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Authors: Simon Levack

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BOOK: The Demon of the Air
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H
andy got there first, as might have been expected, racing across the fields while I was still trying to work out where Snake's cry had come from.
By the time I caught him up the three of them were standing in the middle of the burned-out house. The two boys looked safe and healthy, apart from being coated from head to foot in dark gray ash. Snake was grinning and his older brother was scowling. Their father stood between them. His face had changed from an anxious parent's to that of a judge trying to arbitrate a particularly intractable dispute.
“I found it!” Snake was saying.
“But you wouldn't have if I hadn't pushed you into that heap of ash!” his brother retorted indignantly.
“What have they found?” I asked.
Handy handed it over without speaking. I hefted it in my palm. It was surprisingly light and burned almost black but there was no mistaking it.
It was the lower jaw of a human.
“No wonder they never got those squashes in,” I remarked.
“Should we look for the rest?” Snake asked.
His father looked dubious, but his brother was already rooting around in the ash and rubble after a souvenir of his own. Before either of us could restrain him he had let out a triumphant whoop and was tugging enthusiastically at another blackened fragment. This one was a collarbone.
“Handy …”
“I know,” he said. “I don't like this either, but there's no stopping them now!”
“Why hasn't someone picked up the bones?” I asked. I would have expected the dead man or woman's family to have had the remains cremated or at least put in ajar and buried nearby. To see them casually tossed about disturbed me. A warrior killed or taken in battle could expect his grinning, fleshless skull to molder on a skull-rack and his thighbones to end up on show in his captor's house, swelling his glory, but someone who had died in a stupid accident such as a house fire deserved gentler treatment.
Assuming it had been an accident.
“This happened a while ago,” I added. “Hasn't anyone been here since?”
“Perhaps there isn't anybody—maybe the dead man had no family.”
“Or maybe his family didn't dare come looking for his remains.”
The other man was not paying me much attention, however. He was watching with a mixture of pride and exasperation as his boys turned their quarrel into a race to see who could gather up the most human fragments in the shortest time. “Look at those two! If I could get them to work that hard in the fields we'd never be hungry again!”
Flakes of ash and clouds of soot billowed around us as Buck and Snake worked. By some unspoken agreement, whenever either of them found a bit he dropped it on his own heap beside the ruins of the house. I wondered how they were planning to judge the winner: were they going to count the bones or weigh them?
I stepped across to Snake's heap and decorously placed the jawbone
on it. I gave the heap a second glance as I straightened up. Something did not look right. I bent down again and extracted a bone.
“Snake.”
He came over, his intelligent face turned up toward mine.
“Do you know what this is?”
“It looks like a thigh,” he said accurately.
“Where did you find it?”
He considered the question as gravely as an old gardener being asked to pick out the best spot to plant dahlias in. “Over there,” he said eventually.
The outline of the house could just be made out beneath the ashes. The place he indicated was just outside it. Judging by the fragments of pottery and other detritus that could still be seen there, it must have been the household's rubbish heap.
As I went to examine it his father joined me. “What's the matter?”
“Take a look at this.” Handing him the thigh bone Snake had found, I knelt down and began raking through the ashes.
“It doesn't look as badly burned as the others.”
“No,” I agreed. My fingers closed around something hard and jagged. “Nor does this,” I added as I pulled it free and stood up.
“Hey,” Buck protested, “that's not fair! I might have found that!”
“Shut up,” his father snapped.
“That's another jawbone, isn't it?” observed Snake. “How come it's so much smaller than the first one I found?”
“Because it's a child's,” I told him, “and so is that thighbone your father's holding. I think it might be a good idea if we all had another look at the little collections you two have made, don't you? Let's see exactly what you've got.”
We sorted the bones out. The process of turning their heaps into skeletons enthralled the boys far more than their contest had, and in no time we had assembled three incomplete specimens.
“This must be a tibia, so it goes here …” Snake was saying, placing the bone as precisely as a feather-worker gluing a plume onto a ceremonial shield. “Father, have you noticed both the small skulls are broken?”
His father stood next to me. “What do you make of all this?”
I looked at the bones. Two of the reconstructed skeletons were
noticeably smaller than the third. “A man or woman and two children. What's odd is that the adult's bones look more badly burned than the children's. And your son's right—his skull, her skull's in one piece and theirs aren't. Why do you suppose that is?”
“I don't know. I wonder how the place got set on fire. It must have been pretty quick, to get all three of them. A spark from the hearth catching the thatch, maybe?”
“Maybe.” I began pacing around the perimeter of the demolished house. What had been the interior had been churned and trampled by boys looking for bones, but some of the soil and ash outside was relatively untouched, except at the back around the rubbish heap. I scanned the ground around my feet, hoping it still held some clue to what had happened, although I had no idea what I was looking for until I found it.
“I suppose the roof would have caved in,” Handy was saying, “and maybe it caught them all unawares, but that still doesn't explain why the children's bones are almost white.”
There was something half buried in the earth, near where the doorway would have been: a flash of bright color among the grays, blacks and browns around me. I dropped on one knee to get a closer look.
“And then again, where … Yaotl? What have you found?”
I scraped the ash off the thing and lifted it carefully, holding it between finger and thumb as if it were a venomous insect. It was made of leather, dyed yellow, slightly charred at one end and badly frayed at the other, and large; oversized, in fact.
I showed it to Handy. “A sandal strap.”
“That's funny,” he said. “I doubt if many people from around here own a pair of sandals. It doesn't tell us what happened, though.”
I had already worked out whom the sandal must belong to, and it was as much as I could do not to turn and run down to the lake and all the way along the causeway back to Tenochtitlan.
“It gives us a pretty good idea.” I looked nervously up and down the hillside once more. “This fire wasn't an accident. And whoever left this strap wasn't making a social call. We'd better think about getting out of here—the sooner the better.”
“I don't understand.”
“Then look at this strap again.” I waved it in front of him, scattering
flakes of soot. “It's too big for any sandal you or I are ever likely to wear. Ask yourself who wears sandals with big, floppy straps. Remember the Shorn One we saw on the causeway this morning?”
“The Shorn One,” Handy said dreamily. “They're the greatest warriors in the army, you know, along with the Otomies.” Abruptly he seemed to wake up. He stared at me with his mouth hanging open in astonishment. “No, wait, you can't mean …”
His expression hardened as he added, in a dangerous voice: “Yaotl, just what were you expecting to find here?”
I had been dreading this moment. As quickly as I could, and keeping my voice low so that the boys could not hear me, I told him what my brother had told me, adding the story of my abduction and the bird and Costly's suggestion for good measure. “So you see,” I concluded lamely, “I was hoping to see a sorcerer, really I was, it's just that I thought something might have happened to him.”
“And now you've got us involved with the army! You idiot!”
“Keep your voice down—do you want the boys to hear?”
“Why do you think I'm so angry? What am I going to say to their mother, have you thought of that?”
“I did tell you not to bring them.”
Handy's answer to that was a furious growl and a stamp of his foot which showered ash over us both. “I knew you were bloody trouble as soon as I set eyes on you,” he muttered. “So what happens now? You reckon they'll be back?”
“How do I know?” I could almost see the column pounding up the hill after us, the wind ruffling their feathered shields and tunics as they ran, their swords' obsidian blades glittering in the sunlight, their teeth bared like a hunting animal's. “I think we should get out of here as soon as we can.”
“Oh, don't worry about that, we're off as soon as I've found our lunch bag. You needn't think we're sharing it with you! Buck! Snake! Which of you had the food?”
“He did,” said Buck without looking up from his work.
“Snake?”
“I left it over there,” the younger boy said casually, “under one of those maguey plants, near where Yaotl's standing now.”
Automatically I peered into the shadow cast by the nearest plant and those on either side of it. “Are you sure? I can't see it here.”
Handy swore. “I don't believe this! I tell you boys to do a simple thing …”
“But it was there!” Snake's voice was an outraged squeal. “I put it there when you went up the hill!”
I stepped over to the row of plants and stood on the edge of the little bank of earth above them. “It's probably just fallen over into the field below us,” I said, pulling two broad glistening leaves apart and peering into the space between them.
Two round pale eyes stared back at me.
Startled, I stepped back, letting the leaves flop back into place to cover the eyes again. Then I recovered myself, plunging into the foliage once more just as the owner of the eyes began to move. Dropping Handy's bag, he scuttled along the edge of the field, keeping his head down level with the top of the bank.
“Thief!” I yelled. “There he goes! Catch him!”
The boys liked a live quarry even better than old bones. They exploded out of the wrecked house in a shower of dust and ash and hurled themselves straight at the bank, diving over it to emerge just in front of their prey.
Confused by their joyful cries, he stumbled to a halt. He might have got away if he had turned and fled straight down the hill immediately, since for a moment Buck and Snake were as surprised and disoriented as he was. He left it just too late, though, and even as he was turning to run Handy appeared at the top of the bank, roaring like a bear, and threw himself on him.
“Got you! And if you've eaten all our tortillas …”
His captive said nothing, although since the big man was lying across his chest this was not surprising.
I let myself gingerly down the slope and picked up the bag. “I think it's all here,” I said. “Let's go!”
Handy began to get up, although he kept one knee on the would-be thief to pin him down. “I want a quick look at this one first.”
Then a strange expression came over the big man's face. As he looked down at the child he had caught—and he was just that, I realized, no more than nine or ten years old—Handy's eyes and mouth opened wide, while at his sides his fists clenched and unclenched in a gesture of indecision. He did not seem to know whether to fight or run.
“Handy?”
“Father?” Snake's voice sounded small. “What is it?”
Abruptly his father seemed to make up his mind about something. Bending down, he scooped the captive boy off the ground and shoved him under one arm like a freshly killed turkey. Before any of us could react, he was off down the hill at a brisk trot, with the child's head dangling upside down at his side, bouncing so low it almost scraped on the ground.
“Come on, then!” he called out over his shoulder. “Let's get out of here!”
His sons and I could only stumble after him.
“What's happening?” I called out. “I know we're in a hurry, but … Wait for us!”
As I caught him up he turned to me and said, without breaking his stride: “Can't you see the family resemblance, Yaotl? Look at the ears, man! You and I—we killed this boy's father!”
BOOK: The Demon of the Air
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