I gestured with the point of my arrow. “Betrayed us.”
With a guttural roar, Temilotzin hoisted his obsidian-studded club. “Then he will die!”
“No, please!” Lowering my bow, I caught at his arm. It felt like tugging on an oak log. “We need to question him.”
Reluctantly, Temilotzin relented. The expression on his blood-spattered face was implacable in the moonlight. If I’d had any doubt that a stone face and a stone heart lay beneath his easygoing manner, it vanished then and there. He jerked his chin at Eyahue. “And him? Did he betray us, too?”
“Never!” the old man said with fierce indignation.
“I believe he speaks the truth,” I said. “But we need to know more. Can you guard them without killing anyone?”
He grunted. “I will try.”
Accompanied by Septimus Rousse, I went to help take stock of the situation. Brice de Bretel and another level-headed L’Agnacite fellow named Jean Grenville were working to stoke the campfire and give us more light by which to assess the damage to the wounded. Balthasar Shahrizai, who looked pale but otherwise unharmed, was directing other uninjured men to set up sentry posts farther afield where their night vision wouldn’t be compromised by the blazing fire.
It didn’t surprise me that Balthasar had maintained the presence of mind to fully arm himself. For all his insouciance, there was steel in him.
Aside from poor Clemente DuBois, the dead were those who hadn’t kept their wits, and whom Septimus and I hadn’t been able to aid in time. All five had plunged into battle bare-headed or with unbuckled helmets that had come loose in the fray. The war-clubs of the Cloud People may have been crude weapons, but they were capable of wielding them with deadly force on unprotected flesh.
Bao, kneeling beside a groaning warrior with a broken arm, glanced up at our arrival. “Moirin. You didn’t listen to me, did you?”
It occurred to me that if Bao wasn’t so skilled at keeping his opponents out of reach, it could well be him lying among the dead with a crushed skull. “No, I did not.” I pointed toward the picket-line. “Which is the reason we still have pack-horses, and Temilotzin is standing guard over the traitor Pochotl. Now, tell me what to do.”
“Pochotl, eh?” He sounded tired.
I nodded. “He’s safe enough for now. Tell me how I can help.”
“And me,” Septimus added.
Bao gathered himself. “I need the sharpest blade you can find. We’re going to have to cut off his brigandine. And branches, as straight as you can find. I’ll need to splint his arm once I get it set.”
“I’ll help.” Denis de Toluard limped into the circle of firelight, nursing a bruised thigh. “I understand a bit, at least in theory. Raphael used to discuss his practice with me.”
“Good,” Bao said with curt approval.
The aftermath of battle is a terrible thing. In some ways, this was not the worst I had known. The scale of devastation wrought on human flesh by the weapons of the Divine Thunder in Ch’in was almost more than the mind could encompass.
But this time, I was responsible.
And we were deep in hostile, unfamiliar territory. Our victory was tenuous at best, and the road ahead of us long and hard. The dead would be buried far from home. There was no respite for the wounded, no safe haven where they could heal.
I found the sharpest knife in the camp—one of Balthasar Shahrizai’s well-honed daggers. I held Arnaud Latrelle’s good hand and hummed one of Sister Gemma’s healing Eisandine tunes to the best of my ability while Bao sawed relentlessly at the suede arm of his brigandine with Balthasar’s dagger.
He was a young one, Arnaud Latrelle, younger than me. “Guess I should have taken the time to put on chain-mail?” he gasped.
I stroked his sweat-damp brow. “Next time, aye, that would be a good idea.”
He choked back a scream of pain when Bao and Denis maneuvered the broken bones of his forearm into place, lashing them firm with strips of torn cloth and straight pine-branches Septimus Rousse had procured from a nearby copse.
There were others.
I checked the dilated pupils of two men struck hard on the steel helm by the war-clubs of the Cloud People, soothing them while they retched and vomited.
I comforted another with a broken clavicle, who bit his lip and writhed with agony as Bao eased his chain-mail shirt over his head, Denis holding his legs to keep him as still as possible while Bao wrapped him in makeshift bandages to stabilize the break.
All in all, it was a long night.
Dawn broke over the plain, finding us all weary and exhausted. Brice and some of the others had shifted the corpses of the slain Cloud People warriors some distance from the camp. Our own dead had been arranged in a somber row.
“Should we…?” Balthasar gestured uncertainly at them.
“Bury them?” Bao gave a tired nod. “We can’t leave them for scavengers.”
“What of their weapons and armor?” Balthasar looked ill. “No one wants them to fall into enemy hands, but we can’t afford the extra weight.”
“No.” Bao pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. “And if we bury them in armor…” He dropped his hands and glanced across the empty plain toward the Cloud People settlement atop the mountain. It looked quiet and peaceful from a distance, but appearances were deceiving.
“They very well might dig them up,” Balthasar finished the thought for him.
“Take the armor downstream and throw it in the river,” I suggested. “It’s deep and fast enough in places that they’d be hard-pressed to retrieve it if they even thought to look there.”
Bao gave me a grateful look. “And the water will rust them in time. Well thought, Moirin.”
Accordingly, Balthasar recruited one team to set about the grim business of stripping the dead of whatever armor they’d managed to don in their haste and gathering those pieces they hadn’t, and another team to begin hacking a common grave out of the soil, using the hand-axes and adzes we’d brought for the purpose of building vessels.
While they worked, Bao and I went to question Pochotl. We borrowed Denis and Balthasar—the former because I wanted someone else skilled in the Nahuatl tongue to hear what was said, and the latter for his keen interrogation skills.
As it transpired, Pochotl was more than willing to talk. After months of sullen reticence, he was downright forthcoming. When I asked him why he’d done it, he stared at me as though I’d gone mad.
“To make an end to this!” He waved one hand, indicating the campsite. “I do not fear to risk my life for my people, but why should I do so for yours?”
“Because the Emperor ordered it,” Temilotzin growled. “Do you think he would thank you for giving steel weapons and horses to our enemy?”
Pochotl shrugged. “It is only one small city. None of the Cloud People know how to use these weapons. They do not even have macahuitls. We could have come back with an army and defeated them, taken their weapons and horses. The men of Aragonia are too far away to stop us. The Emperor could not be angry at us, because we did not harm the foreigners under his protection.”
Temilotzin scratched his chin, dislodging flakes of dried blood. “That’s a pretty good plan.”
I scowled at him.
The Jaguar Knight grinned at me. “Peace, my little warrior. I did not say I agreed with it.” He thumped the spotted hide over his chest, loosing a further dusting of dried blood. “I keep my word. Shall I kill him now?”
“Yes!” Eyahue said in a fierce voice.
“No!” I said in alarm. “No, we need to know for sure if he acted alone, or if Eyahue knew.” I glanced apologetically at the old man, who shrugged, taking no offense. “We need to know if the Cloud People are gathering for another attack, and if we’ll find them enemies from now onward.”
“Oh, those are good questions.” Temilotzin turned to Pochotl with a cheerful smile. “Answer them, or before I kill you, I will peel the skin from your flesh and dance before you wearing it like a priest of Xipe Totec.”
“Xipe Totec?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Denis murmured.
Balthasar, doing his best to follow the conversation, shuddered. Even Bao looked a bit nonplussed.
For a mercy, Pochotl continued to answer freely. No, Eyahue had known nothing of his plan, which he’d conjured on the spot once they’d parted ways in the city. The Cloud People were of two minds whether or not to trust him, and decided to send a small raiding party of fifty or sixty warriors to see if it was indeed possible to kill us all in our sleep.
“Not you, Uncle,” he added. “I made them promise to spare us.”
Eyahue glared at him. “Idiot sister-son! You trusted them to keep their word?”
Temilotzin rubbed his chin again. “That is a flaw in your plan.”
“They had no reason not to!” Pochotl defended himself. He gestured at the campsite. “In their eyes, I would have given them a great gift!”
“No,” Eyahue said as slowly as though he were speaking to a dim-witted child. “In their eyes, you would have proved yourself an oath-breaker unworthy of trust. It is likely they would have killed us rather than take any chances. That is why a pochteca’s word of honor is so important. Trade is built on trust. I am sorry you never understood this.” He glanced at me. “The Cloud People attacked us. They will not hold us to blame for their defeat, and I do not believe they will try again.” He nodded at Temilotzin. “You may kill him now.”
Obligingly, the spotted warrior raised his club.
“Wait!” I pleaded once more. Temilotzin sighed and lowered his club. I turned to Pochotl. “You said you found someone among the Cloud People who had seen Prince Thierry’s party on the road. Was that true?”
Pochotl gave me a flat stare. “No,” he said. “I lied.”
“Now may I kill him?” Temilotzin asked in a tone of long-suffering patience.
I thought of Edouard Durel held under guard in Orgullo del Sol. He had betrayed us as surely as Pochotl had, but gods willing, he would be returned to Terre d’Ange to bear witness against Claudine de Barthelme and her son. He would be tried fairly in a court of law, and mayhap even granted some form of clemency for cooperating.
Executing a man in cold blood was not a deed that sat well with me.
But Pochotl had betrayed us; and if his plan had succeeded, there was no chance we would have survived. The Cloud People would have crept into our camp and bludgeoned us to death in our sleep. Pochotl had slit poor Clemente DuBois’ throat with his own hand, and five other men were dead because of his treachery. He had disobeyed the Nahautl Emperor’s direct order.
By the implacable looks on Eyahue and Temilotzin’s faces, I could see that there was no sparing him.
“Yes,” I said to the latter. “You may.”
The Jaguar Knight hoisted his obsidian-studded club. “You may wish to stand back,” he warned us. “This will be messy.”
The rest of us retreated a few paces.
Pochotl stood unmoving, his expression stoic. Temilotzin swung his macahuitl club in one hard, level blow at the fellow’s neck. The edges of the obsidian flakes lining his club may have been brittle, but they were razor-sharp. His strike sheared Pochotl’s head clean away from his body. The head bounced and rolled on the plain, while blood jetted in a crimson geyser from the stump of his neck. The headless body remained upright for the space of a few heartbeats before crumpling to the ground.
Denis de Toluard turned away and vomited.
I would have liked to do the same, but I fought against the surge of nausea, swallowing bile and struggling to keep my face expressionless. Temilotzin gave me an approving look, then clapped Denis on the shoulder. “Your stomach will grow stronger in time,” he assured him, then stooped to pick up Pochotl’s head by its long black hair. “Do you want him buried with the others, old man?” he asked Eyahue.
The old pochteca regarded his nephew’s disembodied head with disgust. “No,” he said. “Leave him to the scavengers.”
We did.
FORTY-FIVE
In the wake of our first battle, once the worst of the aftermath had been dealt with, I found I had a rebellion on my hands.
Alain Guillard, the hotheaded Azzallese baron’s son who had bunked in one of the wardroom’s cabins aboard Naamah’s Dove with us, was arguing that we should turn back; and he’d convinced at least three others.
“This was madness from the beginning!” he railed. “What in Elua’s name were we thinking, any of us?”
“I was thinking I abandoned some of my dearest friends and the Dauphin of Terre d’Ange to their fate!” Denis de Toluard retorted with unexpected force. “And that I’d been given a chance to redeem myself!”
“That’s your burden, Denis,” Alain said in a remorseless tone. “I didn’t.”
“Be glad I carry it!” Denis shouted at him. “It gives me nightmares until I can’t sleep at night!” He jerked his chin at the waiting common grave dug into the earth and the line of D’Angeline dead nearby, stripped of their armor. “If it didn’t, we’d all be like them!”
“And so we all will sooner or later!” Alain shouted back at him. He gestured savagely in my direction. “She doesn’t know where she’s going, Denis! None of us do!” With an effort, he wrestled himself under control. “We’ve been on the road for months, and we’re not even in sight of these fabled jungles. Now we’re supposed to rely on people like to slaughter us in our sleep to assure us we’re on the right track?” He shook his head. “We’re only days away from the borders of the Nahuatl Empire. If we turn back now, we stand a chance of surviving this.”