Now the room was empty except for a wicker chest in the middle of the floor. There were some brown stains around it.
The chest lay open. I walked towards it and stooped to look inside.
‘It’s an empty box.’ I straightened up and faced Kindly. ‘Stop playing games with me, old man. I want to know about this!’ I brandished the knife in front of his face. ‘Why did you send it to me?’
‘Just look again.’
The lid was not merely open. Someone had wrenched it off, ripping its leather hinges. One side of the box was crushed and bent, as if it had been kicked or thrown, and some of the reeds it had been woven from were torn. When I looked at it more closely, I saw that it was soiled: something had splashed on to it, the same brown stuff that had stained the floor, and although it was not sticky any more I had no difficulty, even in the poor flickering light of Kindly’s torch, in recognizing blood.
Then I looked in the box again and saw that it was not empty after all. Something lay in the bottom, curled against its sides in a smooth, perfect curve, as still and natural as a snake contentedly sleeping off a meal. It was a frail thing, hard to spot in the deep shadows cast by the box’s sides, although I recognized it as soon as I knew it was there.
I reached inside the box, fingered the thing, stroked itreverently and gently lifted it out. As I held it up to the light it uncurled itself to its full length, greater than one of my arms. It seemed to glow in the torchlight, shimmering as my breath disturbed it, its colours changing from green to blue to turquoise to something else that was none of them and all three at the same time.
‘A quetzal tail feather,’ I breathed. I could not remember having handled anything so precious. For an Aztec this represented true wealth, far more than gold or shiny stones. It was beautiful, iridescent, and the colour of the young maize stalks on which our hopes rested every summer; it was hard to get, for it had to be plucked intact from the living bird; and it was fragile, like life itself.
And I had seen others just like it only that night. I stared at Kindly in disbelief. Surely, I thought, it must be coincidence. How could this old man be connected with the apparition that had confronted me on the bridge? ‘Where did this come from?’
‘Off the arse of one of those funny-looking birds that fly around in the forests down in the South, of course. Where do you think? It’s not where it came from that I care about — it’s where the rest of it went!’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Look at the base of the feather.’
Instead of a sharp quill, the plume ended in a jagged stump. ‘It’s been broken. It looks as if it was torn off something.’
‘It was.’ The old man sighed wearily. ‘Didn’t you think that was rather a big box to hold one feather, even a very special one? Until the night before last there was some important property of mine in there — more or less all I had, at least until you found that boat with all the stuff my grandson stole from us. Now this is all that’s left.’
‘This wasn’t one of a bundle of loose feathers,’ I said. ‘It wasbroken off a finished work.’ I looked at the old man suspiciously. ‘What was it, a fan, a banner, a costume?’
‘Something like that,’ he mumbled, as though he felt embarrassed.
‘How did it get broken?’
His shoulders sagged even more than usual. ‘Someone stole it — all but this feather!’
‘When?’
‘Two nights ago. The night we held the banquet.’
‘But your house was full of people — lords, merchants, warriors …’ I had been at that banquet, attending my master, who had been among the guests.
‘Yes, exactly. Full of lords, merchants and warriors, most of them out of their heads on sacred mushrooms. What better time to for someone to sneak in and steal a priceless work of art, eh?’
Another voice interrupted him: the one that had sounded across the courtyard earlier.
‘There it is again,’ I said, but the old man’s reaction was the same as before, his head turned sharply aside and a look of annoyance on his face.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered nonchalantly. ‘Probably an urban fox. We get them around here, rummaging around in people’s middens. If the parish police did their job it wouldn’t happen.’
‘Didn’t sound like a fox to me,’ I began, but he had already changed the subject.
‘Now, whoever stole this piece must have got in here very late — not long before dawn, in fact.’ Kindly spoke briskly. ‘We had guards on the doorway. We didn’t release them until long after midnight, when everyone had either left or gone to sleep. You were long gone. I didn’t notice anything was amiss until the morning.’
‘And what did you find then?’
‘Why, just exactly what you see. Nothing but this one feather and the box it was stored in!’
‘So what was it?’
The old man squinted at me thoughtfully. He cleared his throat noisily. He seemed reluctant to speak, and his silence endured until I could not stand it any longer.
‘Look,’ I snapped, ‘you brought me here so that you could show me something. I came all the way from the western shore of the lake, at no small risk to my own life, let me tell you, especially if my master and his steward get to know where I’ve gone. Now I’m tired and hungry and very tempted to go and throw myself at my master’s feet and beg his pardon just for the sake of a few hours curled up on my own sleeping-mat. So if you want me to know what was in that box, then tell me now. Otherwise I’m going!’
Kindly let out a deep sigh that tailed off into a dry rattle. ‘All right,’ he said wearily. ‘But this is a secret, do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed doubtfully.
‘You’ve heard of Pitzauhqui?’
‘Pitzauhqui? The craftsman?’ Of course I had heard of him. He was famous, although he had obviously not shown much potential as a child, since his name meant ‘Skinny’.
‘Who else?’ He clucked in exasperation. ‘Skinny, the featherworker.’
‘You’re not serious?’ I stared down at him. ‘It’s really by him? Why, it must be worth … it must be priceless! How did you get your hands on it?’
If feathers were our most precious commodity, featherwork was our most elevated art form. To the skill of the scribe or the embroiderer were added the dexterity and judgement of the featherworker who chose, trimmed and placed feathers whose shape and natural colour could bring to vivid life the mostextravagant design. Featherworkers created mosaics, costumes, fans whose plumes seemed to radiate from their settings like petals from the heart of a flower. A skilled practitioner of the craft was a man of standing, not as high as a warrior’s but as high as a merchant’s and with none of the envy and bitterness that attended a merchant’s wealth. The featherworkers made the most of this status: like most craftsmen, they passed their skills down from father to son and mother to daughter. I did not know either the featherworkers or their parish, Amantlan, very welclass="underline" the Amanteca, as they were called, guarded their secrets jealously.
Among the featherworkers there were perhaps a couple of craftsmen as renowned as Skinny, whose skill was such that he was said to be a sorcerer, with the power to make the plumes fly into place and even change colour at a word of command. I had seen one of his pieces once. It was a small thing, just a fan made of roseate spoonbill feathers, but I had never forgotten it. The craftsman had contrived to set and layer the plumes so that no two caught the light in the same way. They were all red, but just to glance at them was to see so many colours: orange, chocolate, scarlet, a pink that put me in mind of a magnolia in flower, and blood at every stage from freshly spilled to three days old and cracking.
Skinny’s work was legendary, and would command whatever price the seller asked. I could not begin to guess how Kindly had been able to afford one of his pieces or who might have been so desperate as to sell it to him. All the same, if I had had to guess, the last name that would have occurred to me was the one Kindly gave, answering my question.