Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

I found myself stumbling through the events of the evening since I had met my brother, as helpless as a man staggering through a nightmare, with the thought of frail bones cracking driving me on like a demon at my back.

As I neared the end of the tale I felt the pressure on my hands relax. I flexed my fingers automatically. Long moments of silence passed before I summoned the courage to look up.

My master had raised his head to look at the branches spreading above him. They were bare now, stripped by frost.

“My father’s tree.” He sighed. Abruptly his manner had changed: it became abstracted, almost wistful, as his fingers began caressing a naked branch. “All I ever wanted was something that wasn’t his: some renown of my own. See this tree? My father, Lord Tlacaelel, planted it before I was born-the best part of two bundles of years ago. It will still be growing here when I’m dead.” Suddenly he seized a twig, twisted it violently until it snapped off, and hurled it out of sight into a corner of the patio. The rest of the tree shook and rattled. “And they will still talk about him then, won’t they? The great Tlacaelel!The man four emperors looked up to, the Chief Minister who turned down the throne because he was king enough already! What do you suppose they’ll say about his son?”

I was too afraid to answer. The question was not really addressed to me anyway.

“I dance attendance on my young cousin, Montezuma, and amuse myself sitting in the court of appeal trying to work out which of two depositions amounts to the bigger pack of lies, or deciding which parish’s turn it is to muck out the zoo. But I should be happy with that, shouldn’t I? Because I’m the great Tlacaelel’s son, and that should be enough for anybody!” He sighed. “I suppose it will have to be enough for me, now.”

“My Lord-I don’t understand. Even if Shining Light’s offering was one of the sorcerers, what was he to you? Why does it involve your father?”

“Can’t you see, Yaotl? It’s because of my father that the Emperor is afraid of me! Montezuma acts as if the gods themselves installed him on the throne, but they didn’t-the chiefs elected him, just as they elected every Emperor before him. But he knows his throne is rightfully mine!”

The almost wheedling note in the Chief Minister’s voice did not fool me. He had no need to justify himself to his own slave: what he was saying now was addressed to the Emperor’s spy.

I listened resignedly to a story I knew very well. When the aged Tlacaelel had declined the throne in favor of Montezuma’s uncle, Emperor Tizoc, he had stipulated that his own sons should inherit it on Tizoc’s death. By the end of Tizoc’s short reign, however, Tlacaelel himself had died, and his wishes were no longer of any account. The throne was given to Montezuma’s surviving uncle, Ahuitzotl, and on Ahuitzotl’s death old Black Feathers was again passed over-this time in favor of Montezuma himself.

“Maybe Montezuma thinks he’s going to be poisoned, like Tizoc,” my master grumbled. “Maybe he thinks I had his sorcerers spirited out of the prison, to weaken him, or to cast some sort of spell on him, to sicken his heart with magic. Or maybe he doesn’t-maybe he told me to look for them because he knew they could not be found, to humiliate me.”

“My Lord-he told me to look for them. I have to go to theCuauhcalco Prison. What do I do if he asks about my progress? I can’t tell him you’ve told me not to obey him-he’ll have us both strangled!”

“Then you’d better do as he says. Whatever my cousin may have told you, I don’t have those men. No matter: the Emperor will get them back-but through me, and in my own good time, so that he knows I can’t be trifled with. And that young merchant is going to be made to regret what he has done!”

My master leaned toward me then, planting his trembling bony hands on his knees.

“You will find the sorcerers, Yaotl, and bring them to me-to me personally, do you understand? To me and no one else-not even the Emperor! And before you get any clever ideas about running to Montezuma the moment you set eyes on them, just listen to this.

“I know Montezuma will have told you that when you catch up with the sorcerers you’re to take them straight to him because he’ll have you strangled if you don’t. So hear me now, slave: if I learn you’ve been anywhere near the Emperor before those men are safely in my hands, I’ll have you flayed alive!”

Ispent much of the night prowling around my master’s courtyard, listening to the sounds made by a city stirring in its sleep: the conch-shell trumpet wailing at midnight, a distant answering call from a priest patrolling the city’s bounds, the cry of some creature disturbed on the lake. From time to time the lads from one of the Houses of Youth would break into song, so that the sound would carry across the water and convince our neighbors that we Aztecs never slept.

Then the stars started to disappear, one by one, and the first drops of the winter rain began to fall around me. I went indoors, treadingsoftly to avoid disturbing my room’s other occupant, and huddled on my sleeping mat with my cloak wrapped around me.

My mind would not rest. It kept revisiting the evening’s events.

My master plainly knew more than he ought to about the Emperor’s missing sorcerers; and the Emperor was not fooled. As Montezuma had said to me himself, there were things he had not been told. However, it seemed that he could not move openly against his Chief Minister without evidence.

I was under no illusions about why I had been picked as the man to get him that evidence. “You are spoken of most highly,” Montezuma had said, but what he really wanted was a spy in Lord Feathered in Black’s household: someone who was in no position to deny him whatever he demanded. I wondered, though, where he had got my name from.

It was not hard to guess why Montezuma thought my master was playing him false. Having heard from his own lips how fearful he was for the future and how little he trusted his advisers, I could put myself in the Emperor’s place and imagine the questions he would ask himself. “I rounded up these sorcerers to consult them about my future,” he would have thought, “whether my rule would persist, whether I would live or die. Now they have vanished from a place nobody has ever escaped from. Who might have an interest in what they have to say? Who else, but my rivals for the throne?

“So what do I, the Emperor of the Mexicans, do about it? Of course, I ask my trusty chief minister to investigate. But for reasons that he cannot or will not explain, Lord Feathered in Black fails to find the missing sorcerers. And the next thing I hear is that a Bathed Slave has died uttering what sounds suspiciously like a prophecy-just the sort of thing a sorcerer might be expected to come out with. And who was sent to assist at the sacrifice? None other than the Chief Minister’s own slave-Yaotl!”

What else could the Emperor be expected to conclude, other than that my master knew all along where his sorcerers were, deliberately failed to account for them when he was ordered to look for them, and then made sure that his slave was on hand to hear and report whatever one of them might say in his last moments?

Had I been Montezuma, I grudgingly admitted to myself, I would probably have concluded that the Chief Minister was up to no goodtoo. But why? What could Lord Feathered in Black possibly have to gain by deceiving the Emperor in such a complicated fashion?

I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Somewhere above it were the Chief Minister’s sleeping quarters. “What’s this all about?” I muttered. “Are you just trying to show you’re cleverer than the Emperor?”