“Of course he talks,” she informed me coldly. “All it needed was a little kindness.”
“Have you asked him about his father yet?” I inquired, with a nervous glance at my brother.
“No, and I’m not going to. He’ll tell us about that in his own time, or not at all. What do you want to do-beat it out of him?”
I had been contemplating doing just that, but it was my brother who answered.
“We didn’t come here to hurt anybody.” He spoke to her more gently than I would have thought possible for him; but then I often forgot that he had children and grandchildren of his own. “But we have to know what this boy may have seen or heard. It’s for his own sake as much as ours.”
“And if he won’t answer your questions?”
“Then we’ll have to go away again.” My brother quelled my objection with a look. “He’s suffered enough already. Believe me, I know.”
Star looked as if she was about to say something, but to everyone’s surprise it was the boy who answered. He looked straight at Lion and said: “You came to our village with the soldiers.”
My brother hesitated for a long time before replying: “Yes, I did.”
Star looked at the boy in alarm. “Are you sure you want to talk about this now?”
The lad ignored her. “It was the old man, wasn’t it?”
“What old man?” my brother asked.
“The old man,” the boy repeated doggedly. He seemed to take little notice of anything any of us said. “He made you do it, didn’t he?”
My brother had more discretion than I would have given him credit for. Another man might have ended the discussion there, by seizing on the child’s words as proof that what had happened was not his fault, because he was merely acting under orders. All Lion did was to ask once more, very cautiously, who the old man was.
“He came to the village on foot,” Storm explained, “but I know he was important because the headman had to stand outside the house while they talked. But I knew you could hear things through the wall at the back, if you stood in the right place.”
“Old Black Feathers,” I breathed. “It all makes perfect sense.”
“What were they talking about?” Star asked gently. For all her concern for the child, she was as intrigued as I was.
“I didn’t understand it all. The old man kept asking questions. He wanted to know about something. Men with pale skins and beardshad arrived somewhere in the East. He said something about a place called Xicallanco. He wanted to know …” The boy’s voice faltered.
“Yes?” I leaned forward eagerly.
“The old man wanted to know if the pale men … if they really were men, or if they were gods, and if they were men, whether anyone who traded with them would earn fame and riches.”
“And what was the answer?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t catch it, but I heard the old man say: ‘You don’t have very long.’ And he said something else: he said other people might come and ask the same questions, and not to tell them anything.”
Handy, Lion and I exchanged glances, but before either of us could say a word the child’s composure suddenly cracked, and he burst into tears and hid his face in the folds of Star’s skirt. As she held him, speaking soothing words and rocking him like an infant, we heard his muffled voice crying: “And they did, didn’t they? They came back to kill us all! They took my father and then they came for us-my mother. Why? Why?”
The last words, bawled into Star’s lap, were barely intelligible. She held the boy, cooing and smoothing his hair with her fingers.
After a glance at me, my brother spoke softly to the boy. “Your father kept his word to the old man, lad, that’s why. He didn’t tell the other people what they wanted to hear.”
“All right, Yaotl,” my brother challenged me, after Star had led the sobbing child across the courtyard to the women’s room, “you said it all made perfect sense. It makes no sense to me at all, so you’d better explain.”
Lion, Handy and I squatted together in the courtyard, keeping the morning air’s lingering chill away with tortillas still warm from the griddle. These were a treat, and I was sure Star only let us have them in deference to my brother’s rank. Handy had lent him his best cloak too, although on Lion the old patched two-captive warrior’s mantle that I had first seen the commoner in somehow looked still more incongruous than a bare loincloth.
While we ate, I repeated for Handy’s benefit the story I had told my mother, sister and brother the day before.
“The old man the boy saw was my master,” I said. “It has to have been him.”
“But why?” Handy asked. “Why would the Chief Minister be skulking around sorcerers like some lovelorn girl wanting her fortune told?”
“It sounds as if he wanted to know how a trading venture would fare,” added my brother, “but he’s not a merchant. Why should he care about a trading venture? It’s not as if he needs the money!”
“True,” I said. “I don’t think it’s about money.” As I considered my brother’s words it came to me that the Chief Minister had given me the answer himself, in the evening of the day Storm’s father had died. “It’s about renown. He wants to be as famous as his father, and he wants to put one over on the Emperor at the same time. Lion, you remember what Montezuma told us about the East? Pale men with beards, pyramids on the sea. And you showed me that box yourself, the one full of cloth finer than cotton. The Emperor wanted the sorcerers to tell him whether the strangers he’d heard about were men or gods. His Chief Minister obviously thought he’d find out before the Emperor did. The Emperor mentioned Xicallanco. So did old Black Feathers, when he went to see the sorcerer. So, for that matter, did Lily. She told me her son used to talk about the place, and I don’t see why she should have been lying about that.”
“But what’s some trading post in the East to your master?” my brother asked.
“It’s not the place that interests him,” I replied, “but the reports that have come from there: these pale men from the East. My master thought the way to lasting fame was through these strangers, whoever or whatever they might be; and he wanted it for himself, and the Emperor was to know nothing about it. He obviously couldn’t go to see them in person. He needed an agent, someone he could rely on to keep his mouth shut-and someone who wouldn’t cause a stir if he turned up in a place like Xicallanco. Who else but a merchant? Famously secretive, and as for going abroad to deal with exotic foreigners-well, that’s what they do, isn’t it? And it turned out that the man he dealt with at the ball court, Curling Mist, knew just the man-another of his clients. He’s the link, you see, between old Black Feathers and Shining Light.”
“So the Chief Minister and the young merchant made a deal?” Handy suggested.
“That’s what I think. I suppose the Chief Minister paid off Shining Light’s debts and Shining Light agreed to go to Xicallanco for him. Probably old Black Feathers put up some capital for the venture too-goods to exchange for this wonderful cloth, whatever. And he consulted sorcerers-the way you would before any venture like this, only he did it very, very quietly.
“But then two things went wrong.”
“Montezuma had the sorcerers arrested,” my brother pointed out.
“That was the first, yes. The Emperor decided he wanted to talk to the sorcerers himself! My master must have been terrified when they were rounded up. He’d have had to get them out of the prison, just to make sure they didn’t compromise him. I suppose he just ordered the majordomo to release them into his custody. He’s the Chief Justice, he could do that. That explains why the majordomo was surprised when I came along afterward, as the Chief Minister’s slave, asking how they’d managed to escape. Then when the majordomo found he’d been ordered to act against the Emperor’s wishes he panicked, and said it must be magic. The Emperor more or less believed him, but in any case by then his Chief Minister had got the sorcerers out of his reach. What could he do with them then, though? He wasn’t going to kill them, not if he still wanted his questions answered, and he couldn’t just let them go. He needed somewhere to keep them, in case they talked. It was too dangerous to use his own house. I suppose he asked his partner in crime, Shining Light, who said put them in his warehouse. The only thing is, everything Shining Light owns-”