“Young Warrior!” breathed Lion. “So that’s how he got hold of the sorcerers! And their families-no witnesses, right?”
“Of course. The Chief Minister had to make sure no one could describe him coming to see the sorcerers, especially once they were out of the prison and beyond his control. So he got the Emperor to give him the job of finding them and used it as an excuse to have their families killed.”
Handy bit his lip. “But why the sacrifice?”
“Yes,” added my brother, “and why the body in the canal outsideyour master’s house? You thought that was a message from Young Warrior. What’s that got to do with these strangers in the East?”
“That’s the other thing that went wrong,” I said. “Whatever was going on between Shining Light and Young Warrior, it all changed, around the time of the Festival of the Raising of Banners. Then Shining Light became Young Warrior’s prisoner. Young Warrior had already got his hands on the sorcerers, along with the rest of the merchant’s property, and he’d started torturing them. I suppose he wanted the answers to old Black Feathers’ questions himself. Then he used them to blackmail my master. Old Black Feathers wanted them alive, so he started delivering them to him dead. As for the sacrifice …” I remembered what the merchant’s grandfather had told me, how Young Warrior-or, as far as he was concerned, Curling Mist-and Shining Light might have dreamed the whole business up together as a kind of sick joke. “It was the audacity of it, that was the whole point. They were telling my master they could do anything they wanted.” To have the peasant die at the summit of the Great Pyramid, and so publicly, and be powerless to intervene-unless he wanted to risk exposing his own dealings with the sorcerers-must have provoked my master beyond enduring. “They even sent Nimble to him as a messenger, to make sure he knew what had happened!”
“Storm’s father played his part well,” observed Handy, “considering he wasn’t supposed to be there. How’d they persuade him to be so cooperative?”
“The same way all Bathed Slaves are conditioned-remember what I told you about that, Handy, in the marketplace, just after the sacrifice? They give them sacred wine and sacred mushrooms, they keep them awake, they drill them endlessly, they get an old woman to bathe them and cosset them and make them feel like little children, they cut their hair and whiten their skins-and before that, he’d been hauled off to the prison, sprung and then tortured. In the end he wouldn’t have had an idea of his own left in his head-except one, and that was more important to him than staying alive. He wanted us to tell the old man about the big boat.”
“I still don’t see why Young Warrior was prepared to kill the sorcerers and threaten your master to get you,” Lion said. “Was it reallyall over something that happened at the Priest House all those years ago?”
“What else can it be? For some reason he seems to blame me for what happened to him and the girl from the market.”
“Doesn’t make sense to me,” said Handy. “It wasn’t your fault they had to run away, was it?”
“No, and I can’t pretend to understand it either. I suppose Young Warrior started out being jealous, and over the years it must have become an obsession.”
“Besides,” the commoner added, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “I thought you priests were all supposed to be impotent-aren’t you supposed to stick so many cactus spines and obsidian razors into your parts that you can’t get it up anyway?”
This drew a short, harsh laugh from Lion. “No,” I said coldly. “We used to draw blood from our penises, but only the real fanatics went further than that. I certainly didn’t. I always thought Young Warrior might be the type to do it, but I guess he wasn’t.”
“Does it really matter what started all this?” my brother asked impatiently. “We have to decide what we’re going to do now. Which of them do we go after-Young Warrior or the Chief Minister?”
My brother could be alarmingly direct, especially when he had an end in sight or, as now when his pride had been wounded, a score to settle.
“Both of them,” I said. “We still need to get the sorcerers to the Emperor before we can denounce my master, and we need Young Warrior to lead us to the sorcerers.” I considered for a moment before going on. “I think we go back to Lily’s house now-you and me, Lion. It’s just possible she was able to tell Nimble enough to get her son released, but if she wasn’t, Young Warrior won’t be able to resist having another crack at me. That’s where you come in, brother. You can protect me if he tries another trick like yesterday’s … What’s the joke?”
A wintry smile had appeared on Lion’s face. “I was just remembering,” he said dryly, “how I told you not to expect me to save your worthless hide this time!”
I looked at him seriously. “You will, though, if you have to. You owe me. I went to Coyoacan for you. I found the boy.”
My brother’s face darkened, but whatever he was about to say wasinterrupted by a sudden noise. An argument seemed to be going on outside the courtyard.
Handy cocked his head to one side for a moment, listening.
“It’s Snake,” he announced. “Why’s he making such a row?” He stood up and took a step toward the doorway. “Who’s he arguing with … Oh, shit!”
My brother was on his feet too, running for the women’s room. “Star! Quick, the maize bin!”
I was left alone with my head darting about like a turkey’s, looking for somewhere to run or hide. I thought briefly about the bathhouse, but I was too late to reach it in time and it would have been too obvious a hiding place anyway.
“Handy!” called a voice I knew only too well. “Congratulations! You’ve caught our runaway!”
I let my arms go limp at my sides as I watched an old adversary striding through the entrance to the courtyard toward me, with Snake plodding disconsolately at his heels.
It was my master’s steward.
2
I let the steward drive me out of the courtyard like a stray dog, submitting meekly to the blows falling on my shoulders and back. He was so pleased with himself for having caught me that he did not stop for whatever business had brought him to the house.
“That canoe there. Go on, move!” He propelled me toward the canal beside the house with a vicious shove. Floating there was the canoe he had obviously come in, a little two-man craft with a boatman in the stern. He looked up in alarm when he realized that he had a second passenger. Then he recognized me and his expression changed, first to wide-eyed amazement and then to a broad grin of pure joy.
My heart sank. The boatman was none other than Rabbit, my master’s litter bearer, the man Costly had fooled into taking his medicine while he was supposed to be watching me and whom I had last seen sprawled on the ground after I had hit him with a slave collar.
“In!” the steward roared from a hand’s breadth behind me.
He kicked me as I was stepping into the boat. I had one foot on the bank and one in the bottom of the canoe and his foot swung up between my legs. Pain exploded in my groin and shot up into my guts, driving the breath out of me in a high-pitched whistle. I crashed into the bottom of the boat, rocking it violently and sending spouts of water over the sides.
“You’ve got worse than that to come,” the Prick assured me.
Rabbit gripped the boat’s sides to steady himself. “I haven’t got room for both of you!”
“Oh yes you have,” the steward growled as he stepped over me into the canoe’s bow “Yaotl won’t take up much room lying there like that. If he’s any trouble, we can always chuck him overboard!”