I had lied about the night’s events, both to Lily, to save her from the truth, and to my master, to save my own skin.
The big boat I was standing on had belonged to Lily’s son, Shining Light — the same young man whose corpse she was weeping brokenly over now. He had been a merchant, a member of the class of long-distance traders known as Pochteca, who earned their fortunes and renown through long, often hazardous journeys into distant lands. Shining Light had found an easier path to riches, however. Unknown to the rest of his family, he had hoarded their wealth on this boat and used it to finance an illegal gambling operation, taking secret bets on the sacred Ball Game.
Deceiving and stealing from his own mother and grandfather had not been Shining Light’s only crime. He had depraved tastes, particularly when it came to boys. Once, in one of the marketplaces, he had picked up a rootless but resourceful young man, an orphan named Quimatini, or ‘Nimble’. Nimble had no place in Aztec society. He had sprung from a brief, illicit liaison I had had with a pleasure-girl. He had been brought up among the Tarascans, beyond the Mountains to the West, and had drifted back into Mexico as a youth. Shining Light had adopted him, in his own perverted fashion, and the lad had posed as his lover’s son while he ran errands and collected bets from his customers.
One of those customers had been my own master, Lord Feathered in Black. Shining Light had double-crossed him, though. Many others were caught up in his treachery, and some of them lay on the boat around us, murdered. My son had been his unwitting accomplice.
Lord Feathered in Black had finally caught up with Shining Light and Nimble on the night that had just passed; but he had not learned the truth about either who they were or what they had done. My master, my brother, Shining Light’s mother Lily, the commoner Handy and I had gone in search of them, setting out across the lake in two canoes. As it happened, the canoe with my master and Lily in it had been deliberately run ashore by its boatman, who had panicked and run away, and only Lion and I had confronted the pair. We were the only ones to learn that the man who had betrayed my master was indeed Lily’s child, and that the young man he had in his thrall — who was in the end virtually his prisoner — was my own son.
My brother had had to kill Shining Light. We had set Nimble free, and when my master, Lily and Handy finally reached us, we had lied to them. We had let them think Lily’sson had been held captive by the man he had pretended to be, and killed by him, and that that man and Nimble had escaped.
They appeared to have believed us; but even so, old Black Feathers was not going to let the matter drop. Nimble and his lover had seen and heard things that could imperil his life if the Emperor learned of them. Moreover, he had been duped. My master’s was not a forgiving nature. He wanted revenge.
I was babbling, saying anything that came into my head if I thought it might help persuade Lord Feathered in Black to relent.
‘I might let you down. I’m weak, my Lord. I’ve lost blood, the precious water of life. I might not be able to guide a search party …’
My master laughed out loud.
It was a strange noise, a prolonged hoarse cackle, ending in a series of harsh dry coughs. Then he cleared his throat and his ancient face settled into a grin.
‘Oh, don’t you worry yourself about that, Yaotl. So you might let me down — so what? It’ll be so much the worse for you!’ He threw a significant glance across the water towards the nearest of the temples. ‘Right now you’re probably worth more as a sacrifice to the gods than as a slave!’
My heart sank at this further brutal reminder of my position.
‘You find the boy and his father,’ my master went on relentlessly, ‘and no excuses! If you don’t, it’ll be the worse for you!’
My master had no idea that he was telling me to deliver up my own child, but I knew that if he had known it would have made no difference.
Then Handy spoke up.
‘My Lord, I am sorry, but you can’t send Yaotl after Telpochtli and the boy.’
I stared at him. Terror made my stomach churn. I wonderedwhat he had really seen and heard. He had been knocked into the water early in the fight with Shining Light, before Lion and I had found out who he and Nimble really were. Surely, I told myself, Handy could not know?
Then the commoner spoke again and, realizing what he meant, it was as much as I could do not to laugh out loud from sheer relief.
‘Have you forgotten what day it is?’ he went on wretchedly.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw my master’s face, the taut muscles and bulging eyes seeming to collapse inward as his expression changed from fury to comical bemusement.
‘Yaotl is a slave,’ the commoner reminded him. ‘He’s sacred to Tezcatlipoca. My Lord, this is Tezcatlipoca’s name-day You can’t give Yaotl orders today, it would offend the god. We’re in the middle of the lake — what if he stirs up a storm?’
I saw my brother start at that, and then squint suspiciously at the sky. He had always been more god-fearing than I was. ‘He’s right, my Lord.’ He looked down at my master, whose eyes had now closed in an expression of resigned exasperation.
‘After all, you’re in a little open canoe. It wouldn’t do to take the risk — not on a day like One Death.’
Of all the gods there was none we Aztecs feared more than Tezcatlipoca. The Mocker, we called him, the Enemy on Both Hands, He Whose Slaves We Are. All those titles suited his character — untrustworthy, whimsical and dangerous. You could feel his influence whenever your affairs depended on chance. The merchant who set out on a long trip with his canoe richly laden with trade goods and ended up on a mountainside with vultures picking at his bones was a victim of Tezcatlipoca’s caprice. So was the Lord who sat down in his reserved seat in the front tier overlooking the Ball-Court, with his stake laid out before him, only to watch helplessly while asmall rubber ball flew and bounced from one player’s hip to another’s and reduced him to penury.
I had been no less a victim of the Lord of the Here and Now. Despite being the son of a commoner, from a poor family of farmers and paper-makers from one of the meaner parishes at the southern end of Tenochtitlan, I had found myself among the privileged few allowed to train for the priesthood; but I had ended up as a slave.
For a little boy, who just happened to have been born on an auspicious day, to be thrust into the care of the sinister, black-robed, bloodstained masters of the school we called the House of Tears had hardly felt as if a god were smiling upon him. Twenty years later, though, the man the boy grew into was to feel Tezcatlipoca’s malice even more keenly, when for a minor and meaningless offence he was thrown out of the Priest House and trampled into the mud at the lake’s edge by the men who had been his friends and colleagues.
My expulsion from the priesthood was only the start of my misfortunes. To the misery of knowing what I had lost — not just my status as a priest, recognizable at once by my long hair and black face-paint, but also the daily round of penances and observances that had given my life its meaning — was added the ignominy of being picked up and taken home by my family. They had tolerated me, but never let me forget how I had let them down: how I had thrown away a chance my brothers and sisters had never had, not to mention whatever it had cost my father to secure my admittance to the House of Tears.
I had sought refuge from their taunts and reproaches inside a drinking-gourd. I hoped the sour taste of sacred wine would take away the bitterness of my loss. Instead it doubled my humiliation, getting me arrested for the crime of public drunkenness.
I ought to have died then. For priests and nobles, thepenalty for being found drunk without lawful excuse was to be cudgelled to death. In some ways the alternative was worse. My life was spared, but all my hair was shaved off, in the plaza in front of the Emperor’s palace, before a laughing, jeering crowd. How he wore his hair mattered to an Aztec, whether he had it piled up on his head like a pillar of stone to show he was a successful warrior or left it unkempt, bloody and matted as the mark of a priest. Having your head shaved was like being told you were nobody. It was what we did to a war-captive before sacrificing him, as a sign that, whatever he may have done in life, now he was just a corpse.