I looked at him and laughed deliberately. I was still trying to sound scornful; moreover I wanted to keep the relief out of my voice.
‘Tell me, O Wise One,’ I said sarcastically, ‘just how many Tepanecs does it take to subdue two Aztecs, then?’
‘Here …!’ One of the young men next to me put a hand on my arm, warning me to show more respect, but the priest quelled us both with a look.
‘One,’ he assured me, before stepping through the crowd into the space at its centre.
He walked straight up to the captain. The Otomi glared at him with his sole eye.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’ demanded the priest.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘A servant of Tezcatlipoca.’
The captain’s answer was to stoop briefly to pick up his cruel-looking sword and then bring himself up to his full height, with the weapon raised so that its blades flashed in the evening sunlight.
‘A servant of Tezcatlipoca, eh? Well, the warriors of Huitzilopochtli tell you to mind your own business!’ he roared, shoving the priest in the chest with his free hand.
It was not a hard blow, merely a warning. The Tepanec stumbled back but kept his balance. Nonetheless, it was too much for the spectators. Men surged forward, baying and growling. Elbows and knees barged me aside, almost knocking me over as the youths around me, their pride wounded by my taunts, rushed in to defend their priest.
For a moment there was so much shouting and scuffling that I could not work out what was going on. I heard hoarse cries,the thump and slap of feet and fists striking flesh and the sharper sound they made upon bone, and yelps of pain. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the flash of sunlight on the blades of the captain’s sword. A jet of red liquid shot through the air, droplets falling hot on my cheeks, and someone squealed in pain.
After that there came a long, despairing wail, a cry of sheer terror in a voice that reminded me of my master’s steward’s. Then, gradually, all became quiet again.
Standing on tiptoe, staring between heads and over hunched, tense shoulders, I was able to make out just enough to establish what had happened.
The Otomi had the priest by the throat. He seemed to have forgotten the boatman, at least for now. He was not holding his sword: someone must have managed to wrench it from his grasp.
Fox stood with his back pressed against his captain’s. If they were not a pair, they were prepared to fight as one now, defending each other to the death and taking as many of the enemy with them as they could. There was still a small space around them, no man daring to come within arm’s length.
The steward was easier to see because three of the Tepanecs were holding him up like a trophy. His eyes and mouth were wide open with terror.
‘Well?’ The captain’s voice was tense but steady. He jerked his terrible head towards the steward. ‘Never mind him. He’s nothing. Which of you is going to be first? You’ll have this priest’s blood on your hands!’
A kind of shudder went through the crowd, but nobody moved.
Then the priest spoke, his voice hoarse through being forced out past the Otomi’s almost lethal grip.
‘Nothing lives for ever on Earth,’ he gasped. ‘You can killme, and my ashes will be buried with a dog to guide me through the Nine Hells, and I’ll find my resting place in the Land of the Dead. But then you’ll just be torn to pieces, and the pieces dumped outside the city like garbage, for the vultures and coyotes to pick over. You’ll never rest, and your families will never be able to stop mourning you.’
The captain had no answer to that that I heard. I did not see the grip on the priest’s throat slacken, but I did not see any of the men around him move either.
I was not looking at them any more. Before the priest had finished speaking, I was running as fast as I could towards the shore of the lake and the causeway that would take me back to the city.
4
It was dark by the time I reached Pochtlan. I ran much of the way. In my anxiety to put as much distance between myself and the Otomies I did not stop even to urinate. When I finally stumbled, gasping, to a halt, beside the canal that skirted the merchants’ parish, I was desperate.
I might simply have used the canal, but Aztec modesty prevented me. For a moment I hesitated, shifting my weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, until I saw the solution. A wooden bridge spanned the waterway and at the far end of the bridge, in the featherworkers’ parish of Amantlan, stood a wicker shelter.
I trotted towards it. Others might have hesitated, mindful of tales of demons that caught men during night-time trips to the latrines, hideous female dwarfs whose appearance heralded sickness and death, but my need was urgent enough to overcome such fears.
The frost had made the bridge’s planks slippery and treacherous, forcing me to take short, shuffling steps across it, with my eyes fixed on my feet.
The bridge shook. A tremor ran up both my calves and told me I was not alone. I looked up and the next moment was fighting to keep my footing as my legs shot out from under me.
A god glared silently at me from the far end of the bridge.
I cried out in shock and dread. Even while the rational part of my mind was telling me that what I saw was easy to explain, something older was shouting it down: the terror I had known as a little child, staring up at the fearsome idols in their niches in my parents’ house, and the lore drilled into me in the House of Tears, when I had learned the harsh ways of the gods while sacrificial blood streamed from my tongue and earlobes and shins and penis.
Smoke or steam wreathed the god’s face. Glittering scales fell one over another across his skin. Long, blue-green plumes, each as stiff and sharp as a spear-point, crowned his headdress and towered over his conical fur cap. His eyes were perfect black circles, whose gaze seemed to pass over and through me as indifferently as if I were a thing so insignificant as to have no meaning in his world. Savage fangs, curved like the young Moon, guarded his yawning, ravenous mouth. There was no tongue but I thought I saw something moving inside that dark maw, something that threatened to uncoil and snap out at me with the speed of a lash.
He came towards me through a cloud that thickened and swirled as he spoke.
‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ he cried. His voice was muffled, as though coming from inside a cave.
My legs finally gave way and I toppled backward, crashing on to the hard wood with a shout of pain and fear. The bridge bucked under me. For a moment I lay staring straight up at the stars, with my arms spread out and my palms flat on the floor.
Whimpering with fright, I struggled to get to my feet, falling backward twice before my hands and heels got any sort of a purchase on the slippery wood. I sat bolt upright and stared wide eyed at the empty bridge ahead of me and the entirely empty road beyond it.
I blinked several times to clear my vision.
There was nothing to see.
I hauled myself to my feet, slipping over more than once, and half ran, half slid to the end of the bridge, careless of the fact that a false step could send me tumbling into the canal’s icy water. I staggered on to dry land.
The waters of the canal, hidden from view by its high banks, lapped loudly. I wondered at the splashing sound for a moment, as there was no wind and nothing to disturb the water’s surface, but then I thought that in the empty silence of the night all noises would be magnified, and concentrated on what I could see.
I was in Amantlan now. The featherworkers’ homes stood in a single uninterrupted row in front of me. None showed any sign of wakefulness and there were no dark passageways between them that a man or a god could be hiding in.