‘So what?’ he said indifferently, and a moment later my head was under water again.
When he hauled me out there was a sneer in his voice. ‘That’s not a name that means very much to me. You’ll have to do better than that!’
Instead of dropping me in, he yanked me towards him. For a moment I felt myself swinging through space with the air whistling past my ears until my shoulders caught the wooden edge of the bridge with a sickening crack.
I screamed.
‘We can split your head open!’ Upright roared. ‘We can drown you and make it take all night! We can cut your balls off!’ he added gratuitously. ‘Now talk!’
I felt dizzy I could not see. The red darkness that had threatened to engulf me when I had a foot driving into my chest had come back. There was a roaring in my ears and I could feel my stomach heaving again even though it was empty. I could not tell the truth but to say nothing seemed a certain way to get myself killed.
I could think of only one thing to say: a name.
‘Kindly!’ I gasped.
The grip on my ankles slackened abruptly, although not enough to send me plunging into the canal again.
‘What did he say?’ Shield’s voice was suddenly hushed.
‘Kindly!’ I spluttered again. ‘The merchant! Kindly the merchant! I was going to see him! He’ll vouch for me!’
For a moment, as I hung upside down over the water, I did not know how the police were going to take what I had said. All I knew was that I was in danger of having my brains knocked out against the side of the bridge like a fish killed for bait.
Shield muttered slowly: ‘Kindly the merchant?’
A moment later I was swinging slowly through the air and being lowered, surprisingly gently, on to the surface of the bridge.
As my head made contact with the wood and the rest of me was laid down like a piece of cloth being measured out for cutting, I heard Upright add: ‘I don’t think I’d trust anybody that claimed to know that slippery old bugger! Still, if he says he can vouch for him, we had better check, hadn’t we? If he’s lying …’
I did not hear what would happen if I turned out to be lying, because that was when I passed out.
2
‘This knife.’ The speaker was an old man with a voice so feeble I had to strain to catch his words. ‘Bronze. Very rare. What I’d want to know is, how did he get hold of it?’
All of a sudden he seemed to be shouting so loudly that I wanted to scream and cover my ears. A man’s voice laughed as I squirmed. The sound of it came and went with the throbbing in my head. It was as if my ears were still full of water.
Something hit me on the shoulder. ‘Awake now, are we? Come on, get up!’
I lay face down on an earth floor. I rolled over, opening my eyes and promptly squeezing them shut against the glare of a clear morning sky.
‘Up!’
I pushed myself slowly into a sitting position, with my eyes still shut because I thought the World would be spinning around me and I did not want to have to watch it in case it started my stomach heaving again. I tried to swallow but my mouth and throat were as parched as a dead cactus in the dry season. I thought that was strange, considering that I had nearly drowned.
When I finally dared to look around me the first thing I noticed was that I was naked. With a hoarse croak of horror I pulled my knees up and spread a hand over my loins. That set off more laughter from the men watching me.
‘Told you he’d do that!’ It was Shield speaking. ‘All the trouble he’s in and the only thing he can think of is, where’s his breechcloth?’
I scowled at him resentfully. He stood to one side of me with his arms folded nonchalantly. When I turned my head towards the other side I saw Upright, who was squatting with a bowl between his knees. He surprised me by pushing the bowl towards me.
‘Have some water,’ he suggested. ‘We took those rags off you to make sure you weren’t hiding anything else. We probably did you a favour. They were about to fall to pieces anyway’
I took a cautious sip while I looked past the two men flanking me towards a third, the man whose voice I had first heard.
He knelt on a reed mat, with his old brown knees tucked under him in the style of a woman, no doubt because they were too stiff now for him to squat comfortably. He was a merchant. I could tell that much by his hair, which was long, falling loose and unadorned over his shouders. His cloak was short but finely woven, and even at a glance I could see how much trouble had been taken over its embroidery. Heavy bone plugs pulled at his lower lip and earlobes. The workmanship that had gone into carving them in the shapes of little fishes could not have come cheap.
This man had my son’s knife, grasping the hilt between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and balancing the point on the palm of the other.
I looked at Upright as I put his bowl down. ‘Where am I?’ I hissed. ‘Who’s that?’
Shield took one step forward and flicked a foot casually into the side of my neck. I flopped over, howling in pain.
‘You’re here to answer questions, not ask them! Understand?’
I picked myself up again, noticing a little smear of blood where my elbow had struck the ground. ‘I get the idea,’ I muttered.
‘I am Ozomatl,’ the old man informed me. ‘You are in my house and my parish. I expect you to show a bit of respect! If you’ve forgotten your manners, I’m sure Upright and Shield here will be happy to help you recall them!’
Ozomatclass="underline" I had heard the name, which meant ‘Howling Monkey’. I realized I had even seen him before, at Kindly’s ’s house. He was the man the merchants of Tlatelolco looked to as leader: the man whose voice carried most weight in deciding which trader would have the honour of buying, training and sacrificing a Bathed Slave at festival time, who had the ear of the military governor who ruled their part of the city, and who presided over the merchants’ councils and their courts. The merchants, both because of their wealth and because of the information they brought back from every corner of the World, were immensely powerful; so much so that even men such as my master and the Emperor had to listen to them. And Howling Monkey was the most powerful of the merchants.
His eyes roamed over the weapon in his fingers the way another man’s might have dwelt on a pretty girl. I had never considered how much the knife might be worth, because I had thought of it only as my son’s sole possession. Suddenly I saw it through the eyes of a merchant. Bronze was almost impossible to get in Mexico. The knife by itself must be worth a fortune, and if there were any chance that there might be more bronze where that had come from, any merchant would jump at it.
I licked my lips nervously. ‘You, er, you want to know where I got the knife? Listen, the man you need to ask …’
A sharp cuff to the side of my head silenced me. I looked up to see Shield glaring at me, with his hand raised for anotherblow. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I noticed the old man leaning towards me, as if eager to hear whatever I had to say next. He said nothing, however, and was clearly willing to let his policemen speak for him.
‘Forget where it came from, you murdering little piece of coyote dung! You’re here to tell us what you did with it!’
I looked at Howling Monkey, the chief merchant, and then hastily back at Shield, in case he was on the point of hitting me again. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I was just looking after it. Murdering?’ Suddenly the import of his words seized me, shaking me like hands wrapped around my throat and leaving me just as unable to speak. ‘Murdering who?’ I squeaked, swallowing convulsively to hold my gorge down as I pictured my son’s face, lying in the latrine in Amantlan, amid pools and piles of ordure, surrounded by his own dismembered remains, his strong features collapsed, his clear young skin grey and streaked with mire.
A moment later I was whimpering in pain as Shield seized one of my ears, twisting it until he had forced my head around and could stare into my eyes.