[Aztec 03] - City of Spies Page 2

  ‘Sell you?’ he repeated. ‘How unimaginative!’

  I shuddered at the thought of the kinds of torment his imagination might run to. ‘What else? I’ve given you cause. You’ve had to admonish me three times. You can be rid of me…’ Suddenly the Chief Minister laughed. It was a harsh explosion that burst from his hps in a cloud of spittle, followed by a fit of dry, painful coughing.

  ‘I can be rid of you any time I want to, slave!’ he gasped when he had his breath back. ‘Never forget it! But as for selling you… Oh, I know what you’ve got in mind. You think there’s a risk you’ll be bought for sacrifice, but there’s always the chance someone might have a use for slave with a brain, a bit of initiative, who can read and write, and so what if he needs keeping an eye on, he’s still cheap at twice the price — that’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you think!’

  ‘B-but you’ve no choice!’ I spluttered. ‘You can’t do anything else to me. That’s what the law says. I know my rights!’ Lord Feathered in Black was capable of rages that could make Mount Popacateped in full eruption seem tame, but he was never more dangerous than when he lowered his voice, and when he spoke next he was barely audible.

  ‘Don’t tell me about the law or your rights, Yaotl. I happen to be the Chief Justice of Mexico. I know the law better than anybody. I know exactly what you are entitled to and what you aren’t.’ He gestured to the warrior standing behind me with the merest nod of his head. ‘Captain, perhaps you’d care to take this slave away now?’

  Suddenly two massive hands were under my shoulders, almost yanking my arms from their sockets as they hauled me to my feet.

  ‘Wait!’ I cried. ‘You can’t do this! It’s against the law! There are witnesses!’ In desperation I looked imploringly towards the old man and his daughter; but the warriors flanking them were watching them too, and they kept their eyes fixed on the ground in front of them.

  Then I was being dragged backwards towards the courtyard entrance, with my heels scraping along the ground and my eyes fixed on my master’s face as he leaned contentedly back in his chair.

  ‘You’ll be confined, of course,’ he called after me. ‘No court would refuse me that after you’ve run away three times. But I won’t ill-treat you. As if I would!’

  The moment we had turned the corner and were out of the Chief Minister’s sight I was face down on the ground, my head in the captain’s hands, my nose streaming blood from where he had ground it into the dirt.

  ‘He said he wouldn’t ill-treat you,’ the voice in my ear rasped. ‘Couldn’t promise nobody else would, though, could he?’

  Lord Feathered in Black was true to his word. He never came to peer into my cage and prod its inmate with a stick, and nor did any member of his household. Even his steward did nothing more than gloat. It was the Otomies, who did my master’s bidding but were not his men, whose faces peered at me through the wooden bars so often that I saw their grins and heard their laughter in my sleep. As their captain had pointed out, his lordship was not answerable for what they did to me.

  And they needed no inducement from him to torture and humiliate me. I had once made a fool of the captain, duping him and leading him into the midst of a hostile crowd of foreigners, people he saw as his inferiors, from whom he had only just managed to get away with his life. He was not a man to pass up a chance of revenge.

  Once, while the monstrous one-eyed warrior was standing in front of my cage, smoking a tube full of coarse tobacco and blowing the fumes into my face while he fiddled with the knot in his breechcloth, I wondered aloud why nobody had posed an obvious question.

  ‘I know this is all on account of my son. How come none of you has asked me where he is?’

  ‘Why would we bother?’

  ‘Why? Because he stole from my master, and he knows things about him that old Black Feathers can’t afford to have anyone know. And he got away from you, when my master sent you after him. And now you’ve got me locked in this cage, but you don’t seem to want to know about him any more.’

  ‘All right,’ the Captain grunted. ‘Where is he, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Thought not. You’re not that stupid, are you? You gave yourself up so he had time to get away. Any fool could see that much. Not much point doing that only to let us torture the boy’s whereabouts out of you, was there? No, I know you don’t know where he is. Don’t give a toss, either. We can make you suffer enough for both of you… Aah, at last!’

  The knot had finally come undone. I shut my eyes and held my breath as a hot, stinking jet of urine soused my face. But I smiled, because at least I knew my son was safe.

  The lad’s name was Quimatini, which meant ‘Nimble’, and it suited him. He was young — about fifteen — but smart beyond his years and agile, and I was confident that, while the Chief Minister and his tame warriors were congratulating themselves on my capture, he was running as fast and as far as he could. He would survive, I told myself. He was used to living on his wits. His mother, a prostitute named Miahuaxihuitl, had borne him — unknown to me — far away from Mexico, and he had grown up among the Tarascan barbarians beyond the mountains in the West. He still had a marked Tarascan accent. After enduring the gods knew what privations, he had come back to Mexico, alone, mainly to look for me. There, like so many youngsters before him, he had fallen victim to the procurers and perverts who haunted the marketplaces, and to one brutal predator in particular, a young merchant named Ocotl. But he had survived that too.

  During the days and nights I spent huddled in a remote corner of a slave-dealer’s dingy kennel near the great marketplace of Tlatelolco, I kept Nimble in my head and the thought of him kept me sane. Whatever happened to me, I told myself, he would carry on, and now there was nothing else that mattered.

  It was hard to care that much even about Lily. My master might bluster and threaten her and her father, but in the end there was little even he could do in the face of the immense power and wealth of the merchant class. She should be all right, I knew, and when I thought about her that pleased me, but what had happened between us was too complicated for a man being slowly tormented to death to hold it all in his head. We had shared a sleeping mat once, but I could never forget how it had been her own child — that same Ocotl, her Shining Light — who had dragged my son into his dangerous scheme to cheat my master, and so imperilled all our fives. Nor, I supposed, could she ever forget that it had been my brother and I who had killed her boy.

  So all the while, as I squatted in the middle of my cage, I kept my sons face behind my closed eyes, and if the half smile that the sight of him brought to my lips only made the jeering warriors outside hit me harder, I was past caring.

  2

  ‘Here.’ I looked up wearily at the sound of the slave-dealer’s voice.

  After dragging me away from the old merchant’s courtyard, the Otomies had taken me to a dingy warehouse near the great market of Tlatelolco. The dealers who owned the place seemed to have fallen on hard times, judging by the state of their filthy, frayed cloaks and breechcloths and their constant bickering with one another. Their names were Itzcuintli and Cuetzpallin: Dog and Lizard. My first sight of this surly, snarling pair had seemed to confirm my worst fears. Nobody who bought from them would be overly particular about what he got. The chances were the buyer would not expect his purchase to live long enough for it to matter.

  The man standing in front of my cage now was Dog. His tone was the one he used at feeding-time, to warn me that he was about to throw a mouldy tortilla in my direction. Because of the smell coming from my cage, however, he normally stood so far away that as often as not he missed, or else the stale, stiff bread bounced off the bars and landed out of my reach, so that I could only watch hungrily as the rats dragged it away.

  This morning, however, he stood directly in front of me, although his nose wrinkled in disgust, and the bread he pushed towards me was soft and still warm from the griddle.‘But this is fresh!’ I croaked, before tearing off
a lump and cramming it into my mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ he confirmed, backing away.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s a big day for you. Lord Feathered in Black obviously thinks you’ve been here long enough that there’s no chance of anyone buying you for your looks. You’re going on sale!’

  I stared at him stupidly, dribbling crumbs.

  ‘That’s so you can at least stand up,’ he added, indicating the remains of the tortilla in my hand. ‘Otherwise you’ll probably choke when we put the collar on you. Get on with it. We haven’t much time.’

  I had barely finished my meal when the stones were lifted from the roof of my cage and I was hauled out and dropped on the floor. When I tried to stand, my legs buckled and my head spun, and I prompdy toppled over.

  That earned me a sharp kick in the side. ‘Come on, get up! We’re all waiting for you!’

  Somehow I got to my knees and then unsteadily to my feet. I looked wonderingly around me, until I caught sight of my fellow slaves and understood the slave-dealer’s comment about the collar.

  I had been kept well away from the rest of the merchandise, presumably for fear that they might catch something from me, and so I had not seen my companions before. There were two of them, both tall men, probably captured warriors. It was easy to see how they had come to be sold off cheaply, because they both had dreadful wounds. One had lost an arm, almost certainly hacked off in battle, and judging by its blood-soaked wrappings the stump had not healed well. The other had gaping, ragged holes in his earlobes and lower lip. I guessed he had been wearing a labret and earplugs when he was taken and some looter had torn them out without taking the trouble to unclasp them first. I wondered what had become of the warrior who had captured him. Perhaps he had died himself. I would have expected him to have guarded his captive jealously, for there was not much prestige to be earned presenting the gods with a badly disfigured offering.

  They were attached to each end of a wooden slave-collar, a long pole to which they were fastened by ropes bound tightly around their necks. A third, as yet unused, length of rope dangled from the middle of the pole. I was meant to go between them, but there was one obvious problem.

  ‘They’re both a head taller than me,’ I protested, while a relatively clean breechcloth was put around my loins for decency’s sake. ‘I’ll throttle!’

  ‘I’d have thought that was the least of your worries,’ growled the slave-dealer as he tied me up. ‘If you stand on tiptoe and they stoop, you’ll be all right. Comfy, everybody?’

  What do you say to two strangers with whom you have nothing in common except that you have all been lashed to the same piece of wood and are likely to suffer the same unpleasant death? ‘My name’s Yaotl,’ I ventured.

  The man on my left with the missing arm said: ‘So what?’ The man on my right said nothing. It must have been hard to get words past that shredded lip.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I tried again.

  ‘Where do you think, you piece of Aztec shit?’

  I looked at both men again and understood. They were from Texcala. They wore their hair thickly braided in the style favoured by warriors from that benighted province. I sighed in resignation as I realized that I had been roped together with two of my people’s sworn enemies. Texcala was an impoverished place that the Aztecs had never bothered to subdue. Instead we made war on them continually, to provide the gods with sacrifices and our own warriors with much-needed practice.

  Texcalans hated all Aztecs, naturally. These two were not going to make an exception for me just because we were all tied together.

  ‘So, er, what happened to you, then?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘Mind your own business!’

  As if that were a signal, both Texcalans straightened up and suddenly I was hanging by my neck, with my mouth open like a hungry chick’s and my legs kicking desperately in midair.

  A cane cracked across the Texcalan warrior’s back. ‘Behave yourselves!’ Dog shouted, and then my feet were back on the ground again and I was stumbling towards the doorway, much of the time, as I had been advised, on tiptoe.

  I decided against trying to start any more conversations.

  I emerged from the gloom of the slave-dealers’ warehouse into brilliant sunshine. The sky was clear of clouds and was the pure, bottomless blue that only people who, like the Aztecs, live high up in the mountains ever truly get to know.

  After all the time I had spent in the dark, I found myself surrounded by so much light and colour that my eyes had to squint. I had forgotten how brightly the whitewashed walls of the buildings gleamed and how deep was the indigo of the canals. I watched a duck paddling idly by and wondered why it was going so fast. It was the first animal I had seen, besides the rats, since my capture.

  A canoe took us to the marketplace, where we somehow stumbled through the early-morning crowds to Dog’s and Lizard’s pitch. Lurching uncertainly from side to side as we were, it was surprising that none of us bumped into anybody, but people got smartly out of our way. Either the sight or the smell of me must have been enough to ward them off.

  Trading had begun by the time we arrived. We were shoved into a corner and told to squat and keep quiet. ‘We’ll sell these last,’ Dog told his partner. ‘In the meantime, I don’t want them putting customers off the rest of the stock!’

  Lizard glanced sideways at the three of us. ‘I never understood what was up with that one in the middle. He was a bit scrawny when you got him, and he’d been roughed up a bit, but you might have made something of him. Didn’t I hear you say he could read and write?’

  ‘More trouble than he was worth, though, I gather. But old Black Feathers was pretty clear about what he wanted. Starvation rations and not to bat an eyelid if he got some funny visitors. Not to go on sale until he looks like something a dog’s sicked up.’ He seemed oblivious to the pun on his own name. ‘Who are we to question the Chief Minister? Anyway, he was practically giving him to us. We keep what we get for him, remember? In the meantime, like I said, just keep the three of them out of sight…’

  As I looked around me, at my fellow slaves and at the cus- i tomers looking at them, feeling their muscles and peering into their mouths, sometimes haggling with the slave-dealers but more often walking away, I suddenly felt more despondent than I had in my cage. At least when the Otomies had mocked and abused me they had been treating me as an individual, albeit one they loathed and despised. For all Dog and Lizard and their customers cared, we might as well have been planks of wood or strips of cooked meat. ‘It’s not supposed to be like this,’ I muttered to myself.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ growled the one-armed Texcalan, to my surprise: for a moment I had forgotten we were still tied together.

  ‘The market. Being sold as a slave. It should be a formal affair. That’s what it was like for me the first time, anyway. When I sold myself to Lord Feathered in Black, I had four witnesses and the money counted out in front of me. Twenty large cloaks, enough to live on for a year. All very solemn.’

  The Texcalan replied with a non-committal grunt. His companion spoke, or tried to. I could not understand the words his ruined mouth was struggling to form, but the one- armed man interpreted them for me. ‘He wants to know how you got to be a slave in the first place.’

  ‘To keep myself in drink.’

  He laughed. It was an ugly, hollow sound.

  ‘No, you don’t understand,’ I protested, stung into justifying myself. ‘I used to be a priest, you see, and…’

  ‘You Aztecs must be a slacker lot than we thought, then. Since when did you let your priests drink sacred wine?’

  ‘We don’t. It’s a capital crime for a priest to be drunk unless there’s a good reason. But I’d already been thrown out of the priesthood, and the judges…’ I hesitated as the memory reared up behind my eyes, and once again I saw, for an instant, the crowded square in front of the palace and heard the sickening crunch of cudgels hitting the heads of my fello
w prisoners. ‘The judges decided to be merciful, in my case,’ I concluded in a low voice.

  The laughter came again. ‘Oh, this is priceless!’ the one- armed warrior cried, slapping his thigh. ‘Did you hear that?’ he called across to his companion. ‘Did you hear what we’re roped to? A failed priest, a failed drunk and failed slave! We’re in good company here, aren’t we?’

  ‘And you two are doing so much better for yourselves, of course!’ I spat back at him resentfully.

  ‘That’s war,’ the Texcalan replied indifferently. ‘One day you meet a man who’s bigger or luckier than you. So what? We’ll get a flowery death, we’ll dance around the Sun as he rises every morning and then we’ll come back as hummingbirds or butterflies. That suits me. What have you got coming to you?’

  I hung my head. He was right. What was going to happen to him and his comrade was only what all warriors anticipated: death in batde or under a sacrificial knife. If they had not been so badly disfigured they might have been able to look forward to a last fight, too, against hand-picked Aztec warriors at the Festival of the Flaying of Men. Even with their wounds, it was hard to see what they were doing among such a crowd of weary, broken wretches.

  And what a crowd we were! There were many forms of slavery, and Aztecs submitted to it for many different reasons. A field hand or labourer might find himself short of work and food, for example, while a family with too many mouths to feed might sell a child’s services on the understanding that they would redeem him or replace him with a younger brother or sister when he grew up. In every case a fair bargain was struck and the slave or his parents got something out of it, such as the twenty large cloaks I had received. Discerning customers were prepared to pay well for a sturdy, healthy, intelligent worker.

  The briefest glance at their stock-in-trade was enough to confirm to me that Dog and Lizard were not in that sort of market. I was surrounded by a miscellaneous collection of failed gamblers being disposed of by their creditors, thieves being sold to recover the value of what they had stolen, and foreigners, captives, like the two I was roped to, too clumsy or ugly to be of much use even as sacrifices.