‘There’s a Court of Appeal, yes, with two judges. But I hope it won’t come to that. They have to decide every case in consultation with the King, you see…’
‘And it was the King’s men who brought Lily in in the first place,’ I acknowledged. I shivered. The task I had set myself was looking harder and harder. I had lain awake much of the night wondering what I would do if we located Hare and obtained and deciphered his message only to find that it was, J in fact, something that might threaten the realm. I dismissed I the thought now. There was no point in worrying about it when my chances of finding the missing merchant to begin with were so slim.
‘The other thing we have to bear in mind,’ the lawyer went; on, ‘is that the Useless Days are coming up, and the trial has to be concluded by then. As I said yesterday, that gives us four days at most.’
A year was three hundred and sixty days. Because, however,! the passage of the seasons takes a little longer than that, there were, at the end of each year, five days that belonged to no month, had no names and over which no god presided. This was a frightening time when any sensible person would stay indoors, and not even sacred work such as sweeping and washing the faces of the idols was done. Naturally, no court would sit during the Useless Days.
‘It’s a pity all this had to happen so near the end of the session,’ Obsidian Tongue mused, ‘but we’ll just have to make the best of it. Now, we go in here. You’ll be taken to see your, er, client. I have an application to make,’ he concluded with relish,; no doubt thinking of the extra fee he had induced Kindly to part with.
‘You’re a bit scruffy for a lawyer,’ the guard at the palace gate told me. ‘You look like you’ve been rolled down a mountain.’
‘Accidents happen, even to lawyers,’ I said. ‘I fell out of a canoe and got caught between it and the bank. And all my clothes were ruined by the water, so I had to borrow these rags.’ Obsidian Tongue was attired as splendidly as he had been the day before. I still wore what Lily had given me when she rescued me.
The man grunted. ‘Well, Obsidian Tongue, if you’ll vouch for him…’
The lawyer pulled a face but said he would, and so we were let in.
A steward conducted me through corridors and courtyards, across immense, echoing hallways and around so many corners that, by the time we reached our destination, I had no idea which way I was facing or how far I had come. So much, I thought, for my plan to find out just where Lily was being held. Without a guard I could conceivably wander, lost, inside this vast building until I starved to death.
I was too preoccupied with what I was trying to do to pay much attention to what was going on around me, but I could not fail to notice how opulent my surroundings were. Walls were framed and panelled in oak and cypress that had been planed and polished until they shone, even in the poor light of early morning. The gaps between the smooth slabs underfoot, against which my guide’s and my soles slapped as we walked, were almost invisible. Feather mosaics decorated the Walls in every room — roseate spoonbill, the brilliant green of quetzal, the blue of cotinga, every plume priceless even before they had been made into a work of art. Statues glowered down at me wherever I went: some of granite, others of greenstone, a few small, delicate ones of gold. Many of them portrayed the same man: it seemed that Hungry Coyote was still watching over his domain, even in death.
Eventually we left the brilliant wall-hangings and exquisite statuary behind. The wooden panelling became bare stone looking rough and unfinished in places, and the passageway^ became narrower, stuffier and darker. I became aware of an unmistakable odour: a combination of piss, ordure, stale sweat and the faint, sharp scent of fear.
When I became aware of it, I stopped and had to will myself to go on. I had been in such places before, but seldom had I gone into one expecting to get out alive.
‘We’re near the prison, aren’t we?’
‘It’s right here,’ my guide confirmed, leading the way into a long, low, dingy hall lined on both sides with wooden cages. ‘Your client is over there — that one on its own.’
I looked keenly at the cages and their occupants, and was surprised. The men and women huddling behind their bars looked as dejected as prisoners anywhere, but their conditions were better than the ones I had endured. They had more space than I ever had, enough even to fie down in, and they had pots to relieve themselves in which were not overflowing. In Mexico, prisoners were often slowly starved to death. None of the inmates here was fat, but they did not look like skeletons either.
Lily’s cage was at the far end of one of the rows. As my guide had indicated, it stood a little apart from its nearest!
