The Demon of the Air

3

The month of Eating Maize and Beans: it’s a time of testing. Summer is coming and if the rains fail, the city will starve, the way it did sixty years ago, when even the nobles had to sell their children for want of food. If a priest falters in a song or a sacrifice, the rain-god may just go away from us-empty his rain clouds on the far side of the mountains, perhaps, and water our enemies’ fields instead of ours. The priests have to be prepared for the festival. They have to be culled. Any who aren’t up to it have to be weeded out.”

“You failed the test?” she inquired gently.

“I passed the test! I passed it every year from when I was seven years old!

“Let me tell you what happens. You have to remember that this is all done during a fast, when there is nothing to eat but a few maize cakes at noon. Now, at twilight we make an offering before the hearth in the Priest House. It’s nothing much-dough balls, tomatoes, peppers, something like that. The important thing is that whatever we offer has to be round. It has to be something that will roll about the moment you so much as look at it, because that’s part of the test. You have to pile the offerings up in front of the fire and ifthey don’t stay just where you put them-if they roll over, or worse if the pile collapses-then you’re in trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“I’ll come to that-there’s a lot more to it. When that part’s all over, you strip and make a blood offering.”

I remembered drawing the thorns through my earlobes, feeling the old, numb scar tissue reopening and watching the blood, the water of life so precious to the gods, as it ran over my shoulders and arms.

“Then you run to the lake. It’s the middle of the night and the water’s as cold as the Land of the Dead, but you all have to jump in, from the youngest to the eldest. There was always a lot of shouting and splashing about, and some people tried to tell me it was to attract the gods’ attention or frighten away the lake monster, but I think we were really just trying to stop ourselves freezing to death.

“Then it’s back to the Priest House, to sit and shiver until noon. You’re allowed to sleep, but in the night it’s too cold for sleep, and in the morning the prospect of food keeps your eyes open.

“They feed you at midday-nothing but a few maize cakes, as I said, with some tomato sauce, and that’s part of the test too. You’ve failed the moment you spill or splatter a drop. You try it, when your fingers are numb with cold and your hands are trembling, and all you want is to shovel those maize cakes down your throat and then go to sleep.”

“We owe so much to our priests,” said Lily. I gave her a sharp look, but from her dreamy expression I could tell she meant it.

“You haven’t heard the half of it! You don’t go to sleep in the afternoon, you go to work. You get sent out to Citlaltepec to gather reeds.”

“I think I’ve heard about this. Isn’t that when the priests attack passersby?”

“On the way back, yes, if they’re stupid enough to be out on the road. Hardly surprising, is it? You have a gang of priests, half starved, exhausted, and facing five days and nights of this misery, all in the name of keeping the crops watered, and they come across some ungrateful bastard with a full belly and a warm cloak who thinks his maize and beans just spring out of the ground by themselves-of course they’re going to beat the crap out of him!”

I paused, surprised by my own excitement, the quickness and shallownessof my own breathing and the look on Lily’s face. Her skin had colored a little under the ointment and she was watching me steadily with her lips slightly parted. She was imagining herself as one of us, I thought, feeling our hunger and fatigue and nervous exhaustion, and the release we had got from those few joyous moments of licensed violence.

“Was that part of the test, as well?”

“I suppose it must have been. If you could vent all that anger on some stranger and come back to the temple in good order, ready to start again in the evening, then you might stand a chance … Oh, and one final thing. Whoever is last back to the Priest House …”

“Fails the test?”

“That’s right.”

“So what happens if you fail?”

“Someone will denounce you. They’ll point to the chilli that rolled into the fire, the tomato stain on your breechcloth, your head nodding on your chest when you should be attending to your duties. You’ll be hauled up before a senior priest and made to pay a fine-to your accuser.”

“To your accuser?” She stared. “But that’s mad! You’d all be accusing each other all the time!”

“Why, yes, of course we were. How else do you think we passed the time? It was a game; it was the only thing that made the whole thing bearable.” I could not help smiling at the memory: how we would run back from the lake, too cold, wet, tired and absorbed in our own wretchedness to notice what was going on around us, and yet how soon the squabbling would start the moment we were settled on our mats in the Priest House. Pale eyes would probe the gloom, ready to pick up the slightest lapse, and soon harsh, triumphant cries, spirited denials and bitter recriminations would shatter the strained silence. I remembered how especially sweet it had felt to secure a fine from the man who had denounced you the day before. “The amount you paid depended on how wealthy you were, so it was the great lords’ sons who were denounced most often. Since my father was a commoner and we had no money anyway, I used to do rather well.” By the time the festival began I would have a bundle of cotton capes and fine jewels wrapped up in my cloak, all things of no real use to me except as tokens of my triumph over my fellow priests.

I had known and savored that triumph every year I was a priest, except the last.

“Of course, the fifth day was different.”

I closed my eyes, as if that would keep out the sights of the last day before the festival in my final year at the Priest House. I had to stop myself clapping my hands over my ears in an effort to shut out the sounds as well.

From a long way off, I heard Lily asking me a question.

When I opened my eyes again, they would not meet hers, but were fixed on her hands, which were kept still by gripping her knees through her skirt.

“It had stopped being a game by the fifth day. It was serious. There were no fines and the rich fared the same as the poor. Make a mistake during the first four days and it would cost you nothing more than a couple of cloaks and a bit of ridicule, and you knew you’d get them back in the morning. On the last day it would cost you everything.

“They’d drum you out of the priesthood. They’d drag you by the hair and the ends of your breechcloth to the edge of the lake, throw you in and push you under till you were half drowned, you couldn’t see, you were puking salt water. Men who’d been your friends since childhood would be the first to kick you in the head, and the last as well. Then they’d leave you, and if you were lucky, sooner or later someone would go and tell your family where you were.”

And sooner or later, I reminded myself, your family would come and take you home, and that had been the worst humiliation and the harshest punishment of all.