Kite walked along the path as far as he could go without wading. He turned this way and that, brandishing his sword. ‘See anything?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing,’ I called. I was still on dry land and intended to stay there. ‘I guess we were too late. Or this is the wrong place altogether. Since we didn’t find any footprints, we don’t know they were ever here, do we?’’
Spotted Eagle was standing next to me. I saw him pouting like a child who has been told he has had all his ration of bread for the day. ‘We can’t go back empty handed,’ he objected. ‘Let’s at least look around.’
My enthusiasm for a confrontation with my enemies was starting to wane, now that I was standing on the edge of their territory. The end of my broken sword drooped as I gazed vainly at the green walls around me and wondered what might be peering back at me, unseen, through the cracks in them.
Kite took as step forward, planting his foot noisily into the thick, murky water. ‘We’d better look around. Can either of you suggest where?’ He spoke abruptly, making his frustration obvious.
I watched the muck swirling ponderously around his ankles.
The sight of it reminded me of something my brother had mentioned a few days before.
When I looked up again, I saw the same willows and tall rushes as before, hiding everything else except the malodorous water and the clear blue sky. However, this time they looked different. I had lived here, briefly, in the time when I had lived by scraping scum off the surface of the lake. So if this was my enemy’s territory, then it had been mine too.
I knew how life was lived in the marshes; what the necessities were, and where they were to be found. Perhaps sorcerers and their tame monsters had different needs from those of men, but I doubted it. As I thought about it further, I saw one need that a dancer with dead woman’s forearm might have that was unlike a normal man’s. Then I remembered a conversation in Atlixco marketplace and saw how that need might have been met, out here at the waterlogged edge of the city.
I clutched the sword more tightly. If you are here for a fight, Yaotl, then get it over with, I told myself. Aloud I said: ‘I can tell you where to go, but Spotted Eagle will have to show us how to get there.’
We splashed through mud that clung to our calves and ankles, clambered over slimy banks, and picked our way gingerly over fields that smelled as though they had been manured recently.
Eventually we found ourselves at the edge of one particular square plot, a pile of neglected, churned-up mud with a tumbledown shelter at one corner.
Kite, Spotted Eagle and I stood waist-deep in the waters of a narrow channel, each cowering behind a different willow, and peeped cautiously around the narrow tree trunks. ‘You’re sure this is the place?’ I said in a loud whisper.
‘Of course.’ Spotted Eagle sounded unhappy. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t know my father’s plot? Though it doesn’t look like it did last time I saw it.’
‘I’d say it hasn’t been touched in years,’ muttered Kite.
‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ I repeated what Quail, the fisherman, had told me the previous day, when he had mentioned seeing somebody working here. ‘And look at the shelter.’
It was the only building in sight, a crude round hut with a thatched roof. The thatch was ragged and threadbare at best and in places great dark rents were visible. However, some effort seemed to have been made to fill the holes in with crude patches made of the broad, flat leaves of maguey plants. It would not remain habitable for long, at least in the rainy season, but then, I knew it was not intended to.
The hut, where Handy stored his tools and anything else he needed from day to day, had been fixed up to meet the most basic need of any dweller in the marshes: somewhere more or less dry to lay his head.
I heard a catch in Spotted Eagle’s voice. ‘Are they there now?’
Kite observed: ‘There’s no smoke.’
‘Around here, that proves nothing,’ I pointed out. ‘How easy do you think it is to start a fire in this muck?’
‘I don’t understand how it’s got into this state,’ Spotted Eagle complained. ‘The field looks like a herd of wild pigs has been rooting around in it! How could my father have let it go like this? And what happened to that neighbour Quail mentioned? I can’t imagine who that would have been – most men are too busy minding their own plots to worry about ours.’
The set of the young man’s jaw and the firmness with which he gripped his sword belied the pain and disappointment in his voice. I took a deep breath before I spoke again, knowing that the disappointment at least would be short lived: he was about to find out that there was much worse to come. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but Quail was mistaken. The man he saw wasn’t digging over the soil. He was burying something.’
‘What do you mean?’ Spotted Eagle asked.
Kite interrupted me before I could reply. ‘We’d better go and look,’ he said briskly, ‘but I want this area scouted first. Spotted Eagle, you circle the plot from the left. Keep out of sight and keep quiet. If you see anything you don’t like, then first, you run away, and second, you yell. Otherwise we meet up by the shack in the corner. Got that? Go!’
For a moment the young man merely stared at the policeman; but the tone of command, so much like what he must have heard many times from his instructors at the House of Youth, proved irresistible. Without a word he turned and began wading
