Authors: Simon Levack

The Demon of the Air (9 page)

BOOK: The Demon of the Air

2.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

A
small canal ran alongside the merchant's house. I lingered by it for a while, toying with the idea of hailing a canoe and so saving myself a long walk back to my master's house in the center of Tenochtitlan. I felt tired and dispirited: I could not claim to have achieved very much here, beyond establishing that Shining Light was not at home and that his mother appeared to have less idea of where his sacrificial victim had come from than I had. I did not even know whether to believe her when she claimed her son had gone into exile. On the other hand he must have some reason for setting off on a journey on an unlucky day. I remembered now where I had heard the name Xicallanco: Montezuma had mentioned it as a place where rumors of the pale strangers had been heard. According to my brother, these men had had things like the sword and the cloth he had shown me, and at the time I had thought about how our merchants might covet them. Could Lily's son have gone in search of such things? It seemed possible, but then how had he known of them, I wondered, and again, why had he chosen to go on One Reed?

It was quiet here. The walls around me were the color of sun-bleached bones, and for all I could tell held as much life within them. The water at my feet sparkled in the late morning sunshine. I gazed at my reflection, examining my own gaunt features, my earlobes tattered from years of offering the gods my own blood and my unkempt, thinning, graying hair, and wondered what Lily had seen when she had looked at me.

Had I imagined the way she had looked at me while we were talking about the death of Bathed Slaves? Many women found priests alluring. They found us intriguing and sinister, for our ancient hymns and bloodstained knives, our black robes and long, tangled hair. They thought us brave, because we fasted and bled ourselves and confronted
the gods every day and the creatures that frequented the darkness every night. And they could not have us, for we were celibate, and that only made us more fascinating.

Lily was a handsome woman, much the same age as myself, and something about her had snagged in my heart and was refusing to be dislodged. Perhaps it had been her fierce pride in what her late husband had done, or her refusal to surrender to grief or rage, or her defiance toward the Chief Minister's messenger. Perhaps it had been something in that moment we had shared, dwelling on the long-ago death of her father's slave. She was named for the boldest of flowers and for a moment I thought that if I had just seen its deep red and brilliant yellow petals for the first time, I should not have been so struck by them. I turned the name over on my tongue: “Lily â¦”

Then I allowed the face in the water an indulgent smile. A man who had sold himself into slavery had no ambition, no desire, no will of his own. He had given all that up, and now just had fantasies, and they were safe enough.

Two faces smiled back at me.

I nearly fell in the canal. Recovering hastily from the fright, I stepped back and looked at the new arrival in the flesh.

He was dressed as a priest. Skulls and stars adorned his long black mantle. An ocelot-skin tobacco pouch dangled on his chest. His hair was as long as mine, although not as dirty as a priest's hair would often be: matted and filthy with moss growing in it. Fresh blood, drawn from his earlobes, lay congealing on either side of his neck.

For a moment I had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing myself, a dozen years younger, until the surprise wore off and I began to see the differences.

To begin with the stranger was taller than I was, although he was stooping to bring his face on a level with mine. More interesting than that was the sooty paste covering his face and body. All priests wore this to stain themselves as black as the night that was their habitat, but this man had gone further than anyone else I had seen. He was caked in the stuff. It had rubbed off on the hem of his mantle and collected as a smattering of black dust at his feet. It had cracked around his eyes and mouth, showing slivers of brown skin underneath, but elsewhere it had been applied so thickly it obscured the features underneath like a mask. I could not even tell the man's age,
because he had laid the soot on so heavily that it would have hidden any lines on his face.

Still smiling, he said: “Looking for a boat?”

He was mumbling. Priests often did, owing to their practice of sacrificing their own blood by sticking cactus spines through their tongues.

I looked around quickly. There was no one else beside the canal, although a canoe floated on the water a few paces away. A boatman stood in it, leaning on his pole with his back to me. He was young, an unblooded youth's lock of hair still falling down the nape of his neck.

“You can share mine,” the man beside me added.

I found the sudden appearance of man and canoe disturbing.

“Thanks.” I tried not to sound ungracious. “I might walk back to Tenochtitlan, though.”

The smile vanished, splitting off a few flakes of soot as it did so. “You might not.”

Something jabbed me below my rib cage. I tried to back away, only to find one of my arms seized in a grip like an alligator's bite. I felt a sharp pricking against my stomach and looked down at the knife. It was made of brown metal, like copper, but darker. I had never seen anything like it.

“What's this about? Let me go!”

The grip on my arm tightened.

“The boat.” The man with the knife jerked my arm, twisting me around to face the canoe. Struggling to keep my balance, I could do nothing about trying to escape before I felt the knife again, now prodding me in the small of my back.

As we moved toward the boat, its occupant turned around.

He was Nimble, Curling Mist's sonâthe boy I had last seen and heard taking bets on a ball game from my master.

I thought it was a robbery at first. Perhaps Kindly had not been altogether wrong after all, I thought, assuming that the black-faced man with the knife was Nimble's father, Curling Mist. Perhaps it was true that the merchant owed him money. If he had heard about the young man's departure he might have been in a hurry to collect it before it was too late, and perhaps he thought I had beaten him to it.

“Look, you've got this all wrong. I haven't got anything.”

“Shut up and get in the boat. Call out to anyone and you're dead.”

I was made to clamber into the center of the canoe under the youth's watchful eye. The black-faced man got in behind me. As soon as he had settled himself, with the blade of his knife resting against the side of my neck, the youth pushed off from the side of the canal.

“What's this about?” I demanded. “Where are you taking me?”

My assailant's breath stirred the hair on the back of my head but he said nothing, so I tried the boy instead.

“He doesn't say much, your father, does he?”

The youth had nothing to say either. He was concentrating on the canal's banks and the pole in his hands. He handled the canoe skilfully, avoiding the occasional oncoming craft with nothing more than a slight curl of his lip and an almost imperceptible twist of the pole.

“We're heading out of the city,” I observed. I might as well have been talking to myself. I lapsed into silence, trying to decide what to do while I watched the scenery changing slowly around me.

The canal merged into the broad waterway that spilled into the lake at Copolco on the eastern edge of Mexico's island. Soon the houses gliding by on either side of us would be replaced by fields:
chinampas,
the artificial islands that our farmers had taken to cultivating when they had run out of dry land, and which now surrounded the city.

I watched the houses and fields slipping past me with an odd feeling of detachment. The knife was still scraping the skin at the back of my neck but I was not afraid. What was happening to me was not real. It was too bizarre: to have been sent to Shining Light's house by my master and then kidnapped by the man with whom my master bet on the ball game and his boy. It was obviously not a robbery, since they had made no effort to search me for valuables. What were they planning to do, thenâhold me against my master's gambling debts?

I considered raising the alarm despite the threatened consequences, but there was no one to call to. The houses and fields were silent: most people must either be at home, out of sight and earshot behind the faceless walls of their courtyards, or have gone to the market.

My only chance, unless I steeled myself to take on the youth, the man and the knife alone, was the open lake, where there were always plenty of boats and a shout carried a long wayâprovided I ever got
there. All I could do in the meantime was to try to get them talking. I thought it might distract them at least.

“Do I have to guess what all this is about?”

That drew as much of a response as I expected it to.

“All right, then.” I tried to keep my tone bland and conversational, while my eyes darted about, searching the fields on either side for an opportunity to get away. “You aren't thieves, I know that. So it's me you're after, isn't it? But why?” I paused. The boy went on plying his pole impassively and the knife stayed at my neck. “No, you won't tell me that. All right, then, how did you know where to find me? Was it the woman who told you where to look, or the old man? But they'd never have got a message to you in time, not unless you were right by their house already. What about the Chief Minister?”

The knife twitched.

“Isn't old Black Feathers one of your best customers? What's he going to say when he learns you've made off with his slave?”

From behind me a thick voice said: “I told you, this is too dangerous. We should do him here.” I thought it sounded more distinct than before, as if the effort of talking like a priest was becoming hard to maintain.

I tried to shift my weight forward a little so that I could throw myself at the boy if either he or his father made a move, even though I knew the knife would be deep in my flesh before I could stir a muscle.

The youth turned to look at me and let his eyes linger on my face, as if he were looking for something there.

“No,” he said. His voice sounded too old for his years. “We mustn't.”

I felt the other man's tension through the metal pressed to my skin. I recognized fear or suppressed anger or a mixture of both and wondered how long I had before he got desperate enough to use the knife. “We're taking enough chances with him as it is. The longer we let him live the riskier it gets. I should have killed him beside the canal!”

“Butâ”

“But nothing!” The strain had come out into his voice now, which was suddenly high pitched, almost strangled. “Who do you think I'm doing all this for, anyway? If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't
be on this boat at all!” The cold pricking at my neck vanished and the knife blade appeared at the corner of my eye as he waved it in the youth's direction. I started to turn my head, to flex the muscles in my arms and legs ready to spring. “Don't argue with me! We kill him when I say so!”

The glittering metal swung fully into my sight. I saw shock and alarm in the boy's eyes, and realized too late that the knife was arcing toward my throat.

A strong hand seized my hair and yanked my head backward, stretching my neck like a sacrificial quail's.

“No!” The young man almost screamed, dropping his pole as he threw himself toward me. “Please! You mustn't! Not until we've asked himâwe've got to know!”

He was too slow. His fingers barely brushed Curling Mist's arm before the blade struck my taut skin.

It stayed there, quite still, for a moment that seemed to stretch into days. I was distantly aware of a stinging sensation and the warm, wet feeling of blood running from a shallow cut down the front of my neck. Much closer to me seemed the youth's wide-open, imploring eyes, just a hand's breadth from my face.

“Please,” he begged in a whisper.

The knife wavered a little as the hand holding it relaxed.

“You really want me to spare him?”

“Yes â¦ at least for now.”

“At least for now.” The man behind me slipped once more into his slurring parody of a priest's voice. “All right. You win. He can live until he's told us what you want to know. Then we'll kill him.”

A
t Copolco we turned south to pass along the western edge of the island of Mexico. The boy swapped his pole for a paddle and put a little distance between us and the shore. Whether this was to make it easier for him to avoid running aground or harder for me to escape I did not know, but both he and his companion seemed to relax a little. The knife returned to the side of my neck.

I had not tried to start another conversation. Nearly having my throat cut had made the danger I was in all too real, and I held my tongue for fear of provoking Curling Mist again. I suspected that if he and his son renewed their argument over me, the boy might not win it so easily the second time. Still, as the land receded, I felt I could risk a glance over my shoulder.

The Sun lay low over the mountains, throwing the far shore of the lake into shadow. The water's surface was calm, the bulk of the island of Mexico and the dyke beyond it sheltering it from the winds that sometimes stirred up the great salt lake to the east. Canoes dotted it, although none was close enough to be worth calling out to.

Ahead of us, like a long low wall barring our way, was the causeway connecting Mexico with the small city of Tlacopan on the western shore of the lake. By the time we got there it would be thronging with traders, day laborers and artisans heading home for the night to their towns and villages on the mainland. Every so often they would stop the traffic to open the wooden bridges that pierced the causeway at intervals in order to let boats pass from one part of the lake to another. While the bridges were closed a mass of canoes would build up around them, drifting aimlessly about like reeds scattered over the water while they waited for them to open again. If we found ourselves in the middle of such a crowd, I thought hopefully, then anything might happen.

The nearer shore was all willows, sedges and rushes, with here and there a wooden landing stage or a little adobe house whose whitewashed walls glowed pink in the light of the setting Sun. Once or twice the flat summit of a pyramid appeared above the tops of the willows, with smoke drifting lazily from the temple that crowned it. The greatest city in the World lay just behind this quiet green verge, but here there was no one to be seen.

I heard a faint splash as the paddle was dipped into the water, and my view of the shoreline shifted abruptly as we turned toward it. With a sudden feeling of dread I realized we would not, after all, be crossing the causeway.

In an effort to see where we were going I twisted my head around too quickly and was rewarded with a sharp stinging at the side of my neck as the man behind me reminded me of the knife. He uttered a low, wordless growl as I turned hastily to face the youth again. The boy's face had suddenly turned a little paler than before, and I saw strain in his narrow eyes and tightly compressed lips.

We were entering a little sheltered coveâprobably nothing more than a gap between plots of reclaimed land. There was no one else aboutânor would there be by now, I thought, with dusk fallingâbut we did not quite have the cove to ourselves. There was another boat here, tucked away among the sedges, although I caught only the briefest glimpse of it.

We must be close to our destination, I realized, and if I was going to get away now was the time to do something about it.

“Is this it? Have we arrived yet?” The only answer I got was a tense silence, broken only by the sound of water lapping against the side of the boat.

The boy stood up in the stern, with his paddle poised a hand or two above the water, but he did not dip it in. He was staring at something behind my head.

His lips moved but for a moment no sound came out.

From somewhere behind me, I heard a voice. It was strangely muffled and I could not make out the words, but it was surely a voice.

The man behind me turned toward it, unthinking. I felt the knife leave the side of my neck and I moved. I threw myself forward, launching myself at the boy: in the narrow space of the canoe it was the only way to go.

“Look out!” he shrieked, raising his paddle.

His father went for my hair again, but this time he was too late, because I was already moving. He seized a lock, bunching it in his fist, but my own weight tore it out by the roots. I heard it rip horribly over my own scream of pain but I was still moving. I hit the youth with my shoulder. He fell over backward and I landed on my knees on top of him, my arms flailing wildly at his face.

I must have hit the boy three or four times before his father dragged me off him. Yet again he had my hair, using it now to haul me backward onto my haunches as he bared my throat once more for the knife.

“No! No! No!” I heard Nimble's urgent cries over my own howl of pain and the sounds from behind me, the loud splashing as of something heavy moving about in the water and that voice, clearer now but still unintelligible.

“I've got to kill him!” The voice behind was almost shrill. “Can't you see what's happening? We can't deal with him as well! Get rid of him now! What else can we do?”

The youth was on his feet again. His face was bloody from my attack and his eyes were wide and wild and he had the paddle in his hand, raised much too high above the water.

“We can do this!” he shouted.

With my hair gripped in Curling Mist's fist I had no chance of dodging the blow. I could only watch as the flat of the paddle's blade swung in toward me, to smash into the side of my head.

After the boy hit me with the paddle I had no idea where I was or how I had got there. I could not hear anything over the roaring in my ears and I could not open my eyes. I tasted blood: it filled my nose and mouth and stopped my breathing. My scalp seemed to be on fire and someone was battering the side of my head with a flint axe and my bowels were churning.

I panicked. My arms and legs hit out and thrashed madly. One of my knuckles struck the wooden side of the canoe, yielding a jolt of acute agony that I noticed even over the pain in my head and my guts. The flat of my hand found the same surface again and felt its way to the top and clutched it spasmodically.

Clinging to the canoe's side and hauling one-handed got me,
somehow, onto my knees. My other hand batted at my face and came away wet. It rubbed some of the blood away from my eyes and out of my eyelashes, where it was fast congealing. I coughed and choked. I opened an eye, too briefly to see anything. I thought I heard someone shouting.

I tried to stand then, too quickly, because the world was rocking from side to side, and when I put an arm out to grab something to steady myself there was nothing there. Without uttering a sound, I toppled out of the violently pitching canoe into the freezing waters of the lake.

It was like falling through a sheet of ice, so cold I could not feel how cold it was, and as dark as a cave. I could not think. I could not move. My body was trying to swim, seemingly without any impulse from me, but all I could do was twist about, as helpless as a sick fish. For a horrible moment I thought some water monster had got me; then I found my cloak had wrapped itself around me and pinned my arms to my side.

I had another moment of unthinking panic while my arms strained against the heavy, wet cloth and my legs kicked uselessly. Then the sodden fibers of my cheap cloak finally gave way and I was able to move my arms.

With the last of my strength, I struck upward. The tattered remains of my cloak caught around my ankles and I kicked them angrily away. I looked up, opening my eyes for the first time in the cold fresh water.

I could not see the surface. A large dark shape loomed above me. Just as I realized what it was my head hit something hard.

I had come up under a boat.

I pushed against the rough, pitted wood with both hands, desperate to be free of it before the dizziness that was starting to come over me became too much and I forgot which way was up. I felt movement through my palms: the whole great mass stirring sluggishly and little tremors shooting through it, as if the vessel above me were full of people running from side to side. I was half drowned, I thought, and must be hallucinating: the canoe had not seemed so large.

Then the shadow over my head was gone, and I was on the surface, gulping air in great anguished whooping gasps.

At first I could hear nothing except my own breathing. I trod water,
while I looked around me for the shore. I had to make for it as fast as I could, but my strength was almost gone and the cold was creeping deep into my bones, bringing with it a strange lethargy.

I became dimly aware that there was some sort of commotion going on. I heard shouts of anger or alarm. With my ears still full of water I could not make out any words and I was not listening anyway, but then, for all my growing indifference, came something that made me look up.

“Yaotl!” The voice was still indistinct but I could not mistake my own name. “Nimble! Where's Yaotl?”

I peered up the boat's side, listening to the shouting and the sounds of running feet.

A face appeared above me.

The youth and I stared at each other, both too astounded to speak or move. I saw streaks of blood on his cheeks and neck. It had not had time to dry since I had hit him.

“Yaotl!” the voice cried again.

The face vanished without a sound.

I swam for my life.

BOOK: The Demon of the Air

2.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads