Shadow of the Lords Read Free

and taken home by my family. They had tolerated me, but never let me forget how I had let them down: how I had thrown away a chance my brothers and sisters had never had, not to mention whatever it had cost my father to secure my admittance to the House of Tears.
    I had sought refuge from their taunts and reproaches inside a drinking-gourd. I hoped the sour taste of sacred wine would take away the bitterness of my loss. Instead it doubled my humiliation, getting me arrested for the crime of public drunkenness.
    I ought to have died then. For priests and nobles, the
penalty for being found drunk without lawful excuse was to be cudgelled to death. In some ways the alternative was worse. My life was spared, but all my hair was shaved off, in the plaza in front of the Emperor’s palace, before a laughing, jeering crowd. How he wore his hair mattered to an Aztec, whether he had it piled up on his head like a pillar of stone to show he was a successful warrior or left it unkempt, bloody and matted as the mark of a priest. Having your head shaved was like being told you were nobody. It was what we did to a war-captive before sacrificing him, as a sign that, whatever he may have done in life, now he was just a corpse.
    I had endured it only because I had known I was going to get blind drunk the moment I was set free.
    I had paid for my next gourd full of sacred wine, and many more after that, by selling myself into slavery.
    Slavery was not all bad. An Aztec could sell himself to cover his debts or provide for his family when times were hard or, as in my case, to keep himself in drink for a little longer. The deal had to be struck openly, in the market, before four witnesses. Then the law allowed the slave his freedom during the time it took to run through the money he was given, before he had to surrender himself to his master and do his bidding.
    After that, his master owned his time but not his life. A slave’s property was his own, not his master’s. His master had no rights over his family or his children. A slave could not be ill treated or killed or even sold without good reason – although once he had given his master cause to get rid of him he might well find himself being bought by the priests as a cheap sacrifice.
    There were worse fates than slavery that could befall a man, so long as he had no self-respect. A slave could not glorify and enrich himself by going to war and dragging home captives, or pay his debt to his city by giving his labour to some great
public work, as it was not his to give. In the eyes of my people, I counted for nothing more than an extension of the Chief Minister’s right arm.
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    â€˜What’s so funny?’ my brother demanded.
    We were standing on the Tlacopan causeway, the broad road connecting the island of Mexico with the lake’s western shore.
    Handy had put us all ashore, ferrying us in relays to the small town of Popotla. There my master and the woman had found canoes to take them home, leaving Lion and me to walk. Ordinarily Lion could easily have hired a boat himself, but he had no money with him, and in his present state no one would have taken him for the distinguished and wealthy man he was.
    Now he and I found ourselves in the middle of a dense, jostling crowd. In the northern part of the city the great market of Tlatelolco alone drew at least forty thousand men, women and children every day: buyers and sellers of everything from feathers and jewels to slaves, building materials and human dung to spread in the fields. Most of the bulky items, such as hides or tree trunks or stone from the quarries, came in by canoe, but there was enough traffic left over to jam the roads. Lion had just avoided having his eye pecked out by a live turkey slung over a farmer’s wife’s shoulder, and his snarl as he recoiled and caught my involuntary grin reminded me that this was not what he was used to.
    My elder brother’s origins had been as humble as