The lady herself appeared then. ‘Yaotl,’ she called. ‘Good, I’m glad you’re up. I’ve been helping Goose to get this household moving again. Now we’ll have fresh tortillas, and… What are you two staring at?’
For the first time since she had been rescued from king Maize Ear’s prison, Lily looked healthy, and more than healthy. Her hair had been dressed, the ends caught up and taken forward over her brow to form two horns. One of Handy’s womenfolk must have helped her with that, and with her change of clothes, into a matching skirt and blouse embroidered with blue flowers. Her skin appeared to have lost one or two of the folds and wrinkles that had grown on it lately.
Handy said: ‘Yaotl wanted to know what the noise was.’
‘Noise? I didn’t hear a noise.’
‘Never mind,’ I said hastily. ‘What are we going to do now?’
Handy said: ‘Quail and the others have gone home to rest. As soon as they’re back we’re going to retrieve my wife’s body.’ He did not sound distressed, but determined. Whatever Star’s remains meant to him, and however painful it might be for him to contemplate them, he had decided they did not belong in a muddy field. ‘I’d better go and wake my sons up.’
As soon as he had gone, Lily said: ‘Yaotl, we need to visit the marketplace.’
‘You want to look for Cactus?’
‘And Gentle Heart.’ She smiled grimly. ‘Of course we may have to ask at the House of Pleasure for her.’
‘The House of Pleasure? That will be interesting. I’ve always wondered what the inside of one of those places was like!’
I was rewarded with a playful slap: a gesture only, because of the state of her hands, but it might have led to something more, as we had the courtyard to ourselves for the moment. However, the appearance of a familiar figure at the gateway put a stop to all that. We drew apart guiltily and watched, in my case in astonishment, as my brother’s bodyguard, Ollin, stepped hesitantly into the courtyard.
He was dressed for battle, with his cloak flapping about him, his hair piled up on his head and his sword gripped firmly in his right hand. The lower parts of his legs and his sandaled feet were liberally spattered with mud. He looked uncertainly at both of us before clearing his throat with the air of someone who has something to say but no idea where to begin.
It must be bad news, I thought, and then: Oh, no, not my family!
Aloud I said: ‘What is it? What are you doing here?’
‘You’re needed, Yaotl,’ he replied abruptly. ‘At your brother’s palace. You’re to come at once.’
Lily bristled at that. ‘Who says so? Who are you to give my slave orders?’
‘He’s one of my brother’s men,’ I explained hastily. ‘Ollin, what’s happened? Not my parents, surely?’ I felt sick. It suddenly occurred to me why the captain had not attacked during the night: he had been creating mayhem elsewhere.
Ollin was still staring at Lily, probably as confused as she had been and wondering why this woman was shouting at him. He took his eyes off her reluctantly. ‘Your parents? No, nothing to do with them. It’s Handy…’
‘What are you talking about? He’s been here all night. We saw him just a moment ago.’
‘Will you let me finish?’ he snapped impatiently. ‘It’s his wife. His wife’s body, and that warrior’s, what’s his name?’
‘Red Macaw. How do you know about them?’
‘Your brother’s Guardian of the Waterfront, remember? He heard about what happened yesterday and sent some men out there to secure the site. A good thing too, since I gather the locals are all still fast asleep!’ His sneering tone was unfair, I thought, but I was not about to interrupt. ‘We were too late, though. When we reached the place – one of those sodden little patches of mud out in the middle of the lake – all we found was the smashed up remains of a hut and a hole in the ground, full of water.’
Lily and I exchanged shocked glances. ‘No bodies?’ I said weakly.
‘That’s what I told you, isn’t it? But that’s not what I’m here for. It’s not the bodies your brother wants to know about. I’m told there should have been an otomi warrior costume in that hut, but we pulled what was left of it to pieces and didn’t find so much as a thread. Now why do you suppose that is?’
The answer to the question was obvious. The captain, or the sorcerer, or both had gone back to the field to collect it. What they might have wanted with the bodies, I had no idea, but by securing the uniform the captain had made one thing plain: he had not given up. And if I knew him at all, then driving him from his hiding place would have made him more reckless than ever.
2
Ollin had brought a two-man canoe. There was no room for Lily, who was going to be left with the unenviable job of telling Handy what had happened during the night.
As befitted a man of his rank, Lion lived in a palace, a sprawling single-storey compound close to the Heart of the World, the vast sacred precinct whose temples loomed over the centre of Tenochtitlan. It lay in the shadow of the Great Pyramid with its twin temples to Tlaloc the rain god and Huitzilopochtli the war god, and when the wind was in the right direction my brother could sit in one of his courtyards and smell the incense and the sacrificial blood.
Almost before the boat had coasted to a stop beneath the palace’s stuccoed walls, Ollin and I leaped out and ran past the guards at the entrance. However, the sight that greeted us the moment we were inside made us both skid to a halt.
There were a lot of people
