[Aztec 03] - City of Spies, стр. 60
We went to the house Kindly had found in Huexoda. It seemed the obvious thing to do, at least for the moment. There was no point in going to Hare’s place. Kindly and Nimble had planned to stop there with the girl, but after what had just happened, I assumed Hunter and his comrades would be all over it even before dawn broke. We had to leave the gruesome remains of Black Flower’s spies in the roadway for them to pick up. There was no time to do anything for them.
When we returned to the house, we found a few embers still glowing in the hearth of its one room. While Nimble stirred them, Kindly went straight to the corner where his staff was propped against the wall.
The old man stood still and quiet for a few moments, as though in contemplation. Then, with difficulty and an audible creaking, he bent down to rummage through the little pile of his possessions at his feet, coming up with a tiny sliver of obsidian and a strip of paper. Straightening himself, he lanced his earlobe with the razor and held the paper up to the wound until it was soaked with blood. Finally, he wrapped the darkly stained strip around the staff, whose shape was already barely recognizable beneath the layers of wrapping it had been given in all its owner’s years as a merchant.
The old man was making an offering of his own blood to Yacatecuhtli, Lord of the Vanguard, the merchants’ god: his own god and Lily’s.
As he turned away from the staff, his eyes caught the firelight. To my surprise, they were dry, and when he spoke his voice was steady. ‘She’s in the god’s hands now,’ he said simply.
‘I understand.’ I looked at my feet. There was no hint of reproach in the old man’s look or in his speech; no expression of any kind that I could read. I might have preferred it if he had screamed at me or broken down and wept.
‘Will you find me some incense for the fire. Nimble?’ he asked.
As the room filled with the sweet, sickly scent of burning copal resin, another offering to the old man’s god, I turned my attention to the girl my son had found.
She had opened the blanket to let the fire’s warmth get to her. Underneath it she wore a plain blouse and skirt, both of them patched, frayed and soiled. In one hand she clutched the mutilated doll we had found at Hare’s house. When I looked from the doll’s face to hers, I saw confirmed what we had suspected. The girl was, I guessed, about eleven years old or so, and as unmistakably Mayan as her toy. Her forehead sloped sharply back into the line of her black hair, and her eyes were crossed, their pupils apparently fixed unwaveringly on the bridge of her nose. With her mouth closed I could not see whether her teeth were filed or not, but I saw no need to check.
She kept turning her head, looking from one of us to another as best she could through those peculiar eyes. Her glance was disconcerting, as it was impossible to meet.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked gently.
Nimble came and squatted next to me. ‘We’ve tried talking to her,’ he said, ‘but she just looks at us blankly. I don’t think she speaks any Nahuatl. The only thing I can get out of her is “lx Men.” She keeps saying that. I think it may be her name.’
‘Makes sense if it is,’ Kindly said. ‘I think it means something like “Hen”.’
Little Hen. I thought it might suit the bird-like way in which she kept moving her head. ‘How did you find her?’
Nimble said: ‘Like I said — just a matter of knowing where to look. I don’t know Tetzcoco’s markets, but I know the types; they’re the same the World over. The poor kid would have gone with the first man who offered her food and shelter. That kind’s easy to find. It’s their business to be.’
‘Talking of business,’ grumbled Kindly, ‘it was a pretty costly matter buying her out of there. It’ll be a real shame if she can’t talk to us!’
I looked at the girl keenly. ‘Ix Men?’ I ventured.
She whispered something in reply; a string of exotic, guttural syllables that meant nothing to me whatever.
I remembered something. Turning to Kindly, I said: ‘I thought you knew Mayan? What’s she saying?’
The old man sighed. ‘I know the dialect they speak around Xicallanco, and I can read a few of the funny squiggles they use for writing. But this is mostly gibberish. There are lots of different sorts of Mayan, apparently.’
I groaned. ‘Wonderful. Just what I wanted to hear. I don’t suppose she had a message about her person, did she?’
‘None that we could see.’
I turned back to the girl. ‘Little Hen,’ I sighed. ‘I bet you could tell us everything we want to know, couldn’t you? You must have seen everything Hare was up to… Ah.’
The girl had started, as if stung by a wasp, at the mention of the dead merchant’s name. Then she unleashed a torrent of what sounded like wild abuse, her strange eyes widening, the fist with the doll in it whitening with tension while her empty hand opened and closed spasmodically.
‘Not happy about something. I’d say,’ Kindly observed.
I turned to Nimble. ‘Sounds as if you may have had the correct idea about the merchant.’
My son came and squatted next to me. Leaning a little towards Little Hen, he reached for her doll with one hand but drew it back hastily when she clutched the toy to her chest more tightly than ever.
‘Hare?’ Nimble asked gently.
The girl seemed to hesitate before uttering a single, explosive syllable. She brandished the doll in a sharp,