Simon Levack: The Demon of the Air

“Just a bite, maybe. I have to get back. Can’t keep my master waiting.”

We left the merchant’s offering where it lay. I gave the pathetic pile of flesh a last look as we walked toward the marketplace, but nobody came to collect it, even though I lingered as long as I could, still wondering about those strange marks.

We sat beside the canal that bordered the marketplace and munched on our round, flat bread.

“I wasn’t told much,” I said. “Go to the merchant’s house, join the procession, make sure the sacrifice goes according to plan. My master wanted me there because I know how these things are done. I guess he owed the young man’s family a favor. Do you suppose he expected this to happen?”

“How should I know?” Handy glanced over his shoulder at a corner of the marketplace where bearers and daylaborers could be found plying for hire at daybreak. “They took me on the day before yesterday. They needed a strong pair of hands, in case the offering got frisky.” Flesh flowed under the brown skin of his arms, making me glance wistfully at the bony claws holding my food. “Not much todo in the fields, so I came here. Too many mouths to feed to be sitting around idle at home. A boy came up to me and told me I’d do.”

I had found Ocotl and Handy that morning at daybreak, waiting by the temple in Pochtlan, a parish in Tlatelolco, the northern part of the city. Ocotl sported an amber lip-plug, shell-shaped ear pendants and a netted cape, and carried a feather fan and feathered staves. He was tall for an Aztec, although it was hard to tell what he looked like beneath all his finery; and he had the cocksure manner of the young. His name meant a pine torch, or, figuratively, Shining Light, one who led an exemplary life. Handy wore what had once been his best clothes-an embroidered breechcloth with trailing ends, frayed at the edges, and a two-captive warrior’s orange cloak that had lost much of its color.

There were two servants, whose charge was a heap of fine-looking cloaks that Shining Light had brought along in case he needed them for his slave’s ransom. He needed these because his offering’s journey to the war-god’s temple was not to be a straightforward one. All the offerings due to be presented by the merchants would be conducted first to the parish temple at Coatlan, where a crowd of warrior captives would be waiting in ritual ambush.

The ambush was a curious part of the day’s proceedings, whose meaning was perhaps to teach the merchants that everything worth having had to be fought for. The warrior captives-men who were themselves due to die before sunset-would try to take the merchants’ offerings away from them, and the doomed slaves were expected to defend themselves with bird arrows. It was a real fight, fueled on both sides by sacred wine and the courage of despair, and if a warrior captive took a slave he would kill him unless the slave’s owner paid a ransom to the warrior’s captor. The ransom was always paid, since otherwise the merchant would have nothing to offer the war-god, and all his expensive preparations would go to waste.

One look at the slave himself convinced me that his owner must have little notion of the value of money. He was not an impressive sight.

He had been made to keep vigil at the temple all night and been plied with drink. His hair had gone at midnight and the fine clotheshe had been given the night before had been taken away at dawn, when his face had been washed and his skin covered with chalk to give it a deathly pallor. Now he looked twitchy and febrile, starting even at the gentle voice of the woman who attended him, his bather, as she whispered soothing words into his ear. There was not even a suggestion of the dancer he must once have been in his spindly arms and legs and even though the chalk hid the marks on his skin he had one obvious physical blemish. His ears stuck out of his head at a ludicrous angle, like wings.

I watched him closely as we took our places in the procession. He shuffled along, making no response to the chatter of the woman walking beside him, with his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

At Coatlan, he mutely accepted his bird arrow when it was pressed into his hands but made no use of it. That was not surprising: sometimes the sacred wine made the victims fight like wounded jaguars, but you never could tell what they would do. What struck me, as Handy and I led him back to his master with our ears still full of the warrior captives’ jeers, was the merchant’s indifference to losing his ransom. There had been enough cloth there to keep me for two years.

Peynal’s arrival at the head of a crowd of panting followers stopped the fight and began the victims’ journey to the foot of the Great Pyramid, where the Emperor sat before a great crowd to watch the war-god receive his due.

Our slave acted his part with the others as they ran or staggered four times around the pyramid’s base before lining up at the bottom of the steps. He watched in silence while Peynal’s bearer ran to the top, and the paper, cloth and feather image of the Fire-Serpent was brought down and burned. He said nothing as the war-god’s image was shown to the victims, and nothing as he was led to the foot of the Pyramid.

It was only on the way up that things began to go awry.

Shining Light, the victim and his bather mounted the steps side by side, with Handy and me behind them. I could not take my eyes off those absurd ears. The bather had fallen silent at last, but the merchant kept up a cheerful banter.

“Not long now. How I envy you! The Flowery Death! To dance attendance on the Sun and be reborn as a hummingbird, a butterfly!I spend my days scratching around like a turkey after corn, and when I die I will go to the Land of the Dead like every other wretched soul, but you …”

“Can’t see it, myself,” Handy mumbled. “You could count to twenty on his backbone. He looks all in to me. I thought the merchants were choosier … Look out! There he goes!”

The slave fooled us. Instead of running down the steps, and so blundering straight into us, or racing up them, where there was no escape and one of us would have caught him immediately, he broke sideways to dart across the face of the pyramid. He had gone ten paces before Handy and I were after him.

The young merchant kept climbing, seemingly enjoying himself so much that he failed to notice that his offering had escaped. The bather just stared after her charge.

“Come back here, you …!” Handy roared as he dashed after the sacrifice.

We raced along the narrow steps with a hopping gait, each foot on a different level. The gods must have been laughing. It took an agonizingly long time for our quarry to run out of space and find himself looking out over the side of the pyramid from between two of the stone banner holders that lined the stairway. I knew he was going to jump.

“Listen to me, all of you!” he cried, as though the whole vast teeming city beneath him could hear. “It’s the boat-the big boat! Look for the big boat!”

“Wait!” I said, desperately. What could I tell a man who was about to die, no matter what he or I did? I tried to make out his expression, but against the evening sky and the lake shining in the sunset he was just a shadow with large ears.

“You mustn’t jump. You’re destined for the war-god-you heard your master, you’re going to join the morning Sun …”

The Bathed Slave turned toward me then, twisting and stepping backward at the same time, so that he was poised on the edge of the steps.

“It’s a lie,” he said quietly. “Bathed Slaves go to the Land of the Dead, like everyone else.”

When he smiled his teeth showed white among the shadows of his face.

“Just tell the old man,” he said.

I dived for his feet, almost going over myself as I crashed onto the stones where he had been-but he had taken his last step and was lying, broken, far below me.