“I’m sorry Excuse me,” I blurted unthinkingly.
“Hello, Yaotl,” the familiar old cracked voice responded. He had recognized my voice and I had no choice but to return his greeting.
“Kindly. You’re not drinking tonight, then?”
Twilight gave his filmy eyes a pale gleam.
“At my own banquet?” He sounded shocked. “How could I? Besides, I have to sacrifice at midnight-need a clear head for that. And before you ask, I’m not on the mushrooms either. Bloody things give me the runs.”
So he and I were probably the only completely sober people in the house.
“If you were looking for my daughter,” he went on, “I shouldn’t bother. She won’t see you.”
I looked toward the women’s rooms. They were dark, but who might be stirring in there? “I’d rather like her to tell me that herself.”
“A man going into the women’s rooms, uninvited? In the middle of a feast? And a slave, to boot? Unheard of!” He did not raise his voice, but there was an edge to it that told me I would get no closer to Lily before I was stopped. I remembered the burly warriors who had been recruited as servers for the evening. Part of the reason they were there was to break up any mushroom-induced fights among the guests, and any of them would have been more than equal to the task of subduing one scrawny slave.
His tone softened a little as he asked: “Why did you come here, Yaotl?”
“To ask your daughter to help us find Curling Mist,” I said, and then added, “and to ask her why she helped him when he tried to kill me.”
“And would you believe her if she said she did not?”
“I don’t know I think that’s why I have to ask.”
His answer seemed to come from a long way away “No one in this house bears you any ill will.”
I glanced down at him again, but he was not looking at me any more.
“Please don’t try to see my daughter.” His eyes were fixed on her doorway. “It would only distress her further, and there is nothing she can tell you-believe me.” He looked up again and smiled weakly. “Besides, she’s still in semi-mourning. Do you know she can only wash her hair once every eighty days until Shining Light returns? She won’t want to be seen by anybody right now!”
“All right.” I turned to go.
The old man’s dry, cackling laugh surprised me. “Oh, Yaotl, don’t sulk! Look, I have a present for you.”
“Save it,” I said dismissively, with a look that took in all the riches spread around him. “I’m a slave, remember? You need this to buy off your friends, the warriors.”
“No I don’t! This stuff is a token. They expect us to lay it out here just to show we haven’t forgotten who’s in charge. When the warriors really want something from us, they ask for it in advance and we give it in private. Look-you should take something. The rest ofthem will just pillage it otherwise, and when they get it home they’ll have no idea where it came from or why they took it. So why not? These feathers, now-they’re my family’s particular speciality. Why not take a bunch?”
Against my will I found myself accepting the bundle of long red feathers that he pressed into my hand.
“They’re very soft.” I felt I had to say something about them. “What are they, red spoonbill?”
“No, scarlet macaw.” He grinned up at me, as proud as a small boy who had just caught a frog. “They’re good, though, aren’t they? Where do you think they came from?”
“I don’t know.” I wanted to give the feathers back, but the moment for doing that had passed as quickly as it had come. “Somewhere in the far South-that’s where these birds live, isn’t it?”
Kindly chuckled. “Nearly. That was where we got the idea, but we grow them ourselves.”
I had a wild vision of a family sustaining itself on feathers sprouting from its members’ own rumps, until I realized what it was Kindly had meant.
“Really?” I was fascinated in spite of myself. “You mean you keep the birds here? How come I never saw or heard them?” Plenty of people kept finches, little twittering creatures that were quite at home hanging from the sides of houses in wicker cages. Parrots, I thought, must be a different matter. It would be hard to keep a parrot without the whole parish knowing about it.
“They went the same way as the rest of the merchandise,” he said bitterly. “So where they are now, only the gods and my grandson’s boyfriend know. But it was useful having them close at hand: it meant we could pluck a flight or a tail feather whenever the feather-workers needed one, and we saved ourselves all the effort of catching the birds and then packing the feathers and sending them home.”
I examined the bunch of feathers in my hand. In the twilight their rich, dark red reminded me of dried blood. “I thought the only person in the city who kept these birds was Montezuma.”
“Oh, I expect he has a houseful. And good luck to him! They’re almost more trouble than they’re worth. Of course, having live birds to pluck feathers from is a good idea, and apart from the fact that theyeat their cages they’re not hard to keep, but …” His talk dissolved into a rueful chuckle.
“The noise?” I offered.
“It’s worse than noise,” he confided. “They talk!”
I had an odd sensation in the pit of my stomach. “Talk?”
“Why, yes. You can train them to talk, but … Hey! Where are you going?”
I ran, darting this way and that to avoid the hurtling bodies of the dancers, looking for my brother.
2
I stared into the jostling, swirling crowd, but in the gathering gloom there was no way of telling the dancers apart. I took a deep breath and yelled at the top of my voice, to be heard above the drums, the flutes, the conch-shell trumpets and the stamping feet.
“Lion!”
None of the dancers even missed a beat. I was torn between relief and frustration. None of the assembled warriors seemed to have heard me, but where was my brother when I needed him?
I took another breath, but it caught in my throat as a man fell out of the crowd.
He was at my side in seconds. At first I could not work out how he had recovered from the sacred mushrooms so fast, but then it was obvious. He had not had any, preferring to keep his wits about him.
“What?” Lion demanded, as I led the way indoors, out of the way of the gyrating bodies in the courtyard. We found ourselves in the same room as the Chief Minister, but, judging by the way his chin was bouncing on his chest, his mind was somewhere else. There had obviously been enough mushrooms left over for Handy too, since his head was moving in vague circles and he was dribbling.
“I’ve found the sorcerers.”
“That’s more like it! Let’s pick them up and get out of here. Where are they?”
“On a boat! Young Warrior and his son must be holding them there. The sorcerers trained a bird to call for help, though, and let it go …”
My brother stared at me suspiciously. “Have you been at the mushrooms?”
“No! Look, you remember what that offering of Shining Light’s said, before he died, about a big boat? Everyone thought it was a prophecy-something to do with those pyramids on canoes the Emperor told us about-but it wasn’t! He was just trying to tell us where he and the others had been held. He wanted to tell my master, because he knew old Black Feathers was looking for them, and he thought he would save them from Young Warrior. I’m so stupid, I didn’t realize it until just now, when Shining Light’s grandfather told me his family breeds birds. Big birds with red tail feathers-birds that can be trained to talk, Lion! And I saw one on the lake, that day I was kidnapped by Young Warrior and Nimble!” I groaned as I realized where I had seen signs of the bird, or others like it, since then: displayed among the stakes at the ball court, right in front of where Nimble and I had been sitting, and on the pitch at Tlatelolco market where Young Warrior had accosted me: the pitch belonging to Shining Light’s family. “The sorcerers must have been coaching the birds and they managed to let them go, or they got away, while Young Warrior and his boy were out abducting me. And it was the boat they were being held on, the big boat, that I came up under when I fell out of Young Warrior’s canoe, only I didn’t realize it at the time: I must have swum further under the water than I thought. That’s where Young Warrior’s warehouse is. It’s not a big roomy place in the merchant’s parish. It’s in some sort of narrow, confined space where you’d have to use a knife if you wanted to kill someone because there’s no room to wield a sword. It’s a shelter on the deck of a boat, out on the lake!”