‘I’d have thought that was the least of your worries,’ growled the slave-dealer as he tied me up. ‘If you stand on tiptoe and they stoop, you’ll be all right. Comfy, everybody?’
What do you say to two strangers with whom you have nothing in common except that you have all been lashed to the same piece of wood and are likely to suffer the same unpleasant death? ‘My name’s Yaotl,’ I ventured.
The man on my left with the missing arm said: ‘So what?’ The man on my right said nothing. It must have been hard to get words past that shredded lip.
‘Where are you from?’ I tried again.
‘Where do you think, you piece of Aztec shit?’
I looked at both men again and understood. They were from Texcala. They wore their hair thickly braided in the style favoured by warriors from that benighted province. I sighed in resignation as I realized that I had been roped together with two of my people’s sworn enemies. Texcala was an impoverished place that the Aztecs had never bothered to subdue. Instead we made war on them continually, to provide the gods with sacrifices and our own warriors with much-needed practice.
Texcalans hated all Aztecs, naturally. These two were not going to make an exception for me just because we were all tied together.
‘So, er, what happened to you, then?’ I asked nervously.
‘Mind your own business!’
As if that were a signal, both Texcalans straightened up and suddenly I was hanging by my neck, with my mouth open like a hungry chick’s and my legs kicking desperately in midair.
A cane cracked across the Texcalan warrior’s back. ‘Behave yourselves!’ Dog shouted, and then my feet were back on the ground again and I was stumbling towards the doorway, much of the time, as I had been advised, on tiptoe.
I decided against trying to start any more conversations.
I emerged from the gloom of the slave-dealers’ warehouse into brilliant sunshine. The sky was clear of clouds and was the pure, bottomless blue that only people who, like the Aztecs, live high up in the mountains ever truly get to know.
After all the time I had spent in the dark, I found myself surrounded by so much light and colour that my eyes had to squint. I had forgotten how brightly the whitewashed walls of the buildings gleamed and how deep was the indigo of the canals. I watched a duck paddling idly by and wondered why it was going so fast. It was the first animal I had seen, besides the rats, since my capture.
A canoe took us to the marketplace, where we somehow stumbled through the early-morning crowds to Dog’s and Lizard’s pitch. Lurching uncertainly from side to side as we were, it was surprising that none of us bumped into anybody, but people got smartly out of our way. Either the sight or the smell of me must have been enough to ward them off.
Trading had begun by the time we arrived. We were shoved into a corner and told to squat and keep quiet. ‘We’ll sell these last,’ Dog told his partner. ‘In the meantime, I don’t want them putting customers off the rest of the stock!’
Lizard glanced sideways at the three of us. ‘I never understood what was up with that one in the middle. He was a bit scrawny when you got him, and he’d been roughed up a bit, but you might have made something of him. Didn’t I hear you say he could read and write?’
‘More trouble than he was worth, though, I gather. But old Black Feathers was pretty clear about what he wanted. Starvation rations and not to bat an eyelid if he got some funny visitors. Not to go on sale until he looks like something a dog’s sicked up.’ He seemed oblivious to the pun on his own name. ‘Who are we to question the Chief Minister? Anyway, he was practically giving him to us. We keep what we get for him, remember? In the meantime, like I said, just keep the three of them out of sight…’
As I looked around me, at my fellow slaves and at the cus- i tomers looking at them, feeling their muscles and peering into their mouths, sometimes haggling with the slave-dealers but more often walking away, I suddenly felt more despondent than I had in my cage. At least when the Otomies had mocked and abused me they had been treating me as an individual, albeit one they loathed and despised. For all Dog and Lizard and their customers cared, we might as well have been planks of wood or strips of cooked meat. ‘It’s not supposed to be like this,’ I muttered to myself.
‘What are you talking about?’ growled the one-armed Texcalan, to my surprise: for a moment I had forgotten we were still tied together.
‘The market. Being sold as a slave. It should be a formal affair. That’s what it was like for me the first time, anyway. When I sold myself to Lord Feathered in Black, I had four witnesses and the money counted out in front of me. Twenty large cloaks, enough to live on for a year. All very solemn.’
The Texcalan replied with a non-committal grunt. His companion spoke, or tried to. I could not understand the words his ruined mouth was struggling to form, but the one- armed man interpreted them for me. ‘He wants to know how you got to be a slave in the first place.’
‘To keep myself in drink.’
He laughed. It was an ugly, hollow sound.
‘No, you don’t understand,’ I protested, stung into justifying myself. ‘I used to be a priest, you see, and…’
‘You Aztecs must be a slacker lot than we thought, then. Since when did you let your priests drink sacred wine?’
‘We don’t. It’s a capital crime for a priest to be drunk unless there’s a good reason. But I’d already been thrown out of the priesthood, and the judges…’ I hesitated
