“It was a fluke. We’re professionals, you know. We were going for a points win.”
“Come on, let’s get out of here.” The captain looked up at me again. “You can keep your clothes. You can even have your stake back, if you want.”
“I didn’t have a bet,” I replied.
“You didn’t?” He looked relieved. “Well, that’s all right, then.”
The players began climbing the steps leading out of the court, talking quietly among themselves, perhaps about how they were going to get their newly won wealth home before any of its former owners tried to steal it back from them.
I decided to ask them about Lily, on the off chance that one of them had seen her.
The captain laughed. “Are you joking? We have enough to do keeping our eyes on the ball, never mind looking at girls!”
A couple of his teammates laughed with him, but one of them-the youngest looking, a lad barely out of the House of Youth-paused on the steps and touched his lips thoughtfully with his fingers.
“There was one, though.” He glanced nervously at his captain, who was glaring at him, and added hastily: “I only noticed her because she was the only woman-she stood out in the crowd. And not one of your pleasure girls, either. Middle-aged, I thought, and really plainly dressed, like a commoner’s wife or a merchant’s.”
The breath caught in my throat. “Where is she? Which way did she go?”
The youth lowered his head unhappily before his captain’s silent reproach. “I don’t know. Last time I looked, she’d gone.”
I made myself breathe again. “Never mind,” I said. “At least I know she was here.”
I turned to go.
“You only just missed her, though,” the young man called after me. “She was sitting in the same place you were.”
4
So now I knew for sure that the woman had gone to the ball court in order to speak to Nimble. For some reason she had then left straightaway, vacating the seat next to his, which was how we had found ourselves sitting next to each other. The gods had had no hand in it after all.
I went in search of the boy. I needed to find him, because it wasclear from what he had said to me that he knew all about the Bathed Slave and the man whose body we had found in the canal. He could be the key to finding the sorcerers. It was easy to work out where he had gone: assuming he had been swept along with the crowd running away from the ball court, I merely had to follow a broad trail of footprints, broken feathers, tortilla crumbs and pipe ash. The trail ended a little way away, at the entrance to Tlatelolco market. A surprisingly small group of ball game spectators was milling around there, in front of one of the gateways in the long, low wall that stretched away on either side, surrounding the marketplace. A few were already on their way home, creeping away self-consciously while some of the more patient formed an orderly queue and shuffled in under the watchful eyes of the market policemen guarding the entrance. A vague air of collective foolishness hung over the rapidly dwindling crowd and made itself heard in the subdued voices muttering around me. It felt as if, having seen the ball game end so unexpectedly and run from the scene in such a panic, nobody was quite sure where to go next.
As there was no sign outside the market of Curling Mist’s boy, I joined the queue at the gateway. If he was trying to hide from me, I thought, there was no better place to do it than the vast, overcrowded sprawl that was Tlatelolco market.
The market was in its way as much the heart of our world as the sacred plaza in Tenochtitlan to the South. Between forty and sixty thousand people were drawn to this place every day. They came to buy or sell, or just to stare; to walk quietly up and down the seemingly endless lines of pitches and admire the goods on display and watch and listen to their fellow Aztecs. Much of our subject peoples’ produce ended up here, either through extortion or by trade with towns many days’ march away. Here, laid out on mats, guarded for the most part by middle-aged women, merchants’ wives, mothers and daughters, was everything you could ever want to buy.
I wormed my way through the jostling crowd that filled the spaces between pitches, mumbling apologies when I ducked between a customer and the trader he was haggling with. I poked my head among the colonnades, peered rudely into the faces of passersby and craned my neck to stare over their heads, but there was no sign of Nimble. I searched for him until the Sun had sunk low in the sky and some of the traders were beginning to pack up their wares for the night, and Ihad to accept that I had lost him. For a while I wandered listlessly about, not taking much notice of where I was or what was happening around me, until I found myself in the jewelers’ quarter of the market.
On either side of me were rows of reed mats spread with gold, silver, amber, jade, turquoises, emeralds and feathers. Some jewels were set into bracelets, others carved into ornamental lip-plugs and earplugs. Some of the gold had been made into pendants or arm bands, some into plates, some packed into goose quills in the form of gold dust, as a handy form of currency. Some of the feathers were sold loose, some made up into shimmering mosaics and some fashioned into headdresses, whose blue cotinga and roseate spoonbill plumes would float above the wearer’s crown while iridescent green quetzal feathers trailed gracefully behind him.
I paused by the feathers. It occurred to me that if I wanted to talk to Lily, this was a good place to look for her. Exotic feathers were imported from the South, where I knew the woman’s family had interests.
In any case the feathers themselves were worth admiring. The centerpiece of the display in front of me was a ceremonial shield, a leather disc pasted with blue and red feathers depicting the water monster we called Ahuitzotl, with its teeth, claws and scales picked out in gold. On the mat next to this was a great mass of scarlet feathers, sold in bunches, and they caught my attention because they reminded me of the bunch I had seen displayed in front of me at the ball game. These were fresher, however. They were among the best I had seen. Their color was as vivid as the Sun and the air stirred them as if they were still attached to a bird in flight.
“Do you like them?” the stallholder asked. “My cousin supplies them. They’re our speciality.”
No Aztec could resist such beauty-as glorious and fragile as life itself. “They’re lovely. What are they, red spoonbill?”
“Scarlet macaw. These are the tail feathers.”
“Where does your cousin get them from?”
The stallholder was a young man, perhaps an apprentice merchant impatient to be allowed to accompany his elders on his first foreign venture. As he grinned ingenuously up at me he reminded me of Shining Light. “Family secret,” he said.
“Oh, really? What family would that be, then?” I asked, a little too eagerly.
The stallholder’s grin faded. “These belong to Kindly and his grandson-why do you want to know that?” His tone was suddenly suspicious.
“I might have something for them,” I replied cryptically, “or for Lily. Have you seen her? She manages the business, I gather.”
“Up to a point,” mumbled a new voice behind me.
I spun around but I knew whom I would see before I had moved a muscle. I had heard that voice only briefly but I was never likely to forget it.
Curling Mist was standing a few hands away, leering at me from beneath the layers of soot that caked his face more thickly than ever. One hand was concealed under his cloak. I could guess what it held. I could feel the skin on the back of my neck shrinking at the memory of that strange metal knife.