The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  His fingers plucked distastefully at the ragged hem of his cloak.

  “I think you might tell me why, Yaotl. It seems I have to put on a disguise just to visit my fool of a younger brother, in case half the army follows me with a mind to butcher my entire family. What did you want to run away for? You realize the Chief Minister’s got men out looking for you, don’t you? They’ve even questioned me! Of course, I told them there was no point looking for you here. Yaotl hasn’t been home in years, I said. There’s no way he’d be stupid enough to go back there now, when he knows he’s a wanted man. Obviously I overestimated you!”

  “Why do you think I ran away?” I replied defensively. “People kept trying to kill me!”

  He cast an expert eye over my naked body. I squirmed self-consciously until my sister passed me a clean breechcloth.

  “So I see,” he commented, as I tied the breechcloth with as much dignity as I could manage. “They haven’t made a very good job of it. What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “You can tell me what happened at Coyoacan.”

  My brother suddenly managed to look both shocked and uncomfortable, like a man who has found a hornet buzzing around under his cloak.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You remember what the Emperor told us, Lion. My master took extreme measures to find the sorcerers. I remember what you said as well, about the warriors he sent to Coyoacan. I thought at the time you knew more than you were telling me. But you told me to go there, so I did. I saw the house that got burned down. I saw the bodies—the children, and the woman. I found everything you wanted me find.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I wondered why you took such care to make sure I knew where to look, but didn’t want to tell me what had happened there. You wanted me to see for myself what the Chief Minister had done, but you didn’t want to tell me about it in case I started asking how you knew so much. Only I found more than you bargained for at that house: I found traces of the warriors who’d called there. I found a strap off one of their sandals—one of those big floppy things, like what you normally wear. It was badly frayed. I suppose it was worn out and came off when someone trod on it, but then you wouldn’t bother dressing up for an outing like that, would you?

  “Were you one of them? Did you kill those people?”

  “Yaotl!” my mother cried, appalled.

  My brother said nothing. His jaw began working dangerously. His face had gone dark red with anger.

  I had done it now: I had accused him and gone too far to withdraw. “Lion, since we last met, I’ve been threatened with a knife, abducted, nearly asphyxiated, beaten up and poisoned. I’ve found one body floating in a canal—all right, I know you had nothing to do with that one, but I’ve raked over the burned remains of three others, and I know it was the army that killed them. You didn’t tell me very much, but I’ve seen enough to work some of it out for myself. You are one of the Emperor’s executioners. Was it your handiwork I saw? Why, Lion? At least tell me that. I know one of the sorcerers was taken from that house. Why did his family have to die?”

  My brother’s pent-up fury exploded then. He was a skilled warrior and fast, in spite of his years. He leaped toward me in a blur of speed and I felt the blow, a stinging open-handed slap to the side of my head, before I saw it coming. As I cowered under him he bellowed: “Who do you think you are, to talk to me like that? Am I going to be questioned by a slave, a drunk, a loser like you?” Then he rounded on my mother and sister. “As for you—you brought me here just to listen to this? I had to traipse halfway across the city dressed like a tramp in case the Chief Minister had me followed and all for what? So this idiot could accuse me of murder to my face?”

  “Sit down!”

  My brother had been trained to issue commands and had spent years in the army honing the skill, but there was something much older and deeper in the way my mother spoke. It stirred something planted in him when we had both been little boys, and he had always been the first to come meekly to order, even though he was the eldest and the biggest. He subsided now as quickly as he had flared up.

  “I’ll tell you who he is,” our mother reminded him. “He’s your brother and my son. Now get away from him, and then,” she went on in a dangerous voice, “I want to hear you answer his questions.”

  “Mother,” I began, but she turned on me too.

  “And you, Yaotl, try and keep a civil tongue in your head!”

  Lion sat, glaring at me from under heavy, sulky eyelids.

  I took a deep breath and tried again.

  My mother was right: I ought to choose my words carefully. Lion was one of the most respected and feared men in the city. The gaudy finery in which he and others of his rank vaunted themselves could be got only from the Emperor’s hand, for valor on the battlefield. This was why clothes and jewels were so important to us: if you saw a man like my brother in the street you would not need to ask how he came by his wealth, and you would know either to be polite to him or keep out of his way. Yet Lion had abandoned his public face to come and see me. He had done that for a reason, but I knew better than to forget what it was costing him.

  “I’m sorry, Lion.” The unexpected apology lightened his expression a little. Even my mother sighed happily. “But I have to know what my master did and why. You remember what the Emperor told me to do. I’ve got to find the sorcerers now and get them to him and tell him what his Chief Minister has been up to at the same time. If I can’t do that then I’m likely to suffer a worse fate than the people in that village.”

  My brother shot a brief glance at my mother, who was watching him impassively, like a judge waiting to hear a witness’s evidence.

  The most extraordinary change came over his face. It went from the deep red of overripe tomatoes to the color of an uncooked sweet potato. It seemed to sag, as though all the strength had drained out of it and left the skin hanging unsupported on the bones beneath. Suddenly it felt as though we were looking, not at a famous warrior, but at a common man old before his time.

  He turned his face toward the sky and shut his eyes. When he opened them to look at us again, there was something I had never expected to see: a tear running down his cheek.

  “I don’t know why.” He was barely whispering. “I was never told. But until we talked to the Emperor that day, Yaotl, I thought the orders had come from him. I will eat earth for that!” He touched the ground with a fingertip automatically.

  “So it’s true, then,” my mother stated grimly.

  “I tried not to let them suffer! I made the men take the children outside—they never knew what happened to their mother, or she what we did to them. I didn’t have a choice, do you understand?”

  For a long time none of us answered him. My sister stared resolutely at the strip of bark in front of her, although she had not touched her bark-beater since I had emerged from the bathhouse. My mother’s face might have been carved out of granite.

  At last I made myself say: “I think you’d better tell it from the beginning, Lion.”

  “I didn’t want to be there,” my brother mumbled. “It’s not exactly soldiering, is it? Stringing up women and bashing their children’s brains out, like you’d swing a fish you’d caught against a rock to stop it flopping about.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw my sister wince.

  “Why’d you do it?” I asked.

  “Don’t be stupid! We were under orders. Anyway, the Constables—we’re the Emperor’s hard men, aren’t we? What was it to us, any more than cracking the heads of drunks in front of the palace?”

  I chose to ignore that. “You thought the orders came from the Emperor?”

  “Who else? I didn’t hear him issue them, but …” My brother sighed heavily. “Look, I’ll tell you how it was. We weren’t told anything about these men. We weren’t even told their names. We just had to find the village headman and bring in the man he took us to.

  “We went into Coyoacan in force—a full squad of t
wenty men, a lot just to make an arrest. We met up with the headman and his party outside the village well before daybreak.”

  “What did they tell you?” I asked.

  “They didn’t tell us anything at all! But you pick up things. I heard the word ‘sorcerer’ whispered a couple of times, when they thought we weren’t listening. When I heard that, I thought we were wasting our time. I assumed any sorcerer worth his salt would have known we were coming for him and would have vanished like the mist before we got there. He wouldn’t need to be a sorcerer, for that matter—you try moving a squad of fully armed warriors through a village in complete darkness without making a noise. They must have heard us on the other side of the lake.

  “In the event, though, we picked him up without any trouble at all. We even had men stationed at the back of the house, in case he broke the wall down and got out that way. It was only one of those little crude one-room mud huts, I could have knocked the wall through with my elbows. We needn’t have bothered. The headman just stood at the door and called him, and out he came, as meek as you like.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Little scrawny specimen. Not what you’d call impressive, except for his ears. I think I’d know him again, just from the ears.”

  “What happened to the man then?” I asked.

  “We marched him off to the prison. We didn’t think about him anymore once we’d brought him in. Why should we? I was just relieved we hadn’t had to break any heads. Like I said, this sort of thing isn’t exactly soldiering—not what they hand out cotton capes, tobacco and turquoise lip-plugs for, anyway.

  “So when they told us to go back—”

  “When was that?” I asked eagerly.

  “Not long after the arrests. I wasn’t happy, nor were my men, but orders are orders, and he made it very clear what we had to do. Whatever the man we had taken had done, it meant his family had to die and his house had to be razed. It had to seem as if he had never existed.”

  “He made it very clear? Who?” I asked, although I thought I knew the answer.

  Lion looked appealingly at my mother. She told him to go on in a voice I could barely hear.

  “He spoke to us in person. He didn’t take long—I had the feeling he was in a hurry because he had the same orders to issue to all the other squads who’d been involved in the roundup, and all in person, as if he couldn’t entrust the task to anyone else. It was your esteemed master, Yaotl: the Chief Minister himself, Lord Feathered in Black!”

  He glanced at each of us in turn, as if to gauge the impact his revelation made on us. If he had expected shock he was disappointed. My mother and sister seemed not to have moved a muscle since he had begun speaking, while I had known what he was going to say before he said it. The three of us looked back at him in grim silence.

  Lion drew a hand across his face, and then stared at it, as if surprised to see it had come away wet.

  “We hanged the woman in her own doorway. That’s what he told us to do. I hit her over the head first, when she wasn’t looking, so she wouldn’t know and the children wouldn’t hear her struggling. I told my men it would make them easier to deal with.” Suddenly he snarled like a trapped beast trying to ward off its tormentors. “Do you think we wanted to do this? The Chief Minister told us to swing the children’s heads against the outside wall. I had no choice: my men had all been there when the Chief Minister gave us our orders. He meant it that way, didn’t he? If my men hadn’t heard him, it might have been different, but what else could I do?”

  “What else did you do?” I asked.

  “We searched the house for other occupants. Then we torched it. Even the house had to go, don’t you see? To give the villagers the idea the people who lived there never existed and weren’t to be spoken of.”

  I leaned forward, unable to keep the urgency out of my voice. “You got all the occupants? You’re sure of that?”

  My brother gave me a strange look: the sort of look a drowning man might give to someone he has just seen on shore carrying a rope. “All the occupants … why do you ask?”

  I hesitated, unsure how far I could trust him with news of the boy Handy and I had found. “I just wondered if anyone might have escaped.”

  “I accounted for the whole family.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh yes,” my brother assured me in a voice brittle with self-reproach, “every last one.” He took a deep breath before going on: “Except the one I rescued.”

  “Rescued?” my mother, my sister and I cried in unison.

  “Maybe we didn’t search the place as well as we should have. I think that’s what made me turn back, just the feeling that we’d missed something. I pretended I had a stone in my sandal, sent the rest of the lads on ahead and doubled back into the village.

  “Everyone had run away, of course, and so there was nobody in the place except me and whoever was screaming inside the burning house. I know, I should have left him—but I was sick of the whole business by now. So I got him out, just before the roof fell in. It wasn’t easy, either—he kept kicking and screaming, right up until I dragged him past his mother’s body. I had to push her legs out of the way.” He looked thoughtful. “Funny, he stopped screaming then.”

  “You disobeyed orders?” I was struggling to reconcile the image of a man dragging a terrified child from the burning, collapsing shell of his home with everything else my brother had told us. “What if you’d got caught?”

  “Then your master would have had me cut to pieces, wouldn’t he?” he snapped.

  “Where’s the boy now?” my sister asked anxiously.

  “No idea,” Lion told her. “The moment I put him down he ran for it.” He sighed. “I don’t blame him. The poor kid was probably as frightened of me as he was of the fire.”

  I remembered the boy’s silence and how not even Star’s coaxing had persuaded him to talk. Now it seemed more important than ever to get some words out of him.

  While I was thinking about this, a row was developing between my brother and Jade.

  “I don’t care whose orders you thought you were following!” my sister shrieked. “Don’t you have a mind of your own? Couldn’t you see what you were doing was wrong?”

  “You don’t understand,” Lion replied feebly. He looked to my mother to intervene but she just looked away. “You haven’t been in the army. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Not even Yaotl would have been that stupid!” Jade was brandishing her bark-beater like a warrior waving his sword as he taunts the enemy. “At least he’d have thought of a way out of it!”

  “I got the boy out,” Lion protested. “I risked my life to save him—doesn’t that mean anything? What else could I do?” Then he rounded on me, snarling: “This is all your master’s fault!”

  “Don’t try to blame Yaotl for this, Lion,” my mother warned. “It sounds as if you should have told him all this days ago.”

  “He couldn’t,” I said, surprising myself with my own mildness. “It was the shame of it, wasn’t it, brother? Especially when you realized old Black Feathers had duped you into thinking you were doing the Emperor’s bidding.”

  “At least you might have looked after the boy!” my sister said. “What do you suppose happened to him?”

  “I don’t know,” my brother muttered wretchedly.

  “I do,” I told him. “And I’ve just thought of something you could do to make amends.”

  I told them what I had seen and done since the Festival of the Raising of Banners.

  I told them as much as I thought fitting. I saw no need to mention the night I had spent with Lily, but, to make sense of the rest, I was forced to stumble through an account of my visits to Maize Flower, the girl in the marketplace.

  My sister silently rolled her eyes skyward at that point in the tale. My mother’s expression remained unmoved, as if nothing she heard now could affect her anymore. Lion listened to everything I said with his eyes half closed. Perhaps he
thought following my story would help him make sense of his own.

  My mother’s voice was the first to break the silence after I had finished.

  “So it comes to this. All the while you were supposed to be devoted to the gods, you were running around with some cheap whore from the marketplace.”

  “Not all the time,” I said defensively, “and she wasn’t especially cheap.”

  “And you didn’t even have the sense to make sure you didn’t get her pregnant!”

  “Now wait a moment!” I cried. “I didn’t get her pregnant! That was Young Warrior—you heard me tell you what she said!”

  “And you believed her?” It was my sister’s turn. “I take back what I said, Lion—Yaotl’s even more stupid than you are, after all!”

  My brother stiffened but did not answer her. Instead he looked thoughtfully at me.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this right. You’re saying Young Warrior—that friend of yours at the Priest House, the one who vanished before they could stone him to death for fornication—really ran off with the girl you’d both been seeing, and they had the child she told you about, and now he’s going around pretending to be a priest and taking bets on the ball game, with the boy in tow?”

  “They must have come back to the city years after they left,” I confirmed. “Nimble was brought up abroad, in exile. The lad still has an accent.” I wondered where he had acquired it—among the Tarascans, perhaps? That would explain the bronze knife. “Young Warrior can’t use his own name, of course, and he goes about in disguise. Whenever I’ve seen him, he’s been so heavily blacked up he might be anyone.”