‘What about the sorcerer?’
I had to suppress a yawn. ‘We don’t have any idea who he is, even!’ I heard a rustle of cloth. Lily had lain down beside me on the sleeping mat. Without thinking I rolled over and took her in my arms, and we lay still like that, side by side, letting the warmth of each other’s bodies replace the fading heat of the fire.
Suddenly the woman mumbled into my shoulder: ‘How did they know?’
I was drifting into sleep. ‘Know what?’ I mumbled.
‘About Star. If they wanted a dead woman’s hair and forearm all along – how did they know where to find them?’
I groaned and rolled over onto my back again. ‘Sorcery, maybe?’ I suggested blearily.
‘Come to think of it, how do the captain and the sorcerer know each other?’
I frowned at the roof. ‘There has to be some connection between them, I suppose. Lord Feathered in Black could have put them in touch – Handy works for him, so old Black Feathers may well have known his wife was about to give birth. Come to think of it, I expect he could have told them where Handy’s plot of land was, too. Though the captain said something odd about my old master: something about not being afraid of him any more, about having an edge over him. So it didn’t sound as if they were working together. Maybe old Black Feathers isn’t the connection.’ I yawned. ‘Lily, I’m tired. Can we think about this in the morning?’
She had got hold of a train of thought, however, and was not about to let go. ‘What about this man Cactus?’
‘The curer?’ I grunted in surprise. ‘What about him? I can’t see him being mixed up in this. He’s just a small-time crook, a charlatan.’
‘He knows the midwife.’
It was no use, I realized: Lily was not going to let me sleep until the talk had run out. Perhaps it helped to keep her own nightmares at bay. I forced myself to think about her question. ‘You think Gentle Heart told him what had happened?’
‘I think it may have been the other way around.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She made an impatient clucking noise. ‘Think about it, Yaotl. How many children did Star have?’
‘Nine… before the one she lost.’
‘So she was well able to bear them, wasn’t she? What suddenly went wrong this time?’
‘I don’t know… any number of things.’ I frowned at her. ‘What are you saying?’ But I was beginning to understand, and the thought of it drove the last vestige of sleepiness away.
‘Suppose you’re a sorcerer. You need a charm in a hurry, because you need to break into someone’s house. That means in turn that you need a dead mother in a hurry. You don’t know of any, but you do know of a healthy woman who’s just about to drop…’
‘Now wait a moment – Lily, you can’t mean…’
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit odd, Yaotl?’ She was speaking now in an urgent whisper. ‘Star’s regular midwife is ill. In her place, this woman she’s never heard of just happens to turn up, and she dies, and then her body is stolen. The new midwife just happens to know Cactus, who calls himself a curer, but who could be a sorcerer as well. What if it isn’t all just a coincidence?’
‘But you’re saying Star was murdered!’
‘Not impossible, is it?’
‘But that’s… It can’t be right, Lily. Nobody would do a thing like that.’
‘The otomi would.’
I had no answer to that. She was right, of course. Only a madman would contemplate killing a woman in childbirth. That was like venturing into the realm of Cihuacoatl, the Snake Woman, and challenging the most feared of our goddesses to do her worst; and what kind of horrible vengeance would the dead woman’s spirit wreak when she returned to Earth?
I asked myself whether the captain truly was mad enough to risk so much for the sake of killing me. I did not want to believe it. The thought that all the grief and bloodshed I had witnessed in the last few days, from Star’s death onwards, might have been connected with me from the outset was terrifying.
I found that I was shaking. ‘Lily, if you’re right…’
I turned to towards her, to find that she had raised herself up on one elbow, and was looking down on me. There was not enough light to read her expression.
‘What do I tell Handy?’ I asked. ‘If I’d known anything like this would happen…’
‘You couldn’t have done a thing.’ Suddenly she lowered her face towards mine, and her voice became an almost silent movement in the air by my ear. ‘You couldn’t have helped. No-one could.’
‘What do we do now?’ I muttered miserably.
‘Worry about it in the morning.’
‘But…’
‘In the morning,’ she said firmly.
I felt the movement of her body next to mine on the sleeping mat. There was a sense of purpose to it, an urgency that I known before, which had nothing to do with keeping bad dreams at bay.
Then I rediscovered the wild hunger I had once found in her, that first time we had slept together. We were careful to begin with, I mindful of her hands and she of my tiredness; then we forgot about these things and just gave ourselves to each other.
Afterwards I had the best night’s sleep I had had in years.
FOUR CROCODILE
1
There was no attack on Handy’s house that night.
I did not stir until after daybreak. A wonderful smell filled my nostrils: someone was cooking tortillas on a griddle. But what had woken me up was a peculiar sound, a kind of nasal warbling that put me in mind of some creature in inexpressable pain.
Cautiously I peered out of the doorway.
Handy was in his courtyard, calling out instructions to someone who I gathered was one of his daughters: It appeared she was the one making the bread. ‘What’s that strange noise?’ I asked.
‘It’s
