The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  In the moonlight she was a vague shape in my arms. I could smell her faint, clean woman’s scent better than I could see her.

  I touched her hair. “Lily …”

  My touch broke the spell. All of a sudden she collected herself. “It’s getting late. It’s going to be a cold night. I’m sorry—I did not mean to burden you with my family’s troubles.”

  She got up stiffly. I reached for her again, catching the hem of her skirt with my fingers. She hesitated a moment too long.

  She knelt beside me for a long time, saying little, absorbed in her own thoughts.

  At last she said: “Do you remember Quauhtenanco?”

  “I remember the Merchants coming home.” The whole of Mexico, or so it had seemed at the time, had gone out to greet the victorious merchants, lining the causeway between the southern shore of the lake and the city to cheer the little group on for the last stretch of their journey.

  “I couldn’t believe he was lost.” There was no need to ask who she meant. “They sent runners ahead, of course, so we knew who had come back alive and who hadn’t, but I kept telling myself there must have been a mistake. So I stood there at the side of the causeway, staring at their faces as they came past, while everybody was shouting and cheering and telling me how proud I must be.”

  “I was there too.” At the head of the crowd had been the Fire Priests, the great lords and the Constables. I had been there too, among the priests, my formal cape billowing around me as I blew lustily into my shell trumpet to add to the noise.

  “They’d almost all gone by before I saw him.”

  “‘Saw him?’” I repeated, confused. “You mean your husband? But I thought …”

  “He looked so old,” she went on, as if I had not interrupted her. “He was carrying this trophy—only a feather banner, but from the way he stooped under it, it might have been a block of granite. I couldn’t see his face. It was his cloak I recognized—it was torn and dirty, but I’d have known it anywhere, because I’d embroidered it myself.”

  I knew what she was going to say after that. I had seen him too, shuffling along at the end of that line of gaunt, grimy, exhausted men until he heard a voice he knew, somehow making itself heard over the crowd’s roar, and he had paused, raised his head and smiled.

  “I had little Shining Light in my arms, and I held him up and shouted myself hoarse before I realized—but when I saw it was my father, wearing my husband’s cloak …”

  “You wished he’d died instead.”

  “I wished I’d died, so I would never have known what it was to feel like that! I waited four years for my husband to come back to me, and for just a moment I let myself believe he had—can you imagine what that was like?”

  “Your father just walked on, didn’t he? He had to follow the procession. I saw. He couldn’t meet your eyes.”

  “Four years,” she said again. “And so many years since then.”

  “There’s been nobody else?”

  “No. There might have been—I’ve had offers.” She uttered what might have passed for a laugh. “I’m a wealthy widow, what do you expect? One of the old men you saw the other day, even he’s …” She ended the sentence with a shudder. “But it never seemed to matter, being alone. I had the family business to look after, you see, I had Shining Light—but now there’s nothing.”

  Clear, unblinking eyes searched my face.

  “Do you understand me?” she whispered.

  I wanted to answer her but my mouth was suddenly dry. I felt desire and a kind of fear, both at once.

  Then we held each other again, but this time it was different.

  It was not like being with a pleasure girl. To feel my own heat returned was like watching a flame reflected in an obsidian mirror: a thing known but strange, unpredictable, elusive, uncontainable.

  Afterward she giggled like a young girl.

  “You didn’t learn how to do that in the House of Tears!”

  “It was a skill they didn’t teach.”

  Our priests were celibate, pledged to the gods, but they sometimes strayed. The Emperor, Montezuma, had been a priest, and it was hard to imagine that a man like him, with all his wives and concubines, had never had a girl in all the time he had been at the Priest House.

  I had strayed myself, letting my feet wander toward the market when the madness overcame me. It did not matter, so long as you were discreet, and if you came back laden with shame and sure that your betrayal showed as plainly as blood smeared on the face of a statue, then that was between you and the gods. It was different if you were caught, naturally.

  “So, are you going to tell me about her, then?” the woman wheedled in my ear.

  “Not much to tell.”

  I thought of my visits to the market, of hastily arranged, fleeting encounters that I would promptly try to forget. It was always the market—it was too dangerous to visit the beautiful, lithe creatures from the official pleasure houses, who danced with the warriors and were reserved for them. I knew solid peasant girls, slaves too clumsy to dance and die at the festivals and foreign women stranded, lost and hungry in the midst of a strange, vast city.

  “There was one girl in particular,” I recalled dreamily. “She was a foreigner. She called herself ‘Turquoise Maize Flower.’ She said she was a Huaxtec, and she dressed as one—you know, the brightly embroidered blouse and skirt and her hair braided in colored cloths wound with feathers. I don’t know whether she really was one, though.” The Huaxtecs were a famously hot-blooded race, and I had always suspected Maize Flower had merely been playing on their reputation for inventiveness on the sleeping mat. “I was calling on her regularly at one time. It all ended in tears, of course.”

  I spoke casually, but what I felt in that moment was horror.

  Remembering the last time I had seen the girl and what she had told me then was like being accused of a crime I had committed years ago, and thought I had got away with. It was like looking down and noticing for the first time that the road I had been carelessly ambling along was bordered on both sides by deep chasms that would swallow me as soon as I put a foot wrong.

  “Yaotl? What’s the matter?”

  My muscles had stiffened, involuntarily pushing her away. She must have felt the cold sweat that suddenly came over me.

  “It’s nothing,” I said hoarsely. “Just something I remembered. I’m sorry. I can’t talk now—my ribs hurt.”

  I saw again the faces I had pictured earlier that evening, before I had followed Lily across the courtyard. I knew whose they were now, and wished I did not.

  I lay still in her arms and tried to stop myself from shivering. Neither of us spoke for a long time.

  Eventually I slept.

  EIGHT FLOWER

  1

  I sat up with a start.

  It was morning. The screen had been drawn back and sunlight streamed through the open doorway, around a dark figure whose shadow fell across my sleeping mat.

  I stared stupidly at the shape for what seemed like hours, lying with my head on one side, waiting for sleep to wear off, before realizing there was someone else in my room.

  “Who … ?”

  Lily did not move. “I think you should tell me what really happened.”

  “What?”

  “When you were thrown out of the Priest House, Yaotl.” She spoke in a bleak monotone, like somebody reciting a passage learned by rote. “Tell me who hated you enough to want you expelled, and why.”

  Carefully, mindful of my sore ribs, I levered myself up on one elbow.

  “I don’t understand. Why do you want to know?”

  “Just tell me! I brought you into my house. I’ve fed you and treated your wounds and … and …” She seemed unable to bring herself to mention the rest. “It’s just one thing I want to know—don’t you think you owe me that much?”

  This was bewildering. “I really don’t know. I’d tell you if I could, honestly.”

  “Was it over a woman?”


  “You’re never jealous?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” She stamped her foot. “Just answer me! Was it that woman you were telling me about—Maize Flower?”

  “Lily—what’s all this about?” As sleep receded, along came the memory of how the woman had treated my wounds, and how she had been, lying in my arms in the night. Something had happened since then: she had left me to wake up alone, and come back with a purpose that I did not understand.

  In the way she leaned toward me, with her hands at her sides bunched tightly into fists, there was an almost childish air of determination, as if there was something she absolutely must have that was just beyond her reach.

  All of a sudden I thought I knew what that something was. I had believed all along that Lily had been lying when she said her son had gone into exile. I had assumed that she had been covering up for him, but suddenly, recalling what Curling Mist and Nimble had done to me and what had happened to the sorcerers, I saw another possibility, one that would explain her sudden anger and desperation.

  “This is about your son, isn’t it?” I said slowly. “They’ve got him, haven’t they—Curling Mist and his boy? They’ve kidnapped him—the way they tried to kidnap me! And now they’re threatening you. They made you tell everyone he’d gone away, so the chiefs of the merchants wouldn’t come looking for him. They wanted me—they wanted to know something about me—and now they’ve told you to find it out for them! That’s what this is all for!”

  Even as I spoke them, I wondered at my own words. Could Curling Mist’s hold on Shining Light really have been so strong that he could induce him to part with his fortune? How had he persuaded the young merchant to offer the war-god, at the cost of his family’s good name, a bewildered, emaciated, mutilated prisoner? Had he somehow coerced him into doing that, before completely overpowering him?

  It seemed impossible, but the merchant’s mother appeared to confirm it. Her face, which had been set as firmly as a statue’s, seemed to crumple, and she hid it in her hands and burst into tears.

  “My son had no money, do you see? And he owed that wretched man Curling Mist so much. It ended up that he would do anything he asked him to. Curling Mist made him take that Bathed Slave. I don’t know where he got him from, or why Shining Light had to sacrifice him to the war-god, but he did it, and afterward he had to go and see Curling Mist, to tell him what had happened. I think my son thought he had done all he had to. But he never came home. Before he went, he told me to give out that he’d gone away, because after the sacrifice he wouldn’t be able to show his face in Tlatelolco for a long time. A couple of days later I got the first message.” She looked into my eyes, blinking rapidly. “I had to keep up the pretense that my son had gone away. And I had to report to the boy—I had to tell him if I saw you.”

  “Why, though? What do they want from me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And now you want me to tell you about … about the girl in the market.” A chill came over me, as it had the night before when I remembered how Maize Flower and I had parted.

  She looked down so that her hair fell limply over her face. “I had to see the boy this morning. I told him what you told me last night. He told me to find out more.” With a despairing sob, she added: “Yaotl, please! They’ll kill him if I don’t tell them what they want to know! It’s such a little thing to ask, but it could be worth my son’s life!”

  I did not want to. I did not want to drag this one event out of the tangle of petty and not so petty rivalries, squabbles and feuds that had been life at the Priest House. I did not want to examine it in all its painful detail and endure all that guilt and loss again.

  I listened to the woman’s sobs and watched her shoulders heaving and realized that I had no choice.

  Two boys had been born on the same day—One Death, in the year Nine Reed. One Death was the day-sign of the Smoking Mirror, and each of the boys bore one of the god’s many names. One was called Telpochtli, which meant the Young Warrior. The other was called Yaotl, the Enemy. Both their fathers had promised them to the priests a few days afterward, and that was as much as they had in common.

  “Young Warrior was from a noble family,” I explained. “He could have been born on one of the Useless Days at the end of the year and he’d still have ended up a priest. My father’s just a commoner, and if I’d been born on any other day I’d have gone to the House of Youth like my brothers.”

  “And you were friends?” Lily’s tone had softened a little, now that I seemed to be telling her what she had to know.

  “Friends? I don’t know. No, how could we be? He was a rich kid, surrounded by other rich kids. They’d accept him without question. They’d never accept me: I only survived by being smarter than they were, which didn’t make them like me any better. All the same, Young Warrior was taken into the Priest House the same day I was. He was always there. And we both knew, as soon as we knew each other’s birthdays, that our fates couldn’t be separated.”

  We had practiced telling fortunes together, testing each other on the Book of Days. We had raced each other home with our bundles of sticks during the festival of Eating Maize and Beans, and joyously denounced each other in the evenings—although only during the first four days when it was a harmless game. We had gone into battle as novice warriors together, and on our first time out—when it was permissible to cooperate to bring down a captive—we had been on the same team.

  It turned out we had even shared the same woman.

  “That was Maize Flower?” Lily asked.

  “Yes, although I didn’t know it at the time. To tell you the truth it was a surprise to find out that he’d been to see a girl at all, because I didn’t think he was the type—a bit too serious, more wrapped up in his service to the gods than me, I thought. But I found he was visiting the marketplace regularly too. He couldn’t keep it from me for long. I never told anyone, naturally. Sometimes we made excuses for each other when the other couldn’t be found. I didn’t know who his girl was, though.”

  “But you found out.”

  I did not want to go on with the story. I lifted my eyes from Lily to the edge of the doorway behind her and kept them there, trying to pretend I was alone, until the effort became too much and I became aware of her gaze fixed expectantly on me as if she were willing me to tell her something she already knew.

  “I found out,” I whispered, “when she told me about the child.”

  She gasped. “You had … ?”

  “No,” I replied, a little testily. “At least … Lily, I’d been seeing her for months, but I thought we’d been too careful. I suppose it could have been mine, but why should it? Why not Young Warrior’s or anybody else’s? Why did she have to pick on me?”

  I had long ago decided not to dwell upon the possibility that I might have fathered a child. I had suppressed all thought of him or her, banishing the notion from my mind as I had once effectively banished the unhappy pleasure girl from my life. Only at unguarded moments, or in my dreams, did the thought of my son or daughter sometimes come back to haunt me: a charge that was never proved, never dropped, and to which I had no answer.

  “I laughed at her when she told me, but she just said it had been put in her womb by the Smoking Mirror, and so it didn’t matter who the father was. If she went to the Head Priest and said it was me, he’d believe her.”

  I remembered how my jaw had dropped when Maize Flower had made her announcement, and how quickly I had turned over possibilities, calculations and plans in my mind, grasping the danger I was in long before she threatened me with it.

  “I didn’t think she’d go to the priests. After all, she’d be in almost as much trouble as I would. But I didn’t know! I was trying to reason with her, and then I tried to buy her off. I offered her ten cloaks, which was more than I had and twice what a husband would’ve given her on her wedding day. Then she started getting hysterical. I couldn’t really make out what she was saying through the tears, but there was a lot of nons
ense about trust and love and men and women being stronger than the gods. Stronger than the gods! That’s a good one to remember next time you hear that the lake’s flooded and swept a score of houses away.”

  Maize Flower had kept lunging toward me, trying to grasp the hem of my cloak, and I had kept backing away, turning my face away from hers as if afraid she was going to bite me. Then, suddenly, she had seemed to give up, and had slumped, sobbing, in a corner.

  “Why don’t you just go?” she had cried.

  “Maize Flower …” I had begun, awkwardly stretching a hand toward her, only to have it knocked blindly away.

  “Save your breath! What do I need you for anyway? It’s not even as if it’s your child, you pathetic little fart! Do you think I’d risk the real father’s life by going to the priests? Just get out! I don’t want to see you again!”

  Lily said: “That must have been hard to take.”

  “Do you think so? Just then I think I felt more relieved than anything else. It did hurt,” I conceded, “but that came much later. At the time I just got out as fast as I could, with the insults ringing in my ears.

  “I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying—I think by then a lot of it was in her native language—but there was one phrase I do remember, because it was so odd. It was something like ‘Just as good as you!’ Not ‘better.’ This other man, whoever he was, was definitely ‘just as good.’”

  “And you never saw her again?”

  “No. But I didn’t see much of Young Warrior either. He vanished soon afterward.

  “Before he did, though, he came to see me. He didn’t say much. He just came up to me—I remember this clearly, it was in the middle of a fast, and I was sitting over my one bowl of maize porridge for that day—looked me in the eye and said: ‘You know, don’t you?’

  “I had a mouthful of porridge and couldn’t speak.

  “‘Don’t think you’ve seen the last of me, you peasant. It may take a while, but we’ll pay you back!’ he said, and then he kicked my bowl of porridge clean across the room, spilling the lot, and walked off.”