Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“Why are you dressed like that?” I asked.

He had shed the long yellow cotton mantle of the Guardian of the Waterfront for a cloak of maguey cloth that barely covered his knees. His hair fell down his back, loosely tied with a piece of cord instead of his customary white ribbons. Plain bone keepers had replaced his ornate lip-plugs and earplugs, and his face was unpainted. His feet were bare. It was my brother, but not as I had known him for years, and the moment I registered this I realized that scarcely anyone else in the city would recognize him now. I knew he must feel this keenly. Unless he was calling on the Emperor, when dressing down was obligatory, it was unthinkable for a man of my brother’s rank to shed his hard-won regalia-all the more so when he had been born a commoner.

His fingers plucked distastefully at the ragged hem of his cloak.

“I think you might tell me why, Yaotl. It seems I have to put on a disguise just to visit my fool of a younger brother, in case half the army follows me with a mind to butcher my entire family. What did you want to run away for? You realize the Chief Minister’s got men out looking for you, don’t you? They’ve even questioned me! Of course, I told them there was no point looking for you here. Yaotl hasn’t been home in years, I said. There’s no way he’d be stupid enough to go back there now, when he knows he’s a wanted man. Obviously I overestimated you!”

“Why do you think I ran away?” I replied defensively. “People kept trying to kill me!”

He cast an expert eye over my naked body. I squirmed self-consciously until my sister passed me a clean breechcloth.

“So I see,” he commented, as I tied the breechcloth with as much dignity as I could manage. “They haven’t made a very good job of it. What do you expect me to do about it?”

“You can tell me what happened at Coyoacan.”

My brother suddenly managed to look both shocked and uncomfortable, like a man who has found a hornet buzzing around under his cloak.

“What do you mean?”

“You remember what the Emperor told us, Lion. My master took extreme measures to find the sorcerers. I remember what you said as well, about the warriors he sent to Coyoacan. I thought at the time you knew more than you were telling me. But you told me to go there, so I did. I saw the house that got burned down. I saw the bodies-the children, and the woman. I found everything you wanted me find.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I wondered why you took such care to make sure I knew where to look, but didn’t want to tell me what had happened there. You wanted me to see for myself what the Chief Minister had done, but you didn’t want to tell me about it in case I started asking how you knew so much. Only I found more than you bargained for at that house: I found traces of the warriors who’d called there. I found a strap off one of their sandals-one of those big floppy things, like what you normally wear. It was badly frayed. I suppose it was wornout and came off when someone trod on it, but then you wouldn’t bother dressing up for an outing like that, would you?

“Were you one of them? Did you kill those people?”

“Yaotl!” my mother cried, appalled.

My brother said nothing. His jaw began working dangerously. His face had gone dark red with anger.

I had done it now: I had accused him and gone too far to withdraw. “Lion, since we last met, I’ve been threatened with a knife, abducted, nearly asphyxiated, beaten up and poisoned. I’ve found one body floating in a canal-all right, I know you had nothing to do with that one, but I’ve raked over the burned remains of three others, and I know it was the army that killed them. You didn’t tell me very much, but I’ve seen enough to work some of it out for myself. You are one of the Emperor’s executioners. Was it your handiwork I saw? Why, Lion? At least tell me that. I know one of the sorcerers was taken from that house. Why did his family have to die?”

My brother’s pent-up fury exploded then. He was a skilled warrior and fast, in spite of his years. He leaped toward me in a blur of speed and I felt the blow, a stinging open-handed slap to the side of my head, before I saw it coming. As I cowered under him he bellowed: “Who do you think you are, to talk to me like that? Am I going to be questioned by a slave, a drunk, a loser like you?” Then he rounded on my mother and sister. “As for you-you brought me here just to listen to this? I had to traipse halfway across the city dressed like a tramp in case the Chief Minister had me followed and all for what? So this idiot could accuse me of murder to my face?”

“Sit down!”

My brother had been trained to issue commands and had spent years in the army honing the skill, but there was something much older and deeper in the way my mother spoke. It stirred something planted in him when we had both been little boys, and he had always been the first to come meekly to order, even though he was the eldest and the biggest. He subsided now as quickly as he had flared up.

“I’ll tell you who he is,” our mother reminded him. “He’s your brother and my son. Now get away from him, and then,” she went on in a dangerous voice, “I want to hear you answer his questions.”

“Mother,” I began, but she turned on me too.

“And you, Yaotl, try and keep a civil tongue in your head!”

Lion sat, glaring at me from under heavy, sulky eyelids.

I took a deep breath and tried again.

My mother was right: I ought to choose my words carefully. Lion was one of the most respected and feared men in the city. The gaudy finery in which he and others of his rank vaunted themselves could be got only from the Emperor’s hand, for valor on the battlefield. This was why clothes and jewels were so important to us: if you saw a man like my brother in the street you would not need to ask how he came by his wealth, and you would know either to be polite to him or keep out of his way. Yet Lion had abandoned his public face to come and see me. He had done that for a reason, but I knew better than to forget what it was costing him.

“I’m sorry, Lion.” The unexpected apology lightened his expression a little. Even my mother sighed happily. “But I have to know what my master did and why. You remember what the Emperor told me to do. I’ve got to find the sorcerers now and get them to him and tell him what his Chief Minister has been up to at the same time. If I can’t do that then I’m likely to suffer a worse fate than the people in that village.”

My brother shot a brief glance at my mother, who was watching him impassively, like a judge waiting to hear a witness’s evidence.

The most extraordinary change came over his face. It went from the deep red of overripe tomatoes to the color of an uncooked sweet potato. It seemed to sag, as though all the strength had drained out of it and left the skin hanging unsupported on the bones beneath. Suddenly it felt as though we were looking, not at a famous warrior, but at a common man old before his time.

He turned his face toward the sky and shut his eyes. When he opened them to look at us again, there was something I had never expected to see: a tear running down his cheek.

“I don’t know why.” He was barely whispering. “I was never told. But until we talked to the Emperor that day, Yaotl, I thought the orders had come from him. I will eat earth for that!” He touched the ground with a fingertip automatically.

“So it’s true, then,” my mother stated grimly.

“I tried not to let them suffer! I made the men take the children outside-they never knew what happened to their mother, or she what we did to them. I didn’t have a choice, do you understand?”

For a long time none of us answered him. My sister stared resolutely at the strip of bark in front of her, although she had not touched her bark-beater since I had emerged from the bathhouse. My mother’s face might have been carved out of granite.