“So old Black Feathers was banging on about his father again? You amaze me. I’ve known our beloved Chief Minister a lot longer than you have, young man, and if I had a bag of cocoa beans for every time I’ve heard one of those jealous tirades about his father, I could have bought my freedom years ago.”
“But Lord Tlacaelel’s been dead nearly forty years.”
“Yes, and his son’s never moved out of his shadow. Not surprising, is it? Four emperors deferred to Tlacaelel. He was their equal. Montezuma treats his son like a servant-even though one of his wives is old Black Feathers’ daughter! How often do you suppose our master has to listen to tales of his father’s exploits in war-or even worse, gets asked to tell them himself? And every time he visits that great big palace next to the Heart of the World he must tell himself: ‘If only my father hadn’t turned down the throne, all this would be mine!’”
“Our master’s jealousy isn’t really my problem,” I reminded Costly as I squirmed into a less uncomfortable position under my cloak. “It’s the sorcerers I have to worry about.”
“Don’t you think there’s a connection? What was it he told you-he wanted something that wasn’t his father’s?”
“True, but he also said the Emperor was afraid of him.”
“Why? He’s too old to be any threat. If Montezuma died tomorrow the throne would go to his brother, Cuitlahuac. Our Chief Minister and our Emperor both know that.” The old slave sucked noisily on his bare gums. “I’d lay odds old Black Feathers was lying to you.”
“He would,” I said dryly. “I’m meant to be spying on him, remember?”
The old slave persisted as I rolled over on my mat. “Whatever’shappened to these sorcerers, it’s not just because of some feud between old Black Feathers and Montezuma. It’s got to do with something our master wants-something his father never had. Now what might that be, I wonder?”
ONE REED
1
I did not want to go to the prison, but since I seemed to have no choice, I steeled myself to visit it.
Rainwater had pooled on the flat roof and dripped into the wooden cages that lined the walls. The rushes strewn on the floor had absorbed all the moisture they could and now floated uselessly in shallow puddles. The floor was crisscrossed by thin streams of liquid stained with filth from the overflowing pots the prisoners were given to relieve themselves in. The only light came through tiny apertures set high in the walls: not enough to show you where you were putting your feet, but enough to reveal the misery on the faces of the prison’s handful of desperate inmates.
Each prisoner huddled naked on the floor of his cage. There was a sameness about them, each one alone, unable or unwilling to speak to his neighbors, surrounded by the smell of his own and others’ ordure-reduced to everything an Aztec was not.
“They’re drunks, mostly.” The Emperor’s majordomo dismissed most of the wretches in his care with a single word. “Don’t feel too sorry for them, they’ve only themselves to blame. And these are the worst offenders-the ones their own parishes couldn’t handle. Still, you’d know all this, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
My tone must have been too sharp, as he gave me a curious look. “I thought you were Lord Feathered in Black’s man. He is the Chief Justice, isn’t he, after all?”
“Oh … yes, yes, of course …”
“We had some more interesting characters,” the major-domo went on. “But you know all about the sorcerers, of course.”
“The men who escaped? They really were sorcerers, then?” I asked innocently.
“They must have been, to get out of this place. Turned themselves into birds and flew out through the windows.”
Having seen the windows, I thought nothing much bigger than a hummingbird could have got through any of them, but I kept this to myself.
“That’s what I came to talk to you about,” I said. “Lord Montezuma wanted me to see where the sorcerers had got away from, so that I could see what manner of men we are dealing with. He would want me to eliminate all the mundane explanations first, though.”
“Lord Montezuma?” He sounded surprised, and when he stared at me his eyes were pale discs in the prison’s gloom. “The Emperor sent you? But I thought you said you were the Chief Minister’s man?”
“The Emperor asked the Chief Minister to find out what happened,” I explained, “and then he asked me.”
“He asked you himself?”
“Yes.”
The man looked at his feet. His toes turned over some rushes. I wondered why he seemed to be prevaricating; after all, I could hardly be the first person to ask him these questions. What difference did it make who had sent me? To encourage him, I added, “And so when I ask you a question, it’s as if Lord Montezuma were asking it, except I personally don’t have the power to have you dismembered if you don’t tell me what I want to know. Now, are you going to answer me, or do I have to tell the Emperor you won’t cooperate?”
The majordomo let out a theatrical sigh. “All right. I suppose it can’t hurt if I run through the whole story from the beginning. These men-they’d been rounded up from all over the place, fingered by the headmen of their villages, I think, and brought in by order of the Emperor. He interrogated them personally.”
“What about?”
“What do you think?” The man lowered his voice to an awed whisper. “The omens! It sounded to me as if the Emperor was afraid of some huge disaster, and just wanted some sorcerers to look into the future and give him a straight answer about it. That’s why he had them rounded up, I think, so that he could consult them without thewhole city knowing what they were talking about. He was asking them whether they’d had any visions.”
“And had they?”
“Of course not! If they had been able to predict the sort of catastrophe the Emperor had in mind they would have been fools to own up to it. How do you tell an emperor his realm is about to perish? They just kept saying they’d seen nothing. In the end Montezuma ran out of patience, had them thrown in here and sent me along the next day to question them.”
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing! All they’d tell me was that whatever was going to happen would happen and that a great mystery would come to pass-not exactly helpful. Montezuma was so angry that he kept them in here on starvation rations and then sent me back to interrogate them again. But that was when …”
The majordomo licked his lips. His voice seemed to have dried up and he had to clear his throat before continuing.
“We had a double guard on the place, because the Emperor was so troubled about these men. The guards were all men I’d known for years, men I’d trust with my children’s lives, and none of them saw a thing. They’d all gone-flown away like … well, like bloody birds!”
“How did you explain that to the Emperor?”
“How do you think? I had to go and tell him his most important prisoners, the ones he’d taken a particular interest in, had vanished into thin air. What would you have done?”
“I suppose I would have either run very far away or groveled a lot.”
“Yes, well, I just told him he might as well have me cut to pieces there and then, because there was no sign of his prisoners and none of my guards had seen or heard a thing. I thought I was a dead man. He’s had people disemboweled and their wives and children strangled for less, but I got away with it somehow.” He paused thoughtfully. “It’s not as if he wasn’t angry, mind you. If he ever catches those men, he’s going to make them suffer-and anyone else who gets the blame for their disappearance. But I was lucky. It never seemed to occur to him that it might be my fault-not that it was, of course!”
I eyed him skeptically. “So what did the Emperor think had happened?”
“That they’d used magic to escape, of course.”
So the Emperor had done as any Aztec would in his position. If you needed the favor of the gods, you might go to a priest, but sometimes that was not enough. Perhaps the war-god and the rain-god at the summits of their pyramids seemed too remote from the affairs of men. Perhaps what troubled you was the work of some malignant spirit whose name you did not even know. Then, if you had a dream that needed interpreting, or were about to set off on a long journey or try planting your beans too late in the season, you would go to a sorcerer.