‘Pity I didn’t catch you,’ said Spotted Eagle sullenly.
‘You nearly did. I had to pretend to be gathering stone dung with the other old men and women to escape. You ran past me, very close.’ Handy’s son stared at her, while a look of disgust formed on his face.
‘I took my son’s body back, after that,’ she added. ‘We moved them both, so that you wouldn’t guess what I’d taken and why. But of course I wanted to burn it decently, and bring the ashes here.’ She lowered her head to look at the place where she had been patting down freshly-dug earth. ‘Here, where they belong.’
‘He never went to join the army, did he?’ I said.
‘No, of course not. He lied to Kite about that to protect me, but really he was trying to stop us. He’d never understood what was wrong with him. The sick often don’t, do they? That’s why we have curers. He needed me to tell him that he would never be able to live as long as Star and Handy were around. But when I did something about it, he wouldn’t accept it, which I suppose is always the way.’
‘Why now, though?’ I asked. ‘Your son and Star hadn’t seen each other in a dozen years. What made you do this thing now, after all that time?’
‘The sickness was getting worse, all of a sudden. It was the boy. He was growing into a man, and Red Macaw could talk to him, promise to help train him as a warrior, get news about his mother. I think it made him dwell on what he’d lost.’ When she looked up and turned her gaze on Snake, her eyes were wet. ‘In the end, I did what any mother would.’
Lily had been watching and listening in silence, with narrowed eyes and a deepening frown. When she spoke, it was to say simply: ‘No, you didn’t.’
Lion asked: ‘Why did you go on helping the captain after you found out what he’d done to Red Macaw?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you did. You were there last night.’
‘I wasn’t there to help him,’ she insisted. ‘I was there to kill him.’
‘But you were dancing with my wife’s forearm!’ Handy cried indignantly.
‘It was a ruse. It got me close to him. He wouldn’t trust me otherwise – he certainly wouldn’t let me give him anything to drink! But I knew as soon as he got you in his power his guard would drop. And that was my chance.’
And so she had killed the otomi, pouring burning coals over the feathers and wickerwork on his back because he had murdered her son. It suddenly occurred to me that this had been the only thing she had done in anger, her only act of revenge.
I turned to Handy, intending to say as much to him, and in doing so I missed the final movements of the hand towards the cup, the cup towards her mouth. The first I knew about it was when my brother started forward with a cry of dismay.
When I turned back, she was kneeling as before, with no apparent change in her expression.
‘Handy,’ she said softly, ‘I am sorry for the pain you’ve had to suffer. But Star would have told you what it’s like. You were hurting my son, even if you didn’t mean to. And a mother will do anything to protect her child.’
Then she died.
2
‘I should think it was the most frightening thing I’ve ever known,’ my brother was saying. ‘No, really, I have to admit it – I was scared. There was this creature, strutting and gyrating in front of me, with your mother’s arm in her hand, and I just knew I wouldn’t be able to move a muscle if I tried.’
It was the evening of the day Precious Light had killed herself. We were standing in Atlixco Plaza, by the base of the temple. In front of us, a paving slab had been prized up, revealing a hole large enough to receive a human body. Handy had found Star where her killer had told him to look for her, and he was determined to lay her to rest once and for all as soon as he could.
Snake’s brother, Buck – the one who had gone with him to take a message to Lily’s house two days before – had been listening, enraptured, to the Guardian of the Waterfront’s tales of military prowess. In all fairness, these were mostly as true as they were exciting. However, he frowned in puzzlement when he heard Lion’s account of how Precious Light had bewitched him. ‘That’s pretty much how my father described it,’ the youngster said carefully, before turning to me. ‘She didn’t have that effect on you, though, did she, Yaotl?’
‘That’s because she was fake,’ I replied shortly. I regretted my brusqueness immediately, but the boy kept reminding me of his brother. I had not seen Snake since we had left Precious Light’s house that morning. He was not here now, although he ought to be. How was he going to recover from learning that his father was not his father, and that both his parents had died horribly – not to mention his grandmother?
I remembered what I had told the boy on the way back from my parent’s house, about obsidian and stone, and wondered which he would grow up to be. Would what had just happened turn him one way or the other?
My brother exclaimed indignantly: ‘It’s easy for you to say she was fake, with your priest’s training, but let me tell you, when she was this far away...’ He held his hand up, the thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart.
‘I’m sure the effect she had on you and the others was real enough,’ I assured him. ‘But you knew you wouldn’t be able to move
