Where do you want him?’ I asked, throwing the question over my shoulder like a servant carrying a wicker chest into his master’s newly-built house.
The response was the swish of a sword swinging through the air and a soft thump that might have been made by blades sinking into unresisting flesh.
I dropped the body and whirled around, shocked and indignant. ‘What are you doing? Leave him alone! I brought the body out, like you said...’ I fell silent as I saw what the captain was doing.
He was not using his club to carve pieces from the policeman’s body, as I had thought. Instead, he was standing over Star’s grave, attacking the edges of the shallow hole so as to make it bigger. ‘Get that thing over here,’ he snapped, without looking up. ‘Hurry up! And don’t leave anything behind, do you understand?’
I did what I was told.
The otomi stood aside, swinging his vicious club suggestively as I rolled what was left of Red Macaw into the shallow hole. When I went back to scrape up the mess on the ground between the grave and the shelter, I noticed that he kept looking away, glancing at the dense growth of rushes at the edge of the field as though expecting to see someone emerge from them at any moment. I stared at him in wonder. It seemed that he was nervous about something, but that was almost inconceivable: what could this man be afraid of?
‘You’re scared,’ I blurted out, unthinking.
He ignored that. ‘Now get a shovel from in there and fill the hole in!’ he barked.
‘You don’t want me to climb into it first?’
‘Oh, no.’ He prodded me with the blunt end of his sword. ‘Once Red Macaw’s hidden, I’ll start on you. I’m going to take my time over that, and I intend to make the most of it!’
When I emerged from the shelter for the last time, I was armed with a shovel. I looked at its fire-hardened wooden blade in despair. Against the captain and his obsidian-studded club, I still stood no chance.
I stood by the entrance to the hut and looked into the otomi’s only eye. It glared, unblinking, back at me. ‘Well?’ he growled.
Something made me drop the shovel. As it fell with a soft ‘plop’ at my feet, I cried: ‘Why are you doing this?’
The question did not seem to make him angry. If the twitch of his one eyebrow meant anything, it looked like bemusement. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I was right, wasn’t I? You’re afraid of something. You saw Red Macaw dead in there and it spooked you. Why?’
‘It’s nothing to you. Pick up that shovel!’ He jerked his obsidian-bladed club threateningly, and I responded by stooping towards the tool I had dropped, which lay half-buried in the mud. It came up with a loud squelching sound and heavy with stinking ooze. I shook it once, to knock some of the muck off. I hesitated before shaking it again, much less vigorously, and at the same time I looked at the captain and spoke again, picking up my train of thought in an effort to distract him.
‘You’ve got to hide this body quickly, before someone finds it. Why? You aren’t afraid of any man. You’d tell the emperor to eat his own breechcloth if you felt like it. So it’s something more than a man you’re frightened of. It’s not even lord Feathered in Black, is it?’
‘You’re the one who ought to be frightened,’ he snarled. ‘You’re about to die. If you do what you’re told it might not take as long, that’s all! And this has nothing to do with the chief minister. I’m not afraid of him, not any more. With the edge I’ve got over him now, he’d better be afraid of me!’
‘What edge?’ My thoughts were racing, as I struggled to hold everything in my head at once: the shovel in my hands, the wounded and the dead who lay around me, the monstrous, disfigured warrior and the mysterious fear that had gripped him. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ I cried. ‘That edge – that’s what’s got to you. It’s the sorcerer! You’re afraid of the sorcerer!’
He took a step towards me and jabbed me with the end of club again, hard enough this time to make me stagger backwards. ‘I told you to fill that hole in! Now pick that shovel up and dig! I can take the rest of today and all day tomorrow killing you or I can do it in a moment, understand?’
I understood, but it no longer mattered.
When he prodded me with his club, the captain and I were as close as we were going to be. It would have to do, I judged. With all my strength I thrust the shovel towards him, jerking it sharply towards his ruined face. He did not so much as blink, but a gobbet of thick mud flew from the tool’s flat blade into his one good eye.
He leaped back instinctively, howling in shock and fury. I threw the shovel at him, but did not wait to see whether it connected before turning and running blindly away.
I did not get far.
It is almost impossible to run barefoot through thick, churned-up mud. The stuff clung to my feet, relinquishing them only reluctantly with loud sucking noises. I did not know where I was going. I had had no time to think or pick a direction, instead merely turning towards the nearest canal in the vain hope of crossing it and losing myself in the fields beyond. Yet from behind me the furious roar and the splashing of massive feet striking the mud told me how futile this was,
