The Demon of the Air

4

This time the merchant did not trouble to disguise his voice. I knew it at once, although it now bore little trace of the affable young man I had first met at the Festival of the Raising of Banners.

“Yaotl! Is that you?”

I did not know what to do. The urge to plunge into the lake was strong, even though I did not know how far away the shore was, but my brother was on the boat in front of me, at his enemy’s mercy, and I could not bring myself to abandon him.

“I think you’d better talk to me, Yaotl! I need someone to tell me who I’ve got here-before I start flaying him. He might have trouble telling me himself, after I’ve cut his face off!”

He was standing over Lion’s body. I did not know whether my brother was conscious or even alive. I was surprised to find that I cared. I might not have until a few days before, when I had learned that his shame at what happened at Coyoacan equaled mine at being expelled from the Priest House.

Besides, I told myself, if anything happened to him I would only have to explain it to my mother.

“All right!” I told myself the water was too cold to jump into anyway. “I wouldn’t touch him, if I were you. He’s not just some commoner who won’t be missed.”

“I thought so! The Guardian of the Waterfront!”

“The Guardian of the Waterfront?” Nimble’s voice was hushed with amazement. “You mean, Yaotl’s brother?”

“Who else? My mother told you they were at the banquet together!” My anger at the woman revived for telling him so much, for letting this go so far-and for letting herself be so cruelly duped. “I am having a good night, aren’t I? Fancy me bagging the Guardian of the Waterfront himself! The Emperor should give me jeweled sandals and a jade labret for this, don’t you think, Nimble?” He laughed, but there was no humor in it, and the boy did not join in.

“What do you want?” I demanded.

“Isn’t that obvious? What we want is you! Now get on this boat, before I start skinning your precious brother alive!”

I could probably have got away: the shore could not be that distant, and even if my enemy followed me, there was every chance I could evade him in the darkness. But then, I thought, where would I go? With neither my master nor the Emperor satisfied, the sorcerers unrecovered and the man who had taken them still at large, my brother’s body turned into another grisly message to the Chief Minister and Handy probably drowned-who in the entire city would I have left to turn to?

“I’m coming,” I called. “Just don’t touch him, do you hear me?”

I scrambled across the gap between the boats and stood up in the big vessel’s stern. Shining Light and Nimble were near the shelter, and I kept as far away from them both as I could.

Neither of them made any effort to move toward me. Several shapeless bundles lay at Shining Light’s feet: with a chill I felt even over the cold of the night I realized that they were human bodies and my brother’s was among them.

A commotion had started up on the shore. Voices, one of them my master’s, called through the darkness, and someone was thrashing about in the undergrowth.

“What have you done with my brother?”

Shining Light looked down, as if noticing one of the heaps at his feet for the first time. I heard a thump as he kicked it casually, and Lion’s voice letting out an involuntary groan. “He seems to be still alive.”

When he stepped over Lion’s body I noticed the glint of starlight on obsidian and realized that he was still holding his sword.

“I don’t care about your brother. We only have to settle with you, now, and then we can go.”

Then the boy spoke up. He had not moved, and the young merchant had stepped in front of him. “Shining Light, wait …”

“Wait?” Shining Light snapped, barely glancing over his shoulder. “Wait? What for? You heard enough from Lily, didn’t you? What’s to wait for? We’ve no time!”

As he advanced, brandishing the sword in both hands, I tried to recall the warrior training I had had at the Priest House. I remembered how the instructors had coached us in mock fights with cudgels, and sometimes with real weapons that drew real blood. Slash, don’t chop. Go for the legs, the arms. Avoid the belly, where a wound may be mortal: we want captives, not corpses. Seize your man by the hair and make him submit ….

But I had no weapon and this fight was not going to be by the rules.

I stepped backward.

“Settle with me? I don’t understand. What do we have to settle?”

The volume of noise from the shore suddenly increased. People were crashing and splashing through the reeds as though they were hunting an animal. The man hunting me halted for a moment, as though distracted by the sound, although he kept looking at me.

“You know who I am.”

“Yes, though you had us all fooled for a while. Even when I realizedCurling Mist didn’t exist, it took me a while to work out it was you. I thought you were my old rival, Young Warrior.”

The young merchant laughed. “You thought I was Young Warrior? That’s funny! I thought my disguise was good, but not that good!”

“I thought you must be Young Warrior, and Nimble must be Young Warrior’s son. I couldn’t think who else would hate me so much they’d kill to get their hands on me. But then I realized there were all sorts of reasons why you couldn’t be anyone else but who you are …. Why, though, Shining Light? What’s this all for?”

The sword’s blades glittered as he turned the weapon over in his hands. I longed for him to take his eyes off me, just for an instant. “It really is funny you thought I was Young Warrior,” he said thoughtfully. “He died, you know: the Tarascans sacrificed him. Shall I tell you the story?”

“Go on.”

He wanted to draw this out, I realized, to savor his triumph for as long as possible. If I could keep him talking I might get a chance to go for the sword. Or perhaps I could appeal to the boy for help. He hovered uncertainly behind the other man’s shoulder, looking as if he wanted to say something but could not find the words.

“There was this girl, Maize Flower-remember her, Yaotl? She, her lover and her unborn child had to leave the city in a hurry. You know why. If they’d stayed, they’d have been killed. They couldn’t even stay in the valley. They tried, but there was nowhere safe-nowhere where anybody was prepared to risk making the Aztecs angry by harboring refugees. So they tried to get out over the mountains. And that’s where the girl died. She died in a cave, in childbirth.”

From the shore a furious shout drifted across the water.

Shining Light turned his head toward the sound.

I threw myself forward, crouching to get under the blades of the sword, but my wet feet skidded on the deck and sent me sprawling in front of him.

I lay there, helpless, hearing the weapon whistle as it swung through the air toward me, imagining how the blades would feel as they sliced through skin and flesh and bit deep into my shoulder or my back.

“No!”

Something deflected the sword, turning it over at the last instant so that its flat side slammed between my shoulder blades, knocking the breath out of me and driving my head into the deck so hard that my nose broke.

I heard a heavy blow and a curse just above me. Feet seemed to shuffle and dance on the deck around me. The boy had intervened again.

“No!” he cried. “No, you mustn’t! Don’t you realize, he’s my …”

“Shut up!” the merchant screamed. “I don’t care! I don’t want to hear it! Shut up! Shut up!”

The weapon’s wooden shaft swept through the air. I managed to twist my head around just in time to see the boy step back. He was too slow: the flat of the sword caught him in the chest and sent him reeling, to trip on one of the bodies on the deck and fall back against the shelter in a sobbing heap.

Shining Light let out a brutal scream. With the sword still raised, he whirled around to face me again. “Now see what you made me do! I’m going to kill you for that! I’m going to cut your liver out!”

“What for?” I gasped. I was not playing for time now: I wanted to know. “Why do you hate me so much?”

“Don’t you know? Then you’d better listen. Somehow the child lived. Young Warrior had to leave him with some villagers who’d just lost their own boy. He bought him back again, years later, after he’d made a little money, and took him to live with him in Tzintzuntzan.”

Tzintzuntzan was the Tarascan capital. So Kindly had been right about where the bronze knife had come from.

“Of course, Young Warrior had a Flowery Death, eventually. The Tarascans tolerated him for a while, but as an Aztec, settled among our enemies, he was always living on borrowed time.”

“What about the boy?”

“Ah yes, the boy. Maize Flower’s son.”

I lay still while he began stroking the back of my neck with the edge of his sword.

“The boy managed to flee. He made his way back to Tenochtitlan. He’d grown into a fine lad by then, strong-built like a ballplayer-and handsome, but he was a foreigner with no money. What do you suppose he did for a living, in a city full of procurers and perverts? Allhe had with him when he came here was a bronze knife he kept as a memento. A pity I couldn’t get that back for him, after Constant died.”

Slivers of obsidian pricked the back of my neck, forcing me to press my forehead against the deck until it hurt. I wished I could see the boy, whose sobs had given way to a childish whimpering. If only he would stir himself, I thought, and creep up on his lover with that paddle in his hands.

“So I was right about Nimble,” I said. “He was Maize Flower’s child, after all. And you and he …”

“I found him in the marketplace. He was desperate by then. I bought him off his pimp with some of the goods my old witch of a mother thought I was gambling away. She never knew what a good thing I was making out of idiots who thought I would give them better odds than they’d get at the ball court!

“We’re good together, Nimble and I. Oh, not just in the way you think. We’re a team. I invented Curling Mist because I couldn’t go on taking illegal bets in my own name, and then Nimble became Curling Mist’s son, and his messenger. He was good at it. He’s quick, resourceful, level headed-but, oh, Yaotl! He’s so much more than that-he could have been so much more still, if you hadn’t blighted his life before it even began!”

“But I didn’t …”

He raised his voice to call out over his shoulder without taking his eyes off me. “Why don’t you tell Yaotl what happened when your mother died, Nimble?”

For a moment all I could here was the youth’s rapid, hoarse breathing. Then his voice came in gasps, as if each word was a struggle to utter. “It was … it was what Young Warrior told me-it was the last thing he told me.” He paused. “Maize Flower had a fever after I was born. She babbled, nonsense most of the time. But the name she kept saying, over and over again, was yours. Always ‘Yaotl.’ Never ‘Young Warrior.’ It was your name … always your name …”

As the boy dried up, the merchant carried on. “His mother saved her last breath for you, you see, Yaotl. For you, even though you’d abandoned her and left her and Nimble to their fate. And you’d forgotten all about them!”

“I’m sorry.” It was all I could think of.

“If you’d cared,” the boy said dully, “she might have lived, if she’d thought you cared. She might have fought for her life.”

I experimented with getting up, taking my weight on my palms, only to collapse again as the blades sliced into the back of my neck.

“And what do you want from me now, Nimble?” I asked as calmly as I could. “Revenge, is that it?”

This was so unfair, I thought. It was not as if I had forced them to leave the city. Would it really have helped if I had gone into exile in place of Young Warrior? How was I to know the silly girl had loved me?

Shining Light interrupted the boy’s reply. “Revenge? For what you did to his mother and to him-for being sold twice, and driven from city to city, and turned into a whore! Wouldn’t you want vengeance for that?”

He bent down so that his breath stirred my hair.

“Wouldn’t you want revenge?”

Did the youth really want me dead for the sake of what I had said to his mother all those years ago? I forced myself to remember what it had led to: Maize Flower, delirious and dying in a freezing cave, Young Warrior dead and barbarians chewing on his dismembered corpse, Nimble’s own squalid life. Had it turned him into a killer?

How many times over did I owe him my life?

“I might want revenge,” I gasped, “and so might you, but Nimble doesn’t! He just wants to talk to me, Shining Light! He wants to know who his father is-me or Young Warrior! That’s it, isn’t it, lad?”

I felt giddy. It may have been the blood I was losing from the cuts on my neck, or relief that the boy, at least, did not want me dead. Or it may have been the effort it took to voice the suspicion I had kept at bay for so many years: that Maize Flower’s child may have been mine after all.

As if from a long way off, I heard Nimble speak. “Father …”

Shining Light howled. “Don’t call him that!” Suddenly the blades stopped pricking my neck as he raised the sword. “You’re mine, don’t you get it? This piece of shit is nothing to us. Nothing! And now he’s dead!”

“But aren’t you listening?” I cried desperately. “Nimble doesn’t want you to do this!”

“Shining Light, please!” the boy pleaded.

“Nimble.” It came out as a long, regretful sigh. “You’re so young. You haven’t learned to hate yet, that’s all. But I have. You taught me!

“I’ve heard your tale so many times, and heard you weep as you told it, and listened to you still weeping long into the night afterward when you thought I was asleep. And I’ve burned with anger and wanted to flay your father alive for the pain he’s caused you. And all you wanted to do was talk to him! Even though I could see it wouldn’t do any good, I went along with it-I promised to help you find out the truth. I kept my promise, too-remember when I went to see Yaotl at my own house? But talking doesn’t lead anywhere, love. It just hurts and confuses.

“So don’t worry about Yaotl, Nimble. You’ll get over his death in no time-I’ll see to that!”

“Shining Light!”

In my brother’s mouth the name sounded like an obscenity.

Lion was on his feet, leaning against the shelter. He lurched forward, seemingly oblivious to the boy just a couple of paces from him as he gave all his attention to the merchant. His voice was thick with pain and contempt.

“They’ll burn you alive, you pervert. You’re disgusting. You’re like those little worms that fall out of our backsides. You make me puke. You can’t live cleanly and you can’t even make money honestly.” Lion was trying to goad Shining Light into making the first move. “Your sort don’t even fight like men!” My brother truly resented being hit with a paddle.

I could not move. I could not see the sword or tell whether it was still poised to lop off my head or anything else. I could see only my brother, still mouthing insults as he staggered toward us and sank to his knees.

“It’s no wonder you have to hide on the lake, surrounded by scum. You’d never be allowed in the city.” He was visibly weakening, toppling forward until his hands slapped the wood under him while his voice became a breathless croak. “The women would sweep a piece of filth like you off the streets before morning … Yaotl! Look out!”

Lion shouted the last words.

In an instant he was on one knee and then on his feet. He had slipped his cloak off and held it in both hands, and as he leaped forward he hurled it over Shining Light’s sword arm.

I threw myself to one side.

The cloak missed, but as he darted out of its way Shining Light slipped and toppled over me. Obsidian blades buried themselves in the deck beside me with a sound of splintering wood.

Roaring furiously, Shining Light tore the weapon free and jumped up to face my brother. Lion charged him with just his bare hands. The sword became a blur as it sliced the air between them. It carved flesh from both my brother’s arms, but the blow was mistimed: Lion was too low and too fast and his wounds were shallow. He did not groan or cry out, but as the sword reached the end of its arc, before Shining Light had time to react, he straightened up and delivered a kick to the other man’s stomach that sent him sprawling onto his back, gasping for breath.

“Got you!” Lion cried joyously as he threw himself on his foe, hands clutching at his hair and twisting it brutally. “You’re mine now! My beloved son!”

“Lion!” I hauled myself to my feet. “You’re not on a battlefield now! Just fucking kill the bastard!”

I was too late. Shining Light writhed, twisted, slithered like a live fish out of my brother’s grasp and jerked himself free to the sound of his own hair tearing. He ran toward the shelter, screaming for Nimble.

Shining Light still had the sword. As he scrambled away it flailed wildly behind him, missing Lion’s face by a finger’s breadth. My brother, thrown off balance, took a moment to get after him, and by the time he did, the merchant was on his feet again and facing us.

The boy stood by him, holding the paddle in both hands.

“What now?” I asked.

“The merchant’s mine,” said my brother. “You take the boy. When I say go-”

“Wait a moment! They’re still armed!”

“Come on, Yaotl! Do what he says!” roared Shining Light. “Let’s finish this now!”

“Stop this!”

Nimble’s cry was not loud. It was something between a sob and a muffled scream, a noise of distress and desperation that made the rest of us, all three, pause for an uncertain instant, staring at each other asthough we had all seen something so momentous it dwarfed our quarrels.

“I didn’t want this,” the boy gasped. “I didn’t ask you to kill those men. I only wanted to talk to Yaotl, to find out how it was.”

“I got you out of the marketplace,” said Shining Light.

“You didn’t get me out of the city! You made me run your errands for you, you made me stay on the boat, you wouldn’t let me go and see him, you wouldn’t-”

“He’d have taken you away!” the merchant shouted. “I’d have lost you! Didn’t you want what we had-wasn’t that enough?”

Suddenly I saw how it had been with Shining Light: the years of smothering and pampering by Lily, the urge to be free and what had resulted: the lies and the bizarre parody of a household he and the boy had built, here on the lake. Nimble had depended on him utterly, but there had always been a nagging doubt, the fear that someone would rival him for the lad’s affections.

When it happened, it made no difference if the rival was the boy’s father.

“Put the sword down, Shining Light,” I said gently. “I’m not the one you should be afraid of.”

His head darted left and right, taking in the boy, my brother and me, before alighting for the last time on Nimble’s upturned, troubled face.

“I’ve lost you, then,” he said desolately.

Nimble stared at the deck. The paddle slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the planks by his feet. “It can’t be like this,” he mumbled.

Shining Light did not speak again. He just raised the sword high over his head and charged.

He ignored my brother. He came for me, his mouth open in a scream of rage and his weapon poised to split my skull. I had no time to move or defend myself. It was Nimble who reacted, throwing himself forward and crashing into Shining Light from behind, knocking him down just as the blades began to fall.

Lion jumped in from the side, hurling himself at the merchant as he stumbled under the youth’s attack. My brother made sure of the sword this time, snatching the wooden handle with both hands and twisting it as violently as he had earlier twisted his enemy’s hair.

There was the briefest struggle before Shining Light relinquished the weapon. He did not want it. He wanted me. As my brother reeled backward, caught off guard by the ease with which he had won his prize, Shining Light charged me again, leaving Nimble behind him and slamming his forehead into my freshly broken nose.

I shrieked in pain. With Shining Light’s weight upon me I fell with a crash that jarred my backbone. The man’s hands were around my throat, throttling me, jerking my head up and down and slamming it against the wood. I felt my feet kicking spasmodically and my hands clutching empty air.

In my brother’s hands the sword seemed to move so slowly. As it descended, I saw starlight glance off every sliver of obsidian, from the base to the tip. I saw the last blade flash and go dark like a fire being doused, and heard bone splitting as my brother sank the weapon into Shining Light’s skull.