‘No, thanks.’ I turned to Angry. ‘You turned the Emperor down?’
He regarded me through the steam rising from his bowl of gruel. When he spoke the steam vanished, blown away like cobwebs. ‘The way I work wouldn’t have suited them,’ he said shortly.
‘And Skinny? Did he turn the Emperor down too?’
‘Skinny and I were the best featherworkers we had. Of course, we were great rivals, forever trying to outdo one another. I made the best feather mosaics ever.’ The big man’s tone as he said this was matter-of-fact, without a hint of conceit. ‘Some of them looked so real you would have sworn they were real flowers and birds and maize cobs and fish and people,not pictures at all. Skinny used to make fans and costumes and insignia for warriors to wear on their backs. He didn’t use glue much, he usually went for the frame and thread method, but he did incredible things — I can show you a fan of his that looks like water when a stone hits it, the feathers flying outward and the whole thing looking as if it’s about to burst.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I got more and more commissions — from lords, great warriors, foreigners. I had more work than I could keep up with, even with my family working flat out. I got more and more of my relations in to help, and now, as you can see, I’ve a whole houseful. To be honest,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘some of them aren’t actually related to me at all, so I’ve had to bend the rules a bit to employ them all. Everybody does something different, and knows exactly how to do it.’ He put his bowl down thoughtfully and stared into it. With the fire burning between us it was impossible to read anything into his expression. ‘But you know what? I don’t think there’s one of us, maybe not even me, who could make a feather fan or a mosaic from scratch by himself, not now. And everything we do is flawless, but … Well …’
‘But not original or unique.’ I remembered that picture of the dahlia. ‘But Skinny doesn’t have the same problem. So what happened to him?’
‘He didn’t go the same way as I did. I don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t want to work that way. Maybe it has something to do with where he came from.’
‘I’d been wondering about that. He’s not an Amantecatl, is he? How come he ended up in featherwork?’
‘Oh, you know that, do you? That’s right, he started life in Atecocolecan. But he was born on an auspicious day for a craftsman, and somehow he got himself adopted into one of the families here. I don’t know how. Someone must havedecided he’d be wasted as a labourer. He certainly had talent, but he was always a loner — always insisted on working by himself, even when he couldn’t sell what he’d made except at a huge loss. He couldn’t compete with us, not when we were able to give our customers what they wanted, when they wanted it, and guarantee the quality.’
‘Quality?’ I cried, forgetting myself for a moment. ‘But nobody ever produced featherwork like Skinny! Well, except you, of course.’
‘Save your breath!’ Angry said scornfully. ‘I couldn’t touch Skinny at his finest, and we both knew it. But most of the time, you see, Skinny wasn’t doing his best work. A lot of the time he couldn’t do anything at all. He’d just sit in the middle of a pile of feathers, just picking them up and staring at them all afternoon.’
I imagined the gaunt, hollow-eyed man I had seen earlier that day, idling away his life toying pointlessly with a heap of precious feathers.
‘It’s funny,’ Angry went on. ‘He could have turned out perfectly good fans or anything you wanted whenever he was asked, time after time, but it was as if he couldn’t bring himself to do anything but his best and wouldn’t trust anyone else to help him, even though what he earned from his work was all he had to live on.’
‘You turned the Emperor down. You didn’t tell me whether Skinny did too.’
‘I’d have had to go and live in the Palace, making fans and costumes to the order of Montezuma and his nobles. That would have meant abandoning my set-up here, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure I could work without it. The Palace may have thought this too, because they didn’t insist. I don’t know about Skinny. I’m sure he just didn’t want anybody telling him what to make, even if it was the Emperor. Later on, hiswork dried up, and he started gambling and taking a lot of sacred mushrooms and peyote buttons, and after that the Palace wouldn’t have wanted him anyway.’
‘So what happened to him? How come he went back to Atecocolecan? To that hole he’s living in now?’
Crayfish answered. ‘I think it all started when he got married. That was about two years ago.’
‘He left it late, then, didn’t he?’ I said. Most Aztec men married in their twenties, when they left the House of Youth. Skinny would have been considerably older than that.
‘We all assumed it would never happen,’ Angry said. ‘He’d never shown much interest in girls as a young man. I don’t know what changed his mind. But his wife seemed to have had some effect on him. You’ve met the woman.’ He grimaced suddenly, as if his gruel had suddenly turned sour. ‘I guess she inspired him. He started working again, and they both ended up here.’
‘Here?’ I stared at them both. ‘But Skinny was your rival!’
‘And what do you do with your competitor, when he’s down on his luck? Bring him into the business and make use of him, of course. Skinny had just got married, he was working again but not making much and he needed help. So I hired him.’
I sat in silence, absorbing that along with the last of my food. ‘I’d guess he wasn’t here all that long,’ I said at length.
‘A year, maybe. But when they left, it wasn’t really down to Skinny. It was his brother.’
The porridge was settling in my stomach, spreading its warmth through my veins, and with it the beginnings of a dangerous lassitude. I wanted nothing so much as to stretch out on a sleeping-mat somewhere, or failing that the bare earth. I had been struggling to keep my eyes open. Then, suddenly, Angry mentioned Idle, and I was wide awake again.
My son, I reminded myself. Idle was the man who would know what had happened to my son.
‘I agreed to put Skinny and Butterfly up here for the sake of his reputation, and it seemed to work out at first. Skinny was off the mushrooms. He was putting his back into it. What he produced wasn’t his best, not by a long way, but it wasn’t bad. He just used to take his own supply of cotton and feathers and knives and squat in a corner by himself. His wife would fetch him food and water. I have to admit, she looked after him. He was that obsessive about his work: if she hadn’t made him eat he’d have starved himself.’
‘We used to gather round watching him,’ Crayfish added. ‘All the boys from around here — we all knew his reputation and we wanted to see how he did it, so we could be as a famous as he was.’
‘So what went wrong?’
I had addressed the question to Angry, but his only answer was a little noise at the back of his throat, as though some of his food had got stuck there. Alarmed, I leaned towards him, but his nephew stretched out an arm and stopped me.
‘His brother ran off with my cousin.’ The young man’s tone was apologetic.
‘Oh.’ I did not know what else to say. There was no need to ask what Angry had made of his daughter’s deserting him to join his rival’s family. The craftsman himself kept his eyes averted and said nothing.
‘Idle wasn’t like his brother,’ Crayfish went on in a low voice. ‘Skinny lived for his work. I don’t think Idle knew what work was! My uncle never liked him. I heard him complaining about the way he hung around the courtyard, distracting everybody from their work, scrounging from his brother, chatting up the girls.’ He glanced anxiously at his uncle, but Angry did not react. ‘He wasn’t meant to be livinghere. He still belonged to Atecocolecan. He still had his house in the marshes up there, and a chinampa plot at the edge of the city His parish kept saying they’d take them both away if he didn’t get on and work the land, but he still spent far too much time here.’
‘He can’t have been born on a good day for a craftsman, then,’ I commented.