We men picked up our burden and walked on. The women’s cries had subsided now to whispers and muttering, as though some of their anger had been spent in the chase. The crowd started to disperse, and as the torch-bearers spread out, scattering light over the space around us, I saw more of Atlixco’s plaza. Streets led off it, more or less at right angles to each other. They were little more than paths, interrupted by the canals that boxed the little square, but their junction would still serve for a crossroads.
‘Well, we’re here,’ I said as we brought Star into the middle of the space and settled her carefully on the ground. ‘The burial ground. We made it.’
I did not hear the first part of Handy’s reply. He was staring at the body. To begin with, I did not think he was speaking. I imagined he was taking the opportunity to look at his wife for the last time before she went underground forever, and that all his thoughts were with her. I took a step backward, away from him, supposing he would rather be alone.
Then, however, I realised his lips were moving, and I heard the whispered words: ‘Four nights.’
Four nights: that was the period for which custom demanded the woman’s grave be guarded against robbers. My sudden feeling of unease intensified when the commoner tore his eyes from the corpse to look directly into mine. ‘Yaotl…’
I looked at him in alarm. ‘Oh, no. I said I’d come this far, Handy, but four nights…’ Four nights away from Lily and the relative safety of her house in the northern part of the city; four nights in Atlixco, with the captain prowling in the streets nearby.
He did not shift his gaze. ‘Yaotl, please. We need you. Star needs you. You were trained as a priest, you must know better than any of us what we’ve got to guard her against, and why.’
Spotted Eagle, who had been standing nearby, brooding silently over his mother’s body, responded before I could speak: ‘They won’t have gone far, all those sorcerers and young warriors. They’ll be waiting until the women have gone. Then they’ll come back. Do you want that to happen to my mother?’ He fixed hard, bright young eyes on mine, challenging me to argue. ‘You want her body to be torn apart by thieves and her soul left to wander around in the Nine Hells, trying to find her way across the river?’
Handy contradicted him harshly. ‘No, not the Land of the Dead. She won’t go there. Her soul will left behind, won’t it, Yaotl? She’ll be reduced to prowling the streets, haunting her old home. She’ll be lost, angry. She’ll want us but won’t be able to get near us, except by sending us sickness and death.’ His voice changed, became louder and more shrill. ‘And she’ll do it, because it’s all she can do. That’s what she’ll be reduced to. My wife,’ he concluded with a sob, ‘turned into a demon!’
‘Handy…’ I protested as his son recoiled and then glared at me.
‘You heard that!’ Spotted Eagle cried. ‘You can’t leave us now!’
‘I don’t have a choice. I made a promise. I’ve got to get back to Tlatelolco tonight.’
‘No, you haven’t’
‘Lily will…’
Handy produced something like a ghastly parody of a smile. ‘No, she won’t. When Snake took your message to her I had him say you wouldn’t be back tonight.’
I stared at him, shocked. It was not so much the way I had been manipulated that I was reeling from as his apparent callousness. I could imagine Lily’s face crumpling at the news that I was not coming home, that she would be alone tonight, with no-one to turn to when the nightmares threatened to overwhelm her.
‘You bastards,’ I muttered feebly. ‘Do you think no-one else hurts, apart from you?’
‘Maybe,’ Handy said indifferently. ‘My own hurt’s all I know about, though.’
Goose interrupted us. ‘Are you ready now? There are digging sticks and shovels here.’
The women had found a burial site, near the base of the stumpy pyramid. Atlixco’s temple was very similar to the one I had visited that afternoon in my home parish: half a dozen steps leading up to a platform with a little thatched shrine and a brazier in front of it that emitted frail glowing tendrils of smoke. In front of the temple a paving slab had been prized up, leaving a square of bare earth for us to dig.
We four men set to with a will, determined to get our task over with as quickly as we could. We worked to the sound of crackling torches and under the gaze of Goose and her comrades, and well intentioned though they may have been it felt like being watched by vultures.
At last we had a hole deep and wide enough to lower Star’s seated body into.
I observed Handy’s face as we dragged the mat with his wife’s corpse on it to the hole, and as we lowered her into her grave, moving her body with hands as gentle as her own might have been if she had lived to hold her newborn child. The man’s eyes were now dry and hard and his expression revealed nothing except concentration and physical effort. It was as if at this moment, when he had to say farewell once and for all to the woman he had loved, he found himself drained of all feeling. Or maybe this was one occasion that anger was simply not equal to.
Whatever priest presided over the shrine, he had relinquished it for tonight, leaving the midwives to their mysteries. Only we, who had buried her, were to hear the last words anyone would address to Star.
Goose must have seen more than one of these ceremonies, I realised. She knew what to say. She spoke clearly at first,
