The Kindly I had known was a broken old man, good for nothing except lounging against the wall of his courtyard, swilling sacred wine and talking idly with anyone who still had the patience to listen to him. The steady, unremitting stare with which he returned my gaze belonged on another, still older face than his: the face of a merchant who had once journeyed through hot lands, frozen lands and steamy swamps, who had seen friends die, his son-in-law among them, who had burned his fellow merchants’ travelling-staffs with their bodies and then fought and beaten the barbarians who had killed them. No words of mine were ever going to touch this old man.
‘You know I’m not,’ he said stonily. ‘And I know you’ll do what I’m asking, Yaotl, because it’s the only way you’ll find out what happened to your son.’
I was still gripping the knife. It would have been ridiculously easy to stretch out my arm and sink the blade in this vile old man’s chest. Nobody could have known my hand wasbehind it: nobody except Kindly himself knew I was there. For a moment there was nothing I would rather have done, but my arm seemed to have gone dead.
I dropped the arm with a sigh, letting the weapon dangle loosely from my limp fingers.
‘All right. You win, you old bastard. You’d better tell me just what this wonderful piece was. A headdress, a warrior’s back device, a mosaic?’
‘Oh, no. Nothing so mundane.’
‘Well, what, then?’
‘It was the raiment of a god.’
5
‘The raiment of a god.’
It was so obvious, I thought, and it explained so much. I cursed myself for an idiot, for the terror I had felt on the bridge, confronting what I had thought was an omen. ‘I bet I can guess which one.’
‘You’ve heard the stories, then.’
‘About the vision? I can do better than that, Kindly. I saw him myself!’
He stared at me. ‘You?’ he spluttered. ‘When?’
‘Just before I got here.’ Suddenly I felt the urge to laugh, remembering my own incredulity at hearing the featherworker’s account at my master’s house. Of course neither of us had seen a god. We had both met a man in a stolen costume, although what he was doing haunting the canal between Pochtlan and Amantlan, and how he had managed to vanish so completely, were still a mystery.
Kindly stared at me dumbly while I told him what had happened to me. ‘So it’s still in this parish,’ he muttered when I had finished. ‘Maybe it’ll be all right after all.’
‘Just how did you get hold of this thing? It must be worth …’ My voice tailed off as I tried vainly to imagine what you could barter for something so valuable.
He laughed. ‘It’s priceless, Yaotl! It’s not even as if Skinny was the only craftsman whose work went into it. Naturally asa featherworker he was the last to handle it, since the feathers are the most fragile part, but … well, you saw the mask? The serpent’s head? The scales are turquoises, and so’s the spear-thrower the god was given to carry.’
‘His sandals were made of obsidian,’ I recalled.
‘That’s right, and the front of his shield was striped with gold and seashells, and there was a bloody great emerald set into his cap that would have bought you twenty times over.’ I had to grit my teeth at this callous reference to my status. ‘I tell you, the lapidaries had a field day! But it’s the feathers you would really have noticed. I’ve never seen anything like them.’
‘Me neither.’ Nor, I remembered, had the featherworker I had spoken to at the Chief Minister’s house. ‘So how did you manage to get hold of this thing? For that matter, why? It surely wasn’t Skinny’s to sell!’
‘Skinny and I go back a long way, you see,’ he replied carelessly. ‘His father and some of his uncles used to work for me. Our families helped one another out, from time to time.’
I looked at him coolly I thought I could work out what came next. The featherworker obviously knew Kindly was broke, and that his grandson had made off with everything his family had. He obviously assumed the old merchant would do anything to make money, and if offered what looked like a bargain would snap it up with no questions asked. ‘I don’t suppose you stopped to think that maybe whoever originally commissioned this fabulous costume might want to get his hands on it?’
‘Of course I did! But we had our story ready’ He grinned ruefully. ‘We were going to say it had been stolen from his workshop.’
And no doubt, I thought, by the time the costume’s owner started making serious enquiries, it would already have been sold.
I thought about what Kindly had described to me, the fabulous wealth that the gold, the stones, the feathers, even the seashells, each one picked out and placed with such care in its setting, must represent, the unique craftsmanship that must show in every facet and every plume. I wondered where he could possibly hope to sell something like that, and who would dare buy anything that distinctive. Surely nobody in the city, or in any of the other towns in the valley of Mexico. Perhaps, I thought, Kindly had meant to send it abroad. I knew his family dealt in feathers, importing them from the hot lands in the South and the East, and that they must trade with the barbarians who lived there. Was he hoping to exchange the god’s costume for feathers, for working capital to replace what his grandson had taken?
I thought then that I understood what he had been up to. However dangerous it might have been, to Kindly it would have been worth everything he staked on the venture, to have the prospect of being able to trade in his own right again. For so long, he and his daughter had been impoverished, their business crippled by his grandson’s cheating. The sacred wine Kindly drank so freely may have dulled his judgement, but it had not blunted his pride. He had seen a chance to free himself, to exercise once again the independence that set his merchant class apart from the rest of us Aztecs, and he had seized it without a second’s thought.
How ironic it was that, with his grandson dead and the boat with all the family’s wealth on it recovered, that independence had become his and Lily’s for the taking, without his having to lift a finger.
‘So, to sum up,’ I said sourly, ‘you think I am going to go and look for this costume — or rather, for the man wearing it — in the hope that I might find out what became of my son on the way?’
‘That’s right,’ Kindly said blandly. ‘Of course, I’m sure we could negotiate a finder’s fee …’
‘Oh, don’t bother!’ I cried, suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of disgust. I had no choice in the matter, of course, as I had known full well from the moment I had been given my son’s knife, but I did not have to like it. ‘If you can think of a way of telling my master where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing that won’t get me killed out of hand, than I’ll settle for that!’
‘Really?’ he replied brightly. ‘Is that all? That’s a deal, then!’ Then, seeing my scowl, he added: ‘Oh, come on, Yaoti — I’m joking! Look, I don’t know what you’re going to tell your master, but I guess if you were really worried about that you’d be sitting obediently at the old man’s feet instead of squatting there talking to me. Let’s face it, each of us needs to find something and the chances are the things we both want are in the same place. I can’t very well go running around after them — I’m too old and too well known. So it has to be down to you. Now what about it?’
All my exhaustion, a day and most of a night of unceasing activity and strain, seemed to descend on me then, and I bowed my head, cradling it on my knees, within my folded arms. ‘All right. You win. I’ll look for your precious featherwork.’
‘Excellent!’ he chortled. ‘Now, I think we ought to seal our bargain with a drink, don’t you? There’s a gourd of sacred wine in the kitchen. I won’t be a moment.’