‘Thought you were going to bunk off, did you, Yaotl? Thought you’d have a nice, quiet afternoon, taking your ease in the shade of the fruit trees before a gentle stroll into Tlacopan and maybe a light snack to round off the day? Is that what you thought?’ He took two steps towards me and thrust his face close to mine. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see his fists balling, as if he was about to hit me, although they remained at his sides, no doubt because Handy was there. The commoner was not my master’s possession, and if he chose to intervene the steward could not be sure of winning either the fight or the court case that would follow.
‘We’ll see what Lord Feathered in Black has to say about your idea of obedience later,’ the steward crooned, ‘but first I think we’d better make a start, hadn’t we? Why don’t we go to the market, like your friend here said, and try asking a few questions?’
I hung my head submissively. ‘All right,’ I mumbled, ‘you’re in charge.’
I comforted myself by reflecting that the steward had nomore chance than the Otomies of getting a useful answer out of anyone here. On the other hand, I thought gloomily, as I trudged after him along the road leading into the centre of the town, I still had no idea how I was going to get away.
Get away I must, though. As I walked, my son’s knife bounced against my hip, reminding me that I had urgent business elsewhere.
To an Aztec born and raised in Mexico, Tlacopan was a strange place.
Mexico was a city of whitewashed adobe houses and courtyards, more than anyone had ever been able to count, crammed together so tightly that from the outside it was hard to tell one from another, and almost every one of them was served by a canal. We spent so much of our lives on the water that some of our children learned to paddle a canoe before they could walk. Apart from the great, broad avenues that spread out from the Heart of the World in each of the Four Directions, most of our roads were narrow paths. Our fields lay on the outskirts of the city, on artificial islands made of mud dredged from the bottom of the lake, and they throbbed with activity all year round because their permanently damp soil could bear fruit even at the height of the dry season.
How different were the towns on the mainland! We found ourselves sauntering along wide, dusty streets, between expansive plots that would be full of maize, amaranth, beans, squash, sage or chillies by the end of summer but which now lay largely empty. In the middle of each plot stood a house, its walls stouter than we were used to, since the people here had no bridges they could pull up in the event of an attack.
‘What’s that smell?’ Handy wrinkled his nose. ‘Don’t they empty their privies around here?’
‘What do you expect?’ the steward rasped. ‘Barbarian scum!’
‘They can’t help it,’ I said indulgently. ‘They don’t have boats to take it away, like us. They have to spread it straight on to the fields or carry it all the way down to the lake.’
The steward made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat.
I found myself looking anxiously at the few people we passed, and then at my companions, in case the steward’s obvious contempt for the locals somehow showed. I need not have worried, however, since after a day wandering around in the marshes, we looked less like the all-conquering masters of the One World than a little party of bedraggled peasants.
‘I suppose the market must be near the sacred precinct,’ the steward said. ‘So we’ll make for that pyramid.’ He gestured towards the tallest building in Tlacopan, which now reared up above the trees in front of us. We would be in its shadow soon.
‘And what then?’ Handy asked.
‘We do what we were told, of course — ask around, find out if the man and boy have been seen. It wouldn’t hurt to get to them before the Otomi does!’
Handy looked enquiringly at me. I returned his gaze impassively. So far as I knew my son had never been near Tlacopan. If the steward wanted to waste his time searching for him here, that was fine by me.
‘Let’s go, then,’ I said. ‘We might even find your old woman and her gophers on the way!’
The pyramid loomed ever taller as we approached it. Soon we found ourselves looking up at it between the branches of the trees around us, its bulk like a great shadow thrown across half the sky, blotting out the Sun.
‘Nearly there,’ said Handy to no one in particular. ‘Where’s the royal palace, though? I thought that faced the sacred precinct.’
‘You’re looking at it, I think,’ I told him. ‘They don’t build on the sort of scale we’re used to here.’
In front of us stood a low wall with a building beyond it. It was the sort of house a well-to-do family from Tenochtitlan or Tlatelolco might have lived in, a long, single-storey affair with a low thatched roof. It sprawled over more ground than the houses we were used to but to our eyes it had little else to distinguish it. Homely sounds came from behind the walls: women’s voices, children chanting a nursery rhyme, the repetitive clacking of weavers using back-strap looms.
‘What do you expect?’ I asked, as Handy and the steward gaped. ‘We take the spoils of war and the king in there, he gets whatever Montezuma thinks he can spare him. Tlacopan is supposed to get a fifth of the proceeds of the Empire, but I bet if you looked in a tribute warehouse here you’d find it was half empty.’
‘So they probably don’t like us very much,’ muttered the steward. ‘So what? Who does? Where’s the marketplace?’
‘Follow the road round the corner of the wall,’ I suggested. ‘Everybody seems to be coming from that direction. I suppose trading’s over for the day.’ I looked quickly up at the sky and frowned. ‘Funny, it’s early yet.’
‘They’re not going home,’ Handy said. ‘They’re running away from something!’
Perhaps forty people were coming along the road straight towards us. They were women, their brightly patterned skirts bunched in their hands as their knees flashed beneath their hems, their blouses flapping like paper streamers in the wind, and children, naked under their billowing cloaks, and a few men wearing only breechcloths, their untrimmed hair streaming wildly behind them.
‘Off the road!’ I snapped. ‘They’ll mow us down!’
We darted out of the way just in time to let the little group surge past. None of them spared us a glance.
‘What’s going on?’ asked the steward.
‘Here come some more,’ Handy said. ‘Why don’t you stop one and ask?’
The steward looked at us both indecisively, as a second wave of fugitives bore down on us. Then, with a sudden access of courage, he darted into the streaming crowd and hauled out the smallest child he could find.
‘You!’ he barked at the kicking, squealing infant. ‘What’s all this? What are you running from?’
‘Aztecs!’
The cry of alarm seemed to convulse the crowd. It recoiled as one person, shrinking away from us like a coyote threatened with a blazing torch. One woman alone threw herself at the steward, screaming abuse and slapping his face so hard that he staggered back, before she snatched the child and ran on.
‘Funny.’ Handy stared after them while the steward, clearly dumbfounded, rubbed his cheek. ‘They all ran when they heard your voice. It must have been your accent, but I didn’t know we were that frightening!’
‘We’re not,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Something’s happening up ahead.’
I looked around me. The wall of the little palace hid the sacred precinct and the marketplace from view, and gave no clue as to what might be going on beyond it. The voices we had heard a few moments before were silent, and I imagined the women, hearing the commotion outside, abandoning their work to snatch up the children and usher them hastily indoors.