[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death Read online

  The commoner thanked him, but looked confused. Gentle Heart explained: ‘Cactus finds herbs for me sometimes, and casts auguries. He thought he might have something to alleviate your distress, so I agreed to bring him.’

  Goose said: ‘But why did you come?’

  ‘To see if there was anything I could do,’ the midwife said.

  I seized the chance to say: ‘There is! Handy was asking me about what words to use for his... for Star’s unborn baby. I was trying to explain why I didn’t have any.’

  Her expression when she looked at me was queer. It was a look of alarm, her eyes wide open and shifting left and right like a trapped animal's. She licked her lips and swallowed once. ‘Words?’ she asked. ‘For what?’

  ‘For the child,’ Goose said. She was still holding the bundle she had taken from the sweat bath. Now she walked over to the midwife and deposited it in the woman’s hands before Gentle Heart had a chance to ask her what she was doing.

  Gentle Heart looked at the body, but did not start to unwrap it. I was afraid she was going to drop it; but eventually she said gruffly: ‘Poor little one.’

  ‘We don’t know what to do,’ Handy said. ‘He doesn’t even have a name. And when we asked Yaotl here we got some nonsense about him not even being Spotted Eagle’s brother, as though we’d somehow’ – he took a deep breath – ‘somehow picked up the wrong baby!’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the curer, Cactus, glance at me curiously. I squirmed. ‘Look, I was just trying to say…’

  The woman shut her eyes and frowned as though trying to remember something she had heard once, a long time ago. ‘I think he meant…. it was not the will of Tezcatlipoca that this child be born to your family. Isn’t that right?’ When she opened her eyes it was to look at me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Go on,’ Spotted Eagle ordered.

  The woman took a deep breath. ‘The lord of the Here and Now is… capricious. Yes, that’s the word. He gives and takes life at a whim.’ She looked at the hole by the maize bin. ‘You have found the right place for his body, but I don’t think his soul ever entered it.’

  ‘So where did it go, then?’ the young man demanded. ‘Where is it now?’

  She seemed to have no answer for him. Seeing his tension in the way his hand trembled, I spoke up instead. ‘It’s back where it came from, ready for another life.’

  The midwife took over again, with what sounded like a burst of renewed confidence, and eager to please, to tell these people what they wanted to hear: ‘That’s why I can’t name him, you see, because he didn’t live to see his name day. But you mustn’t be distressed for him. He’s getting ready to be born again. It’s a terrible disappointment for you and a terrible loss, but the child is well.’ And with that, she stooped, and in a quick, simple gesture, placed the body in the hole.

  ‘Is that all?’ Goose started forward. ‘But there must be…’

  ‘There aren’t any words for him,’ Gentle Heart went on, still looking into the tiny grave. ‘He doesn’t need any.’

  ‘But we do!’

  The midwife looked, for a moment, as baffled as I had felt, and more afraid; but at last I had understood what was required, and why my clumsy attempt to explain the dead child’s fate had only angered his family. Belatedly I recognised that if I knew of no ritual for this occasion, then I had better make one up.

  Half closing my eyes, I intoned solemnly: ‘The Giver of Life has taken the little one, the precious feather, the jewel, has taken him back and guided him to the great Milk Tree, and shown him which of its countless teats to suck on until it is his time to appear on Earth.’ It was the truth, as far as I was aware, and if the words were not right I could not see that it mattered now.

  If Star’s spirit was listening, I could only hope she approved.

  6

  After my little improvised speech, the household slowly resumed something resembling normal activity. Goose and the eldest of Handy’s daughters hurried into the house, with a muttered apology from the woman about being so slow providing food and drink. Spotted Eagle and his father took up their tools again and began to fill in the hole they had dug. The other children, sensing they were no longer wanted as spectators, looked about them uncertainly for a moment until Gentle Heart went over to talk to them.

  That left me alone with the newcomer, Cactus.

  I looked at him curiously, taking in his unkempt appearance and trying not to wrinkle my nose too obviously at his odour. He must have been on a fast, I realised, when in addition to starving himself he would have been forbidden from washing. ‘What kind of curer are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’ he replied guardedly. ‘What kind would you like me to be?’

  It was a strange answer. I frowned. ‘There are so many different sorts of curer, aren’t there? Bonesetters, midwives, doctors, soul doctors. Even some sorcerers work as healers, some of the time. I was just wondering…’

  ‘I’m not a sorcerer,’ he said hastily. ‘A soothsayer, yes, in a small way, but… Sorcerers are different, you know that.’ Sorcerers turned themselves into animals, haunted the streets at night, broke into houses while their inhabitants slept.

  They also robbed graves.

  ‘You’ve been fasting,’ I observed.

  ‘It’s because of the herbs I have to gather.’

  ‘Really? Which ones?’ I looked at him with genuine interest, trying to remember, from my priest’s training, what plant could only be gathered by a fasting man. For the moment nothing came to me. My scepticism must have been apparent.

  He looked shamefaced. ‘Oh, all right. I’m not really fasting at all.’ He lowered his voice to an anxious whisper. ‘I just try to look that way because it impresses my patients. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’

  I should have been more surprised. However, I knew of so many ways to pretend to treat a sick person, from casting an augury by throwing maize kernels into water and seeing if they floated to pretending to suck a stone out of the patient’s body. The thing I had always found odd was that provided the invalid was not obviously dying to begin with, these fake cures often worked, as if one could lie to an illness as easily as to a human being. Or perhaps it was merely Tezcatlipoca rewarding a fellow trickster.

  ‘I won’t say anything if you give me a reason not to,’ I said.

  He looked hard at me. ‘What do you mean?’

  I glanced sideways at the midwife, who seemed to have got over whatever had made her so nervous beforehand and was now leading the younger children in some kind of game. There had been something curious about her performance this morning, I decided, and her explanation for her failure to appear the previous night did not ring true. If every midwife refused to attend the funeral of one of her patients, none would ever be buried.

  ‘Tell me how you know her.’

  ‘We work together sometimes. When she delivers a baby she recommends my services to the parents, to help them choose his name-day. As I said, I’m a soothsayer. I know the Book of Days, or most of it, anyway. And I supply her with herbs, sometimes.’ He shot a furtive glance at the father and son shoving the last few spadefuls of earth into the hole, and produced a bulging cloth pouch from beneath his cloak. ‘Talking of which… I heard about the bad business yesterday, and last night. I brought something I thought the husband might like to try. Do you think…’

  He was interrupted by a loud ‘crack’ from the direction of the maize bins, accompanied by what sounded like a grunt of pain. Turning, I saw that Handy had brought his spade down on the loose earth that covered the stillborn child’s grave so hard he had broken it.

  ‘I think I’d forget it if I were you,’ I suggested.

  ‘But these herbs might help him forget.’

  I frowned at the soothsayer. ‘It may be he doesn’t want to. Look, I’ve been in this household since yesterday, and I’ve seen how he’s dealing with it. There’s no telling what he’ll say if he thinks you’re trying to use his grief as an excu
se to push jimson weed or morning glory seeds on him.’

  ‘I’m not…’

  ‘No, I’m sure you’re not.’ I had no wish to spare Handy a row with this fake magician only to get involved in one myself. ‘Maybe some other day. I’ll mention it to him later, if you like.’

  ‘That’s kind of you.’ He seemed mollified. ‘I’ve a pitch in Atlixco marketplace at the moment – been there for a while now. He can find me there any time.’

  ‘Were you there this morning? Did you see anything?’ It occurred to me that a trader setting up before dawn might have noticed some clue; maybe even seen the thief making off with Star’s body.

  I was to be disappointed. ‘I heard about it. But I arrived late today. I had to see someone first. All I saw was a big crowd by the shrine and that policeman trying to calm everybody down.’

  ‘You mean Kite? You want to keep on the right side of him. He’s after whoever took the body. If you were to see or hear anything it wouldn’t hurt you to have a word with him – especially if you want to go on trading in his marketplace.’ I looked at him significantly.

  Some sorcerers healed the sick, when it suited them. Some curers were sorcerers. I was sure there were others, especially those given to fake fasts and unreliable fortune-telling, who were not above pretending to be sorcerers. I wondered what circles this man moved in, and whether, if I mentioned Kite’s name now, some rumour might find its way to the thief. I had no idea what would happen if it did but I thought it might alarm him, and perhaps prompt him into making a mistake.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ he said carelessly. ‘I don’t know what you’d expect me to see, though. It’s not as if I know anyone who’s likely to steal a dead mother’s body.’ He frowned. ‘I told you, I’m not a sorcerer. I don’t know any, either, and as for warriors…’

  ‘I don’t know what you might come across while you’re out looking for peyote buttons.’ I grinned, trying to make a joke of it. ‘Just ask anyone you meet if they happen to have robbed any graves lately!’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ he muttered peevishly. Then he suddenly brightened. He leaned towards me, like a man about to impart to secret, even while I was turning aside to get my nose a little further away from the smell of stale sweat wafting from his torn cloak.

  ‘I’ll tell you something, though. Pass this one to the policeman and tell him it’s from me, won’t you? If whoever robbed this woman’s grave is a sorcerer, he must be a very strange one.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘Why did he take the body?’

  ‘For the forearm,’ I said automatically. ‘It’s well known what a sorcerer can do with a dead woman’s forearm: he can dance with it and the magic can lull an entire household to sleep.’

  ‘So why not just cut the arm off, then?’

  I frowned. ‘Well, because…’

  He chuckled, delighted at his own cleverness. ‘You see? A sorcerer wouldn’t want to drag a whole corpse across the city when he could easily conceal an arm under his cloak. Doesn’t make sense.’

  I thought about this. ‘There are other things he might have wanted,’ I pointed out. ‘The hair, a finger…’

  ‘A sorcerer would have no use for them. They’re warriors’ charms.’

  ‘Maybe the thief thought a warrior might buy them from him.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. After all, how’s the buyer to know for sure how the woman died, or whether she even had any children?’ He asked the question as confidently as any man used to pitching his wares to sceptical customers. ‘She could have been anybody. If you were a warrior about to go into battle, would you risk your life on a charm unless you were sure it was genuine?’

  ‘So you think a warrior must have taken it. No, that doesn’t make sense either,’ I said impatiently. ‘The hair and finger would be even easier to carry than an arm. Why’d a warrior have taken the body?’

  He curled his lip. ‘Can’t help you there,’ he admitted cheerfully. ‘But I thought I’d save you and our policeman wasting your time looking for the wrong man.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said insincerely. ‘I’m beginning to wish I’d not mentioned Kite now. Tell you what, forget what I said about helping him. If you want any favours from him just offer him a bribe!’

  And I was about to add under my breath a fervent wish that Kite would be mortally offended by the offer and beat this cynical impostor until there was no longer an unbroken bone in his body, when a horrible thought made me catch my breath.

  Suppose Cactus were right. It made no sense for either a warrior or a sorcerer to take a whole body when he only wanted a single, easily portable part of it, but what if he wanted more than that? What if he did, indeed, have a need for the hair as well as the arm because he was both a warrior and a sorcerer?

  ‘Perhaps he had time to take just one charm,’ I muttered. ‘You could cut off an arm or a scalp, but how long would it take to get both? Maybe it was easier to take the body, after all.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Cactus asked. I ignored him, appalled and mesmerised by the idea that had occurred to me.

  To be on the trail of someone who was both invincible by day and invisible by night. It was almost too frightening to contemplate, but I forced myself to admit that it made sense of one thing that had happened to me.

  The creature that had attacked me during the night, the being that had no human shape, had carried a sword.

  7

  Goose’s niece had emerged from the house with her aunt, and was standing next to me holding a basket with some dough balls in it. There were not many of them and they did not look appetising – unevenly shaped, burned in places, almost raw in others. Nonetheless she proffered them as correctly as if she were serving at a feast, balancing the basket in her right palm, with her eyes downcast in a modest expression.

  I accepted one out of politeness, taking it left-handed and looking around quickly for Goose, who had the bowl full of dipping sauce. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Tlacotl made these herself,’ Goose told us.

  ‘Well done. They look delicious.’ Cactus sounded more sincere in his appreciation than I would have done, although when I bit into one of the cakes I found it tasted better than it looked.

  I looked at the little girl, whose name meant ‘Osier Twig’. She appeared slightly older than I had thought at first: perhaps ten or eleven, almost ready for her first day at the House of Youth and old enough now to be of some use to her mother about the house in the meantime. Then I remembered, with a pang that almost made me choke on my dough ball, that she no longer had a mother.

  ‘Thank the gentleman, Osier Twig,’ her aunt prompted her.

  The girl looked up at Cactus, to speak to him, and her lips parted, but the only sound she made was a faint ‘Oh!’ of surprise as she quickly hid her face again.

  Goose frowned in annoyance. ‘I’m sorry,’ she started to say, ‘but my niece has had a trying couple of days…’

  Cactus had recovered himself, however. ‘I didn’t realise we’d met!’ he said, addressing the girl.

  ‘Where?’ Goose asked sternly. No doubt she was concerned to learn that her niece had had an encounter with a strange man.

  ‘No, no we haven’t,’ the girl said, stammering in confusion while the remaining dough balls shook so vigorously in their basket that two flew out onto the floor. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’

  ‘Yes, you have,’ the curer said. He caught Goose’s eye and said: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, madam. It’s perfectly innocent. I saw her the day before yesterday, running through Atlixco plaza. You were looking for a midwife,’ he reminded the girl.

  ‘I thought your father sent you to the House of Pleasure?’ I said. I assumed Osier Twig was the girl Goose and Handy had both told me about.

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl wretchedly. She looked as though she would rather be anywhere than where she was now, with not one but two men talking to her. ‘The plaza is on the way. I had to run through the market
place. I heard a couple of people calling out. This man could have been one of them but I – I didn’t stop.’

  ‘Not for me,’ Cactus conceded. ‘But you did for one of my customers.’

  ‘There was an old woman,’ the girl said hastily. ‘She only asked me what was the matter. And I talked to her for a moment, that’s all – just long enough to tell her about mother – and then I went straight to the House of Pleasure. I ran all the way, honestly!’ She wailed the last word before bursting into tears, as though voicing some awful confession.

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ Goose said soothingly. She laid an arm on her niece’s shoulder, trying to still the violent shivering that had overcome her. She looked venomously at Cactus, who was staring at the girl as if he wanted to say something more. A glance at her aunt was enough to silence him, however.

  ‘I ran all the way there,’ Osier Twig snuffled, ‘and all the way back.’

  Goose squeezed her shoulder. ‘You got there soon enough,’ she said. ‘Look how quickly Gentle Heart came!’

  ‘She did that,’ I mused. ‘In fact she must have passed you on the way back to the house.’

  The girl turned her tear-streaked face up to look at me. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes, that’s right. She did.’

  ‘That’s enough.’ Goose was still trying to soothe her niece but there was an edge to her voice that I took to mean there had better be no more questions. ‘And what happened wasn’t your fault.’ She heaved a deep sigh and looked in the midwife’s direction. ‘Not your fault…’ she repeated under her breath.

  Gentle Heart had stopped playing with the children. Now she stood by herself, a few paces away from where Handy and his eldest son were stamping on the child’s grave, flattening the earth so as to obliterate all trace of it. The midwife met Goose’s eye. She seemed to flinch momentarily, but then, gathering her courage, she walked slowly towards us.