The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  “He had something on his mind,” Handy suggested.

  “I wonder what, though.” I frowned thoughfully. “‘The big boat’—whatever it meant, it was important enough to him that he kept hold of it in spite of everything they put him through. Still, I wasn’t talking about the slave. I meant that merchant, Shining Light. The last thing the merchants’ chiefs would have wanted to see representing them in front of the Emperor is a scrawny creature like that slave he bought. Watching him jump off the pyramid will have provoked them beyond endurance.” Gestures like that were not appreciated in Mexico, where even those appointed to die were expected to play their part in our rituals, in return for the honor of a Flowery Death. It was shameful to cheat the gods. “That young man must know how much trouble he’s in now. He’ll be lucky if he can ever show his face in the city again. What made him choose that slave?”

  “Well, that’s a good thing about only hiring yourself out by the day. I won’t have to worry about it in the morning.”

  “I know.” I stood up with a sigh, just as the distant mournful warbling of a conch-shell trumpet signaled sunset. “I don’t really care either, I just want to know how I’m going to explain this to my master.”

  How was I going to explain this to my master?

  Slaves in Mexico had many rights, for we were sacred to Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, a capricious god who laughed at men and delighted in the sort of reversal of fortune that servitude represented. We could have possessions—our own money, even our own slaves. We could marry, and our children were not our masters’ chattels. We could not be ill-treated. A slave could not be sold unless he had given his master cause to be rid of him, and even then only after a third offense. He could not be killed unless he was one of that special class, the Bathed Slaves destined to dance and die at the festivals. This was the law.

  My master, however, was Lord Tlilpotonqui, He Who Is Feathered in Black. He was the Cihuacoatl, High Priest of the goddess called Snake Woman, and the Chief Priest, Chief Justice and Chief Minister of the Aztecs. Old Black Feathers was the most powerful man in the World, save only for the Emperor, and if he was not above the law, still, from where he stood, he could look it in the eye. What if he thought I should have foreseen what had happened? He would do nothing himself, of course, but he might look the other way while his sadistic monster of a steward vented his own rage on me on his master’s behalf.

  As Handy had reminded me, I had seen a lot of sacrifices. I had seen many at close quarters, and I knew every step in the ritual that should have led to the death of Shining Light’s slave, because I had been a priest myself.

  The temple and the Priest House had been my world from childhood, from the day my father, swollen with pride at his son’s acceptance into the harsh school called the House of Tears, had handed me over to sinister, black-robed strangers.

  We called the Priest House the House of Tears with reason: I wept when my father left me, and when soot was rubbed into my face and my ears were cut to make my blood splash onto the idol, and I wept many times afterward, during the bloodlettings, the fasts, the vigils, the rote learning of hymns and the Book of Days, the beatings meted out for the slightest offense. Over the years, however, I became hardened to it: I learned to do without food and sleep and not to mind that my hair was matted and lousy and my skin caked with dried sweat and dried blood. I learned to love the priest’s world because I belonged there, and because even the fiercest of warriors, seeing my blackened, blood-streaked face coming toward him, would stand aside for me. The tears I shed on my first day were no more bitter than those I cried years later, when it was all taken away from me and I was cast roughly back out into the world.

  I had many reasons not to dwell on that time, but as I approached the Chief Minister’s residence, I thought about the sacrifices I had seen as a priest, all the varied ways in which we had sent men, women and sometimes children to the gods, and realized that Handy had been right: I never had seen one go the way today’s had. It was not just how the man had died or his strange, prophetic-sounding words. There had been something unreal in the way he and his master had behaved throughout the day—from the slave’s appearance as a wasted, spindly-limbed freak to the merchant’s disappearance—which made me think each of them had been acting a part. But I could not see how I could have foretold what finally happened.

  So my master had nothing to reproach me with. I told myself this as I scurried fretfully through the few streets leading from the marketplace to his house. I was muttering it under my breath, hoping to convince myself that the Chief Minister might see it the same way, when I turned into the path bordering the canal that ran by his house and bounced off a large man hurrying in the opposite direction.

  “Out of the way, you clumsy … !”

  “Sorry,” I began, before another voice, one that I knew only too well, interrupted both of us.

  “Yaotl! There you are, you termite! We’ve been looking all over the city for you!”

  Disbelief and a renewed sense of life’s unfairness made me groan. I looked again at the large man, noting the cudgel in his paws, and at his fellows, who looked as if they had been hewn from lumps of granite, and finally at the man in their midst, the owner of the familiar voice, no less fearsome than his escort.

  He wore a yellow cloak with a red border, flowing about his calves as only the best cotton could, and tubular plugs in his ears. White ribbons bound his hair firmly at the nape of his neck. His body was stained black, like a priest’s. Yellow sandals with oversized straps adorned his feet. His appearance would have told anyone what he was: a distinguished warrior whose achievements had been rewarded by high office. A knowledgeable observer would have known that he was one of the Constables, who kept the peace in the city by executing those whom the judges had condemned. He might have been able to name the man’s office—Atenpanecatl, Guardian of the Waterfront. He would certainly have known that this official’s escort would be only too happy to use their cudgels at their leader’s whim.

  I needed no observer to tell me any of that, however. I would have known it without seeing the cloak or the ornaments or the bodyguards. As much as I might wish to, I could scarcely fail to recognize my own brother.

  “Mamiztli,” I responded coolly, with his bodyguards glaring down at me and no doubt wondering whether they were supposed to bow before me or bash me over the head. “This is a rare honor. Since when have the Constables handed messages to the Chief Minister’s slave in person?”

  My brother’s name suited him. It meant “Mountain Lion.”

  “More honor than you think, brother,” Lion assured me. “It’s not Lord Feathered in Black we’ve come for. It’s you.”

  “It will have to wait.” I glanced warily up at his escort. “I can’t keep the Chief Minister waiting, you know that.”

  “Oh yes you can. It is not I that wants to see you.”

  “Then who … ?” But I knew the answer, and the knowledge was like a cold claw suddenly twisting my entrails. What man’s summons could take precedence over the Chief Minister’s?

  “Why, the Emperor, of course. Congratulations, brother! You’ve succeeded in attracting the attention of Lord Montezuma!”

  5

  Lion and I grew up in Toltenco, at the edge of the rushes at the southern limit of the city. Our house had two rooms and a little walled yard with a dome-shaped bathhouse. The walls were daubed with mud and whitewashed until they gleamed, and roofed over with thatch so old you could no longer see it for moss. We were commoners: my family’s womenfolk made paper for a living. It was not very good paper: only the sort of cheap, coarse stuff that got burned in people’s hearths as an offering.

  For all that, both my eldest brother and I had seemed destined for great things. He was the great warrior in the making, ferocious, strong, brave and fast, certain to drag home many illustrious captives, provided he did not meet a Flowery Death first. I had none of his gifts, although I was smart and had a tongue nimble enough to tal
k us out of trouble as quickly as my brother’s bravado and hot temper got us into it.

  However, I had one other advantage that, from the outset, set me apart from all of my brothers: my birthday. I was born on One Death, in the year Nine Reed. It was a day so auspicious that I was pledged to the service of the gods almost from birth. How my father could afford to feast the Head Priest well enough to persuade him to let me into the Priest House was something I never knew, because he would never tell me just what it had cost him, although he used to hint at it often enough to show how bitterly he resented it. It must have been one of his proudest days when, seven years later, wearing an old, frayed maguey fiber mantle, made by cutting one of my grandfather’s cloaks in half, and a breechcloth that I had only just learned to tie myself, I went to live among the richly adorned sons of the nobility in the House of Tears. Twenty years after that the priests expelled me, and I was home again.

  My family took me in out of duty, but never forgave me for their disappointment or the shame I had brought upon them or the wealth they had squandered on my education. There was some kindness at home, but there were insults too, and petty humiliations and cold silences, and when I was not being berated with my failure as a son and my ineptitude with a canoe paddle or a digging stick, I was wallowing in self-pity and self-reproach.

  Small wonder that I soon fled from my parents’ house into the secret, soft-edged world of the sellers and drinkers of illicit sacred wine.

  My mother sent me to the market to sell her wares. She never saw the proceeds.

  Even in a city where drink was the preserve of a few—priests, four-captive warriors and the very old—and where being found drunk could cost you your life, there were many places where your troubles could be dissolved in exchange for a few cocoa beans: innocuous-looking stalls in the local markets, nondescript houses by narrow canals, secret spaces among the tall rushes at the edges of the lake. At one of these places a man I had known slightly pressed a gourd into my hands, and when we had emptied it I returned the favor. I did not go home that night.

  For a while I lived in the marshes at the lake’s edge, scraping scum off the surface of the water for local dealers who made it into cakes for sale in the market. As often as not they paid me in kind, with the roughest sacred wine I ever tasted. I kept myself going that way for a while, ignoring the great city, whose effluent I spent my days wading in, so long as it ignored me. We might have gone on like that forever if I had not been caught raving in the streets, out of my head on the dregs of a cast-off gourd.

  I was arrested for the crime of being found drunk in public, and for a former priest there could normally be only one penalty for that: to be executed publicly by the Constables in the Heart of the World.

  I lived only because my brother interceded with the judges. He persuaded them that, although I had once been a priest, I was still a commoner, and so should be punished only as a commoner. A noble or a serving priest would have been cudgeled to death. My brother spared me that, but not my humiliation: the Emperor’s ritual admonition before a great crowd of my fellow Aztecs, followed by the shaving of my head.

  Lion insisted on inflicting the lesser punishment on me himself, and carried out the sentence with evident relish. The strong arms that hauled me up by the hair and then cut it all away were his and it felt at the time as if he would have taken my scalp too if he had been allowed to.

  At the time, I would rather have died. Any Aztec would. I never forgave my brother for saving my life, any more than he and the rest of my family forgave me for blighting theirs. When I sold myself into slavery, I thought I was turning my back on them once and for all.

  Even with night about to fall, the palace’s entrance and the space around it were choked with people. The lord of a foreign city on a state visit, bedecked with feathers, jade and gold, had to mingle with the litigant whose argument with his parish over a land grant had found its way into the court of appeal, with the seasoned warrior claiming his right to be fed at the palace and with the special envoy whose voluminous ceremonial jacket entangled his neighbors’ elbows. They made a colorful crowd, shuffling slowly, mostly silently, toward the entrance, to be admitted or dismissed as the stewards saw fit.

  Ignoring them all, my brother strode directly toward the great stair that led up to the Emperor’s apartments. The crowd parted before us, putting a safe distance between themselves and our escort’s cudgels.

  My brother’s and the escort’s sandals clattered across the stuccoed patio. A few guards stood about, as stiff as statues, swords at the ready for any uninvited visitors. I imagined they would loosen up a little when my brother and I were called in, and they and his bodyguards could swap war stories and all be old soldiers together.

  “Is this going to take long?” Suddenly looming over the fear of what my master would do to me for being late was the prospect of meeting the Emperor. Even to look at his face was said to entail death for a commoner. What could I possibly have done, that he should want to interrogate me in person? “Why don’t we come back in the morning? Look, I’m in no fit state to be seen, I’m still all over blood from the sacrifice …”

  “Shut up,” growled Lion, before disappearing into an antechamber. He came back a moment later, barefoot and lacking his earplugs, his fine cloak swapped for a plain one just too short to cover his knees.

  “And you always used to complain you had nothing to wear.” Nerves made me spiteful.

  “You know perfectly well I’m not allowed to appear before the Emperor in a fine cloak. If I’d had time to go home instead of trailing around looking for you all evening, I wouldn’t have had to borrow this thing.”

  A steward called us forward. As we shuffled toward the room where the Emperor was waiting for us, he hissed urgently: “Don’t forget, you make three obeisances. You don’t speak unless he speaks to you first. If he makes a joke, laugh! You’ll know because he’ll be laughing too. Keep your eyes on the ground. When he’s finished with you, you leave walking backward. Turn your back on him and you’re dead!”

  6

  I knew how the Emperor Montezuma looked, having seen him from a distance: a middle-aged man of middle height, slightly built but well muscled, with a neat beard. I dared not risk so much as a glance at him now, but if I had I would have been disappointed, as Montezuma was nowhere to be seen.

  Besides my brother, I saw five men in the room. They were all standing and all dressed in plain cloaks, like commoners come to present a petition. I knew none of their faces but I guessed that they included the Council of Four, the Emperor’s chief advisers. These men gloried in such tides as Keeper of the House of Darts, Keeper of the House of Darkness, Man Cutter and Raining Blood. They stood two on each side of a large wooden screen bearing pictures of gods picked out in gold. At right angles to it stood another richly decorated screen, and from the crackling and the wisps of smoke coming from behind it I guessed this concealed a hearth. A medley of delicious cooking smells, few of which I recognized, hung in the air.

  The fifth man, who stood apart from the others, next to one of the screens and a little in front of it, would be the Emperor’s interpreter, for it pleased Montezuma to speak to his subjects through an intermediary. That meant, I realized, that the Emperor himself was hidden in the angle between the two screens. He must be eating: no doubt he had felt like a light supper after presiding over the festival. Not even his closest advisers were allowed to see him eating.

  I was taking all this in when my brother suddenly threw himself on his knees and cried: “O Lord! My Lord! O Great Lord!”

  Hastily I did the same, while the council and the interpreter looked on impassively.

  In answer came a mumbling from behind the screen, followed by the interpreter’s harsh, high-pitched cry.

  “Is the Chief Minister’s slave here?”

  Unsure whether this meant I had been spoken to, I appealed silently to the council. One of them nodded at me.

  “My Lord, I am Yaotl.”

&
nbsp; “You know the Cuauhcalco Prison.”

  It was a statement, not a question, and in its uncompromising certainty was as penetrating as an obsidian-bladed spear. Montezuma knew I had not forgotten that moment in the Heart of the World when my name had been called and my brother had hauled me upright by my hair, to show me off to the silent, expectant crowd before carrying out my sentence. It was not the pain of the obsidian razor scouring my scalp that his words recalled, though, nor the ripping sound my hair made as it came away. It was the cage they had kept me in beforehand, a wooden box too small to stand up in, and the smell of putrefaction from the whimpering skeleton in the prison cell next to mine, a man who by Montezuma’s order had been given a little less to eat each day until he wasted away and died.

  “Yes, my Lord.” The bile in my throat reduced my voice to a hoarse whisper. The Emperor could have found no better way of reminding me that he held my life in his hands and could take it from me whenever he chose.

  “Then tell me why we should not have you sent straight back there.”

  “My Lord!” I cried, alarm momentarily overcoming etiquette. “I’ve done nothing wrong!”

  “Have you not?” The Emperor’s tone was impossible to read, but there was no denying the sneer in the interpreter’s voice. “Then how do you account for what happened this evening?”

  He could only mean the sacrifice that had gone wrong. “My … my master, Lord Feathered in Black, the Chief Minister,” I stammered, “he … he ordered me to help at the sacrifice of a merchant’s Bathed Slave. I didn’t know what was going to happen—my Lord, how could I?”