The merchant’s boat was as we had left it, except that the bodies that had lain on its deck had gone.
‘Shining Light’s mother sent a boat to pick him up,’ Handy explained when the steward and I hailed him from the canoe.
‘And the others?’
‘Over the side. Some warriors came out yesterday morning. Tied rocks to their feet and threw them in. Very efficient about it, too — they even brought the rocks with them.’
‘Warriors?’
‘Otomies. Real hard bastards.’
‘Otomies? Are they still here?’ the steward asked quickly, glancing nervously at the boat, which was plainly unoccupied except by Handy.
‘Yes, they’re bobbing about under the water and breathingthrough straws,’ Handy snapped. ‘Of course they’re not here! They paddled their boat over to the mainland. I didn’t feel like asking them to take me with them!’
I understood his annoyance. It was born of fear.
The Otomies are a race of savages who live in the high, dry, cold lands to the north of the valley of Mexico. They are renowned for being brave, strong and stupid, and for painting their bodies blue. We used to make jokes about them: ‘A real Otomi, a miserable Otomi, a green-head, a thick-head, a big tuft of hair over the back of the head, an Otomi blockhead …’ The joke was that you could say all that to one of these foreign dimwits in a conversational tone and he would nod and smile as if you were asking after his grandmother.
‘Otomi’ was also the name of some of our most ferocious warriors, the army’s elite, berserkers sworn never to take a step backward in battle — and if that sounds reasonable, then you try wrestling a big Texcalan nobleman to the ground without losing your footing once, and see how long you last. These psychopaths resembled their barbarian namesakes in every respect except the blue paint, and the fact that you did not make jokes about them, not if you valued your life.
I had to quell a sudden feeling of panic as I realized they must be engaged in the same search we were. If they got to my son before I did, I thought, he would not stand a chance. If the Chief Minister wanted him alive they would probably cut one of his feet off to stop him running away and then keep the foot as a souvenir.
‘The mainland?’ said the steward, biting his lip. ‘We need to get over there.’ He was as nervous about meeting the Otomies as Handy and I were. After all, as a mere three-captive warrior, he was almost as far beneath their contempt. The moment I realized this, I caught the earliest glimmer of a plan, as faint and elusive as the first star in the evening sky.
‘We need to get after them,’ I said briskly. ‘If they’re hunting the same people we are, we ought to be joining forces, don’t you think?’
‘Well, I don’t know …’
‘I’d rather go back to the city,’ Handy grumbled. ‘You haven’t been stuck on this boat for a day and a half. Do you have any idea what my wife’s going to do to me when I finally get home?’
‘Old Black Feathers isn’t going to take kindly to anyone going home before we’ve looked for these two.’ I looked straight at the big commoner to make sure he grasped my meaning. ‘All we really have to do is find the Otomies and point them in the right direction …’
“‘All we have to do”?’ the steward spluttered. ‘Are you mad? Look, we’re not talking about a bunch of little kids out looking for frogs and water-snakes in the marshes. Chasing a couple of runaways is one thing, but this is getting dangerous!’
‘And what’s our master going to do to us if we go back empty handed?’ One look at the steward’s face told me I had touched a nerve. Old Black Feathers could easily make life almost as unpleasant for him as for me. ‘Let’s face it, we’ve no chance of finding them by ourselves, and if we do, how are we going to get them back alive? If we find the soldiers and tell them where to start looking, they’re as likely as not to tell us to get lost — then we can go back to our master and tell him we’ve done our bit.’
Handy seemed to make up his mind then, scrambling over the side of the merchant’s boat and making our canoe rock alarmingly.
‘You won’t have far to look for the warriors,’ the commoner said. ‘They camped just beyond that stand of bulrushes over there. They were singing half the night — kept me awake, not that I was about to complain! If our two runaways heardthem I should think they’d have taken off pretty quickly.’ I thought so too, before remembering that there were not two runaways, only one, and I strongly suspected that he had not run anywhere. Besides, I realized that the singing must have been a feint: while some of the Otomies pretended to carouse noisily, serenading the creatures of the night with boastful warrior songs, others would be creeping quietly through the dense growth of reed and sedge at the shoreline, using the noise as cover. ‘I just want to know what you’re going to tell them.’
As I dipped the paddle into the water and began to propel our overloaded, suddenly ungainly craft in the direction Handy had indicated, I gestured towards another place at the water’s edge, where I could make out a fresh disturbance in the mud and a short trail of flattened plants.
‘I’ll tell them to look over there,’ I said. ‘That’s where their quarry landed.’
Handy followed my glance. Then he stared at me. He opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it again.
The place I had pointed out was where my master’s boatman had grounded his canoe and run away, two nights before. Handy had witnessed the whole thing. I tried not to let the tension show on my face while he decided whether to mention it or not.
‘Over there,’ he said at length. ‘Right.’
Before I could groan with relief the steward asked: ‘Why didn’t you tell our master this yesterday?’
‘It was too foggy yesterday morning. I couldn’t be sure.’ I turned quickly to Handy, hoping to change the subject. ‘What will happen to this boat?’
‘Lily and her father will send someone to fetch it, I expect. There’s enough merchandise left on it — bales of feathers, bags of cocoa beans — lots of stuff from the hot lands in the South — they won’t want to leave all that floating around in the middle of the lake!’
‘But if it was dark when they escaped …’ Whatever else you might say about my master’s steward, he was persistent.
‘What’s that over there?’ I asked. ‘Looks like smoke to me.’
A thin streak of smoke, the sort of thing you might expect to see rising from a pipe that had been packed too tightly, had appeared over the top of the rushes in front of us.
‘It is,’ Handy confirmed. He looked at me. ‘I think that’s from the fire the Otomies made.’
We were very close to the bank now: so close that I could see the water below us changing colour, from dark blue to a cloudy green, and hear the buzzing noise of the flies and mosquitoes that lived in the shelter of the tall plants. Ducks paddled listlessly in and out of the reeds, their feet just visible below the water’s surface, little dark angular shapes making eddies in the scum around them.
‘Where do we go now?’ I began to ask, but the question died in my throat before I had finished asking it.
Something whistled through the air. The boat shuddered. Handy, standing up in the bows, cried out in alarm. An instant later came a scream and a loud splash and suddenly there was no sign of the steward.
I grabbed both sides of the canoe and clung to them as the vessel lurched from side to side. The water was in turmoil, with ducks streaking across its surface in all directions and a large shape floundering noisily about just under its surface.
‘What’s happening?’ I cried. ‘Where’s the steward?’
‘He jumped in.’ Handy dropped on to one knee and reached out over the water towards the submerged creature splashing about beside us. ‘Bet he can’t swim.’
For a moment I hoped he was intending to shove the steward under and hold him there until his struggles stopped, butthen a hand came up, groped blindly towards one of his arms and seized it with enough force to throttle a dog.