The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  “I know too. I used to be a priest.”

  She looked at me with renewed interest and I saw the dark color that had spread over her face and the quick pulse in her throat. I wondered whether she in turn saw me as a young man, when I had been one of the temple’s mysterious, glamorous servants, with my crown of feathers and my cheeks daubed with blood and ochre. She frowned. “But now you’re a slave—how did that happen?”

  The question shocked me back to the present. I did not want to talk about this.

  “My master needs to know where your son’s offering came from,” I said clumsily. “He needs to talk to Shining Light … .”

  “Why?”

  I opened my mouth to reply and then shut it again. What could I say, when for all I knew old Black Feathers might just then be amusing himself deciding what parts of her son’s body he would like to have severed with a dull knife? I heard myself mumbling: “He’s concerned that it went wrong. After all, he sent me to help.”

  “And a lot of help you were too!” she said bitterly. “If you hadn’t let that slave get away when he did, it might have been all right …”

  “There was nothing I could have done!”

  “My son would have been better off hiring another escort, like that big commoner Handy,” she went on, ignoring me. “Two men like him might have been able to hold the slave.”

  “I didn’t ask to be there!” I protested. “I don’t even know why I was there in the first place! Whose idea was it to send me, anyway? Did your son ask for me?”

  “How should I know? I’ve told you, I had no idea what he was doing.”

  “So you don’t know what dealings he had with my master?”

  “Until yesterday, I wasn’t aware that he’d ever had any!”

  “What about the man he placed his bets with—Curling Mist?”

  My last question seemed to strike her like a blow. She leaned forward sharply as if someone had stabbed her in the stomach. She sat up again just as abruptly, but kept her eyes on her knees as she answered me in a voice that was suddenly very small: “My son doesn’t share all his … business affairs with me. Why should he?”

  “But he did use him? He did put money on the ball game through him?”

  I watched her shoulders shudder momentarily beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. “I don’t know. Yes—he probably did. Look, I’m tired. I had the parish chiefs here all morning, and now you come asking questions that I can’t answer.” Her eyes were no longer glistening, merely hard and defiant. “If the Chief Minister wants to talk to my son, then he had better go and look for him. But you can tell him Shining Light isn’t here. He’s gone away to die. See what your master makes of that, slave!”

  3

  A small canal ran alongside the merchant’s house. I lingered by it for a while, toying with the idea of hailing a canoe and so saving myself a long walk back to my master’s house in the center of Tenochtitlan. I felt tired and dispirited: I could not claim to have achieved very much here, beyond establishing that Shining Light was not at home and that his mother appeared to have less idea of where his sacrificial victim had come from than I had. I did not even know whether to believe her when she claimed her son had gone into exile. On the other hand he must have some reason for setting off on a journey on an unlucky day. I remembered now where I had heard the name Xicallanco: Montezuma had mentioned it as a place where rumors of the pale strangers had been heard. According to my brother, these men had had things like the sword and the cloth he had shown me, and at the time I had thought about how our merchants might covet them. Could Lily’s son have gone in search of such things? It seemed possible, but then how had he known of them, I wondered, and again, why had he chosen to go on One Reed?

  It was quiet here. The walls around me were the color of sun-bleached bones, and for all I could tell held as much life within them. The water at my feet sparkled in the late morning sunshine. I gazed at my reflection, examining my own gaunt features, my earlobes tattered from years of offering the gods my own blood and my unkempt, thinning, graying hair, and wondered what Lily had seen when she had looked at me.

  Had I imagined the way she had looked at me while we were talking about the death of Bathed Slaves? Many women found priests alluring. They found us intriguing and sinister, for our ancient hymns and bloodstained knives, our black robes and long, tangled hair. They thought us brave, because we fasted and bled ourselves and confronted the gods every day and the creatures that frequented the darkness every night. And they could not have us, for we were celibate, and that only made us more fascinating.

  Lily was a handsome woman, much the same age as myself, and something about her had snagged in my heart and was refusing to be dislodged. Perhaps it had been her fierce pride in what her late husband had done, or her refusal to surrender to grief or rage, or her defiance toward the Chief Minister’s messenger. Perhaps it had been something in that moment we had shared, dwelling on the long-ago death of her father’s slave. She was named for the boldest of flowers and for a moment I thought that if I had just seen its deep red and brilliant yellow petals for the first time, I should not have been so struck by them. I turned the name over on my tongue: “Lily …”

  Then I allowed the face in the water an indulgent smile. A man who had sold himself into slavery had no ambition, no desire, no will of his own. He had given all that up, and now just had fantasies, and they were safe enough.

  Two faces smiled back at me.

  I nearly fell in the canal. Recovering hastily from the fright, I stepped back and looked at the new arrival in the flesh.

  He was dressed as a priest. Skulls and stars adorned his long black mantle. An ocelot-skin tobacco pouch dangled on his chest. His hair was as long as mine, although not as dirty as a priest’s hair would often be: matted and filthy with moss growing in it. Fresh blood, drawn from his earlobes, lay congealing on either side of his neck.

  For a moment I had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing myself, a dozen years younger, until the surprise wore off and I began to see the differences.

  To begin with the stranger was taller than I was, although he was stooping to bring his face on a level with mine. More interesting than that was the sooty paste covering his face and body. All priests wore this to stain themselves as black as the night that was their habitat, but this man had gone further than anyone else I had seen. He was caked in the stuff. It had rubbed off on the hem of his mantle and collected as a smattering of black dust at his feet. It had cracked around his eyes and mouth, showing slivers of brown skin underneath, but elsewhere it had been applied so thickly it obscured the features underneath like a mask. I could not even tell the man’s age, because he had laid the soot on so heavily that it would have hidden any lines on his face.

  Still smiling, he said: “Looking for a boat?”

  He was mumbling. Priests often did, owing to their practice of sacrificing their own blood by sticking cactus spines through their tongues.

  I looked around quickly. There was no one else beside the canal, although a canoe floated on the water a few paces away. A boatman stood in it, leaning on his pole with his back to me. He was young, an unblooded youth’s lock of hair still falling down the nape of his neck.

  “You can share mine,” the man beside me added.

  I found the sudden appearance of man and canoe disturbing.

  “Thanks.” I tried not to sound ungracious. “I might walk back to Tenochtitlan, though.”

  The smile vanished, splitting off a few flakes of soot as it did so. “You might not.”

  Something jabbed me below my rib cage. I tried to back away, only to find one of my arms seized in a grip like an alligator’s bite. I felt a sharp pricking against my stomach and looked down at the knife. It was made of brown metal, like copper, but darker. I had never seen anything like it.

  “What’s this about? Let me go!”

  The grip on my arm tightened.

  “The boat.” The man with the knife jerked my
arm, twisting me around to face the canoe. Struggling to keep my balance, I could do nothing about trying to escape before I felt the knife again, now prodding me in the small of my back.

  As we moved toward the boat, its occupant turned around.

  He was Nimble, Curling Mist’s son—the boy I had last seen and heard taking bets on a ball game from my master.

  I thought it was a robbery at first. Perhaps Kindly had not been altogether wrong after all, I thought, assuming that the black-faced man with the knife was Nimble’s father, Curling Mist. Perhaps it was true that the merchant owed him money. If he had heard about the young man’s departure he might have been in a hurry to collect it before it was too late, and perhaps he thought I had beaten him to it.

  “Look, you’ve got this all wrong. I haven’t got anything.”

  “Shut up and get in the boat. Call out to anyone and you’re dead.”

  I was made to clamber into the center of the canoe under the youth’s watchful eye. The black-faced man got in behind me. As soon as he had settled himself, with the blade of his knife resting against the side of my neck, the youth pushed off from the side of the canal.

  “What’s this about?” I demanded. “Where are you taking me?”

  My assailant’s breath stirred the hair on the back of my head but he said nothing, so I tried the boy instead.

  “He doesn’t say much, your father, does he?”

  The youth had nothing to say either. He was concentrating on the canal’s banks and the pole in his hands. He handled the canoe skilfully, avoiding the occasional oncoming craft with nothing more than a slight curl of his lip and an almost imperceptible twist of the pole.

  “We’re heading out of the city,” I observed. I might as well have been talking to myself. I lapsed into silence, trying to decide what to do while I watched the scenery changing slowly around me.

  The canal merged into the broad waterway that spilled into the lake at Copolco on the eastern edge of Mexico’s island. Soon the houses gliding by on either side of us would be replaced by fields: chinampas, the artificial islands that our farmers had taken to cultivating when they had run out of dry land, and which now surrounded the city.

  I watched the houses and fields slipping past me with an odd feeling of detachment. The knife was still scraping the skin at the back of my neck but I was not afraid. What was happening to me was not real. It was too bizarre: to have been sent to Shining Light’s house by my master and then kidnapped by the man with whom my master bet on the ball game and his boy. It was obviously not a robbery, since they had made no effort to search me for valuables. What were they planning to do, then—hold me against my master’s gambling debts?

  I considered raising the alarm despite the threatened consequences, but there was no one to call to. The houses and fields were silent: most people must either be at home, out of sight and earshot behind the faceless walls of their courtyards, or have gone to the market.

  My only chance, unless I steeled myself to take on the youth, the man and the knife alone, was the open lake, where there were always plenty of boats and a shout carried a long way—provided I ever got there. All I could do in the meantime was to try to get them talking. I thought it might distract them at least.

  “Do I have to guess what all this is about?”

  That drew as much of a response as I expected it to.

  “All right, then.” I tried to keep my tone bland and conversational, while my eyes darted about, searching the fields on either side for an opportunity to get away. “You aren’t thieves, I know that. So it’s me you’re after, isn’t it? But why?” I paused. The boy went on plying his pole impassively and the knife stayed at my neck. “No, you won’t tell me that. All right, then, how did you know where to find me? Was it the woman who told you where to look, or the old man? But they’d never have got a message to you in time, not unless you were right by their house already. What about the Chief Minister?”

  The knife twitched.

  “Isn’t old Black Feathers one of your best customers? What’s he going to say when he learns you’ve made off with his slave?”

  From behind me a thick voice said: “I told you, this is too dangerous. We should do him here.” I thought it sounded more distinct than before, as if the effort of talking like a priest was becoming hard to maintain.

  I tried to shift my weight forward a little so that I could throw myself at the boy if either he or his father made a move, even though I knew the knife would be deep in my flesh before I could stir a muscle.

  The youth turned to look at me and let his eyes linger on my face, as if he were looking for something there.

  “No,” he said. His voice sounded too old for his years. “We mustn’t.”

  I felt the other man’s tension through the metal pressed to my skin. I recognized fear or suppressed anger or a mixture of both and wondered how long I had before he got desperate enough to use the knife. “We’re taking enough chances with him as it is. The longer we let him live the riskier it gets. I should have killed him beside the canal!”

  “But—”

  “But nothing!” The strain had come out into his voice now, which was suddenly high pitched, almost strangled. “Who do you think I’m doing all this for, anyway? If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be on this boat at all!” The cold pricking at my neck vanished and the knife blade appeared at the corner of my eye as he waved it in the youth’s direction. I started to turn my head, to flex the muscles in my arms and legs ready to spring. “Don’t argue with me! We kill him when I say so!”

  The glittering metal swung fully into my sight. I saw shock and alarm in the boy’s eyes, and realized too late that the knife was arcing toward my throat.

  A strong hand seized my hair and yanked my head backward, stretching my neck like a sacrificial quail’s.

  “No!” The young man almost screamed, dropping his pole as he threw himself toward me. “Please! You mustn’t! Not until we’ve asked him—we’ve got to know!”

  He was too slow. His fingers barely brushed Curling Mist’s arm before the blade struck my taut skin.

  It stayed there, quite still, for a moment that seemed to stretch into days. I was distantly aware of a stinging sensation and the warm, wet feeling of blood running from a shallow cut down the front of my neck. Much closer to me seemed the youth’s wide-open, imploring eyes, just a hand’s breadth from my face.

  “Please,” he begged in a whisper.

  The knife wavered a little as the hand holding it relaxed.

  “You really want me to spare him?”

  “Yes … at least for now.”

  “At least for now.” The man behind me slipped once more into his slurring parody of a priest’s voice. “All right. You win. He can live until he’s told us what you want to know. Then we’ll kill him.”

  4

  At Copolco we turned south to pass along the western edge of the island of Mexico. The boy swapped his pole for a paddle and put a little distance between us and the shore. Whether this was to make it easier for him to avoid running aground or harder for me to escape I did not know, but both he and his companion seemed to relax a little. The knife returned to the side of my neck.

  I had not tried to start another conversation. Nearly having my throat cut had made the danger I was in all too real, and I held my tongue for fear of provoking Curling Mist again. I suspected that if he and his son renewed their argument over me, the boy might not win it so easily the second time. Still, as the land receded, I felt I could risk a glance over my shoulder.

  The Sun lay low over the mountains, throwing the far shore of the lake into shadow. The water’s surface was calm, the bulk of the island of Mexico and the dyke beyond it sheltering it from the winds that sometimes stirred up the great salt lake to the east. Canoes dotted it, although none was close enough to be worth calling out to.

  Ahead of us, like a long low wall barring our way, was the causeway connecting Mexico with the small city of Tlacopan on the we
stern shore of the lake. By the time we got there it would be thronging with traders, day laborers and artisans heading home for the night to their towns and villages on the mainland. Every so often they would stop the traffic to open the wooden bridges that pierced the causeway at intervals in order to let boats pass from one part of the lake to another. While the bridges were closed a mass of canoes would build up around them, drifting aimlessly about like reeds scattered over the water while they waited for them to open again. If we found ourselves in the middle of such a crowd, I thought hopefully, then anything might happen.

  The nearer shore was all willows, sedges and rushes, with here and there a wooden landing stage or a little adobe house whose whitewashed walls glowed pink in the light of the setting Sun. Once or twice the flat summit of a pyramid appeared above the tops of the willows, with smoke drifting lazily from the temple that crowned it. The greatest city in the World lay just behind this quiet green verge, but here there was no one to be seen.

  I heard a faint splash as the paddle was dipped into the water, and my view of the shoreline shifted abruptly as we turned toward it. With a sudden feeling of dread I realized we would not, after all, be crossing the causeway.

  In an effort to see where we were going I twisted my head around too quickly and was rewarded with a sharp stinging at the side of my neck as the man behind me reminded me of the knife. He uttered a low, wordless growl as I turned hastily to face the youth again. The boy’s face had suddenly turned a little paler than before, and I saw strain in his narrow eyes and tightly compressed lips.