The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  I asked the majordomo whether I could question his guards.

  “Go ahead,” he said indifferently. “It’s the same shift we had on duty when the prisoners went missing, but they won’t be able to tell you anything I haven’t.”

  Each of the guards had been handpicked for two qualities: being able to wield a huge cudgel and being able to tolerate enough boredom to crush the mind of anybody that had one to crush. I could not credit any of them with great powers of observation, but I could not imagine any of them falling asleep on the job either. Each of our conversations was a repeat of the last, with me staring up into a slack-jowled, thick-jawed, heavy-lidded face that bore all the expression of one of the masks of human skin worn at the Festival of the Flaying of Men. It would go something like this:

  “What did you see the day the prisoners went missing?”

  “What prisoners?”

  “The sorcerers.”

  “The sorcerers?”

  “Yes, the sorcerers—the ones the majordomo says turned themselves into birds.”

  “Oh, the sorcerers!”

  There would be a pause.

  “Well, what did you see?”

  The guard I was questioning would turn to one of his colleagues—preferably the one I had last spoken to.

  “Did you see anything, mate?”

  “When?”

  “When those sorcerers went missing.”

  “Sorcerers?”

  “Yes—you know.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “The sorcerers—the men who got out. When that happened, what did you see?”

  There would be another pause.

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  The guard I was questioning would turn to me in triumph.

  “See? He didn’t see anything either. I reckon they must have flown away, like bloody birds!”

  After three attempts at this I gave up. I had found out as much as I was going to here.

  2

  I stood outside the prison, savoring the midday sunshine, which had dried up the last of the rain, the clean air and the newly swept earth under my feet.

  I watched the Aztecs around me, the men and women strolling or hurrying through the street or paddling along the canal beside it. I sought out things that distinguished the passersby from the wretches in the prison. I looked at the men’s cloaks with their bright colors and bold patterns, each announcing its wearer’s rank and achievements, and at the earrings and lip-plugs sported by those entitled to them. I looked at the skirts and blouses of the women, no two alike in their rich embroidery, at the yellow ochre on their faces and at the ways they wore their hair—loose or cut short or braided, or done in the formal style that was the emblem of respectable Aztec womanhood: divided and bound at the nape of the neck to leave two ends projecting over the crown like a pair of horns. When I looked down at my own apparel—a plain, functional cloak and breechcloth, with none of the cheap brash jewelry or feather-work that slaves sometimes had to put on to suit their owners’ tastes—I felt comforted. I was among my people, and I was as good as they were, or at least I would be as soon as I could have a bath.

  Something stirred the crowd. Peering between the jostling bodies, I followed the disturbance to its source near the walls of Montezuma’s palace, and caught sight of the heads of a little group of men moving purposefully toward the steps my brother and I had gone up the evening before. There was something familiar about the movement, and the bodyguards’ casual way of parting the crowd to let their master through. Then I saw a flash of yellow as the hem of his cloak brushed the lowest of the steps leading to the palace’s interior.

  I glanced irresolutely in the direction of my master’s house before I made up my mind what to do. He had released me so that I could obey the Emperor’s command and visit the prison. I had a little time in hand, and there were things I had to say to my brother.

  It took me a long time to persuade the sentries to let me into the quarters my brother shared with his fellow executioners, and by the time I found him, he had settled his powerful frame comfortably into a chair and was drinking chocolate.

  He glared at me over the rim of his bowl. “You’ll pardon me for not offering you any. I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “It’s all right,” I said lightly. “I bet you had them put pimentos in it. I hate pimentos in my chocolate. How’s the hand?”

  “Fine.” Under its heavy bandages his left hand looked gratifyingly stiff and swollen. “Nothing hot piss and honey couldn’t cure. What do you want? Have you been to the prison?”

  “I have.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “The sorcerers aren’t there anymore.”

  He slapped his bowl angrily on the floor, sending a tiny dribble of expensive chocolate over the edge. “You think this is funny, don’t you?”

  “No, as it happens, I don’t. I don’t find being put up as the stake in some game between the Emperor and the Chief Minister very funny at all.”

  “So get Montezuma his sorcerers,” he replied unsympathetically, picking his drink up once more. “The game’ll be over then.”

  “It’s not that simple. My master says he hasn’t got them. The Emperor seems to have got the right idea about that Bathed Slave who killed himself yesterday—he was one of the sorcerers. My master doesn’t deny that much, but he says it’s the merchant, his owner, who’s holding them.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “Not necessarily. But I’ll talk to the merchant and find out.” I watched him drinking luxuriously. If he had come across me dying of thirst I would not have put it past him to drain a gourd full of water in front of me just to add to my suffering, but then I might have done the same to him. “There’s something I want to know first, though. Whose idea was it to give the Emperor my name?”

  The cup hid my brother’s face. He said nothing.

  You are spoken of most highly, the Emperor had said.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” The suspicion had planted itself in my mind while we were at Axayacatl’s palace. In the hours since then it had sprouted and put down roots. “You bastard! This is all your doing, isn’t it? You got me involved in this. Why?”

  “Why did I bring you to the Emperor’s notice?” My brother drained his bowl and laid it carefully on the ground between us. “Why do you think? So that you might have a chance to make something of yourself! I told you yesterday—you can repair some of the damage, give your family something to be proud of.”

  “For sure, they’ll be proud to see me flayed alive for going against my master,” I retorted bitterly, “and that’s only if the Emperor’s right and old Black Feathers really does have the sorcerers. What if he doesn’t? What’s the Emperor likely to do then?”

  My brother frowned. “But your master does have them! The Emperor as good as said so.”

  “Only because someone put the idea in his head. Now I wonder who that was?”

  “What are you saying?” My brother gripped the sides of his chair so tightly that I heard the woven canes crack under their hide covering. Something had dislodged his mask: suddenly he was not the renowned warrior taking his ease but the boy I had known as a child, our father’s favorite son, who became the man he was because he grew up more scared of failure than death.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so convinced that my master is hiding the sorcerers, and so determined that I should be the one to find them. I don’t believe this has anything to do with our family. They gave up on me years ago, Lion, and nothing I do now is going to make any difference to them. You had some other reason for wanting me brought into this. Some reason of your own.”

  He picked up his chocolate bowl then, looked at it absently, saw it held only a shallow puddle of froth at the bottom, and put it down again.

  “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll tell you what I know. I think—I mean, I heard—well, you know what the army�
�s like for rumors.” He was not looking at me. He seemed unsure of himself. “Montezuma told you he asked the Chief Minister to find these men when they escaped. I’m not sure exactly what your master did about it. It was all a big secret, but there were warriors involved—I heard there were warriors involved. I heard someone say he’d talked to someone who’d been handpicked for a special mission by the Chief Minister. Apparently he had to go to a village near Coyoacan.” He paused. “Coyoacan,” he repeated, as if wanting to make sure I had caught the name of the place.

  “And what happened there?” I remembered another expression our Emperor had used: Extreme measures. What had that meant?

  “He … he didn’t want to say.” He looked up then, and there was something in the way he stared at me, through eyes that seemed obscured, as though they had somehow withdrawn into his face, which made me think twice about asking any more questions.

  Eventually he added, in what for him was a quiet voice: “All I can tell you is this. I think the Emperor’s decided the reason your master came back from that village empty-handed is that he wanted to.”

  I looked into my brother’s eyes again, but could make nothing out in their darkness. He was concealing something, and if I knew him at all, you could roast him over a slow fire before he would say what it was. One thing was obvious enough, though. Whatever he had seen or heard that was haunting him so, he believed I could do something about it—even though he could not bring himself to tell me what it was.

  “You think I should go to Coyoacan,” I said at last. “You want me to see for myself what old Black Feathers did, don’t you?”

  3

  It was no great distance from Montezuma’s palace to the Chief Minister’s house, through streets that now, in the early afternoon, were largely empty. After parting company with my brother I walked home slowly, giving myself just enough time to work out how many kinds of trouble I was in.

  Montezuma wanted me to find his sorcerers, on pain of death. He thought my master had them. My master claimed he did not have them, and since he had asked me to find them himself, I was inclined to believe him. However, he obviously knew more about them than he was letting on. And now it seemed my brother had some interest in this affair as well, something connected with whatever had happened at Coyoacan, but I would have to go there to find out what that was all about.

  And all I had found at the prison was that it truly was impregnable. Maybe, I thought morosely, I was dealing with magic after all.

  Thoughts were still chasing each other around my head when I reached my master’s house. I was so caught up with them that I did not see the big man until I almost walked into him.

  “Yaotl!”

  The voice was familiar: it belonged to Handy, my comrade in our encounter with the priests.

  I greeted him like an old friend. Anyone who was neither old Black Feathers nor his steward was a welcome sight. We sat in a quiet corner of my master’s patio and drew our cloaks over our knees while we exchanged pleasantries. He asked me where I had been. I replied by asking him what he was doing here.

  “Carrying a message. Come to think of it, you might like to hear about it.”

  I wondered what sort of message he could have to deliver here.

  “The same young lad who put me on to that last job sought me out in the marketplace. They must have been impressed, in spite of what happened, hey? It turned out they wanted me to go all the way to Pochtlan to pick up this letter …”

  “Pochtlan?”

  “Yes, odd, isn’t it? You’d think they’d have found someone in Tlatelolco market, where they’d have had more choice, but anyway … Guess who it was from?”

  “No idea.”

  “Shining Light.”

  “Really?” Considering what I had been through on the young merchant’s account the day before and what I had heard about him from my master since, any news of him was bound to get my attention. “What did it say?”

  “How would I know? I’m just a commoner, I got my schooling at the House of Youth, and you know they don’t teach reading there. I was just told the message was an urgent one for the Chief Minister. I’d sort of hoped to see him—never met a great lord before.” He suddenly had the half-hopeful, half-anxious manner commoners often adopted at the prospect of meeting their rulers. “As he was out when I got here, I had to give it to the steward, though … was that right?”

  “Oh, yes.” The steward could be relied upon to pass a letter straight to my master—and to hang around afterward in the hope of overhearing its contents. “It’ll get to His Lordship, don’t worry.”

  “Good. Shining Light seemed very anxious about it.”

  “You saw him, then? I thought he’d vanished off the face of the Earth, yesterday. What else did he have to say for himself?”

  “We didn’t have time to talk. He was in a rush. He was just setting off in his canoe. He was actually sitting in it when he gave me the letter. It looked as if he had a long way to go, judging by what he had with him—bags of provisions, toasted maize, stuff like that—the sort of stuff you’d take on a long journey.”

  “Hang on!” That could not be right, I thought. I glanced quickly up at the clouds chasing each other briskly across the sky and noted the promise of fresh wind and rain in the evening. “You’re telling me you saw Shining Light setting off on a long journey today—on One Reed?”

  “That’s what it looked like. I know what you’re going to say—it’s not the most auspicious day he could have chosen. I thought it was strange too, especially for a merchant. This sorcerer I go to every time the gods lumber us with another child, he tells me merchants are some of his best clients. They’re so superstitious they never go anywhere without consulting the Book of Days.”

  One Reed was a day influenced by Tezcatlipoca: the Smoking Mirror, the most unruly and capricious of our gods. There could hardly be a worse day for setting out on a long journey. “I wonder where he’s going?”

  We sat silently for a moment, each wrapped up in his own thoughts. Shining Light had left in a hurry, it seemed, but he had still had something to tell my master so urgent that Handy had to trot halfway across the city for the sake of it.

  “Yaotl?”

  “Sorry.” I looked up. “I was thinking.”

  “I was just asking if you knew of any work going around here? I thought I was on to a good thing with Shining Light, you see, but if he’s gone away, then I’m short of an employer …”

  I looked at his muscular arms and recalled his efforts of the day before. What had happened had not been his fault, I thought generously, any more than it had been mine. “I’ll suggest my master bear you in mind,” I promised.

  I went to see the Chief Minister the moment I finished speaking to Handy, to tell him about my visit to the prison.

  In the event my master paid scant attention to my conversations with the majordomo and his guards. He seemed distracted, toying impatiently with a piece of paper on his lap. He did not show me the paper but I assumed it was the letter from Shining Light that Handy had delivered. He kept looking down at it and then at me in a speculative way, as if its contents concerned me.

  When I had finished speaking he tapped the paper on his knee and asked: “What am I going to do about Shining Light?”

  “My Lord, I was going to see him today, but Handy says he’s gone away.”

  “Gone away—a merchant, going on a journey on an unlucky day like One Reed? Rubbish! He’ll be hiding somewhere—and no wonder! He must have a pretty good idea what I’m going to do to him—that’s if the other merchants don’t get their hands on him first!”

  “Then you want me to go to his house today, after all?”

  “Yes. No,” he corrected himself hastily. He looked at his letter again, and a curious half-smile appeared on his face, as if a pleasing thought had just struck him.

  “I think it’s too late to go today. Go, by all means, but leave it till tomorrow.”

  “As you wish, my Lord.�
� I had no urgent wish to go all the way to Pochtlan that afternoon.

  “Is that man Handy still around?”

  “Yes—I believe he’s looking for work.”

  “Good! Tell him not to go anywhere. I will have a letter for him to carry and we’ll make it worth his while if he delivers it tonight.”

  TWO JAGUAR

  1

  The slave who greeted me at Shining Light’s house was barely polite. After staring at me for so long that I began to wonder whether there was something wrong with his eyes, he showed me into the courtyard and told me to rest there, among the foliage plants and empty flowerpots of a winter garden. He offered me something to eat, although when I turned to him to accept he had vanished, leaving me to the courtyard’s only other occupant.

  An old man sat with his back to an immaculately whitewashed wall, against which the dull mottled brown of his ragged cloak stood out like a stain. His head was bowed, and he seemed to be asleep. A thin trail of saliva ran from a corner of his mouth across his chin.

  I shifted my weight indecisively from one foot to the other while I wondered how to get into the house without causing offense. The slave seemed prepared to leave me where I was, alone save for the unconscious old man, for the rest of the day.

  The courtyard’s freshly swept stuccoed floor was already warm beneath my bare soles and its walls gleamed in the morning sunshine, making the doorways into the interior of the house resemble dark cavities. Wicker screens covered some of the doorways, and if anyone apart from the old man was at home, I thought they must be behind one of those.

  I started toward the nearest of the screens.

  The voice cut me off before I had gone two steps.

  “If it’s money you’re after, don’t bother. We don’t keep any here.”

  The other man in the courtyard had raised his head and was watching me. His stare had a vague quality that made me think he was looking past me, until I noticed that his eyes were filmed over with age. There had been nothing vague in his voice, however.