The Demon of the Air (13 page)

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Authors: Simon Levack

BOOK: The Demon of the Air
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I saw the family resemblance. Even upside down, flapping up and down as his head dangled from the crook of the commoner's arm, the boy's ears were unmistakable. When I had last seen them I had been climbing the steps on the Great Pyramid, and they had protruded from the head of the man in front of me: Shining Light's Bathed Slave. It was not just the ears. The child had the slave's scrawny physique and the same air of resignation.
“You're telling me this boy's father was Shining Light's sacrifice? Slow down! What was he doing stealing your lunch?” I gasped.
Handy stumbled and ran toward the causeway, leaving us to keep up as best we could. He ran with the child jammed uncomfortably under one arm. The child's eyes were open but he made no sound. Either there was something wrong with him, I thought, or he must be very brave. In his place, I would have been howling.
“How should I know? All I know is we've found him. We've got to get him home. Don't you see, Yaotl? He can tell us who his father was and where he came from. The merchants will want to know that. They'll want to know where Shining Light got the Bathed Slave who let them down so badly. There'll be a reward!”
There might be more than that, I thought, as we raced past the low stone walls marking the outskirts of Coyoacan and onto the broad,
flat, hard earth roadway that led out across the lake to Mexico. What would happen, I wondered, if anyone—some passing merchant, perhaps, or a member of my master's entourage—happened to recognize the son of Shining Light's offering wedged under Handy's arm?
Halfway along the causeway I stumbled to a halt and tried to call out to the others, to urge them to throw the boy in the water and forget they had ever seen him.
They ignored me. Either I was too out of breath to make myself heard or they were just not listening.
M
y wife will know what to do.” Handy said confidently. His wife, Star, gazed at him in astonishment as he dragged the child into the house.
“I thought you went out to have an omen interpreted. Who's this? And how did you get yourselves into such a state?”
Her husband looked at his own legs as if he had not noticed they were coated in muck from the knees down. “We found this kid skulking around the village. He tried to steal our lunch!” He gave her a severely edited account of the day's activities, which she listened to with mounting incredulity.
“So you failed to find the sorcerer and you let those boys get themselves covered in grime and soot playing with bones?” she said mildly, when he had finished.
“Yes,” Handy admitted.
“Well, you know where the brushes are. If you think I'm cleaning up after you in the morning, you're mistaken. Now, this child …”
Handy started explaining his idea to her. “You remember the Bathed Slave who ran away and then jumped off the edge of the Great Pyramid? This is his son—I'm sure it is. What do you think the merchants would give to find out where he really came from?”
The subject of this discussion squatted in the middle of the room where Handy had put him, with his thumb in his mouth, listening wordlessly while we reminded each other how his father had died. He shivered slightly, although it was not a cold day.
“The merchants aren't going to find out anything from this child if he starves to death,” Star said crisply. “I don't suppose any of you has any idea when he last ate?”
Her husband and I looked at each other self-consciously. “He didn't tell us he was hungry,” I protested.
She gave me a look that would have wilted a cactus. “Why do you think he was after your lunch, then? And it's hardly surprising if he hasn't told you anything—he's obviously scared out of his wits.” She pulled herself to her feet, ignoring her husband's belated offer to help her up, and extended a hand to the child. “Come along. There are fresh tortillas and honeyed tamales—do you like tamales? Of course you do, everyone does. Now, that's better …”
Casting a reproachful glance at us over her shoulder, she led the child out of the room, holding him by the hand that she had somehow coaxed out of his mouth. She took the still unopened lunch bag with her.
Buck and Snake were not the sort of lads to squat at their father's feet when the food had just been taken out of the room. They scampered hastily after their mother and the boy. A moment later we heard her scolding them for leaving muddy footprints in the courtyard.
“Handy,” I began.
“Well, the food's gone,” he said mournfully, “but I think I can find us something to drink. Wait here.”
“We need to talk,” I told his departing back.
He returned a moment later with two bowls. They had water in them, although I caught myself wishing it was something else.
The commoner drained his bowl at once, smacking his lips appreciatively. “I needed that! Now, you were saying we needed to talk?”
“About that child. I don't think you should be so eager to go running to the merchants as soon as you've heard his life story. And I certainly wouldn't tell anyone where you found him.”
He rocked back on his heels, frowning. “I just thought the chief merchants, or maybe your master, since he had something to do with Shining Light …”
I put my bowl down deliberately so as not to smash it on the floor in frustration. “Don't you realize what happened in that village?”
“Why don't you tell me?” he replied coolly. “All I know is three people got killed in a fire, and if we'd been there at the wrong time it might have been seven!”
“They weren't killed in the fire—at least, not all of them. Look: the grown-up's bones were burned worse than the children's, and we found the children outside the house. So she died indoors, with the place blazing all around her. Her children were in the rubbish heap with their heads broken. They must have been killed first and left outside when the house was burned.”
“‘She?' How do you know it was a woman?”
“I'm guessing, but we know what became of Crocodile, and he wasn't there. So I suppose the three we found today were his wife and children. That's what the Chief Minister did—when the sorcerers got out of the prison he had the army go after their families. And judging by that sandal strap I found he wanted a thorough job done, because he handpicked the very best. Now, do you really want to go proclaiming this in the streets?”
“No, I don't!” Handy said in a hurt voice. “I just thought the boy—”
“The boy whose father just happens to have been Shining Light's Bathed Slave. Isn't that a bit of a coincidence—having him turn up while we're picking over the remains of a massacre? Why do you suppose that happened?”
Handy stared sulkily into the bottom of his bowl and waited for me to answer my own question.
“We found the boy there because it was his own house we were turning over. He was hanging around the ruins because he had nowhere else to go. If you're right about Shining Light's Bathed Slave, and he was the boy's father, then that would mean …”
I stopped as I pondered exactly what it would mean.
If Handy was right about who the boy's father was, then it was indeed the Bathed Slave the warriors had been after. If my brother was right about Lord Feathered in Black having sent men to Coyocacan, then that put my master's role in all this beyond question. The house had been visited by the men he had sent to find the Bathed Slave. Obviously they had not found him, but they had not been content to
go away empty-handed. They had killed three members of his family and burned his house to the ground, and they had done it all on my master's orders.
No grown-up Aztec male was a stranger to killing. We killed enemy warriors, or better still dragged them to the tops of our pyramids and offered them to the gods, knowing that they would do the same to us if they could, and believing in the reward the gods had in store for them: to escort the Sun on his journey through the morning sky and after four years to be reborn as hummingbirds or butterflies. When the gods demanded it we even killed women and children, but what we rarely did was to kill wantonly. Human lives were too precious for that; or else why would the gods have valued them so?
The slaughter of ordinary peasants, the subjects of a town so close to Mexico itself, seemed to me an act so audacious, so desperate, so utterly lawless that the man who could order it must be capable of anything. At that moment I did not much care why he had done it. All I could think about was what it meant for me—for his slave, the man most at his mercy.
Who, I asked myself, could protect me from a man like that, once he decided I had let him down once too often, and the trouble he would put himself to by explaining my death away was less than the trouble of keeping me alive?
Only the Emperor himself, I knew, and I also knew that Montezuma would not trouble himself for a moment about the life of a slave unless I gave him what he wanted: the sorcerers. But all I could offer him now was a tongue-tied boy who, from what I had seen and heard, could not even tell us his own name.
 
Night had fallen by the time I left. The boy was still with Star. He had eaten something but for all our coaxing had still not said a word. Handy urged me to stay, but I knew I had to get back to my master's house. I was going to have a difficult enough time as it was, explaining where I had been.
I was going to have to explain it to Lion, too. My brother had sent me to Coyoacan, and as I walked slowly home, treading carefully to avoid straying into the dark waters of the canal beside me, I rehearsed how I was going to tell him what we had found.
But what
had
we found?
I had gone to Coyoacan because my brother had hinted that if I went there I would find some clue to what Lord Feathered in Black had done, in the course of his search for the sorcerers. What I had found was not a sorcerer, but the aftermath of a massacre. It looked as if the victims had been the wife and children of the Bathed Slave who had jumped from the Great Pyramid. The Emperor and my master were both convinced that this man was himself a sorcerer, which explained why Lord Feathered in Black had apparently sent soldiers to his house in search of sorcerers. But killing the man's family would not have helped my master to find him. There must have been another reason for doing that, but what was it?
Then I thought about the warrior who had left his sandal strap at the house. He had been one of the army's elite, perhaps either a Shorn One or an Otomi, the kind who would kill to order and never ask why. Who else would the Chief Minister trust to wipe out a whole family quickly, efficiently and without making a fuss?
As soon as that question occurred to me I saw a possible answer, and it was so abhorrent that I had to stop walking for a moment to fight the wave of nausea that threatened to engulf me.
My brother was one of the army's elite. The strap could easily have been his.
It was my brother who had told me about the warriors going to Coyoacan. I had thought at the time that he knew much more than he was letting on, and that he seemed strangely unsure of himself, as if afraid of saying too much. He would always obey orders and he would carry them out with ruthless dispatch. Yet he was one of the most pious, upright, unbending men I had ever known. What had been done in that village was something he would surely never have stooped to, no matter who ordered it.
“No.” I swallowed a couple of times. “He couldn't … .”
I walked on slowly, unable to dismiss the appalling thought until I rounded the last corner before my master's house and had it driven from my mind by the sight of yet another death.
A
broad canal ran past the front of the Chief Minister's house. His Lordship could alight from his canoe and climb straight up the steps to his private apartments if he chose to. It was here that I had been hailed by the steward three days earlier, before that tense interview with my master at the top of the steps. Tonight my intention was just what it had been then: to find my sleeping mat and curl up on it under my cloak.
As soon as I saw the steps I knew this was not going to happen. They were covered in people standing or sitting on them, making them look like the tiers of stone seats surrounding a ball court.
Several pairs of eyes turned on me for a moment, before swiveling back silently toward the canal. As soon as I had climbed a little way up the steps and turned around to get a good look at the water, I saw why.
From behind me, someone said: “His Lordship should be back soon.” There was a general murmur of assent, as if our master's arrival would help.
Without taking my eyes off the thing floating in the water, I said: “Has anyone sent for a priest?”
 
With neither my master nor his steward to be found, I found myself taking charge. I had them moor boats across the canal in two places, so as to keep the stretch opposite my master's house clear of traffic. Then the two priests who had been sent for went out into the middle of the waterway in a canoe with a long pole to fish the dead man out.
“If it's a drowning, it's our job,” one of them reminded me. The bodies of the drowned, like their souls, belonged to the rain-god and no one except a priest could handle one.
“Just get the body back here,” I said wearily. “His Lordship will
want to know who he is and what happened to him on Earth, not where his soul is going.”
The priests had no trouble finding the body. It was floating in plain sight. It must have been dumped in the water earlier that evening, perhaps as soon as it had got dark, since otherwise someone would surely have seen it being left. Getting it out proved unexpectedly hard, however. The priests kept catching it with their pole only to find that it would not move. It was only after nearly capsizing their canoe twice that they stripped off their cloaks and started delving into the water to find out why.
Seen from the shore in starlight, the priests' sooty bodies, long black hair and sticklike limbs made them look like cranes hunting fish on the lake.
Once they had located the rope, it took only a few moments to haul the stone up. It had been tied to the body's ankle and used as an anchor.
They heaved the body over the side and into the bottom of their boat. They gave it the briefest of examinations before heading back toward the bank. As they scrambled onto dry land their relief was visible in their faces.
“You were right to call us, but it's not a matter for us, after all,” the younger of the two told me. “He didn't drown. His throat was cut.”
That explained why he and his colleague were relieved, for it meant they would not have to bury the body. Those who died by water were not cremated but interred, normally in their own courtyards, in a sitting position. Getting them that way, when they were as often as not slimy, bloated, stinking and half eaten by fish, was not a pleasant task.
“Someone fetch a torch,” I commanded, peering over the side of the boat.
The dead man was naked. It was easy to see that he had been thin, almost emaciated. The hair plastered to the side of his head was long. His eyes and mouth were wide open, as if in terror.
The throat had been slashed cleanly across. That may have been the fatal wound, but it was by no means the only one. The body was covered with strange marks, like scars of varying sizes, from tiny punctures to tracts of ugly puckered flesh.
“Not been in the water very long, if you ask me,” the young priest said conversationally, peering over my shoulder. “He's not swollen up, and the skin's barely discolored. Doesn't smell too bad, either.”
I stretched a hand out behind me, without a word, and someone put a pine torch in it. I clambered into the boat. The priests had got the head and torso aboard but left the feet dangling in the water. I pulled them over the side one at a time, looking closely at the rope tied around one of the ankles as I did so.
“Whoever decided to leave a corpse floating opposite my master's house meant us to find it,” I observed.
“You think it was some sort of message?” It was the young priest again.
“Part of a message, at most,” I replied. “A corpse by itself doesn't amount to much of a message, does it?”
I looked at the naked body, frowning. After what I had seen that day it was hard to feel anything for this unknown victim except bewilderment. Had he really been killed just to convey a message? And if so, where was the rest of it—the key to whatever threat or warning he represented? I thought of a letter, but there was no obvious place where one could be hidden. My eyes roamed over the torso and limbs, searching for some pattern in the wounds covering them, but there was nothing there. Then I looked at the head again and saw the answer.
“I wonder …” I reached down and parted the dead man's long, lank hair. It was wet and sticky and clung to my fingers like cobwebs as they delved into it. They brushed against an ear, and the slick skin behind it, and something else—a coarser, less pliant surface than the skin. Of course, I thought, as I drew the little cloth square out and unfolded it, it would not be paper. Paper would have disintegrated in the water.
Sure enough, someone had drawn on the cloth. It had been hastily done and the ink had got a little smudged but the message was clear enough for me to read. It was simple enough: just a name-glyph.
“At least we know his name, now.”
Then I looked at the drawings again. A single spot, a skull, a crude little stick figure wielding a sword and standing on a path decorated with chevrons.
“Cemiquiztli Yaotl.” I mouthed the words over and over again like an idiot, while the cloth shook in my hands.
“Cemiquiztli” meant “One Death” and “Yaotl” meant “Enemy,” but taken together they spelled out my own name.
“Is this someone's idea of a joke?” I demanded. I began climbing out of the canoe, too shocked to look where I was going. “Did someone tell you to put this with the body?” I waved the piece of cloth in the priest's face.
The priest was not there anymore. The face opposite mine as I stepped onto the edge of the canal was my master's. Next to him was his steward. They were both staring at me, their expressions comically alike, with their eyes starting from their heads and their lower jaws slack with amazement.
The steward recovered first. Stepping delicately around our master, he reached for the cloth square, plucking it from my hand.
“I think we'd better have this, Yaotl.”
The Chief Minister seemed to have lost the power of speech. He kept staring at the body in the bottom of the boat with his mouth hanging open like an imbecile's. His steward silently pressed the note from the body into his nerveless fingers. Someone else took the torch from me and held it over my master's head so that he could read it.
He ignored the note as if unaware that he had it. He seemed oblivious to everything around him except the corpse. Nobody else dared to speak, even in a whisper, and so the only sound was his own breathing. It did not sound healthy—quick and shallow and with an ugly rattle in it.
Finally he broke the silence himself. “Who did this?” he gasped.
“My Lord,” the steward responded in his most simpering tone, “perhaps the note I gave you …”
My master glanced down at the piece of cloth he was holding as if noticing it for the first time. He looked at the body again, and then turned his sharp, glittering eyes on me. It struck me then that they never seemed to age: however lined his face and frail his body got, they were always the same, as though made out of some hard, bright, imperishable stuff like jade or polished marble. Now their gaze was hooded, malevolent and calculating, and made me feel as cold as if I, and not the corpse, had spent the evening floating in the canal. The fear that had assailed me at Handy's house came back redoubled.
“Cemiquiztli Yaotl.” My master's lips moved soundlessly over the name.
“M-my Lord,” I stammered. “We found that note on the body—the body was in the canal. I had priests sent for …”
“Yes, yes, I know all that.” My master looked at the note again. “Why has it got your name on it?”
“I don't know,” I replied in a wretched whisper.
“I do.” The grim certainty in his words matched his expression. When he looked at me again his lips were pressed together in a thin line. “Huitztic!”
“My Lord?” the steward responded eagerly.
“Escort Yaotl to his room—and make sure he stays there until I send for him!”
“But …” I began, but the Chief Minister did not want to hear me. The old man who had had a whole family done to death in Coyoacan quelled my protest with a glare, while his sneering steward propelled me out of his sight, a calloused hand clamped firmly on my arm.
My master's last words seemed to hang in the air behind us.
“Cemiquiztli Yaotl! I will deal with you in the morning!”

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