I scrambled to my feet and looked about me.
The Sun had set, and a grey twilight had descended over the mountains in the West, fading to a starry blackness in the East. A couple of torches lit up the litter and the men around it and glinted off the smooth surface of the well-made and clean-swept road we stood on. There were no other torches or signs of traffic on the road, which seemed to disprove my notion that we might be part of a convoy of prisoners.
Up ahead, vaguely discernible against the eastern sky, loomed a tall, conical shape, its outline like that of a pyramid, but a pyramid studded with rocks and trees and little flickering lights on its sides that might be torches, and here and there a pale spot that daylight might have revealed as a whitewashed wall.
I had never seen the place, but I had heard enough about it to know it for what it was: the hill of Tetzcotzinco, where the Kings of Tetzcoco had their retreat.
‘You’re to go up alone,’ the chief of our escort told me as he helped Lily to her feet. He walked with us to the foot of the hill, leaving his men standing around the litter, some of them no doubt anxiously wondering who would have to answer for the damage I had done to it. Two guards stepped forward at our approach, but when they recognized our escort by the light of his torch they instantly turned their backs. Somebody must have instructed them in advance to take no notice of us.
‘There are five hundred and twenty steps,’ the chief warned us. ‘Will the woman make it?’ Once again I noted this odd concern for our welfare.
‘Yes,’ I said. Whatever we were getting into, I wanted it over with. ‘I’ll help her. She’ll be all right.’
Without another word he turned and walked back towards his men.
I turned to Lily. ‘Come on. We can take it slowly. I think they’ll wait for us.’
‘They?’
I smiled, although it was probably too dark for her to see my expression. ‘That’s right. The King and… whoever else is up there.’ And who would that be, I wondered? Hungry Child and Mother of Light, or men with cudgels or ropes, ready to dispatch both of us the moment their ruler gave the word?
‘I think,’ I said cautiously, ‘that we may have some explaining to do.’
I heard her catch her breath. ‘I can’t lie any more, Yaotl. I haven’t the strength left for that.’
It was the first time since the trial that I had heard her use my name with any sense that she recognized it. On impulse, I stepped towards her and took her upper arm in my hand, keeping well away from her fingers. ‘Don’t worry,’ I assured her. ‘If any lies have to be told, leave them to me. I’m probably better at it than you are.’
As we began to climb I felt curiously light-headed. For all I knew our return down these smooth, broad steps might be like that of sacrificial victims down the stairway of a pyramid, our lifeless bodies rolling limply all the way to the bottom, but now it seemed not to matter. For most of my life I had ignored or defied my fate. To surrender to it now was a relief. And the place we were in was like something out of a beautiful dream.
The steps wound their way upwards among broad terraces. Out of the twilight on either side of us loomed the deeper shadows cast by groves of oak and cypress, with statues in some pale stone such as marble or porphyry lurking wanly in their midst. Past the trees we found ourselves walking through a shrubbery, with a little brook trickling softly among the roots. 1 wondered where the source of the water was, and found out when we had gone a litde further, because we found ourselves on the edge of a pond, a large, regular basin hewn out of the rock of the hillside. There was a statue in the middle of it, and a building — a large house, or a small palace — behind it.
‘It’s magnificent,’ I breathed. ‘Too bad we came up so late. What would it look like in daylight?’
The Moon was up, however, and I could see enough by its fight to get a sense of what lay around me. The little palace gleamed, I realized, as if its walls had been polished.
‘Is that the King?’ Lily asked nervously.
I looked at the statue in the middle of the pond more closely. ‘No. It looks like a jaguar, but with wings…’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that man on the other side of the water.’
I stepped back in surprise, to find one of my feet waving in mid-air as I missed the step I had been standing on. I began to topple backwards, but my cry of alarm was cut off by a gasp of astonishment as Lily hooked an arm around one of mine to stop me falling. We tottered together on the edge of the step until I managed to regain my footing.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘What man?’
She disengaged herself. ‘Look.’
A lone dark figure stood in front of the house. I had taken him for another statue, but then I saw that he must be an uncommonly realistic one, for the cotton of his long, elegant cloak billowed gracefully as no stone could, and the long, curling feathers of his tall headdress shone like real plumes and rustled gently in the fight breeze. And would a statue, I wondered, wear real jade in its lip and ears?
I swallowed. The stranger did indeed look like a king, but why would he meet us here, and where was his retinue? Where was my son?
I gulped. ‘My-my lord,’ I stammered. I dropped to my knees.
The stranger laughed, but there was no mockery in it. ‘Not here, Yaotl, not now. Once, yes.
