I realized that he probably did not believe I was telling him the whole truth, and that it did not really matter. Each of us was playing a part. He was pretending to be my genial, indulgent master and I was pretending to be his loyal slave. That would last while I kept up the act on my side and he still had a use for me.
He did not interrupt my story. At the end of it he sat in thoughtful silence, watching a perfect smoke ring curling and flattening out as it rose toward the ceiling before slipping like a ghost through a small opening high in the wall.
“Curling Mist,” he murmured at last. “You think he is really an old enemy of yours from your days in the Priest House-what did you say his name was, Young Warrior? And he’s the one who’s trying to use the sorcerers to blackmail me into giving you up to him?”
“My Lord, yes. Hasn’t he been sending you messages, demanding that you hand me over? There was one on the body we found floating in the canal.”
A puzzled frown creased my master’s forehead. “Curling Mist, sending me messages? I don’t think so.” He put the smoking-tube down beside him delicately. “Let me show you something.”
The Chief Minister of the Aztecs got slowly to his feet and made his way over to a small reed chest under the little window. As he bent toward it a shaft of sunlight caught his face, picking out in shadow every line that nearly forty years in office had etched into it.
“Ah! Here it is. I want you to look at this.”
As he lowered himself back onto his seat he held out a single sheet of paper.
“It’s a letter. Why, it’s from Shining Light!”
“Your merchant,” the Chief Minister confirmed. “Read on.”
“It’s been written in some haste, and not by a very practiced hand,” I continued. “But I think it says …” The words died in my throat as I read them.
“Your friend Handy gave it to my steward, on Two Jaguar-the day you visited the prison.”
“That was the day Shining Light was kidnapped-when his mother said he left the city.” I looked at the paper again. “But that doesn’t make sense-not if I read this correctly.”
My master had taken up the smoking-tube again and leaned back in his seat. I watched the lines on his face shift as the muscles under them relaxed, and for the first time in the years I had known him wondered how much pain he was in.
“I took it to mean this,” he said. “‘This is my price for the rest of the sorcerers. Give me Yaotl, and they are yours.’ Do you agree?”
“Yes. But if he’d gone …”
“If he’d gone into exile, as his mother was saying, then I would have had to deliver you to his house, wouldn’t I? Which I duly did, the next day. I assumed his mother would take charge of you in his absence. In the event Curling Mist and his boy obviously tried to handle the thing themselves, and they made a mess of it, since you managed to escape.” He reached for the pipe again. “I have had other messages. The one you found on the corpse out there”-a slight turn of his head indicated the general location of the canal-“was one of them. But you think Curling Mist-or Young Warrior, if that’s who he really is-has the sorcerers, not Shining Light? That would mean the merchant was just carrying messages between me and Young Warrior. How amusing!” There was no laughter in his voice.
“I think their relationship is more complicated than that, my Lord. Shining Light and Young Warrior seem to have been lovers, and now Shining Light is Young Warrior’s prisoner. He has the merchant and his merchandise, as well as your sorcerers.”
“So you said. So where does he live, this Young Warrior?”
“You don’t know?”
“Of course not! What, you think the Chief Minister is going to beseen plucking at the hem of some small-time criminal’s cloak?” In his agitation he waved the smoking-tube about, sending flecks of ash flying from its end. “I have taken great care never to meet the man. It’s bad enough that I have to entertain that boy of his on occasion.”
“But if you are to find the sorcerers …”
“I could simply do what Shining Light or Curling Mist or Young Warrior or whoever has them asks me, and hand you over!”
There was a long silence. I wriggled nervously while the Chief Minister drew comfortably on his pipe. I wondered whether that meant the playacting was now over, and the steward would be told to finish what he had set out to do on the morning of Four Vulture, by trussing me up like a deer and delivering me to Young Warrior.
Eventually he took the clay tube out of his mouth. “Relax, Yaotl. If I wanted to exchange you for the sorcerers, would we be talking now? I would just have had my steward make the exchange, and that would be an end to it. But the truth is,” he went on, suddenly sounding older and wearier than ever, “I’m sick of being made a fool of. All this talk of godlike strangers from the East-well, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. You know what I mean?”
“No, my Lord.” I thought I did, however: it was the tale of jealousy, vanity and greed that I had outlined to Handy and Lion only that morning.
“You heard some of it from the Emperor himself, I believe. Weren’t you shown the box-the one that was washed up on the shore of the Divine Sea, with the marvelous cloth and the sword in it? Ever since I saw the things in that box I’ve been waiting for the men who made them to appear. Now they have, and who is going to be the man of the moment now, as my father was all those years ago? Montezuma? I don’t think so. He’s too preoccupied with omens and portents to be able to handle anything like this. All he can think of doing is consulting sorcerers over a silly fairy tale about some mythical ancestor of ours. If these strangers were to come to see him he’d run away-he’d find some cave to hide himself in. No, this was going to be my chance. I, Lord Feathered in Black, was going to be the man who made allies or slaves of these strangers and secured the things they brought with them, their weapons and goods, for the people! And who would have talked about Lord Tlacaelel then?”
I said nothing. I could understand his words but not the desire that lay behind them. It seemed to me not much of an ambition to be worth so many lives, simply to be a bigger man than your father.
My master toyed with the smoking-tube before putting it down for the last time.
“It’s gone out. They always do, if you leave them,” he said regretfully, as he let it roll across the floor away from him. “I know Montezuma thinks that I have the sorcerers, or that I know where they are. I know he told you to find them and bring them to him. You know why I can never allow that to happen?”
“Yes, my Lord. They could tell the Emperor that you instructed his majordomo to release them and hand them over to you. And you did that because you couldn’t let Montezuma know you had consulted them yourself about your plans to deal with the strangers on your own account.”
“I have to get those men back, dead or alive. If the only way to do that is to hand you over to the man who stole them from me, then that’s what I’ll do.” He let that hang in the air for a moment before going on: “But he’s laughing at me. I made a deal with Shining Light: he was to keep those men in a safe place until I could question them myself. Now I find that Young Warrior duped me and kidnapped Shining Light. He turned one of the sorcerers into a Bathed Slave for sacrifice and left another in the water outside my own house. So I don’t just want the sorcerers back-I want this man killed.” My master’s grim smile made his mouth look like just another line across his face. “And as for you, Yaoti-if you don’t want me to make a present of you to your enemy, you’d better help me think of a way of finding him!”