[Aztec 03] - City of Spies, стр. 61

‘Right,’ I said slowly. I looked at my son again. ‘Let’s see if we can at least get her to tell us whether we were right about what happened at Hare’s house, shall we?’

‘How are you going to do that?’ Kindly asked sceptically.

‘We’ll play a game.’ I stood up. ‘Nimble, you can be Hare.’ I gestured towards him and spoke to the girl. ‘Hare.’

She stared at me, or at least turned her head in my direction with her crossed eyes wide and her forehead creased as if in puzzlement.

‘Bear with me,’ I muttered. Aloud, I slapped my own chest and then stood straight upright with my shoulders back and my arms bent. I flexed my muscles and tried to look as much like a beefy warrior as my scrawny frame would allow. ‘Big man.’ I said it in Nahuatl, of course, but in a deep voice.

The girl frowned, as though puzzled, and looked from one of us to the other. ‘Hare,’ she said haltingly, followed by a short, incomprehensible speech.

‘Something she doesn’t like about that,’ Kindly suggested.

‘I don’t know,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe she’s saying I don’t look much like a Texcalan warrior with a ruined face! You can see her point.’

‘Yes. You’re too ugly.’

Next I gestured towards Kindly. ‘Ix Men,’ I announced solemnly.

‘You must be joking!’ spluttered the old man, but that was followed by a most unexpected sound: a sudden peal of laughter from the girl. ‘Ix Men!’ she giggled. ‘Ix Men!’

‘That’s my girl!’ I cried encouragingly.

‘All right,’ Kindly grumbled. ‘Very clever. So now what?’

I hesitated. ‘We need the girl to tell us that.’

‘As if she was directing a play. You want us to act it all out, like in one of those awful farces they put on in front of Quetzalcoatl’s temple for the Eating of Plain Water Tamales?’

‘Something like that.’

Nimble said: ‘If we pretend I’m Hare and this is my house, then I suppose, Father, you ought to be rummaging through my stuff, and I come home and surprise you.’

‘We can try it. Why don’t you step outside?’ As he left I turned back to Little Hen. ‘Hare,’ I reminded her.

‘What about me, then?’ asked Kindly plaintively.

The girl told him. ‘Ix Men,’ she said with a grin and then slapped the ground next to her.

‘Ah, of course,’ I said. ‘Underground. You’re hidden in the hole, aren’t you?’

‘Better start digging, then!’ Kindly suggested.

I replied by grabbing a blanket and throwing it at him. ‘Cover yourself with that.’ Then I got up and walked across the room to bend over him in a dumb show of someone rummaging through a chest. ‘So here I am, rifling through Hare’s possessions . .

A muffled voice asked: ‘Do I come out and surprise you now?’

I looked over my shoulder at the girl. ‘Ix Men?’

She replied at some length, gabbling in her own language and waving her arms about. There was no point in trying to follow what she was saying, of course, but I realized there was a pattern in her movements as her hands reached up into her hair, catching two strands and tugging at them so that they stood up over her head.

‘What does that mean?’ I wondered aloud.

Kindly poked his head from under the blanket to watch her. ‘Perhaps she’s got nits!’ he suggested sourly.

‘I don’t think so… Well, never mind.’ Abandoning, for the moment, the attempt to interpret her gestures, I resumed my pretence of rummaging through the merchant’s possessions. This time, when I looked over my shoulder and spoke her name, she slapped the ground, as she had before Kindly had vanished under the blanket.

‘She’s reminding us that you’re still underneath the chest, and you probably don’t have any idea what’s happening up here. You’ve no way of knowing I’m not Hare… Right, so what makes you come out? Hare comes in and finds me, I suppose. Nimble!’

My son came back into the room. He looked quizzically at the blanket with Kindly under it but said nothing.

‘He’s — or rather she’s — hiding under a wicker chest,’ I explained. ‘Which is where you left her when you went out, I presume. You’ve just come in to find me chucking your stuff about.’ I glanced at the girl. ‘Hare?’

She started gabbling in her own language again.

An argument or a fight,’ Nimble ventured. ‘After all, I’ve Just caught an intruder in my house, haven’t I?’

‘Makes sense. All right, then, so we have a fight.’

Nimble and I locked arms and began dancing around each other in a strange parody of combat.

The girl watched us intently, her head swinging back and forth in time with our mock struggle. She frowned, as though puzzled, and I had the impression that what we were doing was somehow not quite right, but she said nothing.

‘She’s waiting for something,’ Nimble muttered.

‘I agree — oh, I see. We aren’t making any noise!’

Immediately we began grunting and swearing at each other. The girl continued frowning at us for a moment. Then she began gabbling and tugging her hair again.

‘Maybe you should be tearing my hair out, or I should be pulling yours,’ Nimble said.

‘Maybe,’ I said dubiously. ‘Or perhaps I’ve got you to submit, the way warriors do it on a battlefield. I’m supposed to be a warrior, after all. So I grab my fallen opponent by the hair and shout: “This is my beloved son!”’ I looked at Little Hen to see whether the ritual phrase was familiar to her.

She gave no sign of recognition.

‘Still wrong,’ I muttered. ‘But something must have got her out of that hole.’

Nimble crouched in front of her. He spoke her name imploringly. He said it again, looking at the blanket covering Kindly. She repeated it confidently, as though she understood his meaning.

‘That’s something, at least,’ he said. He looked at me and back at the girl again. The word that drew from her might have been birdsong for all it meant to us, but then she turned those strange eyes on Nimble