Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

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Then I realized that a voice I vaguely remembered hearing, crooning softly at me while my wounds were dressed and vile medicine was poured into me, had been Lily’s.

I tried to sit up then. What stopped me was not the sudden, crippling pain or the sensation of broken bones grinding against each other, but the fact that I had been strapped to a board, so tightly that I could scarcely inflate my lungs.

I flopped back on the board with a gasp. I was trapped and at the mercy of my enemies.

I had set out wanting a killer to come for me, and meaning to use the merchant’s mother to bring it about, but not like this-when I was wounded and as helpless as a newborn.

And the bad smell, I realized with a shudder, was my own.

Pain and despair made me groan aloud.

In answer came footsteps in the courtyard outside, the scraping sound of the screen being pulled aside and a tide of light that flooded the room, washing their gray pallor from the faces of the gods.

“What’s going on?” I tried to say. What came out was: “Mmmph?”

The only response was a grunt of effort as I was picked up, sleeping mat and all, and carried through the doorway. My bearers took me through the afternoon sunshine into a shady place, where they propped my board against a wall.

When the feeling that the blood inside my head was sloshing violently back and forth had begun to ease off, I looked around cautiously.

Lily’s father was sitting in the middle of the courtyard with his back to the trunk of an old fig tree, watching me balefully.

“I hope you appreciate that you’re in my place.”

“Mmmph?”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up. My hearing isn’t what it was.”

I tried again, eventually managing something that sounded more like “What-am-I-doing-here?”

“Well, they had to move you out of the room, so they could clean it. It looks as if my daughter’s looked after you all right, but I’m told you’ve left dried blood and piss and the gods know what else all over the place. And I suppose they had to get you upright as well, or else you’d have got pneumonia.”

A man and a woman crossed the courtyard, he carrying a bowl of water and she a broom. The man was Constant, the servant I had met before. Judging by his expression, he was no better disposed toward me now than he had been then.

I made a noise that must have sounded like a question.

“I don’t know,” the old man said, “but they seem to have given you a good working over. Lucky for you Lily went to the market instead of coming straight back here.”

“Lily?” I gurgled. “The market?”

“Why, yes-don’t you remember?” He looked me up and down. “Maybe you don’t. Well, what she told me was, after she’d finished her business at the ball court-where you went looking for her, remember? — she had someone to see at the market. Then she saw a fight going on near one of our pitches: you and a priest. You were on the ground and the priest had a knife, but then something distracted him and you managed to run away. You didn’t get very far.”

His casual words brought the whole thing back-the black-faced man chasing me with his cries of “Thief,” the police heading me off, the blows driven into me from all sides as I was hauled to my feet. I felt as if the ground were sinking under me and my eyes began to roll.

A look of alarm crossed the old man’s face. He snatched up the gourd beside him. “Constant! Quick, the man needs a drink!”

“What happened to the priest?” I gasped weakly.

The male servant who had been cleaning my room emerged, saw the gourd Lily’s father was proffering, and slouched sullenly toward him.

“Give him a mouthful of this, it’ll pick him up,” the old man ordered. “The priest? He ran off, apparently. My daughter said she ran up to the stall he’d been standing by, to ask him what he was shouting about, but he vanished into the crowd before she got there. By then everybody was too busy watching you being beaten up to be able to tell her where he’d gone.” He grinned pitilessly. “You don’t know how lucky you were. The police were all for hauling what was left of you straight off to the courthouse, where they’d probably have had you clubbed to death on the spot. Fortunately my daughter managed to convince them that you hadn’t actually stolen anything, so they let you off with a beating.”

Without a word the servant snatched the gourd from the old man,walked over to me and pressed its opening against my battered lips.

It was sacred wine.

I had once sworn never to touch the stuff again. On the other hand, at that time I had not been beaten unconscious, unaccountably rescued and cared for by a woman I thought of as my enemy, and then strapped to a board and stood up in the corner of someone’s courtyard like a trophy.

I shut my eyes and swallowed the drink as gratefully as a baby devouring his mother’s milk.

“Are you awake?”

The room was dark. I shared it with shadows that moved around me like coyotes prowling around a wounded deer.

“Yaotl?”

I rolled my eyes toward the voice.

The shadows were moving because someone was carrying a torch around the room. As the dark figure lifted it into a bracket in the wall, they stopped, settling down in the corners, suddenly as tame as little potbellied dogs.

“You must be hungry: you haven’t eaten for days. You must try some of this.”

It was only as she knelt beside me, tipping a tortoiseshell bowl toward my lips, that I recognized the void in my belly and realized how long it had been empty of anything except the old man’s sacred wine. The thought made my stomach heave.

Lily was feeding me maize gruel, insubstantial stuff, unseasoned except for a little salt, but as it oozed down my throat my head jerked forward out of her hand and I spewed gruel and sacred wine and thin sour juices down my chin and onto my chest.

She snatched the bowl away but kept her hand behind my head, supporting me until the retching stopped.

“It’s all right,” she cooed. “It’s all right. Relax. We’ll try some more later.”

Putting the bowl down, she gently let my head fall back, and stroked my forehead while my breathing gradually slowed.

I closed my eyes. I did not want to sleep. I wanted to get up and get out, away from the ministrations of this disquietingly kind woman, whose son and his friends were killers who wanted to minglemy blood with that of their other victims, but I was too tired. If I could just rest for a moment, I thought, I could gather my strength until the woman left me alone, and then think of a way out of here.

I must have slept a little.

Perhaps I merely dozed, but it must have looked like sleep to her.

With her hand still resting on my forehead, she was whispering: “My boy. Oh, my poor boy,” in a voice now choked with tears.

SEVEN RAIN

1

The following day, I felt somewhat better. Lily’s servants untied me from the board I had been lying on, and the woman herself brought me another bowl of gruel, which I managed to drink from unaided. She told me how she had had me brought to her house, about the doctor who had attended me twice after I had arrived, and how many days had passed since then. I had arrived on Four Vulture; I had been unconscious or delirious or too weak to speak for a whole day; and today was Seven Rain. Finally she helped me to stagger out into the courtyard, where a mat had been placed for me.

I watched her pacing nervously back and forth in front of me, the hem of her skirt flaring about her ankles as she turned. For a while neither of us spoke, as though each was waiting for the other to break the silence. Finally, I nerved myself to ask the question that had been preying on my mind.

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