I also remembered another young man who had seemed to me old beyond his years. My son was older than this boy, but not by much. I had not seen him grow up, and suddenly the vision I had of us walking and talking together like this, as we never had, brought tears to my eyes and made me break my stride.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’ I swallowed once, blinked a few times and turned back to Crayfish. ‘You were fond of your cousin.’
‘We all were.’ The boy sighed. ‘After my aunt died she took over the household. She cared for the idols — she loved doing that — and made the tortillas and swept and made clothes for my uncle, just the way a wife would have. She was kind to me. She looked after me when I first came to my uncle’s house. She was really more like a sister to me than a cousin — even after she met him.’
There was no need to ask who he meant. ‘You know Idle’s dead.’
‘Good riddance!’ the boy spat.
‘Careful what you say, lad,’ I cautioned him quietly. ‘People might think you had something to do with it!’
‘Me and everyone else he ever met!’ he cried with spirit. ‘The only person I ever knew with a good word to say about him was his wife! Only the gods know what she saw in him.’
‘Did you hear any of what Skinny’s wife said to me?’ I asked. ‘She thought your cousin killed her husband because he was …’ I wondered how worldly the youngster was. ‘He was treating her badly.’
‘Screwing around, you mean.’
I rolled my eyes in disbelief, wondering whether all young boys were like this and my upbringing had been unusually sheltered.
‘I didn’t hear what she said. I don’t believe it. I know her — even if she’d finally realized what her husband was like, she’d never commit murder. It would be a crime!’
‘Obviously,’ I said drily, but I understood. He thought someone as pious as his cousin incapable of any transgression. ‘But the best of people can do terrible things when they’re desperate.’
‘Anyway, why would she need to kill him? She could just have gone back to her father. Uncle Angry would have taken her back, and she knew it. They’d have divorced eventually, and that would have been that. Why would she risk killing him and getting caught? What would have happened to her then?’
I cast my mind back to the law I had been taught in the House of Tears. ‘If she wasn’t put to death she’d probably have been handed over to Butterfly as a slave.’
‘So she’d be worse off than ever!’
‘Someone would have to find her first.’ I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I take it she and Butterfly didn’t get on?’
The youth grimaced. ‘It didn’t help that Marigold’s husband kept making eyes at his sister-in-law — who didn’t do anything to put him off! And Butterfly would go making snide comments about the idols, which upset my cousin.’
‘She may not have been too happy about your cousin’s cosy chats with her husband either,’ I reminded him.
‘I’m sure they weren’t doing anything wrong!’ he said hastily. ‘It’s just that, well, I think Marigold told him things he needed to hear. Do you know what I mean? About how important his work was, how much the gods valued it. Butterfly wouldn’t have understood any of that.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know what to say about Butterfly She seemed to look after her husband well enough, but none of us ever liked her much. My uncle seems to think she’s up to no good, but I can’t get him to say what.’
‘He didn’t know you were going to Atecocolecan.’
‘No. He thinks I’m meeting a friend who’s at the House of Tears, another featherworker’s boy.’ I suspected he meant Stammerer. ‘Going to Idle’s house was my idea, just to see if I could find anything out. To tell you the truth, Uncle Angry has hardly spoken to me in the last couple of days. He’s been hiding in his workshop, not talking to anyone, not letting anyone in, only coming out for his meals. I know he’s brooding over Marigold. It would help him so much if I could find out where she was.’
Crayfish and I parted company at the border of Amantlan. Just before he set off home, he suggested I lose my disguise. He told me my soot was starting to flake off. When I looked down I saw that my hands and legs were beginning to lookgrimy rather than sinister and I was shedding flecks of dark ash the way fruit trees shed blossom in the spring.
Deciding to take the boy’s advice, I looked for a secluded spot, a quiet, narrow canal where I could wash unobserved. Thinking I had found just the place, I turned a corner, only to discover that someone else had had the same idea.
He had just finished relieving himself into the water and was straightening his clothes. He was dressed from neck to ankle in green cotton, and his feet were clad in broad sandals with over-long straps. A sword and a shield lay beside him, and his hair stood up upon his head and flowed in a dark mane down the back of his neck. He had his back to me, but before he turned around I knew who he was: an Otomi warrior.
I stood quite still while he looked me over. I wanted to run, but all my legs seemed able to do was tremble violently, and I knew I would be caught before I had gone five paces. All I could do was trust in my disguise.
I recognized him as one of the captain’s entourage. I was thankful that he was not the captain himself, or Fox, either of whom I was sure would have recognized me. I wondered where his monstrous, one-eyed chief was.
‘What are you doing here?’ the warrior demanded eventually
I remembered to disguise my voice, mumbling the way priests sometimes did, owing to having drawn so much blood from their tongues. ‘The same as you, by the look of it.’
He bent down to pick up his sword and shield. ‘There isn’t a latrine near here. It always feels better to go in the canals in this part of the city, anyway!’ He was obviously from Tenochtitlan, besides having a warrior’s contempt for the merchants and craftsmen who lived in the surrounding houses. Helooked at my robes. ‘What’s a priest of Huitzilopochtli doing in Tlatelolco?’
‘Official business,’ I said casually. ‘I might ask you the same question, though.’
He made an impatient gesture with his sword. ‘We’re looking for a couple of runaways — a boy and an escaped slave. Seen anything like that?’
‘No.’
‘Well, report it if you do. My captain is very keen to get hold of the slave in particular. He led us a merry dance over in Tlacopan, and he’s going to be wearing his own guts for a breechcloth when we find him!’ Suddenly he was looking at me intently. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’
I gulped. ‘I don’t think so. I serve the god at his great temple in the Heart of the World — maybe you’ve seen me at a festival.’
He frowned. ‘No, it’s not that. I don’t know, your face just looks familiar, that’s all.’
I summoned up a nervous laugh. ‘Hard to say under all this black stuff, isn’t it?’
He peered at me for a long moment, while I fought to control my terror. Then he seemed to make up his mind.
‘Can’t stand here all day,’ he said briskly, stepping around me. ‘Got to get after those bastards. It’s a year’s supply of tobacco for the man who catches them!’
Then he was gone, and I was on my knees at the water’s edge, being violently sick.
It was only when the last uncontrollable spasm had passed through me and I squatted, gasping and shivering, by the canal that the full import of what the Otomi had said began to sink in.
He had told me he and his comrades were looking for a slave — me — and a boy. But when I had left him in Tlacopan,the captain had still been convinced that he was pursuing a third person. The boatman he had been torturing would not have known any better.
So how had the Otomies learned the truth?
I stayed where I was for the remainder of the afternoon, trying to rest. Once night had fallen, I finally abandoned my disguise, washing the soot off in the canal and hiding the cloak behind a patch of nettles. Then I made my way back to the house in Atecocolecan.