But at that moment the prospect of being sacrificed barely entered my thoughts. All I could understand was that I was being reprieved. My master was giving me another chance.
I swallowed, I gaped, and then I fell to my knees, less out ofgratitude and deference than because my legs had buckled. I flopped forward in front of his Lordship, prostrating myself, with my arms flung out towards him.
‘My Lord! Thank you! I …’
My words ended in a scream as something hard slammed into the top of my head. I heard a crack like a fir branch full of sap bursting in a fire, and there were pieces of pottery on the floor and scalding liquid all over my head and neck. Unlike most Aztecs, my master liked his chocolate piping hot, and the contents of his bowl seared the tender, bruised flesh of my scalp, making tears spring to my eyes and my hands snatch convulsively at my hair.
‘Don’t start thanking me, you worm! Why do you think I didn’t just give you to my steward and the captain and let them take turns breaking every bone in your body, one by one? Eh? Look at me!’
I raised my head towards my master. A pathetic sight he must have thought me, with fragments of pottery in my hair and chocolate running down my face and over my eyes, forcing me to blink.
‘I’m going to let you live — for now — on one condition.’ Disgust twisted his mouth, as though I were the corpse of some verminous thing found rotting in one of his storehouses. ‘You tell me where the boy is.’
‘The … the boy?’
He leaned towards me slightly, probably as far as his ancient back would allow. ‘The boy, Yaotl. Don’t play dumb. You know who I mean. Shining Light’s accomplice, the one I want for cheating and humiliating me. Your son, Nimble!’
‘My son? How can you … How …?’
‘How do I know? How do you think? His boyfriend’s mother told me.’
‘Lily?’ I asked, incredulously. I remembered Upright tellingme how she had gone to Lord Feathered in Black after I had escaped.
‘Yes, Lily. He only had one mother, as far as I know. And she told me everything you told her. So I know what her son did, and what your son did.’ Suddenly his Lordship laughed, a cackling sound followed by several dry, shallow wheezes. ‘Have you any idea how much that woman hates you? She thinks your boy led hers astray! That’s why she was bringing you back to me. She thought you’d get what you deserved here. If you didn’t, she told me, she’d take your skin off you with her fingernails!’
I said nothing but my mind was in turmoil. I understood, now, how the Otomi I had met by the canal the day before had known who he was looking for. After she had snatched me from Howling Monkey’s house Lily must have come straight here and passed on everything I had told her. But had I told her that much?
I tried to remember what I had said to the tense, bitter woman sitting opposite me in the canoe. I had not intended to mention Nimble. Where had I gone wrong?
‘I know what you were up to in Tlatelolco.’ The Chief Minister’s voice had become soft, and years of experience told me that there was no more dangerous sound in the World. ‘You were looking for him, weren’t you? You convinced that meathead of an Otomi to go blundering into Tlacopan after him and then went to Tlatelolco because somehow you knew that was where he’d really gone. So where is he, Yaotl?’
I looked down and squeezed my eyes shut against the tears that threatened to overwhelm them. ‘My Lord, I don’t know,’ I muttered truthfully. Then I took a deep breath and looked up again, straight into my master’s startlingly clear brown eyes. ‘But you may as well send for the captain now, because even if I did know, I couldn’t tell you.’
3
‘And then what happened?’
Handy, the big commoner my master retained as his general dogsbody, was following my story with a look of frank amazement. I was no less astounded to be looking at him. In fact I was surprised to find myself looking at anything at alclass="underline" by now, I calculated, my eyes ought to be dangling out of their sockets like a couple of dead flowers drooping over a wall.
‘He said he’d give me a day to think about it.’
I still marvelled at the changes that had come over my master’s face in the moments after I had defied him. It had darkened with fury its lines deepening and bunching together and his lips drawing back over his teeth in something like a snarl. Then, abruptly, it had cleared. His hunched shoulders had relaxed a little and he had sat back, letting his fingers caress his chin while he thought over his decision.
I could have one day.
‘Mind you, he told me not to let you out of my sight,’ Handy pointed out.
‘Could have been worse,’ I said. ‘I might have had the Prick for an escort!’
A day during which I was at liberty: no duties; go where you like, Yaotl; start by having a bath and a good meal. Remind yourself how sweet life can be, and ask yourself if you really want the captain to part you from it.
I was not that naive and his Lordship knew it. If I was lying, a day would make no difference. If I was telling the truth, he expected me to look for Nimble again as soon as he set me free. And he had given me Handy as an escort knowing that I thought of the commoner as a friend and would think twice about slipping away and leaving him to face the Chief Minister’s fury.
I had had the bath and the meal, and now Handy and I sat in one of the Palace’s many courtyards while we brought each other up to date on our exploits.
‘I saw Lily when she came to see his Lordship. Angry? She was spitting. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of anything like that, I can tell you, and I’m used to Citlalli at her worst.’ Handy’s wife had a tongue like an obsidian flake: it had scratched me in the past. ‘I couldn’t work out what she was doing here, mind you. You say she told Lord Feathered in Black her own son had duped him? What would have been the good of that?’
‘She probably thought she had no choice. She was in deep trouble for spiriting me away from her parish chief the way she did. I suppose she thought the best way out of it was to bring me back here once she’d got what she wanted from me. The merchants could hardly complain about her restoring the Chief Minister’s slave to him, could they, even if she had a funny way of doing it?’ I sighed regretfully as I realized that what Lily had done probably had a simpler explanation than that. I could not see her handing me over to the Chief Minister in cold blood, just to spare herself a confrontation with her parish elders. She was too proud to have stooped to that. If she really had intended to deliver me to my master, then she had been prompted by anger and a desire for revenge. ‘When I screwed it up for her by escaping there was nothing for it but to come here anyway and tell his Lordship what she’dlearned from me, and hope that would be enough. Which apparently it was.’ My master had by all accounts been more than happy with the woman’s tale. He had even rewarded her with a load of cotton that had gone back to Pochtlan in her canoe.
But how had she known so much? I kept asking myself what I might have said to enable her to guess the truth about Nimble, but I still had no answer.
I asked Handy what had happened to the steward and the captain in Tlacopan after I had fled.
He grinned. ‘They got roughed up a bit. The trouble with people like your captain is they depend on people being so shit scared of them they won’t fight back. But even the Tepanecs were able to work out eventually that there were far more of them than the Otomies. It’s probably just as well that the local version of the Chief Minister turned up eventually, before things started getting really bloody. By the time I got back there with your brother and his warriors, there wasn’t much going on except a lot of snarling and swearing. It didn’t do me any harm — the Prick even thanked me for going to get help.’