I winced. For all my confidence that I had solved the mystery of Kindly’s featherwork, I knew full well that there was no guarantee I would ever be back. Being able to satisfy theEmperor was one thing, but the Chief Minister was another matter, and his demand was one I could never give into. So Montezuma probably would not have me killed, but unless he exerted himself to save me from my master I might yet die.
‘Look, Mother, I might not see you again …’
‘Oh, nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘You always come back. Now go and do what you have to, and if you could manage not to get that cloak too dirty, I’d appreciate it.’
She turned away quickly. I began to stretch a hand towards her, but I hesitated too long, and she was out of reach, lost among the crowd of her guests.
I headed for the doorway, but Handy was in the way
‘What about me, then?’ he asked plaintively.
‘What?’
‘What about me? Look, I know what you’re about. You’re going to warn your son old Black Feathers is after his blood, and once you’re sure he’s safely out of the city, you’ll go to ground or run away yourself. Well, fine, I’d do the same, but where does it leave me? The old bastard’s bound to blame me if you get away — and I can’t run. I’ve a family to think of.’
I looked at him blankly. ‘Um, right.’ His dilemma had never occurred to me. ‘You have, yes. Er, well, can’t you just tell him you couldn’t stop me? No, I suppose not.’ Handy stood a head taller than me and had muscles conditioned by his time in the army and years of hard work in the fields and on the city’s building sites. He could have picked me up and carried me back to the Chief Minister’s palace if he had wanted to.
Glutton, Amaxtli and Jade came up to us. ‘Come to see you on your way,’ Jade said. ‘We wanted to make sure you were really going! What’s up?’
‘Handy’s worried he’ll get the blame if I manage to find Nimble and help him escape,’ I explained.
‘Oh, that’s no problem,’ said Jade’s husband sourly. ‘Bash him over the head, tie him up and shove him in a ditch somewhere — preferably a long way away from here!’
‘Just a moment,’ said Handy.
‘You can’t do that!’ cried Jade.
‘What, like this?’ said Glutton.
My brother was even bigger than Handy Before any of the rest of us knew what he was doing he had stepped up behind him and clouted him on either side of the head with his fists.
We heard a soft thump. Handy’s eyes rolled into the top of his head and he fell forward on to the floor.
Jade screamed and rushed towards him.
‘I didn’t ask you to do that!’ I shouted. ‘You might have killed him!’
‘I didn’t feel anything break,’ my brother said defensively. ‘Anyway, it was for his own good, wasn’t it?’
I stared at him.
‘Are you going, or not?’ Amaxtli asked testily.
I looked down at the prone figure of my friend. As far as I could see past my weeping, hysterical sister, he appeared to be breathing normally. I looked at the crowd in the courtyard. Every back was turned towards me, as if telling me I had no further business here.
I did not answer my brother-in-law I just went.
‘Where is he?’
Kindly’s slave Partridge took a step back through the entrance to his master’s house. He had to, to avoid being run through by the bronze knife I was pointing at his throat.
‘Where’s who? No, you can’t come in. The mistress’s orders …’
‘Get out of my way. Or have you learned how to breathe without a windpipe?’
The man stumbled away from me and then turned and fled, shouting for help. I followed him, letting the knife dangle from my fingers.
The fleeing slave almost bumped into his mistress. Lily was standing in the middle of her courtyard, beneath the fig tree that dominated it. In the tree’s shadow, against the base of one wall, squatted her father. The old man had a drinking-gourd in his hands, as always, but he was wide awake and staring at me with a quizzical expression.
‘Hello, Yaotl,’ said Lily coolly. She ignored her slave, who was cowering behind her. ‘We were expecting you last night.’
‘I got held up,’ I said drily. ‘I want to see my son.’
‘He’s probably asleep.’
‘So bloody well wake him up, then!’ I snapped, waving the knife in front of me furiously.
If Lily found my gesture threatening she did not show it. The corner of her mouth twitched in amusement when she looked at the gleaming blade.
‘Why don’t you put that thing away before you cut yourself? And you, Partridge, stop whimpering and do something useful. Go and see if the boy’s awake … Ah, no need.’
Nimble stood in a doorway, blinking as his eyes took in the sunny courtyard.
I stopped waving the knife and gazed at him.
I could see immediately that he had been in a bad way. His face was gaunt with shadows around the eyes. I thought he seemed old. He had always appeared older than his years, but now the lines etched in his forehead by pain and fever made him look almost as ancient as his father felt. It was hard to say whether he now looked any better than the pale figure I remembered glimpsing across a canal, two days before. Nonetheless he stood up straight and his eyes were clear and alert.
‘Nimble,’ I said. It was difficult to speak. My mouth was dry and the sides of my throat seemed to have stuck together. Eventually I managed to add: ‘I brought your knife back.’
I ought to have been more careful. As we ran into one another’s arms, winding each other in an ecstatic, breathless embrace, I nearly stuck the weapon’s point in his shoulder by accident.
‘I knew you’d come. I thought if I just sent you the knife, you’d know where to find me. I couldn’t think of any other sort of message I could send that would be safe. I was afraid that if I had Kindly or Lily write anything down it might fall into the wrong hands.’
‘You mean old Black Feathers’, or one of his minions’.’ I kept looking at the lad and grinning like an idiot. I had thought I would never see him again, I had thought him dead, more than once. It was hard to accept that we were squatting together in the middle of Kindly’s courtyard, talking, having a conversation, behaving, just for the moment, at least, like a normal father and son. ‘It worked,’ I added. ‘I knew you could only have got the knife from Lily. But I should have guessed where you were anyway, because she’d told my master who you really were, and she didn’t hear that from me — did you, Lily?’
The woman knelt next to her father, with her plain skirt tucked under her knees and a plate of small honeyed maize cakes nestling in its folds. They were the kind of token food offerings that was always presented to a guest, but I noticed that this did not stop Kindly from reaching across his daughter’s lap and plucking one from the plate every so often.
‘No,’ she conceded. ‘Your son told me. Not that he meant to, but he was pretty feverish the day after he was wounded. I think I heard just about everything.’
‘Including who he was, and …’ I looked directly into her eyes as I continued: ‘And how your son died, and why’
She met my glance steadily. ‘That’s right. Everything. But I had to know for sure, you see? I couldn’t trust … sorry, Nimble, but I couldn’t rely on what you said when you were delirious.’ She smiled at the youth and reached out and touched his arm, as if to reassure him. He lowered his head and said nothing. ‘That’s why I took you from Howling Monkey’s house,’ she told me. ‘I needed you to tell me what happened, to confirm what I’d heard from your son.’
‘And then you told my master.’ At one time it would have been an accusation, hurled in her face with all the force I could muster, but with Nimble sitting by us I found I could state it calmly.
‘I’d no choice,’ she said. ‘I’d taken you — not to mention that knife — from the chief of my parish and then you’d escaped. I had to protect myself. Going to your master and telling him what had happened seemed the best way of doing it.’