“What’s this about? Let me go!”
The grip on my arm tightened.
“The boat.” The man with the knife jerked my arm, twisting me around to face the canoe. Struggling to keep my balance, I could do nothing about trying to escape before I felt the knife again, now prodding me in the small of my back.
As we moved toward the boat, its occupant turned around.
He was Nimble, Curling Mist’s son-the boy I had last seen and heard taking bets on a ball game from my master.
I thought it was a robbery at first. Perhaps Kindly had not been altogether wrong after all, I thought, assuming that the black-faced man with the knife was Nimble’s father, Curling Mist. Perhaps it was true that the merchant owed him money. If he had heard about the young man’s departure he might have been in a hurry to collect it before it was too late, and perhaps he thought I had beaten him to it.
“Look, you’ve got this all wrong. I haven’t got anything.”
“Shut up and get in the boat. Call out to anyone and you’re dead.”
I was made to clamber into the center of the canoe under the youth’s watchful eye. The black-faced man got in behind me. As soon as he had settled himself, with the blade of his knife resting against the side of my neck, the youth pushed off from the side of the canal.
“What’s this about?” I demanded. “Where are you taking me?”
My assailant’s breath stirred the hair on the back of my head but he said nothing, so I tried the boy instead.
“He doesn’t say much, your father, does he?”
The youth had nothing to say either. He was concentrating on the canal’s banks and the pole in his hands. He handled the canoe skilfully, avoiding the occasional oncoming craft with nothing more than a slight curl of his lip and an almost imperceptible twist of the pole.
“We’re heading out of the city,” I observed. I might as well have been talking to myself. I lapsed into silence, trying to decide what to do while I watched the scenery changing slowly around me.
The canal merged into the broad waterway that spilled into the lake at Copolco on the eastern edge of Mexico’s island. Soon the houses gliding by on either side of us would be replaced by fields: chinampas, the artificial islands that our farmers had taken to cultivating when they had run out of dry land, and which now surrounded the city.
I watched the houses and fields slipping past me with an odd feeling of detachment. The knife was still scraping the skin at the back of my neck but I was not afraid. What was happening to me was not real. It was too bizarre: to have been sent to Shining Light’s house by my master and then kidnapped by the man with whom my master bet on the ball game and his boy. It was obviously not a robbery, since they had made no effort to search me for valuables. What were they planning to do, then-hold me against my master’s gambling debts?
I considered raising the alarm despite the threatened consequences, but there was no one to call to. The houses and fields were silent: most people must either be at home, out of sight and earshot behind the faceless walls of their courtyards, or have gone to the market.
My only chance, unless I steeled myself to take on the youth, the man and the knife alone, was the open lake, where there were always plenty of boats and a shout carried a long way-provided I ever gotthere. All I could do in the meantime was to try to get them talking. I thought it might distract them at least.
“Do I have to guess what all this is about?”
That drew as much of a response as I expected it to.
“All right, then.” I tried to keep my tone bland and conversational, while my eyes darted about, searching the fields on either side for an opportunity to get away. “You aren’t thieves, I know that. So it’s me you’re after, isn’t it? But why?” I paused. The boy went on plying his pole impassively and the knife stayed at my neck. “No, you won’t tell me that. All right, then, how did you know where to find me? Was it the woman who told you where to look, or the old man? But they’d never have got a message to you in time, not unless you were right by their house already. What about the Chief Minister?”
The knife twitched.
“Isn’t old Black Feathers one of your best customers? What’s he going to say when he learns you’ve made off with his slave?”
From behind me a thick voice said: “I told you, this is too dangerous. We should do him here.” I thought it sounded more distinct than before, as if the effort of talking like a priest was becoming hard to maintain.
I tried to shift my weight forward a little so that I could throw myself at the boy if either he or his father made a move, even though I knew the knife would be deep in my flesh before I could stir a muscle.
The youth turned to look at me and let his eyes linger on my face, as if he were looking for something there.
“No,” he said. His voice sounded too old for his years. “We mustn’t.”
I felt the other man’s tension through the metal pressed to my skin. I recognized fear or suppressed anger or a mixture of both and wondered how long I had before he got desperate enough to use the knife. “We’re taking enough chances with him as it is. The longer we let him live the riskier it gets. I should have killed him beside the canal!”
“But-”
“But nothing!” The strain had come out into his voice now, which was suddenly high pitched, almost strangled. “Who do you think I’m doing all this for, anyway? If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’tbe on this boat at all!” The cold pricking at my neck vanished and the knife blade appeared at the corner of my eye as he waved it in the youth’s direction. I started to turn my head, to flex the muscles in my arms and legs ready to spring. “Don’t argue with me! We kill him when I say so!”
The glittering metal swung fully into my sight. I saw shock and alarm in the boy’s eyes, and realized too late that the knife was arcing toward my throat.
A strong hand seized my hair and yanked my head backward, stretching my neck like a sacrificial quail’s.
“No!” The young man almost screamed, dropping his pole as he threw himself toward me. “Please! You mustn’t! Not until we’ve asked him-we’ve got to know!”
He was too slow. His fingers barely brushed Curling Mist’s arm before the blade struck my taut skin.
It stayed there, quite still, for a moment that seemed to stretch into days. I was distantly aware of a stinging sensation and the warm, wet feeling of blood running from a shallow cut down the front of my neck. Much closer to me seemed the youth’s wide-open, imploring eyes, just a hand’s breadth from my face.
“Please,” he begged in a whisper.
The knife wavered a little as the hand holding it relaxed.
“You really want me to spare him?”
“Yes … at least for now.”
“At least for now.” The man behind me slipped once more into his slurring parody of a priest’s voice. “All right. You win. He can live until he’s told us what you want to know. Then we’ll kill him.”
4
At Copolco we turned south to pass along the western edge of the island of Mexico. The boy swapped his pole for a paddle and put a little distance between us and the shore. Whether this was to make it easier for him to avoid running aground or harder for me to escape I did not know, but both he and his companion seemed to relax a little. The knife returned to the side of my neck.
I had not tried to start another conversation. Nearly having my throat cut had made the danger I was in all too real, and I held my tongue for fear of provoking Curling Mist again. I suspected that if he and his son renewed their argument over me, the boy might not win it so easily the second time. Still, as the land receded, I felt I could risk a glance over my shoulder.
The Sun lay low over the mountains, throwing the far shore of the lake into shadow. The water’s surface was calm, the bulk of the island of Mexico and the dyke beyond it sheltering it from the winds that sometimes stirred up the great salt lake to the east. Canoes dotted it, although none was close enough to be worth calling out to.