The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  “Remember this game, brother?” he cried.

  I remembered: and suddenly we were little boys again, playing at being warriors, with sticks for weapons, and I had been knocked down, as usual, and my big brother was about to seize my hair in the tear-jerking grip that on a real battlefield would make me his captive.

  “This is my beloved son!” His gloating cry completed the warrior’s ritual as he reached for me with his empty hand.

  But I remembered the game better than he did, it seemed, including the way I had played it all those years before. As his fingertips brushed my hair I snapped my head around and sank my teeth into the base of his thumb.

  He howled in pain and outrage. He tried to pull away but I held on like a stoat with a rabbit. I watched the sword twitching as he fought to control himself, to stop himself cleaving my neck in two with it, and then he threw the precious thing hard into the far corner of the room to free his remaining hand.

  He bent toward me, aiming to pinch my nose and make me relinquish my grip, and I drove my fist into his side, just under his ribcage, as hard as I could.

  As he fell I rolled quickly away, opening my mouth and spitting his blood on the floor.

  For a moment we both lay on our sides, panting and glaring impotently at each other.

  A distant shout and the sound of running feet told us that someone had heard us. We got up, still watching each other warily.

  “Your point, brother?” I gasped, as bemused-looking warriors trooped into the room behind me.

  “My point, brother,” Lion growled, as he went for the sword, “is that you don’t have any friends. Get the Emperor what he wants and maybe he will protect you—but don’t expect me to look after your worthless hide this time!”

  8

  My master’s house was as imposing as you would expect a lord’s to be, a miniature version of Montezuma’s palace: two stories of smooth whitewashed stone decorated with curling friezes and a broad stairway at the front leading to a patio and the great man’s apartments on the roof. I had no intention of setting foot on the stairway: I used to spread my sleeping mat on the ground floor at the back and that was where I was headed. There was just a chance that my master had not sent for me yet and my lateness would not be noticed.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Yaotl?”

  I cursed under my breath. The voice that brought me up short belonged to a dark figure lurking in the shadows at the foot of the stairs: Huitztic, my master’s steward.

  “Home to bed,” I replied, hoping his question had no purpose and that I might be able to get away before he thought of one.

  “Not so fast! His Lordship wants to see you. He’s up there.” He jerked his head toward the stairway before adding ominously: “He’s been waiting.”

  I loathed Huitztic. He was a typical three-captive warrior, a strutting bully who had done just enough in the field to convince himself he was the Emperor’s right-hand man and nowhere near enough really to make anything of it. His sort usually ended up with meaningless jobs as messengers or overseers in the houses of the great, where they might just have the brains to realize how futile their lives had become and to take it out on their underlings and the household slaves. He reminded me of the oafs who had taught in the House of Youth that my brothers had attended, another favored career for cast-off warriors, whose bumptious self-importance all too often rubbed off on their charges. The difference was that Huitztic was cruel as well as overbearing. His name meant a sharp object, so naturally I just thought of him as “Prick.”

  “I am, as ever, at His Lordship’s command,” I said, as I started up the stairs. Sarcasm was safe with the steward: he was too stupid to recognize it.

  “But you’re too late.” He sneered. “He’s got someone with him now.” Before I could ask who, he had turned on his heel, smirking, leaving me with one foot poised on the bottommost step, unsure whether to go on up or not.

  I could not see past the top step onto the patio, but I could picture the scene. Old Black Feathers would be sitting in a high-backed wicker chair under his late father’s favorite magnolia tree, gripping his knees with thin, liver-spotted hands, with his visitor squatting respectfully in front of him. I climbed the stairs cautiously. If I kept my head beneath the level of the top step, I thought, I should be able to hear them without being seen.

  The first voice I heard was my master’s. He sounded weary.

  “That’s all he said? ‘Watch out for the big boat.’ Nothing else?”

  “That’s all I was told.” The visitor’s voice was a surprise: it was a very young man’s, barely broken, with a distinctive accent, and I knew it from somewhere. I was still trying to place it as he went on. “He shouted it from the side of the Great Pyramid for all the city to hear and then jumped. Then your slave and that other man—”

  “Yes, yes,” my master interrupted. “No doubt when my slave deigns to put in an appearance I will hear a full report from him. In the meantime, what does Shining Light want from me? Did anyone tell you that?”

  During the short pause that followed I realized who the visitor was: Quimatini, the son of Ayauhcocolli, a man my master sometimes did business with and who used his son as a messenger. I had never met Ayauhcocolli, whose name meant Curling Mist, but I had seen the boy when he had come to the house: a well-built, lithe youth who looked as though he merited a name that meant “Nimble.” The first time we had met he had glared at me as if he wished me dead. I suspected that my master’s dealings with the lad’s father were not wholly legal. This would explain his familiar manner toward my master: he spoke more firmly than I would have done, and had not once addressed the Chief Minister as “My Lord.”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t confide in me or in my father.” The youth giggled suddenly. “Except when he’s run out of money and is trying to persuade us to take his bets on credit, that is!”

  “I’ll have my slave disemboweled!” old Black Feathers raged. “How could he just stand by and let Shining Light make a fool of me—and so publicly as well? You realize what that young merchant’s done, don’t you? He’s made it impossible for me to move against him without making a spectacle of myself! What do I do now—watch those men being killed, one by one, until Shining Light chooses to tell me what he wants?”

  The youth did not answer. I dared not break the silence but my mind was racing. It sounded as if my master knew a lot more than I did about the Bathed Slave, and the young merchant had some hold over him on account of it. Was the Emperor right? Were the men my master had mentioned the missing sorcerers, and had the Bathed Slave been one of them? It would explain how he had known he was destined for the Land of the Dead: a sorcerer might well have learned that much.

  Old Black Feathers let out a long sigh. “You may as well go, Nimble. But if that young man says anything to you or your father, I want to know straightaway—you understand?”

  “Of course,” replied the boy smoothly.

  “Off you go, then.” I tensed, ready for the lad to appear and for my cue to go and face my master’s displeasure. I had a moment longer to wait, though.

  “What about tomorrow?” the youth asked.

  “Tomorrow? Oh, the ball game. Do you know, I’d forgotten all about it.” A flicker of the old eagerness and energy stirred in the Chief Minister’s voice. “What odds is your father offering?”

  “Three to one against the team from Huexotla.”

  My master snorted. “Sometimes your father’s a fool to himself!” There was silence while he considered the proposition. “Of course, I’ll have to back the Emperor’s team, publicly,” he announced at last, “but I’ll have twenty large capes on Huexotla. Tomorrow is going to be a better day!”

  It was as much as I could do not to gasp audibly. Almost everyone who had the wealth to spare gambled on the ball game at one time or another; and so did some who did not have it to spare and whose pastime ended up costing them their liberty. But bets were required to be placed openly, the stakes dis
played by the side of the ball court for the players and the spectators to see. Surreptitious arrangements such as the one my master had just made were strictly illegal.

  I barely saw the boy as he passed me on the stairway, although I heard the sharp hiss of his indrawn breath—the sound made by an especially venomous snake—as he noticed me. All I could think about, as I mounted the rest of the steps up to His Lordship’s patio, was my master’s casual, barely considered gamble.

  Twenty large capes! I had sold myself into slavery for that amount!

  I found old Black Feathers as I had pictured him, sitting in a bearskin-covered wicker seat under the magnolia tree in the middle of the patio.

  He was formally dressed. A gorgeous cotton cloak, ornamented with the faces of eagles and bordered with eyes, floated over his knees and fell to his ankles. A gold labret fashioned like a pelican hung from his lower lip and a double spray of bright plumes, red, blue, yellow and green, towered above his head. Even in the dark of the evening, with his back bent forward with age and a rabbit’s-fur mantle slung over his shoulders for warmth, he was magnificent.

  He was also furious. Even if I had not heard what he had said to the boy, I could have told as much by the soft tapping of a jeweled sandal on the stuccoed floor. I wondered how long he had been waiting for me before the boy had turned up. I wished he had sat indoors, enjoying a cup of chocolate or the attentions of his favorite concubine, rather than out here, feeling the gathering chill seeping into his bones.

  “My Lord.” I made my obeisance, throwing myself abjectly on the floor.

  “Yaotl. You’re late. Where have you been?”

  The Chief Minister was capable of rages that could make a volcano seem tame, but I knew he was never to be feared more than when refined, controlled anger lowered his voice to an intimate whisper.

  “I’m sorry. I fell asleep, after the sacrifice …”

  “You’re lying. You’ve been to see the Emperor.”

  I stared fixedly at the floor, thankful that at least I did not have to meet my master’s eyes.

  “That brother of yours was here.” My master’s deceptively gentle voice hardened. His own father had been Guardian of the Waterfront in his youth, and old Black Feathers often bemoaned the fact that a man of Lion’s humble birth should be allowed to hold the rank. “Everyone knows what a toady he is. He was obviously running some errand for Montezuma. Do you think I’m so stupid I can’t work out what you’ve been up to?”

  “I couldn’t help it!” I protested. There was no point in denying that I had been with the Emperor but at all costs I must not let my master know what I had been ordered to do. “He sent for me to give him my account of the sacrifice—there was no way I could refuse!”

  “Oh, the sacrifice!” he said as if he had forgotten all about it. “And tell me, slave, are you going to favor me with your account as well? Or do I have to make do with getting it secondhand from some passerby?” He was no longer whispering.

  “My Lord, I came as soon as I could …”

  “After all, I could ask anyone, couldn’t I? The whole city heard what that Bathed Slave said and saw how he died. ‘Watch out for the big boat.’ That’s it, isn’t it?” Now he was shouting. Age had not weakened his voice. “Anyone could tell me how my fool of a slave let him go—if they could only stop laughing long enough, that is!”

  “My Lord, I’m truly sorry, we couldn’t hold him.” I cast about frantically for something that would mollify him. “But he did say something else, before he went—and no one else heard it.”

  “What?” Something creaked—either his bones or his seat’s wicker frame—as my master leaned forward urgently. “What else did he say?”

  I told him. I had no idea what the words might mean to him. “He said: ‘Tell the old man.’”

  He stiffened visibly. Watching discreetly through lowered eyes, I saw his face darken to the shade of the sky above us. For a moment I thought he was going to be taken ill. Then he slumped in his chair.

  “What do you suppose he meant?”

  “My Lord, I’ve no idea. Unless …” I could just see one of his knuckles in the corner of my vision, and the answer was there, in the tautness of his skin over the swollen joint. The merchant’s slave’s last words had been a message for my master.

  “Unless he meant you, my Lord.”

  “Me?” he asked sharply. “Why should he have meant me?”

  “I …” I hesitated. It was all too easy to guess why: because Montezuma and my brother had been right. The man who had died this evening had been one of the Emperor’s escaped sorcerers and my master had been behind it all. “I don’t know,” I added wretchedly.

  It must be more complicated than that, I realized. Whatever my master’s involvement may have been in the sorcerers’ disappearance, it could not explain how one of them had come to throw himself off the Great Pyramid, or account for the anger and distress old Black Feathers felt on account of his death. Whatever plans my master may or may not have made for the sorcerers, something had clearly happened to frustrate them.

  “Where do you think the merchant got his victim from?” my master demanded.

  “The market at Azcapotzalco?”

  “Don’t be stupid! You know perfectly well he was never anywhere near a slave market!”

  “Then … my Lord, you do know where he came from!”

  “Know?” Old Black Feathers’ sudden laughter was a dry, mirthless cackle. “Of course I know! That young man used him to make a fool out of me. No doubt it suited him to have the man raving like a lunatic just before he died, with my own slave in attendance to make sure every word was passed on to me. No doubt he thinks he’ll get away with it, keeping them all from me, just to make sure I keep dancing to his tune, but he won’t.”

  “You mean the merchant has the sorcerers?” Simple astonishment made me blurt the words out even as I realized they were a mistake.

  I was still prostrated before my master, with my hands stretched out flat on the floor in front of me. Suddenly something was squeezing each of them: the rough sole of a sandal. I heard a creak as my master leaned forward in his chair, and felt his breath on the back of my neck as he bent down to speak once again in that deadly whisper.

  “I may be old, but I can still break every finger in both your hands before you can even scream—and that’s before I give you to my steward to play with. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I gasped.

  “Now I know Montezuma didn’t summon you just so that you could tell him about a botched sacrifice. He told you about the sorcerers and ordered you to spy on me. What else did he say to you? Don’t lie or leave anything out. You know what I will do to you if you do.”

  I found myself stumbling through the events of the evening since I had met my brother, as helpless as a man staggering through a nightmare, with the thought of frail bones cracking driving me on like a demon at my back.

  As I neared the end of the tale I felt the pressure on my hands relax. I flexed my fingers automatically. Long moments of silence passed before I summoned the courage to look up.

  My master had raised his head to look at the branches spreading above him. They were bare now, stripped by frost.

  “My father’s tree.” He sighed. Abruptly his manner had changed: it became abstracted, almost wistful, as his fingers began caressing a naked branch. “All I ever wanted was something that wasn’t his: some renown of my own. See this tree? My father, Lord Tlacaelel, planted it before I was born—the best part of two bundles of years ago. It will still be growing here when I’m dead.” Suddenly he seized a twig, twisted it violently until it snapped off, and hurled it out of sight into a corner of the patio. The rest of the tree shook and rattled. “And they will still talk about him then, won’t they? The great Tlacaelel! The man four emperors looked up to, the Chief Minister who turned down the throne because he was king enough already! What do you suppose they’ll say about his son?”

  I was too a
fraid to answer. The question was not really addressed to me anyway.

  “I dance attendance on my young cousin, Montezuma, and amuse myself sitting in the court of appeal trying to work out which of two depositions amounts to the bigger pack of lies, or deciding which parish’s turn it is to muck out the zoo. But I should be happy with that, shouldn’t I? Because I’m the great Tlacaelel’s son, and that should be enough for anybody!” He sighed. “I suppose it will have to be enough for me, now.”

  “My Lord—I don’t understand. Even if Shining Light’s offering was one of the sorcerers, what was he to you? Why does it involve your father?”

  “Can’t you see, Yaotl? It’s because of my father that the Emperor is afraid of me! Montezuma acts as if the gods themselves installed him on the throne, but they didn’t—the chiefs elected him, just as they elected every Emperor before him. But he knows his throne is rightfully mine!”

  The almost wheedling note in the Chief Minister’s voice did not fool me. He had no need to justify himself to his own slave: what he was saying now was addressed to the Emperor’s spy.

  I listened resignedly to a story I knew very well. When the aged Tlacaelel had declined the throne in favor of Montezuma’s uncle, Emperor Tizoc, he had stipulated that his own sons should inherit it on Tizoc’s death. By the end of Tizoc’s short reign, however, Tlacaelel himself had died, and his wishes were no longer of any account. The throne was given to Montezuma’s surviving uncle, Ahuitzotl, and on Ahuitzotl’s death old Black Feathers was again passed over—this time in favor of Montezuma himself.

  “Maybe Montezuma thinks he’s going to be poisoned, like Tizoc,” my master grumbled. “Maybe he thinks I had his sorcerers spirited out of the prison, to weaken him, or to cast some sort of spell on him, to sicken his heart with magic. Or maybe he doesn’t—maybe he told me to look for them because he knew they could not be found, to humiliate me.”