I hesitated, teetering on the edge of the canal, unable in that moment to decide whether to leap across or somehow try to hide. That moment of indecision was enough for the panting, roaring, splashing creature behind me to catch me up.
‘Got you!’ he shouted, his breath like a warm wind on the back of my neck. ‘You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that!’
I could only turn to stare mutely at him.
Then a dart whistled past my head.
It buried itself in the wall of the hut with a soft thump. I stared at it for a moment. Then I came to my senses and threw myself flat on the ground as a second missile soared through the air to catch the otomi on the arm.
His scream split the air around us. I thought it made the willow trees shake, although that may have been a trick of the wind. Then he was on the move, his club raised high over his head, its blades flashing, his voice shrieking in an ululating war-cry as he raced towards his unseen opponents.
I glimpsed something moving in the reeds at the edge of the plot. The otomi bore down on them. He had covered half the distance towards them before he stumbled, and I saw that he had a dart buried in his knee. Almost without breaking stride, he bent down, tore the projectile from his flesh and hurled it away.
‘Come out here, you cowards!’ he screamed. ‘Come and show yourselves!’
The only answer was a flurry of darts from whoever was concealed among those reeds. Two of them landed in the mud near where I stood, causing me to jump backwards in fright. One clipped the captain’s skull, doing him little damage but causing him to stumble. He recovered without breaking his stride, but suddenly he was running, not toward the hidden marksman, but away from him.
One enormous leap took him clear across the channel separating Handy’s plot of land from his neighbours’, and then he was gone, reduced to a bellowing, splashing presence, somewhere out there at the edge of the lake.
9
First to emerge from the edge of the field was Spotted Eagle. He ran across the muddy plot in the captain’s wake, yelling incoherently. He would have vanished into the greenery as fast as he had appeared if a strong male voice had not called him back.
The voice belonged to Quail, the fisherman. He crashed through the reads after Spotted Eagle, but unlike the young man, he was not chasing anybody. Instead he made directly for the shelter and the wounded man lying against it. He took no notice of me, dashing past the shallow pit I had been working on with barely a glance.
As Quail stooped over Kite, he shouted over his shoulder at Spotted Eagle: ‘Get over here and don’t be a fool, boy!’
The young man stood in the middle of the field, looking this way and that, clearly at a loss. ‘But he’s getting away!’
‘Good! You’ll never catch him and it’ll be the worse for you if you do. Leave him to others. This man needs help! And you, don’t just stand there, we need something to carry him with – can’t you find a mantle or a blanket in that shed?’
The last words were thrown in my direction. I was about to splutter an indignant reply when I noticed that others were pushing the reeds aside to join us. Two were young men I did not recognise, but I was startled to see that the third was Quail’s daughter, Heart of a Flower, and even more amazed to when I realised that she was the one carrying a throwing stick. She still held a dart between her right thumb and forefinger.
Spotted Eagle thumped the soil by his feet with his sword, but he did as he was told. ‘There’s a blanket in the shelter,’ he said sulkily. I remembered that we had been intending to wrap his mother in it, but she was not likely to be needing it for warmth.
‘I’ll help,’ I said, falling into step beside the newcomers. To the girl I added: ‘That was good shooting.’
‘It was crap shooting,’ she said disgustedly. ‘I should have put his other eye out! But it’s harder than it looks when they’re running straight at you.’
Her father was looking anxiously into the policeman’s eyes. ‘I’m no curer,’ he muttered. ‘But I think he’s in a bad way. We need to get him out of here quickly.’
‘I won’t argue with that,’ I said. Spotted Eagle beat me to the doorway and I let him go to look for the blanket while I added: ‘How did you get here? What happened?’
‘We heard someone shouting and blundering about among the rushes. Then the boy appeared, yelling something about murderers and thieves.’
‘You didn’t see who he was following?’
Spotted Eagle came out of the shelter with the blanket. Quail grabbed it. ‘Help me get it underneath him,’ he said to the men who had come with him. ‘We’ll use it to carry him home. Hope we can make it to the parish hall.’
‘I was following the sorcerer, I think,’ Spotted Eagle said in a low, chastened voice. ‘But he disappeared.’
‘Of course he did,’ Heart of a Flower said contemptuously. ‘If you understood the first thing about hunting you’d know better than to make all that noise! You probably ran straight past him!’
‘That’s enough,’ Quail told his daughter reprovingly. He probably thought her outburst was not quite seemly in an Aztec maiden. ‘We didn’t see him either, remember.’
‘I just did what Kite told me to do,’ Spotted Eagle said defensively. ‘Run about and make a lot of noise, he said. So when that monster appeared at the edge of the field, I did. Then I saw this movement in the reeds and went after
