‘I got it from Skinny himself.’
‘I thought he was dead.’
‘I can assure you he isn’t.’
I stared at the feather in my hands: it was waving wildly,picking up my own agitation, and as it caught the torchlight its blue and green colours chased each other like waves along its length from stem to tip. I looked at the broken end, and tried to imagine the work of art it had been wrenched from. I thought of the man who had made it, and felt something like awe at the thought that the feather I was holding had been part of it, that the great craftsman himself had selected it, handled it and found it its rightful place, gluing it there with turkey fat that he applied himself because no one else could be trusted to do it properly.
‘I heard that he never replaced a feather. He always chose the perfect plume and placed it perfectly, first time. My master tried to commission something from him and couldn’t get it — and people don’t usually say “No” to the Chief Minister! That’s why I thought he was dead. He hasn’t been heard from in years, anyway, and there was a rumour that he’d gone out of his head on sacred mushrooms.’ I frowned at the old man suspiciously. ‘How do you know it was really something of his?’
‘I told you, he gave it to me himself!’
I bent down and carefully laid the feather back in the bottom of its box. It weighed nothing, and I was afraid that if I just dropped it it would blow away. It might even drift up into the torch flame and be ruined, and that would never do. I felt an urge to preserve the thing, against the day when it might be reunited with the rest of whatever peerless creation it had once been part of.
I did not stand up again at once, because I wanted to think. I stared into the dark space inside the box and thought about what I was going to do next. I knew what I ought to do: turn around, walk straight past Kindly and step out of the room, out of the courtyard and into the night. I did not know where I might go after that, but I could already see that the alternativewas likely to bring even more trouble down on my head than I was already in.
However, I had my son’s knife. It had been sent to me for a reason, and until I found out what the reason was, I could never rest. And so, in spite of everything, I stood up and faced the old man and asked him the question he knew I had to ask, to which I already knew the answer.
‘So somebody stole a piece of featherwork from you. I’m sorry to hear about it, but what’s it got to do with me?’
Kindly looked at his feet. At least he had the good grace to appear embarrassed.
‘Well,’ he mumbled, ‘you see, I rather hoped you might find it for me.’
‘And why would I do any such thing?’
He looked up again. In the torchlight his eyes glinted like polished jade. He pursed his lips, as if in thought, before answering: ‘Because … It’s like this, Yaotl. The featherwork wasn’t the only thing in that box. There was something else — something I left in here for safe-keeping because, to be honest, I couldn’t decide where else to put it.’ He nodded towards the angular shape on my hip. ‘I’d wrapped the knife up in several thicknesses of maguey fibre cloth to stop any blood getting on the costume. It was just a shapeless lump of material, but someone found it and took the trouble to unwrap it.’
‘And used it, too.’ I took the knife out once more and examined it. It was valuable in itself, since it was made of bronze, that dull, hard metal that only the Tarascans in the West knew how to work and which was almost unknown in Mexico, but its material worth was not what Kindly had been thinking of.
‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You think whoever came here the other night knew the knife was in this room …’
‘In the house, at least. This was the only empty room, and the rest of the house was full of people, so it would have been the first place a thief would look anyway.’
‘And then, having taken the knife, he decided to lift this costume as well?’
‘It can’t have been that simple. For one thing, there was some sort of struggle over the costume, because that feather was broken off. For another …’
‘The knife was used.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you don’t know who was injured?’
His frown turned the lines on the old man’s face into ravines. ‘I don’t. Nobody in my household, and I think one of the guests would have complained if he’d woken up with stab wounds, don’t you? But there was a trail of blood from here out into the courtyard.’
‘There were two of them.’ In spite of myself I was curious. ‘What happened — did they fall out?’
‘It looks like it, doesn’t it? What else could it have been — two men burgling my house in the same night, both of whom just happened to know exactly what they were looking for and where to find it, and one of them deciding to stick a knife in the other? I think that sounds unlikely.’
‘Where did you find the knife?’
‘In the courtyard.’
I stared at the knife again. It occurred to me that it ought to be cleaned up, but then I thought that was not my task. It was my son’s. Mine was to return his knife to him.
‘What I thought,’ Kindly was saying, ‘was that maybe whichever of them stabbed the other changed his mind and carried his friend home. Of course, they had my property with them. And if you found either of our thieves, you see, then you’d find my property. But at least one of them camehere looking for that knife. And you want to know who that was, and why, don’t you?’
‘So that’s why I’m here,’ I said dully. I kept looking at the weapon. Suddenly I was seeing it with fresh eyes. It was valuable, to be sure: but what might it be worth to someone who had never owned anything else?
My grip on the thing tightened until it shook and my knuckles turned white.
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ the old man said softly. ‘You’ll do anything to get this back to its owner.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Call it a lucky guess. Lily told me what happened on the lake, the other night, and all the things you’d said to her about yourself while you and she were … while you were here before. It wasn’t too difficult to work out that that boy must be yours. And if you thought he’d been here, instead of running away from the city and putting a safe distance between himself and the Chief Minister, you’d be desperate to find out where he was, and what he was up to.’
I remembered the effort and heartache it had cost me, learning that Nimble was my child. How had Kindly discovered it? I shivered at the thought that if this feeble-minded old man could manage to deduce the truth so easily, in spite of the lies I had told his daughter, others might be able to as well — my master among them.
‘So you think my son came looking for his knife,’ I replied in a low voice, ‘and that I’m bound to go looking for him, and if I find out what happened to him, I’m bound to find your precious featherwork.’
He clapped his hands together delightedly. ‘I knew you’d understand! Of course, I’ll pay you if you bring it back in one piece. When can you start?’
My jaw dropped so fast and so far that it hurt. ‘I don’tbelieve you! You somehow manage to get hold of a fabulously valuable piece of featherwork. You keep it here, in a house full of mushroomed-up warriors who everyone knows have no love for you merchants — not to mention the other merchants you invited as your guests, all of them rivals of yours who would cheerfully steal from you out of spite. Then when it gets stolen — big surprise, that! — you expect me to go and get it back from you? Are you mad?’
Anyone else might have accepted what I said. I might have expected a different man’s face to darken or turn pale, according to whether he felt embarrassed at his own foolishness or angry at my reproof, or perhaps to crumple dejectedly when he realized he was not getting his own way. Indeed, I watched Kindly’s face as I finished speaking, but I saw none of these things, and it quickly dawned on me that I was not going to.