The Demon of the Air

2

As if having one drunkard in this house wasn’t enough! Do you think I saved your miserable life just to provide that disgusting old sot with company?”

The sound of Lily’s voice was like a hard rubber ball bouncing off the inside of my skull, although the words themselves seemed to come from far away and to be in a foreign language that I could just about understand with a lot of efforts.

“He is your father.”

“He could be the Sun, the Turquoise Prince himself, with a crowd of warriors dancing around him, and he’d still be a disgusting old sot! At least he has an excuse!”

“So do I,” I ventured.

“Oh no you don’t. The doctor prescribed snake’s tongue for you, not sacred wine, and that’s what you’re getting. Here!”

I sniffed at the proffered bowl, which contained a brownish liquid. I knew it was not literally made of snakes’ tongues but of a herb which was used to treat chest pain. I had learned that much at school. They had not taught me how vile its smell was, but I assumed its taste could not be worse. I was wrong.

“You might have mixed it with honey,” I spluttered.

“I might,” she conceded, taking the bowl back. “Maybe I will, next time, if you learn to grow up!”

It was getting toward evening, and a chilly breeze had got up and driven us indoors-Kindly to collapse, unconscious, on his mat, and me to endure revolting medicine and a lecture on the perils of drink.

The stuff cleared my head, at least. I looked at Lily, who had knelt opposite me, by the open doorway, so that the sunlight that came into the room fell on her. She looked different, somehow, although I could not at first see why.

“Tell me something, Lily. If I’m not your father’s drinking companion, what am I doing here?” I held my breath, fearing the kind of explosion a similar question had provoked that morning, but this time she took it calmly.

“Getting better, of course. You were in such a bad way when the police had finished with you that I couldn’t see what else to do with you, except bring you back here.”

“So you felt sorry for me? Look, I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful, but if some beggar comes to your door offering withered chillies or stale maize cakes for sale, do you buy them? I doubt it.”

She surprised me by looking hurt: she gave an audible sniff and turned her head away sharply As she did so the Sun caught her cheek and I realized what was different. Although her hair was still streaked with gray, her skin looked clearer and paler than before.

On her the effect was so surprising that I could not help remarking: “Ocher?”

She looked at me again. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve painted your face.”

“What do you mean? Oh, I see! No I haven’t,” she corrected me primly, although she could not quite suppress the smile that wanted to form on her lips. “Even if I had any reason to put on makeup, I couldn’t, not while my son’s … away. It’s like being in mourning, for us,” she added in a low voice. “This is only axin ointment, for the cold. It stops my skin drying out at night.”

Her half smile did not chase the lines around her mouth and eyes away. If anything they deepened, but they looked now as if they might have been etched there by laughter as well as pain. They made me wonder how she could be in happier, more relaxed times.

Since we seemed, just for a moment, to be able to speak to each other, I tried putting my question again.

“Why am I really here?”

She sighed. “Why do you think? I wanted to ask you about Shining Light’s sacrifice. Then when I saw you in the marketplace, I thought it was a gift from the gods.”

“We were both lucky, then,” I said skeptically.

“I had to speak to you, because I thought you could tell me about the offering-tell me something that would help me work out where he came from and why he did what he did. I know why my son would have had you with him, you see. He never told me, but it’s obvious enough. He knew he had not prepared the sacrifice properly, and he thought it would help if he had someone who knew all the rituals.”

“I can see why he might have needed that,” I conceded, “but I don’t understand how he fixed on me. He might have got a real priest to advise him, and there must have been enough of his own people, merchants, that he could have turned to. Did your son ask my master for me in particular, or did my master volunteer my services?”

“I’ve no idea.”

I followed my own train of thought. “Shining Light got my name from somewhere. What would have made him go to the Chief Minister? A mutual acquaintance? They both had dealings with Curling Mist.” I noticed Lily’s sharp intake of breath at my mention of the name, but I carried on thinking aloud. “So Curling Mist, or that boy of his, Nimble, could have suggested my name-but what for?” Igroaned aloud, not from the pain of my wounds but from a much older, more enduring anguish. “It’s not even as if I’m a priest! I’m a scribe, a secretary, a messenger, a whipping boy for my master’s vicious dog of a steward. I haven’t set foot in a Priest House in a dozen or more years-what use could I have been anyway?”

Lily said nothing. She was staring at me.

Then I realized that I had been almost shouting, with my fists clenched like a baby’s and the muscles of my face clenched in an angry mask. With an effort and some pain I made them relax.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “Sometimes it’s not so easy, remembering.”

She leaned forward into the room and laid her hands on her knees.

“What happened to you, Yaotl?” she asked earnestly. “You were a priest. You belonged to the gods. You belonged near the sky, in the mountains, on the summits of the pyramids. What made you give all that up to become another man’s possession?”

“Perhaps the gods gave up on me,” I said lightly. It hurt, merely thinking about this subject. “They do that, you know. They’re easily bored. They will raise a man up only to hurl him down again, and if it’s going to happen to you then it’s no use trying to prepare for it, or complaining. And I was dedicated to the most fickle of them all, the Smoking Mirror. Why do you think we call him ‘the Enemy on Both Hands?’”

“Something drove you out of the temple,” she insisted. “What was it-a woman? An argument with another priest?”

“It was a long time ago.” Being asked these things now was like being pricked with maguey spines. “It doesn’t matter any more. Please, let’s just forget it.”

Memories, suddenly released, tumbled over each other in my head: the calculated cruelty of the priests, the temples with their reek of incense and slaughter, the hymns and prayers I still knew by heart, and the confusion, anger and despair that had ended it all. I could live without such memories, cheerfully abandoned years before, with the traces washed away by a cleansing tide of sacred wine.

“You don’t want to tell me.” The woman sat back again, withdrawing from me a little, apparently feeling that my reserve was a poor return for her hospitality. “Well, it’s up to you.” She looked toward the doorway, as if making up her mind to leave.

I realized, surprising myself, that I did not want her to go. All of a sudden sharing my memories with this woman seemed preferable to being left alone with them.

“Do you know …” My voice faltered.

She turned her head. “Yes?”

“Do you know what happens during the month of Eating Maize and Beans, before the festival?”