“Not much happening,” Handy said to me.
I glanced warily up toward the crest of the slope and down toward the town and the lake. “I can’t see anyone at all,” I said. “Should it be busy at this time of year?”
“It’s always busy,” the big commoner assured me. “You should try some honest toil in the fields! Look over there-there are some winter squashes they haven’t got in yet. They’ll lose them if they don’t get a move on.”
The fat vegetables lay, apparently neglected, among their tangled foliage. Just beyond them was a low, dark mound that I took to be earth until I saw a dark plume lifting from its surface in the breeze, and recognized the blackened and pulverized remains of mud bricks embedded in its surface.
Despite the Sun’s warmth on my back I felt a sudden chill.
“What happened here?” I asked slowly.
The big commoner’s brow creased in an expression of concern as he looked at the heap of ash. “It probably belonged to whoever was growing those squashes. I expect someone kicked over a hearthstone and the Old, Old God took offense and burned the place down.”
I laughed nervously. “I hope it wasn’t Crocodile’s.”
“Me too, after coming all this way. We’d better have a lookaround. Maybe we can find someone to tell us where this sorcerer lives.” He raised his voice to call his sons to order, but they took no notice. They were busy bickering and pushing each other about.
“I’ve carried this bag for long enough,” Buck snapped at his brother. “Now it’s your turn. Go on, pick it up!”
Snake replied by aiming a sly kick at his brother’s leg and then, very prudently, running away. I could not help smiling as I watched him go. He was the younger and, I suspected, the smarter of the pair, and he had my sympathy for that. I had been a little bit like him once.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with those boys,” Handy grumbled. “The sooner at least one of them gets some manners beaten into him by a Master of Youths, the better.”
“Leave them to it,” I said. “Let’s find our man and get it over with.”
“All right. You two!” he called. “We’re going up the hill. Mind you look after that bag or we’ll all go hungry!”
I kept looking over my shoulder as we climbed the slope toward the nearest house, as if I expected to see someone following us, but apart from the two boys chasing each other between the rows of maguey plants there was nobody in sight.
The house was a shabby affair of crumbling mud bricks and moldy thatch, with a soiled cloth screen in the doorway that flapped listlessly in the breeze because no one had bothered to secure it at the bottom. The back and sides were surrounded by trash: shattered plates, maize husks, chipped obsidian knife blades, gnawed bones, a broken turkey pen. At the front squatted an old woman, her face tanned by a lifetime in the fields to a leather mask that gave nothing away as she watched us walking up the hill.
“Crocodile? Never heard of him.”
Handy looked at me. I looked away, in case the sense of foreboding I felt showed on my face.
“You must have,” the commoner said. “He’s a sorcerer. He lives here.”
“There are no sorcerers here,” the old woman snapped. “Never have been. You got the wrong village. Go away.”
Handy took a step backward, repelled by her sheer hostility. “What’s going on here, Yaotl?”
I shot a nervous glance at the heap of ash down the hill behind us.Was it my imagination, or had something disturbed it? The plume I had seen earlier had become a large black cloud that hid the ruin itself. My stomach lurched as I realized there was no sign of either of the boys.
I turned back to the old woman. “Who lived in that house?”
The leather mask stayed fixed in place. Only her eyes responded to my question. They blinked once.
She hesitated for what seemed like ages before saying, slowly and quietly but distinctly, “I can’t remember.”
Handy and I stared at each other. We both opened our mouths to speak at the same time, but shut them again when we heard a sharp, shrill cry from the hillside below us.
“Father!”
3
Handy got there first, as might have been expected, racing across the fields while I was still trying to work out where Snake’s cry had come from.
By the time I caught him up the three of them were standing in the middle of the burned-out house. The two boys looked safe and healthy, apart from being coated from head to foot in dark gray ash. Snake was grinning and his older brother was scowling. Their father stood between them. His face had changed from an anxious parent’s to that of a judge trying to arbitrate a particularly intractable dispute.
“I found it!” Snake was saying.
“But you wouldn’t have if I hadn’t pushed you into that heap of ash!” his brother retorted indignantly.
“What have they found?” I asked.
Handy handed it over without speaking. I hefted it in my palm. It was surprisingly light and burned almost black but there was no mistaking it.
It was the lower jaw of a human.
“No wonder they never got those squashes in,” I remarked.
“Should we look for the rest?” Snake asked.
His father looked dubious, but his brother was already rooting around in the ash and rubble after a souvenir of his own. Before either of us could restrain him he had let out a triumphant whoop and was tugging enthusiastically at another blackened fragment. This one was a collarbone.
“Handy …”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t like this either, but there’s no stopping them now!”
“Why hasn’t someone picked up the bones?” I asked. I would have expected the dead man or woman’s family to have had the remains cremated or at least put in ajar and buried nearby. To see them casually tossed about disturbed me. A warrior killed or taken in battle could expect his grinning, fleshless skull to molder on a skull-rack and his thighbones to end up on show in his captor’s house, swelling his glory, but someone who had died in a stupid accident such as a house fire deserved gentler treatment.
Assuming it had been an accident.
“This happened a while ago,” I added. “Hasn’t anyone been here since?”
“Perhaps there isn’t anybody-maybe the dead man had no family.”
“Or maybe his family didn’t dare come looking for his remains.”
The other man was not paying me much attention, however. He was watching with a mixture of pride and exasperation as his boys turned their quarrel into a race to see who could gather up the most human fragments in the shortest time. “Look at those two! If I could get them to work that hard in the fields we’d never be hungry again!”
Flakes of ash and clouds of soot billowed around us as Buck and Snake worked. By some unspoken agreement, whenever either of them found a bit he dropped it on his own heap beside the ruins of the house. I wondered how they were planning to judge the winner: were they going to count the bones or weigh them?
I stepped across to Snake’s heap and decorously placed the jawboneon it. I gave the heap a second glance as I straightened up. Something did not look right. I bent down again and extracted a bone.
“Snake.”
He came over, his intelligent face turned up toward mine.
“Do you know what this is?”
“It looks like a thigh,” he said accurately.
“Where did you find it?”
He considered the question as gravely as an old gardener being asked to pick out the best spot to plant dahlias in. “Over there,” he said eventually.
The outline of the house could just be made out beneath the ashes. The place he indicated was just outside it. Judging by the fragments of pottery and other detritus that could still be seen there, it must have been the household’s rubbish heap.