There was a small crowd gathered around the policeman, although he was doing his best to shoo the bystanders away as I approached. When I heard what he was saying, I felt sick, although it was neither more nor less than I had expected.
‘All right, so you’ve seen it. You all know what a body looks like. Now bugger off, the lot of you, and let me get on with my work! And what do you want?’
The last words were meant for me. I heard mutterings from one or two people who remembered me from the day before, but nobody tried to stop me as I pushed my way through the crowd of onlookers to Kite’s side.
‘Look, Kite, I’ve been thinking. About yesterday. I’m afraid I was wrong. I’m not sure Flower Gatherer ran away after all. I think I know what may have happened to him. You’ll need to dredge the canal.’
He folded his arms and looked down his long, straight nose at me. ‘Oh, really? And what do you suppose I’ll find if I do that?’
‘A body. Weighed down by…’ I heard my voice tail off as I saw where he was looking. I lowered my own gaze to follow his. When I saw what lay at his feet, I staggered, my legs having suddenly lost most of their strength, and might have fallen over if I had not toppled against a man standing just behind me.
The remains were scarcely recognisable as those of a man. The legs and the lower part of the trunk were exposed, apart from the groin, coyly hidden by what was left of a breechcloth. The upper part of the body too was swaddled in some tattered material. The stench rising from the corpse was enough to make me gag. Knowing the smell of rot and piss was mostly that of the pool of canal water surrounding the body did not make it less nauseating.
I swallowed hard. The stink was not the worst of it, by a long way.
Aztecs were not strangers to the sight of human blood. Priests in particular were used to seeing hearts ripped, still beating, from the chests of sacrificial victims; but at certain times anyone might see blood carried through the streets in gourds and daubed on the faces of idols, or men dancing in the flayed skins of captive warriors, or an enemy’s flesh stripped from a severed limb and turned into the makings of a stew. Most men had been to war, and seen friend and foe alike pierced and mutilated. However, I would have guessed that nobody present had ever seen anything like this.
The condition of the body was horrific. Both legs were broken, the knees twisted at bizarre angles, and there was what looked like an extra joint in one calf. Elsewhere the flesh was torn and gouged, criss-crossed by cuts ranging from grazes to deep gaping rents. What I could see made me thankful for the cloth covering the rest, which from the look of it was even more grotesquely misshapen. The cloth itself was so sodden with canal water and stained with dark blood that it was impossible to make out what colour it might have been before. It had been ripped, so that it looked little better than a rag, and part of it appeared to be missing altogether.
Something lay beside the body. Like the cloth it was heavily stained. It was rectangular, hard and smooth: a slab of dressed stone.
‘Well,’ I said quietly, ‘I was right about the paving slab.’
A hand gripped my upper arm, not gently. ‘Now, what was that about dredging the canal?’ Kite’s voice rasped in my ear. ‘I think you’d better tell me what you know, don’t you?’
Without taking my eyes off the body, I said: ‘After we’d buried the woman, we put the paving slab back into place over the body. I realised that I hadn’t seen it when I came back here this morning, after her body had been dug up again. Something that heavy doesn’t just blow away in the wind. Flower Gatherer was missing. I wondered if the two had disappeared together.’
‘The paving slab was tied to the body with this.’ The policeman stirred the stained cloth with his sandaled foot. ‘Anything to say about that?’
‘If the slab was used to weigh the body down,’ I said dully, ‘then they had to have been tied together with something.’ I looked up into the policeman’s face. ‘This looks like part of a cloak.’
‘But what’s it doing here, Yaotl?’
For all the orders Kite had been bellowing when I had arrived, the crowd around us had not dispersed. They were all looking steadily at me, and it felt as though I were surrounded by spears, their tips of flint and obsidian poised to be thrust into my flesh. I began to wish I had let someone from Handy’s household come with me after all; at least I would have felt less alone.
I stammered through the best explanation I could come up with. ‘When the monster attacked us it killed Flower Gatherer and threw his body in the canal. It must have used his cloak to tie the dead man to the paving slab.’ I hesitated. ‘I suppose this is Flower Gatherer’s body? Did anyone recognise it?’
Kite laughed grimly. ‘Look at him! His own mother wouldn’t recognise him! But what are you saying? That someone else has vanished in this parish? I hope you’re wrong. One missing person and one body, I can just about cope with. Two men vanished and one body wouldn’t add up.’
‘The women saw a three-captive warrior following us last night. They got a piece of his cloak. So why don’t you go and talk to Red Macaw?’
There was a stirring in the crowd around me. Somebody tittered, as though I
