‘No footprints at all,’ Fox said. ‘There was a frost two nights ago, and it’s exposed here, so the ground would have been too firm.’ He shot me a challenging look. ‘So where did they go next?’
I lowered my eyes. Fox was, as usual, right: the earth here offered neither a clue nor, which was more to the point, anything I could manufacture a clue out of. I thought about the trees on the hill above us. The idea of leading these men into the woods and losing them there was tempting, until I imagined myself treed among them, perched on a high bough, a helpless target for Fox’s throwing-stick and spear.
‘Your men have already searched the woods,’ I said to the captain. He grunted his agreement. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been the first place I’d have looked. Maybe they rested up there for the night, or maybe not — but either way they’d have moved on. Now the question is, where?’ I was aware of my fingers rubbing one of my torn earlobes, an old nervous habit. I was trying to look like a man concentrating fiercely, while in reality my mind had suddenly gone blank.
The man we were really following, my master’s errant boatman — where had he gone? Where would I have gone, in his position?
The captain grinned at me. ‘You’re going to tell us where — aren’t you?’
I glanced helplessly at Handy, just because his was the least unfriendly face I could see. The muscles of his jaw were oddly contorted: if our situation had not been so desperate, I might have thought he was trying not to laugh. Then he saw me looking at him. His expression froze for a moment. The corners of his mouth drooped dejectedly. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something, and, with his voice faltering only a little, he spoke up.
I might have wept with relief. He was my friend, after all. At the very least, however afraid he was of the Otomies and however annoyed he was with me for getting him involved with them, the stubborn commoner was probably more angry about being bullied by the captain.
‘They wouldn’t be out here at all,’ Handy said. ‘If they stayed in the open you’d hunt them down in no time. It wouldn’t take a squad of warriors much longer to flush them out of the trees if they tried hiding out on the hill. They both know what old Black Feathers is like, don’t they?’
‘They do.’ I picked up his train of thought. ‘They’d be expecting a regiment to come after them, and they’d know the warriors would chop the whole forest down if they had to before they stopped looking. So they can’t be hiding here.’ When I saw the solution, I had to suppress a grin: it was so elegant I almost believed it myself. ‘On the other hand, they can’t have run very far, can they? Not with one of them carrying the other. So …’
The captain twisted his sword threateningly. The shards of obsidian sunk in its shaft flashed as the sunlight caught them,and his own eyes glittered as he watched them. When he spoke he seemed to be talking to the weapon, as though reassuring it that it would have work to do yet.
‘So what you are telling me is that the men we’re after can’t be running away and they can’t be hiding either. What, then? They just vanished? Are they sorcerers? Did they turn themselves into moles and burrow into the soil? Are they down there now, laughing at us?’
He drove the blunt end of the shaft into the ground. It struck the earth with a ‘thump’ that seemed to reverberate in the open field’s empty silence, and when he let the weapon go, it stood upright unsupported.
‘Somebody,’ he reminded me, ‘is going to pay for all this. If these men are lost …’
‘They’re not sorcerers,’ I assured him hastily. ‘I didn’t say they weren’t hiding. I just said they would not be hiding out here.’ I glanced quickly at Handy again: he was looking at his feet, no doubt wondering whether he had been right to take my side.
I took a deep breath. I might live or die by my next few words. But I saw what I had to do. I could not fight the Otomies, nor could I run away from them. I had to take them somewhere where they could not hurt me no matter how angry and frustrated they got and where I would not need legs like a roadrunner’s to outpace them. I had to lure them on to my own ground. I thought wistfully of the city I could not see, out on the lake, hidden by the tall rushes. I imagined its vast, bustling crowds, its networks of narrow streets and canals, the baffling mazes of its marketplaces, the refined manners of its people, most of whom could admire a man like the captain from afar but would go out of their way to avoid talking to him. I could have lost the warriors there in no time.
My own city was beyond my reach, but there were others.
‘Where’s the nearest large town?’ I asked innocently.
The captain got Fox to draw a rough map in the dirt with the point of his harpoon.
‘Say this is Chapultepec,’ he began, digging a small hole.
‘Don’t bother putting the little villages in,’ I said helpfully. ‘They wouldn’t go near those. Everybody knows everybody else, so they’d spot strangers straight away, and they’d tell you about them as soon as you asked just to get rid of you. Telpochtli and the boy would know that.’ I knew there was no point in my trying to hide in a village either, for the same reason.
Fox glowered at me. ‘Right. Here’s the lake …’
‘I think the shoreline should come out further west than that …’
‘Shut up. This is a map, not a work of bloody art. How far could they have gone? I need to know how big an area to cover.
I thought about that: the bigger the better, as far as I was concerned, since it meant the Otomies would have to divide themselves between more towns. ‘Hard to say …’
‘You told us they rested up the first night and we know one of them was too lame to walk.’ The captain’s voice was subdued, for him. He was clearly thinking about how he was going to keep control over his men if he had to disperse them widely over the countryside. ‘Even if he was walking by yesterday morning he won’t have been going very fast. He won’t be up for a climb either, so we can forget anywhere very high up. They certainly haven’t left the valley.’
Fox drove his harpoon repeatedly into the ground, reciting the name of a town with every blow. ‘Coyoacan, Mixcoa, Atlacuihuayan, Popotla, Tlacopan, Otoncalpolco, Azcatpotzalco …’
‘We have to search all of them?’ the captain asked in a disgusted voice.
‘I would,’ I said, ‘but if you go into any of them mob handed you’ll just attract attention and frighten your quarry off. Send a couple of men to each …’
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘And if you were our runaways, which town would you pick?’
‘The biggest,’ I said honestly.
‘Right.’ He looked briefly down at Fox’s map. ‘You and I are off to Tlacopan, then. They,’ he added with a glance at Handy and the steward, ‘can come with us. So can Fox. The rest of you split up how you like: two to each town and a couple to stay here in reserve. Let’s go!’
3
So we set off for Tlacopan — the captain, Fox, Handy, the steward and I.
It was going to take us the best part of the afternoon to reach it, but as I kept assuring my companions, it was the largest and most important town on the western side of the valley, and so easily the best prospect as our quarry’s hiding place.
Most of the journey was undertaken in silence. We had little to say to each other in any case, and every reason to keep our voices down. Although we avoided towns and there were not many people about in the fields, no part of the valley was ever quite empty and there was always the possibility that rumours of our approach would run ahead of us. It did not help that we all so obviously came from the great city at the centre of the lake.