“Then it’s back to the Priest House, to sit and shiver until noon. You’re allowed to sleep, but in the night it’s too cold for sleep, and in the morning the prospect of food keeps your eyes open.
“They feed you at midday-nothing but a few maize cakes, as I said, with some tomato sauce, and that’s part of the test too. You’ve failed the moment you spill or splatter a drop. You try it, when your fingers are numb with cold and your hands are trembling, and all you want is to shovel those maize cakes down your throat and then go to sleep.”
“We owe so much to our priests,” said Lily. I gave her a sharp look, but from her dreamy expression I could tell she meant it.
“You haven’t heard the half of it! You don’t go to sleep in the afternoon, you go to work. You get sent out to Citlaltepec to gather reeds.”
“I think I’ve heard about this. Isn’t that when the priests attack passersby?”
“On the way back, yes, if they’re stupid enough to be out on the road. Hardly surprising, is it? You have a gang of priests, half starved, exhausted, and facing five days and nights of this misery, all in the name of keeping the crops watered, and they come across some ungrateful bastard with a full belly and a warm cloak who thinks his maize and beans just spring out of the ground by themselves-of course they’re going to beat the crap out of him!”
I paused, surprised by my own excitement, the quickness and shallownessof my own breathing and the look on Lily’s face. Her skin had colored a little under the ointment and she was watching me steadily with her lips slightly parted. She was imagining herself as one of us, I thought, feeling our hunger and fatigue and nervous exhaustion, and the release we had got from those few joyous moments of licensed violence.
“Was that part of the test, as well?”
“I suppose it must have been. If you could vent all that anger on some stranger and come back to the temple in good order, ready to start again in the evening, then you might stand a chance … Oh, and one final thing. Whoever is last back to the Priest House …”
“Fails the test?”
“That’s right.”
“So what happens if you fail?”
“Someone will denounce you. They’ll point to the chilli that rolled into the fire, the tomato stain on your breechcloth, your head nodding on your chest when you should be attending to your duties. You’ll be hauled up before a senior priest and made to pay a fine-to your accuser.”
“To your accuser?” She stared. “But that’s mad! You’d all be accusing each other all the time!”
“Why, yes, of course we were. How else do you think we passed the time? It was a game; it was the only thing that made the whole thing bearable.” I could not help smiling at the memory: how we would run back from the lake, too cold, wet, tired and absorbed in our own wretchedness to notice what was going on around us, and yet how soon the squabbling would start the moment we were settled on our mats in the Priest House. Pale eyes would probe the gloom, ready to pick up the slightest lapse, and soon harsh, triumphant cries, spirited denials and bitter recriminations would shatter the strained silence. I remembered how especially sweet it had felt to secure a fine from the man who had denounced you the day before. “The amount you paid depended on how wealthy you were, so it was the great lords’ sons who were denounced most often. Since my father was a commoner and we had no money anyway, I used to do rather well.” By the time the festival began I would have a bundle of cotton capes and fine jewels wrapped up in my cloak, all things of no real use to me except as tokens of my triumph over my fellow priests.
I had known and savored that triumph every year I was a priest, except the last.
“Of course, the fifth day was different.”
I closed my eyes, as if that would keep out the sights of the last day before the festival in my final year at the Priest House. I had to stop myself clapping my hands over my ears in an effort to shut out the sounds as well.
From a long way off, I heard Lily asking me a question.
When I opened my eyes again, they would not meet hers, but were fixed on her hands, which were kept still by gripping her knees through her skirt.
“It had stopped being a game by the fifth day. It was serious. There were no fines and the rich fared the same as the poor. Make a mistake during the first four days and it would cost you nothing more than a couple of cloaks and a bit of ridicule, and you knew you’d get them back in the morning. On the last day it would cost you everything.
“They’d drum you out of the priesthood. They’d drag you by the hair and the ends of your breechcloth to the edge of the lake, throw you in and push you under till you were half drowned, you couldn’t see, you were puking salt water. Men who’d been your friends since childhood would be the first to kick you in the head, and the last as well. Then they’d leave you, and if you were lucky, sooner or later someone would go and tell your family where you were.”
And sooner or later, I reminded myself, your family would come and take you home, and that had been the worst humiliation and the harshest punishment of all.
4
What was your mistake?” the woman asked.
It was years since I had dared ask myself that question, but now the words slipped out painlessly, like a splinter that has worked its way to the surface of your skin.
“I didn’t think I’d made a mistake. I’d been tested over so many years by then that the fifth day didn’t frighten me. There would always be one or two who failed-novices, children whose fathers should never have pledged them to the Priest House in the first place, or old ones who were simply past it-and I remember feeling a bit sorry for some of them, after it was all over for them. But I felt confident enough. Maybe too confident.
“And it was such a small thing! Just one of those tiny green tomatoes, and all I had to do was add it to the pile in front of the fire. I did it, too, without disturbing any of the others, but just as I was about to let go, something stung the back of my neck.
“I don’t know what it was, but it felt like touching the edge of an obsidian razor, or being scratched by the sharpened end of a reed or a cactus spine. It didn’t really hurt, but it made me snatch my fingers back, and, well …”
My fists clenched involuntarily at the memory.
“I didn’t see that tomato roll. I turned round to face the others, to ask what was going on-who had scratched me, or thrown or blown something at me-and then I saw it in their faces. They were all looking past me at the offerings in front of the fire, and I don’t think anyone in that room was breathing.”
I had not turned back to look at the offerings again. There had been no need. The shock and then the certainty I had seen in the faces around me had told me enough.
I had not thought to argue, fight or flee when they came for me. I had just waited, like the most compliant of victims, sitting passively before the fire that it had been my life’s work to tend.
“You never knew who distracted you?”
I lifted my eyes to Lily’s face to find that it was blurred by tears. When I had blinked them away I saw, to my surprise, that her eyes too were glistening.
“No, and I don’t know how-a clay ball blown through a reed, the sharp end of a goose quill, a small stone-Lily, I don’t even know for sure that it was a human act. Suppose it was a god? I think that was what I believed at the time, and that’s why I didn’t protest.”
And it would be just like the Smoking Mirror, who was said to look with particular favor on slaves, to choose such a perverse way of setting the course that would make me, eventually, one of his creatures. But men and women were a tool the gods used, and in my heart I knew that whatever had touched me that evening, all those years ago, had been propelled by a human hand.
I could not sleep. I tossed and turned on my mat, kept awake by the pain of my wounds and questions that had lodged in my head and were refusing to leave.