Authors: Simon Levack

The Demon of the Air (21 page)

BOOK: The Demon of the Air

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W
hat was your mistake?” the woman asked.

It was years since I had dared ask myself that question, but now the words slipped out painlessly, like a splinter that has worked its way to the surface of your skin.

“I didn't think I'd made a mistake. I'd been tested over so many years by then that the fifth day didn't frighten me. There would always be one or two who failedânovices, children whose fathers should never have pledged them to the Priest House in the first place, or old ones who were simply past itâand I remember feeling a bit sorry for some of them, after it was all over for them. But I felt confident enough. Maybe too confident.

“And it was such a small thing! Just one of those tiny green tomatoes, and all I had to do was add it to the pile in front of the fire. I did it, too, without disturbing any of the others, but just as I was about to let go, something stung the back of my neck.

“I don't know what it was, but it felt like touching the edge of an obsidian razor, or being scratched by the sharpened end of a reed or a cactus spine. It didn't really hurt, but it made me snatch my fingers back, and, well â¦”

My fists clenched involuntarily at the memory.

“I didn't see that tomato roll. I turned round to face the others, to ask what was going onâwho had scratched me, or thrown or blown something at meâand then I saw it in their faces. They were all looking past me at the offerings in front of the fire, and I don't think anyone in that room was breathing.”

I had not turned back to look at the offerings again. There had been no need. The shock and then the certainty I had seen in the faces around me had told me enough.

I had not thought to argue, fight or flee when they came for me. I had just waited, like the most compliant of victims, sitting passively before the fire that it had been my life's work to tend.

“You never knew who distracted you?”

I lifted my eyes to Lily's face to find that it was blurred by tears. When I had blinked them away I saw, to my surprise, that her eyes too were glistening.

“No, and I don't know howâa clay ball blown through a reed, the sharp end of a goose quill, a small stoneâLily, I don't even know for sure that it was a human act. Suppose it was a god? I think that was what I believed at the time, and that's why I didn't protest.”

And it would be just like the Smoking Mirror, who was said to look with particular favor on slaves, to choose such a perverse way of setting the course that would make me, eventually, one of his creatures. But men and women were a tool the gods used, and in my heart I knew that whatever had touched me that evening, all those years ago, had been propelled by a human hand.

I could not sleep. I tossed and turned on my mat, kept awake by the pain of my wounds and questions that had lodged in my head and were refusing to leave.

What had really happened the day I had been expelled from the Priest House? I had always accepted it. It had been my fate, ordained by the highest gods, Two Lord and Two Lady, as they had presided over my naming day; if not that, then I had just been another victim of Tezcatlipoca's caprice. Talking about it now had shaken me, stirring up long-buried memories that would not be put down again until I had looked at them afresh.

Had there been a man with a reason to hate me?

I pictured a face, stained all over with soot, with long, matted hair and temples streaked with fresh sacrificial blood: a priest's face, unrecognizable as an individual's. Only the eyes, white against the black-painted skin, might have enabled me to put a name to it, but another vision distracted me from them: another face, seemingly hovering behind the first, less distinct, pale, or perhaps tinted with yellow ocher.

I sat up, as if that would bring the faces into clearer focus.

“I know you,” I muttered.

A noise from outside the room dispelled the vision and sent me, in spite of my pain and the stiffness in my limbs, scrambling toward the doorway.

The Moon and the stars shone through the fine haze made by hearths and temple fires, and my breath was a glowing cloud in front of me as I peered outside. I drew my blanket around me and shivered. There would be a hard frost in the morning.

I heard the noise again: a faint rustling, the sound a skirt might make as its wearer gathered it up to walk quietly across the courtyard.

A slight figure slipped from the shadows, crossed a pool of light and vanished into the darkness again.

Few Aztecs would go out in the dark alone. To come across almost any creature of the nightâan owl, a weasel, a coyote, a skunkâwas to stare your own death in the face; and worst of all were the monsters we conjured out of our own heads. Not many would willingly venture into streets haunted by a headless torso whose chest opened and shut with a sound like splitting wood, by men without heads or feet who rolled, moaning, along the ground, and by fleshless skulls with legs.

I, however, had been a priest. At night I had patrolled the hills around the lake, with my torch, my censer, my conch-shell trumpet and my bundles of fir branches to burn as offerings. It had been my task to face and drive away these monsters, so that my people could sleep soundly on their reed mats. The night no longer held any terrors for me.

Hoping I was still hardened enough against the cold to stop my teeth chattering, I discarded my blanket and followed the woman across the courtyard.

Hiding in the shadows, as she had, I saw a pale, unsteady light in the room nearest to where I had seen her vanish. She had gone to the most important room in the houseâthe kitchen, where the hearth was.

I stepped up to the door.

The hearth was much more than a cooking fire: the three hearthstones were sacred, a shrine both to the Old, Old God of the fire, and
to the Lord of the Vanguard, the merchants' own god. A merchant's traveling staff, wrapped in stiff, heavily stained paper, was propped against the wall behind the hearth. The woman knelt in front of it, with her head bowed so that her face was hidden and the flames cast a huge hunchbacked shadow on the wall behind her.

She had something in her right hand. It glittered in the firelight as she lifted it to her right ear. It was a sliver of obsidian, the sharpest kind of blade we knew.

Its polished surface flashed once as she cut into the earlobe.

The woman's blood ran over the obsidian, quenching its sparkle like water tipped on glowing embers.

With her left hand, Lily held a little clay bowl up to the side of her head. She held it there for a moment, before stretching her hand out over the fire and tipping the pooled blood into the flames. She shook the bowl once to get the last drops out, and put it aside.

Then she took a strip of plain white paper and laid it against her wounded ear. She pressed on it to squeeze out more of her blood, so that when she took it away again it showed black in the poor light of the hearth. She looked at the sodden, limp scrap for a long moment, and then stood up.

I knew what she was going to do. She had sacrificed her blood to the fire-god; now it was the turn of her own personal god, the patron and protector of the merchants. His offerings were not burned. The merchant's mother was not about to throw his gift of her blood into the fire. Instead, she went to the traveling staff propped against the wall and solemnly wound the paper around its middle, adding one more bloodied layer to its binding. She spoke to her god.

Lily's voice was too low for me to distinguish more than a few words, but I heard enough before I came away, treading as softly as when I had approached.

It was not the words themselves which had impressed me. “Only a boy,” she had said, and “Keep him safe”: not much of a prayer, addressed to the god all merchants entrusted their safety to.

If anything was going to move the Lord of the Vanguard, I thought, it was not the words of Lily's prayer, but the desolate, dry sobs that had forced themselves out between them.

A
re you awake?”

Moonlight fell through the doorway across the floor. The woman's elongated shadow lay in the midst of it, the head just touching the edge of my mat.

“Yes.” I had jumped so visibly on hearing her speak that there was no point in pretending otherwise.

Her skirt was like a dark cloud against the light on the floor, and when she turned toward me her toenails glinted like faint stars.

“Why did you follow me across the courtyard?”

“I didn't know it was you.”

She came up to the head of the mat, so that I was looking up at her face, hooded by shadows. I hauled myself up on my haunches.

“You might have been anybody,” I added. “You might have been my master's steward or Curling Mist, come back to finish what they started. Why were you so furtive, anyway?”

She knelt beside me, bowing her head as she had before the fire.

“I didn't want my father or the servants or â¦ or you to see me. I didn't want you to hear me praying.”

I recognized the woman I had first met, the day my master had sent me to inquire about Shining Light. Her voice was low and guttural, as if there were some obstruction in her throat, and the strands of her hair caught by the moonlight shook a little, but there was the same composure, the same reluctance to show or share a sorrow that she could never quite successfully conceal.

I should have challenged her then. I should have confronted her with the truth: that her son had not left the city, that he and Curling Mist and Nimble, his boy, had conspired against my life, and that I was sure she was a part of it all, because I did not believe her story
about meeting the youth at the ball court to pay off Shining Light's debts. That is what I should have said.

I did not, because all of a sudden I had forgotten my terrors and suspicions, and remembered only what I had heard and seen that evening: the woman's bleak little prayer, her trembling hands wrapping the traveling staff in paper soaked in her own blood, the grief and fear that seemed real even if she had been lying to me.

“You really don't think he's coming back, do you?”

“No â¦ yes â¦ I don't think so.” I barely heard the words, but then she gave a loud sniff.

The sound was so childish that I could not help myself: I reached out for her, extending my arms to her at the same time as she turned toward me to hide her face in my bony shoulder.

Even racked by tears, she was discreet, muffling her sobs against my chest until at last they subsided and she lay quietly across me. I murmured what I thought were soothing words and stroked her hair awkwardly.

“He had to go away, do you understand? They'd have killed him if he'd stayedâafter what happened.”

“I know.” She was still talking about the merchants. In spite of everything I wondered whether she really did believe her son had fled their wrath after what had happened to his offering at the festival.

“I know what people think of him. But he's not a monster. He can be so kind. He has so much love, if only people would try to understand him. He's just a boy, a bit wild, with no father to guide him. His father would have taken him in hand. They'd have gone on trading expeditions together, to the Mayans or the Zapotecs or the Yopi. I think that's what Shining Light always wanted, you know, to be like his father, a hero for his people â¦” She broke off with a sob.

In the moonlight she was a vague shape in my arms. I could smell her faint, clean woman's scent better than I could see her.

I touched her hair. “Lily â¦”

My touch broke the spell. All of a sudden she collected herself. “It's getting late. It's going to be a cold night. I'm sorryâI did not mean to burden you with my family's troubles.”

She got up stiffly. I reached for her again, catching the hem of her skirt with my fingers. She hesitated a moment too long.

She knelt beside me for a long time, saying little, absorbed in her own thoughts.

At last she said: “Do you remember Quauhtenanco?”

“I remember the Merchants coming home.” The whole of Mexico, or so it had seemed at the time, had gone out to greet the victorious merchants, lining the causeway between the southern shore of the lake and the city to cheer the little group on for the last stretch of their journey.

“I couldn't believe he was lost.” There was no need to ask who she meant. “They sent runners ahead, of course, so we knew who had come back alive and who hadn't, but I kept telling myself there must have been a mistake. So I stood there at the side of the causeway, staring at their faces as they came past, while everybody was shouting and cheering and telling me how proud I must be.”

“I was there too.” At the head of the crowd had been the Fire Priests, the great lords and the Constables. I had been there too, among the priests, my formal cape billowing around me as I blew lustily into my shell trumpet to add to the noise.

“They'd almost all gone by before I saw him.”

“âSaw him?'” I repeated, confused. “You mean your husband? But I thought â¦”

“He looked so old,” she went on, as if I had not interrupted her. “He was carrying this trophyâonly a feather banner, but from the way he stooped under it, it might have been a block of granite. I couldn't see his face. It was his cloak I recognizedâit was torn and dirty, but I'd have known it anywhere, because I'd embroidered it myself.”

I knew what she was going to say after that. I had seen him too, shuffling along at the end of that line of gaunt, grimy, exhausted men until he heard a voice he knew, somehow making itself heard over the crowd's roar, and he had paused, raised his head and smiled.

“I had little Shining Light in my arms, and I held him up and shouted myself hoarse before I realizedâbut when I saw it was my father, wearing my husband's cloak â¦”

“You wished he'd died instead.”

“I wished I'd died, so I would never have known what it was to feel like that! I waited four years for my husband to come back to me,
and for just a moment I let myself believe he hadâcan you imagine what that was like?”

“Your father just walked on, didn't he? He had to follow the procession. I saw. He couldn't meet your eyes.”

“Four years,” she said again. “And so many years since then.”

“There's been nobody else?”

“No. There might have beenâI've had offers.” She uttered what might have passed for a laugh. “I'm a wealthy widow, what do you expect? One of the old men you saw the other day, even he's â¦” She ended the sentence with a shudder. “But it never seemed to matter, being alone. I had the family business to look after, you see, I had Shining Lightâbut now there's nothing.”

Clear, unblinking eyes searched my face.

“Do you understand me?” she whispered.

I wanted to answer her but my mouth was suddenly dry. I felt desire and a kind of fear, both at once.

Then we held each other again, but this time it was different.

It was not like being with a pleasure girl. To feel my own heat returned was like watching a flame reflected in an obsidian mirror: a thing known but strange, unpredictable, elusive, uncontainable.

Afterward she giggled like a young girl.

“You didn't learn how to do that in the House of Tears!”

“It was a skill they didn't teach.”

Our priests were celibate, pledged to the gods, but they sometimes strayed. The Emperor, Montezuma, had been a priest, and it was hard to imagine that a man like him, with all his wives and concubines, had never had a girl in all the time he had been at the Priest House.

I had strayed myself, letting my feet wander toward the market when the madness overcame me. It did not matter, so long as you were discreet, and if you came back laden with shame and sure that your betrayal showed as plainly as blood smeared on the face of a statue, then that was between you and the gods. It was different if you were caught, naturally.

“So, are you going to tell me about her, then?” the woman wheedled in my ear.

“Not much to tell.”

I thought of my visits to the market, of hastily arranged, fleeting
encounters that I would promptly try to forget. It was always the marketâit was too dangerous to visit the beautiful, lithe creatures from the official pleasure houses, who danced with the warriors and were reserved for them. I knew solid peasant girls, slaves too clumsy to dance and die at the festivals and foreign women stranded, lost and hungry in the midst of a strange, vast city.

“There was one girl in particular,” I recalled dreamily. “She was a foreigner. She called herself âTurquoise Maize Flower.' She said she was a Huaxtec, and she dressed as oneâyou know, the brightly embroidered blouse and skirt and her hair braided in colored cloths wound with feathers. I don't know whether she really was one, though.” The Huaxtecs were a famously hot-blooded race, and I had always suspected Maize Flower had merely been playing on their reputation for inventiveness on the sleeping mat. “I was calling on her regularly at one time. It all ended in tears, of course.”

I spoke casually, but what I felt in that moment was horror.

Remembering the last time I had seen the girl and what she had told me then was like being accused of a crime I had committed years ago, and thought I had got away with. It was like looking down and noticing for the first time that the road I had been carelessly ambling along was bordered on both sides by deep chasms that would swallow me as soon as I put a foot wrong.

“Yaotl? What's the matter?”

My muscles had stiffened, involuntarily pushing her away. She must have felt the cold sweat that suddenly came over me.

“It's nothing,” I said hoarsely. “Just something I remembered. I'm sorry. I can't talk nowâmy ribs hurt.”

I saw again the faces I had pictured earlier that evening, before I had followed Lily across the courtyard. I knew whose they were now, and wished I did not.

I lay still in her arms and tried to stop myself from shivering. Neither of us spoke for a long time.

Eventually I slept.

BOOK: The Demon of the Air

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