She held her head up. Her eyes seemed to catch the sun and flare dangerously as she walked straight towards the chief merchant.
The woman acknowledged me with barely a glance. Suddenly recollecting myself, I hastily covered my groin with my hands again, but she had already looked away.
‘He’s mine,’ she snapped, standing over Howling Monkey with her arms folded, the way a priest at the House of Tears might have done when about to reproach a novice for forgetting the words to a hymn. ‘He’s a slave in my household. What is he doing here?’
Howling Monkey struggled to get to his feet. I noticed with some amusement that, even drawn up to his full height, the top of the old man’s head barely came up to the level of Lily’s chin. ‘He’s under arrest,’ he spluttered. ‘We were trying to decide what to do with him. He didn’t tell us he had anything to do with you.’
‘If you left it up to those two clowns,’ Lily snapped, with the briefest glance at Upright and Shield, ‘I’m not surprised! I doubt if they could have got him to tell them his name!’
‘We did, too!’ cried Shield. A brief, contemptuous glance from the woman shut him up.
I marvelled at the change that had come over Lily.
When I had seen her and Howling Monkey in her ownhouse, not so many days before, she had been at his mercy, forced to listen to a humiliating harangue about her son’s conduct at a time when her family was impoverished and barely able to fend for itself. Now her son was dead and she had recovered her wealth. It was hard to know whether the cause was the confidence born of being able to trade again or the belief that with her only child gone she had nothing further to lose, but for whatever reason she was plainly now in no mood to take any nonsense from anybody
‘Now where are his clothes?’ she demanded. I felt my face heat up as another contemptuous glance swept over me. ‘Where’s his cloak, his breechcloth?’
Upright spoke up. ‘Madam, they were just rags …’ he stammered.
‘By the time you’d finished with them, I expect so! What of it? Get him some new ones!’
‘Now wait a moment!’ Howling Monkey spluttered. ‘A man’s been killed, you know, and we have to investigate that.’
‘No you don’t,’ she said brusquely. ‘As I understand it he wasn’t found in one of our parishes but next door, in Amantlan. What’s it got to do with you?’
‘This knife was found on him.’
Howling Monkey made the mistake of proffering the weapon, which was promptly snatched from him.
‘Mine,’ Lily asserted. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? I thought as much when your messenger came to my house, looking for my father. I knew what you were about the moment I heard him mention the knife. You thought you’d happened upon a source of Tarascan bronze and you could help yourself to it. Well, sorry to disappoint you. This is the only one there is and it’s been in my family for years, as a memento. Now, where’s your evidence?’
‘Evidence?’ The merchant’s voice had become an indignant squeak. ‘My men found him near the body …’
‘No they didn’t! The messenger that came looking for my father said he was picked up this morning. The featherworker’s remains were taken away yesterday And besides, what do you mean, “your” men? I thought they worked for the parish!’
‘But the knife!’ Howling Monkey stammered desperately. ‘It’s covered with blood!’
‘Our own,’ Lily cried instantly. She must have had the answer to that worked out before she had come out that morning. ‘Whenever we sacrifice our blood to Yacatecuhtli we always slit our earlobes and tongues with this knife. It’s a family custom. What, you didn’t know? It’s how we remind the god where we got the knife, where our prosperity and his gifts come from.’
‘What if I believe you?’ Howling Monkey sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘If this man Joker really is your slave, and he had some business with that knife, what then? How do you explain what happened to Idle?’
Lily snorted derisively. ‘He didn’t have any business with the knife at all! He was trying to steal it!’ Then, as the predatory gleam flared up in the old merchant’s eyes again, she added brutally: ‘Of course, he was probably hoping someone like you would give him a good price! But he’s my slave and I have the right to punish him for that. As for the featherworker’s brother, I am sorry to hear about him but he really isn’t my problem. Let the Amanteca find themselves a real suspect!’
With that, she turned her back on the chief of the merchants’ parishes with as much haughty disdain as if he had been some disreputable foreign trader who had just offered her an insultingly low price for her earplugs. She strode between the silent, astonished policemen and stopped in front of me.
‘Up you get, you! You have a lot of explaining to do!’
One hand still hovered uncertainly over my private parts as I blinked up at her. ‘I haven’t got anything to wear,’ Iwhispered plaintively. It made no difference that the woman had seen me with no clothes on. She had seen as much before, although her manner towards me had been very different then. I simply could not contemplate being led naked through the streets of Tlatelolco, bent over, with my head bowed to avoid the astonished gaze of my fellow Aztecs.
Lily turned to Shield and snapped: ‘I asked for someone to replace his clothes! It’s not as if he needs anything decent. Go on, before I start getting angry!’
Shield slouched away, muttering to himself. A few moments later he was back with a breechcloth and a cape. They were plain, but better than anything I usually wore.
As I dressed I heard a step and, looking up, saw that Howling Monkey had relinquished his place on the mat to stand beside Lily.
‘What are you intending to do?’ he demanded.
‘Take this slave home and punish him!’
‘We haven’t finished questioning him!’
‘Questioning him about what? I told you where he got the knife from and what he was planning to do with it. That’s nothing to do with you or anyone else!’
‘But the body … Idle …’
Ignoring him, the woman bent forward and, encircling my forearm in a surprisingly strong grip, she dragged me to my feet. ‘Come on, you! Now,’ she added, glaring once more at the chief merchant, ‘I am going to take my property home, unless anybody proposes to stop me.’
Howling Monkey looked sick. He was in a difficult position. He had clearly been ready to enjoy wringing the truth out of me, with the enthusiastic help of his policemen, but Lily’s unexpected arrival and insistence that I belonged to her changed everything. I wondered at this, because where I came from, in Tenochtitlan, a woman’s voice, while it might be lawin her own home, would not have been heard among men in another’s courtyard. Among the merchants of Tlatelolco, though, things were different. Women were left to run family businesses while the men were abroad, they decided what to bring to market and at what price, and women even served in their own right as directors of the marketplace. If I really were Lily’s slave, then the merchants’ chief would have no authority over me, unless he had real evidence that I had anything to do with Idle’s death.
He turned away
‘All right,’ he muttered darkly. ‘You take him, then. But if I hear he’s been seen in Pochtlan, or any of our other parishes, after today, I’ll have Upright and Shield knock his brains out — and you’ll answer for it as well! Just remember this, Lily. We have unfinished business. You may have got your family’s money back again, but I haven’t forgotten how your boy disgraced himself and his people. I still intend to get to the bottom of that!’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’, said the woman softly. ‘So do I!’
With another tug at my arm, none too gentle, she led me out of the courtyard.