‘I can’t talk to him,’ he said slowly.
‘Why not?’ I stared at him. ‘You can’t mean he’s disappeared too?’
‘Not exactly.’ The man looked troubled. His expression had not been tranquil before, but now, for the first time, I felt that he was not in command of the situation, and that he knew it. He put a hand to his forehead and frowned deeply as if afflicted by a sudden pain between his temples. Then he whipped the hand away, and glared balefully at the people gathered around him.
‘Didn’t I send you lot about your business ages ago?’ he snapped. He raised his arm in a fierce gesture. ‘Go on, scram! Not the slave, though. You’re coming with me!’
In one movement the arm descended and the hand seized my elbow in unbreakable grip.
As he dragged me towards the parish hall, visions of tiny cells swam before my eyes: open cages in airless, lightless rooms, filled with the stench of unwashed bodies and what came out of them. I squealed with fear, but nobody was listening.
9
The parish hall stood at the corner of the marketplace, facing the temple, with the waters of the canal lapping its rear wall. It was a long, low adobe building. Rooms opened onto three sides of its square central courtyard, the front being the outer wall dividing it from the marketplace, with the entrance in its middle. Opposite the entrance, a stairway led up to a broad flat roof. There was a doorway at ground level on either side of the steps.
Some of the doorways leading off the courtyard were closed by wicker screens. Others were dark holes giving no clue to what lay beyond them. I knew in general what such places contained: the parish records, weapons, quarters for local officials. I wondered which room held the stout wooden cages where prisoners would be kept. I was afraid that I might be about to find out, but that was not what Kite had in mind. Instead, he led me towards the steps leading up on to the roof. On the way he barked out orders to a couple of his deputies to go and clean up the mess by the canal outside. They moved reluctantly from where they had been squatting on the hard earth of the courtyard, two men who may have been the pair who had moved to arrest me that morning, or just two more who had been carved out of the side of the same mountain.
‘Up here,’ the policeman ordered.
The roof of the parish hall was decorated with plant pots. What grew from them were mostly hardy specimens. Many were desert varieties. ‘A lot of cacti,’ I observed nervously. ‘What are they for, torturing prisoners with the thorns?’ It was a genuine question. There were some forms of torment – beatings, pricking with maguey spines, drenching in ice-cold water – that I could endure, having known worse as a priest. If that was what the policeman had in mind then I could make myself ready for it.
‘No, they just do well on the roof. I prefer dahlias, really, but it’s too exposed for them up here.’
I stared at him incredulously. ‘Next you’ll be telling me you like sitting up here in the morning, watching the sun rising over the lake while you compose poetry!’
‘And what if I do?’
Flower and Song, was what we called poetry. I supposed Cactus and Song would do as well. I was trying to think of some witty remark to that effect while the policeman squatted on the edge of his roof terrace and motioned for me to do the same.
‘I didn’t bring you up here to admire the blooms,’ he said, ‘nor to beat a confession out of you.’
‘That’s a relief,’ I said weakly.
‘I’ve not given up on that idea, though! However, there are things we need to talk about. Starting with Handy.’
There was an awkward pause while I pretended to admire a fat, globular Eagle’s Claw, a variety normally to be found halfway up a mountain. Kite must take his hobby seriously, I thought. ‘Handy’s an old friend of yours.’
‘I’ve known him a long time. But then, I’ve known most of them a long time.’ He glanced across to the small pyramid, letting his gaze take in the busy marketplace spread out before it. ‘They’re like children,’ he sighed. ‘I have to shout at them and thump them sometimes and make them do things they don’t want to do, but it’s for their own good. And I can look after them. I don’t need interference from your high officials – the palace, the chief minister, pompous upstarts like the Guardian of the Waterfront.’
I had to suppress a smile at the reference to Lion. I wondered whether Kite had any idea that he was my brother. Then I found the policeman was looking straight at me. ‘I can’t always keep the rest of the world out, though, can I? Let alone the rest of the city. Like when you turn up, for instance, and before you know it Handy loses his wife and maybe his brother-in-law, and there are monsters and thieves roaming around...’
‘Not my fault!’ I cried.
‘Maybe not, though you can hardly deny some of this is connected with you. By your own account the monster, or whoever attacked you, called you by your name.’
A movement in the courtyard distracted him for a moment: his men bringing the body inside, mercifully hidden from sight by a blanket.
‘Still,’ he continued, ‘about Handy. You were there this afternoon. How’s he taking it?’
I thought about what I had seen and heard at the commoner’s house. ‘Not well. They’re coping, I suppose. They don’t understand what’s going on around them.’
‘They’re not alone in that!’
‘They had to bury the child this morning,’ I added. ‘They wanted me to help. Maybe I did, a
