Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“I found out,” I whispered, “when she told me about the child.”

She gasped. “You had …?”

“No,” I replied, a little testily. “At least … Lily, I’d been seeing her for months, but I thought we’d been too careful. I suppose it could have been mine, but why should it? Why not Young Warrior’s or anybody else’s? Why did she have to pick on me?”

I had long ago decided not to dwell upon the possibility that I might have fathered a child. I had suppressed all thought of him or her, banishing the notion from my mind as I had once effectively banished the unhappy pleasure girl from my life. Only at unguarded moments, or in my dreams, did the thought of my son or daughter sometimes come back to haunt me: a charge that was never proved, never dropped, and to which I had no answer.

“I laughed at her when she told me, but she just said it had been put in her womb by the Smoking Mirror, and so it didn’t matter who the father was. If she went to the Head Priest and said it was me, he’d believe her.”

I remembered how my jaw had dropped when Maize Flower had made her announcement, and how quickly I had turned over possibilities, calculations and plans in my mind, grasping the danger I was in long before she threatened me with it.

“I didn’t think she’d go to the priests. After all, she’d be in almost as much trouble as I would. But I didn’t know! I was trying to reason with her, and then I tried to buy her off. I offered her ten cloaks, which was more than I had and twice what a husband would’ve given her on her wedding day. Then she started getting hysterical. I couldn’t really make out what she was saying through the tears, but there was a lot of nonsense about trust and love and men and women being stronger than the gods. Stronger than the gods! That’s a good one to remember next time you hear that the lake’s flooded and swept a score of houses away.”

Maize Flower had kept lunging toward me, trying to grasp the hem of my cloak, and I had kept backing away, turning my face away from hers as if afraid she was going to bite me. Then, suddenly, she had seemed to give up, and had slumped, sobbing, in a corner.

“Why don’t you just go?” she had cried.

“Maize Flower …” I had begun, awkwardly stretching a hand toward her, only to have it knocked blindly away.

“Save your breath! What do I need you for anyway? It’s not evenas if it’s your child, you pathetic little fart! Do you think I’d risk the real father’s life by going to the priests? Just get out! I don’t want to see you again!”

Lily said: “That must have been hard to take.”

“Do you think so? Just then I think I felt more relieved than anything else. It did hurt,” I conceded, “but that came much later. At the time I just got out as fast as I could, with the insults ringing in my ears.

“I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying-I think by then a lot of it was in her native language-but there was one phrase I do remember, because it was so odd. It was something like ‘Just as good as you!’ Not ‘better.’ This other man, whoever he was, was definitely ‘just as good.’”

“And you never saw her again?”

“No. But I didn’t see much of Young Warrior either. He vanished soon afterward.

“Before he did, though, he came to see me. He didn’t say much. He just came up to me-I remember this clearly, it was in the middle of a fast, and I was sitting over my one bowl of maize porridge for that day-looked me in the eye and said: ‘You know, don’t you?’

“I had a mouthful of porridge and couldn’t speak.

“‘Don’t think you’ve seen the last of me, you peasant. It may take a while, but we’ll pay you back!’ he said, and then he kicked my bowl of porridge clean across the room, spilling the lot, and walked off.”

“You think he knew about you and Maize Flower?”

“More to the point, he knew I knew about him. It must have been him, mustn’t it? Who else was just as good as I was-no better, no worse? Who else but the man who shared my birthday?

“He must have run away soon afterward. And I never found out what happened to Maize Flower, but she was gone next time I went to the market. Perhaps they went off together. At the time, I hoped they had-I thought it must mean the child was Young Warrior’s and not mine, after all.

“It wasn’t long after that when I left the House of Tears myself-but you know about that. It never occurred to me at the time, but it must have been one of Young Warrior’s noble friends that got me slung out!”

“What will you do now?” Lily asked.

By the time I got to the end of my tale she had relaxed. She fetched food and water for me and knelt in the corner of the room, with her skirt folded under her knees, watching me through red puffy eyes while I nibbled at the edges of a tortilla.

“I don’t know. Obviously I can’t go back to my master, and I can’t very well stay here, can I?”

She lowered her eyes but said nothing.

I sighed. “I wasn’t talking about what happened between us last night. I just meant that Curling Mist and Nimble obviously know where I am now. They’ve attacked me twice. It’s only a matter of time before they come after me again.”

“The boy knows, yes,” she conceded. “I’m not sure about his father.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand how that can be. Anything you told Nimble would get straight back to Curling Mist, surely?”

“I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “Look, this is what happened. After I saw Nimble at the ball court, on Four Vulture, the day you were attacked and brought here, I went to the marketplace. I’d left a young cousin of ours in charge of one of our pitches and I wanted to make sure everything was all right. You spoke to him, I think.”

“The boy selling feathers? Yes, I did.”

“Nimble caught up with me there after the game ended. He was quite flustered. He said he’d seen you at the ball court, and that you were looking for me. He wanted me to be sure to inform him if I saw you. As if I needed telling!”

I smiled grimly. “And you’ve been faithfully reporting on me ever since.” Bitterness welled up in me then, forcing me to add: “I suppose you went to him this morning, didn’t you, and told him all about last night? Was that what you had in mind-getting me to whisper my secrets in your ear on the sleeping mat so you could run straight to that boy with them?”

“No!” She recoiled as if I had just struck her. “No, it wasn’t like that! It was …” She lowered her voice. “You know what it was.”

“I know what it sounded like! I should have known better, shouldn’t I?”

“How dare you!” She was so angry she was spitting. “What doyou think I am? Do you think I’d give myself to any serf or slave just to hear the filthy details of some squalid fling with a pleasure girl in the marketplace?”

I said nothing for a moment. I did not know whether I dared believe her, but then I thought that it hardly mattered anyway, since there was no question of my staying here. My own anger failed in the face of hers. After everything that had happened to me I had little enough left of pride, and what there was was hardly worth fighting over.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I just thought … it’s been so long, you see …” I sighed wearily. “You were telling me about the boy and his father.”

She frowned and bit her lower lip. “There’s something going on between them. I don’t know what it is, but it was the last thing Nimble said to me. He told me to watch out. He said he never meant for anyone to get hurt, but he didn’t think he knew how to stop it any more.”

And just a little while before, in the ball court, the youth had said much the same thing to me: how he had not thought his father would go so far as to have Shining Light’s Bathed Slave killed on the pyramid, and how he had not known of the body in the canal. At the time I had dismissed his words out of hand; but he had quarreled with his father over me in the marketplace, and there had been that strange incident on the lake as well, when he had seen me in the water and said nothing.