Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

Handy took a step backward, repelled by her sheer hostility. “What’s going on here, Yaotl?”

I shot a nervous glance at the heap of ash down the hill behind us.Was it my imagination, or had something disturbed it? The plume I had seen earlier had become a large black cloud that hid the ruin itself. My stomach lurched as I realized there was no sign of either of the boys.

I turned back to the old woman. “Who lived in that house?”

The leather mask stayed fixed in place. Only her eyes responded to my question. They blinked once.

She hesitated for what seemed like ages before saying, slowly and quietly but distinctly, “I can’t remember.”

Handy and I stared at each other. We both opened our mouths to speak at the same time, but shut them again when we heard a sharp, shrill cry from the hillside below us.

“Father!”

Handy got there first, as might have been expected, racing across the fields while I was still trying to work out where Snake’s cry had come from.

By the time I caught him up the three of them were standing in the middle of the burned-out house. The two boys looked safe and healthy, apart from being coated from head to foot in dark gray ash. Snake was grinning and his older brother was scowling. Their father stood between them. His face had changed from an anxious parent’s to that of a judge trying to arbitrate a particularly intractable dispute.

“I found it!” Snake was saying.

“But you wouldn’t have if I hadn’t pushed you into that heap of ash!” his brother retorted indignantly.

“What have they found?” I asked.

Handy handed it over without speaking. I hefted it in my palm. It was surprisingly light and burned almost black but there was no mistaking it.

It was the lower jaw of a human.

“No wonder they never got those squashes in,” I remarked.

“Should we look for the rest?” Snake asked.

His father looked dubious, but his brother was already rooting around in the ash and rubble after a souvenir of his own. Before either of us could restrain him he had let out a triumphant whoop and was tugging enthusiastically at another blackened fragment. This one was a collarbone.

“Handy …”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t like this either, but there’s no stopping them now!”

“Why hasn’t someone picked up the bones?” I asked. I would have expected the dead man or woman’s family to have had the remains cremated or at least put in ajar and buried nearby. To see them casually tossed about disturbed me. A warrior killed or taken in battle could expect his grinning, fleshless skull to molder on a skull-rack and his thighbones to end up on show in his captor’s house, swelling his glory, but someone who had died in a stupid accident such as a house fire deserved gentler treatment.

Assuming it had been an accident.

“This happened a while ago,” I added. “Hasn’t anyone been here since?”

“Perhaps there isn’t anybody-maybe the dead man had no family.”

“Or maybe his family didn’t dare come looking for his remains.”

The other man was not paying me much attention, however. He was watching with a mixture of pride and exasperation as his boys turned their quarrel into a race to see who could gather up the most human fragments in the shortest time. “Look at those two! If I could get them to work that hard in the fields we’d never be hungry again!”

Flakes of ash and clouds of soot billowed around us as Buck and Snake worked. By some unspoken agreement, whenever either of them found a bit he dropped it on his own heap beside the ruins of the house. I wondered how they were planning to judge the winner: were they going to count the bones or weigh them?

I stepped across to Snake’s heap and decorously placed the jawboneon it. I gave the heap a second glance as I straightened up. Something did not look right. I bent down again and extracted a bone.

“Snake.”

He came over, his intelligent face turned up toward mine.

“Do you know what this is?”

“It looks like a thigh,” he said accurately.

“Where did you find it?”

He considered the question as gravely as an old gardener being asked to pick out the best spot to plant dahlias in. “Over there,” he said eventually.

The outline of the house could just be made out beneath the ashes. The place he indicated was just outside it. Judging by the fragments of pottery and other detritus that could still be seen there, it must have been the household’s rubbish heap.

As I went to examine it his father joined me. “What’s the matter?”

“Take a look at this.” Handing him the thigh bone Snake had found, I knelt down and began raking through the ashes.

“It doesn’t look as badly burned as the others.”

“No,” I agreed. My fingers closed around something hard and jagged. “Nor does this,” I added as I pulled it free and stood up.

“Hey,” Buck protested, “that’s not fair! I might have found that!”

“Shut up,” his father snapped.

“That’s another jawbone, isn’t it?” observed Snake. “How come it’s so much smaller than the first one I found?”

“Because it’s a child’s,” I told him, “and so is that thighbone your father’s holding. I think it might be a good idea if we all had another look at the little collections you two have made, don’t you? Let’s see exactly what you’ve got.”

We sorted the bones out. The process of turning their heaps into skeletons enthralled the boys far more than their contest had, and in no time we had assembled three incomplete specimens.

“This must be a tibia, so it goes here …” Snake was saying, placing the bone as precisely as a feather-worker gluing a plume onto a ceremonial shield. “Father, have you noticed both the small skulls are broken?”

His father stood next to me. “What do you make of all this?”

I looked at the bones. Two of the reconstructed skeletons werenoticeably smaller than the third. “A man or woman and two children. What’s odd is that the adult’s bones look more badly burned than the children’s. And your son’s right-his skull, her skull’s in one piece and theirs aren’t. Why do you suppose that is?”

“I don’t know. I wonder how the place got set on fire. It must have been pretty quick, to get all three of them. A spark from the hearth catching the thatch, maybe?”

“Maybe.” I began pacing around the perimeter of the demolished house. What had been the interior had been churned and trampled by boys looking for bones, but some of the soil and ash outside was relatively untouched, except at the back around the rubbish heap. I scanned the ground around my feet, hoping it still held some clue to what had happened, although I had no idea what I was looking for until I found it.

“I suppose the roof would have caved in,” Handy was saying, “and maybe it caught them all unawares, but that still doesn’t explain why the children’s bones are almost white.”

There was something half buried in the earth, near where the doorway would have been: a flash of bright color among the grays, blacks and browns around me. I dropped on one knee to get a closer look.

“And then again, where … Yaotl? What have you found?”

I scraped the ash off the thing and lifted it carefully, holding it between finger and thumb as if it were a venomous insect. It was made of leather, dyed yellow, slightly charred at one end and badly frayed at the other, and large; oversized, in fact.

I showed it to Handy. “A sandal strap.”

“That’s funny,” he said. “I doubt if many people from around here own a pair of sandals. It doesn’t tell us what happened, though.”