Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

My wife will know what to do.” Handy said confidently. His wife, Star, gazed at him in astonishment as he dragged the child into the house.

“I thought you went out to have an omen interpreted. Who’s this? And how did you get yourselves into such a state?”

Her husband looked at his own legs as if he had not noticed they were coated in muck from the knees down. “We found this kid skulking around the village. He tried to steal our lunch!” He gave her a severely edited account of the day’s activities, which she listened to with mounting incredulity.

“So you failed to find the sorcerer and you let those boys get themselves covered in grime and soot playing with bones?” she said mildly, when he had finished.

“Yes,” Handy admitted.

“Well, you know where the brushes are. If you think I’m cleaning up after you in the morning, you’re mistaken. Now, this child …”

Handy started explaining his idea to her. “You remember the Bathed Slave who ran away and then jumped off the edge of the Great Pyramid? This is his son-I’m sure it is. What do you think the merchants would give to find out where he really came from?”

The subject of this discussion squatted in the middle of the room where Handy had put him, with his thumb in his mouth, listening wordlessly while we reminded each other how his father had died. He shivered slightly, although it was not a cold day.

“The merchants aren’t going to find out anything from this child if he starves to death,” Star said crisply. “I don’t suppose any of you has any idea when he last ate?”

Her husband and I looked at each other self-consciously. “He didn’t tell us he was hungry,” I protested.

She gave me a look that would have wilted a cactus. “Why do you think he was after your lunch, then? And it’s hardly surprising if he hasn’t told you anything-he’s obviously scared out of his wits.” She pulled herself to her feet, ignoring her husband’s belated offer to help her up, and extended a hand to the child. “Come along. There are fresh tortillas and honeyed tamales-do you like tamales? Of course you do, everyone does. Now, that’s better …”

Casting a reproachful glance at us over her shoulder, she led the child out of the room, holding him by the hand that she had somehow coaxed out of his mouth. She took the still unopened lunch bag with her.

Buck and Snake were not the sort of lads to squat at their father’s feet when the food had just been taken out of the room. They scampered hastily after their mother and the boy. A moment later we heard her scolding them for leaving muddy footprints in the courtyard.

“Handy,” I began.

“Well, the food’s gone,” he said mournfully, “but I think I can find us something to drink. Wait here.”

“We need to talk,” I told his departing back.

He returned a moment later with two bowls. They had water in them, although I caught myself wishing it was something else.

The commoner drained his bowl at once, smacking his lips appreciatively. “I needed that! Now, you were saying we needed to talk?”

“About that child. I don’t think you should be so eager to go running to the merchants as soon as you’ve heard his life story. And I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone where you found him.”

He rocked back on his heels, frowning. “I just thought the chief merchants, or maybe your master, since he had something to do with Shining Light …”

I put my bowl down deliberately so as not to smash it on the floor in frustration. “Don’t you realize what happened in that village?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” he replied coolly. “All I know is three people got killed in a fire, and if we’d been there at the wrong time it might have been seven!”

“They weren’t killed in the fire-at least, not all of them. Look: the grown-up’s bones were burned worse than the children’s, and we found the children outside the house. So she died indoors, with the place blazing all around her. Her children were in the rubbish heap with their heads broken. They must have been killed first and left outside when the house was burned.”

“‘She?’ How do you know it was a woman?”

“I’m guessing, but we know what became of Crocodile, and he wasn’t there. So I suppose the three we found today were his wife and children. That’s what the Chief Minister did-when the sorcerers got out of the prison he had the army go after their families. And judging by that sandal strap I found he wanted a thorough job done, because he handpicked the very best. Now, do you really want to go proclaiming this in the streets?”

“No, I don’t!” Handy said in a hurt voice. “I just thought the boy-”

“The boy whose father just happens to have been Shining Light’s Bathed Slave. Isn’t that a bit of a coincidence-having him turn up while we’re picking over the remains of a massacre? Why do you suppose that happened?”

Handy stared sulkily into the bottom of his bowl and waited for me to answer my own question.

“We found the boy there because it was his own house we were turning over. He was hanging around the ruins because he had nowhere else to go. If you’re right about Shining Light’s Bathed Slave, and he was the boy’s father, then that would mean …”

I stopped as I pondered exactly what it would mean.

If Handy was right about who the boy’s father was, then it was indeed the Bathed Slave the warriors had been after. If my brother was right about Lord Feathered in Black having sent men to Coyocacan, then that put my master’s role in all this beyond question. The house had been visited by the men he had sent to find the Bathed Slave. Obviously they had not found him, but they had not been content togo away empty-handed. They had killed three members of his family and burned his house to the ground, and they had done it all on my master’s orders.

No grown-up Aztec male was a stranger to killing. We killed enemy warriors, or better still dragged them to the tops of our pyramids and offered them to the gods, knowing that they would do the same to us if they could, and believing in the reward the gods had in store for them: to escort the Sun on his journey through the morning sky and after four years to be reborn as hummingbirds or butterflies. When the gods demanded it we even killed women and children, but what we rarely did was to kill wantonly. Human lives were too precious for that; or else why would the gods have valued them so?

The slaughter of ordinary peasants, the subjects of a town so close to Mexico itself, seemed to me an act so audacious, so desperate, so utterly lawless that the man who could order it must be capable of anything. At that moment I did not much care why he had done it. All I could think about was what it meant for me-for his slave, the man most at his mercy.

Who, I asked myself, could protect me from a man like that, once he decided I had let him down once too often, and the trouble he would put himself to by explaining my death away was less than the trouble of keeping me alive?

Only the Emperor himself, I knew, and I also knew that Montezuma would not trouble himself for a moment about the life of a slave unless I gave him what he wanted: the sorcerers. But all I could offer him now was a tongue-tied boy who, from what I had seen and heard, could not even tell us his own name.

Night had fallen by the time I left. The boy was still with Star. He had eaten something but for all our coaxing had still not said a word. Handy urged me to stay, but I knew I had to get back to my master’s house. I was going to have a difficult enough time as it was, explaining where I had been.

I was going to have to explain it to Lion, too. My brother had sent me to Coyoacan, and as I walked slowly home, treading carefully to avoid straying into the dark waters of the canal beside me, I rehearsed how I was going to tell him what we had found.