‘I knew I should have killed you after I knocked you out.’Butterfly sighed. ‘Couldn’t resist it, though. You looked so tempting, lying there …’
‘Shut up,’ Angry hissed. ‘You,’ he said to me, ‘get on with it!’
Where was my brother? I strained to catch some sound from outside. Occasionally a muffled thump would come from the work gang labouring behind the house. I had not noticed the noise to begin with but it seemed to be getting louder, and occasionally the walls would shake a little.
‘You got involved because your son-in-law’s plan went wrong. He had to be able to deliver the featherwork in the same state as it would have been in if Skinny had just finished it. The trouble is, it wasn’t. He was surprised while he was trying to steal it, by my son, of all people, and it got damaged in the fight. I know he left at least one feather behind because Kindly showed it to me. So he had a big problem. He knew nothing about featherwork himself, and there was no way he could fix it. He needed a featherworker to sort it out. His brother was dead by then, so he came to you.’
‘What’s that noise?’ the woman cried suddenly.
I could not decide whether she had been reacting to something real or just wanted to change the subject. Surely the sound of hammer-blows outside was getting louder, coming closer?
Were those dust motes I could see dancing before my eyes?
‘But you wouldn’t cooperate, would you? I’m not surprised — it must have been galling enough to learn that Skinny had landed such an important commission when he was supposed to be working for you, but then to be asked to finish it so your despised son-in-law could take the credit in your rival’s name — that was too much.’
‘I told that slug Idle where to go,’ the big man confirmed. ‘So he came back the next night with … with …’ He falteredbefore going on, in a small voice: ‘He told me to get on with it if I wanted to see my daughter again.’
The sound from outside was becoming undeniable, thuds and crashes and muffled cries and a shaking that I could feel through the floor.
‘What are they doing out there?’ Angry cried, momentarily distracted. ‘Are they trying to knock the house down, or what?’
‘So I was right!’ Despite my fear it was hard to keep my glee at my own cleverness out of my voice. ‘Idle and Butterfly were holding her hostage, weren’t they? And you lied to me because you were afraid that, if I knew the brothers were twins, I might work out what Idle had done and manage to recover the costume for Kindly. And there would go your daughter’s ransom.’
Angry’s response was a howl of anguish: ‘So where is she, then?’
Butterfly screamed.
Suddenly she, Angry and his sword all vanished in a thick cloud of white dust and I was on the floor. From somewhere very close came a crash so loud that I did not so much hear it as feel it, as if the ground had grown legs and kicked me hard in the small of the back, and then the World exploded into a frenzy of flying masonry chips and plaster.
The dust around me glowed as light poured into the room. Men shouted and cursed. Pieces of timber and fragments of what had been the back wall of the house creaked, cracked and clattered as they fell. A woman shrieked.
I got to my feet, coughing and sneezing and spitting dust. I staggered blindly towards where I thought the doorway must be, away from the light, and into the courtyard of the house.
Voices were all around me, all talking at once, yelling orders or demanding answers to questions I could not make out, or merely swearing. There was a lot of swearing.
As the dust cleared in the open air I began to take in the scene around me. The courtyard was full. Soldiers stood all around, swords drawn in a gesture of battle readiness that their owners’ baffled expressions made a nonsense of. My brother’s bodyguards’ eyes swivelled left and right as they looked for someone who could give them orders, or anything that might give them a clue as to what they were meant to do now. One or two recognized me and looked at me expectantly, as if they thought I could sort this out for them.
I saw my son, standing among the warriors. I realized he must have come here as soon as he found out that Angry and his nephew had already left. Crayfish was next to him, held in the unbreakable grip of a huge armed man.
‘Nimble …’ I croaked. Then, at last, from behind me, I heard the one voice I had been longing to hear since I had arrived at the house that morning.
‘Yaotl? Anybody seen my brother? He’d better have a bloody good explanation for all this … Ah! Right, you come here. I want you to see what we’ve found. You won’t believe it!’
Dust billowed out of the doorway into the ruined back room. Through the cloud strolled Lion, coated in the stuff from head to foot so that he looked like a chalk-whitened captive on the way to his one and only meeting with the Fire Priest’s flint knife. A large flat piece of plaster decorated the top of his head. A hammer swung easily from his right hand.
Behind him, moving as slowly as cripples, came two of his warriors. They were supporting a woman between them. They had to support her because, judging by the way her head hung and her feet dragged apathetically across the ground, she would not have been able to stand unaided, let alone walk. At first I thought she was unconscious, but she was clutching something in both arms. I could not see what it was,because it was swaddled in cloth that had evidently been torn from her skirt. Both the bundle and the woman were caked in dried blood.
My sigh of relief turned into a groan of horror when I guessed what the cloth concealed.
‘Found her in that hidden room at the back, behind the false wall,’ my brother was saying. ‘Lucky the wall didn’t fall on her. Poor creature! You wouldn’t keep a dog like that … What is it?’
I struggled to find my voice. ‘What’s she carrying?’
Lion turned and walked over to her. ‘Here, let me look …’ The woman made no sound, but my worst fears were confirmed by the way she recoiled, snatching the little bundle out of my brother’s reach, and the look of revulsion and disgust that crossed his face as he glimpsed what lay inside the pathetic wrappings.
A loud moan and a bout of convulsive sobbing burst out behind me.
Marigold, Angry’s daughter, turned away, hiding her face and her burden from us all. But her father and her cousin had both seen as much as I had.
I hoped the child had not been born alive. In any event his soul would be happy now, sucking at the heavenly milk-tree until it was his turn to be born again; but there had been enough anguish here, without adding his suffering to it.
3
The warriors found a sleeping-mat in the front room of the house and lowered the silent woman on to it with surprising gentleness. They kept away from her bundle, on Lion’s instructions. She lay down passively, seemingly oblivious to their attentions.
One of my brother’s men ran to fetch her a doctor while the others stood up to watch as Angry and Butterfly were led out into the courtyard, surrounded by more warriors and a small crowd of curious labourers.
‘We only brought the one hammer,’ my brother explained, ‘and they were so sick of driving piles into the lake bed that they were happy to help.’
‘Watch Angry,’ I warned. ‘When he gets over the shock …’ I was almost too late. The featherworker suddenly roared like a trapped animal, and then, as a trapped animal sometimes will, he found a reserve of strength that was probably unknown even to himself, and burst free.