‘He won’t mind, will he? Look, the arrow sacrifice is pretty nasty. And think of the money! We could restock! We could clear out all this rubbish and start again!’
His colleague looked at their customer, who was waiting patiendy for them to finish their wrangling. I looked at him too. I was still wondering where I might have seen him before, and trying to guess what he could possibly be up to.
Would anyone really pay a hundred and five large cloaks just to have me and my companions perforated with arrows? Eventually Lizard said: ‘You’ve got the money?’
3
The cloaks must have come from another stall in the marketplace, because they arrived in no time. They were formally counted out into five lots of twenty and one of five, and then we were released into our new owner’s custody. The men who had brought the cloaks escorted us as we followed our mysterious buyer through the marketplace, with the crowds parting and swirling around us as we staggered forward. ‘Hurry up! We’ve no time to waste!’
I could barely keep up. Most of the time my legs were paddling uselessly in the air as the slave-collar, hoisted on the necks of my two huge companions, dragged me clear of the ground. I could not breathe except on the rare occasions when my feet hit the earth, and then I was too busy taking gulps of air to speak. Just once I managed to blurt out: ‘Where are we going?’
‘The canal,’ the man in front of us told me shortly. ‘There’s a canoe waiting.’ A broad waterway enabled merchants to bring their boats right into the marketplace.
‘A canoe?’ I echoed.
‘Just shut up and move, won’t you?’ he snapped. His head kept moving sharply from side to side, as if he were afraid someone would spring out from one of the market stalls as we passed and attack us. Nobody did, but the moment he looked straight ahead he gave a cry of alarm and froze in his tracks.There was no way I and my two fellow slaves, dragged forward under our own weight, could stop fast enough to avoid running him down. I hit him square in the back, and he sprawled in the dust, giving me a momentary glimpse of what had brought him up short before the wooden collar cracked into the nape of my neck and the three of us who were lashed to it tumbled on top of him.
While my head rang from the blow and I struggled to get up, what I had just seen hung in front of my eyes, as vivid as a feather mosaic suspended on a wall. It might as well have been a picture, I told myself, because it could not be real.
We were almost at one of the entrances to the marketplace, a wide gap in its long, colonnaded wall carefully guarded by the market police. Several of these men were engaged in what looked like a heated argument with a group of warriors, and one of the warriors was the man whose bid had just failed to secure me and my companions. But it was the man at the centre of the group who had attracted my attention: the man wearing a distinctive long yellow cloak with a red border, with his hair bound with white cotton ribbons, his face stained black like a priests and fine leather sandals on his feet.
‘It can’t be,’ I muttered thickly as I forced myself up on to my elbows and once again took the weight of the slave-collar on my neck. ‘Mamiztli?’ Aloud I swore at the two men who had been threatening to hang me by the neck before and whose weight was now holding me down. ‘Come on, get up! What’s the matter with you?’
‘Can’t,’ growled the one on my left. ‘Only got one arm, remember? Why should I, anyway? Might as well die here. You filthy Aztec…’
‘Oh, shut up.’
Just then the man in the yellow cloak caught sight of me.
His jaw dropped, and then he was moving, shoving aside two policemen as he strode through the gateway towards me.
‘Yaotl! It is you! Look, I’m sorry. I told that idiot Ollin I’d pay a hundred large cloaks to get you out of this and the fool thought that meant he wasn’t allowed to go any higher. I’m really sorry. There’s nothing I can do…’
For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken. The man standing over me, babbling almost incoherently about how sorry he was, looked exactly like my elder brother: Mamiztli, the Mountain Lion, the fearless warrior, the man who had fought his way up from nothing, whose prowess had been rewarded with one of the highest ranks a commoner could aspire to: Atenpanecatl, Guardian of the Waterfront. He even had the harsh, barking voice, so suitable for shouting orders. However, he did not talk like him. I had never known Lion apologize to anybody, least of all his younger brother, whom he normally belittled every chance he got.
That explained why the warrior who had been bidding for me had looked familiar. He was one of my brother’s bodyguards.
‘I wish I could help…’
‘You can,’ I said.
‘How?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Get your men to lift this pole up that we’re all tied to before it breaks my neck!’
Two warriors rushed to our aid, brushing aside the feeble protests of the policemen, much as my brother had. It occurred to me that Lion was going to have to get this resolved quickly: neither he nor any other official from Tenochtitlan had any jurisdiction in the marketplace, which was controlled by merchants and had its own police force and its own courts. If anybody suspected him of trying to steal anyone else’s property here — even if the property was his own brother — the consequences would be severe.
As I stood up before him, he took a step backwards, as if I had threatened to hit him.
‘What have they been doing with
