The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  The steward had set it in the next room, after poking a hole in the plaster separating it from Costly’s and mine. I could imagine him working quickly and quietly so as not to disturb either of us before he had time to get back outside. Rabbit, anxious to keep his dereliction of duty to himself, would have assured the steward that I was still in the room, and the Prick, having decided to take no chances, had tried to smoke me out rather than risk going in after me. I was meant to be driven into the courtyard, coughing and weeping, and yoked securely before I came to my senses.

  I wondered whether either the steward or our master had spared Costly a thought.

  As I backed away, my heels fetched up against the wicker chest.

  I spent the last of my air in a gasp of relief. Knowing where the chest was positioned meant I could find my way out. I got up, grabbed the chest in both hands and stumbled from the room, barely noticing when my shoulder smashed into the edge of the doorway on the way out.

  Outside I dropped the chest on the ground and collapsed, panting, on top of it. I could not stay here, I knew, but the need to rest, to gulp down clean, fresh air, was too strong. I lay there, slumped over the chest, until I heard women’s voices.

  “What’s up with these three?”

  “Isn’t that the steward?”

  “What’s that funny smell?”

  I raised my head reluctantly. There were two of them. They both carried brooms, and were eyeing Rabbit, the steward and me as critically as our fathers might have done if they had found us asleep after daybreak.

  “It’s Yaotl!” one of them cried. “What happened? Why are you all lying here?”

  A quick look at the sky, which was lightening steadily, reminded me I did not have much time. Soon the Sun would be up and the courtyard would be full of people, including my master. At some point, too, the steward and Rabbit would wake up, since I was sure I had not hit either of them as hard as I should have.

  “Aren’t you two late?” I mumbled, as I pulled the lid of the chest open and peered inside it. From the top of the Great Pyramid, the bellowing of a conch-shell trumpet warned us that the Sun was up.

  “We were here ages ago,” one of the girls protested, “but the steward sent us away. Very rude about it, too, he was.”

  “And now here he is, lying in the middle of the courtyard. He’ll have to move, I want to sweep that bit.”

  “Can’t you go around him?” I suggested wearily.

  I looked at the contents of the box with a feeling of despair. The few items of value were smoke-damaged beyond hope of repair, but I was past caring about that. They had been Costly’s, and he was dead, and I could not even weep for him because I had no tears left and no time now in which to shed them.

  There was nothing more I could do for Costly now, but I knew what he would have wanted me to do. He would have wanted me to use the chance he had given me by getting clean away as fast as I could, and then following my plan to catch the killer of the man in the canal, find the sorcerers and get them to the Emperor.

  I had to get away, in any event, because my master was clearly more determined than ever to deliver me into Curling Mist and his son’s hands. That explained the smoke and the slave collar; they had been his response to the message of the previous evening, the body in the canal with my name on it. Lord Feathered in Black must have instructed his steward to make sure I was handed over in such a state that I could not run away again.

  I got up slowly.

  “You may as well take this,” I said to the girls, gesturing toward the wicker chest. “Some of it might be salvageable. Anything you can use is yours. We won’t be needing it anymore.”

  2

  Noon found me in Pochtlan, contemplating a stone wall at the rear of the merchant’s property.

  I was not about to announce myself at the gateway. I had a simple message to deliver, but I wanted to make sure it got to the right person: to Shining Light’s mother, Lily. The only way to be sure she received it, before either my master sent men to fetch me home or the merchant himself or his allies tried to kidnap me again, was to speak to her face-to-face. I wanted to come upon her without warning, surprise her with what I had to say and get away in time to plan my next move. That meant sneaking up on the household, and the obvious way to do that was to climb over the courtyard wall.

  I knew I ought to wait until nightfall before attempting it. On the other hand, while I might just survive getting caught doing this during the day, to do it at night would be a sure way of being taken for a sneak thief. Besides, there was an ash tree growing next door, one of whose stout limbs dipped temptingly within my grasp before reaching across to shade the courtyard of Shining Light’s house, and there was no one about.

  Seizing my opportunity, I scrambled up onto the limb. Further good luck greeted me on the far side of the wall, much of which was covered with a mature passionflower whose woody stems gave me a soft and silent landing in the courtyard.

  It was as I had seen it before, except that there was no old man slumped against the wall. There was no one about. Not even a dog stirred.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and stepped across to the nearest doorway. The screen had been pulled away from this one and lay propped against the wall beside it, so that I could walk straight in.

  The room was empty.

  I cursed myself for an idiot. Of course it was empty: why else had the doorway been left uncovered? I turned to go, but something made me turn back.

  There was something odd about this room.

  The walls were only half painted. The back of the room, the half farther from the door, was bare, and the division between the two halves was a straight line. Either it had been left that way on purpose or there had been some physical boundary that had been painted up to and that was no longer there.

  When I inspected the line closely I could see what had happened. The false wall had been knocked away cleanly and the remains of the plaster swept away, but the traces of it were clear enough.

  “So you did hide your wealth here, after all,” I muttered. “I wonder where you put it all?”

  “I wish I knew, too,” said a voice from behind me. “But like I told you before, if you want to talk business, you’ll have to ask my daughter.”

  Fright made me yelp like a dog. I jumped and tottered forward a couple of steps into what had been the hidden part of the room, before regaining my balance and turning to face the old man.

  Shining Light’s grandfather stood in the doorway. His face was hidden in shadow but his bent frame and the sour smell of sacred wine that clung to the air around him were instantly recognizable.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, absurdly reproachful. “I thought you were all asleep!”

  “Had to get up for a piss. Saw you skulking about, thought I’d come and see what you were up to. Besides,” he added, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “shouldn’t I be asking you that question, Yaotl? How did you get in?”

  Drink and age had not dulled his mind too much, I noted, as he seemed to have no trouble remembering who I was.

  “The servant let me in.”

  “No he didn’t. You climbed that ash tree over the back, didn’t you? I ought to have made them cut it down years ago. In summer the kids use it to steal passion fruit off that wall.”

  I was still standing in the bare half of the room. “You told me there was no money here,” I said, adopting the reproachful tone again as I looked at the space around me.

  “There isn’t. There used to be.” Disconcertingly, the old man seemed not to mind being questioned by someone who was on the face of it a burglar. “My grandson took it all away. I gather a friend of his found a better hiding place for it. But as I keep saying, you’ll have to ask …”

  Another voice interrupted his. It was a man’s but sounded as querulous as an old woman’s. “What’s going on? Who’re you talking to?”

  Kindly glanced sideways at the newcomer and then stepped back to let him see th
rough the doorway. As he did so the sunlight fell on his gnarled face, revealing a lopsided grin.

  “It’s an old friend of yours, Constant,” he said, as the servant who had let me into the house on my previous visit peered myopically into the room. “Yaotl, the Chief Minister’s slave.”

  “Yaotl!” The servant jumped back as if I had just stung him. “Him! All right, I’ll go and tell the Parish Chief. We’ll have him taken away!”

  “There’s no need.” The old man laid a restraining hand on the servant’s arm. “I’m sure Yaotl was just going—weren’t you? I dare say he only wanted a word with Lily.”

  “Yes, I do!” I said eagerly.

  “Well, you can’t have one,” the servant informed me curtly. “She’s not here.”

  “Where is she, then?” Somehow it had not occurred to me that Shining Light’s mother would not be at home, patiently waiting for me to slip over the back wall so that I could deliver my message to her.

  “Mind your own business,” rejoined the servant instantly.

  “Why do you want to know?” the old man asked mildly.

  I hesitated, fearful of saying too much, although it occurred to me afterward that my presence was revealing enough by itself. “I want to tell her something that will interest her.”

  “He’s lying,” growled Constant.

  “Only a bit,” said the old man. “He came here for a reason, and I don’t suppose it was to steal our wealth from us. If your master was after money,” he added, looking shrewdly at me, “I imagine he’d just have demanded it.”

  “I’m not working for the Chief Minister now,” I said hastily.

  “Really?” The old man looked thoughtful. “Well, in the end it’s up to my daughter whether she wants to listen to what you have to say or not. She makes up her own mind about everything else. Oh, shut up!” Kindly directed his last words at the servant before turning back to me. “Try the ball court in Tlatelolco.”

  What would a respectable merchant’s widow be doing at a ball court? “You mean Lily has gone to pay off her son’s gambling debts?”

  Or was her motive more sinister than that? I had to face up to the possibility that, whatever Shining Light was up to with Curling Mist and Nimble, his mother was in on it too. If you wanted to arrange a discreet meeting then the ball court, thronging with gamblers, was the obvious place.

  The idea of her conspiring with my kidnappers was enough to make me shiver.

  “You said your daughter didn’t know there were other vices that could seduce a man,” I said bitterly. “I take it she knows all about them now!”

  Shadows fell across the old man’s face as he looked away.

  “Some of them, anyway,” he muttered.

  3

  I raced to the ball court, anxious to outpace the news of my coming. If Lily really was talking to Curling Mist then I wanted to surprise them.

  By the time I got there, sweating and breathless, a game was already in progress. It was a fine day for it, sunny and warm, but not excessively hot, and a recent light drizzle had been enough to dampen the dust in the ball court without softening the mud floor. As I approached I could hear the thump of the solid rubber ball as it bounced off the court’s brick walls and the players’ bodies.

  It was hard to get near the stone seats overlooking the court for the mass of people surrounding it. They were as quiet and well behaved as any gathering of Aztecs, but the business being carried on in whispers among them was being conducted with such intensity that I feared to interrupt it. I found myself edging between little knots of people talking earnestly of odds and prices and swapping gambling tokens.

  Eventually I managed to climb up onto a stone seat and join the crowd looking down into the ball court itself.

  The court was a long, narrow strip of hard earth at the bottom of a deep pit between high brick walls, with shorter strips at right angles to it at either end. Back and forth within the court ran two teams of tough-looking young men, whose hairstyles and scars showed that their bodies had been hardened by war as well as exercise. They wore abbreviated breechcloths and leather pads on their knees and elbows, and they hurled themselves at the ball as if their lives depended upon keeping it in the air—as well they might, for this game could be played to the death, and if the players ever forgot that, they only had to look at the lurid and bloody friezes on the walls above them.

  The ball itself was a dark blur among the jostling bodies, taking a solid shape only in the instant when it was stopped by a hip, a thigh or a buttock. The players were not allowed to use their hands or feet, except to spring off the ground when they fell. Splashes and streaks of blood on the earth showed where players had fallen and got up again. The air above the court was full of the smells of blood and sweat, mixed with an elusive animal scent of high excitement.

  You could not help getting caught up in the game. We spectators leaned forward, craning our necks to follow the ball’s flight and the hurtling, crashing bodies of the players. Nobody cheered, called out or even spoke above a whisper, even when a player did a full somersault to catch the ball at an improbable angle and drive it off the wall and into his opponents’ half of the court. We could never lose sight of the fact that this was more than a game: it was a sacred ritual, one of the ways through which the gods revealed their will, and the dark-robed priests stationed on either side of the court were not just there to award points and punish fouls.

  Some of those watching the game would be hoping it would tell them their fortunes. Others hazarded more than their fate, or less, depending on your point of view. Spread out before us, between us and the court, were money and goods of every kind: bags of cocoa beans, loads of cloth, copper axes and quills full of gold, jeweled lip-plugs and other adornments, fresh squashes, turkeys and quails, folds and sheets of the best paper from Amatlan or Amacoztitlan, and the most precious and delicate thing of all: feathers. Right in front of me was a bundle of the most beautiful scarlet feathers, the kind the merchants and tribute collectors got from distant provinces far to the south, but as stiff and full of color as if they had just been plucked.

  The only rule about betting was that the stakes must be displayed in full view of the players. This was the law my master had broken with his secret wagers with Curling Mist. The reason for it was connected with two small stone rings, not much more than a hand’s breadth across, set into the walls of the court at twice a man’s height. A team that managed to get the ball through one of them would win everything that had been staked on the game. I had never seen this happen, and I knew no one who had.

  The man who had performed the somersault picked himself up, hobbled about for a moment and then hopped to the back of the court while a teammate rushed forward to intercept the ball. One leg was already swelling up: after the game they would have to let the pooled blood out with obsidian razors.

  I reminded myself that I was here to look for someone, not watch the game, but when I glanced at the tiers of seats opposite and around me I saw only the sort of crowd these events usually drew. Most had the short, coarse cloaks and tonsured hairstyles of commoners who had never taken a captive and never would. A few, occupying seats reserved for them at the front, were more gaudily dressed, their lips and ears punctured by jewels that glittered as they chatted to one another. The ball game attracted the very poor, pinning all their hopes on one big win, and the very rich, who could afford to lose. None of the spectators obviously had anything to do with the merchant class and its discreet wealth. And none of them was female.

  Perhaps she had been here and left, I thought. I tried asking my neighbors.

  I could not see the face of the person on my right, as he was leaning forward in his seat with his eyes fixed on the game being played out below us, but I could tell that he had not yet had his head shaved to mark his first capture of an enemy warrior. He wore no cloak, and from the sleek muscle coating his shoulders and back, I thought he might be a ballplayer himself. I had more luck catching the eye of the commo
ner on my left.

  “Come to a lot of these games?” I asked conversationally.

  He grinned. “Whenever I can. Whenever the Governor’s team from Tlatelolco are playing, anyway, but I try to catch all the games—even crappy practice sessions like this one. You?”

  “Oh, you can’t keep me away.” The players were taking up their positions, ready to contest the next point. Sweat made their bruised bodies glisten, where they were not caked with dust, and the earth under their feet was mottled with their drying blood. It would not have occurred to me that this was anything other than a competitive match.

  “There’s a good crowd here,” I said casually, keeping up the pretense of having a conversation until my neighbor’s attention strayed back to the game.

  “Not bad,” he said noncommittally.

  “I was wondering …”

  He turned to me in exasperation. “Are you watching this or not?”

  I edged away from his glare. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I was looking for someone.”

  He gave the ball court a longing glance before deciding that the quickest way of getting rid of me was to answer my questions as concisely as possible. “Well, who is he, then?”

  “She, actually. Her name’s Lily.”

  He fell into a furious fit of coughing. As soon as he recovered he said: “Oh, so it’s like that, is it? You picked an odd place to meet her, then. Wouldn’t a garden have been better?”

  “Better for what?” I stared at him, suddenly confused. I wondered whether he thought I had been planning an assignation, and then realized that that was exactly what he had thought because it was what I would have thought as well, had I been in his place.

  “Well, you know—”