Again there was no answer. I thought the moaning I had heard had been coming from a place just beyond the body I was inspecting. I picked my way towards it, dropping to my knees when I found another dark form lying on the ground.
This one was breathing, although weakly and irregularly. When I touched him, his body jerked once. The moans resumed, but as I listened they began to die away into a feeble wheezing. Then they ended altogether with a faint, throaty rattle.
I heard a soft padding of bare feet from behind me. ‘Father?’ Nimble whispered.
‘Keep yourself hidden!’ I hissed. ‘And I thought I told you to stay behind?’
‘Are you going to argue about that now?’ he whispered.
I opened my mouth to respond and then shut it again. He had a point. ‘All right,’ I muttered grudgingly. Aloud, I called out once more: ‘Hunter! Where are you?’
‘What’s…’ my son began, but then, at last, the warrior answered me, calling out of the darkness up ahead.
‘Is that you, Yaotl?’
‘Where are you?’ I cried again.
The reply was a bark of sardonic laughter. ‘Oh, wouldn’t you like to know!’
I stared blindly ahead of me, momentarily baffled.
‘Nice little ambush you set up here!’ the warrior shouted. ‘I’ve got to admire you. Don’t know how you managed it, with me watching you all the time!’
‘What are you talking about?’ I stood up. ‘What ambush? Who are these men?’
‘I think you can tell me that! Friends of yours, weren’t they? Spying for Black Flower?’
‘No!’ I took a step forward, slipped on the blood and stumbled, almost falling over. I kept my eyes fixed on some imaginary point in the gloom ahead of me, from where I thought the warrior’s voice was coming. ‘I’ve no idea who they were! They must have followed us.’
‘How many more of you are there? Two, three, a whole squad lying in wait for me?’
‘Hunter, listen to me!’ I cried in desperation. ‘I swear I don’t know any more about this than you do! I will eat earth!’ Automatically I bent down to touch the ground with my fingertips, before putting them to my lips in the customary gesture of truthfulness.
So what?’ the disembodied voice sneered. ‘You think I trust you? I’m not standing here listening to any more of this. I’ll be back, and this time I won’t be alone. And just remember we’ve got one of you squatting in a cage! She’s going to pay for this piece of work, believe me!’
‘No, Hunter! Wait!’ I ran forward, and then stopped, staring about me irresolutely. I heard what might have been footsteps receding quickly into the night before silence fell again.
Nimble ran to my side. ‘What’s he talking about?’ he whispered urgently.
‘Lily,’ I gasped. ‘If Maize Ear’s men think I set this up deliberately…’
Nimble grasped my meaning immediately. ‘We’ve got to get after him! If he makes it back to the palace, they’ll kill her!’
‘Or worse,’ I confirmed. ‘Come on!’
We ran, blundering through the night, staggering when we caught our feet on broken ground or had our faces whipped by low branches hanging over the road. We moved in grim silence, save for the hoarse, ragged sounds of our breathing, with our arms stretched in front of us to ward off obstacles. We had no hope at all, except that Hunter might be lying in wait for us, and the two of us together might be able to overpower him before he had time to kill us both.
We were almost back in Tetzcoco, with our way dimly lit now by the flames of temple fires and the occasional torch left crackling against the wall of a house to light its owner’s way home, when I finally sank to the ground, exhausted and utterly dispirited.
Nimble collapsed next to me, his breath coming in great whooping sobs.
‘I’m sorry, son,’ I gasped. ‘We weren’t quick enough.’
‘Never stood a chance, anyway,’ he wheezed back. ‘He’d have killed us if we had managed to catch him. What happened back there, anyway?’
‘Those two obviously followed us all the way from Tetzcoco. Hunter was probably right — they must have been spying for Black Flower. Not soldiers. Once he found them the poor buggers wouldn’t have stood a chance.’
‘What do we do now?’
A sudden, immense weariness came over me, and I shut my eyes, as if I could have fallen asleep where I lay, in the middle of the street. It seemed to have been an age since I had lain down. Then I forced my eyes open again and began hauling myself to my feet as slowly and awkwardly as an old man. ‘Come on,’ I muttered. I looked towards the tallest of the pyramids I could see, a great angular shadow looming overhead with a tiny spark of flame at its peak: the old King Hungry Coyote’s mighty monument to Tezcatlipoca, his Lord of the Near and the Nigh. ‘Only the gods can help Lily now. We can’t.’ I looked back along the road to Huexotla and Hare’s house. It seemed a long way to walk, but I could not see that we had any choice. ‘We’d better head back. Tell Kindly what’s happened. Get ready to meet the Otomies. And pray.’ I looked curiously at my son. “What were you and Kindly doing at Hare’s house?”
“It was the only place I could think of looking for you. I tried your lodgings but they said you’d left and they didn’t know where you’d gone. Luckily Kindly had the same idea as I did.”
“Good for him.” It had not occurred to me that my son Would have trouble finding us after we had been forced to move.
Nimble scrambled to his feet. ‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have a chance to tell you, but we found the girl.’
12
We picked Kindly up outside Hare’s house. He still had the girl with him: a small figure, almost entirely hidden by the blanket he and Nimble had wrapped her in. She was fast asleep
