Lawyer,’ my guide announced before stepping quickly out of the hall. From where I stood I could hear him letting out a long, low exhalation as soon as he got outside. He must have,! been holding his breath.
Lily lay at the rear of her cage with her face turned avvay.l She was wearing the skirt and blouse she had had on when she ! was arrested. They were still relatively clean.
‘I didn’t know she had her own guard,’ I muttered to the warrior.
He started, as if I had woken him from a deep sleep. His hands tightened their grip on his sword, and for an instant I was afraid he was going to mistake me for an enemy, an intruder bent on relieving him of his charge, but then he relaxed.
‘I said, I didn’t know she had her own guard.’
‘Who? Oh, my prisoner,’ he mumbled. ‘Yes, I was just told to stand here and — well, I’m not quite sure what else I’m supposed to be doing, to be honest. Just stand here, that’s what I was told. Whoever she is, she must be pretty important.’
I found that depressing. It could only mean that whatever Lily was supposed to have done was viewed as being particularly heinous.
‘You look after your prisoners well here, don’t you?’ I said, pretending to eye the lines of cages while searching the walls for non-existent exits. There was only one way in and out, as far as I could tell.
‘You’re an Aztec. I can tell by your voice. Well, we don’t just shut people away and leave them to rot in Tetzcoco. No, we treat them properly, until they’re sentenced. Then we kill them.’
‘What if they’re acquitted?’
He pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Well, it happens,’ he conceded. ‘I suppose then we have to let them go.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the cage’s occupant stirring.
Exactly where were you told to stand?’ I asked the guard.
In front of the cage. Why?’
‘How close to the cage? I mean, if you stood a little further away — say, over there — you wouldn’t be disobeying orders, would you?’ I was pointing to a spot halfway down the hall, in the hope that we could compromise on a distance that would not allow the guard to overhear what passed between Lily and me. We were, after all, supposed to be lawyer and client.
He frowned. ‘I don’t know about that. What if you passed her a weapon or something and I couldn’t see?’
‘You can search me,’ I said. ‘Besides, what good would it do her if I did? Tell you what, if you move away a bit, the next time I come I’ll give you a present.’
The man was outraged. Trust me, I thought, to run into a squaddie with a sense of duty. ‘A bribe, you mean? How dare you! What do you take me for?’ he cried in a voice that echoed off the hall’s low ceiling.
‘Well, not exactly a bribe, you know…’
‘I’ve a good mind to take this sword to you, or… or… He spluttered into silence while he tried to think of what might be worse than carving slices off me with the obsidian blades set into the weapon’s shaft. Before he could come up with anything, Lily interrupted him.
‘What’s all that noise?’ she said sleepily as she got up into a kneeling position, sweeping her skirt under her knees. ‘Is that! you, Calquimichin? What are you shouting for? You woke me up!’
I had to smile. The warrior’s name meant ‘House Mouse’, and I would have guessed that he had never been happy with it.
However, his reaction to Lily’s words was extraordinary. He stopped shouting. He took a step away from the cage, as! though it contained a dangerous animal that might lash out at him at any moment, and looked at the floor. ‘I’m sorry,’ he I mumbled, ‘but this man…’
‘What man? Is that my lawyer? About bloody time! Now, listen, I want… Yaotl?’
Her eyes widened in shock as she took in my appearance. I grinned encouragingly at her through the bars. ‘Yes, that’s right. Yaotl the lawyer.’
‘ Yaotl the lawyer. Yaotl-the-lawyer.’ It was as if repeating the phrase would help her get used to the idea. Then she said: ‘Have you gone raving mad?’
‘No. Look, we’ve got a plan…’
‘Mouse!’
The guard jumped when she called his name.
‘I need this pot emptied.’
‘Um… I’ll go and fetch the slave,’ he said. ‘Stay there, won’t you?’ He shot me a nervous glance before hurrying away. I squatted in front of the cage.
‘Where does he think I’m likely to go?’ the woman muttered under her breath.
‘You’ve got him well trained,’ I observed.
She laughed. ‘He’s convinced himself I’m someone of consequence, a queen or a princess or at least a royal concubine. Besides, I think I remind him of his mother. His grandmother even!’ The laughter subsided as she looked at me seriously. I noticed that, for all her seeming ebullience, the lines around her mouth and across her forehead seemed deeper than they had just a day before.
‘How are you?’ I asked awkwardly.
‘Pretty good, considering I’ve got to spend the rest of my life in this cage, before they take me out and kill me. Yaotl, about Hare…’
‘Hare, yes,’ I said eagerly. ‘He’s what I wanted to talk about. We’ve got a plan…’
She interrupted me, bending her head towards the bars and hissing urgently: ‘Never mind that now! Did you find the ring?'
I stared at her. ‘What ring?’
She gave an exasperated sigh, as if I ought to have known what she was talking about. ‘The ring I was supposed to pay Hare with. A very special gold ring with a greenstone skull mounted on it. I hid it in Hare’s house.’
‘Oh, terrific!’ I said bitterly. ‘Maize Ear’s men will have been all over the place by now. They’ll have found it for sure.
