The Demon of the Air (8 page)

Read The Demon of the Air Online

Authors: Simon Levack

BOOK: The Demon of the Air
6.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
T
he slave who greeted me at Shining Light's house was barely polite. After staring at me for so long that I began to wonder whether there was something wrong with his eyes, he showed me into the courtyard and told me to rest there, among the foliage plants and empty flowerpots of a winter garden. He offered me something to eat, although when I turned to him to accept he had vanished, leaving me to the courtyard's only other occupant.
An old man sat with his back to an immaculately whitewashed wall, against which the dull mottled brown of his ragged cloak stood out like a stain. His head was bowed, and he seemed to be asleep. A thin trail of saliva ran from a corner of his mouth across his chin.
I shifted my weight indecisively from one foot to the other while I wondered how to get into the house without causing offense. The slave seemed prepared to leave me where I was, alone save for the unconscious old man, for the rest of the day.
The courtyard's freshly swept stuccoed floor was already warm beneath my bare soles and its walls gleamed in the morning sunshine, making the doorways into the interior of the house resemble dark cavities. Wicker screens covered some of the doorways, and if anyone apart from the old man was at home, I thought they must be behind one of those.
I started toward the nearest of the screens.
The voice cut me off before I had gone two steps.
“If it's money you're after, don't bother. We don't keep any here.”
The other man in the courtyard had raised his head and was watching me. His stare had a vague quality that made me think he
was looking past me, until I noticed that his eyes were filmed over with age. There had been nothing vague in his voice, however.
“I want to speak to Shining Light,” I informed him brusquely. “Do you know where he is?”
“You want my grandson? Oh, I was right, then. It is money you're after! You're still wasting your time, though. You're welcome to look, but you won't find so much as a bag of cocoa beans.”
I reappraised him hastily. I had assumed this piece of human litter was some broken-down old slave that the merchant's family tolerated out of sentiment and because they expected death to relieve them of him shortly. A second glance did little to change my impression of him, but if he was Shining Light's grandfather then he might well be head of the household and so entitled to some respect.
I believed what he said. Merchants hid their wealth. They kept it in secret warehouses, often using each other's, so that no one else could ever be quite sure who owned their contents. Anything they kept in their own houses would be carefully concealed behind false walls. If I had been interested in the merchant's money—whether he kept it in the form of cotton cloaks, bags of cocoa beans, little copper axes or goose quills filled with gold dust—I would have known better than to look for it here.
“I'm not after money,” I assured him. “I just want to speak to Shining Light.”
“Aren't you that man he does business with down at the ball court—what's his name, Curling Mist?” I recalled the meeting I had overheard between my master and Curling Mist's son; here was confirmation that they had had dealings with Shining Light as well. “I assumed you were him, come to collect.”
“I was sent here by the Chief Minister, Lord Feathered in Black,” I declared importantly. “He's the one who has business with your grandson—not some petty criminal.”
The old man laughed, sending a shower of spittle across the courtyard. “The Chief Minister! Young Shining Light's surpassed himself this time, then, if he's managed to get into trouble with him! I wish I could help,” he added, wheezing while he got his breath back, “but my grandson isn't here.”
“Then I'll wait here until he returns.”
“We don't know when he'll be back.” This was the voice of the
slave, who had come back bearing a plate of the stuffed maize cakes known as tamales. He stood in front of me, offering them as politeness dictated, although his surly expression made it clear that this was as far as his courtesy extended. “You might as well go home.”
I looked from the slave to the old man. “No one said he was in trouble. I was just told to speak to him about the Bathed Slave he presented at the festival, that's all.”
“Oh, that,” the old man mumbled. “I might have known. Constant here's right, though: Shining Light, my grandson, he's gone away and we don't know where he's gone or when he'll be back.”
“Well, do you know anything about his offering?” I demanded. “Where did he get him from?”
“I don't know anything about it,” he said firmly. “It was nothing to do with me. Look,” he added with a touch of impatience, “you're talking to the wrong person. My daughter handles our business now. It's her you need to speak to.”
“Then may I see her?”
“Sure. You'll have to wait, though. She's got the chiefs of the merchants' parishes with her at the moment.”
He gestured to Constant, miming the action of upending and draining a gourd full of liquid. As the scowling slave went to fetch his drink, the old man said: “You can keep me company, in the meantime.”
 
The old man's name was Icnoyo, which meant “Kindly.” He told me this as he pulled the maize cob out of the neck of the gourd to let the contents splash freely into his mouth. As an afterthought he offered it to me. He seemed surprised, although not offended, when I waved it away.
“It's against the law,” I pointed out primly.
He laughed. “Not for me, son. I won't see seventy again and I'm a grandfather, I'm allowed as much as I can hold!”
As he tipped the gourd up again I decided I had better ask him something before he fell into a stupor. “You think your grandson owes this man Curling Mist money? Is that why he went away?”
“Could be. I've heard him mention the name—and Shining Light spends a lot of time hanging around the ball courts.”
“So he's a gambler?”
“You could say that. Aren't we all?” There was a trace of bitterness in the old man's voice. “You know the mistake my daughter made with that boy? He was born on Two Rabbit, and you understand what that means.”
“Prone to drunkenness,” I responded automatically, like a student answering an examination question on the Book of Days. I had spent much of my youth in the Priest House poring over screenfold texts, committing to memory the fate of every man and woman ever born, on pain of a beating if I later got any of them wrong. I could still recall the stiffness of the bark paper under my fingers and the crackling sound the pages made when I turned them over. I had no trouble recognizing the destiny prescribed for a man born on Two Rabbit: to be ruined by sacred wine. I wondered how his parents had chosen his name. An exemplary life: I knew only too well how hard that would be to live up to.
“That's right. But believe it or not, our Shining Light never touched a drop, except when he had to as part of a festival. He was never let near it, because his mother was so terrified he would fall victim to his fate. But she didn't realize there are other vices that can seduce a man.” He sighed and upended the gourd, draining it once and for all. “You can't blame her, poor girl. He was the only one she had, and with his father gone …”
“His father? What happened to him?”
The old man closed his eyes. He sat like that, neither looking at me nor speaking, for so long that I wondered if he had been taken ill. I was on the point of doing something—shaking his arm to rouse him or calling for a slave—when abruptly he opened them again and said one word.
“Quauhtenanco.”
I had been a very young man when the inhabitants of a province in the far Southwest had risen against the Aztecs, killing some merchants and besieging the survivors in a town called Quauhtenanco. The merchants had held out for four years, beating off their attackers and making captives of many of them, and when a young general named Montezuma had come to their rescue at the head of the Aztec army, the merchants could only apologize to him for his wasted journey.
Quauhtenanco was no mere symbolic victory and the merchants secured more than just their own lives. It was the key to the hot lands in the South, whose wealth included rubber, cocoa, emeralds and above all feathers—the long, soft, shining green quetzal feathers that Aztecs coveted more than anything and could get nowhere else. It was chiefly for this that the merchants had been awarded their privileges, including the right to dress as warriors and offer slaves to the war-god at the festival of the Raising of Banners. If Shining Light's father had helped win them their status, especially if he had died in the process, then I could see why Shining Light had been allowed to sacrifice a Bathed Slave at the festival.
“We were there together, Shining Light's father—my son-in-law—and I,” the merchant's grandfather explained. “Shining Light was only a baby when we set out, so he never knew his father, and his mother … well, she had no word of us for four years, and then I came home, laden down with the spoils of war and gifts from the Emperor's hand, and her husband didn't. I'm not sure she ever got over it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Quauhtenanco was twenty years ago. She can't still be in mourning, surely?”
“I don't mean she breaks out weeping every day,” the old man said impatiently, “but maybe having only the boy left made her a little overprotective. I've sometimes wondered if, well …” He tapped the gourd absently with his fingers, making a hollow drumming sound, and frowned as he searched for the right words. “I sometimes think she's trying to smother the lad, and it hasn't always been for the best. How she'll cope now Shining Light's gone, I don't know—but look, you might be able to judge for yourself.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move, and I heard the sound of a wicker screen being drawn aside from a doorway.
“I think she can see you now.”
A little group emerged, blinking, into daylight. Their faces had all been tanned like old leather by years of exposure to sun and wind, and they all had plain cloaks, lank hair and a proud, stiff bearing. As the seven of them walked silently past us toward the courtyard's street entrance I realized they must be the leaders of the merchant parishes. Despite their lack of cotton cloaks, lip-plugs, feathers or sandals, these were among the richest men in Mexico.
Just as the last of them was about to leave, he paused and looked back at my companion.
“Kindly,” he said curtly, “your grandson has gone too far this time.”
“Tell it to Oceloxochitl.” The old man suddenly sounded weary. “I don't care anymore.”
“We've told her,” the other man assured him. “She knows we've only been as patient as we have because of the way his father died. When Shining Light comes home,” he added ominously, “his account will be settled.”
T
he servant showed me into a small room. Conventionally pious images of the gods decorated the walls: I recognized Two Lord and Two Lady, who allotted our birth dates and, along with those, our destinies. A low table, spread with delicacies—savory tamales, stuffed tortillas, fruit and assorted sweetmeats—stood in the middle of the room. The only other furniture was a large reed box. It lay open, displaying its contents. They looked like an elaborate suit of clothes: I recognized a colorful, feather-bordered jacket, obsidian sandals and wooden earplugs. They puzzled me at first, until I saw the lock of hair lying in the middle of the heap, and then I understood: these were the clothes the Bathed Slave had danced in during his last days and nights. Afterward they would have become his owner's most treasured possessions, to be kept as long as he lived and burned and buried with him when he died.
Shining Light's mother knelt on a mat beside the box. She greeted me with conventional courtesy.
“You are out of breath, you are hungry. Rest. Eat.”
I sat opposite her, mumbling something polite as I gathered my
cloak around me. I accepted a honeyed maize cake and munched on it to give myself time to think.
Oceloxochitl: it meant “Tiger Lily.” Kneeling, with her head inclined, lit only by whatever sunlight managed to slip past the screen at the doorway, she gave little away. By what I could see—the silver strands in her dark hair, which lay loose upon her shoulders, the lines etched in shadow about her eyes and mouth, her dark, unpainted skin and bright, unstained teeth, the somber, formal patterns of her skirt and blouse—I judged that she was a respectable woman in her early middle years and that she was in mourning. I presumed this was for her son, since I knew the merchants' womenfolk went into mourning whenever their men set out on a long journey.
“I am Lily. You are Lord Feathered in Black's man? You are welcome here.” She spoke in a deep, clear voice, and deliberately, like someone used to choosing her words carefully.
“Thank you, madam. I am his Lordship's slave, yes.”
“What does the Chief Minister require of my poor household?”
“I wanted to speak to Shining Light.”
“Then, sir, you have come too late, and I am sorry your journey has been wasted. My son left on a trading venture yesterday.”
When she looked up her gaze was steady and unblinking. There was no catch in her voice and no tears had left tracks on her cheeks. Only a hand, trembling slightly as it strayed toward the reed box beside her, might have betrayed grief or a need for reassurance.
“Why yesterday?” Disbelief made my voice sharper than I had intended. “Why on a day like One Reed?”
“Why do you think?” Her voice cracked like a dry branch collapsing on a fire. “He had to go away, don't you understand? They'd have killed him if he'd stayed.”
“Who'd have killed him—his creditors?” I remembered what the merchant's grandfather had said about Curling Mist. Perhaps he was not the only one Shining Light owed money to.
“I'm talking about the merchants! You were at the festival, weren't you? You were there when that slave ran away and killed himself. It was the disgrace of it. My son knew he could never show his face among his own people again. He left the city the next day. He knew it was a bad day, at a bad time of year, and he had neither proper provisions
nor his elders' blessing. He knew he could drown in the lake, be killed by robbers or eaten by bears or pumas, die of cold in the mountains or heat in the desert. We merchants have lived with this knowledge for generations. Shining Light's own father was killed by barbarians.”
She would not let herself cry or raise her voice, but I could not miss the way her fingers caught and twisted the fabric of her skirt.
“You don't know where he went?”
“He didn't say, but it may have been in the East—somewhere like Xicallanco. He talked about Xicallanco before he went.”
Xicallanco! “A long way away,” I said, while I tried to remember where I had heard of the place recently.
“Oh, yes. The farther the better!”
“I suppose,” I reflected, “by the time he gets back from a place like that, there's a chance it will have been forgotten—the Bathed Slave and everything.”
“He won't come back.”
“You think he's gone into exile?”
“I think he'll die.” She whispered the words, hissing at me in a voice that sounded like air escaping between hot coals on a brazier. “The same as his father. He died when our son was a baby.”
“I know. Your father told me. Your husband must have been a very brave man. I'm sorry you lost him.”
“It was a long time ago,” she said matter-of-factly. “But yes, he was. He was worth ten of those so-called warriors.” A brief smile surprised me. “Thank you for saying so.”
I remembered what her father had told me about her and Shining Light. I wondered whether I could get her to confirm it, or explain what he had meant about things not always having been for the best.
“It can't have been easy for you all these years—on your own, with your son growing up.”
The woman gave me a curious glance. “It hasn't,” she conceded, “but merchants' wives are used to coping. We have the family business to run, while the men are away for months or years at a time. We're brought up to it. And we weren't poor. The Emperor was very generous, you know. After the merchants got back from Quauhtenanco he sent round boatloads of maize and beans, and cloaks of cotton
and rabbit's fur. We were never going to go hungry, even when my father got too old to go abroad himself. And now Shining Light is ready to start trading on his own account.” She turned her head away sharply and added in a voice suddenly thick with tears: “Or he would be, if this wretched thing hadn't happened!”
“You mean the sacrifice.”
She bit her lip but said nothing.
“That's what the parish chiefs were here about, wasn't it?” I probed gently. “They were angry about what happened. What did they have to say?”
The woman struck the floor next to her with her open right hand, making a ringing slap. “What do you expect they said? Do you know what an honor it is to be selected to offer a Bathed Slave at the festival? A merchant spends his whole life cringing before the warriors, going about barefoot and wearing a rough old cloak instead of nice cotton and ducking out of the way of some oaf he could buy ten times over, and then for one day a year there is this chance to show we are as good as they are. For someone as young as Shining Light to be chosen, and then to show us all up the way he did—is it any wonder they were angry?” Agitation made her teeth grind together. “You know what I had to do just now? I had to listen to seven old men lecturing me on the disgrace we've brought on our people, and demanding to know where Shining Light is now and where he got that slave from in the first place. And I've had to take all that and try and defend my son and pretend I knew what he was up to, when I never did, and do it all by myself because my father's drunk himself into a stupor again and the ungrateful wretch has run away and left me!” She ended with a deep shuddering breath and something like a sob.
“You don't know where Shining Light got his Bathed Slave from, then?”
She gave a loud sniff before replying: “He told me he got him at the big slave market in Azcapotzalco.”
“You didn't believe him.”
Lily looked down at where her hands lay clasped on her knees, between the folds of her skirt. “He left off buying him until very late—too late to train him properly. And when the parish chiefs wanted to inspect him, and advise Shining Light on how to present
him, he kept fobbing them off. The truth is, I don't know where that slave came from.” She tilted her chin up until her eyes glinted in the sunlight. A faint huskiness, a hint of pride, came into her voice. “But I will tell you this. I was with my father when he presented a Bathed Slave at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, in the first year the Emperor allowed the merchants to make an offering, and he was nothing like Shining Light's creature. He danced up the steps ahead of us, the way the poets say they should, and he died like a warrior. I know how these things should be done!”
Her fingers unlaced and laced themselves in her lap. I watched her thigh lift and settle again under the thin material of her skirt, betraying a sudden restlessness, and wondered what feelings came with the thought of that sacrifice, so many years before. Perhaps she pictured herself as a young woman, ascending the Great Pyramid, with the sounds and smells and thrill of death around her, and ahead of her the man her father was sending to die, mounting the last few steps with a triumphant cry on his lips, shedding chalk dust from his heels as he climbed.
I had an unsettling vision of her as she must have been in the moment when her father's slave gave up his life, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed, her eyes shining, the breath caught in her throat. I had seen enough sacrifices to know how it had been, the animal joy that no man or woman with blood in their veins could help being caught up in. It was not bloodlust but a more basic thing: the presence of death and the affirmation of life, two things that our traditions taught us could never be separated.
“I know too. I used to be a priest.”
She looked at me with renewed interest and I saw the dark color that had spread over her face and the quick pulse in her throat. I wondered whether she in turn saw me as a young man, when I had been one of the temple's mysterious, glamorous servants, with my crown of feathers and my cheeks daubed with blood and ochre. She frowned. “But now you're a slave—how did that happen?”
The question shocked me back to the present. I did not want to talk about this.
“My master needs to know where your son's offering came from,” I said clumsily. “He needs to talk to Shining Light … .”
“Why?”
I opened my mouth to reply and then shut it again. What could I say, when for all I knew old Black Feathers might just then be amusing himself deciding what parts of her son's body he would like to have severed with a dull knife? I heard myself mumbling: “He's concerned that it went wrong. After all, he sent me to help.”
“And a lot of help you were too!” she said bitterly. “If you hadn't let that slave get away when he did, it might have been all right …”
“There was nothing I could have done!”
“My son would have been better off hiring another escort, like that big commoner Handy,” she went on, ignoring me. “Two men like him might have been able to hold the slave.”
“I didn't ask to be there!” I protested. “I don't even know why I was there in the first place! Whose idea was it to send me, anyway? Did your son ask for me?”
“How should I know? I've told you, I had no idea what he was doing.”
“So you don't know what dealings he had with my master?”
“Until yesterday, I wasn't aware that he'd ever had any!”
“What about the man he placed his bets with—Curling Mist?”
My last question seemed to strike her like a blow. She leaned forward sharply as if someone had stabbed her in the stomach. She sat up again just as abruptly, but kept her eyes on her knees as she answered me in a voice that was suddenly very small: “My son doesn't share all his … business affairs with me. Why should he?”
“But he did use him? He did put money on the ball game through him?”
I watched her shoulders shudder momentarily beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. “I don't know. Yes—he probably did. Look, I'm tired. I had the parish chiefs here all morning, and now you come asking questions that I can't answer.” Her eyes were no longer glistening, merely hard and defiant. “If the Chief Minister wants to talk to my son, then he had better go and look for him. But you can tell him Shining Light isn't here. He's gone away to die. See what your master makes of that, slave!”

Other books

Chasing Joshua by Cara North
Tulsa Burning by Anna Myers
Evelyn Vine Be Mine by Chelle Mitchiter
Dim Sum Dead by Jerrilyn Farmer
Good Curses Evil by Stephanie S. Sanders
Fervent Charity by Paulette Callen
Catch Me If You Can by Frank W Abagnale
The Fog Diver by Joel Ross