Lion said: ‘I should think your former master was lying, Yaotl. He lured you here in the hope that the otomi would kill you. Then he probably expects me to avenge you and get rid of that maniac for him in the process. Which I suppose I’d have to do,’ he added, in the weary tone of a man acknowledging the need to do some unpleasant job he has been putting off too long, such as mending his roof in the wet season.
‘You’d better stay here,’ my mother suggested. ‘You’d be safe.’
‘Not from me, he wouldn’t,’ my father snapped rebelliously.
She glared at him again. ‘He may be a failure and a slave and have brought disgrace upon our house, but he’s still our son!’
‘Thanks,’ I said sullenly. ‘I can’t stay, though. I’m needed elsewhere.’ I told them about Star and the promise I had made to her husband, to return to help him bury her. There was a moment of shocked silence.
‘The poor woman,’ Jade said softly.
My mother hung her head and murmured: ‘It’s true what the midwives say: “Certainly it is our mortality, we who are women, for it is our battle, for at this time our mother, Cihuacoatl, Quilaztli, exacteth the tribute of death.”’ She looked up. ‘You’d better go and see what you can do for her family, then.’
Sparrowhawk, my youngest brother, had had nothing to say up to now, and when he did finally open his mouth I wished he had kept it shut.
‘The chief minister laid a trap for Yaotl,’ he said as solemnly as a poet revealing the deepest mysteries of life and death. ‘That’s what all this amounts to, isn’t it? But if it’s just him they’re after, why does it matter to the rest of us?’
‘If you knew the kind of people we’re talking about, you wouldn’t ask such bloody silly questions,’ I snarled at him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Because the threat to you lot is the one thing old Black Feathers certainly wasn’t lying about. The otomi would have as much hesitation before slaughtering you all and burning this place to the ground as you would before cracking a flea between your grubby nails. And if I do happen to fall into his hands, how much are you willing to bet that he’d stop then?’
Sparrowhawk blinked.
‘These two lads,’ I continued, indicating Ollin and his partner, ‘and the rest of you are all very well, but if the captain ever does come here… Lion will tell you what he’s capable of!’
‘If he’s an otomi,’ my elder brother said darkly, ‘then he’s capable of anything.’
Anxious looks and a nervous shuffling of feet greeted his remark. It was my mother who replied. ‘So what do you intend to do about him, Yaotl?’
‘Do? What do you mean? I’ve done it, haven’t I, warning you…’
‘You’ve told us you think he may come here to avenge himself for what you did to him,’ she said crisply. ‘We knew that already, thank you. Now you’ve also told us that there’s nothing your brother’s bodyguards and your brothers can do. So it’s up to you, now, isn’t it? Whatever this threat is, you’d better deal with it.’
I gasped, astonished at her reasoning, but my mother did not wait for me to reply. ‘You made this mess, Yaotl,’ she told me, as though I had just upset a bowl of maize gruel over her newly swept courtyard, ‘and now you’ll have to clear it up.’
‘But I can’t!’ I cried. ‘What do you suggest I do? Take on that madman with my bare hands?’
‘I could lend you a spear,’ Sparrowhawk volunteered. My sister told him to shut up.
My mother made an exasperated noise, somewhere between a sigh and a groan. ‘Yaotl, don’t pretend to be stupid,’ she said to me. ‘You can’t do that, obviously. But you can try to find him before he finds you, can’t you?’
‘I can help,’ Lion offered. ‘Lend you a couple of men. Can’t spare any more – we’re at full stretch trying to catch this lunatic as it is.’
‘Men like these two?’ I scoffed, looking at Ollin and his comrade. ‘Forget it, brother. They’d just get in the way.’
‘Suit yourself.’ He sounded hurt at my rebuff, and the tone of his next words was scornful. ‘After all, it’s not as if you’ll need help. You’ll be on familiar territory, after all – didn’t you used to gather stone dung for a living?’
I did not reply to that. It was true, though. Stone dung was what we called scum scraped from the surface of the lakes. It was formed into cakes and sold in the marketplace as food. For a while after I had been slung out of the priesthood I had made ends meet by collecting it. It was revolting work which had given me a lifelong aversion to eating the stuff.
‘You can at least find out what the otomi wants,’ my mother said. ‘Maybe you can reason with him.’
‘I know what he wants! Me! Preferably in bite-sized pieces, in a stew topped with beans and maize! And as for reasoning with him…’
‘Just keep talking,’ my father murmured. ‘You can bore him to death!’
8
The afternoon was moving towards evening when I left my parents’ house. The air was becoming chilly. My skin was still damp from my adventure in the canal, although my mother had grudgingly lent me a dry cloak.
Ollin and his comrade escorted me at first; but their presence was not enough to save me from an ambush.
I ought to have expected to find someone lying in wait for me, but I was too preoccupied. It was hard to come away from a meeting with my family without feeling that I was in some way a terrible disappointment to them all: Yaotl the failed priest, the wastrel, the slave. And what my brother and my mother had said disturbed me. I had never allowed myself to believe lord Feathered in Black when he said that
