The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 Part 15

"So how do you think Heron managed to win the contest?" the steward asked, as he flopped angrily into the stern of the boat.

"It wasn't just luck, then?" I had already guessed that if the G.o.ds had willed the outcome, they had had some human help to arrange it.

"Only if having one of the most powerful men in the World for your great-uncle counts as luck. Actually old Black Feathers can't stand the young toad, but he dotes on his niece the boy's mother and she wants to see her son get to the top."

"And winning a contest like this won't do the lad's career any harm." To be marked with the G.o.ds' favour counted for almost as much as taking a captive in war. "So our master ordered you to give him a helping hand, is that it?"

Huitztic gripped the boat's sides so hard his knuckles turned white. "Me and the priest both. Young Heron had the only hollow drinking-tube sewn into the hem of his cloak, after I'd been to get it from Patecatl. Only I reckon it had more than a hole in it. How hard would it have been for him to prime it before he gave it to me?"

I thought about it. "Not hard. Mushrooms, you could dry them, grind them into powder, and as long as you didn't pack them in too tight I suppose the young man could have sucked it up with the sacred wine without noticing at least until it started to work. Did anyone look at the tube afterwards?"

"Sure. Heron was still clutching it when he was brought here. But the poison was all gone by then, of course."

"It would have been a lot simpler to put the stuff in the jar, wouldn't it?"

Huitztic sn.i.g.g.e.red. "You're not so clever after all, are you? Which jar would you put it in, then?"

I grasped his meaning: how could the poisoner have known which of the fifty-two vessels to dope? "All of them?"

"No. Lord Feathered in Black let some of his serfs drink the rest of the jars dry. You missed an opportunity there! They could barely stand up afterwards, of course, but it was nothing like what happened to Heron."

I frowned. "The rest of the jars?"

"Heron had polished off the jar he was drinking out of before the stuff started taking effect. So we can't tell what may have been in it."

I was still puzzled. Cheating the G.o.ds was a fearful thing to do, but at least their vengeance was uncertain, and might be a long way off. I could not understand why a priest who had agreed to do that would go on to risk the immediate and all-too-certain consequences of angering Lord Feathered in Black.

Perhaps I was about to find out; for the long stone wall of the prison now loomed above us.

I knew the prison. I had been confined here once, awaiting punishment after my arrest for drunkenness. I had to halt on the threshold for a moment, clutching the doorway and shutting my eyes as the sights, sounds and smells came back to me in a rush: the lines of cramped wooden cages stretching away into the gloom; the stench of p.i.s.s and fear and starvation; the shouting. At almost any time of the day or night, as I remembered, somebody would be raving, protesting his innocence or hurling abuse at the guards or calling for his mother, and when he fell silent others would take up the cry, screaming or crying and rattling the wooden bars of their cages hopelessly.

Somebody was shouting now. The words seemed to run into one another as they echoed through the long hall, so that I could not make them all out.

Huitztic shoved me from behind. "Get a move on, before I have them lock you up too!"

I stumbled forward, almost colliding with the guard who had come to find out what we wanted. When we had told him he said: "Good thing you're here. Maybe you can make him shut up."

My master's steward laughed harshly. "Just bash him over the head! That ought to do it."

The guard, a stolid-looking man in a veteran warrior's long cloak and embroidered breechcloth, hefted his cudgel and gave us a lopsided grin. "I don't think so. I don't want to have to explain to my chief why I laid out Two Rabbit."

I frowned. "I thought it was his deputy you had in here."

"It is. But the prisoner's chief came to pay him a visit. And he's the one shouting."

We hurried past the rows of cages, ignored or tracked obsessively by the wretches who squatted in them. At our approach the shouting seemed to reach a crescendo, before dying out abruptly as the tall, slender figure standing in front of one of the cages swung his gaunt face towards us.

If he had not been making so much noise I might have missed him altogether. As a priest he was draped in black, and had stained his face and limbs with pitch, so that in the gloom there was little to see of him but his eyes, which were wide and startlingly pale.

The guard stepped forward. "Now, Two Rabbit," he urged, "there's no need for this. You'll start them all off, and that'll bring my chief running, and I'll never hear the end of it."

The priest turned back to the cage and kicked it hard enough to make the bars rattle. There was a rustle of movement in response, but with Two Rabbit between us I could not clearly see the occupant.

"Hey!" the guard yelled. "Be careful, that's government property!"

"Do you know what this creature did?" the priest rasped. The words burst between his tightly compressed lips like steam from a green log thrown on a fire.

Huitztic pushed himself forward. "We know exactly what he did!" he cried eagerly. "And my master's going to see him punished for it!"

"Your master?" The pale eyes narrowed. "But you're lord Feathered in Black's steward, aren't you?"

"That's right, and the Chief Minister will . . ."

We never found what the Chief Minister was going to do, because his steward's words were drowned by the other man's outraged howl. "Lord Feathered in Black! He's as guilty as this vermin here. He ought to be in that cage with him!"

"Now, steady on," the guard said anxiously. "That's dangerous talk."

"As dangerous as mocking the G.o.ds? As dangerous as making a laughing stock of their priests?" With a last, baleful glance at the cage, he moved, pus.h.i.+ng past us before stalking out of the hall. "He won't get away with it! Tell him that from me!"

Huitztic said nothing. It was the man in the cage who spoke next.

"Yaotl? Is that you?"

Everybody appeared to be staring at me: Huitztic, the prison guard, even the desperate, hollow-eyed prisoners in the shadows around us. They all seemed to be saying: you know this person? And the tone in which they seemed to be saying it was not friendly.

"You must remember me, Yaotl. We trained together." With Two Rabbit gone, I could see his former deputy clearly now. Patecatl had pushed his hand between the bars of the cage in an imploring gesture.

At first I could only gaze at him while I tried to work out where he might have seen me before. When the answer came to me I could only whisper: "Fire Snake?"

"Yes!" the man cried eagerly, straining against the wooden bars until they creaked. "Fire Snake, that's right! Your old pal. Listen, you've got to get me out of here."

Fire Snake: a name from my childhood, from the House of Tears, the harsh school for boys who would be priests. We had not known each other well or liked each other much, but if I had been where he was, I too might have looked upon any familiar face as a long-lost friend's.

Huitztic interrupted before I had a chance to reply. "'Get you out of here'?" He took a step towards the cage and swung his foot at it, making the prisoner leap backwards as the wooden bars rattled for a second time.

"Will you leave my b.l.o.o.d.y cage alone?" the guard yelled.

Ignoring him, the steward went on ranting at the prisoner. "This slave isn't going to get you out of anything! All he's here for is to listen to you telling us how you poisoned Heron. Go on, how did you do it? How did those mushrooms get into that tube?"

"I don't know what you're talking about!" the man in the cage protested. "Anyway, I'm not telling you anything. It's your fault I'm in here. You set me up!"

"You'll talk, or I'll . . . I'll . . ." Huitztic lunged at the cage, grasping the bars and shaking them impotently. "Let me at him! It's time we got him out of there and knocked the truth out of him!"

"You keep away," the guard warned. "n.o.body touches my prisoners without orders."

"This is ridiculous!" Huitztic spluttered. "Don't you know I work for the Chief Minister?"

"So do I," the guard pointed out.

Just then Fire Snake spoke up. "I'll talk to Yaotl. No one else."

"Who asked you?" the steward snapped. "We'll make you talk!"

"How are you going to do that?" I enquired. "The guard won't let you torture him."

The steward turned on the guard resentfully. "What kind of a prison are you running here, anyway?"

"We usually just starve them," the other man offered. "A few days without food loosens their tongues, and it's much less messy than mutilation."

"We haven't got a few days!"

"I'll talk to Yaotl," the man in the cage offered quietly.

"Why don't you leave him to me?" I suggested. "Lord Feathered in Black told me to investigate this business, didn't he? So let me do it."

"This man's a friend of yours!" the steward objected. "You just want to get him off and put me in that cage instead!"

It was a tempting thought, but all I said was: "Then leave the guard here. He'll tell you if we start hatching any conspiracies."

"This had better be good," I told the man crouching on the other side of the bars, "otherwise Huitztic's likely to talk the old man into having me move in there with you."

The steward had stormed off, declaring that he was going to see what the Chief Minister had to say about this, and that he would be back.

Fire Snake peered up at me miserably. "But he's the man who set this thing up! You've got to help me, Yaotl!"

I glanced uneasily at the guard, who was pacing about the hall, snarling at his other charges as if it would help him keep them in order. I suspected he was wondering whether it would not after all have been wiser to have looked the other way while Huitztic beat a confession out of his prisoner.

"Old Black Feathers sent me here for a reason," I replied, speaking half to myself. "If he wanted you roasted over a slow fire for what happened to his great-nephew, then you'd be cooking already. I think I'm here because he doesn't know what happened himself and he doesn't believe what he's been told about it."

"So you think I've got a chance?" he demanded eagerly, his hands gripping the bars.

"Only if you tell me the truth. I can't convince the old man otherwise. Did you put the poison in that straw?"

"No!"

"How did it get there then?"

"Huitztic must have done it!"

"You're going to have to do better than that," I said a little testily. "It's just your word against his. Who's the Chief Minister going to believe, you or his own steward?" And more to the point, I thought, what would the steward do to me if I accused him without evidence?

Fire Snake looked at the floor. "I don't know what happened," he admitted. "That straw was clean when I gave it to the steward. I remember holding it up to the light, to check it had been bored right through. There was nothing there."

"Why did you agree to help Heron cheat? Two Rabbit was right you were making a mockery of the ceremony. Did you expect the G.o.ds to be happy about that?"

"Lord Feathered in Black isn't afraid of the G.o.ds," he muttered. "His steward made it pretty clear what would happen to me and my family if I didn't co-operate. He even had the cheek to suggest I make whatever sacrifices were needed to a.s.suage the G.o.ds' anger afterwards!" The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable, and for the first time I felt a pang of sympathy for him.

"I know what it looks like," he added wretchedly. "I was there when they tested all those jars, right up until the last slave started snoring and they took me away. If any of the sacred wine was poisoned it was only the jar Heron drank out of, and how could anyone have known which one that would be? It has to have been the tube, but I wasn't the one who put the stuff in it."

"There's no way he could have taken the stuff before the dance? Or during it?"

"No chance. Someone would have noticed him munching on mushrooms between dance movements, and if he'd had them before it started he wouldn't have been standing up by the end."

"Then somebody must have poisoned the sacred wine," I said. I had been stooping over the cage. Now I stood up briskly. "It has to have been one or the other, doesn't it? The straw or the pot. Did you see anybody else doing anything to the pot Heron drank from?"

"No, but there were so many of them clambering over each other and pus.h.i.+ng each other out of the way it was hard to see anything clearly."

I imagined the climax of the ceremony: fifty-two clay pots in the middle of a violent, heaving ma.s.s of eager young men. Even if one of them had been able to guess which jar Heron would drink out of, how had he managed to slip the poison into it without anyone noticing?

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the guard moving purposefully towards us. Our conversation was almost over. As I turned to leave, however, one last thought struck me. "Could Heron have told anyone about the edge you and Huitztic had given him? Someone with a motive to interfere?"

Fire Snake uttered a gasp of laughter. "I can think of three hundred and ninety-nine men who had a motive!" he said. "Four hundred if you count Two Rabbit."

"Why him?"

"You heard him just now. He thinks the G.o.ds have been mocked and he's been made a fool of. And he blames me. He's never liked me, says I'm too ambitious."

"Heron's hardly likely to have told Two Rabbit what he was planning, though, is he?"

Fire Snake scowled for a moment, as if in disappointment. "I suppose not. He could have boasted about it to someone else, though."

"Who would that be one of the other young men? One of his rivals in the compet.i.tion? I don't think so. Is there anyone else?"

"I don't know . . . I think he has a girl. But I don't know where you'd find her."

A cough at my shoulder told me it was time to move on.

I crept furtively about my master's palace, peering cautiously in before I would look into a room, keeping to the shadows as I skirted the edges of the courtyards, taking cover when I needed to behind acacia bushes, yucca plants from the lowlands and other greenery. I did not want the steward to see me until I had reported to the Chief Minister, and I would not be ready to do that until after I had spoken to Heron. I a.s.sumed he was still at the palace, since I suspected that even if he had recovered consciousness, he was unlikely to be in a fit state to go wandering off for a while yet. I wondered whether he would co-operate if I asked him who he had told about the trick. If he did not, then I had no idea what I would do. I did not seem to have learned anything useful from Fire Snake.

I wondered about the girl the priest had mentioned. A young man like Heron, with his n.o.ble connections and fresh from his first triumph on the battlefield, might have his pick of the girls from the pleasure houses. From what I had heard, though, it sounded as though he had a more settled arrangement than that. If she knew about the young man's attempt to cheat the G.o.ds, I had to find out; and then I would need to know whom she might have told the secret to.

I was padding as silently as I could along a dark colonnade when a sudden sound stopped me my tracks: a loud groan, a cry of pain.

The noise appeared to be coming from a nearby courtyard. As I crept towards it, I heard it again, but this time it was shut off abruptly, and replaced by something quite different: a woman's voice, hissing furiously: "It's no use moaning and expecting me to feel sorry for you. What happened was your own fault!"

"How do you make that out? I didn't put mushroom powder in that jar myself, did I?"

I grinned. It seemed as though I need look no further for Heron or his girl.

"If you hadn't tried to cheat it wouldn't have happened!"

"How was I supposed to win if I didn't cheat? And please don't shout, Precious Flower."

The girl had not raised her voice above a whisper, but clearly the sacred wine and the mushrooms had not quite worn off, so it probably sounded to Heron as though a Master of Youths were shouting orders into his ear. I peeped around the corner to watch them. He lay stretched out on a stone bench with a cloth over his head. The girl, a tall, slim beauty in a fine cotton blouse and skirt, stood over him with her arms folded. Her hair was loose, like a pleasure girl's, but there was no red stain around her mouth and no sign of the yellow ochre that pleasure girls wore to lighten their skins.

Heron raised his head a little, thought better of it and let it drop again. Hastily Precious Flower stooped to put her hand under it to stop it striking the bare stone.

"Anyway," he mumbled ungratefully, "how did they find out what I was going to do? You must have told them!"