‘I told you you’re not here to ask questions!’ he snarled. ‘Now stop whining and answer me! What did you do to Idle?’
‘Stop it!’ I squealed, pain and fear and self-disgust pushing me out of the reach of any sort of sensible restraint. ‘Do you think I’d kill my own child? Cut him up like a sacrificial victim? How could you …?’ Then the name he had given the dead man registered at last. ‘Wait a moment. What did you say? Idle?’
Relief and the abrupt release of tension do strange things. All of a sudden the savage, inimical face looming over mine took on a comic aspect. The deep lines in the puckered, frowning brow were like those of some constipated old man, straining over a pot. The narrow, grim slit of a mouth was achild’s drawing of unhappiness, a straight line with the edges turned down. The threatening growl in the back of the throat was the sort of noise my stomach made when I had not eaten for a day or so. I started giggling, and once I had started I could not stop.
‘Idle?’ Shield was still twisting my ear but for some reason it did not seem to hurt any more. ‘You mean Skinny’s brother? It was really him?’
‘Of course it was really him. Who did you think you’d killed?’ The big warrior pulled my head about as he shook with rage. ‘Think this is funny, do you? I’ll show you how funny it is!’
The hand holding my ear jerked sharply upward. Whimpering with pain, I was forced to scramble to my feet.
The blow was perfectly timed. I saw it coming when I was about halfway towards standing up, my body unfolded and exposed, unable either to straighten up or, with the tight grip on my ear, to collapse and roll away to safety I could only wait and watch while the fist described a short arc that ended in the pit of my stomach.
I tried to scream but all that came out was a high, almost voiceless whistling. I lurched forward, gasping in agony while I tried to tear myself away from the relentless grip on my ear and curl up around my wounded abdomen. I managed to totter a couple of steps before Shield let me go. He snatched his hand away from my ear as if it were red hot and watched as I pitched forward on to the hard floor.
‘Do you need to hear any more?’ he roared. ‘We found the knife on him. It’s covered with blood. Plainly he used it to kill the featherworker’s brother and cut the body up. He came back last night and we got him. And now here he is, laughing at you!’
With difficulty I hauled my face off the floor and raised myeyes towards the wealthy, powerful man staring at me from his reed mat.
‘You don’t understand!’ I gasped. ‘I was given the knife — Kindly gave me the knife! Why don’t you ask him, and ask him where I was the night before last?’
The old man peering down at me answered coldly: ‘We have. No doubt as soon as he wakes up and gets over his hangover he will tell us all about you. I expect we’ll give whatever he has to say as much weight at it deserves.’ From the stress he laid on ‘deserves’ I gathered that he expected anything that devious old man came up with to weigh about as much as a handful of turkey feathers. ‘But he isn’t here. You are. Now you heard Shield. The brother of a featherworker is dead. Merchants and featherworkers — and Pochtlan and Amantlan, their parishes — go back a very long way, and we look after one another. So when we catch you with the weapon that might have killed Idle and you yourself admit that you were here on the night the deed was done, what do you expect us to make of it?’
‘But I didn’t kill him!’ I protested. ‘All right, I admit I found the body — you’d have to have been blind and deaf with no sense of smell to miss it. I had the knife because Kindly gave it to me — that’s the truth!’
From where he stood next to me, Upright bent down to whisper confidingly in my ear. ‘So convince him. Think of this as a trial and him as the judge.’
‘You can’t try me! I wasn’t even in one of your parishes when these two picked me up.’ Shield growled threateningly. ‘I’m not one of yours, either. I don’t come from Tlatelolco, I’m a Tenochca. Do you have any idea what will happen to you all if you don’t let me go?’
From the knowing, shrewd look on Howling Monkey’s face, I gathered I had made a big mistake.
The next thing I knew I was staring at the sky, or rather squinting at it through eyes narrowed with pain as Shield seized me by the scalp and jerked my head backward. ‘Watch your tongue or I’ll cut it out of your head, you worthless little pool of dog piss!’
He threw my head forward until I was looking at the chief merchant once more.
‘Thank you, Shield,’ the old man said smoothly. ‘Of course, Joker may be right. We don’t know what will follow from anything we do to him, do we? I could ask you to cut his throat and throw him in the nearest canal. I could take him at his word and tell you to carry him back to Tenochtitlan — hand him over to the Emperor, perhaps, or maybe the Chief Minister?’
He grinned at me, his teeth bared like a flayed skull’s, as he watched the effect of his words flow over my face like floodwater, leaving devastation in its wake. I tried not to let my terror show but it was no good, and I could feel my eyes widening and my mouth growing slack at the threat of being handed back to my master. Howling Monkey surely could not know to whom I belonged, but he had obviously guessed that I was a runaway slave up to no good.
‘I can tell you don’t think that’s a good idea. Well then, you’d better help us out, hadn’t you?’
‘Put it another way,’ Shield hissed in my ear. ‘If you don’t tell him the truth, I’ll scalp you!’
I did not know what to do. What could I say that would satisfy these men, especially if their chief thought he already knew what I was and was merely playing with me? Perhaps I could pretend to be a slave of Kindly’s, and hope against hope that he would not disown me. Surely, I thought, he would not risk abandoning me where I might be forced to tell the World about the illicitly acquired merchandise he had asked me to find.
‘You really ought to tell him, you know.’ I gritted my teeth at the sound of Upright’s voice: his helpful advice was beginning to annoy me, especially since I knew he would be just as willing to skin me alive as his deputy was. I wondered how they decided which of them was to bully the suspect and which to befriend him. Did they throw a bean in the air and see which side up it landed or just take turns? ‘It’s going to come out anyway, in the end.’
I stared at Howling Monkey and swallowed nervously as I finally made up my mind what to say to him. I was going to be Kindly’s new slave, and then at least they would have a story that they would have to investigate, and in the time it took them to do that, I would try to think of something else, in case the old man failed to back me up.
‘I …’
‘You want to know who he is? I’ll tell you!’
The voice came from behind me, from the entrance to Howling Monkey’s house, and it rang across the broad space around me as loud and clear as a trumpet announcing the dawn. I recognized it, but could not believe my ears. I turned, scrambling on to one knee to get a better look, heedless of the risk that Shield would clout me for daring to get up without permission; in the event he was as fascinated by the newcomer as I was, and so were the other two. They all ignored me as their eyes tracked her uncertainly across the courtyard.
Lily had put on reed sandals to come out that morning. Their clattering as she strode towards the silent men had the sort of portentous, threatening note a warrior strives for when he beats his spear against his shield before a battle. They must have been the only sound any of us heard, because I was not breathing and I was sure that nobody else was either.
She looked magnificent. She had put on what must have been her finest clothes: a long shift over a matching skirt, inpale yellow and lilac in a jagged pattern like lightning bolts, both made of cotton, in brazen defiance of all convention and the law. Gold pendants hung from her earlobes, descending over her shoulders in sparkling cascades that were shot through with the green of jade or emerald. Her hair was unbound, as it must be while she was in mourning for her son, but she had not neglected it: it had been brushed until it billowed about her head and neck in a magnificent black and silver mane, waving in time to her steps.