Before any of us could ask her what she had meant, she had turned around and disappeared within her house, leaving us to follow.
Once through the doorway we found ourselves in a small, well-kept courtyard. Snake, Kite and I squatted, Lily kneeled, and the old woman remained standing, explaining that if she once got down on the floor it would take her a long time to get up again. She appeared to be alone in the house, but she had not been shirking her domestic duties, as the place was spotless, the whitewash on the walls gleaming in the morning sunshine.
Once we were all settled, an uncomfortable silence descended, persisting for a few moments until the old woman decided it was time to speak. I had the uncomfortable feeling that she was going to dictate whatever was said and done within her own walls, and that here not even the emperor’s word carried more weight.
‘You said this was about my son,’ she said abruptly, ‘but my son is dead.’
‘We don’t know that,’ I put in. ‘The police don’t know whose the bodies are.’
‘He is dead,’ she asserted again. ‘If not here, then in some other place: some mountain pass or freshly turned over field or at the top of some barbarian city’s pyramid. You know this,’ she said to Kite.
The policeman looked unhappy. ‘He said he was going to try to join the army. I haven’t seen him since, so I don’t know whether he made it.’
‘It doesn’t matter. You know what he wanted.’
I remembered my conversation with the policeman on the rooftop of the parish hall, how he had suspected that the old three-captive warrior had gone looking for a flowery death. ‘Why, though?’ I wondered aloud.
She turned scornful eyes on mine. ‘Only a slave would ask that. All warriors crave death by the obsidian knife. What other reason did he need?’
‘But why now, after all these years?’ Kite asked.
The old woman did not answer, but she did not need to. It was obvious, I realised, if we just accepted what she said, and took it for granted that her son had followed the warrior’s calling. Then Kite’s question was the only one left to be answered.
‘What’s changed?’ I was thinking aloud. ‘He hasn’t fought for years, and suddenly decides to go to war one last time. Something prompted him to do that. Maybe it was a soothsayer casting an augury, but I bet it wasn’t.’ I regarded the woman once more, and this time it was her turn to look away. ‘It was Star’s death, wasn’t it? How blind we’ve all been! That’s what the big quarrel was about!’
I heard a small sound from Lily, a suppressed gasp. When I turned towards her I saw her staring at me, her eyes slowly widening as she grasped my meaning.
‘What are you talking about?’ Snake asked.
Red Macaw’s mother looked carefully at him. ‘Tell me something, boy.’
The youngster scowled at her rebelliously. ‘What?’
‘You knew my son, didn’t you? He used to talk to you in the street.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he ask you about your mother?’
‘Sometimes. What’s this all about?’
She turned away from him then and fixed her sharp, bright eyes upon Lily.
Lily met her gaze steadily and said: ‘I understand.’
‘Well, I don’t!’ the boy cried. He lurched awkwardly to his feet. ‘What are you all talking about?’
Precious Light moved a brown, bony arm, the loose and wrinkled skin seeming to fall away from it like a fold of cloth as she stretched out a hand in Snake’s direction. The gesture puzzled me, but my mistress caught her meaning.
‘Er… Snake…’
The lad got to his feet. In a choked voice he muttered: ‘I’m thirsty. I’m going to go and get some water.’
I never knew whether it was tact beyond his years, fear of what he might learn if he stayed or simple embarrassment that made him get up and leave at that point, but I watched him stumble from the room with a mixture of relief and pity.
‘He’ll be better off alone for a moment,’ Red Macaw’s mother advised us. ‘And I want you to hear this, anyway. Then you judge for yourself what to tell the boy.’
She was looking at me again. Her gaze was uncomfortable. There was something in it that reminded me of my former master, the ancient lord Feathered in Black. Like his, her eyes seemed like those of someone much younger than she was, clear, sharp and bright with a feral kind of intelligence, and the old woman had the chief minister’s way of staring straight at me that was rare among Aztecs.
‘My son never married. Unheard of, isn’t it? Especially for a successful warrior. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t have had his pick of the girls in this parish: I knew that much even when he was still at the House of Youth, before he’d taken his first captive. But Red Macaw didn’t want to know. He never showed the least sign of wanting to give his stone axe to the Masters of Youth, though he could certainly have afforded to.’ The stone axe was the symbolic price a man paid for his release from the House of Youth, traditionally presented at a costly feast, laid on at his family’s expense, when he wanted to marry. ‘I heard rumours – people were whispering about him, in the end, asking if he might be… might be a…’ She found it hard to say the word, even now. Sodomy was a capital crime, punished by burning alive, and a great disgrace.
‘But he wasn’t, was he?’ Lily said.
‘No. No, it wasn’t that. It was a woman.’
‘Star.’
‘I didn’t understand it at first – not for years,
