There was no sound except, after a while, my own teeth chattering. I tugged my cloak around me for warmth, but it made no difference.
What was happening to Kindly, I wondered? Had he got to the house, and what had he found there?
A violent shivering began to overcome me. I willed myself to stop, fearful that I was going to give my position away, but it did no good. I realized that if I did not get up and start moving soon, I might never be able to move at all. Already my hands and feet were getting numb.
I started to rise, and that was the exact moment when I first heard someone moving stealthily through the undergrowth.
Terrified, I pressed myself flat against the ground. I jammed a finger between my teeth to silence them and held my breath.
Nothing happened for so long that I began to wonder whether I had imagined the sound. I took my finger out of my mouth and was once more on the point of getting up when it came again, and this time it was unmistakable: a soft footfall accompanied by a crackle of crushed grass.
I froze, pressing my face into the dirt. I tried to think, to decide whether I ought to carry on trying to lie perfectly still or to leap up and run away, but my mind refused to work, and then it was too late anyway, as my pursuer was on top of me.
I had one hand splayed out in front of me. I felt a sudden I impulse to snatch it out of harm’s way just at the moment — when somebody stepped silently out of the darkness and trod on my fingers.
I winced and gritted my teeth. Luckily he was not wearing sandals and seemed not to weigh much, but as his heel rocked back and forth uncertainly, the pain made me dig holes in the palm of my other hand with my nails and brought tears to my eyes.
He seemed to stand where he was, wavering, for an age before finally lifting his foot and taking a step forward.
I could stand it no longer and let out a sob of relief.
The footsteps halted. I heard the foliage in front of me rustling as someone turned slowly around.
A voice whispered something urgently. But what it said was so unexpected that I heard myself gasping in reply: ‘What?’
‘I said, “Father? Is that you?”’
Now my tears were of relief, and they soon turned into paroxysms of sobbing that kept me on the ground even while my son was bending over me, trying to lift me up.
‘I can’t believe it’s you!’
‘You keep saying that,’ the young man said a little testily. ‘You’re not even supposed to be in the valley. You’re meant to be beyond the mountains — in Tarascan country.’
‘Why would I want to go over there? The Tarascans are a bunch of savages. Come on, you must be even colder than I am.’
Nimble and I crawled and stumbled uphill towards Hare’s house, feeling our way through the darkness, which for my frozen, nerveless fingers was no easy matter. I merely followed the young man blindly, assuming that if I climbed in his footsteps I would be all right. I was too bewildered and disorientated to take any decisions of my own. I could not get over my amazement at hearing my son’s voice, here in Tetzcoco of all places.
Nimble told me he had gathered some wood with a view to kindling a fire in the courtyard but had not dared to light it yet. ‘I couldn’t be sure the place wasn’t still being watched. I think they’ve gone now, though. No one tried to stop Kindly going in, anyway.’
As we scrambled over the broken wall into the corner of the courtyard, I heard an old man’s voice coming from somewhere within the tiny house. ‘Oh, it’s you at last. What did you do, fall asleep out there?’
I bristled at this dismissal of my night of acute discomfort, tension and terror. ‘I was trying to keep our tail off your back, you ungrateful old…’
‘And nearly led me into a trap in the process!’ I heard a faint sound as of liquid sloshing about in a gourd, and Kindly’s voice had a slight slur, which was unusual for him in spite of the amount he drank. Evidently he had had a stressful evening as well.
Slightly chastened, I said: ‘I wasn’t to know about that.’ What had happened, it seemed, was that Kindly’s and my follower, instead of shadowing either me or the old man, had somehow got ahead of us and gone direct to the house.
‘I don’t suppose Kindly was going very fast,’ Nimble pointed out. ‘As soon as he was sure he knew where you were going, your tail could have overtaken both of you easily enough, without you seeing him, just by slipping past you along side roads. That’s the best way to follow someone, you know — get in front of them. I bet you were looking over your shoulders all the way, weren’t you?’
I looked curiously at my son, wondering, not for the first time, just what he might have had to do as a boy to have learned such things. One day, I thought, I might ask him, provided I was sure I wanted to know the answer.
‘So the man who’d been following us went on ahead, to Hare’s house, and ran straight
