‘We’ll have to try to hide you at the back of the house somewhere. It’s overgrown enough.’
‘What about you two?’ I asked, looking at Kindly and Little Hen.
‘I’ll come with you,’ the old man said. ‘The girl can stay here. I think she’s used to being left on her own.’
I stared at him sceptically. ‘You want to come?’ I had assumed he would be quite happy to be left behind, babysitting the girl. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
You said yourself — Lily’s my only daughter. I can’t help her by running all over the city, as you put it, but if there’s anything I can do, I’ll be there.’
13
Nimble did his best to convey to Little Hen where we were going and what we wanted her to do, using hand signals. I could only hope she understood that she was to stay put until one of us returned, but when she looked at him her expression was as inscrutable as ever.
We dropped Kindly off at the bottom of the slope at the back of the house, just around a bend in the stream so that he would not be visible from the courtyard. ‘I think this is as close as you dare to get,’ I told him. ‘Try to stay out of sight, and don’t make any noise!’
He grinned at me. ‘You forget that I used to do things like this all the time when I was younger! Did I ever tell you about that time in Xoconochco…?’
‘Not now,’ I said firmly.
‘Oh, all right. But I promise you, you won’t even hear my teeth chattering. Not that I have that many left!’
I looked at the old man curiously. ‘You seem in good spirits all of a sudden.’
‘Oh, there’s nothing like exercise and night air to get the blood flowing through your veins again! And I’ve got this for company.’ He lifted his gourd and shook it so that I could hear the liquid inside. Then he added, in a sober voice: ‘It’s doing something that matters, do you understand? Risking everything and having everything to gain. Not something I’ve done much of these past few years.’
‘Don’t get carried away,’ I warned him as I turned to follow Nimble up to the house.
‘Good luck!’ he hissed back.
My own hiding place was to be a shallow depression right at the back of the house, with the courtyard wall a few hand’s breadths away. We found it after scrambling up the bank, keeping our heads down in case anyone should be glancing in our direction. I had been hoping that the Sun, poised just above the mountains beyond the lake, would blind anyone looking westwards, but in the event the house appeared deserted.
Nimble helped me to make my hollow a little deeper, scraping at the soil with his fingers and then with the blade of the Tarascan bronze knife he always carried, his most precious possession. ‘When you’re in there I’ll chuck some weeds and stuff over you. Once it gets a bit darker you’ll be invisible.’
I looked up from where I kneeled, scrabbling in the dirt alongside my son. ‘Funny there’s no one about. I know we set the meeting for sunset, but you saw the Otomies earlier, and I’d have thought they’d be keeping an eye on the place. And where are Rattlesnake and his men?’
‘I saw the Otomies outside the front. Maybe they were just making sure they had the right house. Why should they bother hanging around any longer than they have to? If you or Lily came here at all, it would be to talk to them. They don’t need to do anything except turn up. And Rattlesnake will probably Wait for them to arrive so that he can grab all of you.’
‘I suppose so.’ I looked past Nimble at the courtyard wall. ‘Is h me, or is that a bit more broken down than it was?’
He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Could be. What of it? It was badly battered in that corner before. Are you going to get in this hole now? I don’t think we can dig it any deeper.’
I lay down reluctantly. ‘I just wish I could get rid of the feeling that I was being followed all the time.’
‘That’s just what being in this city for a few days does to you.’
Within a few moments after Nimble had thrown the last of the foliage on top of me, I had had enough.
I had seldom been so uncomfortable. Even the cage the slave-dealers had kept me in, I reflected miserably, might have been better than where I was now. At least there I had had room to squat. It did not help that the ends of my fingers were raw and bloody, the nails torn from scrabbling in the loose soil.
I was cramped, terrified and in need of a piss. As the Sun began to drop out of sight, I realized that I was going to be bitterly cold as well.
I strained to catch some sound from the house, at the same time trying to picture what might be happening in there. I wondered whether my son and the Otomies had found each other, and, if they had, what might follow. Would the evening end in a straightforward business transaction, with the captain and his men congratulating themselves on the price they had got for their stolen goods and Nimble left with the thing we had been seeking for days, or in a scene of shrieking carnage as the Otomies worked out their rage on my son and then on me, as I rushed vainly to his aid?
I could hear nothing.
I wondered, too, where Rattlesnake, Hunter and the rest of Maize Ear’s men were. Nimble’s suggestion that they might wait for the Otomies to arrive before putting in an appearance made sense, but I found it odd that we had seen no evidence of them watching the house. Or were they hiding nearby? I had found it easy enough to find a
