Face to face with a god. In the man’s expression, in his staring eyes and bared teeth, I saw something of the terror he must have felt. He was telling the truth, I had no doubt of that. To have learned from others that they had seen what he had and that it had not been just a bad dream could only have added to his fear.
I was about to ask him what had happened next — where the god had gone, whether he had fainted or run away — when an urgent tugging at the hem of my cloak interrupted me.
‘Your visitor, slave,’ the Prick hissed.
My visitor would not come into the courtyard. The steward had to lead me out to him. He did so with ill grace, flapping the ground at his heels with the hem of his long cotton cloak in the hope of stirring some dust up into my face as I walked in his footsteps. By the time we got to the foot of the broad flight of steps leading from the terrace at the front of my master’s house to the canal that ran by it, he was muttering audibly.
‘Not much longer to go. Just you wait till tomorrow, you uppity little sod … Here you are.’
In the failing evening light the paved space at the front of the house bore a pale, colourless glow, as did the house opposite. The canal between them was a broad band of pure black. In the middle of it danced a shimmering patch of yellow light, the reflected glow of the fire on top of a nearby pyramid.
My visitor had contrived to stand so that his body was silhouetted against the patch of light, and all I saw of him at first was the angular shape of a tall man half turned towards me.
‘Yaotl?’
‘Here he is,’ the steward said unenthusiastically.
‘Thank you,’ my visitor said, and then, when the other man showed no sign of going away, added pointedly, ‘That will be all.’
I heard the steward’s cloak rustle as he turned on his heel and stalked back into the house. The moment he was out of sight I turned to the shadowy figure standing by the canal.
‘Thanks very much. Do you have any idea what that is going to cost me in the morning?’
The stranger laughed.
‘Shut up!’ I snapped. ‘You don’t have to put up with that oaf every day of your life. He’s bad news when he’s annoyed — and nothing annoys a flunky like him more than being ordered about by a complete stranger. Who are you, anyway?’
The laughter dried up quickly. ‘Sorry, but I thought it was funny — I mean, I should have known better, because we’re in the same position — but I have to give you a message, and it’s urgent and very private.’
‘“The same position”? So you’re a slave, too?’ I warmed towards him a little. To have seen the steward off as he had took some nerve, even if it was my hide that was likely to pay for it. By now, also, I was intrigued. ‘Whose slave? And what are you doing running errands on One Death? Shouldn’t you be having a rest?’
‘I volunteered. I’m new, you see — only sold myself a little while ago. My name’s Chihuicoyo.’ It meant ‘Partridge’. ‘I haven’t even spent all the money I was given yet, so by rights I shouldn’t be working, but my master needed me in a hurry, and you like to make a good impression, don’t you?’
I understood that. A valued slave might be given a position of responsibility, overseeing other slaves, or even get his freedom on easy terms. If he ingratiated himself enough with his master’s wife and the old man died off at a convenient time, then of course the possibilities were endless …
‘So when Icnoyo sent for me to give you a message, I didn’t think I ought to refuse.’
I stared at the man.
It was hard to make out any details in the poor light; just a short cloak that hung from his shoulder in the stiff way that cheap maguey fibre cloth does. ‘All I could see of his face was a pair of glittering eyes, narrow like most Aztecs’, and some strands of hair. He wore his hair shorter than I did, I realized, but so did most people: I kept mine hanging loose over my shoulders to cover my ears, mutilated as they were by years of penitential bloodletting as a priest.
It was not his appearance which made me stare, though. It was shock.
‘Did you say “Icnoyo”?’ I asked weakly.
Once, when I was a youngster in the House of Tears, one of the older boys gave me a piece of amber which, it turned out, he had been rubbing with a piece of cloth so as to wake up the spirit inside it. It had given me a shock and him a good laugh.
This slave’s words jolted me now as much as that piece of amber had.
Icnoyo, an old merchant with an unlikely name — it meant ‘Kindly’ — was Lily’s father, and the grandfather of Shining Light. To hear from the old man this evening, when I thoughtI had done with his household and had only to worry about my own troubles and the horrible dilemma I would be faced with in the morning, was the last thing I would have looked for.
‘That’s right,’ the slave confirmed. ‘Kindly was very anxious to get this to you straight away. I had to give it to you in person, nobody else. He said it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else, but you’d know what to do with it.’
‘Maybe I would. If it’s so urgent why didn’t his daughter tell me about it last night, or this morning? He forgets what I am. I might have been able to do something about it today, if I’d known what he wanted, but it’s no good now. I think my master has other plans for me.’ I sighed regretfully. Now I was getting over the shock I could feel my interest being piqued. What sort of cryptic message could Kindly’s slave be bearing?
‘Hold your hand out.’
Partridge’s voice abruptly dropped to an urgent whisper. Without thinking I did as he asked, and in the darkness I felt rather than saw the heavy cloth-wrapped bundle that fell into my palm. When I looked down I noticed that it was darker than the skin of my hand, and that was also when I registered that it was damp.
‘What’s this?’
There was no answer.
When I looked up again the slave had vanished.
I looked wildly about me. I took a deep breath, ready to call out, but stopped myself, and stood and listened instead.
The only sound was the soft pad-pad-pad of bare feet running away along the road by the canal.
I perched on the bottom tier of the stairway leading from the canal up to my master’s house and stared at the thing in my hand.
The sound of the drums still came to me, but now the musicians my master had hired were competing with those in other nearby houses, so that from where I sat the whole city seemed to echo with their rhythm. Every great house would be full of people praying and making offerings to Tezcatlipoca. For those who did not live in great houses or who could not get themselves invited to them, the priests in all the temples would be intoning hymns to Him Whose Slaves We Are. Everyone, from the most celebrated warrior and the richest merchant to the meanest serf shivering on his waterlogged plot out on the lake, would be demanding the god’s favour. The poor man would pray for the stroke of fortune that would make him instantly rich. The rich man would ask the god to stay his hand and let him keep what he had.
Almost alone in the city, I asked for nothing. I had nothing worth keeping, and I had seen too much ever to believe that the god could not make things worse if he chose.
The only thing I did have was a sodden cloth-wrapped bundle. As I hefted it an unpleasant thought occurred to me about why it might be so damp. Then, when I brought the thing up to my nose for a cautious sniff, I almost threw it away in disgust. There is something about the smell of human blood that retains the power to appal even the most accustomed of butchers.
Gingerly, with the bundle held at arm’s length, I started picking at its wrapping. As the thin, cheap cloth started to come away in shreds, I promised myself I would throw the nasty thing in the canal and wash my hands the moment I found out what it was.
My fingers, numb with cold and damp, seemed to move more and more slowly the closer they got to the middle of the parcel. There was something about its weight, tugging at my hand like a doomed fish being brought up in a net, about itsshape, sleek and full of purpose, about its unemphatic gleam, which I knew well enough to fear.
Then it lay in my hand, with the remains of its cloth binding littering the ground around me like the discarded skins of snakes.
My first impulse was to drop the thing. My second was to wrap my hand around it and clasp it to my chest in a fierce embrace and never let go. My third was to be violently sick.
In the event I did none of those things. I just sat by the canal and stared at what lay in my hand, a bronze knife sticky with congealing blood, and tried to grasp its meaning.
I knew this knife. I had been threatened with it more than once. The last time I had seen it, its blade had been buried in the breast of Kindly’s old slave, Nochehuatl. That had been five days ago, and it explained how the merchant had come by the weapon, although I realized with a thrill of horror that some of the blood that coated it now was fresher than the dead slave’s would be.
It was a grisly token, but it was more than that. The knife had been the only thing my son owned, his sole memento of his upbringing as an exile among the Tarascans, the barbarians beyond the mountains in the West who alone knew how to make and work bronze.
Why had the old merchant sent it to me now? Was he trying to tell me that my son had come back to claim it?