‘Help me, won’t you?’ he grunted as he hauled the sodden, helpless object towards the boat. I did not move. I thought I was doing enough by restraining myself from bashing the steward over the head with the paddle. Instead I looked around for whatever had attacked us. It took only a moment to find it.
‘Harpoon.’ Handy had seen it at the same time: a short hardwood spear projecting from the boat’s side, near the bow. Its flint tip was buried deep in the wood. ‘You were lucky, Yaotl — a hand’s breadth or so higher and that would have gone through your spleen!’
A length of rope trailed from the spear’s shaft. I tugged at it with my fingers, making the rope rise dripping from the water, and then dropped it suddenly when I realized that our assailant must be at the other end of it.
‘Who threw this?’ I whispered hoarsely. We were floating in plain sight of the bank and had made enough noise already to scare every bird on the western side of the lake, but I still felt the urge to be quiet.
‘I’d take a wild guess,’ retorted Handy drily, ‘and say it was the man standing over there among the rushes. It’s the throwing-stick and the rope he’s holding. They sort of give it away.’
I had not seen or heard him but that was hardly surprising. An Otomi’s favoured tactic when confronted by the enemy was to rush screaming towards him and drag him noisily to the earth by his hair, but that did not mean he would have forgotten all of his hunting skills. Perhaps he had been lying in wait for us all along or perhaps, as soon as he had heard us coming, he had crept towards the shoreline to greet us. Either way here he was, and I felt myself caught off guard.
He was tall and spare, without a sign of any excess flesh under his dark, weather-beaten skin. He wore only abreechcloth, his full warrior costume having presumably been discarded in favour of being able to move about without having it rustle on the ground behind him or against the tall plants on either side. He carried no sword, but that gave me no comfort. One look at his hairstyle — the tall column that crowned his forehead and the loose locks flowing extravagantly over the nape of his neck — assured me that he could probably have killed all of us with his bare hands.
Following Handy’s gaze, I took in the throwing-stick, a long plain length of wood with a notch at the end for the spear. The warrior had been hoping to catch his breakfast and we had got in his way.
He watched our antics in silence. While Handy hauled the spluttering, coughing steward over the side, I took up the paddle to propel us towards the bank.
Handy and I jumped into the water, tugged our feet out of the muck beneath it and waded ashore. The steward fell in, got to his knees and began to be violently sick.
Only when he had finished retching and stood up, pulling his waterlogged cloak around him in an effort to restore his dignity, did the Otomi deign to speak.
‘Who are you?’
‘Lord Feathered in Black is my master,’ the steward gasped, ‘and this is …’
‘I didn’t ask you!’ the stranger snarled. ‘I know perfectly well who you are and what your master wants. What’s he got to say?’ He nodded towards me.
‘I’m Yaotl,’ I said. ‘I’m the Chief Minister’s slave, and this here is a retainer of his, Handy. We were just looking for …’ Suddenly inspiration died on me like a plant withering for lack of water and manure, and I found I was left floundering helplessly. ‘Just looking for …’
‘A man and a boy?’
‘Have you found them?’ the steward asked eagerly. My stomach lurched fearfully at the thought that the Otomies might already have found their prey, or the boy at least, and my son might even now be on his way back to my master, trussed like a deer, shivering with pain from whatever the warriors had done to him and terror at the tortures the Chief Minister was intending to inflict.
‘No,’ the Otomi said sourly. He bent down and tugged sharply at his rope. The spear at the other end splashed into the water, making me wonder how much strength it took to pull it free with so little effort. ‘Not a trace of them. Spent the whole of yesterday wading through this muck. Nothing. The lads up in the hills behind us haven’t done any better, but at least they kept their feet dry!’ He scowled at each of us in turn as he reeled in his rope. ‘So old Black Feathers decided we needed some help, did he?’ There was no need to ask how much help he thought we were likely to be. ‘You’d better come with me. You can tell my captain why the duck he was going to have for breakfast is happily paddling away on the wrong side of the valley!’
The steward pursed his lips dubiously at the prospect of meeting a squad of hungry warriors. ‘We want to show you something first,’ he said hastily.
‘Really? What is it — a side of venison?’
‘Yaotl thinks he knows where the two you’re looking for went.’
The Otomi looked me up and down. ‘Experienced tracker, is he?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s just that …’
‘Only we could do with one. Look, we’re not used to this sneaking-about stuff, you see? Show me some Texcalan scumbag who thinks he’s hard enough to take me on and I’ll show you what I can do with him, but following a trail through the marshes isn’t my idea of fun, I can tell you!’
Handy, loyal as ever, took up the steward’s theme. ‘Well then, Yaotl here’s your man. He could track a bird through the air!’
‘Wait a moment!’ I cried, alarmed. I could see my plan to mislead both the steward and the Chief Minister’s warriors succeeding altogether too well. What would happen if they expected me to lead them to their quarry and found out that I had no more idea of where to start looking than they had?
The Otomi looked at me. ‘Quite right,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘we can’t just go running around on my say-so. We ought to go and see the boss first.’ With that, he turned and vanished into the rushes, leaving only a small gap between the tall, swaying plants as a clue to the direction he had gone in.
The steward looked at me. ‘What now?’ he asked in a disgusted tone.
‘Better get after him, I suppose,’ I said reluctantly.
‘Good idea, smartarse. Where did he go?’
‘Follow the smoke smell,’ Handy suggested.
It did not take us long to make our way along the trail of broken reeds and churned-up mud to the site where the Otomies had built their fire. Above the rustle of rushes and the slap of mud beneath our feet I could hear urgent, angry whispers being passed back and forth.
‘So what did you catch, Cuectli? A deer? A heron? A duck?’ The voice had an odd quality, as if the speaker were murmuring asides out of one half of his mouth only.
Cuectli, whose name meant ‘Fox’, responded with a sad sigh. ‘Only idiots.’
I could not quite catch the captain’s reply, but plainly it was not an encouraging one, as the next thing I heard was Fox’s voice singing my praises. ‘One of them’s a tracker, though. An expert. Claims he can follow a bird through the air!’
‘Let’s have a look at him, then!’
The next thing I knew I was being pulled through the tall plants into the clearing, there to stand face to face with one of the ugliest-looking individuals I have ever seen.
If I had needed a reminder of the type of man the Emperor liked to have in the vanguard of the army, in the front row of the battle line, one glance at this one would have been enough.
Unlike Fox, the captain was fully dressed. His torso, arms and legs were tightly wrapped in a suit of bright green cotton, which served only to emphasize the bulging muscles under it. His feet had been thrust into broad, flat sandals that put me in mind of paving slabs. He had bound up his grey-streaked hair in the same way as Fox. I could not see the insignia he would carry on his back when he went into battle — a tall, teardrop-shaped device, crowned with long green feathers, which would make him instantly recognizable to friend and terrified foe alike — or his round, feather-bordered shield, but I guessed they were both close at hand, carefully wrapped up to preserve them from the mud and damp. No doubt they would have impeded his progress through the rushes, but in his case, I thought, they were hardly needed. He would have been fright-ening enough stark naked, because, even though I took all the details of his costume in and grasped their meaning without conscious thought, I forgot all about them when I saw his face.