The dead man was naked. It was easy to see that he had been thin, almost emaciated. The hair plastered to the side of his head was long. His eyes and mouth were wide open, as if in terror.
The throat had been slashed cleanly across. That may have been the fatal wound, but it was by no means the only one. The body was covered with strange marks, like scars of varying sizes, from tiny punctures to tracts of ugly puckered flesh.
“Not been in the water very long, if you ask me,” the young priest said conversationally, peering over my shoulder. “He’s not swollen up, and the skin’s barely discolored. Doesn’t smell too bad, either.”
I stretched a hand out behind me, without a word, and someone put a pine torch in it. I clambered into the boat. The priests had got the head and torso aboard but left the feet dangling in the water. I pulled them over the side one at a time, looking closely at the rope tied around one of the ankles as I did so.
“Whoever decided to leave a corpse floating opposite my master’s house meant us to find it,” I observed.
“You think it was some sort of message?” It was the young priest again.
“Part of a message, at most,” I replied. “A corpse by itself doesn’t amount to much of a message, does it?”
I looked at the naked body, frowning. After what I had seen that day it was hard to feel anything for this unknown victim except bewilderment. Had he really been killed just to convey a message? And if so, where was the rest of it-the key to whatever threat or warning he represented? I thought of a letter, but there was no obvious place where one could be hidden. My eyes roamed over the torso and limbs, searching for some pattern in the wounds covering them, but there was nothing there. Then I looked at the head again and saw the answer.
“I wonder …” I reached down and parted the dead man’s long, lank hair. It was wet and sticky and clung to my fingers like cobwebs as they delved into it. They brushed against an ear, and the slick skin behind it, and something else-a coarser, less pliant surface than the skin. Of course, I thought, as I drew the little cloth square out and unfolded it, it would not be paper. Paper would have disintegrated in the water.
Sure enough, someone had drawn on the cloth. It had been hastily done and the ink had got a little smudged but the message was clear enough for me to read. It was simple enough: just a name-glyph.
“At least we know his name, now.”
Then I looked at the drawings again. A single spot, a skull, a crude little stick figure wielding a sword and standing on a path decorated with chevrons.
“Cemiquiztli Yaotl.” I mouthed the words over and over again like an idiot, while the cloth shook in my hands.
“Cemiquiztli” meant “One Death” and “Yaotl” meant “Enemy,” but taken together they spelled out my own name.
“Is this someone’s idea of a joke?” I demanded. I began climbing out of the canoe, too shocked to look where I was going. “Did someone tell you to put this with the body?” I waved the piece of cloth in the priest’s face.
The priest was not there anymore. The face opposite mine as I stepped onto the edge of the canal was my master’s. Next to him was his steward. They were both staring at me, their expressions comically alike, with their eyes starting from their heads and their lower jaws slack with amazement.
The steward recovered first. Stepping delicately around our master, he reached for the cloth square, plucking it from my hand.
“I think we’d better have this, Yaotl.”
The Chief Minister seemed to have lost the power of speech. He kept staring at the body in the bottom of the boat with his mouth hanging open like an imbecile’s. His steward silently pressed the note from the body into his nerveless fingers. Someone else took the torch from me and held it over my master’s head so that he could read it.
He ignored the note as if unaware that he had it. He seemed oblivious to everything around him except the corpse. Nobody else dared to speak, even in a whisper, and so the only sound was his own breathing. It did not sound healthy-quick and shallow and with an ugly rattle in it.
Finally he broke the silence himself. “Who did this?” he gasped.
“My Lord,” the steward responded in his most simpering tone, “perhaps the note I gave you …”
My master glanced down at the piece of cloth he was holding as if noticing it for the first time. He looked at the body again, and then turned his sharp, glittering eyes on me. It struck me then that they never seemed to age: however lined his face and frail his body got, they were always the same, as though made out of some hard, bright, imperishable stuff like jade or polished marble. Now their gaze was hooded, malevolent and calculating, and made me feel as cold as if I, and not the corpse, had spent the evening floating in the canal. The fear that had assailed me at Handy’s house came back redoubled.
“Cemiquiztli Yaotl.” My master’s lips moved soundlessly over the name.
“M-my Lord,” I stammered. “We found that note on the body-the body was in the canal. I had priests sent for …”
“Yes, yes, I know all that.” My master looked at the note again. “Why has it got your name on it?”
“I don’t know,” I replied in a wretched whisper.
“I do.” The grim certainty in his words matched his expression. When he looked at me again his lips were pressed together in a thin line. “Huitztic!”
“My Lord?” the steward responded eagerly.
“Escort Yaotl to his room-and make sure he stays there until I send for him!”
“But …” I began, but the Chief Minister did not want to hear me. The old man who had had a whole family done to death in Coyoacan quelled my protest with a glare, while his sneering steward propelled me out of his sight, a calloused hand clamped firmly on my arm.
My master’s last words seemed to hang in the air behind us.
“Cemiquiztli Yaotl! I will deal with you in the morning!”
6
“You get in there and stay put,” the steward snarled as he shoved me through the doorway. “I’ve got to talk to Rabbit.”
Rabbit was a large, dim man who had been in my master’s household since boyhood and had risen eventually to the menial position of litter bearer. He had had the misfortune to cross our path as the steward was dragging me back to my room, and had been ordered to come with us. The steward had no intention of spending the rest of a winter’s night huddled in the open courtyard watching my doorway, and thought poor old Rabbit would be the ideal deputy.
I slumped against the wall in a corner of my room, with all thought of sleep gone. I had come home that evening with my mind in turmoil.
Why had a message bearing my name been left on the body? Did it have something to do with the sorcerers? I felt that it must, but could not see what.
There had been something about the dead man himself-but I would have to see his body again to be certain, and I could hardly do that, I told myself gloomily, while I was confined to my room.
And I suspected that by the time they came to let me out of here it would be too late.
“So what have you done this time? And what’s Rabbit doing out there?”
On any other night I would have dreaded the sound of Costly’s voice, but tonight it was a relief to hear he was awake. It gave me a chance to share my troubles instead of brooding on them. The old slave lived for gossip and devoured every word eagerly.
As soon as I had finished he said astutely: “So let me guess. You think the body in the canal might be one of those sorcerers the old man’s so anxious to get his hands on, is that right?”
“It could be,” I said. “I’d need to look at it again-and that still wouldn’t tell me why it had my name on it.” I growled in frustration. “But I can’t do anything about it from in here, can I? How do I get past Rabbit?” I could picture the litter bearer on guard opposite our doorway, no doubt wishing he was curled up on his own sleeping mat rather than squatting in this chilly courtyard, but wide-awake nonetheless and not about to let his master down.