What had really happened the day I had been expelled from the Priest House? I had always accepted it. It had been my fate, ordained by the highest gods, Two Lord and Two Lady, as they had presided over my naming day; if not that, then I had just been another victim of Tezcatlipoca’s caprice. Talking about it now had shaken me, stirring up long-buried memories that would not be put down again until I had looked at them afresh.
Had there been a man with a reason to hate me?
I pictured a face, stained all over with soot, with long, matted hair and temples streaked with fresh sacrificial blood: a priest’s face, unrecognizable as an individual’s. Only the eyes, white against the black-painted skin, might have enabled me to put a name to it, but another vision distracted me from them: another face, seemingly hovering behind the first, less distinct, pale, or perhaps tinted with yellow ocher.
I sat up, as if that would bring the faces into clearer focus.
“I know you,” I muttered.
A noise from outside the room dispelled the vision and sent me, in spite of my pain and the stiffness in my limbs, scrambling toward the doorway.
The Moon and the stars shone through the fine haze made by hearths and temple fires, and my breath was a glowing cloud in front of me as I peered outside. I drew my blanket around me and shivered. There would be a hard frost in the morning.
I heard the noise again: a faint rustling, the sound a skirt might make as its wearer gathered it up to walk quietly across the courtyard.
A slight figure slipped from the shadows, crossed a pool of light and vanished into the darkness again.
Few Aztecs would go out in the dark alone. To come across almost any creature of the night-an owl, a weasel, a coyote, a skunk-was to stare your own death in the face; and worst of all were the monsters we conjured out of our own heads. Not many would willingly venture into streets haunted by a headless torso whose chest opened and shut with a sound like splitting wood, by men without heads or feet who rolled, moaning, along the ground, and by fleshless skulls with legs.
I, however, had been a priest. At night I had patrolled the hills around the lake, with my torch, my censer, my conch-shell trumpet and my bundles of fir branches to burn as offerings. It had been my task to face and drive away these monsters, so that my people could sleep soundly on their reed mats. The night no longer held any terrors for me.
Hoping I was still hardened enough against the cold to stop my teeth chattering, I discarded my blanket and followed the woman across the courtyard.
Hiding in the shadows, as she had, I saw a pale, unsteady light in the room nearest to where I had seen her vanish. She had gone to the most important room in the house-the kitchen, where the hearth was.
I stepped up to the door.
The hearth was much more than a cooking fire: the three hearthstones were sacred, a shrine both to the Old, Old God of the fire, andto the Lord of the Vanguard, the merchants’ own god. A merchant’s traveling staff, wrapped in stiff, heavily stained paper, was propped against the wall behind the hearth. The woman knelt in front of it, with her head bowed so that her face was hidden and the flames cast a huge hunchbacked shadow on the wall behind her.
She had something in her right hand. It glittered in the firelight as she lifted it to her right ear. It was a sliver of obsidian, the sharpest kind of blade we knew.
Its polished surface flashed once as she cut into the earlobe.
The woman’s blood ran over the obsidian, quenching its sparkle like water tipped on glowing embers.
With her left hand, Lily held a little clay bowl up to the side of her head. She held it there for a moment, before stretching her hand out over the fire and tipping the pooled blood into the flames. She shook the bowl once to get the last drops out, and put it aside.
Then she took a strip of plain white paper and laid it against her wounded ear. She pressed on it to squeeze out more of her blood, so that when she took it away again it showed black in the poor light of the hearth. She looked at the sodden, limp scrap for a long moment, and then stood up.
I knew what she was going to do. She had sacrificed her blood to the fire-god; now it was the turn of her own personal god, the patron and protector of the merchants. His offerings were not burned. The merchant’s mother was not about to throw his gift of her blood into the fire. Instead, she went to the traveling staff propped against the wall and solemnly wound the paper around its middle, adding one more bloodied layer to its binding. She spoke to her god.
Lily’s voice was too low for me to distinguish more than a few words, but I heard enough before I came away, treading as softly as when I had approached.
It was not the words themselves which had impressed me. “Only a boy,” she had said, and “Keep him safe”: not much of a prayer, addressed to the god all merchants entrusted their safety to.
If anything was going to move the Lord of the Vanguard, I thought, it was not the words of Lily’s prayer, but the desolate, dry sobs that had forced themselves out between them.
5
Are you awake?”
Moonlight fell through the doorway across the floor. The woman’s elongated shadow lay in the midst of it, the head just touching the edge of my mat.
“Yes.” I had jumped so visibly on hearing her speak that there was no point in pretending otherwise.
Her skirt was like a dark cloud against the light on the floor, and when she turned toward me her toenails glinted like faint stars.
“Why did you follow me across the courtyard?”
“I didn’t know it was you.”
She came up to the head of the mat, so that I was looking up at her face, hooded by shadows. I hauled myself up on my haunches.
“You might have been anybody,” I added. “You might have been my master’s steward or Curling Mist, come back to finish what they started. Why were you so furtive, anyway?”
She knelt beside me, bowing her head as she had before the fire.
“I didn’t want my father or the servants or … or you to see me. I didn’t want you to hear me praying.”
I recognized the woman I had first met, the day my master had sent me to inquire about Shining Light. Her voice was low and guttural, as if there were some obstruction in her throat, and the strands of her hair caught by the moonlight shook a little, but there was the same composure, the same reluctance to show or share a sorrow that she could never quite successfully conceal.
I should have challenged her then. I should have confronted her with the truth: that her son had not left the city, that he and Curling Mist and Nimble, his boy, had conspired against my life, and that I was sure she was a part of it all, because I did not believe her storyabout meeting the youth at the ball court to pay off Shining Light’s debts. That is what I should have said.
I did not, because all of a sudden I had forgotten my terrors and suspicions, and remembered only what I had heard and seen that evening: the woman’s bleak little prayer, her trembling hands wrapping the traveling staff in paper soaked in her own blood, the grief and fear that seemed real even if she had been lying to me.
“You really don’t think he’s coming back, do you?”
“No … yes … I don’t think so.” I barely heard the words, but then she gave a loud sniff.
The sound was so childish that I could not help myself: I reached out for her, extending my arms to her at the same time as she turned toward me to hide her face in my bony shoulder.
Even racked by tears, she was discreet, muffling her sobs against my chest until at last they subsided and she lay quietly across me. I murmured what I thought were soothing words and stroked her hair awkwardly.