The Demon of the Air

2

With nothing to give to a boatman I made my way through the city on foot, keeping well away from anywhere I might be recognized. Fortunately I left Pochtlan at the hottest part of the day, when there were few people about. At last I stood beside the canal that trickled past one wall of the yard, staring at the little house I had grown up in and wondering whether it had been worth the journey.

With the Chief Minister presumably looking for his errant slave, it would not be safe to stay at my old home, and I had certainly not come for sentimental reasons. I was not here for a rest either, although my bones and muscles throbbed, my stomach still felt as if it had been kicked and my head did not belong on my shoulders.

It was not as if I expected to be made welcome anyway.

I had no choice, however. I had tried seeking out Shining Light and his allies and the attempt had nearly cost me my life and left me feeling betrayed and humiliated. I believed Lily’s fear for her son was genuine, and that whatever their relationship may have been before, Curling Mist was now using Shining Light to make his mother do his bidding, just as he had earlier tried using the sorcerers to force my master to hand me over. I also knew, especially after Curling Mist’s attack on me, that Nimble had wanted to know about my affair with Maize Flower and Curling Mist wanted to kill me. None of this information had gotten me any nearer finding the sorcerers, however.

Now I had another confrontation in mind, one which might prove as dangerous as the one I had just survived. I was going to look for my elder brother, to challenge him with his complicity in thekillings in Coyoacan, and demand to know just what it was about the Chief Minister and the sorcerers that he knew but had held back from me.

I dared not go near my brother’s quarters at the palace, for fear of being seen by my master or his servants. The only other option was to come home.

I watched an old woman emerge from the yard to empty a clay pot briskly into the canal. She had hair the color of ash, skin like old paper and arms and legs so thin they looked as if a child could snap them. Clad in an old blue skirt and blouse and limping on swollen joints, she looked frail and pitiable, although in reality she was neither.

She shot a curious glance at me before turning back into the house but showed no sign of knowing who I was.

“Mother?”

She was almost inside the yard before she stopped to glance over her shoulder.

“What do you want?” She might have been talking to a stranger, and an unwelcome one at that.

“You know who I am.” I started toward her. She half turned in my direction but took another step into the yard.

“Do I?” she replied coldly. “I don’t know. You look a bit like my youngest son, Yaotl the drunkard, but you can’t be him. He’s a slave in the Chief Minister’s household.” She spat the word “slave” at me as though a fly had landed on her tongue, but made no move to stop me as I walked toward the entrance to the house.

Halting nervously on the threshold, I asked her where my father was.

“Chapultepec,” she informed me grudgingly, “along with your brothers-except Lion, of course. They were called up to work on the aqueduct-good, honest toil!” This was her way of reminding me that I was exempt from being conscripted into a work gang, as any commoner might be, only because I was a slave and my labor belonged to my master. “I don’t expect them back tonight-now, isn’t that lucky for you?” she added with a sneer.

So I would not have to see my father, after all. What I had to do here was going to be fraught enough as it was, without the furious recriminations that would have been bound to accompany such ameeting. I felt a surge of relief, barely tempered by my mother’s adding: “They took the last of today’s tortillas with them in their lunch bags when they left this morning, so you needn’t think you’re going to be fed!”

“Yaotl!” My sister, Precious Jade, was making paper in the yard, using a wooden beater on strips of fig-tree bark stretched over a stone. “What are you doing here?”

“Thanks for the welcome,” I replied sullenly. “I’ve walked a long way, you know. I need a rest.”

“You smell revolting and you look as if you’ve been in a fight.” She sniffed elaborately.

I sat down facing her. “It’s a long story, Jade,” I said wearily. “I’m too tired to tell it now, though.”

My mother emerged from the house carrying a copper mirror that had hung on one of the walls since I was a baby and a bowl of rich maize gruel. The smell reminded me how thoroughly I had emptied my stomach a few hours before. “I was going to give it to the dogs,” she said, “but since you’re here you might as well eat it. I don’t suppose slaves eat very well.”

As I gobbled the porridge my sister said: “I hope that doesn’t go the same way as your last meal. Or had you given up solid food?”

“Give it a rest, Jade,” I mumbled between gulps. “I haven’t had a drink in years.” I told myself that Kindly’s gourds had not counted, because I had been sick, and of course the drink Curling Mist had forced on me had not counted either.

All the same, there was no denying that it had been real sacred wine that had passed my lips and warmed my belly. I seized on the memory of that last mouthful, the gourd jammed against my lips, the bitterness of the mushrooms underlying the sacred wine’s sour taste, and told myself that was what it was really like, and I never wanted to touch the stuff again.

I felt my stomach contract and hurriedly pushed the bowl away.

“What’s the matter?” asked my mother. “Don’t you like it?”

“Not used to home cooking,” my sister suggested. “He’s been living on delicacies from the Chief Minister’s table. Good, wholesome food makes him throw up … Why don’t you give him the mirror, Mother? Show him what he’s become!”

“Look, I’m just full, that’s all …” I heard my own voice tail off as the mirror was dangled in front of me.

The eyes, with their deep brown irises shifting from side to side, I could accept as my own, even if their lids were heavier than I remembered. It was the blue-black marks around them, the swollen and bent nose, the shapeless ears and the thought of whatever lay under my cloak that I had not dared look at which scared me.

“All right,” I breathed, “so I’m no beauty. So there was a fight. It wasn’t my fault!”

“I’m surprised you can remember anything about it,” snapped my sister.

“So how did you look, the last time Amaxtli hit you?” I retorted viciously. My brother-in-law could be as free with his fists as my sister was with her tongue.

“That’s enough!” My mother had had years of practice at putting down our arguments. “Yaotl, I hope you didn’t come here just to start a row. What do you want?”

“I need to speak to Lion.”

My mother and my sister looked at each other. My mother said, in what for her was a subdued voice: “You’re in trouble again, aren’t you? Is it that serious?”

“My life is in danger.”

“It would have to be more serious than that!” said Jade.

“Look, will you help me, or what?”

“We will send a message to him,” said my mother stiffly. “Whether he’ll come is another matter. He doesn’t love you, Yaotl.”

“I know that.”

My sister said: “In the meantime, you can clean yourself up. Have a bath. Yes, actually that’s a good idea-have a bath. It will get you out of our sight for a while!”

I looked at the dome-shaped bathhouse, at the soot stain against one wall and the hearthstones that showed where the fire was built up to heat the interior. I thought about shedding my filthy clothes, the dust of the city and the strange face I had taken on-the face of a fugitive-and exchanging them for the dark, private, steamy world of a sweat bath.

“Who’s going to make the fire up?” I asked, dubiously.

“I will,” said Jade firmly. “Don’t worry-it will be nice and hot. Trust me!”

It is always a mistake to fall asleep in a sweat bath.

I awoke from a sleep of sheer exhaustion into a nightmare: a hot, dark, airless, cramped space with something yanking my ankle as ferociously as a dog tugging at a bone or the water monster dragging a doomed sailor down to his death. I howled. I called on the gods, the Emperor and my mother to save me. I kicked out, my hands reached vainly for the smooth wall enclosing me, and I hit my head on the entrance to the bathhouse.

The afternoon sky drenched my eyes with daylight, but when I squeezed them shut I saw little sparks twinkling like stars.

“What’s up with him?” demanded the voice I had come to hear and had been dreading.

“You probably woke him up,” Jade replied.

“Maybe he was having a nightmare,” my mother suggested.

“I hope not,” said Lion sourly. “I’d have hated to interrupt … Are you with us yet, you lazy toad?”

I sat up. The yard spun around me. I shook my head to clear it and wished I had not as my ears started to ring.

“I was having a bath,” I said unnecessarily. I stared at my brother. There was something wrong with his appearance. I closed my eyes, thinking in my befuddled state that I might be imagining things, but when I opened them again he was still there and still looked the same.

“Why are you dressed like that?” I asked.

He had shed the long yellow cotton mantle of the Guardian of the Waterfront for a cloak of maguey cloth that barely covered his knees. His hair fell down his back, loosely tied with a piece of cord instead of his customary white ribbons. Plain bone keepers had replaced his ornate lip-plugs and earplugs, and his face was unpainted. His feet were bare. It was my brother, but not as I had known him for years, and the moment I registered this I realized that scarcely anyone else in the city would recognize him now. I knew he must feel this keenly. Unless he was calling on the Emperor, when dressing down was obligatory, it was unthinkable for a man of my brother’s rank to shed his hard-won regalia-all the more so when he had been born a commoner.

His fingers plucked distastefully at the ragged hem of his cloak.

“I think you might tell me why, Yaotl. It seems I have to put on a disguise just to visit my fool of a younger brother, in case half the army follows me with a mind to butcher my entire family. What did you want to run away for? You realize the Chief Minister’s got men out looking for you, don’t you? They’ve even questioned me! Of course, I told them there was no point looking for you here. Yaotl hasn’t been home in years, I said. There’s no way he’d be stupid enough to go back there now, when he knows he’s a wanted man. Obviously I overestimated you!”

“Why do you think I ran away?” I replied defensively. “People kept trying to kill me!”

He cast an expert eye over my naked body. I squirmed self-consciously until my sister passed me a clean breechcloth.

“So I see,” he commented, as I tied the breechcloth with as much dignity as I could manage. “They haven’t made a very good job of it. What do you expect me to do about it?”

“You can tell me what happened at Coyoacan.”

My brother suddenly managed to look both shocked and uncomfortable, like a man who has found a hornet buzzing around under his cloak.

“What do you mean?”

“You remember what the Emperor told us, Lion. My master took extreme measures to find the sorcerers. I remember what you said as well, about the warriors he sent to Coyoacan. I thought at the time you knew more than you were telling me. But you told me to go there, so I did. I saw the house that got burned down. I saw the bodies-the children, and the woman. I found everything you wanted me find.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I wondered why you took such care to make sure I knew where to look, but didn’t want to tell me what had happened there. You wanted me to see for myself what the Chief Minister had done, but you didn’t want to tell me about it in case I started asking how you knew so much. Only I found more than you bargained for at that house: I found traces of the warriors who’d called there. I found a strap off one of their sandals-one of those big floppy things, like what you normally wear. It was badly frayed. I suppose it was wornout and came off when someone trod on it, but then you wouldn’t bother dressing up for an outing like that, would you?

“Were you one of them? Did you kill those people?”

“Yaotl!” my mother cried, appalled.

My brother said nothing. His jaw began working dangerously. His face had gone dark red with anger.

I had done it now: I had accused him and gone too far to withdraw. “Lion, since we last met, I’ve been threatened with a knife, abducted, nearly asphyxiated, beaten up and poisoned. I’ve found one body floating in a canal-all right, I know you had nothing to do with that one, but I’ve raked over the burned remains of three others, and I know it was the army that killed them. You didn’t tell me very much, but I’ve seen enough to work some of it out for myself. You are one of the Emperor’s executioners. Was it your handiwork I saw? Why, Lion? At least tell me that. I know one of the sorcerers was taken from that house. Why did his family have to die?”

My brother’s pent-up fury exploded then. He was a skilled warrior and fast, in spite of his years. He leaped toward me in a blur of speed and I felt the blow, a stinging open-handed slap to the side of my head, before I saw it coming. As I cowered under him he bellowed: “Who do you think you are, to talk to me like that? Am I going to be questioned by a slave, a drunk, a loser like you?” Then he rounded on my mother and sister. “As for you-you brought me here just to listen to this? I had to traipse halfway across the city dressed like a tramp in case the Chief Minister had me followed and all for what? So this idiot could accuse me of murder to my face?”

“Sit down!”

My brother had been trained to issue commands and had spent years in the army honing the skill, but there was something much older and deeper in the way my mother spoke. It stirred something planted in him when we had both been little boys, and he had always been the first to come meekly to order, even though he was the eldest and the biggest. He subsided now as quickly as he had flared up.

“I’ll tell you who he is,” our mother reminded him. “He’s your brother and my son. Now get away from him, and then,” she went on in a dangerous voice, “I want to hear you answer his questions.”

“Mother,” I began, but she turned on me too.

“And you, Yaotl, try and keep a civil tongue in your head!”

Lion sat, glaring at me from under heavy, sulky eyelids.

I took a deep breath and tried again.

My mother was right: I ought to choose my words carefully. Lion was one of the most respected and feared men in the city. The gaudy finery in which he and others of his rank vaunted themselves could be got only from the Emperor’s hand, for valor on the battlefield. This was why clothes and jewels were so important to us: if you saw a man like my brother in the street you would not need to ask how he came by his wealth, and you would know either to be polite to him or keep out of his way. Yet Lion had abandoned his public face to come and see me. He had done that for a reason, but I knew better than to forget what it was costing him.

“I’m sorry, Lion.” The unexpected apology lightened his expression a little. Even my mother sighed happily. “But I have to know what my master did and why. You remember what the Emperor told me to do. I’ve got to find the sorcerers now and get them to him and tell him what his Chief Minister has been up to at the same time. If I can’t do that then I’m likely to suffer a worse fate than the people in that village.”

My brother shot a brief glance at my mother, who was watching him impassively, like a judge waiting to hear a witness’s evidence.

The most extraordinary change came over his face. It went from the deep red of overripe tomatoes to the color of an uncooked sweet potato. It seemed to sag, as though all the strength had drained out of it and left the skin hanging unsupported on the bones beneath. Suddenly it felt as though we were looking, not at a famous warrior, but at a common man old before his time.

He turned his face toward the sky and shut his eyes. When he opened them to look at us again, there was something I had never expected to see: a tear running down his cheek.

“I don’t know why.” He was barely whispering. “I was never told. But until we talked to the Emperor that day, Yaotl, I thought the orders had come from him. I will eat earth for that!” He touched the ground with a fingertip automatically.

“So it’s true, then,” my mother stated grimly.

“I tried not to let them suffer! I made the men take the children outside-they never knew what happened to their mother, or she what we did to them. I didn’t have a choice, do you understand?”

For a long time none of us answered him. My sister stared resolutely at the strip of bark in front of her, although she had not touched her bark-beater since I had emerged from the bathhouse. My mother’s face might have been carved out of granite.

At last I made myself say: “I think you’d better tell it from the beginning, Lion.”

“I didn’t want to be there,” my brother mumbled. “It’s not exactly soldiering, is it? Stringing up women and bashing their children’s brains out, like you’d swing a fish you’d caught against a rock to stop it flopping about.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw my sister wince.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked.

“Don’t be stupid! We were under orders. Anyway, the Constables-we’re the Emperor’s hard men, aren’t we? What was it to us, any more than cracking the heads of drunks in front of the palace?”

I chose to ignore that. “You thought the orders came from the Emperor?”

“Who else? I didn’t hear him issue them, but …” My brother sighed heavily. “Look, I’ll tell you how it was. We weren’t told anything about these men. We weren’t even told their names. We just had to find the village headman and bring in the man he took us to.

“We went into Coyoacan in force-a full squad of twenty men, a lot just to make an arrest. We met up with the headman and his party outside the village well before daybreak.”

“What did they tell you?” I asked.

“They didn’t tell us anything at all! But you pick up things. I heard the word ‘sorcerer’ whispered a couple of times, when they thought we weren’t listening. When I heard that, I thought we were wasting our time. I assumed any sorcerer worth his salt would have known we were coming for him and would have vanished like the mist before we got there. He wouldn’t need to be a sorcerer, for that matter-you try moving a squad of fully armed warriors through a village in complete darkness without making a noise. They must have heard us on the other side of the lake.

“In the event, though, we picked him up without any trouble at all. We even had men stationed at the back of the house, in case hebroke the wall down and got out that way. It was only one of those little crude one-room mud huts, I could have knocked the wall through with my elbows. We needn’t have bothered. The headman just stood at the door and called him, and out he came, as meek as you like.”

“What did he look like?”

“Little scrawny specimen. Not what you’d call impressive, except for his ears. I think I’d know him again, just from the ears.”

“What happened to the man then?” I asked.

“We marched him off to the prison. We didn’t think about him anymore once we’d brought him in. Why should we? I was just relieved we hadn’t had to break any heads. Like I said, this sort of thing isn’t exactly soldiering-not what they hand out cotton capes, tobacco and turquoise lip-plugs for, anyway.

“So when they told us to go back-”

“When was that?” I asked eagerly.

“Not long after the arrests. I wasn’t happy, nor were my men, but orders are orders, and he made it very clear what we had to do. Whatever the man we had taken had done, it meant his family had to die and his house had to be razed. It had to seem as if he had never existed.”

“He made it very clear? Who?” I asked, although I thought I knew the answer.

Lion looked appealingly at my mother. She told him to go on in a voice I could barely hear.

“He spoke to us in person. He didn’t take long-I had the feeling he was in a hurry because he had the same orders to issue to all the other squads who’d been involved in the roundup, and all in person, as if he couldn’t entrust the task to anyone else. It was your esteemed master, Yaotl: the Chief Minister himself, Lord Feathered in Black!”

He glanced at each of us in turn, as if to gauge the impact his revelation made on us. If he had expected shock he was disappointed. My mother and sister seemed not to have moved a muscle since he had begun speaking, while I had known what he was going to say before he said it. The three of us looked back at him in grim silence.

Lion drew a hand across his face, and then stared at it, as if surprised to see it had come away wet.

“We hanged the woman in her own doorway. That’s what he told us to do. I hit her over the head first, when she wasn’t looking, so she wouldn’t know and the children wouldn’t hear her struggling. I told my men it would make them easier to deal with.” Suddenly he snarled like a trapped beast trying to ward off its tormentors. “Do you think we wanted to do this? The Chief Minister told us to swing the children’s heads against the outside wall. I had no choice: my men had all been there when the Chief Minister gave us our orders. He meant it that way, didn’t he? If my men hadn’t heard him, it might have been different, but what else could I do?”

“What else did you do?” I asked.

“We searched the house for other occupants. Then we torched it. Even the house had to go, don’t you see? To give the villagers the idea the people who lived there never existed and weren’t to be spoken of.”

I leaned forward, unable to keep the urgency out of my voice. “You got all the occupants? You’re sure of that?”

My brother gave me a strange look: the sort of look a drowning man might give to someone he has just seen on shore carrying a rope. “All the occupants … why do you ask?”

I hesitated, unsure how far I could trust him with news of the boy Handy and I had found. “I just wondered if anyone might have escaped.”

“I accounted for the whole family.”

“You’re sure?”

“Oh yes,” my brother assured me in a voice brittle with self-reproach, “every last one.” He took a deep breath before going on: “Except the one I rescued.”

“Rescued?” my mother, my sister and I cried in unison.

“Maybe we didn’t search the place as well as we should have. I think that’s what made me turn back, just the feeling that we’d missed something. I pretended I had a stone in my sandal, sent the rest of the lads on ahead and doubled back into the village.

“Everyone had run away, of course, and so there was nobody in the place except me and whoever was screaming inside the burning house. I know, I should have left him-but I was sick of the whole business by now. So I got him out, just before the roof fell in. It wasn’teasy, either-he kept kicking and screaming, right up until I dragged him past his mother’s body. I had to push her legs out of the way.” He looked thoughtful. “Funny, he stopped screaming then.”

“You disobeyed orders?” I was struggling to reconcile the image of a man dragging a terrified child from the burning, collapsing shell of his home with everything else my brother had told us. “What if you’d got caught?”

“Then your master would have had me cut to pieces, wouldn’t he?” he snapped.

“Where’s the boy now?” my sister asked anxiously.

“No idea,” Lion told her. “The moment I put him down he ran for it.” He sighed. “I don’t blame him. The poor kid was probably as frightened of me as he was of the fire.”

I remembered the boy’s silence and how not even Star’s coaxing had persuaded him to talk. Now it seemed more important than ever to get some words out of him.

While I was thinking about this, a row was developing between my brother and Jade.

“I don’t care whose orders you thought you were following!” my sister shrieked. “Don’t you have a mind of your own? Couldn’t you see what you were doing was wrong?”

“You don’t understand,” Lion replied feebly. He looked to my mother to intervene but she just looked away. “You haven’t been in the army. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Not even Yaotl would have been that stupid!” Jade was brandishing her bark-beater like a warrior waving his sword as he taunts the enemy. “At least he’d have thought of a way out of it!”

“I got the boy out,” Lion protested. “I risked my life to save him-doesn’t that mean anything? What else could I do?” Then he rounded on me, snarling: “This is all your master’s fault!”

“Don’t try to blame Yaotl for this, Lion,” my mother warned. “It sounds as if you should have told him all this days ago.”

“He couldn’t,” I said, surprising myself with my own mildness. “It was the shame of it, wasn’t it, brother? Especially when you realized old Black Feathers had duped you into thinking you were doing the Emperor’s bidding.”

“At least you might have looked after the boy!” my sister said. “What do you suppose happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” my brother muttered wretchedly.

“I do,” I told him. “And I’ve just thought of something you could do to make amends.”

I told them what I had seen and done since the Festival of the Raising of Banners.

I told them as much as I thought fitting. I saw no need to mention the night I had spent with Lily, but, to make sense of the rest, I was forced to stumble through an account of my visits to Maize Flower, the girl in the marketplace.

My sister silently rolled her eyes skyward at that point in the tale. My mother’s expression remained unmoved, as if nothing she heard now could affect her anymore. Lion listened to everything I said with his eyes half closed. Perhaps he thought following my story would help him make sense of his own.

My mother’s voice was the first to break the silence after I had finished.

“So it comes to this. All the while you were supposed to be devoted to the gods, you were running around with some cheap whore from the marketplace.”

“Not all the time,” I said defensively, “and she wasn’t especially cheap.”

“And you didn’t even have the sense to make sure you didn’t get her pregnant!”

“Now wait a moment!” I cried. “I didn’t get her pregnant! That was Young Warrior-you heard me tell you what she said!”

“And you believed her?” It was my sister’s turn. “I take back what I said, Lion-Yaotl’s even more stupid than you are, after all!”

My brother stiffened but did not answer her. Instead he looked thoughtfully at me.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right. You’re saying Young Warrior-that friend of yours at the Priest House, the one who vanished before they could stone him to death for fornication-really ran off with the girl you’d both been seeing, and they had the child she told you about, and now he’s going around pretending to be a priest and taking bets on the ball game, with the boy in tow?”

“They must have come back to the city years after they left,” I confirmed. “Nimble was brought up abroad, in exile. The lad still hasan accent.” I wondered where he had acquired it-among the Tarascans, perhaps? That would explain the bronze knife. “Young Warrior can’t use his own name, of course, and he goes about in disguise. Whenever I’ve seen him, he’s been so heavily blacked up he might be anyone.”

“But Young Warrior was a priest! What’s he doing, taking illegal bets for a living?”

“I was a priest-what am I doing as a slave?” I responded crisply. “Young Warrior’s been living outside the law ever since he left the Priest House. You said it yourself: he could be stoned to death. What has he got to lose?”

“So what do you want to do now, go and denounce them all to the Emperor-your master, Young Warrior and his lad?”

“The young man might be your nephew,” my mother warned him.

“No he isn’t!” I insisted. My mother’s and my sister’s willingness to believe the child had been mine made me uneasy. “All the same, I don’t think it would be a good idea. The Emperor wants the sorcerers, not a tall story about his Chief Minister. Telling Montezuma that old Black Feathers doesn’t know where those men are because he lost them, when we have no more idea of their whereabouts than he does, won’t help us at all.”

“So what can we do, then?” I noticed that all of a sudden Lion and I appeared to have become allies. I had mixed feelings about that: the renowned and mighty warrior was not going to be content to take directions from his disgraced younger brother for long. “Go looking for Curling Mist, Young Warrior, whatever his name is?”

I grimaced. “That hasn’t done me a lot of good so far! Besides, I don’t even know what he looks like under all that soot-not after all these years, anyway. I’d rather concentrate on the sorcerers. I think we ought to find out what my master’s interest in those men was in the first place-what any of them might have done that would have made him go after his whole family. The boy you saved from the burning house is the only person I know of who might be able to tell us that. As far as I know, he’s still at Handy’s place. He wasn’t talking when I left. He may have said something since, of course, but if he hasn’t, it will be because Star’s too gentle. I have a feeling what heneeds is a fright, to shock it out of him.” I looked steadily at my brother. “Seeing you again ought to do it.”

“That sounds brutal,” my sister objected.

“He could be right, though,” Lion replied. “Might even help the lad, in the long run. Boys from the House of Youth get like that sometimes, the first time they follow the army to war and see the darts flying and real wounds. They come back and won’t talk about it, and that’s not good. You want to go and see your friend Handy tomorrow, then?” The prospect of doing something, however small, to repair the damage he had done had given him back something of his old briskness of manner.

His pride had taken a beating, however, and was obviously still suffering under his mother and his sister’s reproachful looks. He soon announced that he was tired and wanted to go in and rest. I imagined him sitting awake all night, with his face to the wall, now scowling, now twisted with grief and regret, now frowning in bewilderment at the position he found himself in.

“You, in the meantime, can make yourself useful,” my mother said, handing me a bark-beater.

“What?” I cried feebly. “You let my brother go in and rest and expect me to do women’s work?”

“You’re eating our food, you can share our work,” said my sister. “And leave Lion alone-can’t you see he’s suffering?”

“So am I! I’ve still got the bruises-and I haven’t killed anyone!”

I wondered how it was that my brother’s offense seemed to have been so quickly forgiven, but then I decided to forget it. I was never going to be the favorite son.