‘It’s not the truth, though. It’s what they say, I know. It’s what you’re supposed to show to the other warriors – especially your enemies. But no man really feels that way, or he’d be mad. Your father doesn’t.’ I hesitated before adding: ‘I was sent to the House of Tears when I was not much younger than you.’
He looked startled. ‘You were a priest?’
‘I know – astonishing, isn’t it? But when I went I was told I must not weep: I must not keep looking back at my home and my parents. It wasn’t my home any more.’ I smiled ruefully at the memory. ‘My eyes were like waterfalls! And so were all the other youngsters’. You could have held the lot of us over a pile of burning chillies and no-one would have noticed the difference.’
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ The boy searched my face as if looking for some meaning there.
‘I’m just saying that when you’re told you have to have a heart of stone, that’s not really how anyone is, not if they know what’s good for them. Or if they are like that, it’s because stone is strong, not brittle like obsidian. If you go on pretending things that matter don’t – if you keep telling yourself you don’t miss your mother – then sooner or later you’ll snap like a used razor.’
The boy blinked. He did not look convinced. I hoped he was smart enough to remember what he was told and sooner or later learn from it.
But as we walked on it occurred to me that there must be some who never had grasped the difference between obsidian and stone, the ones who had never understood that to be hard and sharp was not the same as to be strong. Whatever I might say, there was a place for men like that in the ranks of our armies. They could be found among the berserkers, the warriors who fought with no pity and who valued their own lives only a little more than they minded anybody else’s, which was scarcely at all. Such men might be mad, but so long as their madness was turned on the enemy, that was all right.
What made a man like that in the first place, though, I wondered – what produced a creature like my enemy, the captain of the otomies? Might it have been the sort of loss that Handy and his sons had suffered?
9
Snake and I returned to the house in Atlixco just before nightfall.
I found Handy standing in the middle of his courtyard, with his best cloak – the one he had been presented with years before, after taking his second enemy captive – draped around his shoulders. He was fidgeting nervously, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and fiddling absently with the hem of the cloak, like a man about to undertake some task that he feared might be beyond him.
With him were two men I did not know.
Handy introduced the younger of them as his son, Spotted Eagle. We studied one another coolly. I could make little of what I saw. Spotted Eagle was a typical Aztec youth, slim and muscular, his lips seemingly frozen into an angry pout and his eyes into a resentful glare, but still bearing the unblooded warrior’s telltale tuft of hair on the back of his closely shaved head.
Handy’s other visitor turned out to be his brother-in-law Xochipepe, or ‘Flower Gatherer’.
‘Yaotl,’ I said, answering the other man’s unspoken question. ‘Friend of the family. Handy asked me to help.’
Flower Gatherer’s appearance surprised me. For some reason I had imagined Star’s sister to be married to a man like Handy, a commoner, but a successful warrior in his day, a respected veteran with a captive or two to his credit, and now a stolid, reliable member of his community. Instead I saw a small, rough looking individual, with his bowed head shaved in a tonsure: a sign that he had never dragged a prisoner home from the battlefield and, given his age, surely never would. He was marked as a failure, in other words, condemned to menial work and poverty. His cloak was short, ragged and so threadbare it was almost translucent, and his grubby breechcloth was not much better.
‘You’re Goose’s husband?’
I must have betrayed more surprise than I had intended to, because he looked up, scowled and barked back at me: ‘Sure I am. You another one who doesn’t think I’m good enough?’
I took a step backward, almost bumping into Goose, who had emerged from the interior of the house with an armful of fresh bread. ‘No, I didn’t say that!’
He scowled at me like a sulky child. ‘Why not? Everyone else does. Her parents’ – he glanced at his wife – ‘her sister, all of them. Just because I never got lucky on the battlefield.’
‘That’s enough, Flower Gatherer,’ Handy growled. ‘And you’ll leave Star out of this, if you know what’s good for you!’
His brother-in-law glowered at him, but he lowered his head and said nothing else.
Goose stood in the middle of the courtyard, still holding the tortillas. She looked wretched, her face drawn and her hair dishevelled. In a painfully obvious effort to change the subject she told her husband and Spotted Eagle: ‘That Red Macaw was here earlier, trying to poke his nose in.’
‘Him?’ A slight lift in Spotted Eagle’s voice suggested mild surprise. ‘I suppose you told him where to go?’
‘I did.’ Handy’s voice had an edge to it, reflecting the tension the man must be feeling. He clearly did not want to pursue the topic. ‘Has the sun gone down yet? Good. Gentle Heart and the other women should be here soon. I’m going to get the hammer, and Spotted Eagle, you had best come in and pay your respects to your grandfather and your grandmother.’ He turned, leaving his eldest boy to follow him, and
