Lily had said it was not a safe place to be carrying secret messages. Hunter had talked of watching people, and then watching the people they talked to. And I remembered the demeanour of the people I had noticed on the way to Hare’s house: furtive, almost frightened.
‘You’ll appreciate, I have to be careful what I say,’ he said, although I was unsure what the word ‘careful’ might mean to someone who had drunk as much sacred wine as he had. ‘But what everybody knows is this. Before the old King, Hungry Child, died, he shut himself away in his retreat in Tetzcotzinco and pined away, supposedly from grief at what happened to his son.’
‘Prince of Willows?’ I asked.
‘Yes. He would have succeeded his father, no doubt, if it hadn’t been for that wretched girl, but instead there was a dispute. Four of Hungry Child’s sons contended for the throne; in the end, it went to Lord Maize Ear.’
‘Our beloved Emperor’s nephew,’ Kindly observed. ‘But his brother. Black Flower, didn’t take it lying down, did he?’
The lawyer looked annoyed, like a man trying to tell a joke when someone else steals the punch line. ‘He did not. He roused his supporters in the North of the valley, and beyond the mountains, and the next thing Maize Ear knew, he had a civil war on his hands. Black Flower was very popular, you see — his mother was one of Hungry Child’s lawful wives, not a concubine like Maize Ear’s mother, and in Tetzcoco it’s normally the King’s eldest lawful son who succeeds his father.’ Obsidian Tongue looked significantly at Kindly and me when he said this. I took the point: among the Aztecs, Emperors ''’ere elected by a small clique of nobles. The Tetzcocans clearly resented Maize Ear, not just because he was Montezuma’s nephew but because the manner of his accession was essentially alien to their way of doing things — an Aztec imposition.
‘So, even with his uncle backing him. Maize Ear hasn’t been able to get rid of his half-brother to this day. Now there’s a truce between them, with Black Flower still in power up in the North and his half-brother sitting on the throne here. But neither man is exacdy happy with the state of things. The city is — I should say, is rumoured to be — full of spies for both sides.’
‘And anyone, like Lily, who gets caught in the middle of all this is in trouble,’ Kindly said grimly.
‘But she wasn’t spying for anyone!’ I protested. ‘All she did was put Hare in touch with someone at the palace… Ah.’
‘You see?’ the lawyer said. ‘That in itself may have amounted to a crime against the state, depending on who Lily’s contact at the palace was and what the message was that Hare was trying! to get to her.’
I frowned. ‘We know her contact was a concubine called Mother of Light. What else do we know?’
Kindly replied: ‘No one I’ve asked seems to know her. I gathered she was one of Hungry Child’s women, but that doesn’t tell
