The Demon of the Air

4

What was your mistake?” the woman asked.

It was years since I had dared ask myself that question, but now the words slipped out painlessly, like a splinter that has worked its way to the surface of your skin.

“I didn’t think I’d made a mistake. I’d been tested over so many years by then that the fifth day didn’t frighten me. There would always be one or two who failed-novices, children whose fathers should never have pledged them to the Priest House in the first place, or old ones who were simply past it-and I remember feeling a bit sorry for some of them, after it was all over for them. But I felt confident enough. Maybe too confident.

“And it was such a small thing! Just one of those tiny green tomatoes, and all I had to do was add it to the pile in front of the fire. I did it, too, without disturbing any of the others, but just as I was about to let go, something stung the back of my neck.

“I don’t know what it was, but it felt like touching the edge of an obsidian razor, or being scratched by the sharpened end of a reed or a cactus spine. It didn’t really hurt, but it made me snatch my fingers back, and, well …”

My fists clenched involuntarily at the memory.

“I didn’t see that tomato roll. I turned round to face the others, to ask what was going on-who had scratched me, or thrown or blown something at me-and then I saw it in their faces. They were all looking past me at the offerings in front of the fire, and I don’t think anyone in that room was breathing.”

I had not turned back to look at the offerings again. There had been no need. The shock and then the certainty I had seen in the faces around me had told me enough.

I had not thought to argue, fight or flee when they came for me. I had just waited, like the most compliant of victims, sitting passively before the fire that it had been my life’s work to tend.

“You never knew who distracted you?”

I lifted my eyes to Lily’s face to find that it was blurred by tears. When I had blinked them away I saw, to my surprise, that her eyes too were glistening.

“No, and I don’t know how-a clay ball blown through a reed, the sharp end of a goose quill, a small stone-Lily, I don’t even know for sure that it was a human act. Suppose it was a god? I think that was what I believed at the time, and that’s why I didn’t protest.”

And it would be just like the Smoking Mirror, who was said to look with particular favor on slaves, to choose such a perverse way of setting the course that would make me, eventually, one of his creatures. But men and women were a tool the gods used, and in my heart I knew that whatever had touched me that evening, all those years ago, had been propelled by a human hand.

I could not sleep. I tossed and turned on my mat, kept awake by the pain of my wounds and questions that had lodged in my head and were refusing to leave.

What had really happened the day I had been expelled from the Priest House? I had always accepted it. It had been my fate, ordained by the highest gods, Two Lord and Two Lady, as they had presided over my naming day; if not that, then I had just been another victim of Tezcatlipoca’s caprice. Talking about it now had shaken me, stirring up long-buried memories that would not be put down again until I had looked at them afresh.

Had there been a man with a reason to hate me?

I pictured a face, stained all over with soot, with long, matted hair and temples streaked with fresh sacrificial blood: a priest’s face, unrecognizable as an individual’s. Only the eyes, white against the black-painted skin, might have enabled me to put a name to it, but another vision distracted me from them: another face, seemingly hovering behind the first, less distinct, pale, or perhaps tinted with yellow ocher.

I sat up, as if that would bring the faces into clearer focus.

“I know you,” I muttered.

A noise from outside the room dispelled the vision and sent me, in spite of my pain and the stiffness in my limbs, scrambling toward the doorway.

The Moon and the stars shone through the fine haze made by hearths and temple fires, and my breath was a glowing cloud in front of me as I peered outside. I drew my blanket around me and shivered. There would be a hard frost in the morning.

I heard the noise again: a faint rustling, the sound a skirt might make as its wearer gathered it up to walk quietly across the courtyard.

A slight figure slipped from the shadows, crossed a pool of light and vanished into the darkness again.

Few Aztecs would go out in the dark alone. To come across almost any creature of the night-an owl, a weasel, a coyote, a skunk-was to stare your own death in the face; and worst of all were the monsters we conjured out of our own heads. Not many would willingly venture into streets haunted by a headless torso whose chest opened and shut with a sound like splitting wood, by men without heads or feet who rolled, moaning, along the ground, and by fleshless skulls with legs.

I, however, had been a priest. At night I had patrolled the hills around the lake, with my torch, my censer, my conch-shell trumpet and my bundles of fir branches to burn as offerings. It had been my task to face and drive away these monsters, so that my people could sleep soundly on their reed mats. The night no longer held any terrors for me.

Hoping I was still hardened enough against the cold to stop my teeth chattering, I discarded my blanket and followed the woman across the courtyard.

Hiding in the shadows, as she had, I saw a pale, unsteady light in the room nearest to where I had seen her vanish. She had gone to the most important room in the house-the kitchen, where the hearth was.

I stepped up to the door.

The hearth was much more than a cooking fire: the three hearthstones were sacred, a shrine both to the Old, Old God of the fire, andto the Lord of the Vanguard, the merchants’ own god. A merchant’s traveling staff, wrapped in stiff, heavily stained paper, was propped against the wall behind the hearth. The woman knelt in front of it, with her head bowed so that her face was hidden and the flames cast a huge hunchbacked shadow on the wall behind her.

She had something in her right hand. It glittered in the firelight as she lifted it to her right ear. It was a sliver of obsidian, the sharpest kind of blade we knew.

Its polished surface flashed once as she cut into the earlobe.

The woman’s blood ran over the obsidian, quenching its sparkle like water tipped on glowing embers.

With her left hand, Lily held a little clay bowl up to the side of her head. She held it there for a moment, before stretching her hand out over the fire and tipping the pooled blood into the flames. She shook the bowl once to get the last drops out, and put it aside.

Then she took a strip of plain white paper and laid it against her wounded ear. She pressed on it to squeeze out more of her blood, so that when she took it away again it showed black in the poor light of the hearth. She looked at the sodden, limp scrap for a long moment, and then stood up.

I knew what she was going to do. She had sacrificed her blood to the fire-god; now it was the turn of her own personal god, the patron and protector of the merchants. His offerings were not burned. The merchant’s mother was not about to throw his gift of her blood into the fire. Instead, she went to the traveling staff propped against the wall and solemnly wound the paper around its middle, adding one more bloodied layer to its binding. She spoke to her god.

Lily’s voice was too low for me to distinguish more than a few words, but I heard enough before I came away, treading as softly as when I had approached.

It was not the words themselves which had impressed me. “Only a boy,” she had said, and “Keep him safe”: not much of a prayer, addressed to the god all merchants entrusted their safety to.

If anything was going to move the Lord of the Vanguard, I thought, it was not the words of Lily’s prayer, but the desolate, dry sobs that had forced themselves out between them.