‘What?’
‘There’s someone coming. Surely it can’t be time already?’
The torch heralded not one person but several. The little group moved silently towards our cage. Watching the flickering light reflected off their hair, I could see that the men approaching Were a mixture. Some were seasoned warriors, but others, who looked more humble, might have been labourers or even slaves.
Leading them all was the official who had reluctantly received us after the trial. Mouse held the torch.
I looked fearfully up at the roof of the cage and listened to the scraping sound of the stone weights being removed.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘You’re to see the King,’ the official replied. He directed Mouse and one of the newcomers to lift the top off the cage. ‘Both of you, straight away. Out you come.’
Two arms reached inside the cage, seeking for Lily. She gave a sharp cry of pain, pressing against me as she shrank from the warrior’s touch.
I cringed when I heard it, but started at the response from outside the cage.
‘Be careful, you clumsy oaf!’ the official barked. ‘You’ll hurt her! Mind her hands.’
The warrior mumbled something apologetic as he and a colleague gently eased Lily away from me and out of the cage. Baffled, I clambered out unaided to stand facing our visitors, wondering how to frame the question I wanted to ask: what had been in the King’s summons to make these men care whether they hurt us or not?
‘Can you walk? We’ve got a litter waiting for you outside. We can bring it in here if we need to.’
‘A litter?’ I repeated incredulously.
‘You’ve got a long way to go, and the King wants to see you now.’
I looked at Mouse. ‘Where are we going? The King’s here, in the palace, isn’t he?’
‘No, he’s still in Tetzcotzinco. He doesn’t get here until tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow? But surely he has to be here today, to judge the last cases and see to the punishments. Tomorrow’s the first of the Useless Days, isn’t it?’
Mouse laughed, a strange, high-pitched sound to come from a large man. ‘No, that’s the day after! What, did you think it was morning?’
‘I thought it must be.’
‘The Sun hasn’t set yet. He soon will, though, so you’d better hurry.’
Lily spoke up for the first time. Looking at the guards surrounding us, she said quietly: ‘I can walk.’
We were escorted to a rear gateway, away from the crowds that presumably still thronged the front of the palace. Here, in a narrow lane largely hidden from casual sight by the high walls of two of the houses that abutted the King’s residence, we found a fitter waiting for us. It was a comparatively plain affair, its canopy fringed with black grackle feathers and its two seats covered with deer hide rather than jaguar skin, but I was not about to complain. I had never travelled in a fitter before, and this was not merely because canoes were more useful in Tenochtitlan. Litters represented the kind of luxury that was reserved for lords.
Mouse accompanied us as far as the fitter and fussed over Lily as she got into it. ‘I knew it!’ he was saying. ‘I kept telling them they’d better treat you properly. You were obviously more important than you seemed. You won’t forget I said that, will you?’
The canopy supported cotton drapes that were unfastened and let fall as soon as Lily and I were seated. Abruptly we were plunged into gloom. I wondered whether this was to prevent us from seeing out or to ensure that no curious passer-by saw who was in the litter. I was still wondering this when I felt the ground lurch away from under me and we were moving.
Lily started. ‘Why are they taking us to Tetzcotzinco?’ she asked, as if she had only just realized where we were going.
‘I don’t know.’ I fought to suppress a surge of panic. We seemed to be swaying helplessly through the air. My stomach felt as if I had eaten a plateful of bad snails. I decided that I preferred canoes. The open lake could be dangerous, I thought, but at least if you were tossed out of a boat you would have a soft landing.
I wanted to take my mind off the desire to poke my head out between the drapes and be violently sick. Also, there was something encouraging about Lily’s innocent question, a sign that she was aware of what was happening around her and beginning to take an interest in it. So I began to explain what little I knew, and ended up relating most of what had befallen me, her father and my son while she had been shut in the prison.
She did not speak until I had finished, and for a while afterwards I wondered whether she had heard me. Then she said, as softly as if to herself: ‘So my father had the ring all along . .. But you found the girl, and Mother of Light and the King, Hungry Child?’
‘We did, but it doesn’t seem to have helped you at all. I’m so sorry, Lily. I thought if we could find the message and make sense of it, we could prove that you weren’t any danger to Maize Ear at all, but we couldn’t work out what that little girl was on about. Of course, Hungry Child may have got more out of her by now, but I doubt it. I think those gestures she was making must have been some kind of Mayan magic, or something equally incomprehensible.’ I recalled the gestures, the stretching of her eyelids, the pulling on her chin, the scrubbing of her face, the handfuls of hair lifted up over the top of her head. It had all had the look of ritual, I told myself. ‘Of course, what it certainly wasn’t was anything to do with
