‘Thank you for helping us find her,’ she said quietly.
My jaw dropped. Neither Handy nor his son said anything. They gave no sign of having heard her. I felt my face growing warm with embarrassment. ‘I haven’t done anything… I mean, Goose, I wouldn’t know where to start…’
‘But you will,’ she sad simply. She smiled weakly. ‘That’s what matters.’ She turned to her brother-in-law. ‘You have to come home. The baby needs attending to. Then we have to look for Flower Gatherer. And what the thief took.’
Handy, his son, Goose and I walked slowly back towards the commoner’s house.
Handy and Spotted Eagle had lapsed into a moody silence. Goose was quiet as well, making no obvious effort to persuade me to help in the search for her sister’s corpse, and indeed scarcely looking at me: she preferred staring silently at the walls and gardens that we passed, content, until we were nearly at our destination, to leave me to my thoughts.
Death was no stranger to me. As a priest I had seen many men and some women die on the killing stone in front of a temple, and had accepted what I had seen as necessary, the price the gods exacted for letting us, their creatures, live on Earth. More recently, it had sometimes happened that I found myself looking at a body and wondering how the death had come about; and on occasion I had been the one to uncover the answer. What had befallen Star had been no mystery, so far as I was aware, but was beyond my experience, taking her into a realm that no man would ever know.
Star had not merely died. She had begun to transform herself into a Divine Princess, just as a warrior who had a flowery death in battle or on the sacrificial stone earned his place in the morning sun’s entourage. I did not truly understand this process. I could not have said what stages the woman’s soul had to pass through on its passage from the body to the Land of the Women beyond the western edge of the world, or how far it would have got. If its journey had been interrupted, where would that leave Star? Was some part of her still residing in a ruined, decomposing thing, even now being dragged carelessly across the city, or hacked to pieces for its magical properties? Or was it somehow caught between two worlds, the one it had inhabited in life and the one it yearned for, lost, confused and angry at whatever was dragging it back?
It may have been a movement in the air, or merely my own hunger and exhaustion pricking my imagination, but I glanced nervously upwards, seized suddenly by the conviction that her spirit, the part of her that ought now to be with the afternoon sun, was somehow hovering above my head.
It was an Aztec belief that the Divine Princesses sometimes came back to Earth to bring sickness to men and children, and there were four dates in our calendar in particular when no man would go out after dark for fear of them. What might she do to me, I wondered, if she knew I had done nothing to help her?
‘I’ll try,’ I said. I meant the words for Star, wherever and whatever she now was. The answer I came from close beside me, however.
‘I know,’ said the dead woman’s sister. ‘I never doubted you would.’
5
In a short space of time the house in Atlixco had seen so many losses: Handy’s of his wife and stillborn child; his children’s of their mother; Goose’s of her sister, perhaps also of her missing husband; and her parents’ of a daughter. Each loss would have to be taken in or made good somehow, but it was hard to guess where this might begin.
At first, Goose appeared to take charge. Issuing her orders firmly, but in a voice hoarse with strain, she rounded up the children, whom we had found scattered like their own abandoned toys about the courtyard, and drove them indoors, commanding the girls to attend to their work and the boys to get out of the way. Her manner, even when directing Handy and me to squat in a corner while she fetched a broom, put me in mind of my mother’s, when she had made me and my brothers and sisters line up before setting out for some ritual celebration. I suspected that telling others what to do was how Goose sought to master her own bewildered grief, and treating the adults around her as children was the only way she knew of doing it.
Handy appeared to have withdrawn into himself. He slumped obediently in a corner, beside the sweat bath where his wife had died. I squatted by him, seeing the exhaustion in his haggard face and resisting the temptation to yawn and rub my eyes.
Spotted Eagle was almost as tired as his father, but he was alert enough to look around him with a critical eye. ‘My brothers haven’t made a very good job of that wall,’ he muttered.
I noticed that some attempt had been made to stop up the hole Handy had knocked in his courtyard wall. It was a crude effort, little more than a heaping-up of the rubble left over from the earlier demolition. I guessed from Spotted Eagle’s words that two or more of his brothers had been left with the job of closing up the exit their mother had taken. The hole made for her had to be sealed as quickly as possible, in case her ghost used it to return and bring disease and death to those still living in her house.
‘It’ll do,’ I said. I had no idea whether the attempt to fill the opening in would be adequate to stop a vengeful female spirit or not, but
