I let out a long breath and watched it cloud the air in front of me and slowly disperse.
‘Vanished into thin air,’ I grunted. I felt a renewed jab of fear. I had no difficulty recognizing what I had seen. No Aztec could have mistaken it.
‘Nonsense,’ I told myself. ‘He must be around here somewhere. He’s hiding, that’s all. If I wait long enough I’ll see the bastard.’
But it sounded hollow. However hard I tried, I could not convince myself that I had not seen what others had seen: the Feathered Serpent, the Precious Twin, the Lord of the Wind.
‘Quetzalcoatl?’ I whispered. ‘Why?’
If the god of wisdom, the god who had created mankind by mixing his own blood with ground-up bones he had stolen from the Lord of the Underworld, was abroad in the city, what could this mean? The god bore the same name as the last king of the Toltecs, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, our own Emperor Montezuma’s predecessor. It had long been rumoured that theToltec king had never died, but had fled his realm vowing one day to return and reclaim what was his. Did what I had just seen somehow portend the end of Montezuma’s reign? If it did, what would come after it?
I let out a long, shuddering breath, and looked down, feeling a chill about my loins. I realized wryly that I no longer needed the latrine after all.
I discarded my breechcloth, replacing it with a strip of maguey fibre ripped from the bottom of my old cloak. Then, feeling naked and chilly but with my modesty still essentially preserved, I crossed the bridge again and went to meet the old man who had sent me the knife.
Kindly’s was the only house in Pochtlan that I knew well. Until recently he had lived here with Lily and Shining Light. Lily had lost her husband many years before on a trading venture. Since then she had run the household more or less alone. Her son had grown up, despite all her care, into a dissolute monster, and her father, the household’s nominal head, was an old man close to senility who made full use of the licence the law gave him to drink all the sacred wine he could hold.
Once, briefly, Lily and I had slaked each other’s despair and loneliness. The moment had passed, swept away like leaves on a flooding river by a tide of feelings — her care for her son, mine for my own survival — but it had left its mark. Now I found it hard to approach this house without thinking of its mistress as she had been then, and afterwards: coolly courageous in her determination to find her worthless boy, utterly broken in her grief over his body.
I swallowed once. I had no need to be nervous, I told myself. I was not entering this house as a trespasser, as I had once before. I had been summoned here. I gripped the bronzeknife and stepped over the threshold, with my head darting to left and right as if I expected to be ambushed.
Nothing moved in the shadows around me. I allowed myself to relax, until a querulous old man’s voice snapped at me out of the darkness.
‘There you are! Took your bloody time, didn’t you?’
I started. After everything I had seen and done that day, culminating in the apparition on the bridge, it was as much as I could do not to turn and run. I made myself stand still, while my breathing slowed and the pounding in my chest settled down to a normal rhythm, before I replied.
‘Kindly? Is that you?’
I was answered by a shuffling noise, a harsh growl as of someone clearing his throat and about to spit, and a shadowy movement that gradually became a little, bent figure coming into the starlight in the middle of the courtyard. It was hard to make his face out in the gloom, but even if I had not known his voice, I could have guessed who he was from the sour reek of his breath.
‘Of course it’s me. Who else would it be?’
‘What are you doing out here at this time of night?’ I demanded suspiciously. ‘Aren’t you cold?’
‘Freezing! But I don’t sleep much at night now. I heard you scampering about out here and thought I’d better take a look before you woke the rest of the household. You picked a funny time to call.’
‘You sent for me,’ I said shortly. ‘Your slave gave me this. I came as soon as I could.’
I held out the bronze knife. He waved it away.
‘I’m sorry it had to be so theatrical, but I needed to get your attention!’
I tucked the weapon back into the scrap of cloth tied around my waist. ‘You got it. Now what do you want from me?’
I heard shuffling footsteps moving slowly away.
‘Come into the kitchen.’
I followed the old man into the most important room in the house: the kitchen, the room with the hearth, whose flickering yellow flames cast deep shadows across the faces of the idols surrounding it, throwing them into stark, grotesque relief.
I had looked into this room once before, but a few things had changed. The long, tall merchant’s staff that had stood in one corner, propped up and wrapped in bloodied strips of paper — offerings against its owner’s safe return, from whatever remote corner of the World his calling might send him to — was missing. Then I remembered that the staff had belonged to Shining Light and his mother would have had it burned with his remains. Where it had stood were neat piles of goods: tobacco tubes, cocoa beans and spices, cups and plates, enough wood for a huge fire. They must have been bought for the young man’s wake.
‘Where’s Lily?’ My question came out as a croak, because my mouth had suddenly gone dry at the thought that I might see her again, that she might be sleeping or stirring just a few paces away.
‘Away,’ he said shortly. ‘Now we’ve got our merchandise back, we need to shift some of it quickly, to get some capital back into the business. She’s in Tetzcoco, for the market. She went straight there, as soon as she’d finished washing her son’s body.’
I sighed, although whether it was with disappointment or relief I could not have said myself.
‘Now, there are things I have to show you.’
The old man was pushing something into the fire. A moment later the room was filled with the bright flames and acrid, resinous fumes of a pine torch.
‘Follow me.’
He led the way slowly across the courtyard: a little man, lurching along, with the flickering torchlight catching his silver hair, and his head bowed like a hunchback’s.
As I fell into step behind him, a sharp cry sounded from somewhere near by.
It was stifled in an instant, as if someone had clapped a hand over the caller’s mouth, but it seemed to hang in the air: a shout of pain or terror, the sort of sound a very young child might make waking from a nightmare. However, the voice that uttered it had not been a child’s.
‘What was that?’ I asked in a hushed voice.
The old man did not break his stride. He had turned his head sharply in the direction of the cry but his only response was the sharp hiss of an indrawn breath, a sound of irritation rather than fear.
‘Nothing,’ he snapped, hurrying on.
I looked over my shoulder, towards where the sound had come from. I stared at the opposite corner of the courtyard, where doorways were pools of absolute blackness opening out into the surrounding gloom. Peering at them told me nothing. ‘It must have been something. Listen, I saw something tonight …’
Kindly did not answer me, and when I turned back towards him I saw that he had gone, but the light of his torch flickered inside a nearby room and spilled out of the doorway, as faint as moonlight reflected off the surface of a canal.
I followed him.
‘What’s this all about?’
The old man carefully set the torch into a bracket on the wall. Then he gestured silently at something in the middle of the room.
I looked around me briefly. I had been in here before, andrecognized the peculiar decorations. The walls and ceiling in one half of the room were immaculately whitewashed and adorned with neatly executed, if not elaborate, paintings of the gods. By contrast the rear of the room had been left bare, covered only with a thin, uneven coating of brown plaster. There had once been a false wall dividing the two halves of the room, as there often was in merchants’ houses, to conceal hoarded wealth.