Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“You mean the sacrifice.”

She bit her lip but said nothing.

“That’s what the parish chiefs were here about, wasn’t it?” I probed gently. “They were angry about what happened. What did they have to say?”

The woman struck the floor next to her with her open right hand, making a ringing slap. “What do you expect they said? Do you know what an honor it is to be selected to offer a Bathed Slave at the festival? A merchant spends his whole life cringing before the warriors, going about barefoot and wearing a rough old cloak instead of nice cotton and ducking out of the way of some oaf he could buy ten times over, and then for one day a year there is this chance to show we are as good as they are. For someone as young as Shining Light to be chosen, and then to show us all up the way he did-is it any wonder they were angry?” Agitation made her teeth grind together. “You know what I had to do just now? I had to listen to seven old men lecturing me on the disgrace we’ve brought on our people, and demanding to know where Shining Light is now and where he got that slave from in the first place. And I’ve had to take all that and try and defend my son and pretend I knew what he was up to, when I never did, and do it all by myself because my father’s drunk himself into a stupor again and the ungrateful wretch has run away and left me!” She ended with a deep shuddering breath and something like a sob.

“You don’t know where Shining Light got his Bathed Slave from, then?”

She gave a loud sniff before replying: “He told me he got him at the big slave market in Azcapotzalco.”

“You didn’t believe him.”

Lily looked down at where her hands lay clasped on her knees, between the folds of her skirt. “He left off buying him until very late-too late to train him properly. And when the parish chiefs wanted to inspect him, and advise Shining Light on how to presenthim, he kept fobbing them off. The truth is, I don’t know where that slave came from.” She tilted her chin up until her eyes glinted in the sunlight. A faint huskiness, a hint of pride, came into her voice. “But I will tell you this. I was with my father when he presented a Bathed Slave at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, in the first year the Emperor allowed the merchants to make an offering, and he was nothing like Shining Light’s creature. He danced up the steps ahead of us, the way the poets say they should, and he died like a warrior. I know how these things should be done!”

Her fingers unlaced and laced themselves in her lap. I watched her thigh lift and settle again under the thin material of her skirt, betraying a sudden restlessness, and wondered what feelings came with the thought of that sacrifice, so many years before. Perhaps she pictured herself as a young woman, ascending the Great Pyramid, with the sounds and smells and thrill of death around her, and ahead of her the man her father was sending to die, mounting the last few steps with a triumphant cry on his lips, shedding chalk dust from his heels as he climbed.

I had an unsettling vision of her as she must have been in the moment when her father’s slave gave up his life, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed, her eyes shining, the breath caught in her throat. I had seen enough sacrifices to know how it had been, the animal joy that no man or woman with blood in their veins could help being caught up in. It was not bloodlust but a more basic thing: the presence of death and the affirmation of life, two things that our traditions taught us could never be separated.

“I know too. I used to be a priest.”

She looked at me with renewed interest and I saw the dark color that had spread over her face and the quick pulse in her throat. I wondered whether she in turn saw me as a young man, when I had been one of the temple’s mysterious, glamorous servants, with my crown of feathers and my cheeks daubed with blood and ochre. She frowned. “But now you’re a slave-how did that happen?”

The question shocked me back to the present. I did not want to talk about this.

“My master needs to know where your son’s offering came from,” I said clumsily. “He needs to talk to Shining Light ….”

“Why?”

I opened my mouth to reply and then shut it again. What could I say, when for all I knew old Black Feathers might just then be amusing himself deciding what parts of her son’s body he would like to have severed with a dull knife? I heard myself mumbling: “He’s concerned that it went wrong. After all, he sent me to help.”

“And a lot of help you were too!” she said bitterly. “If you hadn’t let that slave get away when he did, it might have been all right …”

“There was nothing I could have done!”

“My son would have been better off hiring another escort, like that big commoner Handy,” she went on, ignoring me. “Two men like him might have been able to hold the slave.”

“I didn’t ask to be there!” I protested. “I don’t even know why I was there in the first place! Whose idea was it to send me, anyway? Did your son ask for me?”

“How should I know? I’ve told you, I had no idea what he was doing.”

“So you don’t know what dealings he had with my master?”

“Until yesterday, I wasn’t aware that he’d ever had any!”

“What about the man he placed his bets with-Curling Mist?”

My last question seemed to strike her like a blow. She leaned forward sharply as if someone had stabbed her in the stomach. She sat up again just as abruptly, but kept her eyes on her knees as she answered me in a voice that was suddenly very small: “My son doesn’t share all his … business affairs with me. Why should he?”

“But he did use him? He did put money on the ball game through him?”

I watched her shoulders shudder momentarily beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. “I don’t know. Yes-he probably did. Look, I’m tired. I had the parish chiefs here all morning, and now you come asking questions that I can’t answer.” Her eyes were no longer glistening, merely hard and defiant. “If the Chief Minister wants to talk to my son, then he had better go and look for him. But you can tell him Shining Light isn’t here. He’s gone away to die. See what your master makes of that, slave!”

Asmall canal ran alongside the merchant’s house. I lingered by it for a while, toying with the idea of hailing a canoe and so saving myself a long walk back to my master’s house in the center of Tenochtitlan. I felt tired and dispirited: I could not claim to have achieved very much here, beyond establishing that Shining Light was not at home and that his mother appeared to have less idea of where his sacrificial victim had come from than I had. I did not even know whether to believe her when she claimed her son had gone into exile. On the other hand he must have some reason for setting off on a journey on an unlucky day. I remembered now where I had heard the name Xicallanco: Montezuma had mentioned it as a place where rumors of the pale strangers had been heard. According to my brother, these men had had things like the sword and the cloth he had shown me, and at the time I had thought about how our merchants might covet them. Could Lily’s son have gone in search of such things? It seemed possible, but then how had he known of them, I wondered, and again, why had he chosen to go on One Reed?

It was quiet here. The walls around me were the color of sun-bleached bones, and for all I could tell held as much life within them. The water at my feet sparkled in the late morning sunshine. I gazed at my reflection, examining my own gaunt features, my earlobes tattered from years of offering the gods my own blood and my unkempt, thinning, graying hair, and wondered what Lily had seen when she had looked at me.