Shadow of the Lords by Simon Levack Page A

said, ‘but I still don’t understand …’
    â€˜Go on, then!’ I urged him. ‘There’s no time to lose!’
    He gave the pitiful creature on the ground one lingering
glance, just as the captain took a step towards it and raised his knife again. Then Handy reached out, slapped me once on the arm, and ran.
    â€˜Where’s he going?’ snapped Fox.
    â€˜Thought he saw something,’ I said. ‘Might have been the boy. He’ll be back in a moment.’
    â€˜Ah!’ The captain bent towards his victim. ‘Did you hear that? Now we can really start to have some fun!’
    Then he drove the knife one more time into the already ruined mouth. The boatman let out a bubbling scream and writhed and jerked like a stranded fish.
    â€˜How did this happen?’ I asked quietly.
    Standing next to me was a young man. His head was shaved, and I guessed that meant that he had lost the tuft of hair that he would have borne throughout his years at the House of Youth, or wherever boys from Tlacopan did their training. So he had been to war and taken a captive, but judging by his nervousness and the way his eyes followed the captain, constantly flicking from the man’s villainous face to the flint knife and back again, he was no seasoned veteran.
    â€˜Someone told me they found the man hiding in a granary,’ he said. ‘They could tell he was an Aztec, of course, so they had him locked up in the palace and sent a messenger to Mexico. Then the Otomi came. He said the Aztec Chief Minister had sent him. He ordered us to hand over any Aztec runaways to him, so we brought the man out.’
    â€˜And you let him get away with it?’ I said, raising my voice provocatively.
    I glanced quickly at the men in the middle of the crowd but they were concentrating on the boatman, who was coughing and spitting blood and fragments of teeth out on the ground. How long did I have before he started to speak?
    â€˜What kind of warriors do you have here, anyway? Two
men start terrorizing your women and children and breaking up your marketplace, and you just do what they tell you? Didn’t anyone think to stop them, or ask them why they were doing this?’
    Fox looked up, frowning, and took a step towards his captain, as if he wanted to warn him of something. He must have heard me, I thought desperately, but then the boatman reached up to grab the hem of the captain’s cloak, tugging at it as if he were trying to haul himself upright, and I realized that he was trying to speak as well and that whatever time I had was fast running out.
    â€˜Call yourselves men?’ I cried out at last, letting as many of the crowd as possible hear the scorn and incredulity in my voice, and no longer caring whether or not the captain, Fox and the steward realized what I was up to. ‘Why, it’s no wonder we Aztecs rule the whole World!’
    â€˜No wonder at all, when your Emperor keeps our King as a hostage in his palace and all our seasoned warriors are sent abroad while yours squat at home with nothing to do except drink chocolate and torture their neighbours!’
    I turned, as did the men around me, to look at the speaker.
    He was a priest. I could tell that immediately, by looking at his face, which was stained black with soot, streaked with blood drawn from his earlobes, and framed by a mass of lank, tangled hair. He wore a long robe, of cotton rather than maguey fibre, and the tobacco pouch that hung from his neck was no mere shapeless bag but a miniature jaguar, complete with jaws, four paws and a tail, exquisitely fashioned from real ocelot skin. He must, I realized, be a man of some standing. Perhaps he was from the city’s chief temple. I looked up at the summit of the pyramid that loomed over the sacred precinct and the marketplace and understood: he had been standing up there, watching the captain’s and Fox’s activities, and having
seen the disturbance in the