Simon Levack: The Demon of the Air

On the fourth night he was taken to the merchant’s parish temple. He was made to drink sacred wine, laced with sacred mushrooms-what we called obsidian wine. Drunk, he staggered through one last dance until midnight. Then they cut off his hair.

How you wore your hair mattered in Mexico. Along with your clothes, it was the measure of who you were and what you had done. Tangled hair, matted with sacrificial blood, was the mark of a priest. Commoners and merchants wore their hair loose. An unblooded youth, who had yet to take a captive in war, had a big tuft of hair on the back of his head, which was shaved-all but for a single lock on the right side-when he took part in his first capture; and the lastlock was taken when he took his first enemy warrior unaided. After that his hairstyle revealed his achievements in war, and a stranger could see what a man had done just by looking at his head. A tonsure meant he had never taken a captive unaided, while a mass of hair, piled on top of his head in the style we called “stone pillar,” meant he had taken at least two. Our mightiest and most feared warriors, the Shorn Ones, wore their hair in a stiff crest on one side only.

To cut off a mature man’s hair was not simply to humiliate him. It was to deny him any status at all. The moment the Bathed Slave’s hair was taken, he ceased to exist. From that moment, he was already dead; and, knowing this, most had no will of their own, and would follow the ritual of their death blindly.

Unless, perhaps, the gods had inspired them to utter a prophecy.

In the West, the souls of mothers who had died in childbirth were bearing the Sun down into the Land of the Dead.

“Time to go.” Handy tucked the uneaten portion of his food away in his lunch bag. I stared into the darkening water at our feet, watching the reflected light from the temple fires above us as it broke up and put itself back together in the wake of a canoe.

“Wonder why he did it?” I mused.

He yawned. “Maybe he thought he might as well save himself a climb.” He got up, letting his cloak fall over his knees. “Don’t know what all that crap was about a big boat, though. And what was that about Bathed Slaves going to the Land of the Dead-is that right?”

“It is. They don’t join the morning Sun’s retinue like captured warriors. Mind you,” I added thoughtfully, “we don’t tell them that, naturally. I wonder how he knew?”

“And I wonder who the old man is we were supposed to tell.”

“I don’t know.”

“And the other funny thing,” my companion reminded me, “is the way he didn’t try anything, like running away or talking his way out of it, until the last moment.”

“That’s not so strange, though. It’s the way he was treated beforehand: sacred wine, bathing, exhaustion, hunger, more sacred wine, and the costumes and the chalk whitening to make him look like death … after enough of that, I doubt if he’d have known his own name, and he’d have done anything you asked him to without question. All he’d have been able to think about was putting one foot in front of the other. Unless …” I paused.

“He had something on his mind,” Handy suggested.

“I wonder what, though.” I frowned thoughfully. “‘The big boat’-whatever it meant, it was important enough to him that he kept hold of it in spite of everything they put him through. Still, I wasn’t talking about the slave. I meant that merchant, Shining Light. The last thing the merchants’ chiefs would have wanted to see representing them in front of the Emperor is a scrawny creature like that slave he bought. Watching him jump off the pyramid will have provoked them beyond endurance.” Gestures like that were not appreciated in Mexico, where even those appointed to die were expected to play their part in our rituals, in return for the honor of a Flowery Death. It was shameful to cheat the gods. “That young man must know how much trouble he’s in now. He’ll be lucky if he can ever show his face in the city again. What made him choose that slave?”

“Well, that’s a good thing about only hiring yourself out by the day. I won’t have to worry about it in the morning.”

“I know.” I stood up with a sigh, just as the distant mournful warbling of a conch-shell trumpet signaled sunset. “I don’t really care either, I just want to know how I’m going to explain this to my master.”

How was I going to explain this to my master?

Slaves in Mexico had many rights, for we were sacred to Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, a capricious god who laughed at men and delighted in the sort of reversal of fortune that servitude represented. We could have possessions-our own money, even our own slaves. We could marry, and our children were not our masters’ chattels. We could not be ill-treated. A slave could not be sold unless hehad given his master cause to be rid of him, and even then only after a third offense. He could not be killed unless he was one of that special class, the Bathed Slaves destined to dance and die at the festivals. This was the law.

My master, however, was Lord Tlilpotonqui, He Who Is Feathered in Black. He was the Cihuacoatl, High Priest of the goddess called Snake Woman, and the Chief Priest, Chief Justice and Chief Minister of the Aztecs. Old Black Feathers was the most powerful man in the World, save only for the Emperor, and if he was not above the law, still, from where he stood, he could look it in the eye. What if he thought I should have foreseen what had happened? He would do nothing himself, of course, but he might look the other way while his sadistic monster of a steward vented his own rage on me on his master’s behalf.

As Handy had reminded me, I had seen a lot of sacrifices. I had seen many at close quarters, and I knew every step in the ritual that should have led to the death of Shining Light’s slave, because I had been a priest myself.

The temple and the Priest House had been my world from childhood, from the day my father, swollen with pride at his son’s acceptance into the harsh school called the House of Tears, had handed me over to sinister, black-robed strangers.

We called the Priest House the House of Tears with reason: I wept when my father left me, and when soot was rubbed into my face and my ears were cut to make my blood splash onto the idol, and I wept many times afterward, during the bloodlettings, the fasts, the vigils, the rote learning of hymns and the Book of Days, the beatings meted out for the slightest offense. Over the years, however, I became hardened to it: I learned to do without food and sleep and not to mind that my hair was matted and lousy and my skin caked with dried sweat and dried blood. I learned to love the priest’s world because I belonged there, and because even the fiercest of warriors, seeing my blackened, blood-streaked face coming toward him, would stand aside for me. The tears I shed on my first day were no more bitter than those I cried years later, when it was all taken away from me and I was cast roughly back out into the world.

I had many reasons not to dwell on that time, but as I approachedthe Chief Minister’s residence, I thought about the sacrifices I had seen as a priest, all the varied ways in which we had sent men, women and sometimes children to the gods, and realized that Handy had been right: I never had seen one go the way today’s had. It was not just how the man had died or his strange, prophetic-sounding words. There had been something unreal in the way he and his master had behaved throughout the day-from the slave’s appearance as a wasted, spindly-limbed freak to the merchant’s disappearance-which made me think each of them had been acting a part. But I could not see how I could have foretold what finally happened.