‘Ix Men! Ix Men!’
‘Nimble! What happened?’ I cried, breaking into a shambling run.
‘She’s gone!’
‘Well, we can see that,’ said Kindly from behind me. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I only looked away for a moment. She was sitting down just over there, in that little hollow, not doing anything.’ He indicated a small depression in the earth, about twenty paces from where we stood by the palace wall. I could see why the girl might have chosen to rest there: although it was surrounded by tall weeds and unkempt bushes, the place itself was as smooth and bare as if it had been swept.
‘“A moment”?’ Kindly repeated sceptically.
‘It was just a glance! I’d just asked her — well, talking to myself, really — which corner of the building you’d be coming around, and when I looked back she’d gone!’
‘Did you hear anything?’ I asked.
‘No.’
I walked over towards the spot he had shown us. I was not worried and only mildly annoyed. I presumed the girl had merely got bored and decided to play tricks on us; there was enough undergrowth around to tempt a bored child into a game of hide-and-seek. After all, I asked myself, what reason could the girl have for running away now? If she had wanted to be free of us, she could simply have wandered off while Nimble, Kindly and I were at Hare’s house. It made no sense.
I balanced on the edge of the little depression, calling Little Hen’s name softly.
A giggle came back in answer. The voice was high-pitched like a girl’s, but it sounded hollow, as though she were in a narrow space.
Nimble and Kindly came up behind me. They were arguing.
‘You can’t just have looked away. What did she do, turn herself into an ant?’
‘I’m telling you I did! She had the time it took to turn my head, no more!’
‘Come on, admit it. You went off into those trees to take a leak.’
‘I did not!’
‘Will you two shut up?’ I snapped. ‘I’m trying to listen! Oh, it’s gone now — I thought I heard her.’
‘Where?’ Nimble demanded eagerly.
‘Try looking down,’ Kindly suggested.
I stared at him, and then did as he told me. I saw it immediately: among the bushes, just on the far side of the clear area at my feet, there was a small hole, looking scarcely bigger than what a rabbit might have made.
A little, grinning face stared back at me.
‘Little Hen!’ I cried joyously. ‘How did you get down there?’
‘She must have fallen,’ my son said, relief plain in his voice. He extended a hand to the girl and she clambered out, shedding earth and weeds on the ground around her.
‘But into what?’ I got on my hands and knees and inspected the hole. It was a little bigger than it had looked because it was overhung with foliage and a lip of earth, but nobody much larger than Little Hen could have got into it. ‘This can’t be what we’re looking for, can it? It’s too small.’
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ my son agreed sadly. He got down on his knees beside me and began poking around in the tangled growth around the edges of the hole. ‘Though this is odd — look. Some of these weeds look as if they’ve been trampled — no, pulled up, rather — they aren’t rooted to anything.’ He pulled aside a ragged mat of greenery to reveal what looked like a large square of bare earth, but was not.
‘This is wood!’
‘So are those trees,’ Kindly muttered caustically.
‘This is more like a plank.’
I hooked my fingers around an edge of the hole and began to pull gently. I felt the ground move under me.
‘I think we’re kneeling on a trapdoor,’ I whispered.
A stranger answered me. A clear, deep male voice, with a touch of asperity in its tone.
‘You are. And if you don’t get off, it’s likely to collapse under your weight!’
I leaped up and twisted to face the newcomer. I knew who he was, though, even before I took in his appearance, despite the fact that I had never heard his voice.
He looked a little different from when I had seen him before, in his guise as Mother of Light’s father. He was still an old man, seemingly, his hair as white and his face as deeply etched as before, but he no longer stooped. Standing upright as he surveyed the four of us with bright and baleful eyes, he was a head taller than I, and the steady hands that now held his staff up in front of him like a weapon were firm, their strength evident from their bulging tendons.
‘Who are you, then?’ Kindly asked coolly.
The tall man did not answer him. Instead he looked at me. ‘You must be Yaotl the slave.’
I met his gaze for a moment, but it was too much. His eyes threatened to sap my will. It was partly their steady, unblinking stare, which gave them superficially an air of authority, but it was more than that. There was something compelling in their rich, impenetrable darkness, something redolent of great pain or grief somehow mastered but never forgotten.
On an impulse I fell to my knees, and then on to my face. ‘Oh, lord! My lord! Oh, Great Lord!’
My son and Lily’s father stood by, baffled, and Little Hen laughed, but how else was I to greet the last great King of Tetzcoco, Hungry Child himself, Lord Nezahualpilli?
15
Hungry Child oversaw the replacement of the foliage that had helped to camouflage his trapdoor. Then he himself opened the contraption.
‘It’s always been enough to deceive the casual eye,’ he remarked ruefully, ‘but not to fool a small child, it seems! Unfortunately, we had to leave a hole just big enough to see out of so that we could check there was no one about before we came up. Now, all of you, in you
