3
Lily maintained a grim silence as she strode briskly towards the canal and a waiting canoe. Following in her footsteps, I felt like a small child caught stealing cactus fruit from the market and being dragged home by his mother to face a beating.
‘Lily …’
‘Shut up. Get in the boat!’
‘I just wanted to say “thank you”,’ I said meekly.
‘I told you to get in the boat.’ She turned to me suddenly. ‘And save your gratitude! I didn’t get you out of there for your own good. Those two bears of policemen could have spent the rest of the day working you over, for all I care! And if you don’t tell me what I want to know, then I’ll take you straight back there and invite them to make a start on you. I might even watch!’
Her hands were clenched around the material of her skirt, bunching the cloth and crumpling it the way a cook might crush coriander leaves to squeeze the flavour out of them. When I looked in her eyes they were hooded as if with rage, but they glistened too, as if full of tears.
‘Look, I know it can’t have been easy …’
She hit me suddenly, swinging her open hand against my cheek with a ringing slap that left a hot streak of pain against my lower jaw.
I stared at her, slack jawed, until I became aware of the salty taste of blood and realized that the blow had made me bite my tongue. She said nothing but looked pointedly at the canoe. I climbed in meekly, settling myself in front of the boatman. He was Partridge, Kindly’s slave who had brought me the knife, but he gave no sign of having recognized me.
‘You know where to go,’ the woman said sharply, as he pushed off from the side of the canal. ‘And as for you,’ she added, looking at me, ‘you can start telling me the truth. I want to know what you did to my son!’
‘Lion and I told you what happened,’ I said blandly.
‘You lied! You killed him — you and your brute of a brother!’
‘How can you say that?’ I felt the blood drain from my face, leaving it chill and numb, as if she had thrown a pitcher of cold water over it. If she had guessed the truth then there was no telling where that would lead.
She leaned forward and hissed into my face like a snake about to bury its fangs in my cheek. ‘I know what Shining Light was doing on that boat. I know what he and Nimble had been doing between them. Now I want to know why you and your brother killed him. Revenge, was that it? Or was it because of what he and your son had been up to? Did you hate him for that? Or did you just want to spite me, because a few moments with you on a sleeping-mat didn’t make me your devoted slave for ever?’
Partridge’s eyes nearly fell out of his head at that, but he kept his face impassive and his gaze fixed on the water in front of him. I glanced anxiously at the Sun and realized, with a nervous start, that we were heading south, towards Tenochtitlan, and not towards Lily’s home in Pochtlan. I gripped the side of the canoe tensely as it occurred to me that she might be intending to give me back to my master.
I wondered how she had guessed the truth, or whether perhaps Kindly had deduced it in the same uncanny way in which he had worked out that Nimble was my son. I thought about trying to escape. I could have leapt over the side and swum to the shore of the canal, but the thought of scuttling away to hide among the neighbouring houses with her taunts and sneers ringing in my ears, like a cockroach dodging blows from a furious housewife’s broom, was too appalling to contemplate. The truth had to come out, but as I looked into her eyes and saw the pain in them — the raw skin under the lids, the spider’s webs of broken red lines traced over the whites and the dark furrows on her cheeks from night after night of weeping — I suddenly felt more pity than anything else.
‘It wasn’t any of those,’ I heard myself saying. ‘It was just self-defence. We — Lion and I — wanted to make Shining Light give up his sword, but he tried to kill me. There wasn’t anything — else we could do. We could have spared you the truth …’
‘You wanted to spare your son, and yourself from having to explain what he was doing on that boat!’
‘Well, that too,’ I conceded.
‘Who killed him? Who drove that sword into his skull — you or your brother?’
‘Does it matter? Lily, you know what Shining Light did. Don’t make me tell you all over again.’
Astonishingly, she laughed. It was a sort of laughter I had not heard before, a thin, bitter sound that seemed to come from high up near the bridge of her nose rather than her mouth, and had no amusement in it whatsoever. ‘Tell me? You don’t have to. I know what he was, but he was my son!’ The laughter shattered then, splintering into a shower of muffled tears as she buried her face in her hands, and I stared hopelessly at her bowed head and heaving shoulders. For an instant Ithought she might pitch forward into my arms. I even raised my hands, ready to catch her, but her pride and anger were too strong for that.
At last she looked up again. Her palms glistened damply as she lowered them into her lap.
‘Just tell me who it was,’ she whispered. ‘I just have to know.’
‘Lion,’ I said reluctantly, because now there seemed no reason to lie. ‘But Lily, Shining Light did have his hands around my throat at the time!’
‘And what had you and your brother done to him? You goaded him into it, didn’t you? What did you do, taunt him with your cleverness, just because you’d managed to find out where he was hiding?’
‘It wasn’t anything like that. Lily, he … he was desperate. He knew he would never have been allowed to live. My master would have killed him — he’d have had him burned alive. You know he could have done that. Shining Light hadn’t just swindled the Chief Minister, he was a murderer, and he and Nimble were … well, you know the penalty for what they did together.’ I found it hard, even now, to acknowledge the crime my son and his lover had committed. I understood, as well as any Aztec could hope to, what had driven the two of them into each other’s arms, but nothing in my upbringing or teaching had equipped me to look at an offence against the gods with anything but disgust.
Lily would not meet my eyes. She looked over my shoulder, at something in the middle distance. When I turned around and saw what it was I felt as if my stomach were about to fall through the bottom of the canoe, because right up ahead of us, at the edge of a broad, traffic-choked canal, stood one of the tall stone cacti that marked the boundary between Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan. I was being taken back to my master.
I turned back to her. ‘Lily,’ I said earnestly, ‘you have to listen to me! I didn’t want your son to die. He wanted it himself and he wanted to take me with him! Don’t you understand?’
She kept her head up. Her eyes were dry and clear now, and her fingers lay still in the folds of her skirt without any trace of a tremor.
‘I understand,’ she said steadily. ‘You and your brother killed my son.
‘Yes … no, wait, didn’t you hear what I said?’
She looked at me then and gave me the thinnest of smiles. ‘I’ve heard as much as I want to from you. Anything else you want to say, you can save for your master.’
I gaped at her in horror.
‘What did you expect?’ she asked coldly. ‘You heard what Howling Monkey said — if you’re seen in Tlatelolco again there’ll be trouble. I’m taking you back to Lord Feathered in Black. No doubt he’ll be fascinated to know what you’ve been doing during the last couple of days.’
‘But he’ll kill me!’ I cried, and then, realizing that in her present state of mind that was unlikely to do me much good, I added: ‘I could tell him about your son — how he cheated him, what he and Nimble got up to …’ My voice tailed off as we both realized what I was saying.
‘You’ll tell him what your own boy did to him, will you? I don’t think so. He can’t hurt mine any more.’ She lifted her eyes. ‘Here we are — Tenochtitlan. Better start thinking about what you’re going to tell your master, slave.’