Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

At last I made myself say: “I think you’d better tell it from the beginning, Lion.”

“I didn’t want to be there,” my brother mumbled. “It’s not exactly soldiering, is it? Stringing up women and bashing their children’s brains out, like you’d swing a fish you’d caught against a rock to stop it flopping about.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw my sister wince.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked.

“Don’t be stupid! We were under orders. Anyway, the Constables-we’re the Emperor’s hard men, aren’t we? What was it to us, any more than cracking the heads of drunks in front of the palace?”

I chose to ignore that. “You thought the orders came from the Emperor?”

“Who else? I didn’t hear him issue them, but …” My brother sighed heavily. “Look, I’ll tell you how it was. We weren’t told anything about these men. We weren’t even told their names. We just had to find the village headman and bring in the man he took us to.

“We went into Coyoacan in force-a full squad of twenty men, a lot just to make an arrest. We met up with the headman and his party outside the village well before daybreak.”

“What did they tell you?” I asked.

“They didn’t tell us anything at all! But you pick up things. I heard the word ‘sorcerer’ whispered a couple of times, when they thought we weren’t listening. When I heard that, I thought we were wasting our time. I assumed any sorcerer worth his salt would have known we were coming for him and would have vanished like the mist before we got there. He wouldn’t need to be a sorcerer, for that matter-you try moving a squad of fully armed warriors through a village in complete darkness without making a noise. They must have heard us on the other side of the lake.

“In the event, though, we picked him up without any trouble at all. We even had men stationed at the back of the house, in case hebroke the wall down and got out that way. It was only one of those little crude one-room mud huts, I could have knocked the wall through with my elbows. We needn’t have bothered. The headman just stood at the door and called him, and out he came, as meek as you like.”

“What did he look like?”

“Little scrawny specimen. Not what you’d call impressive, except for his ears. I think I’d know him again, just from the ears.”

“What happened to the man then?” I asked.

“We marched him off to the prison. We didn’t think about him anymore once we’d brought him in. Why should we? I was just relieved we hadn’t had to break any heads. Like I said, this sort of thing isn’t exactly soldiering-not what they hand out cotton capes, tobacco and turquoise lip-plugs for, anyway.

“So when they told us to go back-”

“When was that?” I asked eagerly.

“Not long after the arrests. I wasn’t happy, nor were my men, but orders are orders, and he made it very clear what we had to do. Whatever the man we had taken had done, it meant his family had to die and his house had to be razed. It had to seem as if he had never existed.”

“He made it very clear? Who?” I asked, although I thought I knew the answer.

Lion looked appealingly at my mother. She told him to go on in a voice I could barely hear.

“He spoke to us in person. He didn’t take long-I had the feeling he was in a hurry because he had the same orders to issue to all the other squads who’d been involved in the roundup, and all in person, as if he couldn’t entrust the task to anyone else. It was your esteemed master, Yaotl: the Chief Minister himself, Lord Feathered in Black!”

He glanced at each of us in turn, as if to gauge the impact his revelation made on us. If he had expected shock he was disappointed. My mother and sister seemed not to have moved a muscle since he had begun speaking, while I had known what he was going to say before he said it. The three of us looked back at him in grim silence.

Lion drew a hand across his face, and then stared at it, as if surprised to see it had come away wet.

“We hanged the woman in her own doorway. That’s what he told us to do. I hit her over the head first, when she wasn’t looking, so she wouldn’t know and the children wouldn’t hear her struggling. I told my men it would make them easier to deal with.” Suddenly he snarled like a trapped beast trying to ward off its tormentors. “Do you think we wanted to do this? The Chief Minister told us to swing the children’s heads against the outside wall. I had no choice: my men had all been there when the Chief Minister gave us our orders. He meant it that way, didn’t he? If my men hadn’t heard him, it might have been different, but what else could I do?”

“What else did you do?” I asked.

“We searched the house for other occupants. Then we torched it. Even the house had to go, don’t you see? To give the villagers the idea the people who lived there never existed and weren’t to be spoken of.”

I leaned forward, unable to keep the urgency out of my voice. “You got all the occupants? You’re sure of that?”

My brother gave me a strange look: the sort of look a drowning man might give to someone he has just seen on shore carrying a rope. “All the occupants … why do you ask?”

I hesitated, unsure how far I could trust him with news of the boy Handy and I had found. “I just wondered if anyone might have escaped.”

“I accounted for the whole family.”

“You’re sure?”

“Oh yes,” my brother assured me in a voice brittle with self-reproach, “every last one.” He took a deep breath before going on: “Except the one I rescued.”

“Rescued?” my mother, my sister and I cried in unison.

“Maybe we didn’t search the place as well as we should have. I think that’s what made me turn back, just the feeling that we’d missed something. I pretended I had a stone in my sandal, sent the rest of the lads on ahead and doubled back into the village.

“Everyone had run away, of course, and so there was nobody in the place except me and whoever was screaming inside the burning house. I know, I should have left him-but I was sick of the whole business by now. So I got him out, just before the roof fell in. It wasn’teasy, either-he kept kicking and screaming, right up until I dragged him past his mother’s body. I had to push her legs out of the way.” He looked thoughtful. “Funny, he stopped screaming then.”

“You disobeyed orders?” I was struggling to reconcile the image of a man dragging a terrified child from the burning, collapsing shell of his home with everything else my brother had told us. “What if you’d got caught?”

“Then your master would have had me cut to pieces, wouldn’t he?” he snapped.

“Where’s the boy now?” my sister asked anxiously.

“No idea,” Lion told her. “The moment I put him down he ran for it.” He sighed. “I don’t blame him. The poor kid was probably as frightened of me as he was of the fire.”

I remembered the boy’s silence and how not even Star’s coaxing had persuaded him to talk. Now it seemed more important than ever to get some words out of him.

While I was thinking about this, a row was developing between my brother and Jade.

“I don’t care whose orders you thought you were following!” my sister shrieked. “Don’t you have a mind of your own? Couldn’t you see what you were doing was wrong?”

“You don’t understand,” Lion replied feebly. He looked to my mother to intervene but she just looked away. “You haven’t been in the army. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Not even Yaotl would have been that stupid!” Jade was brandishing her bark-beater like a warrior waving his sword as he taunts the enemy. “At least he’d have thought of a way out of it!”