Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“I’ve got to kill him!” The voice behind was almost shrill. “Can’t you see what’s happening? We can’t deal with him as well! Get rid of him now! What else can we do?”

The youth was on his feet again. His face was bloody from my attack and his eyes were wide and wild and he had the paddle in his hand, raised much too high above the water.

“We can do this!” he shouted.

With my hair gripped in Curling Mist’s fist I had no chance of dodging the blow. I could only watch as the flat of the paddle’s blade swung in toward me, to smash into the side of my head.

After the boy hit me with the paddle I had no idea where I was or how I had got there. I could not hear anything over the roaring in my ears and I could not open my eyes. I tasted blood: it filled my nose and mouth and stopped my breathing. My scalp seemed to be on fire and someone was battering the side of my head with a flint axe and my bowels were churning.

I panicked. My arms and legs hit out and thrashed madly. One of my knuckles struck the wooden side of the canoe, yielding a jolt of acute agony that I noticed even over the pain in my head and my guts. The flat of my hand found the same surface again and felt its way to the top and clutched it spasmodically.

Clinging to the canoe’s side and hauling one-handed got me,somehow, onto my knees. My other hand batted at my face and came away wet. It rubbed some of the blood away from my eyes and out of my eyelashes, where it was fast congealing. I coughed and choked. I opened an eye, too briefly to see anything. I thought I heard someone shouting.

I tried to stand then, too quickly, because the world was rocking from side to side, and when I put an arm out to grab something to steady myself there was nothing there. Without uttering a sound, I toppled out of the violently pitching canoe into the freezing waters of the lake.

It was like falling through a sheet of ice, so cold I could not feel how cold it was, and as dark as a cave. I could not think. I could not move. My body was trying to swim, seemingly without any impulse from me, but all I could do was twist about, as helpless as a sick fish. For a horrible moment I thought some water monster had got me; then I found my cloak had wrapped itself around me and pinned my arms to my side.

I had another moment of unthinking panic while my arms strained against the heavy, wet cloth and my legs kicked uselessly. Then the sodden fibers of my cheap cloak finally gave way and I was able to move my arms.

With the last of my strength, I struck upward. The tattered remains of my cloak caught around my ankles and I kicked them angrily away. I looked up, opening my eyes for the first time in the cold fresh water.

I could not see the surface. A large dark shape loomed above me. Just as I realized what it was my head hit something hard.

I had come up under a boat.

I pushed against the rough, pitted wood with both hands, desperate to be free of it before the dizziness that was starting to come over me became too much and I forgot which way was up. I felt movement through my palms: the whole great mass stirring sluggishly and little tremors shooting through it, as if the vessel above me were full of people running from side to side. I was half drowned, I thought, and must be hallucinating: the canoe had not seemed so large.

Then the shadow over my head was gone, and I was on the surface, gulping air in great anguished whooping gasps.

At first I could hear nothing except my own breathing. I trod water,while I looked around me for the shore. I had to make for it as fast as I could, but my strength was almost gone and the cold was creeping deep into my bones, bringing with it a strange lethargy.

I became dimly aware that there was some sort of commotion going on. I heard shouts of anger or alarm. With my ears still full of water I could not make out any words and I was not listening anyway, but then, for all my growing indifference, came something that made me look up.

“Yaotl!” The voice was still indistinct but I could not mistake my own name. “Nimble! Where’s Yaotl?”

I peered up the boat’s side, listening to the shouting and the sounds of running feet.

A face appeared above me.

The youth and I stared at each other, both too astounded to speak or move. I saw streaks of blood on his cheeks and neck. It had not had time to dry since I had hit him.

“Yaotl!” the voice cried again.

The face vanished without a sound.

I swam for my life.

The shore here was man-made, the edge of a chinampa plot held together with stakes and willows. There was no easy, shallow beach for me to flop onto like a stranded fish and crawl up. On the other hand there were plenty of tangled willow roots for my numb, slippery fingers to cling to as I hauled my protesting body onto relatively dry land.

I had no idea whether anyone had followed me from the boat. I had not heard anyone, but I did not care. I was too exhausted to do anything except collapse, face upward, in the middle of a muddy field.

The Sun had set. The sky was darkening, turning a deep blue, and the willow branches overhead were dark jagged shadows, shot through with stars that were steady bright points in the thin, clear winter air.

If I stayed here I might freeze to death, I thought dreamily, but I could just lie still for a moment, listening to the faint rustling of the bare branches as they swayed gently above me.

I closed my eyes.

They snapped open again.

Something was moving through the branches.

I peered straight up, looking for the movement again, wondering whether I had fancied it. Then I both saw and heard it: a large bird, its wings beating madly as it took off from a bough just above me, seemed to dither in midair and dropped heavily onto a lower limb. A little shower of broken twigs fell around me, followed by a couple of large feathers drifting downward.

The bird perched, swaying uncertainly back and forth. Something about its brief, awkward flight made me think it was unused to being airborne.

I tried to get up for a closer look. I slipped in the mud under me, landing hard on my backside, and swore.

The bird took flight. It exploded into the air, showering me again with debris from the trees as it crashed through the branches around it, and streaked off into the night, cawing loudly, and then there was nothing left but a few scattered feathers and the sound of its raucous voice over the water.

I do not know how long I stood there, staring after it. It was long enough for the Moon to come up because, when I picked up one of the long, stiff feathers and examined it, I noted how it glistened in the silver light, and how deep was its red color.

I was trembling by then, but not from the cold. It was a natural reaction, I told myself, even for one who had been a priest, when confronted with a message from the gods: for the bird had to have been an omen.

I had not mistaken its cries as it had flown away. I had heard them before, in the moments before the boy had hit me with the paddle. Now I knew them for words. But what kind of bird could utter human speech?

“Save us!” it had cawed, over and over again. “Save us! Save us! Save us!”

I had a long walk home from the chinampa plot. I staggered and sloshed my way across one waterlogged field after another, scrambling in and out of the icy ditches between them where they were too wide to jump, unsure whether I was heading the right way or just going around in circles.

When I reached my master’s house I was exhausted, cold, wet, hungry, filthy, in pain and furious. I had had long enough to think about what had happened to me to ask myself what it meant, and to come up with the only possible answer. I stamped up the steps toward my master’s private apartments, intending, if I had to, to burst in on him there, because by now I was too enraged to care what he might say or do to me.