The Demon of the Air

TEN WIND
1

My friend Handy, my brother had called him, but judging by the way the big commoner greeted us at dawn the next day he clearly saw our relationship differently.

“Get away from my house,” he said before I had opened my mouth, “and take your filthy pal with you.”

I took a step back from his threshold and stared at him in astonishment. I resisted the temptation to turn and look at my brother to see what he made of Handy’s appraisal. I was dressed in my usual short maguey fiber cape and breechcloth. Lion had let his appearance deteriorate still further since the previous day: now he wore only an old breechcloth that looked as if a pair of dogs had been fighting over it.

“Listen,” I protested, “you haven’t given me a chance to explain.”

“Explain what?” He turned back into his house. A mass of human hair, dangling from the ceiling, brushed the top of his head and he swiped at it angrily. It was an old war trophy, taken no doubt from the owner of one of the thighbones decorating his courtyard. “What’s there to explain? Exactly how I’m going to be put to death, just for being seen talking to you? I’d rather not know!”

“But we just wanted to talk to the boy!” I called from the doorway.

That brought Star waddling into the room from the courtyard with urgent shushing noises. “Be quiet, you fools! Do you want the whole city to know?”

Handy turned back to me with a helpless gesture. “You see, now? I wouldn’t have to put up with this if I hadn’t litstened to you. Now I have this extra mouth to feed and the moment anyone so much as comes round the corner at the end of the street, we have to stuff thelad in a maize bin in case it’s that steward of your master’s.” He sighed in exasperation. “Look, you might as well come in. Snake! Where are you? Run on ahead and tell them I’ll be late.”

“Thanks. My master’s steward? What would he be doing here?”

“Giving me orders. I work for Lord Feathered in Black now.”

“What?” Lion and I cried simultaneously. I looked quickly at my brother and then even more quickly away again. “As what?” I added weakly.

“As a handyman, a messenger. Lord Feathered in Black needed someone he could rely on, especially after his most valuable slave had gone missing. I’d been carrying messages to him for that merchant, Shining Light, and I suppose he thought I was reliable.” Handy caught me glancing nervously at the doorway. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not about to turn you in. But you see how awkward this is for me. How would I explain it, if I was found talking to some runaway?”

I could see how awkward it might be for him. More to the point, I could see how fatal it might be for me. “Of course,” I said as smoothly as I could. “I quite understand. Lion, we’d better forget the boy.”

But at that moment the boy from Coyoacan himself appeared. He had been attracted by all the fuss. Ignoring the rest of us, he went straight up to Star.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Nothing, Storm,” she said soothingly. “These men were just …”

Then he noticed my brother. He screamed.

Star wanted to get the boy out of our sight, but my brother would not have it, and Handy, forced to choose between them, sided reluctantly with the Constable. The woman submitted less than graciously to her husband’s will, planting herself by the door with a fierce scowl on her face and an arm draped protectively around the child’s shoulders. The moment we left the house, I suspected, Handy was going to wish he had never been born.

“Of course he talks,” she informed me coldly. “All it needed was a little kindness.”

“Have you asked him about his father yet?” I inquired, with a nervous glance at my brother.

“No, and I’m not going to. He’ll tell us about that in his own time, or not at all. What do you want to do-beat it out of him?”

I had been contemplating doing just that, but it was my brother who answered.

“We didn’t come here to hurt anybody.” He spoke to her more gently than I would have thought possible for him; but then I often forgot that he had children and grandchildren of his own. “But we have to know what this boy may have seen or heard. It’s for his own sake as much as ours.”

“And if he won’t answer your questions?”

“Then we’ll have to go away again.” My brother quelled my objection with a look. “He’s suffered enough already. Believe me, I know.”

Star looked as if she was about to say something, but to everyone’s surprise it was the boy who answered. He looked straight at Lion and said: “You came to our village with the soldiers.”

My brother hesitated for a long time before replying: “Yes, I did.”

Star looked at the boy in alarm. “Are you sure you want to talk about this now?”

The lad ignored her. “It was the old man, wasn’t it?”

“What old man?” my brother asked.

“The old man,” the boy repeated doggedly. He seemed to take little notice of anything any of us said. “He made you do it, didn’t he?”

My brother had more discretion than I would have given him credit for. Another man might have ended the discussion there, by seizing on the child’s words as proof that what had happened was not his fault, because he was merely acting under orders. All Lion did was to ask once more, very cautiously, who the old man was.

“He came to the village on foot,” Storm explained, “but I know he was important because the headman had to stand outside the house while they talked. But I knew you could hear things through the wall at the back, if you stood in the right place.”

“Old Black Feathers,” I breathed. “It all makes perfect sense.”

“What were they talking about?” Star asked gently. For all her concern for the child, she was as intrigued as I was.

“I didn’t understand it all. The old man kept asking questions. He wanted to know about something. Men with pale skins and beardshad arrived somewhere in the East. He said something about a place called Xicallanco. He wanted to know …” The boy’s voice faltered.

“Yes?” I leaned forward eagerly.

“The old man wanted to know if the pale men … if they really were men, or if they were gods, and if they were men, whether anyone who traded with them would earn fame and riches.”

“And what was the answer?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t catch it, but I heard the old man say: ‘You don’t have very long.’ And he said something else: he said other people might come and ask the same questions, and not to tell them anything.”

Handy, Lion and I exchanged glances, but before either of us could say a word the child’s composure suddenly cracked, and he burst into tears and hid his face in the folds of Star’s skirt. As she held him, speaking soothing words and rocking him like an infant, we heard his muffled voice crying: “And they did, didn’t they? They came back to kill us all! They took my father and then they came for us-my mother. Why? Why?”

The last words, bawled into Star’s lap, were barely intelligible. She held the boy, cooing and smoothing his hair with her fingers.

After a glance at me, my brother spoke softly to the boy. “Your father kept his word to the old man, lad, that’s why. He didn’t tell the other people what they wanted to hear.”

“All right, Yaotl,” my brother challenged me, after Star had led the sobbing child across the courtyard to the women’s room, “you said it all made perfect sense. It makes no sense to me at all, so you’d better explain.”

Lion, Handy and I squatted together in the courtyard, keeping the morning air’s lingering chill away with tortillas still warm from the griddle. These were a treat, and I was sure Star only let us have them in deference to my brother’s rank. Handy had lent him his best cloak too, although on Lion the old patched two-captive warrior’s mantle that I had first seen the commoner in somehow looked still more incongruous than a bare loincloth.

While we ate, I repeated for Handy’s benefit the story I had told my mother, sister and brother the day before.

“The old man the boy saw was my master,” I said. “It has to have been him.”

“But why?” Handy asked. “Why would the Chief Minister be skulking around sorcerers like some lovelorn girl wanting her fortune told?”

“It sounds as if he wanted to know how a trading venture would fare,” added my brother, “but he’s not a merchant. Why should he care about a trading venture? It’s not as if he needs the money!”

“True,” I said. “I don’t think it’s about money.” As I considered my brother’s words it came to me that the Chief Minister had given me the answer himself, in the evening of the day Storm’s father had died. “It’s about renown. He wants to be as famous as his father, and he wants to put one over on the Emperor at the same time. Lion, you remember what Montezuma told us about the East? Pale men with beards, pyramids on the sea. And you showed me that box yourself, the one full of cloth finer than cotton. The Emperor wanted the sorcerers to tell him whether the strangers he’d heard about were men or gods. His Chief Minister obviously thought he’d find out before the Emperor did. The Emperor mentioned Xicallanco. So did old Black Feathers, when he went to see the sorcerer. So, for that matter, did Lily. She told me her son used to talk about the place, and I don’t see why she should have been lying about that.”

“But what’s some trading post in the East to your master?” my brother asked.

“It’s not the place that interests him,” I replied, “but the reports that have come from there: these pale men from the East. My master thought the way to lasting fame was through these strangers, whoever or whatever they might be; and he wanted it for himself, and the Emperor was to know nothing about it. He obviously couldn’t go to see them in person. He needed an agent, someone he could rely on to keep his mouth shut-and someone who wouldn’t cause a stir if he turned up in a place like Xicallanco. Who else but a merchant? Famously secretive, and as for going abroad to deal with exotic foreigners-well, that’s what they do, isn’t it? And it turned out that the man he dealt with at the ball court, Curling Mist, knew just the man-another of his clients. He’s the link, you see, between old Black Feathers and Shining Light.”

“So the Chief Minister and the young merchant made a deal?” Handy suggested.

“That’s what I think. I suppose the Chief Minister paid off Shining Light’s debts and Shining Light agreed to go to Xicallanco for him. Probably old Black Feathers put up some capital for the venture too-goods to exchange for this wonderful cloth, whatever. And he consulted sorcerers-the way you would before any venture like this, only he did it very, very quietly.

“But then two things went wrong.”

“Montezuma had the sorcerers arrested,” my brother pointed out.

“That was the first, yes. The Emperor decided he wanted to talk to the sorcerers himself! My master must have been terrified when they were rounded up. He’d have had to get them out of the prison, just to make sure they didn’t compromise him. I suppose he just ordered the majordomo to release them into his custody. He’s the Chief Justice, he could do that. That explains why the majordomo was surprised when I came along afterward, as the Chief Minister’s slave, asking how they’d managed to escape. Then when the majordomo found he’d been ordered to act against the Emperor’s wishes he panicked, and said it must be magic. The Emperor more or less believed him, but in any case by then his Chief Minister had got the sorcerers out of his reach. What could he do with them then, though? He wasn’t going to kill them, not if he still wanted his questions answered, and he couldn’t just let them go. He needed somewhere to keep them, in case they talked. It was too dangerous to use his own house. I suppose he asked his partner in crime, Shining Light, who said put them in his warehouse. The only thing is, everything Shining Light owns-”

“Young Warrior!” breathed Lion. “So that’s how he got hold of the sorcerers! And their families-no witnesses, right?”

“Of course. The Chief Minister had to make sure no one could describe him coming to see the sorcerers, especially once they were out of the prison and beyond his control. So he got the Emperor to give him the job of finding them and used it as an excuse to have their families killed.”

Handy bit his lip. “But why the sacrifice?”

“Yes,” added my brother, “and why the body in the canal outsideyour master’s house? You thought that was a message from Young Warrior. What’s that got to do with these strangers in the East?”

“That’s the other thing that went wrong,” I said. “Whatever was going on between Shining Light and Young Warrior, it all changed, around the time of the Festival of the Raising of Banners. Then Shining Light became Young Warrior’s prisoner. Young Warrior had already got his hands on the sorcerers, along with the rest of the merchant’s property, and he’d started torturing them. I suppose he wanted the answers to old Black Feathers’ questions himself. Then he used them to blackmail my master. Old Black Feathers wanted them alive, so he started delivering them to him dead. As for the sacrifice …” I remembered what the merchant’s grandfather had told me, how Young Warrior-or, as far as he was concerned, Curling Mist-and Shining Light might have dreamed the whole business up together as a kind of sick joke. “It was the audacity of it, that was the whole point. They were telling my master they could do anything they wanted.” To have the peasant die at the summit of the Great Pyramid, and so publicly, and be powerless to intervene-unless he wanted to risk exposing his own dealings with the sorcerers-must have provoked my master beyond enduring. “They even sent Nimble to him as a messenger, to make sure he knew what had happened!”

“Storm’s father played his part well,” observed Handy, “considering he wasn’t supposed to be there. How’d they persuade him to be so cooperative?”

“The same way all Bathed Slaves are conditioned-remember what I told you about that, Handy, in the marketplace, just after the sacrifice? They give them sacred wine and sacred mushrooms, they keep them awake, they drill them endlessly, they get an old woman to bathe them and cosset them and make them feel like little children, they cut their hair and whiten their skins-and before that, he’d been hauled off to the prison, sprung and then tortured. In the end he wouldn’t have had an idea of his own left in his head-except one, and that was more important to him than staying alive. He wanted us to tell the old man about the big boat.”

“I still don’t see why Young Warrior was prepared to kill the sorcerers and threaten your master to get you,” Lion said. “Was it reallyall over something that happened at the Priest House all those years ago?”

“What else can it be? For some reason he seems to blame me for what happened to him and the girl from the market.”

“Doesn’t make sense to me,” said Handy. “It wasn’t your fault they had to run away, was it?”

“No, and I can’t pretend to understand it either. I suppose Young Warrior started out being jealous, and over the years it must have become an obsession.”

“Besides,” the commoner added, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “I thought you priests were all supposed to be impotent-aren’t you supposed to stick so many cactus spines and obsidian razors into your parts that you can’t get it up anyway?”

This drew a short, harsh laugh from Lion. “No,” I said coldly. “We used to draw blood from our penises, but only the real fanatics went further than that. I certainly didn’t. I always thought Young Warrior might be the type to do it, but I guess he wasn’t.”

“Does it really matter what started all this?” my brother asked impatiently. “We have to decide what we’re going to do now. Which of them do we go after-Young Warrior or the Chief Minister?”

My brother could be alarmingly direct, especially when he had an end in sight or, as now when his pride had been wounded, a score to settle.

“Both of them,” I said. “We still need to get the sorcerers to the Emperor before we can denounce my master, and we need Young Warrior to lead us to the sorcerers.” I considered for a moment before going on. “I think we go back to Lily’s house now-you and me, Lion. It’s just possible she was able to tell Nimble enough to get her son released, but if she wasn’t, Young Warrior won’t be able to resist having another crack at me. That’s where you come in, brother. You can protect me if he tries another trick like yesterday’s … What’s the joke?”

A wintry smile had appeared on Lion’s face. “I was just remembering,” he said dryly, “how I told you not to expect me to save your worthless hide this time!”

I looked at him seriously. “You will, though, if you have to. You owe me. I went to Coyoacan for you. I found the boy.”

My brother’s face darkened, but whatever he was about to say wasinterrupted by a sudden noise. An argument seemed to be going on outside the courtyard.

Handy cocked his head to one side for a moment, listening.

“It’s Snake,” he announced. “Why’s he making such a row?” He stood up and took a step toward the doorway. “Who’s he arguing with … Oh, shit!”

My brother was on his feet too, running for the women’s room. “Star! Quick, the maize bin!”

I was left alone with my head darting about like a turkey’s, looking for somewhere to run or hide. I thought briefly about the bathhouse, but I was too late to reach it in time and it would have been too obvious a hiding place anyway.

“Handy!” called a voice I knew only too well. “Congratulations! You’ve caught our runaway!”

I let my arms go limp at my sides as I watched an old adversary striding through the entrance to the courtyard toward me, with Snake plodding disconsolately at his heels.

It was my master’s steward.