Shouting obscenities, the warrior stood over him with his sword held high in both hands, ready for a last, mortal, chopping blow.
Time seemed to stop. The sword seemed to hang in the air, poised there for an age. There was nothing I could do; even as I was urging my legs to throw me between my son and the blades, I knew I could never get there in time.
The captain drew breath, and a terrible silence fell over the hillside.
It was broken by a voice from out of the night: a voice from every Aztec’s nightmares.
‘Oh, my sons!’ It sounded like an old woman speaking: high-pitched, reedy and tremulous, with a husky quality as if the speaker’s throat were constricted. ‘Oh, my sons! What is to become of you?’ It was coming from down the slope, in the direction of the stream.
The effect on the captain was extraordinary. He turned, the sword wavering uncertainly.
‘Who’s there?’ he called. ‘Who are you?’
Something was moving below us, near the stream. Whatever it was, it seemed to be picking its way haltingly up the slope towards us, and it was speaking.
‘Oh, my children! Oh, the poor warriors, the Eagle Warriors, the Jaguar Warriors! The Otomies — first of all, the Otomies!’
The captain stepped backwards. The sword dangled now at the height of his waist, not threatening anybody. ‘I… I asked you who you were.’
This man would not quail before any human enemy. He would accept death if it came for him — would welcome it, even, if it was a flowery death on the battlefield or beneath a sacrificial knife. But as with most warriors, the things that haunted the night terrified him beyond reason, and I knew he would have recognized this apparition as the most dreadful of all.
I watched and listened with a curious feeling of detachment. As a priest, I had been trained to confront such terrors and to tell true portents from false ones.
You know who I am, Captain,’ piped the eerie, high-pitched voice.
‘Cihuacoatl?’ The Otomi whispered the name. Cihuacoad the Snake Woman: the most feared of our goddesses, a being so ravenous for human hearts and blood that she was depicted always with gore dripping from her mouth.
‘Your captives have nourished me many times. Now it is your turn!’
The sword fell to the ground with a thump. The brave warrior screamed and turned to flee, stumbling blindly up the hill, falling and picking himself up and gibbering helplessly until he was out of earshot.
I felt dizzy. The night sky whirled around me and I fell to my knees.
14
The fire the Otomies had built in Hare’s house had all but gone out. I brought it back to life again, feeding it with pieces of the wicker chest for want of any other fuel. I hoped I would not have to burn the whole thing. I had no wish to uncover the merchant’s grave again.
Once I had a healthy blaze going, its light revealed the other occupants of the room: Kindly, Nimble and Little Hen. We had dragged the lifeless body of the Otomi into the courtyard to join the dead Texcalan.
Nimble sat close to the fire, silent and trembling, with one leg stretched out before him. Kindly was examining it with the practised eye of a merchant who had seen and treated many wounds in the course of his travels.
‘Could be a lot worse. That’s a nasty deep cut on your thigh, but it looks clean enough.’
‘Good thing you held on to the captain as tightly as you did,’ I said. ‘It must have been hard for him to get any leverage, hacking away at someone on his back.’
My son grimaced. ‘It still hurts!’
‘I’ll need to wash it and bind it up with something to slow the bleeding,’ Kindly said. Standing over my son, he began untying his breechcloth.
Nimble stared at him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I told you — I need to wash the wound. Sit still.’ The old man aimed a jet of urine over my son’s injured leg.
Little Hen giggled.
Nimble said reproachfully: ‘There’s a stream at the bottom of the hill!’
‘Sure,’ the old man retorted. ‘And it’s full of shit and turkey heads. Take it from me, if you want clean water, the best place to get it from is your own bladder. You’re lucky I drink so much!’ He began readjusting his clothes. ‘Now, what we really need is some honey to stop the wound going bad, but unfortunately we haven’t got any. It should be all right, though, if I can find some clean cloth to dress it with.’
‘Our clothes are all filthy,’ I said. ‘Try tearing a strip off one of the warriors’ cloaks outside.’
While Kindly was attending to this, I looked at my son and the girl. He looked ill, weak from shock and loss of blood, but I knew he was young and strong and would recover quickly if he were given a chance. The girl’s expression was as impassive as ever, although she kept turning her head towards the remains of the wicker chest, no doubt thinking about what was hidden underneath it. I wondered what thoughts and memories that, in turn, led to. What had Hare done to her, and why had he kept her in that dark, cramped prison?
‘Little Hen,’ I sighed. Perhaps, I thought, it was just as well she could not speak to us. What horrors would she have to relive as she revealed them? Yet at that moment I simply wanted to tell her that I knew something of how it felt to be shut into a tiny space, without hope, experiencing nothing but cruelty from the people around me.
Kindly came back with a long strip of cloth. ‘Only maguey fibre,’ he said, ‘but it’s reasonable quality and it looks clear enough.
