Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“Are you going to let go of my hair?” he asked, his accented voice suddenly sounding as young as his years. “It hurts.”

I gave it a malicious tug, watched him wince, and let go. “Don’t get any ideas,” I warned him. “You and I are going to talk.”

“Yes.” His tone was almost eager. “Did I hear you say you were looking for Lily?”

If he had been sullen or truculent I might have listened to him, but his treating this as a conversation annoyed me. “I’m going to ask the questions!” I snapped. “You can start by telling me what you meant by kidnapping me the other day!”

“We didn’t mean you any harm! We just wanted to talk to you!”

“What do you mean, you didn’t mean any harm? What was the knife for, then? What about the body in the canal? You didn’t mean him any harm, either?”

“Body?” Frowning, he managed to look puzzled. “What body?”

“The one we found last night, floating outside the Chief Minister’s house-with a little message asking for me to be delivered to the sender. Which I nearly was, yoked like a slave at the market. And I was lucky-there’s an old man lying dead, back at my master’s house, because of your little gesture!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I bet you don’t! Like you don’t know why the man in the water was covered in burns and cuts and bruises, the same as the poor wretch Shining Light forced to impersonate a Bathed Slave-or are you going to tell me you didn’t know about that either?”

To my surprise he made no effort to bluster. He looked at a place between his feet and mumbled: “Look, that wasn’t my idea. I’d no idea he’d go so far. I thought we could get them to talk if we just showed them the cactus spines, waved the fire under their noses …”

“Them?” I echoed. “You mean the sorcerers?” Then, remembering that, although the men around us were engrossed in the game, this was a public place, I lowered my voice. Whispering my questions made me feel uncomfortably like a conspirator. “The men who got out of the prison? Where are they?”

He raised his head again, before turning it quickly as if he were looking over his shoulder. “I don’t think I can tell you.”

“Well, if you don’t tell me, you can tell the Emperor! Have you ever been inside the prison? Do you want me to describe it to you?”

“I can’t tell you!”

“Where’s your father?”

The boy stared at me. “My father?”

“Yes, your father. Curling Mist!”

“My father?” he said again, his whisper now barely audible. Then, for no obvious reason, he started giggling.

He carried on giggling while I sat and gaped at him. He covered his mouth with his hand and giggled into it. I might have struck or shaken him but I was too shocked by his reaction to do either. He was still giggling when a sudden commotion broke out in the ball court, followed by a roar from the spectators around us.

Distracted, I jumped up to find that everyone else had done the same.

It took a few moments to find a position from where I could see past the people in the row in front, but then I saw that the players and the officiating priests were all standing about, their faces upturned and all looking equally bewildered. The ball lay in the dust in the middle of the court, inert and seemingly forgotten, as if it had served its purpose. It had gone through one of the stone rings set at the top of the wall.

A strange silence descended over the crowd. It was as if their voices had drained away as fast as the blood from their faces.

But when I turned toward him, the boy had gone. He had slithered away between the legs of the standing spectators like a water snake among rushes.

Many years ago, the defeated side would have lost much more than the game. Their captain, at least, would have been bundled up the steps of the nearest pyramid, where the last thing he saw on Earth would have been the black face of the priest who took his heart out.

I lived in more civilized times, when the losing team merely had to be hustled out of the ball court and got away as fast as possible to avoid being torn apart by a furious crowd of disappointed gamblers. Theoretically the winners had the right to pillage the losers’ clothing and possessions and the onlookers’ as well, but in practice that was the least of anybody’s worries.

There was no point running after the boy. If I was lucky, I would find him later, trampled to death by the stampeding crowd, who otherwise would sweep him along with them. At moments like this the restraint we Aztecs habitually imposed on ourselves was abandoned, replaced by the ugly ferocity that so terrified our enemies. As the only spectator with no stake in the game, I kept my place until thelast of the crowd had gone and the dust they had stirred up had begun to settle, only cringing slightly when two sandaled warriors trod on my legs in their haste to get after the losing team.

I stood up and looked into the court. The winners were still there, looking, if anything, even more bemused than their opponents had.

“Congratulations,” I called out.

One of the players-the captain, I supposed-looked up at me imploringly.

“Look, we’re really sorry. We didn’t mean it to happen.”

I had gathered up my cloak and was about to leave, but now I paused. “What are you talking about?”

“You must have lost a fortune. But it wasn’t us, not really. It was the gods-it was Tezcatlipoca.”

The dust made me sneeze. “Don’t worry about it. I didn’t-”

“And that other lot,” one of the other players added, ignoring me. “They shouldn’t have put so much topspin on the ball, in that last rally. How were we to know where it was going to end up?”

“And the ball was harder than usual.”

There was a note of genuine fear in their voices. Perhaps they were afraid of what would happen when the crowd gave up its pursuit of their opponents and came back for the men who had actually knocked the ball through the ring, but I guessed it was more than that. A god-almost certainly the Smoking Mirror-had touched their lives and probably changed them forever. I knew how they felt. He had intervened in mine enough times, seldom to the good, but I doubted that I had felt more desperate and afraid than they did.

“It was a fluke. We’re professionals, you know. We were going for a points win.”

“Come on, let’s get out of here.” The captain looked up at me again. “You can keep your clothes. You can even have your stake back, if you want.”

“I didn’t have a bet,” I replied.

“You didn’t?” He looked relieved. “Well, that’s all right, then.”

The players began climbing the steps leading out of the court, talking quietly among themselves, perhaps about how they were going to get their newly won wealth home before any of its former owners tried to steal it back from them.

I decided to ask them about Lily, on the off chance that one of them had seen her.

The captain laughed. “Are you joking? We have enough to do keeping our eyes on the ball, never mind looking at girls!”

A couple of his teammates laughed with him, but one of them-the youngest looking, a lad barely out of the House of Youth-paused on the steps and touched his lips thoughtfully with his fingers.

“There was one, though.” He glanced nervously at his captain, who was glaring at him, and added hastily: “I only noticed her because she was the only woman-she stood out in the crowd. And not one of your pleasure girls, either. Middle-aged, I thought, and really plainly dressed, like a commoner’s wife or a merchant’s.”

The breath caught in my throat. “Where is she? Which way did she go?”

The youth lowered his head unhappily before his captain’s silent reproach. “I don’t know. Last time I looked, she’d gone.”