Jade, as shrewd as ever, told me what happened next. ‘The featherworker found out, and stole the goods back.’
‘That’s what must have happened,’ I agreed. ‘Skinny wouldn’t just have known what his handiwork was worth. He also knew — as I’m pretty sure Idle didn’t — who had commissioned it. And let’s just say he would have been seriously scared at the idea of having to explain that it was missing.
‘Skinny planned the theft well. He seems to have known where to look, and that there would be a lot of people about who’d be in no real state to recognize him or work out what he was doing or stop him doing it. He just had one piece of bad luck. There was one other person in the house who was wide awake and alert, because he was there for the same reason as our featherworker: my son, Nimble.’
At the mention of my son’s name, something rippled through my audience: a kind of restlessness, a shuffling of feet and one or two sighs. Even my father, who had ignored me ever since I had started speaking, looked up sharply. None of them had ever set eyes on Nimble, or even known of his existence until a few days before, but nobody could fail to respond to the idea of a long-lost grandson, nephew or cousin. Perhaps, I thought, they were all able to take one look at his father and feel sorry for the lad. It saddened me that they would probably never meet him.
‘He wanted to get his bronze knife back. He knew his …’ I looked at the eager faces around me and hastily amended what I had been about to say to avoid offending their sensibilities. ‘He knew his associate, Shining Light, had taken it to Kindly’s house and left it there. The knife wasn’t all he found, of course.
‘Only the gods know exactly what happened when our two thieves surprised each other. Obviously there was a fight: I saw the bloodstains, on the floor and in the courtyard outside, and on the knife itself, and I saw what looked like a knife wound on Skinny’s hand. I don’t suppose Nimble tried to stop Skinny taking the costume. He just wanted to grab the knife and run. Maybe Skinny found it first, and the fight started when Nimble tried to take it off him.
‘I’m afraid Nimble came off worse. In fact, for a while, afterI found the body at the bridge, I thought he’d died.’ A groan came from several throats. ‘It didn’t occur to me at the time that the blood I saw on the bridge couldn’t have anything to do with what I’d seen at Kindly’s house, because there was no trail connecting them.
‘As for Skinny — I don’t know whether he’d planned what he did next or whether it just occurred to him on the spur of the moment. Instead of carrying the costume home, he put it on. It didn’t slow him down any more wearing it than it would carrying it, and he knew that if he was dressed as a god anyone he met would run away rather than try to stop him. It worked so well he wore it again a couple of nights later, when I saw him. Then he was trying to scare people off while his accomplice disposed of his brother.’
The fire was burning down rapidly: it was little more than a pile of ash harbouring a few stunted flames, although there was still plenty of smoke. There was a chill in the air, even though the sky was brightening and the mountains were appearing in the East, their peaks and ridges dark and jagged against a pale pink background. The Sun would be up soon, heralding the end of the fast and the start of the festivities as well as, for me, the day I had to satisfy both my masters — the Chief Minister and the Emperor — or perish.
‘I think Skinny and Idle had their last argument when Skinny got home. He’d have been spoiling for a fight. He’d got involved in one brawl already that he hadn’t been ready for, and then had a terrifying journey home. Maybe Idle had words to say about how close Skinny and Marigold had been getting. It’s hardly surprising they came to blows. Idle died. I don’t know whether Skinny meant to kill him or whether things just got out of hand, but the next thing they knew, they had a body to dispose of.’
‘They?’ Glutton had been frowning in puzzlement for muchof the night, but he had been following the story well enough to ask the question.
‘Skinny, of course, and his wife, and for all I know Marigold. None of them had any reason to love Idle. For all I know they were all in it together.’
‘Why did they choose that latrine to dump the body in?’ Jade asked. ‘It was taking an incredible risk, carrying it all that way. Why not just bury it in the marshes at the back of the house?’
I frowned. She had a point. ‘They’re working on the chinampa plots up there,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they were afraid of someone finding it so close to the house. It would have been too easy to connect it with them.’
Jade’s husband thought he had spotted a flaw in my account. ‘I thought it was Skinny who identified the body after the police found it,’ he pointed out. ‘That doesn’t figure, if he’d hidden it in the first place.’
‘The police knew his brother was missing. There can’t be a lot of unidentified corpses in Amantlan at any one time. That’s why they came and asked him to help identify the body, and when he found his brother’s charm, he had to own up to who it was. It wouldn’t have mattered that much. There was nothing to connect him with the killing, after all.’
‘So the featherworker got his piece back, and killed his brother, and all the stories about people seeing visions of the god Quetzalcoatl were down to him.’ Handy was motioning with his fingers, as if he were trying to count off all the unsolved mysteries one by one. ‘All right, so what happened to him? And his … well, whatever was going on between them — to Marigold?’
‘Oh, that’s simple,’ I said airily. ‘Butterfly killed them both.’
‘What?’
‘Well, who else? She hated Marigold. Whether her relationship with Skinny was innocent or not, I’m pretty sure Ican guess what Butterfly made of it all. It was simple jealousy. She killed Marigold, probably shortly after Idle died, and later she killed her own husband. Perhaps he’d been fretting over where his girlfriend had got to, and it started to get on her nerves. I think she did it just before I went to her house the second time, when she told me Skinny had gone out. She didn’t make nearly as good a job of dumping the body as her husband had: she just left it floating in a canal and it was found almost immediately. That may be why she took more care over Marigold’s body. Nobody’s found that yet.’
‘You went to that house a third time.’ My mother’s unblinking stare and sneering tone told me Handy had told her what had happened the night I tried burgling the featherworker’s home.
I sighed. ‘I don’t know what to say about that. You know about the woman, and the god.’
‘Who was wearing the costume then?’ Jade asked. ‘Both brothers were dead, weren’t they?’
I looked at her seriously. ‘I don’t think there was a costume then. Maybe it was the Morning Glory seeds, or … I don’t know. But that time, I think it really was the god.’
Nobody had an answer to that. A long silence ensued. Even the crackling of the fire had ceased.
Eventually Handy asked, hesitantly: ‘So, where’s the featherwork?’
‘Butterfly’s house,’ I said quickly, relieved to have a question I could answer sensibly. ‘Where it had been all along. You see, there was one place I didn’t know about — although I should have realized it was there at the time …’
‘Featherwork?’ My father’s voice, heard for the first time since I had begun, silenced me and made everyone sit up. ‘Forget the featherwork, who cares about that? What aboutyour son?’ He looked at my mother. ‘Our grandson. Where is he? What are you going to do about him?’
‘Oh, that’s even simpler,’ I said.
Then I did one of the most stupid things I have ever done. I told him.
SEVEN GRASS
1
The young man with the trumpet seemed eager to be off as soon as the Sun came up. He could not decently leave until the parish priest arrived to perform the sacrifices and formally end the fast, and he even managed to sound a few half-hearted notes, but he kept staring at the eastern sky, as if willing the Sun to get a move on. Every so often he would look nervously at me, but I could hardly blame him for that. For a priest, accustomed to long fasts and sleepless nights, the office he had been expecting to perform at my parents’ house would have seemed like a holiday. The last thing he had needed was a madman turning up uninvited and throwing the whole carefully planned ritual into chaos.