I worried about the ring. Lily had clearly felt it was almost more important than her trial, and that it would be a disaster if it fell into the wrong hands, but I could not understand why. Perhaps Mother of Light had stolen it, but that was hard to believe. I assumed that, as a Kings concubine, she would have had more than enough jewels to her name without needing to help herself to anyone else’s. And what was so special about this ring that the merchant wanted it for his pay?
Then there was the separate matter of how two men had met their deaths in this house. I looked uneasily across at the body in the courtyard, having the uncomfortable feeling that, with Kindly and Nimble asleep, he was my only companion. ‘Are you Hare?’ I whispered. ‘I suppose you ought to be. This is your house, after all. But what was that Texcalan doing here?’ I sighed. ‘And who killed whom?’ I looked into the fire again. Hare, assuming it was he, had been stabbed with a wooden peg. The Texcalan had been killed with a knife, or at any rate something with a blade. Had they fought each other? Reluctantly I got up and looked at that hideous wound again. I realized that it had not been a straight fight: the wound was in the man’s back, and the other, I recalled, had had his throat cut. From my limited knowledge of combat, that was unlikely to have happened during a tussle with the adversaries facing each other.
When the solution came to me, it was so obvious I had to groan at my own stupidity. Then, snatching one of the last pieces of wood from Nimble’s pile, I fit one more torch and headed back indoors.
The clothes were still where I had left them after throwing them out of the hole, scattered over the floor. I picked them up and laid them out, the mantle at the bottom and the blouse and skirt on top of it, as if waiting for their owner to slip into them and wrap the mantle around her.
When I picked the mantle up, something that had been caught in its folds clattered to the floor. It was a small wooden object, which I glanced at through the corner of my eye before looking again at the clothes for some clue about their owner.
I saw at once that whoever had been hidden under the chest had been even smaller than I had thought: a child. If these clothes had been made or bought to fit her, I would put her age at maybe eleven or twelve: not quite old enough to go to school at a House of Youth.
Frowning, I bent down to pick up the wooden object.
Something sharp stabbed my finger when I touched it, making me yelp. I glared helplessly at the offending article, but felt my expression soften as I realized what it was.
In my hand lay a child’s doll: a crudely carved toy, with its features daubed on so roughly the paint might have been applied with somebody’s fingertip. Still, they were clear enough for me to see, even in torchlight, that there were some odd things about the little figure’s face. Its eyes were distinctly crossed, as though it were trying to look at its own nose all the time, and the high forehead was flat and sloped sharply backwards.
The doll had only one leg. That was why I had got a splinter, I could see, because the missing limb had been snapped off roughly. When I examined its surviving counterpart, all my suspicions about what had happened in the house appeared to be confirmed. It was about the same length as the piece of wood Lily had picked up the day before.
8
I shook the other two awake just as the first conch-shell trumpet began announcing the approach of dawn from the top of a temple. Once the yawning, scratching and grumbling had subsided, we stood around the body, trying to decide what to do with it.
It looked no prettier in the pre-dawn twilight than it had in the middle of the night, and it was not much easier to make out any distinguishing features.
‘Needs a good wash,’ Kindly said.
‘How do you suggest we do that?’ I demanded. ‘Are we supposed to carry it all the way down to the stream?’
‘It was only a suggestion. What else can we do with it?’
‘Put it back where we found it,’ Nimble answered.
‘What for?’ Kindly wanted to know. ‘I should think whoever picked up our shadow yesterday will be on their way back here as soon as it’s light enough to set out. We ought to just beat it.’
I thought this over. ‘No, I think Nimble’s right. I don’t think Hunter and Rattlesnake know about this body. That’s strange, I admit…’
‘They probably thought they’d got what they came for when they grabbed my daughter,’ the old man suggested.
‘I expect so. And only another merchant would have had your suspicions about what might be under that box. But as I was saying, I don’t think they came across the body, because I can’t see why they’d have gone to so much trouble to hide it again if they had. And if they don’t know it already, I don’t think I want them finding it now. It would only give them something else to accuse Lily of.’ Besides, I was uneasy about leaving the dead man in the open. If we could not decently cremate him, to put him back where we found him seemed the least we could do.
Nimble and I wrapped the corpse as best we could and put it back into the pit, along with the girl’s clothes that had covered it.
As we pushed the chest back over the hole, Kindly observed: ‘It’s a bit like a funeral, isn’t it?
