Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“If you can’t sleep,” grumbled a voice out of the darkness, “then you can come here and turn me over before I get fucking bedsores.”

Talking to myself, I had woken my roommate up.

Patiyoh was his name-or rather, it was the name he had been known by for as long as I had dwelled in my master’s household. I was sure it was old Black Feathers’ idea of a joke, for it meant “costly.” He had once been a useful slave, but he had been crippled by a stroke years before, and now all he did was lie on his sleeping mat, consuming his master’s food and doing no work in return. He was safe enough as long as he gave his master no cause for complaint. A few of his fellow slaves, including me, kept him alive by small kindnesses, such as changing his soiled breechcloth from time to time and carrying him out into a secluded corner of the courtyard when the weather was good. The others did it because they knew they might one day find themselves in Costly’s position. I had my own reasons to feel indebted to the old man.

Seizing him by his bony shoulders and rolling him on his side took little effort. As I crawled back onto my own sleeping mat, however, I learned I was not going to get away that lightly.

“So, what’s old Black Feathers done to you now?”

“Never mind,” I mumbled. “Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t,” he said petulantly, “not since you woke me up. Now the floor under this mat is as hard as stone, and it’s not as if I can toss and turn until I get to sleep, so you’ll just have to keep talking to me, won’t you? Or have you forgotten what you owe me?”

“No.” I sighed. “I haven’t forgotten.”

What I owed this crippled old man was nothing less than my life. When I had come into our master’s household-after the Chief Minister had snapped me up as a bargain in the marketplace-I had been helplessly in the grip of the Four Hundred Rabbits, the gods of the sacred wine. The twenty cloaks my master had paid me for my liberty had gone on the roughest, sourest and cheapest drink I couldget. When the money had run out and I had given myself up to servitude, in accordance with the bargain my master and I had struck, I still had no thought beyond the next gourd. It was Costly who had seen me through it, whose wasted, bony arms had held me as I had shivered and struggled and cried out for just a drop, just a taste of fermented maguey sap on my tongue.

I could never forget what he had done for me. He would never let me.

I told him of everything I had seen and heard that evening. It took a long time, but the old man was still awake at the end.

“So old Black Feathers was banging on about his father again? You amaze me. I’ve known our beloved Chief Minister a lot longer than you have, young man, and if I had a bag of cocoa beans for every time I’ve heard one of those jealous tirades about his father, I could have bought my freedom years ago.”

“But Lord Tlacaelel’s been dead nearly forty years.”

“Yes, and his son’s never moved out of his shadow. Not surprising, is it? Four emperors deferred to Tlacaelel. He was their equal. Montezuma treats his son like a servant-even though one of his wives is old Black Feathers’ daughter! How often do you suppose our master has to listen to tales of his father’s exploits in war-or even worse, gets asked to tell them himself? And every time he visits that great big palace next to the Heart of the World he must tell himself: ‘If only my father hadn’t turned down the throne, all this would be mine!’”

“Our master’s jealousy isn’t really my problem,” I reminded Costly as I squirmed into a less uncomfortable position under my cloak. “It’s the sorcerers I have to worry about.”

“Don’t you think there’s a connection? What was it he told you-he wanted something that wasn’t his father’s?”

“True, but he also said the Emperor was afraid of him.”

“Why? He’s too old to be any threat. If Montezuma died tomorrow the throne would go to his brother, Cuitlahuac. Our Chief Minister and our Emperor both know that.” The old slave sucked noisily on his bare gums. “I’d lay odds old Black Feathers was lying to you.”

“He would,” I said dryly. “I’m meant to be spying on him, remember?”

The old slave persisted as I rolled over on my mat. “Whatever’shappened to these sorcerers, it’s not just because of some feud between old Black Feathers and Montezuma. It’s got to do with something our master wants-something his father never had. Now what might that be, I wonder?”

Idid not want to go to the prison, but since I seemed to have no choice, I steeled myself to visit it.

Rainwater had pooled on the flat roof and dripped into the wooden cages that lined the walls. The rushes strewn on the floor had absorbed all the moisture they could and now floated uselessly in shallow puddles. The floor was crisscrossed by thin streams of liquid stained with filth from the overflowing pots the prisoners were given to relieve themselves in. The only light came through tiny apertures set high in the walls: not enough to show you where you were putting your feet, but enough to reveal the misery on the faces of the prison’s handful of desperate inmates.

Each prisoner huddled naked on the floor of his cage. There was a sameness about them, each one alone, unable or unwilling to speak to his neighbors, surrounded by the smell of his own and others’ ordure-reduced to everything an Aztec was not.

“They’re drunks, mostly.” The Emperor’s majordomo dismissed most of the wretches in his care with a single word. “Don’t feel too sorry for them, they’ve only themselves to blame. And these are the worst offenders-the ones their own parishes couldn’t handle. Still, you’d know all this, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

My tone must have been too sharp, as he gave me a curious look. “I thought you were Lord Feathered in Black’s man. He is the Chief Justice, isn’t he, after all?”

“Oh … yes, yes, of course …”

“We had some more interesting characters,” the major-domo went on. “But you know all about the sorcerers, of course.”

“The men who escaped? They really were sorcerers, then?” I asked innocently.

“They must have been, to get out of this place. Turned themselves into birds and flew out through the windows.”

Having seen the windows, I thought nothing much bigger than a hummingbird could have got through any of them, but I kept this to myself.

“That’s what I came to talk to you about,” I said. “Lord Montezuma wanted me to see where the sorcerers had got away from, so that I could see what manner of men we are dealing with. He would want me to eliminate all the mundane explanations first, though.”

“Lord Montezuma?” He sounded surprised, and when he stared at me his eyes were pale discs in the prison’s gloom. “The Emperor sent you? But I thought you said you were the Chief Minister’s man?”

“The Emperor asked the Chief Minister to find out what happened,” I explained, “and then he asked me.”

“He asked you himself?”

“Yes.”

The man looked at his feet. His toes turned over some rushes. I wondered why he seemed to be prevaricating; after all, I could hardly be the first person to ask him these questions. What difference did it make who had sent me? To encourage him, I added, “And so when I ask you a question, it’s as if Lord Montezuma were asking it, except I personally don’t have the power to have you dismembered if you don’t tell me what I want to know. Now, are you going to answer me, or do I have to tell the Emperor you won’t cooperate?”

The majordomo let out a theatrical sigh. “All right. I suppose it can’t hurt if I run through the whole story from the beginning. These men-they’d been rounded up from all over the place, fingered by the headmen of their villages, I think, and brought in by order of the Emperor. He interrogated them personally.”