5
Toltenco meant ‘At the Edge of the Rushes’. My home parish had been built on low-lying, marshy ground that Lake Tetzcoco continually threatened to reclaim for its own, and in fact some of the houses at its edge stood on stilts.
The place where I had grown up lay at the southern edge of the city, and it was past noon by the time I reached it, after threading my way along narrow canal paths and across still narrower bridges. It would have been quicker if I had not been casting continual nervous glances over my shoulder, ever on the look-out for a giant with murder in his sole eye. I saw no sign of him. What was less reassuring was that I saw no sign of the men lord Feathered in Black was supposed to have following me, either. I was becoming more and more convinced that these men had never existed.
After a while I stopped worrying about what my former master might or might not be up to and turned my thoughts instead to the things I had seen and heard that morning. I recalled Star’s death, and what had surrounded it: the absence of her own midwife; her father’s furious reproaches to her husband and Handy’s own row with Red Macaw; my getting caught up, against my better judgement, in the funeral arrangements.
I knew what Kindly would have made of it all, had he been there. Fate, he would have called it: an instance of the gods making the cocoa bean stand up on its end. How else had a strong woman, who had already brought nine healthy children into the World, suddenly been taken ill? And just when the midwife who attended her could not be found? Coming on top of my own troubles, at the very moment when I had been forced back into Mexico to confront my enemy, it surely showed Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, the god of chance, at his most malicious.
I had always been less ready then Lily’s father to accept chance and fate as the rulers of our lives. As a priest, I had been dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, and I knew the god well. I thought I knew when his influence was making itself felt and when it was not and when some human agency seemed to be at work. What had happened in the last few days surely had to be coincidence: there was no way Star’s death could be connected with my return to the city. However, something about it made me uneasy. In some way I could not have explained, it did not feel like the work of a god.
I toyed with these ideas as I walked, until at last I found myself within a few streets of my family’s home, experiencing the familiar sensation of not having the vaguest idea of what to do next.
The obvious course of action was to walk directly to my parents’ house, which was only a few streets away, and deliver my warning, but I felt wary of doing that. I had had enough surprises for one morning. ‘Too obvious,’ I muttered. ‘What if there’s someone watching the entrance? Or both of them?’ The house had a street entrance direct into the principal room, which in turn gave onto a small courtyard surrounded by other rooms, and at the rear of the courtyard was a second opening that led, via a small wooden landing stage, to a canal. If one was being watched then it was safe to assume that both were.
‘Think about this, Yaotl,’ I told myself. ‘You can’t walk in through the doorway. So what’s left? Over the wall?’ I tried to picture the area around the house. There were no trees overhanging the courtyard, and it stood apart from its neighbours, so that I could not hope to drop in from next door’s rooftop. I would not have wanted to try it anyway. It would have meant trying to creep into a stranger’s property unobserved, and I had no desire to be taken for a thief.
Thoughts of somehow trying to get into the house from above prompted me to glance in the direction of Toltenco’s temple, a small shrine with a threadbare thatched roof that stood on top of a stumpy pyramid in the centre of the parish. It was just high enough to provide a vantage point from which I could see into the surrounding streets and canal-paths. If there were any dangerous characters loitering in the vicinity, I thought, it would be good to be able to spot them before they caught sight of me. And I had known the priest, Imacaxtli, ‘the Worthy Man’, ever since I was a child. Even if I could not see much from the shrine, it would be worth talking to him anyway. Very little happened in his parish without his knowing about it.
The pyramid stood in the middle of a little plaza that had weeds growing up between its flagstones. It was not an impressive sight. Most of my memories of it were from childhood and it had seemed much taller then. Even the thread of dried sacrificial blood running down its side seemed thinner than it had used to.
I began striding purposefully in the direction of the little pyramid. However, I was too nervous about being seen to keep this up. By the time I got there, I was shuffling, bent over as though that would somehow make me less visible. It was probably a good disguise as it must have made me look like a cripple. I stayed in the shadows for as long as I could, slipping furtively between them whenever I had to cross open ground. There were a few people about, standing or squatting in what passed for the marketplace in this parish, but from what I could see of them
