Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

The knife twitched.

“Isn’t old Black Feathers one of your best customers? What’s he going to say when he learns you’ve made off with his slave?”

From behind me a thick voice said: “I told you, this is too dangerous. We should do him here.” I thought it sounded more distinct than before, as if the effort of talking like a priest was becoming hard to maintain.

I tried to shift my weight forward a little so that I could throw myself at the boy if either he or his father made a move, even though I knew the knife would be deep in my flesh before I could stir a muscle.

The youth turned to look at me and let his eyes linger on my face, as if he were looking for something there.

“No,” he said. His voice sounded too old for his years. “We mustn’t.”

I felt the other man’s tension through the metal pressed to my skin. I recognized fear or suppressed anger or a mixture of both and wondered how long I had before he got desperate enough to use the knife. “We’re taking enough chances with him as it is. The longer we let him live the riskier it gets. I should have killed him beside the canal!”

“But-”

“But nothing!” The strain had come out into his voice now, which was suddenly high pitched, almost strangled. “Who do you think I’m doing all this for, anyway? If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’tbe on this boat at all!” The cold pricking at my neck vanished and the knife blade appeared at the corner of my eye as he waved it in the youth’s direction. I started to turn my head, to flex the muscles in my arms and legs ready to spring. “Don’t argue with me! We kill him when I say so!”

The glittering metal swung fully into my sight. I saw shock and alarm in the boy’s eyes, and realized too late that the knife was arcing toward my throat.

A strong hand seized my hair and yanked my head backward, stretching my neck like a sacrificial quail’s.

“No!” The young man almost screamed, dropping his pole as he threw himself toward me. “Please! You mustn’t! Not until we’ve asked him-we’ve got to know!”

He was too slow. His fingers barely brushed Curling Mist’s arm before the blade struck my taut skin.

It stayed there, quite still, for a moment that seemed to stretch into days. I was distantly aware of a stinging sensation and the warm, wet feeling of blood running from a shallow cut down the front of my neck. Much closer to me seemed the youth’s wide-open, imploring eyes, just a hand’s breadth from my face.

“Please,” he begged in a whisper.

The knife wavered a little as the hand holding it relaxed.

“You really want me to spare him?”

“Yes … at least for now.”

“At least for now.” The man behind me slipped once more into his slurring parody of a priest’s voice. “All right. You win. He can live until he’s told us what you want to know. Then we’ll kill him.”

At Copolco we turned south to pass along the western edge of the island of Mexico. The boy swapped his pole for a paddle and put a little distance between us and the shore. Whether this was to make it easier for him to avoid running aground or harder for me to escape I did not know, but both he and his companion seemed to relax a little. The knife returned to the side of my neck.

I had not tried to start another conversation. Nearly having my throat cut had made the danger I was in all too real, and I held my tongue for fear of provoking Curling Mist again. I suspected that if he and his son renewed their argument over me, the boy might not win it so easily the second time. Still, as the land receded, I felt I could risk a glance over my shoulder.

The Sun lay low over the mountains, throwing the far shore of the lake into shadow. The water’s surface was calm, the bulk of the island of Mexico and the dyke beyond it sheltering it from the winds that sometimes stirred up the great salt lake to the east. Canoes dotted it, although none was close enough to be worth calling out to.

Ahead of us, like a long low wall barring our way, was the causeway connecting Mexico with the small city of Tlacopan on the western shore of the lake. By the time we got there it would be thronging with traders, day laborers and artisans heading home for the night to their towns and villages on the mainland. Every so often they would stop the traffic to open the wooden bridges that pierced the causeway at intervals in order to let boats pass from one part of the lake to another. While the bridges were closed a mass of canoes would build up around them, drifting aimlessly about like reeds scattered over the water while they waited for them to open again. If we found ourselves in the middle of such a crowd, I thought hopefully, then anything might happen.

The nearer shore was all willows, sedges and rushes, with here and there a wooden landing stage or a little adobe house whose whitewashed walls glowed pink in the light of the setting Sun. Once or twice the flat summit of a pyramid appeared above the tops of the willows, with smoke drifting lazily from the temple that crowned it. The greatest city in the World lay just behind this quiet green verge, but here there was no one to be seen.

I heard a faint splash as the paddle was dipped into the water, and my view of the shoreline shifted abruptly as we turned toward it. With a sudden feeling of dread I realized we would not, after all, be crossing the causeway.

In an effort to see where we were going I twisted my head around too quickly and was rewarded with a sharp stinging at the side of my neck as the man behind me reminded me of the knife. He uttered a low, wordless growl as I turned hastily to face the youth again. The boy’s face had suddenly turned a little paler than before, and I saw strain in his narrow eyes and tightly compressed lips.

We were entering a little sheltered cove-probably nothing more than a gap between plots of reclaimed land. There was no one else about-nor would there be by now, I thought, with dusk falling-but we did not quite have the cove to ourselves. There was another boat here, tucked away among the sedges, although I caught only the briefest glimpse of it.

We must be close to our destination, I realized, and if I was going to get away now was the time to do something about it.

“Is this it? Have we arrived yet?” The only answer I got was a tense silence, broken only by the sound of water lapping against the side of the boat.

The boy stood up in the stern, with his paddle poised a hand or two above the water, but he did not dip it in. He was staring at something behind my head.

His lips moved but for a moment no sound came out.

From somewhere behind me, I heard a voice. It was strangely muffled and I could not make out the words, but it was surely a voice.

The man behind me turned toward it, unthinking. I felt the knife leave the side of my neck and I moved. I threw myself forward, launching myself at the boy: in the narrow space of the canoe it was the only way to go.

“Look out!” he shrieked, raising his paddle.

His father went for my hair again, but this time he was too late, because I was already moving. He seized a lock, bunching it in his fist, but my own weight tore it out by the roots. I heard it rip horribly over my own scream of pain but I was still moving. I hit the youth with my shoulder. He fell over backward and I landed on my knees on top of him, my arms flailing wildly at his face.

I must have hit the boy three or four times before his father dragged me off him. Yet again he had my hair, using it now to haul me backward onto my haunches as he bared my throat once more for the knife.

“No! No! No!” I heard Nimble’s urgent cries over my own howl of pain and the sounds from behind me, the loud splashing as of something heavy moving about in the water and that voice, clearer now but still unintelligible.