The Demon of the Air

2

The servant showed me into a small room. Conventionally pious images of the gods decorated the walls: I recognized Two Lord and Two Lady, who allotted our birth dates and, along with those, our destinies. A low table, spread with delicacies-savory tamales, stuffed tortillas, fruit and assorted sweetmeats-stood in the middle of the room. The only other furniture was a large reed box. It lay open, displaying its contents. They looked like an elaborate suit of clothes: I recognized a colorful, feather-bordered jacket, obsidian sandals and wooden earplugs. They puzzled me at first, until I saw the lock of hair lying in the middle of the heap, and then I understood: these were the clothes the Bathed Slave had danced in during his last days and nights. Afterward they would have become his owner’s most treasured possessions, to be kept as long as he lived and burned and buried with him when he died.

Shining Light’s mother knelt on a mat beside the box. She greeted me with conventional courtesy.

“You are out of breath, you are hungry. Rest. Eat.”

I sat opposite her, mumbling something polite as I gathered mycloak around me. I accepted a honeyed maize cake and munched on it to give myself time to think.

Oceloxochitl: it meant “Tiger Lily.” Kneeling, with her head inclined, lit only by whatever sunlight managed to slip past the screen at the doorway, she gave little away. By what I could see-the silver strands in her dark hair, which lay loose upon her shoulders, the lines etched in shadow about her eyes and mouth, her dark, unpainted skin and bright, unstained teeth, the somber, formal patterns of her skirt and blouse-I judged that she was a respectable woman in her early middle years and that she was in mourning. I presumed this was for her son, since I knew the merchants’ womenfolk went into mourning whenever their men set out on a long journey.

“I am Lily. You are Lord Feathered in Black’s man? You are welcome here.” She spoke in a deep, clear voice, and deliberately, like someone used to choosing her words carefully.

“Thank you, madam. I am his Lordship’s slave, yes.”

“What does the Chief Minister require of my poor household?”

“I wanted to speak to Shining Light.”

“Then, sir, you have come too late, and I am sorry your journey has been wasted. My son left on a trading venture yesterday.”

When she looked up her gaze was steady and unblinking. There was no catch in her voice and no tears had left tracks on her cheeks. Only a hand, trembling slightly as it strayed toward the reed box beside her, might have betrayed grief or a need for reassurance.

“Why yesterday?” Disbelief made my voice sharper than I had intended. “Why on a day like One Reed?”

“Why do you think?” Her voice cracked like a dry branch collapsing on a fire. “He had to go away, don’t you understand? They’d have killed him if he’d stayed.”

“Who’d have killed him-his creditors?” I remembered what the merchant’s grandfather had said about Curling Mist. Perhaps he was not the only one Shining Light owed money to.

“I’m talking about the merchants! You were at the festival, weren’t you? You were there when that slave ran away and killed himself. It was the disgrace of it. My son knew he could never show his face among his own people again. He left the city the next day. He knew it was a bad day, at a bad time of year, and he had neither proper provisionsnor his elders’ blessing. He knew he could drown in the lake, be killed by robbers or eaten by bears or pumas, die of cold in the mountains or heat in the desert. We merchants have lived with this knowledge for generations. Shining Light’s own father was killed by barbarians.”

She would not let herself cry or raise her voice, but I could not miss the way her fingers caught and twisted the fabric of her skirt.

“You don’t know where he went?”

“He didn’t say, but it may have been in the East-somewhere like Xicallanco. He talked about Xicallanco before he went.”

Xicallanco! “A long way away,” I said, while I tried to remember where I had heard of the place recently.

“Oh, yes. The farther the better!”

“I suppose,” I reflected, “by the time he gets back from a place like that, there’s a chance it will have been forgotten-the Bathed Slave and everything.”

“He won’t come back.”

“You think he’s gone into exile?”

“I think he’ll die.” She whispered the words, hissing at me in a voice that sounded like air escaping between hot coals on a brazier. “The same as his father. He died when our son was a baby.”

“I know. Your father told me. Your husband must have been a very brave man. I’m sorry you lost him.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said matter-of-factly. “But yes, he was. He was worth ten of those so-called warriors.” A brief smile surprised me. “Thank you for saying so.”

I remembered what her father had told me about her and Shining Light. I wondered whether I could get her to confirm it, or explain what he had meant about things not always having been for the best.

“It can’t have been easy for you all these years-on your own, with your son growing up.”

The woman gave me a curious glance. “It hasn’t,” she conceded, “but merchants’ wives are used to coping. We have the family business to run, while the men are away for months or years at a time. We’re brought up to it. And we weren’t poor. The Emperor was very generous, you know. After the merchants got back from Quauhtenanco he sent round boatloads of maize and beans, and cloaks of cottonand rabbit’s fur. We were never going to go hungry, even when my father got too old to go abroad himself. And now Shining Light is ready to start trading on his own account.” She turned her head away sharply and added in a voice suddenly thick with tears: “Or he would be, if this wretched thing hadn’t happened!”

“You mean the sacrifice.”

She bit her lip but said nothing.

“That’s what the parish chiefs were here about, wasn’t it?” I probed gently. “They were angry about what happened. What did they have to say?”

The woman struck the floor next to her with her open right hand, making a ringing slap. “What do you expect they said? Do you know what an honor it is to be selected to offer a Bathed Slave at the festival? A merchant spends his whole life cringing before the warriors, going about barefoot and wearing a rough old cloak instead of nice cotton and ducking out of the way of some oaf he could buy ten times over, and then for one day a year there is this chance to show we are as good as they are. For someone as young as Shining Light to be chosen, and then to show us all up the way he did-is it any wonder they were angry?” Agitation made her teeth grind together. “You know what I had to do just now? I had to listen to seven old men lecturing me on the disgrace we’ve brought on our people, and demanding to know where Shining Light is now and where he got that slave from in the first place. And I’ve had to take all that and try and defend my son and pretend I knew what he was up to, when I never did, and do it all by myself because my father’s drunk himself into a stupor again and the ungrateful wretch has run away and left me!” She ended with a deep shuddering breath and something like a sob.

“You don’t know where Shining Light got his Bathed Slave from, then?”

She gave a loud sniff before replying: “He told me he got him at the big slave market in Azcapotzalco.”

“You didn’t believe him.”

Lily looked down at where her hands lay clasped on her knees, between the folds of her skirt. “He left off buying him until very late-too late to train him properly. And when the parish chiefs wanted to inspect him, and advise Shining Light on how to presenthim, he kept fobbing them off. The truth is, I don’t know where that slave came from.” She tilted her chin up until her eyes glinted in the sunlight. A faint huskiness, a hint of pride, came into her voice. “But I will tell you this. I was with my father when he presented a Bathed Slave at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, in the first year the Emperor allowed the merchants to make an offering, and he was nothing like Shining Light’s creature. He danced up the steps ahead of us, the way the poets say they should, and he died like a warrior. I know how these things should be done!”

Her fingers unlaced and laced themselves in her lap. I watched her thigh lift and settle again under the thin material of her skirt, betraying a sudden restlessness, and wondered what feelings came with the thought of that sacrifice, so many years before. Perhaps she pictured herself as a young woman, ascending the Great Pyramid, with the sounds and smells and thrill of death around her, and ahead of her the man her father was sending to die, mounting the last few steps with a triumphant cry on his lips, shedding chalk dust from his heels as he climbed.

I had an unsettling vision of her as she must have been in the moment when her father’s slave gave up his life, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed, her eyes shining, the breath caught in her throat. I had seen enough sacrifices to know how it had been, the animal joy that no man or woman with blood in their veins could help being caught up in. It was not bloodlust but a more basic thing: the presence of death and the affirmation of life, two things that our traditions taught us could never be separated.

“I know too. I used to be a priest.”

She looked at me with renewed interest and I saw the dark color that had spread over her face and the quick pulse in her throat. I wondered whether she in turn saw me as a young man, when I had been one of the temple’s mysterious, glamorous servants, with my crown of feathers and my cheeks daubed with blood and ochre. She frowned. “But now you’re a slave-how did that happen?”

The question shocked me back to the present. I did not want to talk about this.

“My master needs to know where your son’s offering came from,” I said clumsily. “He needs to talk to Shining Light ….”

“Why?”

I opened my mouth to reply and then shut it again. What could I say, when for all I knew old Black Feathers might just then be amusing himself deciding what parts of her son’s body he would like to have severed with a dull knife? I heard myself mumbling: “He’s concerned that it went wrong. After all, he sent me to help.”

“And a lot of help you were too!” she said bitterly. “If you hadn’t let that slave get away when he did, it might have been all right …”

“There was nothing I could have done!”

“My son would have been better off hiring another escort, like that big commoner Handy,” she went on, ignoring me. “Two men like him might have been able to hold the slave.”

“I didn’t ask to be there!” I protested. “I don’t even know why I was there in the first place! Whose idea was it to send me, anyway? Did your son ask for me?”

“How should I know? I’ve told you, I had no idea what he was doing.”

“So you don’t know what dealings he had with my master?”

“Until yesterday, I wasn’t aware that he’d ever had any!”

“What about the man he placed his bets with-Curling Mist?”

My last question seemed to strike her like a blow. She leaned forward sharply as if someone had stabbed her in the stomach. She sat up again just as abruptly, but kept her eyes on her knees as she answered me in a voice that was suddenly very small: “My son doesn’t share all his … business affairs with me. Why should he?”

“But he did use him? He did put money on the ball game through him?”

I watched her shoulders shudder momentarily beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. “I don’t know. Yes-he probably did. Look, I’m tired. I had the parish chiefs here all morning, and now you come asking questions that I can’t answer.” Her eyes were no longer glistening, merely hard and defiant. “If the Chief Minister wants to talk to my son, then he had better go and look for him. But you can tell him Shining Light isn’t here. He’s gone away to die. See what your master makes of that, slave!”