“I know too. I used to be a priest.”
She looked at me with renewed interest and I saw the dark color that had spread over her face and the quick pulse in her throat. I wondered whether she in turn saw me as a young man, when I had been one of the temple’s mysterious, glamorous servants, with my crown of feathers and my cheeks daubed with blood and ochre. She frowned. “But now you’re a slave-how did that happen?”
The question shocked me back to the present. I did not want to talk about this.
“My master needs to know where your son’s offering came from,” I said clumsily. “He needs to talk to Shining Light ….”
“Why?”
I opened my mouth to reply and then shut it again. What could I say, when for all I knew old Black Feathers might just then be amusing himself deciding what parts of her son’s body he would like to have severed with a dull knife? I heard myself mumbling: “He’s concerned that it went wrong. After all, he sent me to help.”
“And a lot of help you were too!” she said bitterly. “If you hadn’t let that slave get away when he did, it might have been all right …”
“There was nothing I could have done!”
“My son would have been better off hiring another escort, like that big commoner Handy,” she went on, ignoring me. “Two men like him might have been able to hold the slave.”
“I didn’t ask to be there!” I protested. “I don’t even know why I was there in the first place! Whose idea was it to send me, anyway? Did your son ask for me?”
“How should I know? I’ve told you, I had no idea what he was doing.”
“So you don’t know what dealings he had with my master?”
“Until yesterday, I wasn’t aware that he’d ever had any!”
“What about the man he placed his bets with-Curling Mist?”
My last question seemed to strike her like a blow. She leaned forward sharply as if someone had stabbed her in the stomach. She sat up again just as abruptly, but kept her eyes on her knees as she answered me in a voice that was suddenly very smalclass="underline" “My son doesn’t share all his … business affairs with me. Why should he?”
“But he did use him? He did put money on the ball game through him?”
I watched her shoulders shudder momentarily beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. “I don’t know. Yes-he probably did. Look, I’m tired. I had the parish chiefs here all morning, and now you come asking questions that I can’t answer.” Her eyes were no longer glistening, merely hard and defiant. “If the Chief Minister wants to talk to my son, then he had better go and look for him. But you can tell him Shining Light isn’t here. He’s gone away to die. See what your master makes of that, slave!”
3
A small canal ran alongside the merchant’s house. I lingered by it for a while, toying with the idea of hailing a canoe and so saving myself a long walk back to my master’s house in the center of Tenochtitlan. I felt tired and dispirited: I could not claim to have achieved very much here, beyond establishing that Shining Light was not at home and that his mother appeared to have less idea of where his sacrificial victim had come from than I had. I did not even know whether to believe her when she claimed her son had gone into exile. On the other hand he must have some reason for setting off on a journey on an unlucky day. I remembered now where I had heard the name Xicallanco: Montezuma had mentioned it as a place where rumors of the pale strangers had been heard. According to my brother, these men had had things like the sword and the cloth he had shown me, and at the time I had thought about how our merchants might covet them. Could Lily’s son have gone in search of such things? It seemed possible, but then how had he known of them, I wondered, and again, why had he chosen to go on One Reed?
It was quiet here. The walls around me were the color of sun-bleached bones, and for all I could tell held as much life within them. The water at my feet sparkled in the late morning sunshine. I gazed at my reflection, examining my own gaunt features, my earlobes tattered from years of offering the gods my own blood and my unkempt, thinning, graying hair, and wondered what Lily had seen when she had looked at me.
Had I imagined the way she had looked at me while we were talking about the death of Bathed Slaves? Many women found priests alluring. They found us intriguing and sinister, for our ancient hymns and bloodstained knives, our black robes and long, tangled hair. They thought us brave, because we fasted and bled ourselves and confrontedthe gods every day and the creatures that frequented the darkness every night. And they could not have us, for we were celibate, and that only made us more fascinating.
Lily was a handsome woman, much the same age as myself, and something about her had snagged in my heart and was refusing to be dislodged. Perhaps it had been her fierce pride in what her late husband had done, or her refusal to surrender to grief or rage, or her defiance toward the Chief Minister’s messenger. Perhaps it had been something in that moment we had shared, dwelling on the long-ago death of her father’s slave. She was named for the boldest of flowers and for a moment I thought that if I had just seen its deep red and brilliant yellow petals for the first time, I should not have been so struck by them. I turned the name over on my tongue: “Lily …”
Then I allowed the face in the water an indulgent smile. A man who had sold himself into slavery had no ambition, no desire, no will of his own. He had given all that up, and now just had fantasies, and they were safe enough.
Two faces smiled back at me.
I nearly fell in the canal. Recovering hastily from the fright, I stepped back and looked at the new arrival in the flesh.
He was dressed as a priest. Skulls and stars adorned his long black mantle. An ocelot-skin tobacco pouch dangled on his chest. His hair was as long as mine, although not as dirty as a priest’s hair would often be: matted and filthy with moss growing in it. Fresh blood, drawn from his earlobes, lay congealing on either side of his neck.
For a moment I had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing myself, a dozen years younger, until the surprise wore off and I began to see the differences.
To begin with the stranger was taller than I was, although he was stooping to bring his face on a level with mine. More interesting than that was the sooty paste covering his face and body. All priests wore this to stain themselves as black as the night that was their habitat, but this man had gone further than anyone else I had seen. He was caked in the stuff. It had rubbed off on the hem of his mantle and collected as a smattering of black dust at his feet. It had cracked around his eyes and mouth, showing slivers of brown skin underneath, but elsewhere it had been applied so thickly it obscured the features underneath like a mask. I could not even tell the man’s age,because he had laid the soot on so heavily that it would have hidden any lines on his face.
Still smiling, he said: “Looking for a boat?”
He was mumbling. Priests often did, owing to their practice of sacrificing their own blood by sticking cactus spines through their tongues.
I looked around quickly. There was no one else beside the canal, although a canoe floated on the water a few paces away. A boatman stood in it, leaning on his pole with his back to me. He was young, an unblooded youth’s lock of hair still falling down the nape of his neck.
“You can share mine,” the man beside me added.
I found the sudden appearance of man and canoe disturbing.
“Thanks.” I tried not to sound ungracious. “I might walk back to Tenochtitlan, though.”
The smile vanished, splitting off a few flakes of soot as it did so. “You might not.”
Something jabbed me below my rib cage. I tried to back away, only to find one of my arms seized in a grip like an alligator’s bite. I felt a sharp pricking against my stomach and looked down at the knife. It was made of brown metal, like copper, but darker. I had never seen anything like it.