‘No,’ I cried hastily, as the sunlight flashed off four sets of cruelly sharp obsidian blades. ‘No, but you said … you called me a murderer — I had nothing to do with Idle, I tell you. I swear it, I will eat earth …’
‘Idle?’ To my amazement Upright laughed. ‘You don’t think we still care about Idle, do you?’
‘You mean there’s someone else?’
‘Oh, this is pathetic!’
The end of the sword hit me just below the rib cage, knocking the breath out of me so that I could not cry in pain but only collapse, doubled over and gasping vainly for air.
I barely heard what Upright said next, but I managed to follow it somehow.
‘You’re such an idiot, Yaotl. If you’d stopped with Idle I don’t suppose anyone would really have given a toss. Certainly I wouldn’t. I gather his family might even have paid you for getting rid of him. But you had to go on, didn’t you? You didn’t seriously expect the Amanteca to overlook the death of someone like Skinny, did you?’
There was an argument over whether or not to search the house. Upright wanted to, but the local men wanted to leaveand were not prepared to let the men from Pochtlan have the place to themselves. It was not a prolonged or heated discussion, since Upright and Shield were convinced they had got their man. It would be easier and more fun, they assured their colleagues, to get any evidence they needed by beating it out of me rather than breaking up the courtyard or rifling through wicker chests full of old skirts and breechcloths.
By the time this was settled I had got my breath back enough to be frog-marched through the empty front room to the canoe the two men had brought with them. At least, I told myself as I was bundled into the swaying craft, I would be spared the walk back.
Shield took up the pole. As he pushed us away from the shore he let his eyes linger on his two local colleagues as they turned their backs indifferently and walked away along the side of the canal.
‘Get a warm welcome around here, don’t you, boss?’
Upright grunted. ‘We wouldn’t like it if a couple of strangers turned up on our patch and started telling us what’s what.’ He leered at me. ‘Maybe we should have told them our suspect was from Tenochtitlan. They wouldn’t have minded then. Round here I don’t suppose they like Southerners any more than we do.’
‘We didn’t know …’
The constable shot a warning glance at his deputy but it was too late to stop me from picking up his meaning. ‘You weren’t out looking for me, then?’ I asked innocently.
Upright looked suddenly sick. ‘Mind your own business!’
‘Only, if you weren’t, then who were you after? What made you connect me with whatever’s happened to Skinny?’
‘The fact that you did it!’ rumbled Shield dangerously. He was taking out his annoyance and embarrassment on the pole, stirring up the muck at the bottom of the canal and cleaving adark wake through the weeds and scum on its surface. I hoped he might be furious enough to capsize us or run us hard aground and give me a chance to run, but he was too skilful for that.
‘We just came here to tell Skinny’s wife the bad news,’ his superior said. ‘Of course, we called on the local police on the way, and what did we find? The newly widowed Butterfly tearing her hair out and babbling about finding you, of all people, trying to burgle her house. Wouldn’t you say that’s a bit suspicious? Especially since you’ve never answered for what happened to Idle. And we know the story you and Lily came up with was a pack of lies.’
‘Did you ask Kindly about it?’ As soon as I posed the question I realized it was pointless. Whatever Kindly may have said scarcely mattered since the truth, at least about who I was, had come out anyway. I had a vision of the merchant’s daughter striding into Howling Monkey’s courtyard, her skirt flowing around her and the sound of her sandals striking the floor, and was suddenly aware of the risk she had taken and the fact that, for whatever reason, it had not come off. ‘And what about Lily?’ I asked, in a small voice.
‘What about her?’ Upright grimaced. ‘Like father, like daughter, aren’t they? And she had a son who was just as bad. If any of that family told me my own name I’d have to run home and ask my mother, to check!’ He laughed shortly. ‘Don’t worry, she set the record straight. After you did a runner — wasn’t I surprised when that happened! — she went and told your master what had happened.’
‘What?’
Shield gave an unpleasant chuckle. ‘Old Black Feathers himself! The Chief Minister!’
‘Of course, there wasn’t much for us to do once we knew whose slave you were. He’s got enough men of his own tosend running around after you without needing any help from us. If we’d wanted to get you for doing Idle, we reckoned we might as well wait and see what was left after they’d finished with you.’ He gave me what may have been a pitying look. ‘And from the look of some of them, you’re bloody lucky we found you first!’
I wondered what had possessed Lily to go to my master, but I had more urgent worries on my mind now. ‘So where are you taking me now?’ I asked in a low voice. ‘Back to Lord Feathered in Black?’ I could guess what would happen after that. My master would gloat over me for a while and then hand me over to the captain’s tender mercies.
‘Oh no. Not now You’re going to the Governor.’
‘Itzcohuatzin? Why him?’
‘Why do you think? I told you Skinny was a mistake. As soon as we knew who the dead man was, every parish policeman in Tlatelolco was told to bring whoever did it to the Governor. Now I don’t know whether Lord Feathered in Black has any other ideas, seeing as you’re his slave, but since I’ve had no orders to the contrary, it’s to the Governor you’re going.’
‘What happened to Skinny?’ I asked.
Shield groaned. ‘Here we go again!’
Upright snorted. ‘You might tell us. We know you attacked him on the Pochtlan side of the canal, right near the bridge with Amantlan. Why so close to where we found his brother? I suppose you were unlucky, though. I don’t reckon you hit him hard enough to have killed him outright, but of course he drowned. You could have pulled him out, though.’
‘Maybe he thought he was doing him a favour, letting the poor bugger die like that,’ Shield suggested. People who died by water were spared the terrors and misery of the Land of the Dead; instead they were destined to spend the afterlife inTlalocan, the rain-god’s paradise, where the seasons never let you down and there was always plenty to eat.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said, for the sake of saying it.
‘Well, you can tell that to the Governor and whoever else asks you,’ Upright said indifferently. ‘I’m curious, though. Why’d you do it? What were Idle and Skinny to you?’
‘He fancied getting up the widow’s skirt!’
Shield’s crude jibe jolted some memory, a dream I thought I had once had, or rather a nightmare, and suddenly I was in a dark, cramped space, and a great snake was wrapping its coils around me, its woman’s voice cooing softly in my ear, saying things that should have been beautiful and arousing and were all the more grotesque and sickening because of it.
I struggled. I tried to cry out, to stand up, to flee, and then there was a massive hand on my shoulder, driving me back down into the bottom of the boat.
‘Don’t even think about it!’ Shield snarled.
I sat, shivering, while Upright looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Interesting,’ he said at last.
‘Look,’ I said, mustering all my self-control to keep my voice steady, ‘I didn’t kill Skinny because I wanted his wife or for any reason. I didn’t kill Idle. I was asked by Kindly the merchant to look for some property of his that he thought they had. That’s why I was at their house.’
Why had I found Shield’s words so disturbing? More of the visions of gods and serpents that I had had in the night were coming back to me. I wondered why the images were so enduring. Dreams, even those induced by the seeds of the Morning Glory plant, were fragile, evanescent things, usually dispersing like mist as soon as the Sun came up, but these would not go away. They were like the memory of a real event rather than something I had had to travel to the land of dreams to see.