He had thought he had seen a god. Cihuacoatl, that most feared of goddesses, She of the Serpent Skirt, whose voice spelled doom to all who heard it, had called out to him out of the darkness.
The apparition had, as it happened, a perfectly mundane explanation: but for him, a typically superstitious warrior, a man who feared no human enemy but could be transfixed by an owl’s call or the sight of a badger, mundane explanations did not exist. He had fled, gibbering, into the night. I had imagined that might be the last I would see of him.
I abandoned my prone position to rise to my knees. My former master watched me doing it but said nothing.
‘You think he’s given up trying to get to me directly,’ I said slowly. ‘He’s going to get his revenge on my family instead. And Handy…’
‘He has a grudge against him too, I gather, and of course he knows the commoner is a friend of yours.’
‘How are you going to stop him?’ I demanded. ‘You have to catch him before anyone else does. Because if they do, and they start asking questions, it could be a bit awkward, couldn’t it?’
‘Assuming they can take him alive, yes. Some of the tasks I gave him and his men to do were a little, well, unorthodox. And he lacks a certain delicacy of manner, which is very necessary in an otomi warrior, but it can be taken too far.’ He glanced sideways at the king, who sat looking straight ahead, his lips compressed in a grim expression. No doubt he was thinking of the havoc the captain had wreaked in his own realm. ‘If it became known in the wrong quarters that I had been...’ He hesitated as if searching for the right expression.
‘ “Encouraging” him?’ I suggested. ‘I can see the consequences might be a bit awkward. Fatal, even, if “the wrong quarters” happened to be anywhere near Montezuma!’
‘Quite so. But as to how I stop him… Well, now we’re coming to the point. I need your help.’ He leaned forward as he said this, gripping the arms of his chair and talking very slowly and carefully in his eagerness to be understood. ‘Your help,’ he repeated, ‘in exchange for your life.’
I could only stare at him while my mind tried to grapple with what I was hearing. Surely, I thought, this must be some cruel joke. It sounded as though the chief minister were offering me some sort of deal, but the notion of lord Feathered in Black being anything less than ruthlessly, violently single-minded in his quest for vengeance was too surreal to bear. Less surprising to find that the gods had reversed the order of night and day or replaced the mountains with rolling hills.
It was Lily who spoke, while I was still trying to remember how my tongue worked. ‘You want Yaotl to find the captain for you?’ She had levered herself up on her elbows to glare defiantly at the old man on the chair, and she did not take her eyes off him even as I unthinkingly helped her up into a kneeling position. ‘Why? You have enough men of your own you can call on. Why don’t you just send them after him?’
‘Because if he’s hiding where I think he is – at the edge of the lake, among the marshes and the chinampa fields – then it would take an army to flush him out. It’s a labyrinth there, as you well know. And I can’t send an army. I’d have to tell far too many people exactly what they were searching for, and why!’
‘So how do you plan for me to do this, then?’ I asked.
‘Come back to Mexico,’ he replied airily. ‘Go about your normal business and wait for him to find you. A couple of my men could follow you. At a discreet distance, naturally.’
‘Discreet enough so that it takes a conveniently long time for them to get stuck in, you mean? Time enough for him to finish me off and rid you of two problems at once?’
‘Oh, you do make everything so difficult!’ old Black Feathers replied petulantly. ‘I’m sure we can come up with some way of reassuring you, and it would be well worth your while, you know. I can offer you – all of you – a lot more than just your lives. How long were you going to stay here, in Tetzcotzinco? What would it be worth to you, to be able to live here in Mexico openly? Do you really want to be exiles, or be forever skulking in the shadows, afraid someone will recognise you?’
The wheedling tone he had adopted did not impress me; but his words themselves did. I had been living on my wits ever since I had run away from him. I was tired. I wanted to stop running and hiding. And above all, I wanted to go home.
No Aztec would ever feel at home anywhere but in Mexico. In the scant few bundles of years since the war-god had brought the Aztecs to the island in the midst of the lake, shown them an eagle perched on a cactus and told them that it was to be their dwelling-place, my ancestors had turned Mexico’s marsh and rock into the greatest city in the world. They had filled it with houses, temples, palaces and gardens and surrounded it with chinampa fields, ever-fertile plots made of mud dredged from the river bed. Every street, every canal, every wall bore the stamp of my people; every plaza rang with voices chattering, cursing and laughing in the accent I knew. In Mexico I had been hunted like an animal, abused, imprisoned, tortured and threatened with death; but suddenly, now that the chief minister had shown me what my choice
