The Demon of the Air (18 page)

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Authors: Simon Levack

BOOK: The Demon of the Air
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A
woman's voice said: “Don't move.”
I was not about to try. It seemed to me that I had made the effort once, a long time ago, but pain and nausea and a sinister scraping sound from somewhere inside my body had made me stop.
Besides, I knew I was going to die soon. Why bother moving, when it could not help? I considered giving up breathing, because it hurt my ribs and achieved nothing except to prolong the pain, but I kept forgetting. I would be about to pass out when a bright shaft of pain like an obsidian knife stung me awake.
“Take it easy!” It was the woman's voice again. A weight was laid on my shoulder, pressing it gently but firmly to the ground.
“Can you open your mouth?”
“Mmmph?”
I could not speak because my lips were numb and the tongue behind them was swollen through having had my teeth driven through it.
“Try to drink this.”
I could not see what she was offering me because my eyelids were bruised, pulpy masses that had gummed themselves shut.
“It will help your ribs.”
Liquid trickled onto my mouth. Some ran over my cheeks and down my chin. It was as sour as vomit and burned my throat.
I coughed. The pain of coughing made me gasp.
“Have a little more,” said the deep, seductive voice.
I was too feeble to fend her off or stop her pouring more of her fetid brew into me. I was too feeble even to retch.
“Sleep, now,” she said.
I slept.
 
I woke up.
I could open my eyes a little. All I could see were vague shapes, shadows and pools of light blurring into one another, and everything tinged with red. It was hard to make any sense of what I was looking at until I thought of closing one eye. Then the world stopped spinning long enough for me to work out that I was indoors somewhere and that from the way the shadows fell it must be either late afternoon or early morning.
Pain sliced through my skull, forcing me to shut both eyes again. I moaned.
Someone moved nearby: my ears, although they were singing, picked up the slightest noise, such as a maize ear being dropped in the street outside, or somebody's joints creaking as he stood up. A hand at the back of my neck lifted my head, while another laid something warm over my brow, a thick paste that stung when it was pressed into place. I moaned again. As the stinging subsided I felt brisk, efficient fingers tying on a bandage.
“Can you speak?” It was the woman's voice again.
“Mmmph?”
“It's all right. Rest. You're safe here.”
 
When I woke up again I was alone in a small room with only an evil smell for company.
I lay on my back in the middle of the floor, staring at the ceiling. I could just about unglue my eyes now, although there was little to see but gray plaster. When I turned my head to look at a wall I saw more of the same, apart from a couple of large irregular smudges. I remembered the light drizzle there had been recently and thought of damp. They were going to have to renew the thatch on the roof before the real rains began in the summer, I told myself, while I turned my head the other way.
Opposite the smudged wall was an odd pattern of little lights, like stars but more regularly spaced and less distinct. I frowned as I tried to make them out. I blinked and stared at them, and gradually they
became two identical sets of lights placed side by side, and in the space between them was a pain like a wooden peg being driven into my skull. My stomach lurched.
My head rolled back of its own accord, leaving me staring at the ceiling again. I shut my eyes and swallowed convulsively, to stop the gorge rising in my throat, and I lay still, in darkness, until the agony and nausea subsided.
I waited until all I was left with were a dull throbbing in my head—a familiar pain that I seemed to have had always, its regular beat almost reassuring, as though I needed it to remind me I was still alive—and aching ribs that protested every time I drew breath.
The smell worried me. Even the poorest houses in Mexico, one-roomed hovels perched on stilts over the marshes on the fringes of the city, were cleaned every day, but this room stank like a dog left for dead in a badly kept latrine.
I decided not to move my head again, but to try looking at my surroundings out of the corners of my eyes, the way a rich man looks at a beggar. That seemed to help. I could see no furniture of any kind, but I now knew what the little lights were. When I was not seeing double, there was just one set of them. They were daylight showing through the gaps in a wicker screen. They were the room's only illumination, just enough to paint everything around me a washed-out gray color.
The lights were all equally bright. That meant the Sun was not shining straight on the doorway. I wondered how far it had moved round and then realized I did not even know what day it was.
I let out a soft moan as a fresh wave of sickness rolled sluggishly over my stomach.
Where was I and how long had I been here?
The appalling truth began to take shape in my befuddled mind even before I glanced at the wall opposite the doorway and realized that what I had taken for dark smudges were really paintings, their colors turned to shades of gray in the gloom, but still recognizable if you knew them. They were Two Lord and Two Lady. I had last seen them in this room the day I had come looking for news of Shining Light, when the young merchant's mother had received me as graciously as she could and told me her son had gone into exile.
Then I realized that a voice I vaguely remembered hearing, crooning softly at me while my wounds were dressed and vile medicine was poured into me, had been Lily's.
I tried to sit up then. What stopped me was not the sudden, crippling pain or the sensation of broken bones grinding against each other, but the fact that I had been strapped to a board, so tightly that I could scarcely inflate my lungs.
I flopped back on the board with a gasp. I was trapped and at the mercy of my enemies.
I had set out wanting a killer to come for me, and meaning to use the merchant's mother to bring it about, but not like this—when I was wounded and as helpless as a newborn.
And the bad smell, I realized with a shudder, was my own.
Pain and despair made me groan aloud.
In answer came footsteps in the courtyard outside, the scraping sound of the screen being pulled aside and a tide of light that flooded the room, washing their gray pallor from the faces of the gods.
 
“What's going on?” I tried to say. What came out was: “Mmmph?”
The only response was a grunt of effort as I was picked up, sleeping mat and all, and carried through the doorway. My bearers took me through the afternoon sunshine into a shady place, where they propped my board against a wall.
When the feeling that the blood inside my head was sloshing violently back and forth had begun to ease off, I looked around cautiously.
Lily's father was sitting in the middle of the courtyard with his back to the trunk of an old fig tree, watching me balefully.
“I hope you appreciate that you're in my place.”
“Mmmph?”
“I'm sorry, you'll have to speak up. My hearing isn't what it was.”
I tried again, eventually managing something that sounded more like “What—am—I—doing—here?”
“Well, they had to move you out of the room, so they could clean it. It looks as if my daughter's looked after you all right, but I'm told you've left dried blood and piss and the gods know what else all over the place. And I suppose they had to get you upright as well, or else you'd have got pneumonia.”
A man and a woman crossed the courtyard, he carrying a bowl of water and she a broom. The man was Constant, the servant I had met before. Judging by his expression, he was no better disposed toward me now than he had been then.
I made a noise that must have sounded like a question.
“I don't know,” the old man said, “but they seem to have given you a good working over. Lucky for you Lily went to the market instead of coming straight back here.”
“Lily?” I gurgled. “The market?”
“Why, yes—don't you remember?” He looked me up and down. “Maybe you don't. Well, what she told me was, after she'd finished her business at the ball court—where you went looking for her, remember?—she had someone to see at the market. Then she saw a fight going on near one of our pitches: you and a priest. You were on the ground and the priest had a knife, but then something distracted him and you managed to run away. You didn't get very far.”
His casual words brought the whole thing back—the black-faced man chasing me with his cries of “Thief,” the police heading me off, the blows driven into me from all sides as I was hauled to my feet. I felt as if the ground were sinking under me and my eyes began to roll.
A look of alarm crossed the old man's face. He snatched up the gourd beside him. “Constant! Quick, the man needs a drink!”
“What happened to the priest?” I gasped weakly.
The male servant who had been cleaning my room emerged, saw the gourd Lily's father was proffering, and slouched sullenly toward him.
“Give him a mouthful of this, it'll pick him up,” the old man ordered. “The priest? He ran off, apparently. My daughter said she ran up to the stall he'd been standing by, to ask him what he was shouting about, but he vanished into the crowd before she got there. By then everybody was too busy watching you being beaten up to be able to tell her where he'd gone.” He grinned pitilessly. “You don't know how lucky you were. The police were all for hauling what was left of you straight off to the courthouse, where they'd probably have had you clubbed to death on the spot. Fortunately my daughter managed to convince them that you hadn't actually stolen anything, so they let you off with a beating.”
Without a word the servant snatched the gourd from the old man,
walked over to me and pressed its opening against my battered lips.
It was sacred wine.
I had once sworn never to touch the stuff again. On the other hand, at that time I had not been beaten unconscious, unaccountably rescued and cared for by a woman I thought of as my enemy, and then strapped to a board and stood up in the corner of someone's courtyard like a trophy.
I shut my eyes and swallowed the drink as gratefully as a baby devouring his mother's milk.
 
“Are you awake?”
The room was dark. I shared it with shadows that moved around me like coyotes prowling around a wounded deer.
“Yaotl?”
I rolled my eyes toward the voice.
The shadows were moving because someone was carrying a torch around the room. As the dark figure lifted it into a bracket in the wall, they stopped, settling down in the corners, suddenly as tame as little potbellied dogs.
“You must be hungry: you haven't eaten for days. You must try some of this.”
It was only as she knelt beside me, tipping a tortoiseshell bowl toward my lips, that I recognized the void in my belly and realized how long it had been empty of anything except the old man's sacred wine. The thought made my stomach heave.
Lily was feeding me maize gruel, insubstantial stuff, unseasoned except for a little salt, but as it oozed down my throat my head jerked forward out of her hand and I spewed gruel and sacred wine and thin sour juices down my chin and onto my chest.
She snatched the bowl away but kept her hand behind my head, supporting me until the retching stopped.
“It's all right,” she cooed. “It's all right. Relax. We'll try some more later.”
Putting the bowl down, she gently let my head fall back, and stroked my forehead while my breathing gradually slowed.
I closed my eyes. I did not want to sleep. I wanted to get up and get out, away from the ministrations of this disquietingly kind woman, whose son and his friends were killers who wanted to mingle
my blood with that of their other victims, but I was too tired. If I could just rest for a moment, I thought, I could gather my strength until the woman left me alone, and then think of a way out of here.
I must have slept a little.
Perhaps I merely dozed, but it must have looked like sleep to her.
With her hand still resting on my forehead, she was whispering: “My boy. Oh, my poor boy,” in a voice now choked with tears.

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