The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (31 page)

“Is there anyone else at home?” I asked. “Anyone who might know where he went?”

She hesitated for long time, her eyes in her lap. I suspected she was trying to think of a reason not to answer me, but at last she said: “My son. I don’t think he’ll help you,
though. He’s probably down by the aqueduct, filling his jars.”

Blue Feather’s son was called Cloud Eagle. He was a tall, burly young man of about twenty, his muscles developed by years of hauling heavy jars about. I found him at one
of the water-sellers’ favourite places for filling up, close to where the previous day’s ceremony had taken place. Cloud Eagle was in a canoe on a broad waterway at the point where it
ran beneath the aqueduct’s twin channels. He was standing upright and trying to keep his craft steady using a long wooden pole jammed into the canal’s bottom, while an older man poured
water down towards him using a large clay jug. Unfortunately the boat kept moving, and while some of the water went where it was supposed to, tumbling into open jars with a hollow rattle, much of
it ended up in the bottom of the boat, over the younger man’s head, or in the canal.

“Hold that thing still, can’t you?” cried the man on the edge of the aqueduct.

“I’m doing my best!” his colleague protested. He was sweating, his muscles straining with the effort of keeping the canoe where it was supposed to be. He was clearly not
accustomed to this particular task and, from where I stood, it looked as though he was making a mess of it.

“Cloud Eagle?” I called out from the bank.

“Yes,” snapped the youngster. “What do you want?”

“Sorry to distract you, but . . .”

The man on the aqueduct threw his jug down in disgust: it dropped straight into the canal, missing the canoe by a hand’s breadth. The young man in the boat sat down heavily.

“Sorry,” I said again, “but it’s about your father . . .”

With a sigh he got up and took up his pole again, using it to push the boat towards me. “All right. I’m coming. Don’t think I can help you, though.”

From above my head a voice snarled: “Keep it short. We’ve still got a living to make!”

Cloud Eagle did not get out of the boat. He was taller than I so, although the bank was raised a little above the water’s surface, we were almost eye-to-eye.

“My cousin lent me this boat,” he explained, indicating with a glance over his shoulder that his cousin was the elder man still glowering down at us. “He said he’d help
me until Father comes back . . . or at least until we find his canoe.”

I felt my eyebrows lift. “Your father took his boat with him?” That was curious. His wife had not mentioned this. It was odd enough for a man to wander off by night for no apparent
reason, but where could he possibly want to go that would mean he needed his canoe? It suggested he had not merely felt the urge to go behind the wicker screen hiding the nearest public latrine,
and maybe fallen in a canal on the way. He had had some purpose in mind, one that meant travelling farther than he could easily walk.

“Yes, he seems to have done. I hope the boat comes back . . . I mean, I hope he comes back, of course, but there’s no way we could afford to replace the canoe. In the meantime, Flint
Knife up there has let us use his, and he agreed to help me fill the jars, just for today.” The lad grimaced. “I should have suggested we do it the other way around. I’m usually
the one scooping water out of the aqueduct and pouring it out, while Father holds the boat steady. I hadn’t realized his part of the job was so difficult!”

I looked at the jars surrounding him in the boat. None was more than half full. “I expect you’re right and you can’t help, but have you any idea at all where your father might
have gone? Or if he was, well, up to anything – well, you know what I mean . . .”

“I know,” said the young man sadly. “Anything he wouldn’t want my mother to know about, you mean? No, I don’t think so. If there was anything like that he
didn’t share the secret with me.”

I sighed. I was going to have to go back to Lily with nothing to report, but I could think of nothing more to ask. “All right, thanks. If he does appear, let him know that Tiger Lily wants
to see him, won’t you?”

As I turned away, and Cloud Eagle picked up his pole again, a thought struck me. “How are you going to carry on now that jug’s gone in the water?” I asked curiously.

“Oh, that happens all the time.” He laughed. “I’ll just dive down and get it again. We’ve lost it in deeper water than this before! It’s only waist-high here;
that’s one of the reasons we use this spot.”

Lily was, as I had anticipated, not particularly pleased at my failure, and the prospect of her two years’ free deliveries vanished somewhere beyond the city limits, but
she was even less pleased the next morning.

“I don’t believe it!” The words, uttered in her shrillest voice echoed around the courtyard of her house. “Both of them gone, now?”

The bearer of the news was none other than Flint Knife: Cloud Eagle’s cousin.

“That man owes me a good deal,” Lily was saying, “and if you’re telling me his son’s gone missing as well . . .”

“What happened?” I asked Flint Knife. “And why are you here?”

The man was almost as angry as Lily. His face was a peculiar purple colour. “How should I know what happened? All I know is, when I went to fetch my boat this morning, it wasn’t
there. I though my cousin might have borrowed it so I went to his house. But his mother told me he’d vanished in the night – just like his father before him! I came here because I knew
you’d been looking for Blue Feather and you spoke to his son yesterday – I thought you might have some idea where he might have gone.” The man breathed heavily, and added:
“I need that boat, you understand? It’s all very well helping out a relative in trouble, but I have to have it back, or else how am I supposed to live?”

The pitiful note in his voice did not impress Lily. “I don’t understand what made you think we could help. I’ve got enough troubles of my own – what?”

Her last word was snarled at me, because I had just cleared my throat. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we can help, after all.” I turned to the water seller.
“Just one question, though. When you spoke to Blue Feather’s wife this morning, did she seem upset at all?”

He stared at me incredulously. “What, a woman who’s just had both her husband and her son vanish into thin air?” He paused, frowning. “Actually, now you come to think of
it, she didn’t seem all that concerned. She didn’t look as if she’d been up all night crying, anyway.”

“What are you thinking, Yaotl?” my mistress demanded.

I glanced up at the sky. It was cloudy, but I sensed that the sun had not yet climbed very high. “It may not be too late,” I muttered to myself. “If he waited until dawn . . .
And he would, he might not find the place in the dark . . .” I looked at my mistress. “We’ll have to go now, though,” I said. “In fact if we can run, so much the
better!”

I was to regret my suggestion four hundred times over before we had come to the water-seller’s house. As a former priest I had been trained to endure pain and exhaustion,
by the endless round of fasts, ritual self-mortifications and vigils that our rites demanded, but that had been many years before. By the time we reached our objective my lungs felt as though they
had been seared by hot smoke and my legs were twitching and threatening to double up under me. Flint Knife looked and sounded worse than I was. Lily, who had kept pace with us with her skirts
gathered about her knees, seemed, surprisingly, a little better, although in truth for the last part of the journey we had all more or less slowed to a brisk walk. All the same, as soon as the
little house hove into sight I realized we had got there in time.

We all paused for a moment, panting. It was Cloud Eagle’s uncle who was the first to utter words, staggering two further, exhausting steps towards the canoe moored by the house.
“That’s . . . my . . . boat!” he gasped incredulously.

“Yes,” I muttered, starting forward myself. “And there’s your nephew, and look what he’s holding under his arm! Stop!”

The young man wasted only a moment staring at me and my exhausted and desperate-looking companions. Then he leapt straight into his canoe, the object still cradled under his arm, and seized a
paddle with his free hand. At the same time his mother appeared from the house, screeched once and ran along the bank towards us.

Cloud Eagle managed one-handed to get the boat to move. It did not get very far. Flint Knife let out an angry howl and jumped into the waist-deep water in front of it, waving his arms wildly.
The canal was too narrow for the vessel to pass, and Cloud Eagle could not get enough speed up to run his cousin down. He bellowed in frustration, lashing the water with his paddle. Then he raised
it to strike at Flint Knife, which was when I drew level with the canoe, jumped in and wrested the trophy from the crook of his arm.

At the same time Lily raced past me to confront Cloud Eagle’s mother. Recalling the words they used to each other still makes me blush. It took Cloud Eagle’s despairing voice to call
an end to the brawl. “It’s all right, Mother,” he moaned, tossing the paddle into the canal. “It’s no good. They’re on to us. They’ve got it
now.”

There was barely room for all of us to squat or kneel in the courtyard of Blue Feather’s house. The water-seller’s wife – widow, I reminded myself – did
not offer us anything to eat. She stood in the corner and glared at us.

I set the thing I had taken from her son on the hard earth in front of me. The goddess Jade Skirt’s emerald eyes gleamed into mine, sparkling as if with mirth. Well, I thought, nobody ever
claimed the gods had no sense of humour.

“Well, now I’ve got my boat back, I’ll be off,” Flint Knife said.

“Not so fast!” snapped Lily. “I still want to know what happened, and where’s Blue Feather?” When no one else answered she turned to me. “Yaotl?”

“In the lake, near where the aqueduct enters the city, I should think.” I looked at his son. “But I don’t think he’ll be coming back from there, will he?”

The lad said nothing.

“You’d better explain,” Lily said.

“It’s easy enough. You remember how the water-seller wanted me to describe the ceremony at the aqueduct in detail – even down to things like exactly where the priest was
standing when he threw the idol in the water? He claimed it was because he wanted to make sure it was all done right, but of course that was nonsense. Why should it matter to him? He’s just
an ordinary trader, and not a very successful one at that, judging by the state of this place.” The grey-haired woman hissed reproachfully. “Which reminds me – I noticed tobacco
tubes in the trash heap outside, and couldn’t think what they were doing in such a poor household.

“I didn’t work out what was happening when the old man vanished, but when we heard his son had disappeared too, it was suddenly obvious. They were after this statue – or at
least the gold and jewels in it. This is what I think happened. Both Blue Feather and Cloud Eagle went out the other night, in Blue Feather’s canoe. They knew where the statue was, thanks to
my description. However they were a bit wary of just going straight to the place to fish it out, because it was inside the city and someone might see what they were up to. So instead, they took
their boat to the point near the shore of the island, where the aqueduct first enters the city. Cloud Eagle here climbed up to the aqueduct and made his way along it. I’m not sure how deep it
is when it’s full, but I suppose he used one of those tobacco tubes to breathe through.

“He would have had to grope around under the water for a while, but he obviously found what he was looking for. Then he made his way back and threw the statue down to his father in the
boat.”

A groan from the young man told me I had got it right. “That’s where it went wrong, isn’t it?” I said. “Because Blue Feather didn’t catch it – and being
solid gold, it went through the bottom of the boat, straight into the lake. And by the time Cloud Eagle here realized what had happened, the boat and his father had both vanished.”

Lily gasped. Even Flint Knife muttered something under his breath that may have been an expression of shock. Cloud Eagle looked at the ground. Only his mother was impassive.

“And that’s it, really. The young man had to go home and tell his mother what had happened. She knew about the plot all along, of course – she could hardly fail too, with both
of them out overnight – and they agreed that he should go back the next night and try to retrieve the statue from where it had sunk. He’s a good diver – unlike his father, alas!
Blue Feather and the boat will still be there, of course.” Even if Cloud Eagle could have retrieved the body, I knew he would not: the drowned were sacred to the Rain God and only priests
could touch them. “They must be in the lake – someone would have noticed them in a canal.”

There was a long silence, which Lily eventually broke. “So, I’m not going to get my free water.” She sounded philosophical enough about it. “What do we do with these,
though?” she asked, indicating our unwilling hosts. Aztecs rarely went out at night, except with good reason; but Lily and I had a good reason. Besides, I had been a priest, and knew how to
fight any demons we might encounter. And we had the gods on our side, I thought, as I extended a hand to help my mistress up to the edge of the aqueduct; one of the gods, at least.

“Amazing, the risks some people will take,” I mused, as I gazed for the last time into Lady Jade Skirt’s glittering green eyes.

“What, us perching here, you mean?”

“No, I mean fooling around with the gods, the way that water seller was prepared to do, and for what? For something he could sell in the marketplace.”

We had not reported Cloud Eagle and his mother to the authorities. Losing Blue Feather and the boat had seemed punishment enough.

I smiled, and after a brief glance at my mistress, tossed the gold statue back into the water, where it belonged.

I watched it sink with a twinge of fear. What if it were looted a second time? What about all the other precious things that were tossed into the water and, as the workman had told me, never
seen again? What if, in the end, the goddess never got anything but the kind of rubbish the labourers found when they dredged the aqueduct?