Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“You know who I am.”

“Yes, though you had us all fooled for a while. Even when I realizedCurling Mist didn’t exist, it took me a while to work out it was you. I thought you were my old rival, Young Warrior.”

The young merchant laughed. “You thought I was Young Warrior? That’s funny! I thought my disguise was good, but not that good!”

“I thought you must be Young Warrior, and Nimble must be Young Warrior’s son. I couldn’t think who else would hate me so much they’d kill to get their hands on me. But then I realized there were all sorts of reasons why you couldn’t be anyone else but who you are …. Why, though, Shining Light? What’s this all for?”

The sword’s blades glittered as he turned the weapon over in his hands. I longed for him to take his eyes off me, just for an instant. “It really is funny you thought I was Young Warrior,” he said thoughtfully. “He died, you know: the Tarascans sacrificed him. Shall I tell you the story?”

“Go on.”

He wanted to draw this out, I realized, to savor his triumph for as long as possible. If I could keep him talking I might get a chance to go for the sword. Or perhaps I could appeal to the boy for help. He hovered uncertainly behind the other man’s shoulder, looking as if he wanted to say something but could not find the words.

“There was this girl, Maize Flower-remember her, Yaotl? She, her lover and her unborn child had to leave the city in a hurry. You know why. If they’d stayed, they’d have been killed. They couldn’t even stay in the valley. They tried, but there was nowhere safe-nowhere where anybody was prepared to risk making the Aztecs angry by harboring refugees. So they tried to get out over the mountains. And that’s where the girl died. She died in a cave, in childbirth.”

From the shore a furious shout drifted across the water.

Shining Light turned his head toward the sound.

I threw myself forward, crouching to get under the blades of the sword, but my wet feet skidded on the deck and sent me sprawling in front of him.

I lay there, helpless, hearing the weapon whistle as it swung through the air toward me, imagining how the blades would feel as they sliced through skin and flesh and bit deep into my shoulder or my back.

“No!”

Something deflected the sword, turning it over at the last instant so that its flat side slammed between my shoulder blades, knocking the breath out of me and driving my head into the deck so hard that my nose broke.

I heard a heavy blow and a curse just above me. Feet seemed to shuffle and dance on the deck around me. The boy had intervened again.

“No!” he cried. “No, you mustn’t! Don’t you realize, he’s my …”

“Shut up!” the merchant screamed. “I don’t care! I don’t want to hear it! Shut up! Shut up!”

The weapon’s wooden shaft swept through the air. I managed to twist my head around just in time to see the boy step back. He was too slow: the flat of the sword caught him in the chest and sent him reeling, to trip on one of the bodies on the deck and fall back against the shelter in a sobbing heap.

Shining Light let out a brutal scream. With the sword still raised, he whirled around to face me again. “Now see what you made me do! I’m going to kill you for that! I’m going to cut your liver out!”

“What for?” I gasped. I was not playing for time now: I wanted to know. “Why do you hate me so much?”

“Don’t you know? Then you’d better listen. Somehow the child lived. Young Warrior had to leave him with some villagers who’d just lost their own boy. He bought him back again, years later, after he’d made a little money, and took him to live with him in Tzintzuntzan.”

Tzintzuntzan was the Tarascan capital. So Kindly had been right about where the bronze knife had come from.

“Of course, Young Warrior had a Flowery Death, eventually. The Tarascans tolerated him for a while, but as an Aztec, settled among our enemies, he was always living on borrowed time.”

“What about the boy?”

“Ah yes, the boy. Maize Flower’s son.”

I lay still while he began stroking the back of my neck with the edge of his sword.

“The boy managed to flee. He made his way back to Tenochtitlan. He’d grown into a fine lad by then, strong-built like a ballplayer-and handsome, but he was a foreigner with no money. What do you suppose he did for a living, in a city full of procurers and perverts? Allhe had with him when he came here was a bronze knife he kept as a memento. A pity I couldn’t get that back for him, after Constant died.”

Slivers of obsidian pricked the back of my neck, forcing me to press my forehead against the deck until it hurt. I wished I could see the boy, whose sobs had given way to a childish whimpering. If only he would stir himself, I thought, and creep up on his lover with that paddle in his hands.

“So I was right about Nimble,” I said. “He was Maize Flower’s child, after all. And you and he …”

“I found him in the marketplace. He was desperate by then. I bought him off his pimp with some of the goods my old witch of a mother thought I was gambling away. She never knew what a good thing I was making out of idiots who thought I would give them better odds than they’d get at the ball court!

“We’re good together, Nimble and I. Oh, not just in the way you think. We’re a team. I invented Curling Mist because I couldn’t go on taking illegal bets in my own name, and then Nimble became Curling Mist’s son, and his messenger. He was good at it. He’s quick, resourceful, level headed-but, oh, Yaotl! He’s so much more than that-he could have been so much more still, if you hadn’t blighted his life before it even began!”

“But I didn’t …”

He raised his voice to call out over his shoulder without taking his eyes off me. “Why don’t you tell Yaotl what happened when your mother died, Nimble?”

For a moment all I could here was the youth’s rapid, hoarse breathing. Then his voice came in gasps, as if each word was a struggle to utter. “It was … it was what Young Warrior told me-it was the last thing he told me.” He paused. “Maize Flower had a fever after I was born. She babbled, nonsense most of the time. But the name she kept saying, over and over again, was yours. Always ‘Yaotl.’ Never ‘Young Warrior.’ It was your name … always your name …”

As the boy dried up, the merchant carried on. “His mother saved her last breath for you, you see, Yaotl. For you, even though you’d abandoned her and left her and Nimble to their fate. And you’d forgotten all about them!”

“I’m sorry.” It was all I could think of.

“If you’d cared,” the boy said dully, “she might have lived, if she’d thought you cared. She might have fought for her life.”

I experimented with getting up, taking my weight on my palms, only to collapse again as the blades sliced into the back of my neck.

“And what do you want from me now, Nimble?” I asked as calmly as I could. “Revenge, is that it?”

This was so unfair, I thought. It was not as if I had forced them to leave the city. Would it really have helped if I had gone into exile in place of Young Warrior? How was I to know the silly girl had loved me?

Shining Light interrupted the boy’s reply. “Revenge? For what you did to his mother and to him-for being sold twice, and driven from city to city, and turned into a whore! Wouldn’t you want vengeance for that?”

He bent down so that his breath stirred my hair.

“Wouldn’t you want revenge?”

Did the youth really want me dead for the sake of what I had said to his mother all those years ago? I forced myself to remember what it had led to: Maize Flower, delirious and dying in a freezing cave, Young Warrior dead and barbarians chewing on his dismembered corpse, Nimble’s own squalid life. Had it turned him into a killer?