Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

There would be another pause.

“I didn’t see anything.”

The guard I was questioning would turn to me in triumph.

“See? He didn’t see anything either. I reckon they must have flown away, like bloody birds!”

After three attempts at this I gave up. I had found out as much as I was going to here.

Istood outside the prison, savoring the midday sunshine, which had dried up the last of the rain, the clean air and the newly swept earth under my feet.

I watched the Aztecs around me, the men and women strolling or hurrying through the street or paddling along the canal beside it. I sought out things that distinguished the passersby from the wretches in the prison. I looked at the men’s cloaks with their bright colors and bold patterns, each announcing its wearer’s rank and achievements, and at the earrings and lip-plugs sported by those entitled to them. I looked at the skirts and blouses of the women, no two alike in their rich embroidery, at the yellow ochre on their faces and at the ways they wore their hair-loose or cut short or braided, or done in the formal style that was the emblem of respectable Aztec womanhood: divided and bound at the nape of the neck to leave two ends projecting over the crown like a pair of horns. When I looked down at my own apparel-a plain, functional cloak and breechcloth, with none of the cheap brash jewelry or feather-work that slaves sometimes had to put on to suit their owners’ tastes-I felt comforted. I was among my people, and I was as good as they were, or at least I would be as soon as I could have a bath.

Something stirred the crowd. Peering between the jostling bodies, I followed the disturbance to its source near the walls of Montezuma’s palace, and caught sight of the heads of a little group of men moving purposefully toward the steps my brother and I had gone up the evening before. There was something familiar about the movement, and the bodyguards’ casual way of parting the crowd to let their master through. Then I saw a flash of yellow as the hem of his cloak brushed the lowest of the steps leading to the palace’s interior.

I glanced irresolutely in the direction of my master’s house before I made up my mind what to do. He had released me so that I could obey the Emperor’s command and visit the prison. I had a little time in hand, and there were things I had to say to my brother.

It took me a long time to persuade the sentries to let me into the quarters my brother shared with his fellow executioners, and by the time I found him, he had settled his powerful frame comfortably into a chair and was drinking chocolate.

He glared at me over the rim of his bowl. “You’ll pardon me for not offering you any. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“It’s all right,” I said lightly. “I bet you had them put pimentos in it. I hate pimentos in my chocolate. How’s the hand?”

“Fine.” Under its heavy bandages his left hand looked gratifyingly stiff and swollen. “Nothing hot piss and honey couldn’t cure. What do you want? Have you been to the prison?”

“I have.”

“What did you find out?”

“The sorcerers aren’t there anymore.”

He slapped his bowl angrily on the floor, sending a tiny dribble of expensive chocolate over the edge. “You think this is funny, don’t you?”

“No, as it happens, I don’t. I don’t find being put up as the stake in some game between the Emperor and the Chief Minister very funny at all.”

“So get Montezuma his sorcerers,” he replied unsympathetically, picking his drink up once more. “The game’ll be over then.”

“It’s not that simple. My master says he hasn’t got them. The Emperor seems to have got the right idea about that Bathed Slave who killed himself yesterday-he was one of the sorcerers. My master doesn’t deny that much, but he says it’s the merchant, his owner, who’s holding them.”

“And you believe him?”

“Not necessarily. But I’ll talk to the merchant and find out.” I watched him drinking luxuriously. If he had come across me dying of thirst I would not have put it past him to drain a gourd full of water in front of me just to add to my suffering, but then I might havedone the same to him. “There’s something I want to know first, though. Whose idea was it to give the Emperor my name?”

The cup hid my brother’s face. He said nothing.

You are spoken of most highly, the Emperor had said.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” The suspicion had planted itself in my mind while we were at Axayacatl’s palace. In the hours since then it had sprouted and put down roots. “You bastard! This is all your doing, isn’t it? You got me involved in this. Why?”

“Why did I bring you to the Emperor’s notice?” My brother drained his bowl and laid it carefully on the ground between us. “Why do you think? So that you might have a chance to make something of yourself! I told you yesterday-you can repair some of the damage, give your family something to be proud of.”

“For sure, they’ll be proud to see me flayed alive for going against my master,” I retorted bitterly, “and that’s only if the Emperor’s right and old Black Feathers really does have the sorcerers. What if he doesn’t? What’s the Emperor likely to do then?”

My brother frowned. “But your master does have them! The Emperor as good as said so.”

“Only because someone put the idea in his head. Now I wonder who that was?”

“What are you saying?” My brother gripped the sides of his chair so tightly that I heard the woven canes crack under their hide covering. Something had dislodged his mask: suddenly he was not the renowned warrior taking his ease but the boy I had known as a child, our father’s favorite son, who became the man he was because he grew up more scared of failure than death.

“I don’t understand why you’re so convinced that my master is hiding the sorcerers, and so determined that I should be the one to find them. I don’t believe this has anything to do with our family. They gave up on me years ago, Lion, and nothing I do now is going to make any difference to them. You had some other reason for wanting me brought into this. Some reason of your own.”

He picked up his chocolate bowl then, looked at it absently, saw it held only a shallow puddle of froth at the bottom, and put it down again.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll tell you what I know. I think-Imean, I heard-well, you know what the army’s like for rumors.” He was not looking at me. He seemed unsure of himself. “Montezuma told you he asked the Chief Minister to find these men when they escaped. I’m not sure exactly what your master did about it. It was all a big secret, but there were warriors involved-I heard there were warriors involved. I heard someone say he’d talked to someone who’d been handpicked for a special mission by the Chief Minister. Apparently he had to go to a village near Coyoacan.” He paused. “Coyoacan,” he repeated, as if wanting to make sure I had caught the name of the place.

“And what happened there?” I remembered another expression our Emperor had used: Extreme measures. What had that meant?

“He … he didn’t want to say.” He looked up then, and there was something in the way he stared at me, through eyes that seemed obscured, as though they had somehow withdrawn into his face, which made me think twice about asking any more questions.

Eventually he added, in what for him was a quiet voice: “All I can tell you is this. I think the Emperor’s decided the reason your master came back from that village empty-handed is that he wanted to.”

I looked into my brother’s eyes again, but could make nothing out in their darkness. He was concealing something, and if I knew him at all, you could roast him over a slow fire before he would say what it was. One thing was obvious enough, though. Whatever he had seen or heard that was haunting him so, he believed I could do something about it-even though he could not bring himself to tell me what it was.