I opened my mouth to speak, but no words would come out. I was ready with the lie: ready to tell the King how Hare had found a Texcalan warrior in his house, how they had fought, how Little Hen had come to Hare’s aid and then slain him as he finished the warrior off. Then I looked at Little Hen, quite oblivious to everything going on around her, and finally I looked at Lily, and saw that the appeal in her eyes was not for another of my lies but for the truth, whatever it cost.
‘Yaotl… Lily said.
I interrupted her. ‘It’s all right. The truth won’t hurt anybody now.’ I wanted to believe it. ‘You’ll have to help me, but you won’t need to tell any lies.’
The King concurred softly. ‘It would be good to have the truth. It has been in short supply in Tetzcoco lately.’
‘My lord,’ I responded, ‘a lot of men have died in or near the house Hare rented in your domain. There’s no mystery about most of them, though.’ I gave a brief account of the fight of the previous night, when the King’s own agents had surprised the Otomies and been massacred by them. His concerned frown deepened to one of consternation when I told him who the captain’s men were and where they had come from, but he said nothing.
‘But there were two that remained a mystery. You know that when Lily and I went there the first time, we found a dead warrior. And Hare himself had been killed and hidden underneath the house.’
‘I have the report of your mistress’s trial,’ he confirmed.
Suddenly Kindly interrupted. He had never been any respecter of persons. ‘I thought we’d worked out that Little Hen and Hare killed the Texcalan and then she killed Hare,’ he said, ‘or something of the sort, at least. Are you saying that isn’t right?’
A look of irritation crossed the King’s face, but he did not speak. He looked to me to provide an answer.
‘Yes, I am,’ I said. ‘At the time it seemed the only explanation, because it fitted what we knew, or what we thought we knew. Hare had been wounded by a wooden spike, which we were pretty sure Little Hen had made out of one of her doll’s legs. We thought she must have heard Hare and the Texcalan warrior fighting and popped up out of her hole to surprise the Texcalan. Then Hare finished him off with a blade, but Little Hen took the chance to rid herself of the merchant. That’s what we thought, and, of course, we put on that little act for Little Hen to see if we were right.’
Nimble looked up from where he had been squatting by the young girl. ‘There was something about it Little Hen didn’t like,’ he reminded me. ‘Remember how she kept pulling her hair and shouting at us, and how she pressed that doll into your hands?’
I glanced anxiously at the King to see whether this interruption had annoyed him as much as the previous one, but he was looking at me intently, as if he was content to treat Nimble and Kindly as part of a spectacle being performed before him and was eagerly awaiting my response.
‘My son’s right,’ I said. ‘She seemed happy enough with our attempt to reconstruct what had happened, but there was obviously some detail that wasn’t quite right, something to do with Hare finding the Texcalan and fighting him, and with how that spike ended up in Hare’s back. She kept making this gesture, pulling her hair, and we couldn’t understand what she was going on about, although I saw her make the same gesture when she was talking to Lord Hungry Child.’
The former King said: ‘This was when she was babbling about what happened to her after she came to Tetzcoco. All I could get then was that it had something to do with a woman, but I couldn’t really follow it.’
I heard a sharply indrawn breath from Lily. I turned to her and smiled reassuringly. Then I went on: ‘Yes, it had something to do with a woman. A woman with her hair bound up with the ends standing over her forehead, like horns. Which, of course, is just what the girl was trying to show us.’
It was a style worn by most conventional, respectable Aztec women, the style Lily usually favoured, although at the moment her hair hung untidily over her shoulders.
I hesitated before continuing, speaking to Lily herself in a gentler tone: ‘I didn’t think of it before your trial. After all, I thought you’d never been to Hare’s house before, and it was true what I said to Snake Heart — you didn’t have the opportunity to go there after we’d got to Tetzcoco, while I was laid up in that guesthouse. But then Snake Heart asked me if 1 could prove you hadn’t been to the house before we came here. Of course, I couldn’t — because you had been there! That was what Little Hen was trying to tell us. And no wonder — why should she have gone to Hare’s aid when he’d been keeping her in that hole for who knows how long? You, though, were another matter.’
Lily looked down and said nothing.
‘Wait a moment!’ cried her father. ‘You’re seriously trying to tell us my daughter took on that Texcalan warrior by herself?’ It was hard to say whether he was outraged at my accusation or impressed by Lily’s courage. ‘It’s ridiculous!’
Lily cried: ‘No, that isn’t true! I didn’t know the Texcalan had even been at Hare’s house before Yaotl and I went there and found him dead!’
Maize Ear frowned at me. ‘So what are you saying?’
‘What Lily says is
