Simon Levack: The Demon of the Air

Ignoring them all, my brother strode directly toward the great stair that led up to the Emperor’s apartments. The crowd parted before us, putting a safe distance between themselves and our escort’s cudgels.

My brother’s and the escort’s sandals clattered across the stuccoed patio. A few guards stood about, as stiff as statues, swords at the ready for any uninvited visitors. I imagined they would loosen up a little when my brother and I were called in, and they and his bodyguards could swap war stories and all be old soldiers together.

“Is this going to take long?” Suddenly looming over the fear of what my master would do to me for being late was the prospect of meeting the Emperor. Even to look at his face was said to entail death for a commoner. What could I possibly have done, that he should want to interrogate me in person? “Why don’t we come back in the morning? Look, I’m in no fit state to be seen, I’m still all over blood from the sacrifice …”

“Shut up,” growled Lion, before disappearing into an antechamber. He came back a moment later, barefoot and lacking his earplugs, his fine cloak swapped for a plain one just too short to cover his knees.

“And you always used to complain you had nothing to wear.” Nerves made me spiteful.

“You know perfectly well I’m not allowed to appear before the Emperor in a fine cloak. If I’d had time to go home instead of trailing around looking for you all evening, I wouldn’t have had to borrow this thing.”

A steward called us forward. As we shuffled toward the room where the Emperor was waiting for us, he hissed urgently: “Don’t forget, you make three obeisances. You don’t speak unless he speaks to you first. If he makes a joke, laugh! You’ll know because he’ll be laughing too. Keep your eyes on the ground. When he’s finished with you, you leave walking backward. Turn your back on him and you’re dead!”

Iknew how the Emperor Montezuma looked, having seen him from a distance: a middle-aged man of middle height, slightly built but well muscled, with a neat beard. I dared not risk so much as a glance at him now, but if I had I would have been disappointed, as Montezuma was nowhere to be seen.

Besides my brother, I saw five men in the room. They were all standing and all dressed in plain cloaks, like commoners come to present a petition. I knew none of their faces but I guessed that they included the Council of Four, the Emperor’s chief advisers. These men gloried in such tides as Keeper of the House of Darts, Keeper of the House of Darkness, Man Cutter and Raining Blood. They stood two on each side of a large wooden screen bearing pictures of gods picked out in gold. At right angles to it stood another richly decorated screen, and from the crackling and the wisps of smoke coming from behind it I guessed this concealed a hearth. A medley of delicious cooking smells, few of which I recognized, hung in the air.

The fifth man, who stood apart from the others, next to one of the screens and a little in front of it, would be the Emperor’s interpreter, for it pleased Montezuma to speak to his subjects through an intermediary. That meant, I realized, that the Emperor himself was hidden in the angle between the two screens. He must be eating: no doubt he had felt like a light supper after presiding over the festival. Not even his closest advisers were allowed to see him eating.

I was taking all this in when my brother suddenly threw himself on his knees and cried: “O Lord! My Lord! O Great Lord!”

Hastily I did the same, while the council and the interpreter looked on impassively.

In answer came a mumbling from behind the screen, followed by the interpreter’s harsh, high-pitched cry.

“Is the Chief Minister’s slave here?”

Unsure whether this meant I had been spoken to, I appealed silently to the council. One of them nodded at me.

“My Lord, I am Yaotl.”

“You know the Cuauhcalco Prison.”

It was a statement, not a question, and in its uncompromising certainty was as penetrating as an obsidian-bladed spear. Montezuma knew I had not forgotten that moment in the Heart of the World when my name had been called and my brother had hauled me upright by my hair, to show me off to the silent, expectant crowd before carrying out my sentence. It was not the pain of the obsidian razor scouring my scalp that his words recalled, though, nor the ripping sound my hair made as it came away. It was the cage they had kept me in beforehand, a wooden box too small to stand up in, and the smell of putrefaction from the whimpering skeleton in the prison cell next to mine, a man who by Montezuma’s order had been given a little less to eat each day until he wasted away and died.

“Yes, my Lord.” The bile in my throat reduced my voice to a hoarse whisper. The Emperor could have found no better way of reminding me that he held my life in his hands and could take it from me whenever he chose.

“Then tell me why we should not have you sent straight back there.”

“My Lord!” I cried, alarm momentarily overcoming etiquette. “I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“Have you not?” The Emperor’s tone was impossible to read, but there was no denying the sneer in the interpreter’s voice. “Then how do you account for what happened this evening?”

He could only mean the sacrifice that had gone wrong. “My … my master, Lord Feathered in Black, the Chief Minister,” I stammered, “he … he ordered me to help at the sacrifice of a merchant’s Bathed Slave. I didn’t know what was going to happen-my Lord, how could I?”

“Because your master knew!” the interpreter spat back as quickly as if he had known the Emperor’s reply before it was uttered.

“But I don’t even know why I was there! I will eat earth!” I touched the ground with my fingers and put them to my lips. It was our favorite way of showing sincerity, a sacred oath that meant that,having taken earth in your mouth, you would be returned to the earth, your ashes buried in it, if you were not speaking the truth.

For a moment I felt more alone than at any other time in my life. I turned desperately to my brother, but he had eyes only for the floor, and the four councillors kept theirs focused resolutely on the middle distance in front of them. When rescue came it was in the most unlikely form: a voice from behind the screen-soft and lisping, but undeniably meant to be heard-the voice of the Emperor himself.

“So tell me, slave,” that deceptively quiet voice said, “tell me what you do know.”

There was no hiding his eagerness. The fact that he had chosen to speak betrayed it. I imagined him leaning forward over his dish of turkey, snails, water-fly eggs, stewed human meat or whatever, staring at the screen as if he could see through it, in his anxiety to hear me as I stumbled through my account. When I got to the point where Shining Light’s victim spoke, telling us to look out for a big boat, something like a sigh broke from him: the sort of sound you make when you have recognized something that was there all along.

There was a long silence after I had finished. Then the Emperor spoke again, quietly still, but for us all to hear.

“These are disturbing times. We hear of omens, of portents: fire streaming through the sky, temples burning, the lake boiling and flooding on a day without wind. We hear rumors from the East, from our outpost at Xicallanco on the coast of the endless Divine Sea: rumors about men with pale skins and hair on their faces. We hear stories from the land of the Mayans. They tell of strangers from islands on the Divine Sea, of dreadful things that have happened there-how pale-skinned men with beards came and all the people died or fled or were made slaves. We have seen pictures of pyramids on the sea, borne on huge canoes.” He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “And now the whole city hears a Bathed Slave raving about a big boat before throwing himself off the Great Pyramid. Does all this mean the peril-whatever it is-is coming from the Divine Sea?”