“What are you thinking, Yaotl?” my mistress demanded.
I glanced up at the sky. It was cloudy, but I sensed that the Sun had not yet climbed very high. “It may not be too late,” I muttered to myself. “If he waited until dawn … And he would, he might not find the place in the dark…” I looked at my mistress. “We’ll have to go now, though,” I said. “In fact, if we can run, so much the better!”
I was to regret my suggestion four hundred times over before we had come to the water seller’s house. As a former priest I had been trained to endure pain and exhaustion by the endless round of fasts, ritual self-mortifications, and vigils that our rites demanded, but that had been years before. By the time we reached our objective my lungs felt as though they had been seared by hot smoke and my legs were twitching and threatening to double up under me. Flint Knife looked and sounded worse than I was. Lily, who had kept pace with us with her skirts gathered about her knees, seemed, surprisingly, a little better, although in truth for the last part of the journey we had all more or less slowed to a brisk walk. All the same, as soon as the little house hove into sight I realised we had got there in time.
We all paused for a moment, panting. It was Cloud Eagle’s cousin who was the first to utter words, staggering two further, exhausting steps towards the canoe moored by the house. “That’s … my … boat!” he gasped incredulously.
“Yes,” I muttered, starting forward myself. “And there’s your cousin, and look what he’s holding under his arm! Stop!”
The young man wasted only a moment staring at me and my exhausted and desperate-looking companions. Then he leapt straight into the canoe, the object still cradled under his arm, and seized a paddle with his free hand. At the same time his mother appeared from the house, screeched once, and ran along the bank towards us.
Cloud Eagle managed one-handed to get the boat to move. It did not get very far. Flint Knife let out an angry howl and jumped into the waist-deep water in front of it, waving his arms wildly. The canal was too narrow for the vessel to pass, and Cloud Eagle could not get enough speed up to run his cousin down. He bellowed in frustration, lashing the water with his paddle. Then he raised it to strike at Flint Knife, which was when I drew level with the canoe, jumped in, and wrested the trophy from the crook of his arm.
At the same time Lily raced past me to confront Cloud Eagle’s mother. Recalling the words they used to each other still makes me blush. It took Cloud Eagle’s despairing voice to call an end to the brawl. “It’s all right, Mother,” he moaned, tossing the paddle into the canal. “It’s no good. They’re on to us. They’ve got it now.”
There was barely room for all of us to squat or kneel in the courtyard of Blue Feather’s house. The water seller’s wife-widow, I reminded myself-did not offer us anything to eat. She stood in the corner and glared at us.
I set the thing I had taken from her son on the hard earth in front of me. The goddess Jade Skirt’s emerald eyes gleamed into mine, sparkling as if with mirth. Well, I thought, nobody ever claimed the gods had no sense of humour.
“Well, now I’ve got my boat back, I’ll be off,” Flint Knife said.
“Not so fast!” snapped Lily. “I still want to know what happened, and where’s Blue Feather?” When no one else answered she turned to me. “Yaotl?”
“In the lake, near where the aqueduct enters the city, I should think.” I looked at his son. “But I don’t think he’ll be coming back from there, will he?”
The lad said nothing.
“You’d better explain,” Lily said.
“It’s easy enough. You remember how the water seller wanted me to describe the ceremony at the aqueduct in detail-even down to things like exactly where the priest was standing when he threw the idol in the water? He claimed it was because he wanted to make sure it was all done right, but of course that was nonsense. Why should it matter to him? He’s just an ordinary trader, and not a very successful one at that, judging by the state of this place.” The grey-haired woman hissed reproachfully. “Which reminds me-I noticed tobacco tubes in the trash heap outside, and couldn’t think what they were doing in such a poor household.
“I didn’t work out what was happening when the old man vanished, but when we heard his son had disappeared, too, it was suddenly obvious. They were after this statue-or at least the gold and jewels in it. This is what I think happened: Both Blue Feather and Cloud Eagle went out the other night, in Blue Feather’s canoe. They knew where the statue was, thanks to my description. However, they were a bit wary of just going straight to the place to fish it out, because it was inside the city and someone might see what they were up to. So instead, they took their boat to the point near the shore of the island where the aqueduct first enters the city. Cloud Eagle here climbed up to the aqueduct and made his way along it. I’m not sure how deep it is when it’s full, but I suppose he used one of those tobacco tubes to breathe through.
“He would have had to grope around under the water for a while, but he obviously found what he was looking for. Then he made his way back and threw the statue down to his father in the boat.”
A groan from the young man told me I’d got it right. “That’s where it went wrong, isn’t it?” I said. “Because Blue Feather didn’t catch it-and being solid gold, it went through the bottom of the boat, straight into the lake. And by the time Cloud Eagle here realised what had happened, the boat and his father had both vanished.”
Lily gasped. Even Flint Knife muttered something under his breath that may have been an expression of shock. Cloud Eagle looked at the ground. Only his mother was impassive.
“And that’s it, really. The young man had to go home and tell his mother what had happened. She knew about the plot all along, of course-she could hardly fail to, with both of them out overnight-and they agreed that he should go back the next night and try to retrieve the statue from where it had sunk. He’s a good diver-unlike his father, alas! Blue Feather and the boat will still be there, of course.” Even if Cloud Eagle could have retrieved the body, I knew he would not: The drowned were sacred to the Rain God and only priests could touch them. “They must be in the lake-someone would have noticed them in a canal.”
There was a long silence, which Lily eventually broke. “So, I’m not going to get my free water.” She sounded philosophical enough about it. “What do we do with these, though?” she asked, indicating our unwilling hosts.
Aztecs rarely went out at night, except with good reason; but Lily and I had a good reason. Besides, I had been a priest, and knew how to fight any demons we might encounter. And we had the gods on our side, I thought, as I extended a hand to help my mistress up to the edge of the aqueduct; one of the gods, at least.
“Amazing, the risks some people will take,” I mused, as I gazed for the last time into Lady Jade Skirt’s glittering green eyes.
“What, us perching here, you mean?”
“No, I mean fooling around with the gods, the way that water seller was prepared to do, and for what? For something he could sell in the marketplace.”
We had not reported Cloud Eagle and his mother to the authorities. Losing Blue Feather and the boat had seemed punishment enough.
I smiled and, after a brief glance at my mistress, tossed the gold statue back into the water, where it belonged.
I watched it sink with a twinge of fear. What if it were looted a second time? What about all the other precious things that were tossed into the water and, as the workman had told me, never seen again? What if, in the end, the goddess never got anything but the kind of rubbish the labourers found when they dredged the aqueduct?
If that were the case, I thought, then we had better get used to drinking lake water, after all.