The Demon of the Air

6

I knew how the Emperor Montezuma looked, having seen him from a distance: a middle-aged man of middle height, slightly built but well muscled, with a neat beard. I dared not risk so much as a glance at him now, but if I had I would have been disappointed, as Montezuma was nowhere to be seen.

Besides my brother, I saw five men in the room. They were all standing and all dressed in plain cloaks, like commoners come to present a petition. I knew none of their faces but I guessed that they included the Council of Four, the Emperor’s chief advisers. These men gloried in such tides as Keeper of the House of Darts, Keeper of the House of Darkness, Man Cutter and Raining Blood. They stood two on each side of a large wooden screen bearing pictures of gods picked out in gold. At right angles to it stood another richly decorated screen, and from the crackling and the wisps of smoke coming from behind it I guessed this concealed a hearth. A medley of delicious cooking smells, few of which I recognized, hung in the air.

The fifth man, who stood apart from the others, next to one of the screens and a little in front of it, would be the Emperor’s interpreter, for it pleased Montezuma to speak to his subjects through an intermediary. That meant, I realized, that the Emperor himself was hidden in the angle between the two screens. He must be eating: no doubt he had felt like a light supper after presiding over the festival. Not even his closest advisers were allowed to see him eating.

I was taking all this in when my brother suddenly threw himself on his knees and cried: “O Lord! My Lord! O Great Lord!”

Hastily I did the same, while the council and the interpreter looked on impassively.

In answer came a mumbling from behind the screen, followed by the interpreter’s harsh, high-pitched cry.

“Is the Chief Minister’s slave here?”

Unsure whether this meant I had been spoken to, I appealed silently to the council. One of them nodded at me.

“My Lord, I am Yaotl.”

“You know the Cuauhcalco Prison.”

It was a statement, not a question, and in its uncompromising certainty was as penetrating as an obsidian-bladed spear. Montezuma knew I had not forgotten that moment in the Heart of the World when my name had been called and my brother had hauled me upright by my hair, to show me off to the silent, expectant crowd before carrying out my sentence. It was not the pain of the obsidian razor scouring my scalp that his words recalled, though, nor the ripping sound my hair made as it came away. It was the cage they had kept me in beforehand, a wooden box too small to stand up in, and the smell of putrefaction from the whimpering skeleton in the prison cell next to mine, a man who by Montezuma’s order had been given a little less to eat each day until he wasted away and died.

“Yes, my Lord.” The bile in my throat reduced my voice to a hoarse whisper. The Emperor could have found no better way of reminding me that he held my life in his hands and could take it from me whenever he chose.

“Then tell me why we should not have you sent straight back there.”

“My Lord!” I cried, alarm momentarily overcoming etiquette. “I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“Have you not?” The Emperor’s tone was impossible to read, but there was no denying the sneer in the interpreter’s voice. “Then how do you account for what happened this evening?”

He could only mean the sacrifice that had gone wrong. “My … my master, Lord Feathered in Black, the Chief Minister,” I stammered, “he … he ordered me to help at the sacrifice of a merchant’s Bathed Slave. I didn’t know what was going to happen-my Lord, how could I?”

“Because your master knew!” the interpreter spat back as quickly as if he had known the Emperor’s reply before it was uttered.

“But I don’t even know why I was there! I will eat earth!” I touched the ground with my fingers and put them to my lips. It was our favorite way of showing sincerity, a sacred oath that meant that,having taken earth in your mouth, you would be returned to the earth, your ashes buried in it, if you were not speaking the truth.

For a moment I felt more alone than at any other time in my life. I turned desperately to my brother, but he had eyes only for the floor, and the four councillors kept theirs focused resolutely on the middle distance in front of them. When rescue came it was in the most unlikely form: a voice from behind the screen-soft and lisping, but undeniably meant to be heard-the voice of the Emperor himself.

“So tell me, slave,” that deceptively quiet voice said, “tell me what you do know.”

There was no hiding his eagerness. The fact that he had chosen to speak betrayed it. I imagined him leaning forward over his dish of turkey, snails, water-fly eggs, stewed human meat or whatever, staring at the screen as if he could see through it, in his anxiety to hear me as I stumbled through my account. When I got to the point where Shining Light’s victim spoke, telling us to look out for a big boat, something like a sigh broke from him: the sort of sound you make when you have recognized something that was there all along.

There was a long silence after I had finished. Then the Emperor spoke again, quietly still, but for us all to hear.

“These are disturbing times. We hear of omens, of portents: fire streaming through the sky, temples burning, the lake boiling and flooding on a day without wind. We hear rumors from the East, from our outpost at Xicallanco on the coast of the endless Divine Sea: rumors about men with pale skins and hair on their faces. We hear stories from the land of the Mayans. They tell of strangers from islands on the Divine Sea, of dreadful things that have happened there-how pale-skinned men with beards came and all the people died or fled or were made slaves. We have seen pictures of pyramids on the sea, borne on huge canoes.” He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “And now the whole city hears a Bathed Slave raving about a big boat before throwing himself off the Great Pyramid. Does all this mean the peril-whatever it is-is coming from the Divine Sea?”

He fell silent. Naturally everybody else did too, including me, although I had the feeling that he wanted someone to answer him. What was our Emperor afraid of-some terrible defeat? Defeat at whose hands, though: the mysterious pale, bearded strangers he had spoken of, the men from beyond the shores of the Divine Sea?

Plainly Montezuma had long feared that a dreadful fate was going to overtake his city. Now something as simple as a few words about a big boat, spoken by a crazy man about to die, had pitched him into a void of unknowing terror which no word from me or anyone else in that room could fill.

When he spoke again, it was on a surprising note of anger.

“Soon there will be strangers among us-that much we know from the omens. But will they be gods, or men disguised as gods? How would you answer that, slave?”

I stared at the screen, avoiding the eyes of the dignitaries standing above me while I struggled to come up with an answer. Visions of what happened to people who disappointed the Emperor drove everything else from my head. I had to say something but for a moment all I could think of was that prison. Then I saw the prison’s darkness and, swirling around in it, the shapes my half-starved, exhausted mind had peopled it with when it surrounded me: sinister, threatening shapes that might be men or animals or demons …

Desperate, I blurted out the first word that came into my head, a word for the men and women whose home was darkness.

“Sorcerers!”

Sorcerers: men and women who went abroad at night, changed into jaguars, coyotes or weasels. Men and women with the power to cure the sick or paralyze and pillage a whole household, as the mood took them. Men and women who could travel to the next World and bring its secrets back with them. “My Lord, if I needed to know who those strangers were, I would need a sorcerer to tell me.”

For a long time there was silence from behind the screen. Then I heard something else: something that sounded like the ghost of a wry chuckle.

Was the Emperor laughing? He seemed to be, although nobody else was joining in; and it was the interpreter who replied.

“That was wisely answered. We consulted sorcerers. His Lordship, the Keeper of the House of Darkness, will explain what became of them.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the four councillors give a start and risk a quick scowl at the screen before condescending to look at me.

“Lord Montezuma sent for sorcerers to interpret the omens hespoke of,” he said mechanically. “He had them brought from their homes and questioned them personally. When they failed to give him the answers he wanted, they were imprisoned.”

“They were imprisoned,” Montezuma’s interpreter added, “in a place you know very well.”

“My Lord, please!” I begged. I was shivering, because there was only one place the Emperor could be referring to. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Find them,” came the short reply.

“Find …?” I gasped, as I realized what the command meant. Nobody escaped from the prison: either you were let out or you died there. “But …”

The interpreter ground on relentlessly. “Your master, slave, is Chief Justice and Chief Minister. When the sorcerers disappeared we commanded him to look for them. He sent men after them, but did not find them. He took extreme measures-ill-advised measures, perhaps, because they are still at large. We find this hard to understand.” He let the Emperor’s words hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “Granted that these men were sorcerers, did they turn themselves into birds, bewitch their guards, or use some other form of magic to escape? Where are they?

“Your master has not been able to account for what happened. Perhaps these men did fly away on the night air. We might believe that-but when we see a man presented as a Bathed Slave who is plainly no such thing and hear him utter prophetic words and learn that our Chief Minister ordered his own man to be present when he died, we start to wonder.”

“My Lord-you can’t mean that Shining Light’s offering …?”

The words died in my throat as the Emperor spoke again-this time to me alone.

“You are spoken of most highly, slave. I know that your life has been troubled, but we can only accept whatever fate it amuses the gods to send us. Now I need a man of discretion and good sense. I know there are things I have not been told.” Montezuma paused significantly. “The sort of man I need will remember his duty to me-Quetzalcoatl’s heir, the servant on Earth of the Lord of the Here and Now.”

The silence that followed was full of memories of a dark, damp,noisome, cramped place, the agony of an empty belly, the despair of knowing you might never stand upright or see the Sun again.

“Now tell me you are the man I need, Yaotl.” The voice behind the screen had become so soft it was almost inaudible.

“Yes, my Lord.”

I could say nothing else now. If the Emperor had told me he needed a man who could produce live rabbits out of his anus, I would have been that man.

I barely heard the interpreter’s words as he gave me my instructions. I did not need them. It was plain what I was being told to do: find the sorcerers who had vanished from Montezuma’s impregnable prison, although my own master, the Chief Minister, had failed to locate them; and find out if there was any connection between them and the man I had seen die this evening.

“Bring those men to us, slave-not your master, or anyone else!”

In short Montezuma wanted me for his spy in his Chief Minister’s household; and if my master had secrets he was determined to keep from the Emperor, then so much the worse for me.

The interpreter’s final words were like one more twist in the cord I could already feel tightening around my neck. “You will begin your search tomorrow,” he informed me loftily, “at the Cuauhcalco Prison.”