Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“But we just wanted to talk to the boy!” I called from the doorway.

That brought Star waddling into the room from the courtyard with urgent shushing noises. “Be quiet, you fools! Do you want the whole city to know?”

Handy turned back to me with a helpless gesture. “You see, now? I wouldn’t have to put up with this if I hadn’t litstened to you. Now I have this extra mouth to feed and the moment anyone so much as comes round the corner at the end of the street, we have to stuff thelad in a maize bin in case it’s that steward of your master’s.” He sighed in exasperation. “Look, you might as well come in. Snake! Where are you? Run on ahead and tell them I’ll be late.”

“Thanks. My master’s steward? What would he be doing here?”

“Giving me orders. I work for Lord Feathered in Black now.”

“What?” Lion and I cried simultaneously. I looked quickly at my brother and then even more quickly away again. “As what?” I added weakly.

“As a handyman, a messenger. Lord Feathered in Black needed someone he could rely on, especially after his most valuable slave had gone missing. I’d been carrying messages to him for that merchant, Shining Light, and I suppose he thought I was reliable.” Handy caught me glancing nervously at the doorway. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not about to turn you in. But you see how awkward this is for me. How would I explain it, if I was found talking to some runaway?”

I could see how awkward it might be for him. More to the point, I could see how fatal it might be for me. “Of course,” I said as smoothly as I could. “I quite understand. Lion, we’d better forget the boy.”

But at that moment the boy from Coyoacan himself appeared. He had been attracted by all the fuss. Ignoring the rest of us, he went straight up to Star.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Nothing, Storm,” she said soothingly. “These men were just …”

Then he noticed my brother. He screamed.

Star wanted to get the boy out of our sight, but my brother would not have it, and Handy, forced to choose between them, sided reluctantly with the Constable. The woman submitted less than graciously to her husband’s will, planting herself by the door with a fierce scowl on her face and an arm draped protectively around the child’s shoulders. The moment we left the house, I suspected, Handy was going to wish he had never been born.

“Of course he talks,” she informed me coldly. “All it needed was a little kindness.”

“Have you asked him about his father yet?” I inquired, with a nervous glance at my brother.

“No, and I’m not going to. He’ll tell us about that in his own time, or not at all. What do you want to do-beat it out of him?”

I had been contemplating doing just that, but it was my brother who answered.

“We didn’t come here to hurt anybody.” He spoke to her more gently than I would have thought possible for him; but then I often forgot that he had children and grandchildren of his own. “But we have to know what this boy may have seen or heard. It’s for his own sake as much as ours.”

“And if he won’t answer your questions?”

“Then we’ll have to go away again.” My brother quelled my objection with a look. “He’s suffered enough already. Believe me, I know.”

Star looked as if she was about to say something, but to everyone’s surprise it was the boy who answered. He looked straight at Lion and said: “You came to our village with the soldiers.”

My brother hesitated for a long time before replying: “Yes, I did.”

Star looked at the boy in alarm. “Are you sure you want to talk about this now?”

The lad ignored her. “It was the old man, wasn’t it?”

“What old man?” my brother asked.

“The old man,” the boy repeated doggedly. He seemed to take little notice of anything any of us said. “He made you do it, didn’t he?”

My brother had more discretion than I would have given him credit for. Another man might have ended the discussion there, by seizing on the child’s words as proof that what had happened was not his fault, because he was merely acting under orders. All Lion did was to ask once more, very cautiously, who the old man was.

“He came to the village on foot,” Storm explained, “but I know he was important because the headman had to stand outside the house while they talked. But I knew you could hear things through the wall at the back, if you stood in the right place.”

“Old Black Feathers,” I breathed. “It all makes perfect sense.”

“What were they talking about?” Star asked gently. For all her concern for the child, she was as intrigued as I was.

“I didn’t understand it all. The old man kept asking questions. He wanted to know about something. Men with pale skins and beardshad arrived somewhere in the East. He said something about a place called Xicallanco. He wanted to know …” The boy’s voice faltered.

“Yes?” I leaned forward eagerly.

“The old man wanted to know if the pale men … if they really were men, or if they were gods, and if they were men, whether anyone who traded with them would earn fame and riches.”

“And what was the answer?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t catch it, but I heard the old man say: ‘You don’t have very long.’ And he said something else: he said other people might come and ask the same questions, and not to tell them anything.”

Handy, Lion and I exchanged glances, but before either of us could say a word the child’s composure suddenly cracked, and he burst into tears and hid his face in the folds of Star’s skirt. As she held him, speaking soothing words and rocking him like an infant, we heard his muffled voice crying: “And they did, didn’t they? They came back to kill us all! They took my father and then they came for us-my mother. Why? Why?”

The last words, bawled into Star’s lap, were barely intelligible. She held the boy, cooing and smoothing his hair with her fingers.

After a glance at me, my brother spoke softly to the boy. “Your father kept his word to the old man, lad, that’s why. He didn’t tell the other people what they wanted to hear.”

“All right, Yaotl,” my brother challenged me, after Star had led the sobbing child across the courtyard to the women’s room, “you said it all made perfect sense. It makes no sense to me at all, so you’d better explain.”

Lion, Handy and I squatted together in the courtyard, keeping the morning air’s lingering chill away with tortillas still warm from the griddle. These were a treat, and I was sure Star only let us have them in deference to my brother’s rank. Handy had lent him his best cloak too, although on Lion the old patched two-captive warrior’s mantle that I had first seen the commoner in somehow looked still more incongruous than a bare loincloth.

While we ate, I repeated for Handy’s benefit the story I had told my mother, sister and brother the day before.

“The old man the boy saw was my master,” I said. “It has to have been him.”

“But why?” Handy asked. “Why would the Chief Minister be skulking around sorcerers like some lovelorn girl wanting her fortune told?”

“It sounds as if he wanted to know how a trading venture would fare,” added my brother, “but he’s not a merchant. Why should he care about a trading venture? It’s not as if he needs the money!”

“True,” I said. “I don’t think it’s about money.” As I considered my brother’s words it came to me that the Chief Minister had given me the answer himself, in the evening of the day Storm’s father had died. “It’s about renown. He wants to be as famous as his father, and he wants to put one over on the Emperor at the same time. Lion, you remember what Montezuma told us about the East? Pale men with beards, pyramids on the sea. And you showed me that box yourself, the one full of cloth finer than cotton. The Emperor wanted the sorcerers to tell him whether the strangers he’d heard about were men or gods. His Chief Minister obviously thought he’d find out before the Emperor did. The Emperor mentioned Xicallanco. So did old Black Feathers, when he went to see the sorcerer. So, for that matter, did Lily. She told me her son used to talk about the place, and I don’t see why she should have been lying about that.”