The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  “Because your master knew!” the interpreter spat back as quickly as if he had known the Emperor’s reply before it was uttered.

  “But I don’t even know why I was there! I will eat earth!” I touched the ground with my fingers and put them to my lips. It was our favorite way of showing sincerity, a sacred oath that meant that, having taken earth in your mouth, you would be returned to the earth, your ashes buried in it, if you were not speaking the truth.

  For a moment I felt more alone than at any other time in my life. I turned desperately to my brother, but he had eyes only for the floor, and the four councillors kept theirs focused resolutely on the middle distance in front of them. When rescue came it was in the most unlikely form: a voice from behind the screen—soft and lisping, but undeniably meant to be heard—the voice of the Emperor himself.

  “So tell me, slave,” that deceptively quiet voice said, “tell me what you do know.”

  There was no hiding his eagerness. The fact that he had chosen to speak betrayed it. I imagined him leaning forward over his dish of turkey, snails, water-fly eggs, stewed human meat or whatever, staring at the screen as if he could see through it, in his anxiety to hear me as I stumbled through my account. When I got to the point where Shining Light’s victim spoke, telling us to look out for a big boat, something like a sigh broke from him: the sort of sound you make when you have recognized something that was there all along.

  There was a long silence after I had finished. Then the Emperor spoke again, quietly still, but for us all to hear.

  “These are disturbing times. We hear of omens, of portents: fire streaming through the sky, temples burning, the lake boiling and flooding on a day without wind. We hear rumors from the East, from our outpost at Xicallanco on the coast of the endless Divine Sea: rumors about men with pale skins and hair on their faces. We hear stories from the land of the Mayans. They tell of strangers from islands on the Divine Sea, of dreadful things that have happened there—how pale-skinned men with beards came and all the people died or fled or were made slaves. We have seen pictures of pyramids on the sea, borne on huge canoes.” He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “And now the whole city hears a Bathed Slave raving about a big boat before throwing himself off the Great Pyramid. Does all this mean the peril—whatever it is—is coming from the Divine Sea?”

  He fell silent. Naturally everybody else did too, including me, although I had the feeling that he wanted someone to answer him. What was our Emperor afraid of—some terrible defeat? Defeat at whose hands, though: the mysterious pale, bearded strangers he had spoken of, the men from beyond the shores of the Divine Sea?

  Plainly Montezuma had long feared that a dreadful fate was going to overtake his city. Now something as simple as a few words about a big boat, spoken by a crazy man about to die, had pitched him into a void of unknowing terror which no word from me or anyone else in that room could fill.

  When he spoke again, it was on a surprising note of anger.

  “Soon there will be strangers among us—that much we know from the omens. But will they be gods, or men disguised as gods? How would you answer that, slave?”

  I stared at the screen, avoiding the eyes of the dignitaries standing above me while I struggled to come up with an answer. Visions of what happened to people who disappointed the Emperor drove everything else from my head. I had to say something but for a moment all I could think of was that prison. Then I saw the prison’s darkness and, swirling around in it, the shapes my half-starved, exhausted mind had peopled it with when it surrounded me: sinister, threatening shapes that might be men or animals or demons …

  Desperate, I blurted out the first word that came into my head, a word for the men and women whose home was darkness.

  “Sorcerers!”

  Sorcerers: men and women who went abroad at night, changed into jaguars, coyotes or weasels. Men and women with the power to cure the sick or paralyze and pillage a whole household, as the mood took them. Men and women who could travel to the next World and bring its secrets back with them. “My Lord, if I needed to know who those strangers were, I would need a sorcerer to tell me.”

  For a long time there was silence from behind the screen. Then I heard something else: something that sounded like the ghost of a wry chuckle.

  Was the Emperor laughing? He seemed to be, although nobody else was joining in; and it was the interpreter who replied.

  “That was wisely answered. We consulted sorcerers. His Lordship, the Keeper of the House of Darkness, will explain what became of them.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the four councillors give a start and risk a quick scowl at the screen before condescending to look at me.

  “Lord Montezuma sent for sorcerers to interpret the omens he spoke of,” he said mechanically. “He had them brought from their homes and questioned them personally. When they failed to give him the answers he wanted, they were imprisoned.”

  “They were imprisoned,” Montezuma’s interpreter added, “in a place you know very well.”

  “My Lord, please!” I begged. I was shivering, because there was only one place the Emperor could be referring to. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Find them,” came the short reply.

  “Find … ?” I gasped, as I realized what the command meant. Nobody escaped from the prison: either you were let out or you died there. “But …”

  The interpreter ground on relentlessly. “Your master, slave, is Chief Justice and Chief Minister. When the sorcerers disappeared we commanded him to look for them. He sent men after them, but did not find them. He took extreme measures—ill-advised measures, perhaps, because they are still at large. We find this hard to understand.” He let the Emperor’s words hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “Granted that these men were sorcerers, did they turn themselves into birds, bewitch their guards, or use some other form of magic to escape? Where are they?

  “Your master has not been able to account for what happened. Perhaps these men did fly away on the night air. We might believe that—but when we see a man presented as a Bathed Slave who is plainly no such thing and hear him utter prophetic words and learn that our Chief Minister ordered his own man to be present when he died, we start to wonder.”

  “My Lord—you can’t mean that Shining Light’s offering … ?”

  The words died in my throat as the Emperor spoke again—this time to me alone.

  “You are spoken of most highly, slave. I know that your life has been troubled, but we can only accept whatever fate it amuses the gods to send us. Now I need a man of discretion and good sense. I know there are things I have not been told.” Montezuma paused significantly. “The sort of man I need will remember his duty to me—Quetzalcoatl’s heir, the servant on Earth of the Lord of the Here and Now.”

  The silence that followed was full of memories of a dark, damp, noisome, cramped place, the agony of an empty belly, the despair of knowing you might never stand upright or see the Sun again.

  “Now tell me you are the man I need, Yaotl.” The voice behind the screen had become so soft it was almost inaudible.

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  I could say nothing else now. If the Emperor had told me he needed a man who could produce live rabbits out of his anus, I would have been that man.

  I barely heard the interpreter’s words as he gave me my instructions. I did not need them. It was plain what I was being told to do: find the sorcerers who had vanished from Montezuma’s impregnable prison, although my own master, the Chief Minister, had failed to locate them; and find out if there was any connection between them and the man I had seen die this evening.

  “Bring those men to us, slave—not your master, or anyone else!”

  In short Montezuma wanted me for his spy in his Chief Minister’s household; and if my master had secrets he was determined to keep from the Emperor, then so much the worse for me.

  The interpreter’s final words were like one more twist in the cord I
could already feel tightening around my neck. “You will begin your search tomorrow,” he informed me loftily, “at the Cuauhcalco Prison.”

  7

  My brother’s guard made as if to fall in as we left the Emperor’s apartments, but he dismissed them with a gesture, and we crossed the patio alone, silent apart from the flapping of his sandal straps and the padding of my bare feet in his wake. He spoke to me only when we had got out onto the open plaza and I had turned to leave.

  “We need to talk, Yaotl.”

  Stars were starting to come out overhead. “My time isn’t my own,” I pointed out. “I’m late already. When my master can spare me …”

  He snapped at me, in a strained voice: “This is the Emperor’s business! Do you think I’m wasting my time with you for the sake of my health?” Then he added, more mildly: “I have to show you something. So you know how important finding these sorcerers is to the Emperor.”

  “I already know! He as good as told me I’d find myself in a stew with maize and beans if I don’t find them—that’s important enough for me!”

  Lion was already trotting briskly across the plaza. After a quick, nervous glance at the heavens I set off after him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The palace of Axayacatl.”

  The palace that had been built for Montezuma’s late father was on the far side of the Heart of the World. It was now used to store weapons and valuables, and so although dark and silent was heavily guarded.

  The warriors at the entrance took one look at my brother and let us through with barely a nod. He seized a torch and plunged into the maze of echoing corridors that was the deserted complex’s interior.

  “Look, I told you, my time isn’t my own. The Emperor won’t thank you if I can’t serve him because my master’s had me beaten to death for keeping him waiting …”

  Ignoring my protests, my brother turned one last corner and stopped. Anchoring the torch in a niche in the wall, he turned to me and gestured silently at something lying by his feet.

  We were in a small, bare room. The flickering torchlight lit up no details except for the thing Lion had evidently brought me here to see: a large wooden box in the middle of the floor.

  “What’s this?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Open it.”

  The lid was heavier than those of the wicker chests I was used to. At first sight there was not much underneath it: a few old pieces of cloth and one or two other things I did not recognize.

  “Clothes?” I said. “What, the Emperor wants me to do his laundry as well?”

  “Pick it up,” he said sourly. “Touch it. Then you’ll see.”

  At the top of the heap was something like a woman’s blouse, but with long sleeves and an opening in the front like the jackets that priests and imperial envoys wore on special occasions. It had been white, with a simple but unfamiliar pattern embroidered on it, although even in the torchlight I could see it was now badly discolored. It was not the design or the pattern, though, that made me catch my breath. The cloth had a texture like nothing I had ever felt: it slipped through my fingers, slithering between them so smoothly I thought I would drop it, but when I dared to tug at it I realized it was also stronger than any cloth I had handled.

  “What do you think?”

  “This is better than cotton.” Awed, I replaced it reverentially and let the lid of the box fall shut. “Better than cotton!”

  “This box was washed up on the eastern shore of the Divine Sea, a few years ago. Montezuma gave most of the things in it away to the kings of Tetzcoco and Tlacopan, but he kept these.”

  I forced my mind back to the conversation with Montezuma, while my fingers tingled with the memory of how that cloth had felt. “The Emperor mentioned strangers from islands on the Divine Sea, pale men with beards—did they have things like this?” I was beginning to see what had so disturbed the Emperor. There was something unearthly about this material.

  “Yes—and other things besides. Look.” The lid of the box opened again with a creak, shatteringly loud in the silent, empty space around us, and Lion pulled something out of it. It was long and narrow and glinted in the torchlight.

  “A weapon,” he breathed. As he held it up I saw that it was like a sword, except that the blade, instead of being a flat shaft of fire-hardened wood with obsidian slivers set in its edges, was a single piece of metal, a little like silver but duller and somehow more solid looking.

  “This is harder than bronze,” my brother said. “You remember what the Tarascans did to our army, a few years ago, with their bronze swords and spear points? Imagine what our warriors could achieve, armed with this metal instead of wood, flint and obsidian!”

  “And what our merchants would do in their wake, with cloth like that to trade,” I added, gesturing at the open box. “Is that what the Emperor thinks?”

  “He thinks whoever possesses things like this must be like a god,” my brother said soberly, lowering the sword but not replacing it, “and you do not trifle with gods. According to the reports I’ve heard, the strangers came across the Divine Sea in canoes the size of palaces, and they fought the Mayans with swords like this one, and a weapon that made a sound like thunder and produced fire and smoke and threw stones hard enough to kill.”

  A tremor had crept into his voice. Lion had always been devout, even for an Aztec, and this talk of gods was making him nervous.

  “I gathered that he had the missing sorcerers rounded up,” I said, “so they could tell him who these strangers were and what to do about them.”

  “It’s more than that. Montezuma thinks one of these pale-faced strangers might be Quetzalcoatl, come back to reclaim his kingdom!”

  Now I saw the real source of the Emperor’s anxiety to have the sorcerers back, and the fear I had detected in him even through his wooden screens.

  Many bundles of years before, all the lands that were now in Montezuma’s realm had been ruled by the Toltecs. They had been a marvelous race, and all the fine things we Aztecs had, the arts of painting and poetry and feather-work and casting precious metals, had been learned from them. Their blood ran in the veins of our rulers, even though their last king, Quetzalcoatl—a man who bore the same name as our god, the Feathered Serpent—had ended his reign fleeing into exile in the East, across the Divine Sea toward the land of the Mayans. It had always been rumored that he might return, however, to claim his kingdom back from his descendant, the Emperor of Mexico.

  If that was what Montezuma believed, then he was not just concerned to find out what some unknown savages from across the sea were up to. He was terrified that his ancestor was going to come to him, call him to account for his reign, and destroy him if he was found wanting. What he had wanted the sorcerers to tell him was nothing less than his own fate.

  “Now, do you see?” my brother went on. “Montezuma thinks his very life is at stake. He was jittery enough before, which is why he had the sorcerers thrown in the prison. That was nothing compared to the state he’s in now it seems they were able to fly out of their cages!” He spoke with feeling, and I wondered how afraid he was for his own position, knowing what the Emperor was capable of. “If it turns out they were able to use magic to escape …”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said thoughtfully. “There are men who can turn themselves into birds or animals at will, of course there are, but they’re pretty rare. Most sorcerers are fakes. They just use a lot of cheap tricks to fool gullible people. You know that way of curing a sick man by sucking a stone out of his body? Chances are the curer’s got a stone in his mouth ready and he bites his cheek so it’s all bloody when the patient sees it. Most magic’s done that way. So maybe these men flew away, but until I see feathers lying around on the floor of the prison, I’d sooner believe they got out on their feet.”

  “But how? And where did they go?”

  “If I could answer that …” I paused, remembering that the moment I could answer his questions was the moment my troubles would reall
y begin. “I have to get out of this, somehow,” I added, half to myself.

  My brother stared at me as if I had just sprouted a third ear. “What do you mean, ‘get out of this?’”

  “Don’t be simple, Lion.” I tried to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “What if the Emperor’s right and old Black Feathers knows more about these sorcerers than he’s letting on—what then? If I were to find anything out, which I won’t, do you think he’s just going to let me go running to the palace? He’d have me impaled first! I’m a dead man whatever happens!”

  “So just do your duty,” my brother said coldly.

  “I’m a slave—my duty is to my master, no one else.”

  The metal sword shook and flashed in the torchlight as Lion fought with his temper. “You selfish worm!” he cried. “Who cares about your miserable life? How do you think it’s been for your father, your brothers, watching what’s become of you? How do you think it’s been, trying to make a career, trying to practice a craft, trying to keep up a reputation, when all people keep saying to you is, ‘Oh, yes, I know you, you had that brother, the drunkard—how did he escape getting his head broken, anyway?’”

  “I might have known you’d bring that up …”

  “You’ve done your best to drag the family name through the dust over the years—one thing after another. Now, just when you have a chance to repair some of the damage, all you can think of is how to make it even worse …”

  “Next you’ll be telling me I owe you my life.”

  “You do.”

  My retort died in my throat, because he was right. A sudden recollection of the pain and the crowd’s laughter made my eyes sting and I turned sharply away, to hide my anguish.

  The warning came too late. I heard the weapon’s faint whistle as it swung through the air in the very instant the blow fell.

  He hit me with the flat of the sword, catching me between my shoulders with a force that sent me staggering to my knees. As I fell I half twisted around to see him launch himself toward me, the gleaming blade held aloft and a feral snarl on his lips.