[Aztec 03] - City of Spies Read online

  There were some, especially merchants, who would pay as much as forty or sixty large cloaks merely for the privilege and prestige of having a fine-looking slave dance and die for them at an important festival. I doubted the lot of us would fetch more than thirty at most.

  I was watching a young girl trying to show off her skills with a spindle. She was trying to balance it on end in a little clay bowl while she wound the coarse fibre on to it, but it kept toppling over. Every time this happened, one of the dealers would lean over and clout her ear, eliciting a little sob of pain and frustration. The customer, an elderly woman, decided there were no bargains here after all and walked away.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Dog snapped, hitting the unfortunate girl again. Her borrowed skirt and blouse — put on her for show, and to be stripped off her again the moment she was sold — were too large and made her look smaller and more wretched than ever as she huddled inside them, shrinking in silence from the blows and rebukes. ‘At this rate we’ll never get rid of any of you! What is it? Do you like your cage so much you want to be put back in it? I can…Oh, what do you want?’

  The last words were addressed to someone standing in front of the slave-dealers’ pitch, looking curiously at their wares. I could just about see him between the backs of two of the men on sale in front of me. I caught a glimpse of a nondescript face, shoulder-length, unornamented hair and a short, plain cloak before I saw the stranger’s eyes and noticed with a start that they seemed to be staring straight into my own.

  The man had the look of a commoner, or perhaps a well- treated slave. There was something familiar about him, but I could not remember where I might have seen him before.

  Lizard elbowed his partner aside. ‘Idiot,’ he muttered. ‘Is that any way to talk to a customer? Sir, what can I interest you in? I’ve got spinners, embroiderers, labourers. You want someone cheap to help manure your fields, I’ve got just what you need here…’

  ‘How much for that one at the back?’

  ‘Dancers? I’ve got dancers… My drummer’s gone off to buy himself a bowl of snails, but as soon as he’s back I’ll put them through their paces… Which one?’

  ‘Over there, tied to the collar, between the one-armed man and one with all the scars. How much?’

  I caught my breath as I realized what was happening. The transaction that was going to seal my fate was about to take place.

  Lizard gave an embarrassed cough. ‘For him? Um… He’s not for sale, he’s… er, the three of them, they come as a set. Special purchase.’

  I stared at him. What was he talking about? I could not understand what the Texcalans and I could possibly have to do with one another.

  The customer was undeterred. ‘Well, all right. What do you want for the three of them, then?’

  Dog butted in. ‘No, you don’t understand. We can’t let them go to just anybody, because — well — because…’

  His voice tailed off, but I could have completed the sentence for him. I had just worked out what was going on. I was supposed to be bought by some stooge of my master’s. Lord Feathered in Black could not have me killed himself, but I realized there was nothing to stop him encouraging someone else to have me sacrificed in the nastiest fashion possible.

  Regardless of the way the movement tightened the rope around my neck, I slumped forward in despair, not unlike the girl with the spindle. A small part of me had been clinging to the remote hope that I might be bought for something other than a hideous death at the top of a pyramid, but now I saw how illusory that was.

  ‘I’ll give you twenty capes.’

  Lizard gasped. He stared at the man before recollecting himself just in time to respond in a weak voice: ‘Each?’

  The man said nothing.

  Dog plucked urgently at his colleague’s cloak. ‘Careful!’ he hissed. ‘Remember what his lordship said…’

  ‘I know, I know, but twenty capes . .

  ‘Thirty.’

  Now it was the stranger’s turn to start and stare.

  The new offer had come from someone standing behind him. I could just make out a tall figure with his hair piled up over his head in the fashion we called ‘pillar of stone’. It was the style of a seasoned warrior.

  My stomach lurched as I thought of the Otomies. Was this one of the captain’s men? The hair was not quite right for an Otomi, though, and the voice was not one of those I had heard taunting me every day for as long as I could remember.

  The commoner scowled at the newcomer. ‘All right. Thirty each!’

  ‘A hundred for the lot, then.’ The big man shouldered his way forward to stand next to his rival. His bright red netted cape, long blue labret and eagle feather headband showed that he had taken at least five captives in war and was reckoned a great fighter. And I suddenly realized that there was something vaguely familiar about him as well, although again I could not place it.

  The two slave-dealers looked at each other, slack-jawed. They plainly had no idea what to do and were not helped by the fact that a small crowd of curious spectators was beginning to gather, drawn by this impromptu auction. After a morning spent desperately trying to attract customers, suddenly they had more than they knew what to do with.

  Eventually Lizard turned to the bidders. He sighed regretfully. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but it’s not that simple. I can’t let these men go to just anybody, I told you. I’ve strict instructions about what they can be sold for, you see…’

  ‘These wouldn’t be any use for anything other than a cheap sacrifice,’ snapped the warrior.

  ‘Well, that’s it, you see. They have to be sold for sacrifice.

  And besides. I’ve already got a buyer.’ So my suspicion about what Lord Feathered in Black was up to had been right.

  ‘Will he pay a hundred?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘I’ll match that,’ the commoner cried suddenly. ‘And I promise you, they’ll all die. Slowly.’

  ‘How?’ Lizard asked suspiciously.

  The man hesitated. ‘How? Er… arrows. You know, when the priests string them up and shoot them full of holes as an offering to the rain-god.’

  Beside me, my Texcalan friend muttered: ‘You Aztec bastard.’

  I was not sure whether he meant me, the slave-dealer or the commoner, but he had cause. The arrow sacrifice was perhaps even more unpleasant than the fire sacrifice, because there was no quick, clean kill with a flint knife at the end. The idea was to make the victim’s blood spurt violendy on the ground from as many wounds as possible, to resemble the rain the priests were trying to encourage. They would keep us alive for as long as they could, shooting small bird arrows into our arms and legs, until we stopped wriggling and bled to death.

  ‘Why these three?’

  ‘They’re ideal. The big ones are for the novices, for practice. The runt in the middle will be harder to hit, a challenge, better sport for the more experienced archer.’

  ‘Hang on,’ the warrior growled. ‘I can do better than that. And I bid a hundred first, remember.’

  The slave-dealers were speechless. It was left to a small boy at the front of the rapidly growing crowd, a lad too young even to be wearing a breechcloth under his short brown cape, to call out: ‘Go on, then, what are you going to do to them?’

  My fellow slave with the ragged lip and ears uttered a dangerous noise in the back of his throat. I wondered nervously if the two Texcalans were about to launch themselves at the crowd, dragging me with them into the middle of a one-sided fight, but neither moved.

  ‘Cut their hearts out, of course.’

  ‘Why is that better?’ Lizard asked. ‘That happens to nearly all sacrifices.’

  ‘Because the people I represent are Mayans, that’s why. They don’t slice cleanly through the breastbone like Aztecs; they go in under the ribcage. So they’ll have to pull their guts out of the way first! Only it takes practice, see. Very particular, their gods are, and their priests don’t do nearly as many as ours, so they need some f
ive bodies to hone their skills on before trying the real thing.’

  ‘All the same. Lizard,’ Dog murmured, ‘one hundred cloaks…’

  ‘Look, do you want the money or not?’

  ‘I’ll go to a hundred and five!’

  The big man’s eyes widened as if in shock. The slave-dealers looked at him expectantly, but he said nothing. For a distinguished warrior he looked strangely unsure of himself. He stared at the ground, then shot a look of hatred at his rival, and finally turned his back, wrapping his cloak around him.

  At last he said softly: ‘I can’t go that high.’

  ‘They’re mine, then!’ the successful bidder crowed.

  The other looked over his shoulder, straight at me. He seemed about to say something but then, apparently thinking better of it, pushed his way through the crowd and left.

  The slave-dealers looked at each other. ‘What do you think?’ said Lizard.

  ‘A hundred and five,’ Dog repeated dreamily. He must have been thinking that this was far more than he had expected to make all day.

  ‘Yes, but what about old Black Feathers?’

  ‘He won’t mind, will he? Look, the arrow sacrifice is pretty nasty. And think of the money! We could restock! We could clear out all this rubbish and start again!’

  His colleague looked at their customer, who was waiting patiendy for them to finish their wrangling. I looked at him too. I was still wondering where I might have seen him before, and trying to guess what he could possibly be up to.

  Would anyone really pay a hundred and five large cloaks just to have me and my companions perforated with arrows? Eventually Lizard said: ‘You’ve got the money?’

  3

  The cloaks must have come from another stall in the marketplace, because they arrived in no time. They were formally counted out into five lots of twenty and one of five, and then we were released into our new owner’s custody. The men who had brought the cloaks escorted us as we followed our mysterious buyer through the marketplace, with the crowds parting and swirling around us as we staggered forward. ‘Hurry up! We’ve no time to waste!’

  I could barely keep up. Most of the time my legs were paddling uselessly in the air as the slave-collar, hoisted on the necks of my two huge companions, dragged me clear of the ground. I could not breathe except on the rare occasions when my feet hit the earth, and then I was too busy taking gulps of air to speak. Just once I managed to blurt out: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The canal,’ the man in front of us told me shortly. ‘There’s a canoe waiting.’ A broad waterway enabled merchants to bring their boats right into the marketplace.

  ‘A canoe?’ I echoed.

  ‘Just shut up and move, won’t you?’ he snapped. His head kept moving sharply from side to side, as if he were afraid someone would spring out from one of the market stalls as we passed and attack us. Nobody did, but the moment he looked straight ahead he gave a cry of alarm and froze in his tracks.There was no way I and my two fellow slaves, dragged forward under our own weight, could stop fast enough to avoid running him down. I hit him square in the back, and he sprawled in the dust, giving me a momentary glimpse of what had brought him up short before the wooden collar cracked into the nape of my neck and the three of us who were lashed to it tumbled on top of him.

  While my head rang from the blow and I struggled to get up, what I had just seen hung in front of my eyes, as vivid as a feather mosaic suspended on a wall. It might as well have been a picture, I told myself, because it could not be real.

  We were almost at one of the entrances to the marketplace, a wide gap in its long, colonnaded wall carefully guarded by the market police. Several of these men were engaged in what looked like a heated argument with a group of warriors, and one of the warriors was the man whose bid had just failed to secure me and my companions. But it was the man at the centre of the group who had attracted my attention: the man wearing a distinctive long yellow cloak with a red border, with his hair bound with white cotton ribbons, his face stained black like a priests and fine leather sandals on his feet.

  ‘It can’t be,’ I muttered thickly as I forced myself up on to my elbows and once again took the weight of the slave-collar on my neck. ‘Mamiztli?’ Aloud I swore at the two men who had been threatening to hang me by the neck before and whose weight was now holding me down. ‘Come on, get up! What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Can’t,’ growled the one on my left. ‘Only got one arm, remember? Why should I, anyway? Might as well die here. You filthy Aztec…’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  Just then the man in the yellow cloak caught sight of me.

  His jaw dropped, and then he was moving, shoving aside two policemen as he strode through the gateway towards me.

  ‘Yaotl! It is you! Look, I’m sorry. I told that idiot Ollin I’d pay a hundred large cloaks to get you out of this and the fool thought that meant he wasn’t allowed to go any higher. I’m really sorry. There’s nothing I can do…’

  For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken. The man standing over me, babbling almost incoherently about how sorry he was, looked exactly like my elder brother: Mamiztli, the Mountain Lion, the fearless warrior, the man who had fought his way up from nothing, whose prowess had been rewarded with one of the highest ranks a commoner could aspire to: Atenpanecatl, Guardian of the Waterfront. He even had the harsh, barking voice, so suitable for shouting orders. However, he did not talk like him. I had never known Lion apologize to anybody, least of all his younger brother, whom he normally belittled every chance he got.

  That explained why the warrior who had been bidding for me had looked familiar. He was one of my brother’s bodyguards.

  ‘I wish I could help…’

  ‘You can,’ I said.

  ‘How?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘Get your men to lift this pole up that we’re all tied to before it breaks my neck!’

  Two warriors rushed to our aid, brushing aside the feeble protests of the policemen, much as my brother had. It occurred to me that Lion was going to have to get this resolved quickly: neither he nor any other official from Tenochtitlan had any jurisdiction in the marketplace, which was controlled by merchants and had its own police force and its own courts. If anybody suspected him of trying to steal anyone else’s property here — even if the property was his own brother — the consequences would be severe.

  As I stood up before him, he took a step backwards, as if I had threatened to hit him.

  ‘What have they been doing with you? You look worse than you did when you were in prison!’

  ‘Just lost a bit of weight, that’s all. I’d feel better if someone could untie me from this thing.’

  Lion looked at the ground. ‘I wish I could. It would just get j us both into more trouble, though. Look, I’m sorry…’

  ‘You keep saying that. It’s starting to sound boring.’

  His head snapped up and his eyes flared. I saw his hands make fists as he fought to control his sudden burst of temper. ‘Now, listen, you little…’

  That was better. That was the Lion I knew. Suddenly I felt almost cheerful, as if I had not just been bought by someone intent on using me for ritual target practice.

  ‘All right,’ I said soothingly. ‘Calm down.’ I prodded the man who had bought me with my foot. He was still lying face down in front of me, groaning. No doubt he was feeling sorry for himself, having just been pressed into the dirt by the j weight of three slaves. ‘That’s the man who bought me, but he was acting as someone’s agent. Why don’t you pick him up and ask him what was so special about us that he was prepared to pay so much?’

  He did as I suggested. ‘It’s a good question,’ he said as he dragged the wretched man to his feet. ‘It beats me why anyone would have given a cocoa bean for you, even if you didn’t look as if a house had fallen on you! And what’s that smell?’

  I ignored his question and concentrated on the man trying to stand in front of me. With his cloak ripped, his
palms raw from trying to break his fall and his eyes rolling dazedly, it was easy to forget that the man in front of me was, if not my owner, then very obviously someone whose standing was a good deal higher than my own. Even though I was the one still lashed to a pole with two enemy captives, all of us doomed to a ghastly fate, I found myself interrogating him.

  ‘Who are you working for? Who’s my new owner?’

  The man blinked stupidly at me. I frowned at him, suddenly struck once again by the feeling that I had seen him somewhere before.

  My brother seized his shoulder and shook him roughly. ‘Come on, answer the question! I want to know who put up all that money!’

  ‘Put him down and move away,’ said a stern voice from behind me. I could not turn around to look at the speaker, but I could guess what was happening. The men guarding the gateway, finding themselves outnumbered by Lion’s bodyguards, had gone for reinforcements.

  My brother was unmoved. ‘Who are you?’ he asked coolly, looking past me.

  ‘Market police. Let that man go, or you’ll answer to the judges for it. The court is sitting over there.’ I could not see, but I assumed the man was gesturing towards the large, low building where the marketplace’s court was permanently in session. I hoped my brother would control himself: justice here tended to be swift and brutal. ‘And I want you to tell me what you’re doing with these slaves. They’re not your property.’

  ‘Whose are they, then?’

  And then, before the policeman could reply to my brother’s insolent question, I saw the answer, sweeping through the entrance to Tlatelolco marketplace in a cloud of filth: obscen- nies pouring from the mouth of a middle-aged woman, plainly although smardy dressed in a blouse and skirt of finely woven maguey fibre. Her long, silver-streaked hair was conservatively styled, divided and bound at the nape of the neck with both ends sticking up in front. In her agitation these bobbed about like an ant’s feelers.

  I could have told she was of the merchant class by her dress — too fine for a commoner, but not made of the cotton that was reserved for the families of lords and mighty warriors. I did not need the clue, however.