It was my turn to stare as I realized that I was being dismissed from his sight, and that as far as my master was concerned our discussion was over.
I crept away down the steps. It was hopeless to argue. If my master knew I was telling the truth but was denying it for some reason then nothing I could say would make him change his mind. In any event, what was I going to suggest-that he take my kidnapping up with Curling Mist, when I was convinced the two of them had connived to bring it about in the first place?
As I headed back to my room, however, I was left with the uneasy impression that he had ordered me to rest because he wanted to keep me in his house, within easy reach, while he made up his mind what to do with me.
6
I crawled onto my sleeping mat, grabbing a rough old blanket with numb fingers and pulling it over my painfully cold limbs, and lay down, too exhausted to care that I was still caked in mud and blood.
“Where have you been all day?”
I groaned. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“How can I?” Costly grumbled. “I threw my blanket off duringthe day, when it was too hot, and now I can’t reach it. I’m freezing! Also, no one’s been around to give me my medicine, and I haven’t been able to go all day.”
Swearing under my breath, I got up and found the old slave’s blanket for him. It was too late for him to have the revolting infusion he took to open his bowels, but I found the gourd anyway so that I could give it to him first thing in the morning. I swirled the liquid inside it around and judged that he had enough to last him a couple of days.
“That’s better. Now you can lull me to sleep, telling me what you’ve been up to.”
I told him. I wanted nothing better than to slip into unconsciousness myself, but I was too uncomfortable. A violent shivering had come over me and my head was throbbing. At the same time the numbness that had come over my toes and fingers from being immersed in icy water and exposed to the evening’s chill was wearing off and they felt as if they were on fire.
My companion’s only response was: “So you fancy your chances with the widow, then?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I growled between teeth clamped together to stop them chattering. “Apart from the fact that she’s from a merchant family and I’m a commoner and a slave, she’s got no reason to like me. She thinks I’m part of the reason her son ran away.”
“And she’s not your type anyway,” he added mockingly. When I ignored him he went on: “Still, I’d be more worried about this man Curling Mist. You really think our master gave you to him to settle a bet? It seems a roundabout way to go about it, though.”
“That was my first thought. Even he might not get away with handing me over openly. I thought staging a kidnapping might be the easiest way of doing it without risking exposing himself.” The explanation sounded plausible, but I had already worked out that it was nonsense. It was simply too much trouble to go to for the sake of a trifling debt. “Besides, he seemed remarkably eager to kill me. I’d not have been worth much to him if he had!”
But what was I worth to Curling Mist and his boy? They had wanted something from me, and me in particular. No, I corrected myself: the man would have killed me immediately, but the boy hadexpected me to tell him something. What information could I have that he might need so badly he and his father were prepared to kidnap me to get it?
“Why did he let me go?” I wondered aloud, remembering that blood-streaked face peering at me over the side of the boat. I could not make sense of any of it. The boy had played his part in my abduction, and he had hit me with the paddle, although he had plainly done that so that his father would refrain from taking the knife to me. But why had he not called out when he was watching me treading water and his father was shouting for me?
“What about this bird, then?” Costly interrupted my thoughts. “You say it talked-that could be an omen, couldn’t it? Either that or it was a sorcerer who’d turned himself into a bird. Say, you don’t suppose …?”
“It wasn’t one of the men I’m looking for. I’m sure they’re just charlatans. I don’t think real sorcerers would have let themselves get shut in the prison in the first place, and anyway the bird I saw looked too big to get between the bars of one of those cages. A sorcerer would have turned himself into something tiny, like a hummingbird or a swift. An omen, though …”
I hugged my blanket uneasily. There had been many omens seen in Mexico of late. The Emperor had described some of them to me but there had been others: two-headed men, a disembodied female voice crying out in the streets at night, lightning striking the war-god’s temple. “It could be. An omen of what, though?”
He let out a breathless, croaking laugh. “That’s an easy one to answer! Take a leaf out of the Emperor’s book-get a sorcerer to tell you!”
“Very funny.” At last the shivering was beginning to subside. I rolled over, intending to sleep, but the old man was not finished.
“No, I mean it,” he persisted. “Why not hire a sorcerer to interpret the bird? It might be the answer to all your questions.”
“I don’t know any sorcerers-not real ones, anyway.”
“No problem. There’s a man I used to go to, name’s Crocodile, he lives in a village down near Coyoacan. Just mention my name and he’ll-”
I sat upright once more. “Did you say Coyoacan?”
“I know it’s a long way, but if you start early enough …”
“Coyoacan.” The name recalled my brother’s face, and the thing hidden in its shadows when he had mentioned it. I shivered, although I had forgotten the cold.
“Of course,” Costly went on, “he doesn’t come cheap. The genuine article never does.”
“I haven’t any money, you know that.”
“Then use some of mine. There’s some good cotton in that chest over there, easily enough to pay for a consultation.”
The chest he meant was the small reed box that contained our possessions. In my case they were pathetically few-a single worthless souvenir from my days as a priest, a couple of badly worn maguey fiber capes and breechcloths and little else. Costly had a little more: some money in the form of cloth and cocoa beans and a couple of bone nose-plugs, as I recalled. The money was what he had saved, as most slaves did if they could, against the day when he might be able to buy his freedom.
“I can’t take that,” I said.
He sighed. “Yaotl, what do you think I’m going to do with it? Buy myself back from old Black Feathers? What good would that do me? I can’t walk and there’s no one out there to look after me. I’d starve-I might as well be a slave and eat. I was …” I heard him swallow, as if trying to get rid of an obstruction in his throat. “I was going to leave it all to you anyway, so you might as well take some now. Consider it an advance on your inheritance!”
I could not think of anything to say.
I had spent years fetching and carrying for the old slave, putting food in his toothless mouth, giving him his medicine and cleaning up the results, turning him over in his bed when he was too weak and stiff to move himself and above all listening to his incessant complaints, and in all that time it had never occurred to me to expect anything more from him than what he had already done. Yet what made my eyes sting now was not his generosity in leaving me all he possessed. It was the thought that if I ever came into his money, it would be because I was never going to hear the old man’s whining voice again.
“Thank you,” I managed eventually.
The only answer was a loud snore.
THREE EAGLE
1
I left my master’s house before dawn, without speaking to anyone. The Chief Minister had not got up and I wanted to be gone before he learned I had defied his order to rest. I took some of Costly’s money with me, although I had no intention of paying any of it to a sorcerer.