He looked at me curiously. ‘I’d have thought that was the midwife’s job.’
‘It should be, just as Star’s burial last night was. But she didn’t turn up for one and she didn’t exactly rise to the occasion for the other, either.’ I was surprised at the anger I felt rising within me as I described the pathetic little ceremony beside Handy’s maize bins, and Gentle Heart’s arrival with Cactus in the midst of it. ‘She didn’t seem to have any idea! It’s not just that she didn’t know the words. For that matter, as far as I know there aren’t any words. It’s that she didn’t seem to have much idea what it was all for. Neither did I, at first, but then I used to be a priest – my business was with gods, not men, and gods don’t have any feelings at all.’
The policeman pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘And what about this character who came with her?’
‘Cactus?’ I thought about the curer, seeing his straggly hair and his grubby cloak again in my mind’s eye. ‘He’s a fake at best. At worst…’ I told him about the conversation I had had with Cactus, and about the terrifying possibility that had occurred to me, that the thief of Star’s body might be both a warrior and a sorcerer.
Kite took the hint. ‘You think he may have been trying to put you off the scent? But that would make him the thief, then, wouldn’t it?’
I shivered. I had been resisting the idea that I had stood within a few fingers’ lengths of a sorcerer and had had a conversation with him. ‘It’s a possibility.’
‘Well, I know what he looks like. Next time he puts in a appearance in the market, I’ll bring him in.’
I still did not know quite why he had brought me up here. It was as though there were something in particular that he wanted to say to me but for some reason he was reluctant to bring it up. I decided to force the issue. ‘Well,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘It’s getting late. Time I was heading back…’
A sinewy hand grasped the hem of my cloak hard enough to tear the material, had I made any real effort to get away. I looked down at the policeman, wondering why, when I was standing and he was still on his haunches, I still felt as though he towered over me.
‘Not so fast,’ he said quietly. ‘I told you I wanted to talk about Handy…’
‘You have talked about him. Then we moved on to Gentle Heart and Cactus. Then you said maybe the man I’d been talking to this afternoon was a sorcerer. I thought I’d go before it got really scary!’
‘… Handy and Red Macaw.’
That silenced me.
‘Now,’ Kite continued, as I slowly lowered myself back into a squatting position, ‘it’s common knowledge that the two of them didn’t get on.’
‘I got that general impression.’
‘Then you can see what’s coming, and why I got you up here to talk about it rather than mouthing off in the middle of that bunch of gossipy old women down there in the plaza. I have one old friend – and he is, or was – who’s just lost his wife in about the worst way you can imagine, and not taking it very well.’
‘Yes.’ I could not very well disagree.
‘And I have an unidentified body which may belong to another old friend with whom Handy had a long-running feud.’
‘What?’
‘Red Macaw’s gone too. That’s what I meant when I said I couldn’t talk to him.’
I gaped at him. ‘Red Macaw’s gone… where?’ On occasion my gift for asking penetrating questions deserted me.
‘If I knew that…’ he began patiently. ‘I can tell you where he said he was going. He came to see me yesterday afternoon. He’d heard there was to be a flowery war with Texcala. He wanted to join up.’
Texcala lay beyond the mountains to the east, a nation of proud warriors whom the Aztecs had never managed to subdue, although we kept their borders so tightly sealed that they lived in the kind of wretched poverty that produces the hardiest and fiercest soldiers. Every few years their army and ours would meet at a prearranged place for a formal battle. It gave both sides the opportunity to practise their skills and take the kind of prisoner the gods most wanted to have as sacrifices: men known to be mighty fighters, rather than effete barbarians.
Unfortunately our army had been badly beaten in the last clash, and many of our young men had long been clamouring for another one, to avenge their losses.
‘He’s too old to fight,’ I objected. ‘And surely with his bad leg…’
‘The army would accept a three-captive warrior,’ Kite assured me, ‘if he can only catch them up; because they’ve already left, including the draft from this parish. All I could do was wish him luck. And hope he found what he was looking for.’ He looked at me steadily as he said this, and I understood.
Red Macaw might be seeking fame or glory, but at his age his chances of finding either would be slim. It sounded to me as though what he had really been eager for was death: what our poets and priests sang of as the sweetest end a man could have, death in battle or on the sacrificial stone of an enemy’s temple: the flowery death. I wondered what might have driven him to that.
Kite was saying: ‘I need a reason why the body was hidden in the canal. If it is Flower Gatherer’s body, then what would be the point of doing that, since everyone knows he was here last night?’
‘Could be a double bluff,’ I suggested, without much conviction. ‘Slow you down, fool you into looking for the wrong man.’
‘Maybe. It’s possible, though, isn’t it, that Red Macaw’s fate overtook him before he even set out on the road?’
I was barely listening, however. I was too busy contemplating an unpleasant
