5
Gentle Heart may not have been based at the House of Pleasure, but she was well enough known there for one of the other women to be able to tell us where she lived. Lily, of course, had been given the same information.
We ran out of the building, under the astonished gaze of the guards at the entrance, and scrambled into the first canoe for hire that came past. The boatman’s jaw dropped when he took in my brother’s appearance. His amazement can only have increased when he heard the Guardian of the Waterfront’s barked directions. Still, he seized his pole and set to with a will when Lion named the price he was willing to pay to be taken to Gentle Heart’s house as quickly as ever he could go.
‘Whoever attacked Slender Neck – it must have been either Cactus or Gentle Heart,’ I gasped, as soon as I had got my breath back. ‘One of them must be the sorcerer. They’ll be in it together.’
Beside me, Handy sat stiffly in the bottom of the canoe. The vessel pitched and rocked as the boatman wove in and out between other craft, bumping into a few that responded too slowly to Lion’s demands to get out of the way. The big commoner seemed not to notice the movement. ‘He was in my house,’ he muttered. ‘Both of them were.’
‘One of them poisoned Slender Neck, in order to leave the coast clear for Gentle Heart.’ I was trying to piece together what must have happened while I talked. ‘Once she was out of the way, you were bound to send to the House of Pleasure for a replacement. So Cactus stationed himself where he could intercept your daughter on her way there. Gentle Heart may have already been coming to your house, but he had to make it look as if she’d been summoned. I bet he was the one who called at the House of Pleasure afterwards, just to make sure they didn’t send someone else who might have interfered with his plans.’
‘But why?’ The words broke from Handy as an anguished cry. ‘Him, I can understand, if he was a sorcerer: he’d have had a use for her arm, at least. But why did she do it? And why us?’
‘I don’t know.’ I admitted. ‘He may have found her down on her luck and offered her a chance to make some money – a share of whatever he stole, perhaps.’ There was another possibility, of course: the otomi captain could have recruited both of them. But then how, I wondered, had they all got to know of each other?
Lion had been listening to our talk, in intervals between shouting at passing boats and barking orders to his boatman. ‘What did they do to Slender Neck?’ he asked.
I had learned a good deal of medicine during my training as a priest. ‘What she described sounded a bit like a rattlesnake bite. Cactus must have a supply of the venom.’
Lion said: ‘I came across one of these once, in the broken country to the South. Horrible big thing, must have been as long as I am tall.’ He shuddered. ‘Never saw anyone killed with one before, though! How did he get hold of it? How did he use it?’
‘Catching them is an art,’ I said. ‘I suppose it’s one a sorcerer would learn, if he had a use for the venom. As for how you use it: I guess you’d have to be close, as close as whoever attacked Slender Neck was. I suppose you press the jaw closed on your victim’s skin and venom flows through the fangs, even if the snake’s dead.’ I had learned a lot of curious things at the House of Tears, including enough about rattlesnakes to be grateful that I had never met one. ‘It’s not the most reliable way of killing anyone, or the quickest. Slender Neck survived, obviously. But it would have put her out of action for a while, which is probably all her attacker needed.’
‘You make it sound as if Cactus might be a genuine sorcerer after all,’ Lion said reproachfully.
‘I know. I don’t understand it, but that poison came from somewhere.’
‘And Star? Was that poison, too?’
‘It must have been the herbs. Cactus offered these herbs to Slender Neck and she didn’t like the way they smelled. I suppose that was his initial plan: to get Star’s own midwife to administer the poison for him.’
The canoe gave a sudden lurch, forcing me to break off and clutch the side to avoid being tipped out, as a shower of abuse gushed over us from the barge full of seed corn we had nearly rammed.
As I tried to recover my train of thought an idea occurred to me. ‘Poison… It wasn’t just Star and Slender Neck, you know. He tried to poison you too.’ I was looking at Handy.
The commoner returned my look speechlessly.
‘He was going to push some remedy onto you, when your child was buried. I told him not to, and he probably gave up because he didn’t think you’d take it anyway. I should think it would have killed you pretty quickly if you had.’
‘You think he tried to kill Handy as well? Why would he have wanted to do that?’ Lion asked. ‘And what about those two men of lord Feathered in Black’s? We thought all that was on account of you, if you remember. Why would Cactus or Gentle Heart want you dead? Neither of them knew you.’
‘Maybe Red Macaw put him up to it.’ The look on Handy’s face had not changed but his knuckles were white with tension.
‘Why?’ Lion posed the obvious question.
‘He was jealous. He wanted me and Star dead, because he couldn’t have her. He wanted Yaotl and Spotted Eagle dead, because you helped bury her and he couldn’t. So he got Cactus to do his dirty work for him – or
