The Demon of the Air

2

I let the steward drive me out of the courtyard like a stray dog, submitting meekly to the blows falling on my shoulders and back. He was so pleased with himself for having caught me that he did not stop for whatever business had brought him to the house.

“That canoe there. Go on, move!” He propelled me toward the canal beside the house with a vicious shove. Floating there was the canoe he had obviously come in, a little two-man craft with a boatman in the stern. He looked up in alarm when he realized that he had a second passenger. Then he recognized me and his expression changed, first to wide-eyed amazement and then to a broad grin of pure joy.

My heart sank. The boatman was none other than Rabbit, my master’s litter bearer, the man Costly had fooled into taking his medicine while he was supposed to be watching me and whom I had last seen sprawled on the ground after I had hit him with a slave collar.

“In!” the steward roared from a hand’s breadth behind me.

He kicked me as I was stepping into the boat. I had one foot on the bank and one in the bottom of the canoe and his foot swung up between my legs. Pain exploded in my groin and shot up into my guts, driving the breath out of me in a high-pitched whistle. I crashed into the bottom of the boat, rocking it violently and sending spouts of water over the sides.

“You’ve got worse than that to come,” the Prick assured me.

Rabbit gripped the boat’s sides to steady himself. “I haven’t got room for both of you!”

“Oh yes you have,” the steward growled as he stepped over me into the canoe’s bow “Yaotl won’t take up much room lying there like that. If he’s any trouble, we can always chuck him overboard!”

“Where are you taking me?” I gasped.

“Why, home, of course. Lord Feathered in Black will be so glad to have you back. He’s missed you!”

“Pleased to hear it,” I croaked. There was one thing I urgently had to tell the steward, and then I did not care if I never spoke to him again. “Listen, you must want to know what I was doing at Handy’s house.”

“Oh, all in good time. Don’t spoil things by telling me everything at once, Yaoti-I’m looking forward to beating it out of you!”

“I’m still looking for the prisoners-the ones the Emperor and our master told me to find,” I said carefully. “The man Shining Light offered to the war-god at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, he was one of them. His Lordship knows this. I wanted to find out if Handy remembered anything about him.” At all costs I must not give the steward or my master any reason to go back to the commoner’s house, at least until Lion and Storm were safely out of the way.

“That’s very interesting,” the steward said insincerely.

“He didn’t know anything. In fact he didn’t want to speak to me at all.”

“Well, you can tell it all to Lord Feathered in Black. I’ll be sure not to cut your tongue out until afterward!”

The rest of the journey to my master’s house was uneventful. The steward taunted me but I ignored him. For all his bluster, I knew no words of his could hurt me. It was what my master might choose to do and say that I had to worry about, and I distracted myself from his steward’s infantile threats by trying to master my fear of what was to come. I kept telling myself that Lord Feathered in Black could do nothing more than admonish me, that that was the law, but the image of those charred bones at Coyoacan kept forcing itself into my mind. Had the woman and children thought they were safe before the soldiers came?

As the Chief Minister’s residence came into view, I noticed a small party standing at the foot of the stairway leading to my master’s apartments. Most of them were warriors, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw the man in their midst, whose escort they plainly were. For an instant I thought he was my brother, from his clothes, his hair and his demeanor, but then I remembered that I had left Lion at Handy’s house, and at the same time I noticed that the ribbons in his hair were red rather than white. He was the Keeper of the House of Darkness: another of the Constables, and one of the advisers who had attended Montezuma when I had been summoned before the Emperor.

He his eyes tracked us as Rabbit brought the canoe to the side of the canal, and as we scrambled ashore, each of us throwing ourselves at the man’s feet with a cry of “My Lord …”

“Enough!” he snapped, and our obeisances ended abruptly. For a moment there was silence. I looked up from the floor, puzzled, wondering why he was standing there wasting time on us rather than getting on with whatever business had brought him to the Chief Minister’s house.

His eyes met mine. “Well, Yaotl?” he barked suddenly. “Your master told me you were missing, but I assume you have been looking for the sorcerers, as the Emperor ordered?”

“Er … Yes, my Lord …”

“So where are they?”

I swallowed, but could not find any words.

“The Emperor is getting impatient. The sorcerers, Yaotl. You were told to bring them to him. Where are they?”

The Steward spoke then. “My Lord, Lord Feathered in Black is on the track of them,” he announced, “and his slave here …”

“Shut up.”

I struggled to come up with an answer that was close enough to the truth to be convincing but not so close that the Emperor would conclude I had let him down. “M-my Lord,” I stammered, “I’m very close to them. A man named Curling Mist has them, in a merchant’s warehouse.”

“Where is this warehouse?”

“That’s the one thing I can’t tell you yet, my Lord … But I’m close to it, very close …”

The man leaned toward me, until his face was so near mine I could see little bubbles of spittle at the side of his mouth, popping in time with his words. “‘Very close,’ eh?” He stood up and half turned to glance up the steps behind him, toward where my master must be waiting for me. “How much closer will you be when you get up there, I wonder?”

“I won’t tell Lord Feathered in Black any more than I’ve told you, my Lord! I can’t! It’s all I know!”

“So you say.” He looked at each of his escorting warriors in turn, and they looked back at him, as if expecting an order. I tensed, wondering just how impatient Montezuma was-impatient enough to have told the Keeper of the House of Darkness to end it all here, on my own master’s threshhold?

“We go back to the palace,” he told his guards. As they fell in he turned back to me.

“Consider this your last warning, slave. The Emperor is relying on you. You will find those men, and bring them to Lord Montezuma, or your life will be forfeit!”

Rabbit and the steward frogmarched me up the steps and dumped me unceremoniously at my master’s feet.

Lord Feathered in Black listened in silence to his steward’s account of the encounter at the foot of his stairway.

“The Keeper of the House of Darkness told me much the same thing,” he said to no one in particular, “although he was more polite about it. So my esteemed cousin still thinks I have his precious sorcerers! If only I did!” He sighed. “You two may go. Yaotl will remain.”

He said nothing to me while Rabbit and the steward backed out if his presence and hastened away down the steps. He sat in his high-backed reed chair, looking at me the way a man might look at a bowl of stew if he suspected the meat was rotten. I said nothing to him. What would have been the point?

As the silence endured, I reflected on what had just happened to me. I realized that my situation was now more desperate than ever. If I survived whatever punishment my master might have in store for me for running away, it would only be because he still expected me to recover the sorcerers for him. The purpose of the Keeper of the House of Darkness’s visit had obviously been to remind us both that the Emperor himself wanted them back. Even if I could find them, what was I to do then, if his Chief Minister was still intent on keeping them for himself?

A girl appeared at the edge of my vision, carefully stepped around the quivering mess on the floor and passed my master a clay smoking-tube. Its end was already lit, and as he drew deeply on it the room filled with the complex aromas of a rich man’s tobacco-the leaf itself, the resinous scent of liquid amber, bitumen and a hint of vanilla.

When he finally spoke, addressing me through a cloud of fragrant smoke, his voice was calm and steady-neither the bellow of his superficial rages nor the sinister hiss of his deadly ones.

“You must understand that a man in my position simply cannot afford to have his most valuable slave disappear the way you did. I would be a laughingstock. At the very least I am going to have to have you formally admonished, and you know what that means.”

I tried in vain not to stare at him in astonishment, until the smoke caught my eyes and forced me to squeeze them shut.

Formally admonished?

“Oh yes, my Lord,” I said hastily, scarcely able to believe what I had heard. It meant that I would be subjected to a ritual harangue about my shortcomings as a slave before at least two witnesses. This was not a fearsome punishment at all, except that the third time it happened I could be sold, and as a slave known to be habitually recalcitrant I would be bought for only one purpose: as a very cheap gift for the gods. But I had been expecting far worse: the prospect of a savage beating had seemed optimistic.

My joy and relief were quickly tempered by the thought that the old man would not be merciful without reason. I waited fearfully to hear what else he might have in mind.

“Good. Well, now we’ve got that distasteful subject out of the way, I want you to tell me what you’ve been doing since you ran away.”

I told him what I dared. I had been to the ball court in Tlatelolco, seen the boy there and been attacked by Curling Mist. I had been taken to the merchant’s house, and there Curling Mist had attacked me again. I did not say I had gone home to Toltenco. I could not deny having been to Handy’s house, of course, since the steward had found me there, but I explained that to my master the same way I had to his steward, by claiming I had wanted to talk to Handy about Shining Light’s Bathed Slave.

I realized that he probably did not believe I was telling him the whole truth, and that it did not really matter. Each of us was playing a part. He was pretending to be my genial, indulgent master and I was pretending to be his loyal slave. That would last while I kept up the act on my side and he still had a use for me.

He did not interrupt my story. At the end of it he sat in thoughtful silence, watching a perfect smoke ring curling and flattening out as it rose toward the ceiling before slipping like a ghost through a small opening high in the wall.

“Curling Mist,” he murmured at last. “You think he is really an old enemy of yours from your days in the Priest House-what did you say his name was, Young Warrior? And he’s the one who’s trying to use the sorcerers to blackmail me into giving you up to him?”

“My Lord, yes. Hasn’t he been sending you messages, demanding that you hand me over? There was one on the body we found floating in the canal.”

A puzzled frown creased my master’s forehead. “Curling Mist, sending me messages? I don’t think so.” He put the smoking-tube down beside him delicately. “Let me show you something.”

The Chief Minister of the Aztecs got slowly to his feet and made his way over to a small reed chest under the little window. As he bent toward it a shaft of sunlight caught his face, picking out in shadow every line that nearly forty years in office had etched into it.

“Ah! Here it is. I want you to look at this.”

As he lowered himself back onto his seat he held out a single sheet of paper.

“It’s a letter. Why, it’s from Shining Light!”

“Your merchant,” the Chief Minister confirmed. “Read on.”

“It’s been written in some haste, and not by a very practiced hand,” I continued. “But I think it says …” The words died in my throat as I read them.

“Your friend Handy gave it to my steward, on Two Jaguar-the day you visited the prison.”

“That was the day Shining Light was kidnapped-when his mother said he left the city.” I looked at the paper again. “But that doesn’t make sense-not if I read this correctly.”

My master had taken up the smoking-tube again and leaned back in his seat. I watched the lines on his face shift as the muscles under them relaxed, and for the first time in the years I had known him wondered how much pain he was in.

“I took it to mean this,” he said. “‘This is my price for the rest of the sorcerers. Give me Yaotl, and they are yours.’ Do you agree?”

“Yes. But if he’d gone …”

“If he’d gone into exile, as his mother was saying, then I would have had to deliver you to his house, wouldn’t I? Which I duly did, the next day. I assumed his mother would take charge of you in his absence. In the event Curling Mist and his boy obviously tried to handle the thing themselves, and they made a mess of it, since you managed to escape.” He reached for the pipe again. “I have had other messages. The one you found on the corpse out there”-a slight turn of his head indicated the general location of the canal-“was one of them. But you think Curling Mist-or Young Warrior, if that’s who he really is-has the sorcerers, not Shining Light? That would mean the merchant was just carrying messages between me and Young Warrior. How amusing!” There was no laughter in his voice.

“I think their relationship is more complicated than that, my Lord. Shining Light and Young Warrior seem to have been lovers, and now Shining Light is Young Warrior’s prisoner. He has the merchant and his merchandise, as well as your sorcerers.”

“So you said. So where does he live, this Young Warrior?”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course not! What, you think the Chief Minister is going to beseen plucking at the hem of some small-time criminal’s cloak?” In his agitation he waved the smoking-tube about, sending flecks of ash flying from its end. “I have taken great care never to meet the man. It’s bad enough that I have to entertain that boy of his on occasion.”

“But if you are to find the sorcerers …”

“I could simply do what Shining Light or Curling Mist or Young Warrior or whoever has them asks me, and hand you over!”

There was a long silence. I wriggled nervously while the Chief Minister drew comfortably on his pipe. I wondered whether that meant the playacting was now over, and the steward would be told to finish what he had set out to do on the morning of Four Vulture, by trussing me up like a deer and delivering me to Young Warrior.

Eventually he took the clay tube out of his mouth. “Relax, Yaotl. If I wanted to exchange you for the sorcerers, would we be talking now? I would just have had my steward make the exchange, and that would be an end to it. But the truth is,” he went on, suddenly sounding older and wearier than ever, “I’m sick of being made a fool of. All this talk of godlike strangers from the East-well, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. You know what I mean?”

“No, my Lord.” I thought I did, however: it was the tale of jealousy, vanity and greed that I had outlined to Handy and Lion only that morning.

“You heard some of it from the Emperor himself, I believe. Weren’t you shown the box-the one that was washed up on the shore of the Divine Sea, with the marvelous cloth and the sword in it? Ever since I saw the things in that box I’ve been waiting for the men who made them to appear. Now they have, and who is going to be the man of the moment now, as my father was all those years ago? Montezuma? I don’t think so. He’s too preoccupied with omens and portents to be able to handle anything like this. All he can think of doing is consulting sorcerers over a silly fairy tale about some mythical ancestor of ours. If these strangers were to come to see him he’d run away-he’d find some cave to hide himself in. No, this was going to be my chance. I, Lord Feathered in Black, was going to be the man who made allies or slaves of these strangers and secured the things they brought with them, their weapons and goods, for the people! And who would have talked about Lord Tlacaelel then?”

I said nothing. I could understand his words but not the desire that lay behind them. It seemed to me not much of an ambition to be worth so many lives, simply to be a bigger man than your father.

My master toyed with the smoking-tube before putting it down for the last time.

“It’s gone out. They always do, if you leave them,” he said regretfully, as he let it roll across the floor away from him. “I know Montezuma thinks that I have the sorcerers, or that I know where they are. I know he told you to find them and bring them to him. You know why I can never allow that to happen?”

“Yes, my Lord. They could tell the Emperor that you instructed his majordomo to release them and hand them over to you. And you did that because you couldn’t let Montezuma know you had consulted them yourself about your plans to deal with the strangers on your own account.”

“I have to get those men back, dead or alive. If the only way to do that is to hand you over to the man who stole them from me, then that’s what I’ll do.” He let that hang in the air for a moment before going on: “But he’s laughing at me. I made a deal with Shining Light: he was to keep those men in a safe place until I could question them myself. Now I find that Young Warrior duped me and kidnapped Shining Light. He turned one of the sorcerers into a Bathed Slave for sacrifice and left another in the water outside my own house. So I don’t just want the sorcerers back-I want this man killed.” My master’s grim smile made his mouth look like just another line across his face. “And as for you, Yaoti-if you don’t want me to make a present of you to your enemy, you’d better help me think of a way of finding him!”

So my master wanted to shed still more blood. I might well have killed Young Warrior myself if I had the chance, but I felt a sudden urge to be sick.

I forced myself to think.

“The only person who I know is in contact with him is the merchant’s mother, Lily,” I said. “She was hoping that if she could tell the boy, Nimble, enough about me, her son would be released …”

“He wasn’t. She’s still saying he’s abroad.”

“Then she must still be talking to the boy. I thought that by goingto see her I could offer myself as bait-I could get Young Warrior to come to me.”

“And it worked. He did!”

“Yes-nearly killing me in the process.”

My master’s chair creaked as he sat back, with his eyes closed and the fingers of one hand drumming thoughtfully on his knee.

I had to try to think faster than he could.

It was too much to hope he would let me go anywhere alone: he would assume that I intended to run away the first chance I got. The idea of repeating my attempt to lure Young Warrior out of hiding through Lily obviously appealed to him, but if he had his way I would have an escort of his own choosing-and in all likelihood neither Young Warrior nor I would survive the encounter.

I had to find a way of arranging the meeting so that old Black Feathers could not control the outcome, and I could have some chance of getting away.

“My Lord,” I said slowly, “could the merchants be prevailed upon to hold a banquet?”

He opened his eyes and frowned. “A banquet?”

“If you tell Lily and her father to give one, they will. You are always invited to the merchants’ feasts. I would be in your retinue-and there would be enough of us to catch Young Warrior if he tried anything.” Not to mention, I thought privately, enough other people to enable me to hide in the crowd and make my own escape. It was not much of a plan, but it was all I could come up with.

“A banquet.” A dreamy look came into the Chief Minister’s eyes. “I like it. After all that family’s put me through, I think a good meal is the least they can offer me!”