The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  I glanced doubtfully up at the pyramid. The blue and red of the temples at its summit still gleamed vividly in the sunshine, but the line of shadow creeping up the bloodstained steps told me it was not long before nightfall.

  “Just a bite, maybe. I have to get back. Can’t keep my master waiting.”

  We left the merchant’s offering where it lay. I gave the pathetic pile of flesh a last look as we walked toward the marketplace, but nobody came to collect it, even though I lingered as long as I could, still wondering about those strange marks.

  We sat beside the canal that bordered the marketplace and munched on our round, flat bread.

  “I wasn’t told much,” I said. “Go to the merchant’s house, join the procession, make sure the sacrifice goes according to plan. My master wanted me there because I know how these things are done. I guess he owed the young man’s family a favor. Do you suppose he expected this to happen?”

  “How should I know?” Handy glanced over his shoulder at a corner of the marketplace where bearers and daylaborers could be found plying for hire at daybreak. “They took me on the day before yesterday. They needed a strong pair of hands, in case the offering got frisky.” Flesh flowed under the brown skin of his arms, making me glance wistfully at the bony claws holding my food. “Not much to do in the fields, so I came here. Too many mouths to feed to be sitting around idle at home. A boy came up to me and told me I’d do.”

  I had found Ocotl and Handy that morning at daybreak, waiting by the temple in Pochtlan, a parish in Tlatelolco, the northern part of the city. Ocotl sported an amber lip-plug, shell-shaped ear pendants and a netted cape, and carried a feather fan and feathered staves. He was tall for an Aztec, although it was hard to tell what he looked like beneath all his finery; and he had the cocksure manner of the young. His name meant a pine torch, or, figuratively, Shining Light, one who led an exemplary life. Handy wore what had once been his best clothes—an embroidered breechcloth with trailing ends, frayed at the edges, and a two-captive warrior’s orange cloak that had lost much of its color.

  There were two servants, whose charge was a heap of fine-looking cloaks that Shining Light had brought along in case he needed them for his slave’s ransom. He needed these because his offering’s journey to the war-god’s temple was not to be a straightforward one. All the offerings due to be presented by the merchants would be conducted first to the parish temple at Coatlan, where a crowd of warrior captives would be waiting in ritual ambush.

  The ambush was a curious part of the day’s proceedings, whose meaning was perhaps to teach the merchants that everything worth having had to be fought for. The warrior captives—men who were themselves due to die before sunset—would try to take the merchants’ offerings away from them, and the doomed slaves were expected to defend themselves with bird arrows. It was a real fight, fueled on both sides by sacred wine and the courage of despair, and if a warrior captive took a slave he would kill him unless the slave’s owner paid a ransom to the warrior’s captor. The ransom was always paid, since otherwise the merchant would have nothing to offer the war-god, and all his expensive preparations would go to waste.

  One look at the slave himself convinced me that his owner must have little notion of the value of money. He was not an impressive sight.

  He had been made to keep vigil at the temple all night and been plied with drink. His hair had gone at midnight and the fine clothes he had been given the night before had been taken away at dawn, when his face had been washed and his skin covered with chalk to give it a deathly pallor. Now he looked twitchy and febrile, starting even at the gentle voice of the woman who attended him, his bather, as she whispered soothing words into his ear. There was not even a suggestion of the dancer he must once have been in his spindly arms and legs and even though the chalk hid the marks on his skin he had one obvious physical blemish. His ears stuck out of his head at a ludicrous angle, like wings.

  I watched him closely as we took our places in the procession. He shuffled along, making no response to the chatter of the woman walking beside him, with his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  At Coatlan, he mutely accepted his bird arrow when it was pressed into his hands but made no use of it. That was not surprising: sometimes the sacred wine made the victims fight like wounded jaguars, but you never could tell what they would do. What struck me, as Handy and I led him back to his master with our ears still full of the warrior captives’ jeers, was the merchant’s indifference to losing his ransom. There had been enough cloth there to keep me for two years.

  Peynal’s arrival at the head of a crowd of panting followers stopped the fight and began the victims’ journey to the foot of the Great Pyramid, where the Emperor sat before a great crowd to watch the war-god receive his due.

  Our slave acted his part with the others as they ran or staggered four times around the pyramid’s base before lining up at the bottom of the steps. He watched in silence while Peynal’s bearer ran to the top, and the paper, cloth and feather image of the Fire-Serpent was brought down and burned. He said nothing as the war-god’s image was shown to the victims, and nothing as he was led to the foot of the Pyramid.

  It was only on the way up that things began to go awry.

  Shining Light, the victim and his bather mounted the steps side by side, with Handy and me behind them. I could not take my eyes off those absurd ears. The bather had fallen silent at last, but the merchant kept up a cheerful banter.

  “Not long now. How I envy you! The Flowery Death! To dance attendance on the Sun and be reborn as a hummingbird, a butterfly! I spend my days scratching around like a turkey after corn, and when I die I will go to the Land of the Dead like every other wretched soul, but you …”

  “Can’t see it, myself,” Handy mumbled. “You could count to twenty on his backbone. He looks all in to me. I thought the merchants were choosier … Look out! There he goes!”

  The slave fooled us. Instead of running down the steps, and so blundering straight into us, or racing up them, where there was no escape and one of us would have caught him immediately, he broke sideways to dart across the face of the pyramid. He had gone ten paces before Handy and I were after him.

  The young merchant kept climbing, seemingly enjoying himself so much that he failed to notice that his offering had escaped. The bather just stared after her charge.

  “Come back here, you … !” Handy roared as he dashed after the sacrifice.

  We raced along the narrow steps with a hopping gait, each foot on a different level. The gods must have been laughing. It took an agonizingly long time for our quarry to run out of space and find himself looking out over the side of the pyramid from between two of the stone banner holders that lined the stairway. I knew he was going to jump.

  “Listen to me, all of you!” he cried, as though the whole vast teeming city beneath him could hear. “It’s the boat—the big boat! Look for the big boat!”

  “Wait!” I said, desperately. What could I tell a man who was about to die, no matter what he or I did? I tried to make out his expression, but against the evening sky and the lake shining in the sunset he was just a shadow with large ears.

  “You mustn’t jump. You’re destined for the war-god—you heard your master, you’re going to join the morning Sun …”

  The Bathed Slave turned toward me then, twisting and stepping backward at the same time, so that he was poised on the edge of the steps.

  “It’s a lie,” he said quietly. “Bathed Slaves go to the Land of the Dead, like everyone else.”

  When he smiled his teeth showed white among the shadows of his face.

  “Just tell the old man,” he said.

  I dived for his feet, almost going over myself as I crashed onto the stones where he had been—but he had taken his last step and was lying, broken, far below me.

  3

  So much has happened since the days when the priests sacrificed to the gods at the summit of the Great Pyramid. No doubt the old ways now seem strange and
barbaric, and people wonder what it was all about, and why so many had to die under the Fire Priest’s flint knife.

  This is what we were taught.

  The World had been destroyed four times: by ravening jaguars, by the wind, by a rain of fire and by a flood. Each time the people had perished or been transformed beyond recognition, and so after the flood, at the beginning of the present age, the gods had to repopulate the Earth.

  After the last catastrophe one of their number, Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, went down into Hell to gather up the bones of the dead. However, even after he had retrieved them and had them ground up into powder, there was still no life in them. He had to slit his member and add his own blood to the powder to make a paste from which the first man and woman could be molded, and the other gods had to do likewise. The gods gave us life with their blood, and our debt to them could only be repaid with blood.

  What is more, we believed that without the daily tribute of human hearts, the Sun would not move. This part of the story went like this: after men and women had been created, the World was still in darkness, and so the gods gathered to re-create the Sun. They built a great fire and called on a splendid, richly adorned god to leap into it to be burned and reborn as the Sun. However, the fire was too hot, and while this magnificent god shrank from the fierce flames, the despised, wizened, pimply and disgusting god Nanahuatzin leaped past him into the inferno. As Nanahuatzin’s flesh blistered in the fire, shame overcame the splendid god’s fear and he jumped into the blaze as well. Nanahuatzin became the Sun and his magificent rival, the Moon. At first each was as bright as the other, but the other gods threw a rabbit in the Moon’s face to dim his light, and we see the rabbit’s shape on the Moon’s face to this day.

  Now the Sun and the Moon had been born, but they would not rise. They sat on the horizon, wobbling uncertainly, until the remaining gods sacrificed themselves to give them the energy they needed to move through the sky. Quetzalcoatl cut the other gods’ hearts out, throwing them into the fire before leaping into it himself. Then the first day began, thanks to the self-sacrifice of the gods, and we believed we had to follow their example, for if the gods were denied their feast of human hearts and blood, then the World would end.

  But we were like gods ourselves! No Aztec, not even the Emperor, believed himself to be a god, but we and the gods were partners in the struggle to sustain the Sun in his progress through the sky. Why else had the gods elevated our city over all others, to be the greatest in the World? Why else were our armies sent forth, but to gather captives for the Flowery Death, as we called it? Why else did we join in the gods’ feasting, eating the flesh of those who died on the killing stone while the gods were consuming their hearts?

  We gave our own blood freely enough, and all Aztecs took part in this, piercing our earlobes whenever we were called upon to repay a little of what we owed. Priests used to go further, slitting their tongues and penises with obsidian knives and drawing ropes through them, and presenting the bloodied ropes as a mark of their devotion. But the most precious offering, the gift of hearts that made the Sun rise, came mostly from captive enemy warriors and slaves bought for the purpose.

  Enemy warriors were the most prized victims and the greater a man’s prowess in battle the more the gods would savor his heart. The Aztec warrior who captured a distinguished opponent and presented him to be sacrificed could expect great rewards: lavish gifts from the Emperor’s hand, the right to wear cotton and sandals in the city and have his hair arranged in a certain style, the right to eat at the palace and drink sacred wine. Above all he would have what all Aztecs craved: fame and the chance to vaunt himself in front of his fellows.

  Some slaves were almost as valuable as captured warriors. These were the Bathed Slaves, purchased at great expense and pampered and groomed and bathed until they were a worthy gift for the god they were to die for. It was a great honor to be allowed to present one of these slaves. It meant shouldering some of the burden of the debt we owed to the gods and being allowed to act like a mighty warrior for a day.

  No group within the city competed for this honor more fiercely than the merchants. No matter how wealthy he was, the merchant’s demeanor was modest, marked by a cloak of coarse maguey fiber cloth instead of cotton, long, loose hair like a commoner’s and bare feet instead of sandals. This was only prudent in a city where wealth earned through trade, rather than as a reward for great deeds on the battlefield, was viewed with envy and contempt. Once in a while, however, a few selected merchants were allowed to dress up as warriors and present expensive slaves for sacrifice as if they had personally dragged them home from the wars. Such an occasion was the war-god’s great Festival of the Raising of Banners.

  I knew what preparations the young man who had presented our offering would have made for this festival. He would have gone to Azcapotzalco, the town that boasted the World’s greatest slave market, where he would have picked his man out from among the strongest and most beautiful the dealers had to offer. The slave would have been put through his paces. The merchant would have squeezed his muscles, looked into his eyes and mouth, inspected his body for blemishes, and watched him dance to the beat of a two-toned drum. A good dancer was worth a fortune, and he may have cost our young merchant forty of the large capes we used for money. Then he would have led his slave home and shut him in a wooden cage.

  I sometimes wondered what made so many Bathed Slaves go unprotesting to their deaths. No doubt some believed our poets when they sang of the sweetness of a Flowery Death and looked forward to joining the dead warriors who escorted the Sun toward his zenith and were reborn on earth as hummingbirds or butterflies. Others probably just resigned themselves, but I suspected that for many, caught up in the ritual of the festival, whatever they may have done in their previous lives—all the decisions and mistakes and accidents that had led to their being paraded before prospective buyers in the market—it must have seemed remote and strange, and the flint knife the only thing of substance that remained.

  The Bathed Slave was given a fine cotton cape and breechcloth, along with a long curved labret, pointed quetzal feathers for his ears, rattles made of ocelot skin and seashell for his ankles and strips of gold, turquoise, coral and obsidian to bind in his hair. He was given tobacco and flowers and good food. Then he was made to dance.

  For four nights he danced to the sound of drums, gliding through the steps of the Snake Dance before the admiring gazes of the young merchant’s family and guests. On the third night he was given more clothes and adornments: a feather-bordered jacket, colored blue, black and red and decorated with skulls and bones, a feather headdress, dyed turquoise with white pendants, obsidian sandals, brightly painted wooden earplugs, falcon wings of paper. These were sacred, and the man who wore them must have felt himself changed, a step further along the road toward his death and transfiguration.

  On that third night, also, he met his companions on that road—the escorts hired to stop him running away at the last moment, the priest who would supervise his vigil during his last night on Earth and his bather, the grotesquely motherly old woman who would tenderly wash his face, cosset him and speak soothingly to him and be with him constantly until he died.

  On the fourth night he was taken to the merchant’s parish temple. He was made to drink sacred wine, laced with sacred mushrooms—what we called obsidian wine. Drunk, he staggered through one last dance until midnight. Then they cut off his hair.

  How you wore your hair mattered in Mexico. Along with your clothes, it was the measure of who you were and what you had done. Tangled hair, matted with sacrificial blood, was the mark of a priest. Commoners and merchants wore their hair loose. An unblooded youth, who had yet to take a captive in war, had a big tuft of hair on the back of his head, which was shaved—all but for a single lock on the right side—when he took part in his first capture; and the last lock was taken when he took his first enemy warrior unaided. After that his hairstyle revealed his achievements in war, and a str
anger could see what a man had done just by looking at his head. A tonsure meant he had never taken a captive unaided, while a mass of hair, piled on top of his head in the style we called “stone pillar,” meant he had taken at least two. Our mightiest and most feared warriors, the Shorn Ones, wore their hair in a stiff crest on one side only.

  To cut off a mature man’s hair was not simply to humiliate him. It was to deny him any status at all. The moment the Bathed Slave’s hair was taken, he ceased to exist. From that moment, he was already dead; and, knowing this, most had no will of their own, and would follow the ritual of their death blindly.

  Unless, perhaps, the gods had inspired them to utter a prophecy.

  4

  In the West, the souls of mothers who had died in childbirth were bearing the Sun down into the Land of the Dead.

  “Time to go.” Handy tucked the uneaten portion of his food away in his lunch bag. I stared into the darkening water at our feet, watching the reflected light from the temple fires above us as it broke up and put itself back together in the wake of a canoe.

  “Wonder why he did it?” I mused.

  He yawned. “Maybe he thought he might as well save himself a climb.” He got up, letting his cloak fall over his knees. “Don’t know what all that crap was about a big boat, though. And what was that about Bathed Slaves going to the Land of the Dead—is that right?”

  “It is. They don’t join the morning Sun’s retinue like captured warriors. Mind you,” I added thoughtfully, “we don’t tell them that, naturally. I wonder how he knew?”

  “And I wonder who the old man is we were supposed to tell.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And the other funny thing,” my companion reminded me, “is the way he didn’t try anything, like running away or talking his way out of it, until the last moment.”

  “That’s not so strange, though. It’s the way he was treated beforehand: sacred wine, bathing, exhaustion, hunger, more sacred wine, and the costumes and the chalk whitening to make him look like death … after enough of that, I doubt if he’d have known his own name, and he’d have done anything you asked him to without question. All he’d have been able to think about was putting one foot in front of the other. Unless …” I paused.