Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

I shrieked in pain. With Shining Light’s weight upon me I fell with a crash that jarred my backbone. The man’s hands were around my throat, throttling me, jerking my head up and down and slamming it against the wood. I felt my feet kicking spasmodically and my hands clutching empty air.

In my brother’s hands the sword seemed to move so slowly. As it descended, I saw starlight glance off every sliver of obsidian, from the base to the tip. I saw the last blade flash and go dark like a fire being doused, and heard bone splitting as my brother sank the weapon into Shining Light’s skull.

Even dead, Shining Light kept up his assault, his head butting me violently as my brother tugged at the sword buried in his skull, before dropping onto my shoulder as if from exhaustion when Lion abandoned the weapon.

My brother turned on Nimble, ready to fight him with his bare hands.

The youth had not moved, and the paddle still lay where he had dropped it. He stared passively at Lion through pale, unblinking eyes.

I could hear my brother’s breathing, heavy and rough from the struggle with Shining Light. He was poised in a feline crouch, ready to break Nimble’s neck the moment the lad took a step forward, but Nimble just stood there, waiting for him, saying nothing and acting as if he did not really care what Lion did.

Dead men are heavy. I had to fight to get the corpse off my chest,shaking my head to get the blood out of my eyes as I rolled it away from me and stood up next to my brother. My head swam with the pain from my twice-broken nose.

Lion gave me an uncertain glance.

“What now?” he muttered tensely.

I looked at Nimble. “How’s it going to be, then, lad?” I asked quietly.

He said nothing. He kicked listlessly at the paddle, sending it sliding toward me across the spreading slick of blood. I left it.

“Where are the sorcerers?” Lion asked.

Nimble spoke for the first time since his lover had died. “Here,” he said shortly.

“Here? But …”

I looked around me at the shapeless bundles lying on the deck. We were surrounded by corpses. It was the aftermath of a massacre.

My brother turned a full circle as he took in the scene, his head snapping from left to right as he counted the bodies. “This isn’t all of them?” He gave a despairing groan. “Who did this? When?”

“He did.”

I dropped to my knees beside one of the huddled bodies. I pushed it with the palm of my hand and it turned over, showing flat, pale eyes and white teeth to the stars. It was cold, but not stiff: that had already worn off.

“He’s been dead for days,” I said, looking up at Nimble. “And the others?”

“After you got away from him at his house, Shining Light went mad. He came straight back to the boat and killed them all with the sword.”

“And what were you doing?” snapped my brother.

“Talking to his mother-I was at the ball court, trying to tell Lily her son wouldn’t be coming home yet. I didn’t know what he was doing. When I got back here he was … they were lying here, all around him, and he was sitting in the middle, grinning and covered with blood.” Suddenly his voice broke. “I swear I didn’t want any of this to happen! I only wanted to know … I only wanted to know about my father, but once Shining Light started this I couldn’t stop it!”

I stood and faced the weeping youth. “I don’t understand why you had to go through all this just to talk to me. You could have seen me at my master’s house at any time.”

“Shining Light said I mustn’t. You might have told your master, or anyone, and then people would have known about us. If we talked to you, he said, we had to have you in our power. And besides, he-Shining Light-he was enjoying himself! I didn’t see it until it was too late, but he enjoyed making a fool of your master. He thought it was funny, when he had the idea of making him send you to watch that peasant die at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, so you’d be implicated in what happened.”

“So Kindly was right,” I said, half to myself. “He thought his grandson and Curling Mist had dreamed it all up as a joke. Couldn’t you have stopped it?”

“I didn’t know he was going to do it-I thought at the time he was joking. It wasn’t until he saw me afterward, and made me go to your master and tell him what had happened, that I realized what he’d done.” Nimble groaned, a tormented sound. “He hurt those men, the sorcerers. He tortured them to make them tell him what they’d told the Emperor, even though they obviously had nothing to tell-you could tell they weren’t real sorcerers at all, just peasants who knew a few conjuring tricks. But Shining Light didn’t really care-he just wanted to hear them scream.”

“He was your lover,” I said.

“He saved me! He bought me out of the marketplace. He didn’t make me go back there! He was kind. Do you know what it’s like, never knowing kindness, never being loved for your own sake?” He looked me straight in the eye then. “I’d no father or mother. I’d been bought and sold so many times, I’d lost count. So much money has been paid for me, but before Shining Light no one ever treated me as if I was worth so much as a cocoa bean.”

“What do you mean, you had no father?” my brother asked harshly. “What about Young Warrior?”

“Young Warrior wasn’t my father.”

“You can’t know that!” I cried.

“Yes I can-he and Maize Flower never made love. He wanted to-but he wasn’t like you. He couldn’t: his vows to the gods stoppedhim, and he’d mutilated himself too much, offering blood. I know, I saw what he did. They just used to talk, and hold each other. That’s all some men want, some of the time,” he added, as one who knew.

“In the end you were the only one she’d give herself to, Yaotl. I’m your son.”

To hear it said was to hear and see so much misery: a woman I barely recalled, dying with my name on her lips; the child we had made, abandoned among savages when his only friend and protector was killed and eaten in the name of foreign gods; the young man passed from one pair of rough filthy hands to another; the mother who could not stop loving her only child, though she knew he was a monster; the madman tormented by a kind of jealousy I could scarcely begin to understand. I put my hands over my ears, then over my eyes, as if they could shut them all out.

I barely heard my brother asking why Young Warrior had treated Nimble as his own.

“For my mother’s sake. He was devoted to her. He made a promise, to return me to my father-he made me promise, too.”

And all that misery to be laid at my feet. I could see now why Maize Flower had been wrong, and why the gods were stronger than us, after all. They could see the ends of things. If I had known what it would lead to, I would not have left her. I might have died, but I would not have felt like this.

“Nimble,” I heard myself say huskily, “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

In my arms he was not the muscular youth I had seen on the boat and at the ball court. He was a child, trembling and weeping for everything we had both lost.

“You’ll both be more than sorry in a moment,” my brother growled. “Look over there.”

In the darkness it was hard to see what he was looking at, until a pale flash of spray showed where a paddle had been dipped in the water.

The curses that reached us faintly across the water might have come out of any canoe on the lake, but the voice uttering them was not male.

“Your master and Lily,” said Nimble. “And she’s paddling.”

“Their boatman must have escaped,” my brother said, “and good luck to him! But they’ll be here soon.” He looked speculatively at Nimble and then at me. “So what are we going to do? I have to get you back to Montezuma.”