He had been right, up to a point, in saying that I could not get lost. Although it was terrifying and confusing it was impossible to wander off my route once I had picked my direction: I only had to follow the canal. I knew exactly which way I was headed. However in a matter of moments I realised that I had no way to tell how far I had gone.
I had estimated the distance I had to travel to be a couple of hundred paces, but a pace on foot was a different matter from my shuffling crawl, and anyway I soon lost count of how many times I had forced my knees to bend and stretch. I may have been invisible to anyone watching the house but this was of little use since I could see nothing at all.
I began to feel as though I had been crawling through mud and filth and icy, brackish water for ever. When I dared to break the surface to look around me, though, I found that I had gone maybe a dozen paces. If my mouth had not been filled by one end of a reed pipe I would have groaned aloud. I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. In order to restrain myself from trying to look around me again before I had made any real progress, I shut my eyes and tried to remember some of the old hymns I had been forced to learn in the House of Tears. After a while the metre of the words and the rhythm of my breathing became indistinguishable. I started to lose track of time, along with all sensation in my arms and legs as the numbing cold seeped through them. I went on reciting the hymn but it became more and more mechanical. Part of my mind turned the words over again and again, and part of it made my legs move and my chest rise and fall, and the rest of me seemed to have gone to sleep.
Something tugged sharply on my breathing tube.
My eyes snapped open, peering uselessly into the darkness. My hands clutched at the hollow reed. But it had been a long time since I had felt anything through my fingertips and the first I knew that the reed had been snatched from my grasp was when water flooded into my mouth, down my throat and into my lungs.
I choked, gasped and retched. I could not think of what to do and no instinct helped me. I could not jump out of the water because I did not know which way was up. I flapped about as wildly as the quail Worthy had killed earlier on, with my hands snapping at empty air as they searched vainly for the breathing tube.
I might have drowned there, kneeling in a stretch of shallow water within shouting distance of the house I had grown up in, if a pair of strong arms had not locked themselves firmly around me and hauled me upright.
At first all I could do was flop forward against them, coughing and spluttering while my feet slithered under me, scrabbling for a purchase. Then, as I brought my painful gasps for breath under control, it occurred to me to wonder who had grabbed me. I tried to turn, but was held fast.
A voice I did not recognise rasped in my ear: ‘Hold still, you!’ From a little further away a second voice called out: ‘What have you caught, then, Ollin? It’s not an ahuitzotl, is it?’
‘No such luck. If this is a water-monster then I’m a Huaxtec. It’s just some clown crawling along the canal. I told you that tube sticking up there looked all wrong.’
I made another effort to twist round. In response the man holding me released one of his arms so that he could hit me, striking the side of my head so hard that my teeth were knocked together. ‘I told you not to move!’ he snapped.
‘Who are you?’ I blurted out hoarsely.
I was swung around to face the man who stood on the bank, and there was no mistaking the hair piled up on his head in a veteran soldier’s haircut, or the glittering blades of the sword he was brandishing.
I had failed, I thought bleakly. The man who had caught me was a warrior. He was not the captain but it was not difficult to guess whose orders he was acting on.
The man’s voice rasped in my ear. ‘See that man there? I’m going to put you on the bank in front of him now, and if you try anything clever he’ll cut your legs off at the knees and we’ll make you crawl back the way you came, without your breathing-tube. Understand?’ Without waiting for an answer Ollin lifted me up and tossed me bodily out of the water.
I threw up my hands in an effort to control my fall but I was an instant too late. I flopped helplessly against the wooden pilings at the edge of the canal, catching one of them against my midriff and sending a foamy mixture of air and water spraying from my nose and mouth.
I gasped and flopped over sideways, doubled up in agony, while the warrior on the bank seized one of my arms just below the shoulder and pulled me fully onto dry land.
‘So, what’s your game, then?’ he hissed.
Something tickled my ear. I lay quite still, realising that what I felt was the sharpest edge in the world: the blade of an obsidian-studded sword. I began trembling uncontrollably, either from the cold or from fear, and the ticking became a sharp pain.
‘Careful,’ breathed the man holding the sword. ‘Nearly took your ear off.’
‘Let me get up,’ I croaked.
‘Not till you tell us what you thought you were doing.’ The chill was worse out of the water
