I smelled the next person before I saw him. He had the dark robes, black-daubed skin and tangled hair of a priest, and he had the unique stench of a man who has not washed in a long time and is still covered in scabs from offering his own blood to the gods. I stepped smartly aside for him and greeted him politely. He ignored me.
‘Idiot,’ I muttered, scowling after him. ‘You don’t fool me.
Too busy communing with the gods to notice mere mortals, my arse. Think you’re better than I am, do you? Why…’
‘You!’ a voice yelled. ‘Stay there!’
I jumped, whirled around to confront the speaker, and then nearly fainted from terror. A small party of warriors was advancing on me. They were carrying swords, not cudgels. Their glittering obsidian blades seemed to be winking at me.
‘Um… who, me?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘D-d-d-delivering a message,’ I said without thinking.
‘Who to?’
‘One of the, er, one of the King’s concubines…’ I fought to keep the tremor out of my voice. The men stood around me in a loose circle, eyeing me with distaste and glancing towards their leader for instructions. He was a tall man in a richly embroidered cotton cloak and matching breechcloth, with a labret and earrings of amber, leather sandals with long trailing straps and half his hair shaved off. I did not know what rank his appearance represented here in Tetzcoco, but anyone could have told that he was a senior, brave, ferocious and utterly pitiless warrior.
He looked me up and down and then rolled his eyes as if in despair. ‘So I’m interrupting an assignation,’ he growled. ‘Too bad. We’re looking for someone. A spy. Went missing around the middle of the morning.’
I said nothing.
‘Well?’ he snapped. His sword shook menacingly.
‘I haven’t seen anyone!’ I wailed.
'He’s a lawyer,’ one of his men informed me. ‘At least, he claims to be. Calls himself Yaotl. Last seen wearing a plain cloak and breechcloth, but he may have changed his disguise by now. Ugly character, apparently, weedy looking, no meat on him. Looks as if he could do with a good meal. A bit like you, I should think, but taller.’
I silently thanked my patron god for the fact that the dwarf had overestimated my height from having to look up at me all the time. ‘Haven’t seen anyone like that.’
The warriors’ leader sighed heavily. ‘Bugger. All right, you’d better get on.’
‘What do I do if I see him?’ I asked.
The man laughed. ‘Run away and scream for help! He may not look much, but by all accounts he’s extremely dangerous. He’ll be well trained, desperate, ruthless, and he’s armed…’
‘Armed?’
‘Threatened his escort with a concealed knife.’
As the warriors trotted away, I had to grin. Now I knew how the dwarf had explained away my disappearance. I could hardly blame him, although it did not make my position any easier.
Finally I found someone, a commoner, who had heard of Mother of Light and was able to tell me where to look for her. His suggestion surprised me.
‘We rarely see her nowadays. I think she must have her own j house, outside the palace, and she keeps herself to herself mostly, but somebody told me they’d seen her in one of the J courtyards around where the Council of Music meets.’
‘What would she be doing there?’
‘Listening to someone reciting poetry, I expect. Maybe reciting some herself.’ He frowned. ‘Why are you looking for her, anyway?’
‘I have a message to deliver.’
‘What sort of message?’
‘A private message,’ I said with careful emphasis.
‘Oh, well, please yourself. I suppose now you want me to tell you where to find the Council of Music. Well, I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to hurry. She’s never around for very long — a very elusive lady.’
I all but ran in the direction he indicated.
The Council of Music, when it was not trying suspected sorcerers, highway robbers or priests accused of fornication, oversaw teachers. In Mexico, anything more than rudimentary instruction in singing and other arts such as painting, writing and fine speech was a matter for the House of Tears, where priests were brought up and trained. In Tetzcoco, those who were good enough were trained in the palace itself, at least in principle under the eye of the King. Acolhuans prided themselves on speaking the finest and most polished Nahuatl to be heard anywhere in the valley, and their long-dead king. Hungry Coyote, in particular, had been renowned as a poet, as for that matter had his son. Hungry Child. Naturally both men had wanted to surround themselves with others like them, and they did everything they could to encourage them.
I had vaguely known all of this before I ever came to Tetzcoco and had long ago reached my own conclusion about why Hungry Coyote had gone to such lengths to foster his singers’ and his artists’ skills. No doubt he had loved these things for their own sake, but he had also known that his kingdom’s prestige would never be based on prowess in war, because his warriors would never be a match for the Aztecs. All he had done, I had thought, with all an Aztec’s contempt for a people we thought effete, weak and snobbish, was to make the most of the one thing they could do better than we.
None of what I had known about Tetzcoco, though, prepared me for what I found when I followed the directions I bad been given.
It turned out that I only needed an approximate idea of "'here the Council of Music was located in order to find the place, because once I got close I only had to follow my ears. The most extraordinary noise flowed through the corridors and open spaces around it: snatches of song, fragments of unidentifiable, rhythmic speech, presumably poetry, drums, flutes, and somebody crying — probably a child being pricked with thorns for singing out of tune, if my own experiences in a
