Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

Now I had another confrontation in mind, one which might prove as dangerous as the one I had just survived. I was going to look for my elder brother, to challenge him with his complicity in thekillings in Coyoacan, and demand to know just what it was about the Chief Minister and the sorcerers that he knew but had held back from me.

I dared not go near my brother’s quarters at the palace, for fear of being seen by my master or his servants. The only other option was to come home.

I watched an old woman emerge from the yard to empty a clay pot briskly into the canal. She had hair the color of ash, skin like old paper and arms and legs so thin they looked as if a child could snap them. Clad in an old blue skirt and blouse and limping on swollen joints, she looked frail and pitiable, although in reality she was neither.

She shot a curious glance at me before turning back into the house but showed no sign of knowing who I was.

“Mother?”

She was almost inside the yard before she stopped to glance over her shoulder.

“What do you want?” She might have been talking to a stranger, and an unwelcome one at that.

“You know who I am.” I started toward her. She half turned in my direction but took another step into the yard.

“Do I?” she replied coldly. “I don’t know. You look a bit like my youngest son, Yaotl the drunkard, but you can’t be him. He’s a slave in the Chief Minister’s household.” She spat the word “slave” at me as though a fly had landed on her tongue, but made no move to stop me as I walked toward the entrance to the house.

Halting nervously on the threshold, I asked her where my father was.

“Chapultepec,” she informed me grudgingly, “along with your brothers-except Lion, of course. They were called up to work on the aqueduct-good, honest toil!” This was her way of reminding me that I was exempt from being conscripted into a work gang, as any commoner might be, only because I was a slave and my labor belonged to my master. “I don’t expect them back tonight-now, isn’t that lucky for you?” she added with a sneer.

So I would not have to see my father, after all. What I had to do here was going to be fraught enough as it was, without the furious recriminations that would have been bound to accompany such ameeting. I felt a surge of relief, barely tempered by my mother’s adding: “They took the last of today’s tortillas with them in their lunch bags when they left this morning, so you needn’t think you’re going to be fed!”

“Yaotl!” My sister, Precious Jade, was making paper in the yard, using a wooden beater on strips of fig-tree bark stretched over a stone. “What are you doing here?”

“Thanks for the welcome,” I replied sullenly. “I’ve walked a long way, you know. I need a rest.”

“You smell revolting and you look as if you’ve been in a fight.” She sniffed elaborately.

I sat down facing her. “It’s a long story, Jade,” I said wearily. “I’m too tired to tell it now, though.”

My mother emerged from the house carrying a copper mirror that had hung on one of the walls since I was a baby and a bowl of rich maize gruel. The smell reminded me how thoroughly I had emptied my stomach a few hours before. “I was going to give it to the dogs,” she said, “but since you’re here you might as well eat it. I don’t suppose slaves eat very well.”

As I gobbled the porridge my sister said: “I hope that doesn’t go the same way as your last meal. Or had you given up solid food?”

“Give it a rest, Jade,” I mumbled between gulps. “I haven’t had a drink in years.” I told myself that Kindly’s gourds had not counted, because I had been sick, and of course the drink Curling Mist had forced on me had not counted either.

All the same, there was no denying that it had been real sacred wine that had passed my lips and warmed my belly. I seized on the memory of that last mouthful, the gourd jammed against my lips, the bitterness of the mushrooms underlying the sacred wine’s sour taste, and told myself that was what it was really like, and I never wanted to touch the stuff again.

I felt my stomach contract and hurriedly pushed the bowl away.

“What’s the matter?” asked my mother. “Don’t you like it?”

“Not used to home cooking,” my sister suggested. “He’s been living on delicacies from the Chief Minister’s table. Good, wholesome food makes him throw up … Why don’t you give him the mirror, Mother? Show him what he’s become!”

“Look, I’m just full, that’s all …” I heard my own voice tail off as the mirror was dangled in front of me.

The eyes, with their deep brown irises shifting from side to side, I could accept as my own, even if their lids were heavier than I remembered. It was the blue-black marks around them, the swollen and bent nose, the shapeless ears and the thought of whatever lay under my cloak that I had not dared look at which scared me.

“All right,” I breathed, “so I’m no beauty. So there was a fight. It wasn’t my fault!”

“I’m surprised you can remember anything about it,” snapped my sister.

“So how did you look, the last time Amaxtli hit you?” I retorted viciously. My brother-in-law could be as free with his fists as my sister was with her tongue.

“That’s enough!” My mother had had years of practice at putting down our arguments. “Yaotl, I hope you didn’t come here just to start a row. What do you want?”

“I need to speak to Lion.”

My mother and my sister looked at each other. My mother said, in what for her was a subdued voice: “You’re in trouble again, aren’t you? Is it that serious?”

“My life is in danger.”

“It would have to be more serious than that!” said Jade.

“Look, will you help me, or what?”

“We will send a message to him,” said my mother stiffly. “Whether he’ll come is another matter. He doesn’t love you, Yaotl.”

“I know that.”

My sister said: “In the meantime, you can clean yourself up. Have a bath. Yes, actually that’s a good idea-have a bath. It will get you out of our sight for a while!”

I looked at the dome-shaped bathhouse, at the soot stain against one wall and the hearthstones that showed where the fire was built up to heat the interior. I thought about shedding my filthy clothes, the dust of the city and the strange face I had taken on-the face of a fugitive-and exchanging them for the dark, private, steamy world of a sweat bath.

“Who’s going to make the fire up?” I asked, dubiously.

“I will,” said Jade firmly. “Don’t worry-it will be nice and hot. Trust me!”

It is always a mistake to fall asleep in a sweat bath.

I awoke from a sleep of sheer exhaustion into a nightmare: a hot, dark, airless, cramped space with something yanking my ankle as ferociously as a dog tugging at a bone or the water monster dragging a doomed sailor down to his death. I howled. I called on the gods, the Emperor and my mother to save me. I kicked out, my hands reached vainly for the smooth wall enclosing me, and I hit my head on the entrance to the bathhouse.

The afternoon sky drenched my eyes with daylight, but when I squeezed them shut I saw little sparks twinkling like stars.

“What’s up with him?” demanded the voice I had come to hear and had been dreading.

“You probably woke him up,” Jade replied.

“Maybe he was having a nightmare,” my mother suggested.

“I hope not,” said Lion sourly. “I’d have hated to interrupt … Are you with us yet, you lazy toad?”

I sat up. The yard spun around me. I shook my head to clear it and wished I had not as my ears started to ring.

“I was having a bath,” I said unnecessarily. I stared at my brother. There was something wrong with his appearance. I closed my eyes, thinking in my befuddled state that I might be imagining things, but when I opened them again he was still there and still looked the same.