The Demon of the Air

3

I raced to the ball court, anxious to outpace the news of my coming. If Lily really was talking to Curling Mist then I wanted to surprise them.

By the time I got there, sweating and breathless, a game was already in progress. It was a fine day for it, sunny and warm, but not excessively hot, and a recent light drizzle had been enough to dampen the dust in the ball court without softening the mud floor. As I approached I could hear the thump of the solid rubber ball as it bounced off the court’s brick walls and the players’ bodies.

It was hard to get near the stone seats overlooking the court for themass of people surrounding it. They were as quiet and well behaved as any gathering of Aztecs, but the business being carried on in whispers among them was being conducted with such intensity that I feared to interrupt it. I found myself edging between little knots of people talking earnestly of odds and prices and swapping gambling tokens.

Eventually I managed to climb up onto a stone seat and join the crowd looking down into the ball court itself.

The court was a long, narrow strip of hard earth at the bottom of a deep pit between high brick walls, with shorter strips at right angles to it at either end. Back and forth within the court ran two teams of tough-looking young men, whose hairstyles and scars showed that their bodies had been hardened by war as well as exercise. They wore abbreviated breechcloths and leather pads on their knees and elbows, and they hurled themselves at the ball as if their lives depended upon keeping it in the air-as well they might, for this game could be played to the death, and if the players ever forgot that, they only had to look at the lurid and bloody friezes on the walls above them.

The ball itself was a dark blur among the jostling bodies, taking a solid shape only in the instant when it was stopped by a hip, a thigh or a buttock. The players were not allowed to use their hands or feet, except to spring off the ground when they fell. Splashes and streaks of blood on the earth showed where players had fallen and got up again. The air above the court was full of the smells of blood and sweat, mixed with an elusive animal scent of high excitement.

You could not help getting caught up in the game. We spectators leaned forward, craning our necks to follow the ball’s flight and the hurtling, crashing bodies of the players. Nobody cheered, called out or even spoke above a whisper, even when a player did a full somersault to catch the ball at an improbable angle and drive it off the wall and into his opponents’ half of the court. We could never lose sight of the fact that this was more than a game: it was a sacred ritual, one of the ways through which the gods revealed their will, and the dark-robed priests stationed on either side of the court were not just there to award points and punish fouls.

Some of those watching the game would be hoping it would tell them their fortunes. Others hazarded more than their fate, or less, depending on your point of view. Spread out before us, between us andthe court, were money and goods of every kind: bags of cocoa beans, loads of cloth, copper axes and quills full of gold, jeweled lip-plugs and other adornments, fresh squashes, turkeys and quails, folds and sheets of the best paper from Amatlan or Amacoztitlan, and the most precious and delicate thing of all: feathers. Right in front of me was a bundle of the most beautiful scarlet feathers, the kind the merchants and tribute collectors got from distant provinces far to the south, but as stiff and full of color as if they had just been plucked.

The only rule about betting was that the stakes must be displayed in full view of the players. This was the law my master had broken with his secret wagers with Curling Mist. The reason for it was connected with two small stone rings, not much more than a hand’s breadth across, set into the walls of the court at twice a man’s height. A team that managed to get the ball through one of them would win everything that had been staked on the game. I had never seen this happen, and I knew no one who had.

The man who had performed the somersault picked himself up, hobbled about for a moment and then hopped to the back of the court while a teammate rushed forward to intercept the ball. One leg was already swelling up: after the game they would have to let the pooled blood out with obsidian razors.

I reminded myself that I was here to look for someone, not watch the game, but when I glanced at the tiers of seats opposite and around me I saw only the sort of crowd these events usually drew. Most had the short, coarse cloaks and tonsured hairstyles of commoners who had never taken a captive and never would. A few, occupying seats reserved for them at the front, were more gaudily dressed, their lips and ears punctured by jewels that glittered as they chatted to one another. The ball game attracted the very poor, pinning all their hopes on one big win, and the very rich, who could afford to lose. None of the spectators obviously had anything to do with the merchant class and its discreet wealth. And none of them was female.

Perhaps she had been here and left, I thought. I tried asking my neighbors.

I could not see the face of the person on my right, as he was leaning forward in his seat with his eyes fixed on the game being played out below us, but I could tell that he had not yet had his head shaved to mark his first capture of an enemy warrior. He wore no cloak, andfrom the sleek muscle coating his shoulders and back, I thought he might be a ballplayer himself. I had more luck catching the eye of the commoner on my left.

“Come to a lot of these games?” I asked conversationally.

He grinned. “Whenever I can. Whenever the Governor’s team from Tlatelolco are playing, anyway, but I try to catch all the games-even crappy practice sessions like this one. You?”

“Oh, you can’t keep me away.” The players were taking up their positions, ready to contest the next point. Sweat made their bruised bodies glisten, where they were not caked with dust, and the earth under their feet was mottled with their drying blood. It would not have occurred to me that this was anything other than a competitive match.

“There’s a good crowd here,” I said casually, keeping up the pretense of having a conversation until my neighbor’s attention strayed back to the game.

“Not bad,” he said noncommittally.

“I was wondering …”

He turned to me in exasperation. “Are you watching this or not?”

I edged away from his glare. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I was looking for someone.”

He gave the ball court a longing glance before deciding that the quickest way of getting rid of me was to answer my questions as concisely as possible. “Well, who is he, then?”

“She, actually. Her name’s Lily.”

He fell into a furious fit of coughing. As soon as he recovered he said: “Oh, so it’s like that, is it? You picked an odd place to meet her, then. Wouldn’t a garden have been better?”

“Better for what?” I stared at him, suddenly confused. I wondered whether he thought I had been planning an assignation, and then realized that that was exactly what he had thought because it was what I would have thought as well, had I been in his place.

“Well, you know-”

“No, I don’t,” I snapped. “Look, I’m not talking about a pleasure girl-she’s a merchant’s widow and the mother of another.” I felt a sudden urge to pitch him over the backs of the seats in front of us and all the way down into the bottom of the court, just to wipe the knowing, lascivious smirk off his face. “Now have you seen her or not?”

Indifferent to my anger, my neighbor turned back to the game. “Sorry, friend, but I can’t help you …”

I did not hear whatever else he might have had to say.

It had been just a blur of movement out of the corner of my eye, but the play had sent a ripple of appreciative murmuring through the crowd and one or two of the spectators were standing. The ball had come to rest on the short strip running across one end of the court and the team whose half it was in were standing around it. Judging by their gestures and the fragments of agitated speech that drifted up to where I sat, they were exchanging views among themselves about how it had got there and whose fault it was.

“Oh yes!” The burly youth on my right was one of those on their feet. He turned to me. “You saw, didn’t you? That was a classic! The ball can’t have been more than a hand’s breadth off the ground when he returned it! That …”

His voice tailed off as he saw me staring at him. Then the shock of recognition widened his eyes until they were as round as the ball.

It was Nimble, Curling Mist’s son and messenger.

He made an inarticulate noise and turned, trying to scramble out of his seat and clamber up over the tiers above us.

“Hey!” cried someone in the row behind me. “Sit down! We can’t see!”

“You can’t get out this way. What do you think you’re doing?”

I reached up, grabbed the lock of hair hanging from the back of the youth’s head and yanked it firmly. He howled in pain and staggered backward.

“You heard them,” I growled. “Sit down!”

He slumped back in the seat next to me and glowered at me.

I said nothing. I was so astonished to see him there that for a moment I could think of nothing to say. I could only stare and marvel at the gods and their sense of humor. It was hard to believe that even the capricious Smoking Mirror would be so perverse as to put this youth, of all people, in the seat next to mine.

“Are you going to let go of my hair?” he asked, his accented voice suddenly sounding as young as his years. “It hurts.”

I gave it a malicious tug, watched him wince, and let go. “Don’t get any ideas,” I warned him. “You and I are going to talk.”

“Yes.” His tone was almost eager. “Did I hear you say you were looking for Lily?”

If he had been sullen or truculent I might have listened to him, but his treating this as a conversation annoyed me. “I’m going to ask the questions!” I snapped. “You can start by telling me what you meant by kidnapping me the other day!”

“We didn’t mean you any harm! We just wanted to talk to you!”

“What do you mean, you didn’t mean any harm? What was the knife for, then? What about the body in the canal? You didn’t mean him any harm, either?”

“Body?” Frowning, he managed to look puzzled. “What body?”

“The one we found last night, floating outside the Chief Minister’s house-with a little message asking for me to be delivered to the sender. Which I nearly was, yoked like a slave at the market. And I was lucky-there’s an old man lying dead, back at my master’s house, because of your little gesture!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I bet you don’t! Like you don’t know why the man in the water was covered in burns and cuts and bruises, the same as the poor wretch Shining Light forced to impersonate a Bathed Slave-or are you going to tell me you didn’t know about that either?”

To my surprise he made no effort to bluster. He looked at a place between his feet and mumbled: “Look, that wasn’t my idea. I’d no idea he’d go so far. I thought we could get them to talk if we just showed them the cactus spines, waved the fire under their noses …”

“Them?” I echoed. “You mean the sorcerers?” Then, remembering that, although the men around us were engrossed in the game, this was a public place, I lowered my voice. Whispering my questions made me feel uncomfortably like a conspirator. “The men who got out of the prison? Where are they?”

He raised his head again, before turning it quickly as if he were looking over his shoulder. “I don’t think I can tell you.”

“Well, if you don’t tell me, you can tell the Emperor! Have you ever been inside the prison? Do you want me to describe it to you?”

“I can’t tell you!”

“Where’s your father?”

The boy stared at me. “My father?”

“Yes, your father. Curling Mist!”

“My father?” he said again, his whisper now barely audible. Then, for no obvious reason, he started giggling.

He carried on giggling while I sat and gaped at him. He covered his mouth with his hand and giggled into it. I might have struck or shaken him but I was too shocked by his reaction to do either. He was still giggling when a sudden commotion broke out in the ball court, followed by a roar from the spectators around us.

Distracted, I jumped up to find that everyone else had done the same.

It took a few moments to find a position from where I could see past the people in the row in front, but then I saw that the players and the officiating priests were all standing about, their faces upturned and all looking equally bewildered. The ball lay in the dust in the middle of the court, inert and seemingly forgotten, as if it had served its purpose. It had gone through one of the stone rings set at the top of the wall.

A strange silence descended over the crowd. It was as if their voices had drained away as fast as the blood from their faces.

But when I turned toward him, the boy had gone. He had slithered away between the legs of the standing spectators like a water snake among rushes.

Many years ago, the defeated side would have lost much more than the game. Their captain, at least, would have been bundled up the steps of the nearest pyramid, where the last thing he saw on Earth would have been the black face of the priest who took his heart out.

I lived in more civilized times, when the losing team merely had to be hustled out of the ball court and got away as fast as possible to avoid being torn apart by a furious crowd of disappointed gamblers. Theoretically the winners had the right to pillage the losers’ clothing and possessions and the onlookers’ as well, but in practice that was the least of anybody’s worries.

There was no point running after the boy. If I was lucky, I would find him later, trampled to death by the stampeding crowd, who otherwise would sweep him along with them. At moments like this the restraint we Aztecs habitually imposed on ourselves was abandoned, replaced by the ugly ferocity that so terrified our enemies. As the only spectator with no stake in the game, I kept my place until thelast of the crowd had gone and the dust they had stirred up had begun to settle, only cringing slightly when two sandaled warriors trod on my legs in their haste to get after the losing team.

I stood up and looked into the court. The winners were still there, looking, if anything, even more bemused than their opponents had.

“Congratulations,” I called out.

One of the players-the captain, I supposed-looked up at me imploringly.

“Look, we’re really sorry. We didn’t mean it to happen.”

I had gathered up my cloak and was about to leave, but now I paused. “What are you talking about?”

“You must have lost a fortune. But it wasn’t us, not really. It was the gods-it was Tezcatlipoca.”

The dust made me sneeze. “Don’t worry about it. I didn’t-”

“And that other lot,” one of the other players added, ignoring me. “They shouldn’t have put so much topspin on the ball, in that last rally. How were we to know where it was going to end up?”

“And the ball was harder than usual.”

There was a note of genuine fear in their voices. Perhaps they were afraid of what would happen when the crowd gave up its pursuit of their opponents and came back for the men who had actually knocked the ball through the ring, but I guessed it was more than that. A god-almost certainly the Smoking Mirror-had touched their lives and probably changed them forever. I knew how they felt. He had intervened in mine enough times, seldom to the good, but I doubted that I had felt more desperate and afraid than they did.

“It was a fluke. We’re professionals, you know. We were going for a points win.”

“Come on, let’s get out of here.” The captain looked up at me again. “You can keep your clothes. You can even have your stake back, if you want.”

“I didn’t have a bet,” I replied.

“You didn’t?” He looked relieved. “Well, that’s all right, then.”

The players began climbing the steps leading out of the court, talking quietly among themselves, perhaps about how they were going to get their newly won wealth home before any of its former owners tried to steal it back from them.

I decided to ask them about Lily, on the off chance that one of them had seen her.

The captain laughed. “Are you joking? We have enough to do keeping our eyes on the ball, never mind looking at girls!”

A couple of his teammates laughed with him, but one of them-the youngest looking, a lad barely out of the House of Youth-paused on the steps and touched his lips thoughtfully with his fingers.

“There was one, though.” He glanced nervously at his captain, who was glaring at him, and added hastily: “I only noticed her because she was the only woman-she stood out in the crowd. And not one of your pleasure girls, either. Middle-aged, I thought, and really plainly dressed, like a commoner’s wife or a merchant’s.”

The breath caught in my throat. “Where is she? Which way did she go?”

The youth lowered his head unhappily before his captain’s silent reproach. “I don’t know. Last time I looked, she’d gone.”

I made myself breathe again. “Never mind,” I said. “At least I know she was here.”

I turned to go.

“You only just missed her, though,” the young man called after me. “She was sitting in the same place you were.”