Not for long, though, if he was disgraced. My heart tightened in my chest.
Huei set her baby in a wooden cradle. She unrolled a reed mat over one of the jaguar pelts, and sat on the ground. "I'll have the slaves bring some refreshments," she said. "Your sister is watching over the children. But I think you and I would rather wait until we include her in the conversation."
I said nothing. Huei had always been honest with me, which was one of the reasons we'd related so well to one another. "Very well," I said, finally. "Let's start with the awkward questions. Did you abduct or harm Priestess Eleuia?"
Her eyes flickered. "Through nahual magic? You know I can't use that."
No. Being born on the day Eight Death, she had no nahual. But her equivocation wasn't what I had expected, and it frightened me. "Huei, please. Can you answer the question?"
She didn't speak for a while. "I knew there was someone. It's obvious when you no longer have your husband's attention, and even more obvious when you see him acting like an infatuated child. But I didn't know her name."
I studied her for a while. "And if you had known?"
Huei spread her hands, carefully. "I – I don't know what I would have done." She sounded sincere. "But believe me, I wouldn't sum mon a nahual."
"How did you know he'd been arrested?"
"Calpulli gossip," Huei said. She picked up a wooden rattle – one of the children's toys – and flicked it between her fingers with a dry, hollow sound. "I came as soon as I could. Not that it changed anything, of course. The Storm Lord smite him," she said. "Didn't he realise that he'd lose everything? That we'd lose everything? I thought–" She paused, and her eyes glimmered in the light.
She was crying. "Huei…" I said, unsure of what I could do. I extended a hand halfway across the space that separated us.
Like Neutemoc, she was looking through me, as if I didn't exist. "He did things. He rose from his status of peasant to a respected warrior. He was going somewhere, and taking us along with him."
"I don't know what you mean," I said, as gently as I could. I felt as if I were intruding on some private grief: never a pleasant thought, and even worse when you knew the person as well as I knew Huei. "Going somewhere?"
"Making something out of his life," Huei said. "And then, all of a sudden, he realises it's not worth it any more, that he can throw it all into Mictlan."
"I don't think–"
"I know him, Acatl," Huei said. "He was driven."
And you? If he was driven, and making something out of his life, what did you think you were doing?
"And you loved him because of what he was?"
Huei said nothing, but she didn't need to. It was in her eyes: she loved him, and her anger at him was fear; fear that she would lose him to the executioner's mace.
"I'm sorry," she said after a while. "It wasn't meant for you."
I didn't know what to say. I just shook my head, feeling utterly useless. "I'm sorry."
Huei blinked, dispelling the last of her tears, though her voice still shook. Behind her, the gods in the frescoes watched, expressionless, uncaring. "You're not the one at fault. He is, unfortunately." I said, "He might still be acquitted. I'm trying."
"But you don't believe in his innocence," Huei said. "You don't either."
Huei's face tightened. "I believe he was sleeping with that priestess. I don't believe he killed her. He couldn't kill anyone, not in cold blood."
"He's a warrior."
"Yes, he is. But not an assassin, Acatl."
No. But a man used to making hard decisions, often in a short time. Huei wasn't the best judge of Neutemoc's character, being blinded both by jealousy and by love. And I still didn't know whether my brother had fathered Eleuia's child.
I said nothing for a while, thinking of all it would mean to her. I couldn't tell her about the child, or discuss my suspicions. It would have hurt her needlessly.
Huei must have sensed that I had run out of conversation subjects. She rose, went to the door, and clapped her hands to summon a slave. "Bring some chocolate," she said. "And tell Mihmatini to come, too."
She sat down again. "So," she said. "It's been a while since we last saw each other."
Four years, to be precise. Four years of minding my own small parish in Coyoacan – stopping, from time to time, to dwell on Huei and Mihmatini, but never gathering enough will to walk into that house again. The house where Mother had died; where Father's body had lain, untended to for hours.
"You haven't changed," Huei said. "Not really."
I shrugged. "I've come back to Tenochtitlan. But things are the same. I've been doing nothing much. The usual for a priest."
Huei's eyes narrowed. "You cheapen yourself," she said.
I shook my head. "You want success? Ask Neutemoc." Ask Mihmatini; ask Father and Mother. Ask them who had taken them in.
"Not any more." Her voice, loaded with terrible sarcasm, erased whatever I'd been about to say: we stared at each other in silence, until the noise of a shrieking child broke the awkwardness.
"Uncle Acatl!" A young child, whom I didn't recognise. Mazatl, I realised with a shock. She'd been much younger last time I'd been in this house, barely starting to piece sentences together.
Her brother Necalli was more dignified. I tried to remember how old he was. Eight, nine years old? His head was shaved; he wore the single lock of hair that marked the unproved warrior.
And behind him, my sister Mihmatini, grown from a gangly girl into a beautiful woman, blossoming in the calmecac like a marigold flower. She walked slowly, gracefully, her shirt swishing, revealing anew with every step the glint of jade bracelets at her ankles. Her hair, tied in a long queue at her back, shone like polished obsidian. My heart tightened in my chest.
"The lost brother comes home?" she asked, with a smile.
I shrugged. "Sometimes," I said. It had been too long since I had last seen her: my fault, for not finding the courage to walk back into that house in spite of Neutemoc's presence.
Mihmatini made a mock punching gesture. "Stop being so serious."
"It comes with the position, I'm afraid," I said.
She grimaced. "Sure, and I'm the Consort of the Emperor."
She sat down, with both children crowding near her. The toddler Mazatl, in particular, kept trying to climb into her lap, and Mihmatini gently pushed her off every time.
Slaves brought refreshments, and a light lunch: maize cakes, and frogs with chilli peppers, spread on the reed mat so we could each help ourselves from the ceramic dishes. I was famished. In fact, I realised with a shock, my last meal dated back to the previous evening. I'd been walking around the Sacred Precinct and the city on a completely empty stomach.
Mihmatini watched me gulp down a frog, and barely hid a smile. "I think someone's forgotten to eat today."
"Men," Huei snorted. "All the same."
I hurriedly swallowed, so I could answer. "Now you're being unfair."
Mihmatini raised her cup of chocolate to her lips, and inhaled the pungent aroma of vanilla and cacao. "Maybe, maybe," she said. She looked at Huei, obviously trying very hard to stifle a laugh.
I'd visited Mihmatini in her calmecac, but had never seen her so relaxed, so radiant. For all that she'd spent the last ten years away, she seemed to be utterly at ease with Huei and the children, so much more than me.
The rest of the meal was much the same: spent on pleasantries, listening to the two women mocking me, and carefully avoiding the shadow Neutemoc's arrest cast over both their futures. Afterwards, I walked with Mihmatini in the courtyard garden, among the marigold and tomato flowers. "You look well," I said.
She grimaced. "I can't say the same about you." She poked me between the ribs. Surprised, I leapt out of her path, and she laughed again. "You're a priest for the Dead, not Mictlantecuhtli. The salient bones and skeleton look aren't compulsory, Acatl."
"Ha-ha," I said, trying to be serious. But in her company, it was hard to stay so, hard to remember all that waited for me outside. "I thought you were going to stay in that temple."
Mihmatini's face turned grave. "I thought so, too," she said. "The priestesses wanted me to stay. They said they had never had a student so gifted with magic. But…"
She shrugged. "In the end, it wasn't where my heart was. I wanted to go home, find a husband of my own, raise my own children."
All things that were forbidden to priests. "I see," I said. "And since then…" I started, wondering why she was still in Neutemoc's house, and not married.
She shrugged. "It will come, in time. I'm not desired."
"Surely, as Neutemoc's protégée–"
She blushed. "He's been busy lately."
My stomach contracted. What had Neutemoc done, again? "Too busy to look for a husband?"
"I'm young," Mihmatini said. "I can wait. It's going to take time for this to be sorted out, I expect."
"I hope not." Both for Neutemoc's sake, and for her own. She wasn't young. Eighteen was old, in a land where the first marriages were contracted when the girls were sixteen. She wasn't plain, or poor. But a husband would want a girl able to bear children; and the more Neutemoc and Huei waited, the more prospective alliances disappeared.
Mihmatini must have caught some of my thoughts. "He means well."
How could I answer that? "He's been busy, as you said." Busy quarrelling with Huei; busy giving in to the charms of a priestess. Great occupations, worthy of a warrior.
A thought occurred to me. "You sleep here."
Mihmatini pointed to a small opening, to the eastern side of the courtyard, its entrance-curtain adorned with leaping deer. "In that room. Why?"
"Do you know where Huei was yesterday night?"
She puffed her cheeks, thoughtfully, a habit neither Mother nor the calmecac had broken out of her. "Yesterday night? Pretty well. We played patolli all night. And a good thing we used tokens instead of cacao beans, or I'd be out of money."
I made a sweeping gesture, taking in her red-dyed cotton shirt, her wide skirt with its finely embroidered hem, and the jade necklace she wore around her neck. "Aren't you already out of money, owning all of that?"
She looked at me, her eyes widening in mock surprise. "Why, is that a joke, brother?"
It had to be written somewhere, on some divination priest's codex, that I'd never have the upper hand with her. "Very well. I'll stick to serious subjects, if that curbs your hilarity. Are you sure about the patolli? You didn't step out at some point?"
"For a very short time," Mihmatini said. "Huei couldn't have gone out and murdered the priestess, or whatever you think she did. She didn't have time."
"Hmm," I said. It all sounded solid. But still…
"You're calling me a liar?" Mihmatini said.
She might have protected Huei out of friendship or gratitude. But if that was so, my sister had changed much in the years since our childhood. I didn't think that was the case. "You might not realise the significance of something you saw, but–"
"I know what I saw," Mihmatini said. "Huei was with me the whole evening, Acatl. I'll swear to it in court, if it comes to that."
I hadn't really thought Huei was the culprit, in any case. She might have hated Neutemoc's lover, but one thing was sure: she truly loved her husband. Which didn't leave me with anything I could use to spare Neutemoc the death penalty.
SIX
The Seekers
I came back to the temple with a full stomach, intending to stay only briefly before I resumed my talk with Neutemoc. But I found Teomitl waiting for me at the entrance to the storehouse, chatting with Ezamahual: a lean, nervous novice priest, a son of peasants who couldn't believe he'd had the good fortune of entering calmecac. Given how captivated Ezamahual was by Teomitl's talk, I could have emptied the storehouse in front of him without raising the alarm.
Ah well. Youth would wear off at some point. I belatedly realised I wasn't so old myself: only thirty. But I felt old; out of place.
Teomitl didn't see me immediately, but Ezamahual did. He straightened up and Teomitl turned.
"Acatl-tzin. I've come back from the registers. I have what you asked from me."
He was still filled with that coiled energy; it lay beneath every word, every short, stabbing gesture he made with his hands. "Out of all the names you gave me, only Priestess Zollin was born on a Jaguar day."
He gave me a quick account of the names: neither the dancers, Huei nor the other senior priestesses of the calmecac could have summoned that nahual.
There was one name missing from that recitation, though. "Mahuizoh?" I asked. "The Jaguar Knight? You couldn't find him?"
"I searched," Teomitl said, in what was almost an angry retort. I was starting to understand such a reaction was usual with him, and wondering if I had the patience to deal with that. "There are two Mahuizohs who are members of the Jaguar Knights."
"And?" I asked.
"Their birthdates?" I expected him to protest, but he surprised me by closing his eyes. "One Rain and Three Jaguar."
"I'm impressed," I admitted. "What about their age?"
"They're both around thirty-six," Teomitl said.
Tlaloc's lightning strike me. It didn't remove Mahuizoh from my list. Though it was significantly shorter now, with just the priestess Zollin, the Jaguar Knight Mahuizoh, and my brother Neutemoc left. I wished the search parties would find Eleuia, or, failing that, some evidence that would help me decide.
Teomitl was still standing, waiting. "You did well," I said.
"No." He sounded disgusted. "I was one hour at the records for six birthdates. That's hardly the pinnacle of efficiency."