Reluctantly, I drew away from Lily. ‘All right,’ I said, between clenched teeth. ‘I’ll come. But I’ll need a sword. And can’t you at least rustle up some more men?’
‘Yaotl!’ Lily cried. ‘You can’t! They’ll kill you!’
I forced myself to look at her face, to see how her eyes suddenly misted over with shocked, angry tears. ‘No, they won’t.’ I was not sure myself which of us I was trying to convince.
‘What’s got into you? Just now you were all for running away!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said helplessly. ‘I just remembered what my mother said, about having made this mess and having to help clear it up. And you said I couldn’t keep running forever.’
‘I can’t fetch any more men,’ Kite said. ‘There’s no time. If there are any more of these prints, we need to find them before they’re cleaned up. But I’d already thought about arming you. Spotted Eagle’s bringing his father’s sword for you.... Speaking of which, here he is.’
‘Yaotl,’ Lily urged, ‘you can’t do this! I won’t let you!’
I could not meet her eyes a second time. ‘You will, though,’ I muttered. ‘You know I have to... Spotted Eagle, what is that?’
The young man hurried out of his father’s house. He looked different from when I had seen him before, although the change was subtle. The unblooded youth’s tuft of hair still marked the back of this head, and his cloak was still the plain one of a man who had yet to take a captive, but something about the lad himself was altered. The petulance that I had associated with him at first was gone, and even his grief seemed to have been submerged for the moment. A grin like a coyote’s was fixed on his face, and he moved with the brisk assurance of the hunter who has seen his prey.
‘Your sword, Yaotl.’ Answering my question, he presented the weapon to me with flourish. ‘Look after it! Father wants it back!’
He pressed it into my hands. I felt my fingers close around the handle, without my willing it, as I stared at the thing and wondered whether I had made the right decision after all.
I wondered what use Handy had put the sword to in the years since he had last wielded it in battle. Perhaps he had employed it as a digging stick, or to bang wooden pegs into the walls of his house, because it was grimy, and the blades set into the shaft bore dark stains whose origin I preferred not to guess at. The shaft itself had a deep split running along half its length, and the two rows of blades were like an old man’s teeth, because most were broken, loose and wobbly and many were missing altogether.
Spotted Eagle caught some of my consternation. ‘It may not look much,’ he said in a hurt tone. ‘But it’s won a few fights, and you won’t find one better balanced.’
I twisted it experimentally, trying to remember what a sword ought to feel like. Like all priests I had trained for a while in a House of Youth, and I had gone to war, but it had all been a long time ago. Still, the boy was not wrong: the handle ended in a heavy wooden knob that balanced the long, flat shaft perfectly. If I did not drop it or cut my own arm off with what was left of its edge, it would be better than nothing.
I glanced at the young man’s own weapon, its blades forming a single, unbroken line along either side of its immaculately polished shaft, and said sardonically: ‘I’ll treat it like it was my own.’
Lily took a step towards me. ‘Yaotl, please,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t order you not to go.’ Of course not; she had too much pride. ‘I’m asking you. You’ve done enough!’
I jerked my head roughly in the direction of Handy’s house. ‘Look after them in there,’ I said hoarsely. ‘They need help. And don’t worry. The chances are we won’t find anything and we’ll be back before nightfall!’
Spotted Eagle said: ‘Oh, I hope you’re wrong.’
5
As Kite had said, we followed the most direct route to the water’s edge. It was no great distance but the walk appeared to last an age. We kept halting while one or other of us squatted to peer at some mark on the canal path in front of us that would invariably turn out not to resemble a footprint, but it was not just that that slowed us down. We knew we were heading into peril; a greater peril perhaps than any of us had faced, since we did not know even whether our enemy was human. With every step I felt as though my feet had been glued to the ground. I supposed it might be like this for a sacrificial victim on the climb towards the summit of the great pyramid, where the fire priest and his flint knife awaited him. Even the bravest man could not know for certain what might lie beyond the moment when his heart was torn out: was it to be rebirth as one of the morning sun’s companions, as the priests told us; or nothing; or something worse than oblivion?
These thoughts troubled me until the moment when I realised that there were no longer any houses on either side of us, but only greenery: tall reeds, and beyond them taller willow trees, planted in rows and carefully lopped so as to shore up the edges of the fields without denying the sun’s warmth to the crops. Ahead of us, the path narrowed and petered out, becoming a rough bank against which green water lapped sluggishly.
From somewhere nearby, a crow cackled. Some larger bird, probably a heron, took flight, the splash of its exit from the water and the heavy beat of its wings
