Just a few months previously events had happened to alter our relationship. It had come as a shock to each of us to find anything in the other to respect, let alone like. But what I saw now was even more shocking. One thing I would never have expected, even in the days when he would hold my face under water with the sincere intention of drowning me, was to see him showing fear of any human enemy.
‘You can beat him, though, can’t you?’ I said cautiously.
He looked up with wide open eyes, not troubling to conceal his nervousness, which if I had thought about it I might have taken as a compliment of sorts. ‘I hope so,’ he said quietly. ‘But the truth is, Yaotl, I’m not sure. I’m not young, and I can’t pretend I’m as fast as I used to be.’
‘You’re a match for men half your age,’ I countered, because it happened to be true.
‘Probably I am. But the otomi isn’t half my age. He’s got the speed still, and the experience, and the guts…’
‘He’s mad,’ I pointed out.
That provoked another bark of mirthless laughter. ‘Mad! Yaotl, you don’t know the half of it! Did you ever hear what happened to him?’
Something in the way he posed the question made me shiver. I found my knuckles tightening around the pole, and had to force myself to loosen their grip, to let the long wooden shaft trail lazily in our wake, as it should if we were not to crash into the side of the canal.
Lion went on: ‘I’ve been making some enquiries, asking about in the warrior houses. I thought there must be some veterans who knew of him. And it turned out there were plenty, but nobody who’d own up to being a friend of his, or having had much to do with him. Even his fellow berserkers – the other otomies and the shorn ones – even they looked away when I mentioned him, as if he were some kind of embarrassment to them.’
‘But you found someone eventually,’ I prompted.
‘Oh yes. I found out who he was. And how he got his wound.’
‘I always assumed he was in a fight. I often wondered what happened to the man who lost it.’
‘No. It wasn’t that. Let me tell you, Yaotl, if you think you’re scared of him now, just wait till you hear the story!’
Lion had heard the tale in the House of Song, from a grizzled veteran who was too old to do anything now but lend his cracked voice to the verses our warriors chanted nightly, to keep our enemies in bad dreams. And this old man in turn had heard it from a prisoner of war: a warrior from Cholola, whose cage he had been guarding for a few days before the man was taken to the summit of the great pyramid to be sacrificed.
Cholola was an independent city beyond the mountains to the East, one that the Aztecs had never subdued. They spoke the Nahuatl language, as we did, but like the Texcalans and the Huexotzincans, they were our implacable foes. We could not conquer them but fought them regularly, in what we called the flowery wars: formal clashes where both sides would test the mettle of their young men, honing their skills and giving them the chance to take a distinguished captive or earn the honour of a flowery death at the top of the enemy’s pyramid.
Montezuma had sent an emissary there once, a young warrior named Pizotzin.
What his message had been, Lion’s informant could not say, but it had not been well received. The Chololans planned to emphasise their rejection of it by sending Pizotzin home alive, but without either his hands, or the skin of his face and arms.
The Chololan prisoner had been one of those present when the mutilation had begun.
‘He planned it. That’s what’s so terrifying, do you see?’ My brother spoke in hushed tones. ‘He lay there, on that stone bench, with five men holding him down, and he knew that once they’d started – once they’d begun to peel the flesh off his face – he knew they’d relax, loosen their grip, because they’d think he was so helpless from pain and fear that they wouldn’t have to hold him any more.’
The otomi had not acted until half his face was hanging off by a thread of twisted skin. Only then, when any normal man would have fainted dead away and his guards had begun to laugh and joke among themselves at the expense of the tormented thing in their midst, had he made his move.
‘Apparently it all happened too fast to follow. There was this loud crack which was someone’s jaw breaking, and that seems to have been the man who held the obsidian knife. Then everyone was trying to grab Pizotzin, but they were getting in each other’s way, and by then there was so much blood no-one could get a grip. The old man I spoke to said that, to hear this prisoner he was guarding talk, you couldn’t rightly see what was happening, and in the end the Chololan just did what everyone else did: he ran for it. It was the shock. And funnily enough, no-one held it against him afterwards. What had happened was so bizarre that his fellow warriors all assumed it was sorcery, and there’s no defying that.’
‘How did the otomi – Pizotzin? – get away afterwards?’ I asked.
‘It seems nobody was prepared to try to stop him,’ said Lion grimly. ‘And is that surprising? There can’t have been more than one man roaming
