The Demon of the Air

EIGHT FLOWER
1

I sat up with a start.

It was morning. The screen had been drawn back and sunlight streamed through the open doorway, around a dark figure whose shadow fell across my sleeping mat.

I stared stupidly at the shape for what seemed like hours, lying with my head on one side, waiting for sleep to wear off, before realizing there was someone else in my room.

“Who …?”

Lily did not move. “I think you should tell me what really happened.”

“What?”

“When you were thrown out of the Priest House, Yaotl.” She spoke in a bleak monotone, like somebody reciting a passage learned by rote. “Tell me who hated you enough to want you expelled, and why.”

Carefully, mindful of my sore ribs, I levered myself up on one elbow.

“I don’t understand. Why do you want to know?”

“Just tell me! I brought you into my house. I’ve fed you and treated your wounds and … and …” She seemed unable to bring herself to mention the rest. “It’s just one thing I want to know-don’t you think you owe me that much?”

This was bewildering. “I really don’t know. I’d tell you if I could, honestly.”

“Was it over a woman?”

“You’re never jealous?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” She stamped her foot. “Just answer me! Was it that woman you were telling me about-Maize Flower?”

“Lily-what’s all this about?” As sleep receded, along came the memory of how the woman had treated my wounds, and how she had been, lying in my arms in the night. Something had happened since then: she had left me to wake up alone, and come back with a purpose that I did not understand.

In the way she leaned toward me, with her hands at her sides bunched tightly into fists, there was an almost childish air of determination, as if there was something she absolutely must have that was just beyond her reach.

All of a sudden I thought I knew what that something was. I had believed all along that Lily had been lying when she said her son had gone into exile. I had assumed that she had been covering up for him, but suddenly, recalling what Curling Mist and Nimble had done to me and what had happened to the sorcerers, I saw another possibility, one that would explain her sudden anger and desperation.

“This is about your son, isn’t it?” I said slowly. “They’ve got him, haven’t they-Curling Mist and his boy? They’ve kidnapped him-the way they tried to kidnap me! And now they’re threatening you. They made you tell everyone he’d gone away, so the chiefs of the merchants wouldn’t come looking for him. They wanted me-they wanted to know something about me-and now they’ve told you to find it out for them! That’s what this is all for!”

Even as I spoke them, I wondered at my own words. Could Curling Mist’s hold on Shining Light really have been so strong that he could induce him to part with his fortune? How had he persuaded the young merchant to offer the war-god, at the cost of his family’s good name, a bewildered, emaciated, mutilated prisoner? Had he somehow coerced him into doing that, before completely overpowering him?

It seemed impossible, but the merchant’s mother appeared to confirm it. Her face, which had been set as firmly as a statue’s, seemed to crumple, and she hid it in her hands and burst into tears.

“My son had no money, do you see? And he owed that wretched man Curling Mist so much. It ended up that he would do anything he asked him to. Curling Mist made him take that Bathed Slave. Idon’t know where he got him from, or why Shining Light had to sacrifice him to the war-god, but he did it, and afterward he had to go and see Curling Mist, to tell him what had happened. I think my son thought he had done all he had to. But he never came home. Before he went, he told me to give out that he’d gone away, because after the sacrifice he wouldn’t be able to show his face in Tlatelolco for a long time. A couple of days later I got the first message.” She looked into my eyes, blinking rapidly. “I had to keep up the pretense that my son had gone away. And I had to report to the boy-I had to tell him if I saw you.”

“Why, though? What do they want from me?”

“I don’t know.”

“And now you want me to tell you about … about the girl in the market.” A chill came over me, as it had the night before when I remembered how Maize Flower and I had parted.

She looked down so that her hair fell limply over her face. “I had to see the boy this morning. I told him what you told me last night. He told me to find out more.” With a despairing sob, she added: “Yaotl, please! They’ll kill him if I don’t tell them what they want to know! It’s such a little thing to ask, but it could be worth my son’s life!”

I did not want to. I did not want to drag this one event out of the tangle of petty and not so petty rivalries, squabbles and feuds that had been life at the Priest House. I did not want to examine it in all its painful detail and endure all that guilt and loss again.

I listened to the woman’s sobs and watched her shoulders heaving and realized that I had no choice.

Two boys had been born on the same day-One Death, in the year Nine Reed. One Death was the day-sign of the Smoking Mirror, and each of the boys bore one of the god’s many names. One was called Telpochtli, which meant the Young Warrior. The other was called Yaotl, the Enemy. Both their fathers had promised them to the priests a few days afterward, and that was as much as they had in common.

“Young Warrior was from a noble family,” I explained. “He could have been born on one of the Useless Days at the end of the year and he’d still have ended up a priest. My father’s just a commoner, and ifI’d been born on any other day I’d have gone to the House of Youth like my brothers.”

“And you were friends?” Lily’s tone had softened a little, now that I seemed to be telling her what she had to know.

“Friends? I don’t know. No, how could we be? He was a rich kid, surrounded by other rich kids. They’d accept him without question. They’d never accept me: I only survived by being smarter than they were, which didn’t make them like me any better. All the same, Young Warrior was taken into the Priest House the same day I was. He was always there. And we both knew, as soon as we knew each other’s birthdays, that our fates couldn’t be separated.”

We had practiced telling fortunes together, testing each other on the Book of Days. We had raced each other home with our bundles of sticks during the festival of Eating Maize and Beans, and joyously denounced each other in the evenings-although only during the first four days when it was a harmless game. We had gone into battle as novice warriors together, and on our first time out-when it was permissible to cooperate to bring down a captive-we had been on the same team.

It turned out we had even shared the same woman.

“That was Maize Flower?” Lily asked.

“Yes, although I didn’t know it at the time. To tell you the truth it was a surprise to find out that he’d been to see a girl at all, because I didn’t think he was the type-a bit too serious, more wrapped up in his service to the gods than me, I thought. But I found he was visiting the marketplace regularly too. He couldn’t keep it from me for long. I never told anyone, naturally. Sometimes we made excuses for each other when the other couldn’t be found. I didn’t know who his girl was, though.”

“But you found out.”

I did not want to go on with the story. I lifted my eyes from Lily to the edge of the doorway behind her and kept them there, trying to pretend I was alone, until the effort became too much and I became aware of her gaze fixed expectantly on me as if she were willing me to tell her something she already knew.

“I found out,” I whispered, “when she told me about the child.”

She gasped. “You had …?”

“No,” I replied, a little testily. “At least … Lily, I’d been seeing her for months, but I thought we’d been too careful. I suppose it could have been mine, but why should it? Why not Young Warrior’s or anybody else’s? Why did she have to pick on me?”

I had long ago decided not to dwell upon the possibility that I might have fathered a child. I had suppressed all thought of him or her, banishing the notion from my mind as I had once effectively banished the unhappy pleasure girl from my life. Only at unguarded moments, or in my dreams, did the thought of my son or daughter sometimes come back to haunt me: a charge that was never proved, never dropped, and to which I had no answer.

“I laughed at her when she told me, but she just said it had been put in her womb by the Smoking Mirror, and so it didn’t matter who the father was. If she went to the Head Priest and said it was me, he’d believe her.”

I remembered how my jaw had dropped when Maize Flower had made her announcement, and how quickly I had turned over possibilities, calculations and plans in my mind, grasping the danger I was in long before she threatened me with it.

“I didn’t think she’d go to the priests. After all, she’d be in almost as much trouble as I would. But I didn’t know! I was trying to reason with her, and then I tried to buy her off. I offered her ten cloaks, which was more than I had and twice what a husband would’ve given her on her wedding day. Then she started getting hysterical. I couldn’t really make out what she was saying through the tears, but there was a lot of nonsense about trust and love and men and women being stronger than the gods. Stronger than the gods! That’s a good one to remember next time you hear that the lake’s flooded and swept a score of houses away.”

Maize Flower had kept lunging toward me, trying to grasp the hem of my cloak, and I had kept backing away, turning my face away from hers as if afraid she was going to bite me. Then, suddenly, she had seemed to give up, and had slumped, sobbing, in a corner.

“Why don’t you just go?” she had cried.

“Maize Flower …” I had begun, awkwardly stretching a hand toward her, only to have it knocked blindly away.

“Save your breath! What do I need you for anyway? It’s not evenas if it’s your child, you pathetic little fart! Do you think I’d risk the real father’s life by going to the priests? Just get out! I don’t want to see you again!”

Lily said: “That must have been hard to take.”

“Do you think so? Just then I think I felt more relieved than anything else. It did hurt,” I conceded, “but that came much later. At the time I just got out as fast as I could, with the insults ringing in my ears.

“I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying-I think by then a lot of it was in her native language-but there was one phrase I do remember, because it was so odd. It was something like ‘Just as good as you!’ Not ‘better.’ This other man, whoever he was, was definitely ‘just as good.’”

“And you never saw her again?”

“No. But I didn’t see much of Young Warrior either. He vanished soon afterward.

“Before he did, though, he came to see me. He didn’t say much. He just came up to me-I remember this clearly, it was in the middle of a fast, and I was sitting over my one bowl of maize porridge for that day-looked me in the eye and said: ‘You know, don’t you?’

“I had a mouthful of porridge and couldn’t speak.

“‘Don’t think you’ve seen the last of me, you peasant. It may take a while, but we’ll pay you back!’ he said, and then he kicked my bowl of porridge clean across the room, spilling the lot, and walked off.”

“You think he knew about you and Maize Flower?”

“More to the point, he knew I knew about him. It must have been him, mustn’t it? Who else was just as good as I was-no better, no worse? Who else but the man who shared my birthday?

“He must have run away soon afterward. And I never found out what happened to Maize Flower, but she was gone next time I went to the market. Perhaps they went off together. At the time, I hoped they had-I thought it must mean the child was Young Warrior’s and not mine, after all.

“It wasn’t long after that when I left the House of Tears myself-but you know about that. It never occurred to me at the time, but it must have been one of Young Warrior’s noble friends that got me slung out!”

“What will you do now?” Lily asked.

By the time I got to the end of my tale she had relaxed. She fetched food and water for me and knelt in the corner of the room, with her skirt folded under her knees, watching me through red puffy eyes while I nibbled at the edges of a tortilla.

“I don’t know. Obviously I can’t go back to my master, and I can’t very well stay here, can I?”

She lowered her eyes but said nothing.

I sighed. “I wasn’t talking about what happened between us last night. I just meant that Curling Mist and Nimble obviously know where I am now. They’ve attacked me twice. It’s only a matter of time before they come after me again.”

“The boy knows, yes,” she conceded. “I’m not sure about his father.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand how that can be. Anything you told Nimble would get straight back to Curling Mist, surely?”

“I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “Look, this is what happened. After I saw Nimble at the ball court, on Four Vulture, the day you were attacked and brought here, I went to the marketplace. I’d left a young cousin of ours in charge of one of our pitches and I wanted to make sure everything was all right. You spoke to him, I think.”

“The boy selling feathers? Yes, I did.”

“Nimble caught up with me there after the game ended. He was quite flustered. He said he’d seen you at the ball court, and that you were looking for me. He wanted me to be sure to inform him if I saw you. As if I needed telling!”

I smiled grimly. “And you’ve been faithfully reporting on me ever since.” Bitterness welled up in me then, forcing me to add: “I suppose you went to him this morning, didn’t you, and told him all about last night? Was that what you had in mind-getting me to whisper my secrets in your ear on the sleeping mat so you could run straight to that boy with them?”

“No!” She recoiled as if I had just struck her. “No, it wasn’t like that! It was …” She lowered her voice. “You know what it was.”

“I know what it sounded like! I should have known better, shouldn’t I?”

“How dare you!” She was so angry she was spitting. “What doyou think I am? Do you think I’d give myself to any serf or slave just to hear the filthy details of some squalid fling with a pleasure girl in the marketplace?”

I said nothing for a moment. I did not know whether I dared believe her, but then I thought that it hardly mattered anyway, since there was no question of my staying here. My own anger failed in the face of hers. After everything that had happened to me I had little enough left of pride, and what there was was hardly worth fighting over.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I just thought … it’s been so long, you see …” I sighed wearily. “You were telling me about the boy and his father.”

She frowned and bit her lower lip. “There’s something going on between them. I don’t know what it is, but it was the last thing Nimble said to me. He told me to watch out. He said he never meant for anyone to get hurt, but he didn’t think he knew how to stop it any more.”

And just a little while before, in the ball court, the youth had said much the same thing to me: how he had not thought his father would go so far as to have Shining Light’s Bathed Slave killed on the pyramid, and how he had not known of the body in the canal. At the time I had dismissed his words out of hand; but he had quarreled with his father over me in the marketplace, and there had been that strange incident on the lake as well, when he had seen me in the water and said nothing.

“I had the feeling,” Lily went on, “that the boy was afraid of something, because he kept looking over his shoulder all the time. I wondered if it was his father.”

“Curling Mist was close enough,” I said, “along with that knife of his. He’s crazy, isn’t he? The boy would be right to be afraid. It doesn’t explain why he tried to save me, though, or why his father wants me dead.”

The explanation struck me before the words were out of my mouth. When I saw it, all the muscles in my face went loose, my eyes widened and my mouth fell open, and it was only afterward that I noticed I was staring past the woman at nothing like a slack-jawed imbecile.

“Yaotl?” she asked, alarmed. “What is it?”

“Oh, Quetzalcoatl,” I said softly, vainly invoking the god of wisdom, “I’ve been such an idiot!”

“What’s the matter? What are you talking about?”

“Young Warrior!”

“What about him?”

“That’s who he is! Of course!” I groaned. “My enemy-who else would hate me enough to want me dead?” I put my hand to my forehead and drew it down over my eyes as though clearing them of something that had obscured my vision, like cobwebs. “Young Warrior and Curling Mist are the same man!”

It was Lily’s turn to stare. “I don’t understand-I thought you said Young Warrior had left years ago-before you were thrown out of the Priest House.”

“He did. He must have come back. But it makes such perfect sense-he disguises himself as a priest because that’s what he used to be; and because under all that soot he could be anybody, so there’s no chance of me or any of his other contemporaries recognizing him. It explains why he wanted you to find out how I left the Priest House, and about Maize Flower. He’s obsessed-and he really hates me, enough to want to kill me with his own hands.”

“So why doesn’t his son want you dead as well?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he just doesn’t hate me as his father does. Perhaps he thinks it’s all getting out of control.” There was another possibility, I knew, but the moment it occurred to me I felt the horror again, the chasms opening up around me, the accusing voice calling my name.

I could not bring myself to name that possibility out loud, but Lily did.

“Or perhaps he thinks he’s your own.”

“No,” I said instantly, and as firmly as I could for the trembling that had come over me. “No, I don’t believe it. Maize Flower told me the child wasn’t mine-she said that, remember? And Young Warrior took her with him. He’d never have done that if she was carrying another man’s child.

“He’s not mine. He can’t be. He’s not!”

Lily stared at her hands resting in her lap and I munched my tortilla absently.

The woman broke the silence by reminding me that I had not told her what I intended to do now.

“Go away, I suppose,” I said dully. “When I came looking for you it was to give you a message for your son, but that was when I thought I was fit enough to take my enemies on. Now I need somewhere to hide from them. It’s too dangerous to stay here.”

“I know.” Lily had the good grace to sound regretful.

“What about you? What are you going to do?”

“I have to see the young man again,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I’ll have to tell him what you’ve told me-about the pleasure girl and leaving the Priest House, I mean, not the rest. I hope …” She faltered, took a deep breath and carried on: “I hope it’s enough to get Shining Light back. They can’t keep him forever, surely?”

I took a sip of water and watched her over the rim of my bowl. She looked tired, and as long as her son was away she was not allowed to disguise the deep shadows under her eyes with makeup. I wondered how much sleep she had had since he had been gone. I had seen her in so many moods in such a short time, I thought: proud, kindly, passionate, angry, distraught.

I remembered her father’s warning not to mention her son’s tastes. I sighed, realizing that if what I suspected was true then I was going to have to make her angry again. I had no choice, however: I had to know.

“What exactly is your son’s relationship with Curling Mist?”

Her expression froze.

“What do you mean?”

“I know your merchandise was taken to his warehouse. Your father told me.”

Lily let out a long shuddering breath. “Curling Mist convinced Shining Light it would be the ideal place to hide our stock. No one would ever know where it was, he said. I told the boy he was a fool, but he’s a man: it was his decision. He wouldn’t listen to me, and my father wouldn’t intervene. And he owed the man so much money. Now-it’s like living on sufferance. I don’t know where this warehouse is. Shining Light couldn’t tell me-he doesn’t know where it is himself! I just used to hope my son and Curling Mist didn’t fall out and Curling Mist would let us have enough of our own property to live on. Now, though …”

“Are Shining Light and Curling Mist lovers?”

I was not prepared for what she did next. Suddenly she was across the room with her hand in my hair and wringing it so savagely that I spat a mouthful of bread on the floor.

“Don’t you dare ask me that! Never, ever! Do you understand?”

“Yes!” Pain and surprise forced tears from my eyes.

She twisted the hand in my hair still further. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, I told you, yes!”

She let go. “Just remember what’s at stake for us. Shining Light and I were honored for his father’s sake, but that’s all over now, since … well, you know what’s happened. And now that parasite, Curling Mist, has got his hands on my son and our wealth, all we have left is trade, and until Shining Light’s back and can go abroad there’s precious little of that. If anyone outside my family ever hears that my son is … my son is a …” She swallowed, unable to say the word. “You know what would happen. If he showed his face in the city he would be burned alive and I would never be allowed to trade again.” Lily put her face very close to my face then, close enough that her breath on my cheek felt like a kiss, and hissed: “I will kill to prevent that, do you hear me?”

She resumed her place in the corner. I took one last tentative bite at the tortilla she had given me, but although I chewed and swallowed it dutifully I found I had lost my appetite.