[Aztec 03] - City of Spies Read online

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2006

  This edition first published by Pocket Books, 2007

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Simon Levack, 2006

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  Pocket Books & Design is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster

  The right of Simon Levack to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Extracts from ‘Nezahualpilli’s lament’, taken from Flower and Song: Poem of the Aztec Peoples, translated by Eduard Kissam & Michael Schmidt are

  reproduced by kind permission of the publishers, Anvil Press Poetry.

  1 3579 10 8642

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN-10:1-4165-0254-8

  ISBN-13:978-1-4165-0254-8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are

  either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

  For Sarah and Isaac,with love

  Acknowledgements

  I doubt whether anybody who hasn’t written a book for publication can appreciate how much authors rely on agents and editors. My name wouldn’t be on the cover without the help and advice (and salesmanship!) of Jane Gregory and the rest of her team at Gregory & Co, especially Anna, for her very detailed notes. Thanks likewise to Kate Lyall Grant at Simon & Schuster for her continued encouragement and support.

  And thanks, as ever, to Sarah, for her trenchant remarks and for providing me with inspiration on demand.

  Author’s Note

  City of Spies is the third novel featuring Cemiquiztli Yaotl and set in the Mexico of the early sixteenth century, in the final years before the coining of the Conquistadors. It picks up the story of Yaotl and his friends and enemies at the point where my previous book, Shadow of the Lords, left them, and transports them across the waters of Lake Tetzcoco to the town of Tetzcoco, the second power in the Aztec world.

  Tetzcoco was a separate kingdom linked to the Aztec city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in an arrangement sometimes known as the Triple Alliance (the third member of the alliance was the small state of Tlacopan).

  Tetzcoco was regarded as the centre of Aztec culture, renowned for its artists, its poets, its elevated form of the Aztec language Nahuatl, and its courts. However, in its last hundred years or so of independent existence, the city had a chequered history: first humbled by a rival state, Azcapotzalco, then resurgent under its great Kings Nezahualcoyod (‘Hungry Coyote’) and Nezahualpilli (‘Hungry Child’), but finally eclipsed by the all-powerful Aztec Emperors. After Nezahualpilli’s death, the Aztecs sought to impose their own candidate on the throne, Montezuma’s nephew Cacama (‘Maize Ear’). This triggered a civil war, which, by the time this novel opens in the beginning of 1518 (the end of the Aztec year Twelve House), had subsided into an uneasy truce.

  With half the kingdom ruled, in defiance of Montezuma, by Maize Ear’s half-brother, Ixdilxochitl (‘Black Flower’).

  This novel, then, is set against a background of political turbulence. I have imagined Tetzcoco as a place where suspicion and intrigue rule, and spies are everywhere . . .

  A Note on Nahuatl

  The Aztec language, Nahuatl, is not difficult to pronounce, but is burdened with spellings based on sixteenth-century Castilian. The following note should help:

  Spelling Pronunciation

  c

  c as in ‘Cecil’ before e or i; k before a or o

  ch

  sh

  x

  sh

  hu, uh

  w

  qu

  k as in ‘kettle’ before e or i; qu as in ‘quack’ before a

  tl

  as in English, but where ‘-tl’ occurs at the end of a word the ‘l’ is hardly sounded.

  The stress always falls on the penultimate syllable.

  I have used as few Nahuatl words as possible and favoured clarity at the expense of strict accuracy in choosing English equivalents. Hence, for example, I have rendered Cihuacoatl as ‘Chief Minister’, calpolli as ‘parish’, octli as ‘sacred wine’ and maquahuitl as ‘sword’, and have been similarly cavalier in choosing English replacements for most of the frequently recurring personal names. In referring to the Aztec Emperor at the time when this story is set I have used the most familiar form of his name, Montezuma, although Motecuhzoma would be more accurate.

  I have used two different English words to translate the title Huey Tlatoani. This literally means ‘Revered Speaker’ and was applied to rulers, including Montezuma. I have referred to Montezuma as the ‘Emperor’ of Mexico, but to avoid confusion I have used ‘King’ for the ruler of Tetzcoco, although he was a Huey Tlatoani as well.

  Finally, I have called the people of Mexico-Tenochtidan ‘Aztecs’, although their own name for themselves was Mexico, ‘Mexicans’.

  The name of the principal character in the novel, Yaotl, is pronounced ‘YAH-ot’.

  The Aztec Calendar

  The Aztecs lived in a world governed by religion and magic, and their rituals and auguries were in turn ordered by the calendar.

  The solar year, which began in our February, was divided into eighteen twenty-day periods (often called ‘months’). Each month had its own religious observances associated with it; often these involved sacrifices, some of them human, to one or more of the many Aztec gods. At the end of the year were five ‘Useless Days’ that were considered profoundly unlucky.

  Parallel to this ran a divinatory calendar of 260 days divided into twenty groups of thirteen days (sometimes called ‘weeks’). The first day in the ‘week’ would bear the number 1 and one of twenty names — Reed, Jaguar, Eagle, Vulture, and so on. The second day would bear the number 2 and the next name in the sequence. On the fourteenth day the number would revert to 1 but the sequence of names continued seamlessly, with each combination of names and numbers repeating itself every 260 days.

  A year was named after the day in the divinatory calendar on which it began. For mathematical reasons these days could bear only one of four names — Reed, Flint Knife, House and Rabbit — combined with a number from 1 to 13. This produced a cycle of fifty-two years at the beginning and end of which the solar and divinatory calendars coincided. The Aztecs called this period a ‘Bundle of Years’.

  Every day in a Bundle of Years was the product of a unique combination of year, month and date in the divinatory calendar, and so had, for the Aztecs, its own individual character and religious and magical significance.

  1

  In my first few days in the slave-dealers’ warehouse, I sought to escape my tormentors. I cowered, with my back pressed hard against the stout bars at the back of my wooden cage, and tried to ward off their blows by putting my hands over my face, shielding my eyes by making fists over them like a sobbing child. It never worked. The cage was too small for me to stand up in, let alone dodge the long canes they prodded me with, and if I managed to shield my face for a moment they would only aim for some other delicate, fleshy part of me. Besides, they did not ha
ve to use sticks. On one occasion a whole bag of ground-up maguey thorns was tipped over me, and then all they had to do was stand back and laugh as I writhed, wept and scratched myself bloody in the midst of a blinding, itching cloud. And I was spat at and had excrement thrown over me through the bars, although soon I was so badly soiled with my own ordure that I barely noticed.

  After a while I stopped cowering. I crouched, naked, in the middle of my tiny space, neither inviting the blows nor flinching from them, neither watching nor ignoring the faces leering at me, neither marking the passage of the days nor trying to escape them by falling asleep. Sleeping was not much better than being conscious, anyway. Being asleep just meant waking up again, discovering afresh my wounds and bruises and theagony of limbs I never had room to straighten. Worst of all, it meant dreams: nightmares about the fate that awaited me.

  ‘The fire sacrifice,’ my master’s steward crowed, standing in front of my cage just after the top had been shut over me and weighted down with a rock. ‘Did you ever see anyone die that way? Horrible, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said shortly, in answer to both questions. The victims, bound hand and foot, would be dragged up the steps of the pyramid of Teccalco to where a huge brazier had been set up on its summit. They must have felt its heat as they were carried around it, and their terrified faces, whitened with chalk to give them a deathly cast, used to glow pink in its red fight. They rarely made a sound, and in the moment when each one was about to die a strange silence would descend on the whole scene, disturbed only by the crackling of the brazier. Then, after four unhurried, much-practised swings, the priests holding the trussed captive would toss him alive on to the coals.

  While he twisted and shrieked and his skin blackened and split, there would be music and dancing. A young man dressed as a squirrel would prance around the fire, whistling through his fingers, while another, got up as a bat, shook a pair of gourd rattles as gaily as an entertainer at a feast.

  I remembered especially how one brave man had died. He had not screamed when the priests threw him on to the fire and made no sound even when they hooked him out again, still alive, and let him tumble on to the ground, scattering white-hot coals around him. He had made a noise only when they tried to pick him up and a long strip of burned skin peeled away from his back. Then, through what was left of his throat, he had forced a strange, keening cry, like a sick animal’s whimpering, that had ended only when he was stretched over the sacrificial stone and the priest was tearing the heart out of his chest for an offering to the god of fire.

  ‘I bet that’ll be it,’ the steward said. ‘Which festival is it? Come on, Yaotl, you used to be a priest. You must know.’

  ‘They kill some that way at the Festival of the Fall of the Fruit,’ I mumbled automatically, ‘and some others at the Arrival of the Gods.’

  ‘Lots of time to look forward to it, then!’ I had been shut in my cage in the middle of winter, and both the festivals I had mentioned took place in late summer.

  ‘You know that won’t happen to me. The fire sacrifice is reserved for captured enemy warriors. I’m not a warrior; I’m a slave.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure the priests will make an exception. What if there hasn’t been a war lately and captives are hard to get? They could throw you in as a makeweight. It’s like the way a woman ekes out a stew sometimes, hiding dog meat under a layer of turkey. I don’t suppose the god will notice the difference.’

  I said nothing. I knew what he was telling me was probably true, but I preferred not to think about it, far less discuss it.

  ‘Of course, you’re assuming you’re going to be bought by civilized people like Aztecs. Maybe it’ll be some horrible barbarians. Some of those savages are capable of anything: the Matlatzinca, for instance. They’ve got this way of crushing their victims slowly in a net. Very messy!’

  ‘Maybe I won’t be bought as a sacrifice. Someone might want to put me to work. Lord Tlilpotonqui did, after all.’

  The steward’s only answer to that was to walk away, laughing.

  My master. Lord Tlilpotonqui, whose name meant Feathered in Black, was being careful.

  He was the second most powerful man in the World. He was the Cihuacoatl, priest of the goddess of that name, and also Chief Priest, Chief Justice and Chief Minister of the Aztecs. Within the Aztec capital, Mexico, only the Emperor Montezuma’s voice carried greater weight. All the same, he was not all-powerful. Montezuma did not trust him, with good reason. He was not beyond the reach of the law. And he could not, any more than could the most miserable serf stirring! shit into a muddy field with his digging stick, afford to ignore the will of the gods.

  I was his lordship’s slave. Aztec law looked remarkably kindly upon slaves, because we were the creatures of Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, the most powerful and dangerous god of them all.

  Tezcatlipoca was the lord of chance, of unlooked-for good fortune and unforeseen calamity. He was known as the Mocker for his capriciousness, as Him Whose Slaves We Are for his arbitrary toying with human lives, as the Enemy on both hands. Gamblers at the Patolli-mat and the Ball-court feared and courted him, and he was naturally the foe of the rich and the friend of those with nothing to lose — and who had less to lose than a slave, another man’s possession?

  In a perverse way, it was the Smoking Mirror’s patronage of slaves that explained my present predicament.

  I had done more than enough to exhaust Lord Feathered in Black’s patience. I had run away more than once, disobeyed him, connived with those he saw as his enemies, even assaulted members of his household. If ever a master had reason to ill- treat a slave, he had, but neither human nor divine law allowed anything beyond a beating. The very worst thing he could do to me, and then only after having three occasions to admonish me formally, before witnesses, was to sell me. And that, I had foolishly hoped when we finally confronted each other after my last escapade, might just be enough to save me.

  He had been sitting in the middle of a courtyard, on a high-

  backed cane chair placed there for him by his servants: an ancient man, whose sunken cheeks and swollen, liver-spotted hands belied the bright, feral gleam in his eyes as he surveyed me. He was dressed in a long cotton cloak, embroidered with butterflies, in a design repeated on the dangling tassels of his breechcloth and echoed in the little jewelled ornaments on his earplugs, labret and sandals, every item chosen to mark him out as a great lord. Around him stood a squad of warriors, huge men, every one of them clad from head to toe in green cotton and with his hair piled high on top of his head and cascading down his back in the style of Otomies, the fiercest and most pitiless of Aztec warriors. Between two of the Otomies, not held by them physically but plainly having no more chance of escape than a mouse caught between the paws of a jaguar, stood the courtyard’s owner, a rich merchant, and his daughter. Their names were Icnoyo — ‘Kindly’ — and Oceloxochitl, or ‘Tiger Lily’. The woman and I had been lovers once, for a very short while. As I looked at her now, seeming very small and far away across her father’s courtyard, my feelings were a strange blend of pity and resentment at the hold she still had over me. My master had known taking her hostage would bring me to him.

  ‘You have to let them go,’ I said. I had decided, when I walked through the entrance to the courtyard, that I was not going to prostrate myself before him, as I normally would. If I were to survive this meeting it could only be as his equal, not as his possession.

  The old man regarded me steadily, his eyes unblinking and betraying no hint of surprise at my insolence. ‘Let them go, Yaotl? What do you mean?’

  ‘They are merchants. Even if they had done anything wrong, it would be for their own courts to try them. You have no authority here…’

  The old man said nothing. The thinnest of smiles barely touched the corners of his mouth before one of his henchmen delivered his answer for him, and I was on my knees with my hands in the dust in front of me, choking and gasping for breath as I fought to recover from the blow
between my shoulder blades that had felled me.

  I half turned to look at my assailant. A single eye glared back at me. I felt sick at the sight of it, and of the face it nesded in: a wreck of a face, half of it reduced by a sword cut years before to a featureless glistening slab of scar tissue.

  The captain of the Otomies grinned mirthlessly back at me.

  ‘That’s where you belong in the presence of your betters, you scum — on your knees! My lord, why don’t I cut his legs off so we don’t have to remind him again?’

  I twisted my head anxiously around to look at my master again. He was stroking his chin thoughtfully, as though considering the captain’s idea.

  ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ he murmured. ‘As for the merchant and his daughter — really, Yaod, you surprise me. Let them go? From their own house, where they were kind enough to receive me and my friends as their guests? What an idea! Of course, if Kindly here were to tell me I was no longer welcome…’

  He did not deign to look around. If he had he would have seen the woman start forward, as if to protest, only to be halted by her father kicking her ankle. Already hunched over with age, he had his eyes so downcast that he seemed on the verge of toppling over. No doubt he would have kneeled, if only he had been able to bend his knees far enough. ‘Of course, my lord, whatever meagre hospitality my pitiful household can extend to you is yours…’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Lord Feathered in Black.

  ‘Thank you, my lord.’

  ‘So much for the merchant, slave,’ my master said to me. ‘What do you suggest I do with you?’

  ‘Sell me.’

  ‘Sell you?’ He sounded surprised or even disappointed. I dared not try to stand for fear of the violent presence at my back, and from my position on the ground I had to crane my neck awkwardly to see my master’s face. There was no expression on it whatever.