The Demon of the Air

9

I spent much of the night prowling around my master’s courtyard, listening to the sounds made by a city stirring in its sleep: the conch-shell trumpet wailing at midnight, a distant answering call from a priest patrolling the city’s bounds, the cry of some creature disturbed on the lake. From time to time the lads from one of the Houses of Youth would break into song, so that the sound would carry across the water and convince our neighbors that we Aztecs never slept.

Then the stars started to disappear, one by one, and the first drops of the winter rain began to fall around me. I went indoors, treadingsoftly to avoid disturbing my room’s other occupant, and huddled on my sleeping mat with my cloak wrapped around me.

My mind would not rest. It kept revisiting the evening’s events.

My master plainly knew more than he ought to about the Emperor’s missing sorcerers; and the Emperor was not fooled. As Montezuma had said to me himself, there were things he had not been told. However, it seemed that he could not move openly against his Chief Minister without evidence.

I was under no illusions about why I had been picked as the man to get him that evidence. “You are spoken of most highly,” Montezuma had said, but what he really wanted was a spy in Lord Feathered in Black’s household: someone who was in no position to deny him whatever he demanded. I wondered, though, where he had got my name from.

It was not hard to guess why Montezuma thought my master was playing him false. Having heard from his own lips how fearful he was for the future and how little he trusted his advisers, I could put myself in the Emperor’s place and imagine the questions he would ask himself. “I rounded up these sorcerers to consult them about my future,” he would have thought, “whether my rule would persist, whether I would live or die. Now they have vanished from a place nobody has ever escaped from. Who might have an interest in what they have to say? Who else, but my rivals for the throne?

“So what do I, the Emperor of the Mexicans, do about it? Of course, I ask my trusty chief minister to investigate. But for reasons that he cannot or will not explain, Lord Feathered in Black fails to find the missing sorcerers. And the next thing I hear is that a Bathed Slave has died uttering what sounds suspiciously like a prophecy-just the sort of thing a sorcerer might be expected to come out with. And who was sent to assist at the sacrifice? None other than the Chief Minister’s own slave-Yaotl!”

What else could the Emperor be expected to conclude, other than that my master knew all along where his sorcerers were, deliberately failed to account for them when he was ordered to look for them, and then made sure that his slave was on hand to hear and report whatever one of them might say in his last moments?

Had I been Montezuma, I grudgingly admitted to myself, I would probably have concluded that the Chief Minister was up to no goodtoo. But why? What could Lord Feathered in Black possibly have to gain by deceiving the Emperor in such a complicated fashion?

I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Somewhere above it were the Chief Minister’s sleeping quarters. “What’s this all about?” I muttered. “Are you just trying to show you’re cleverer than the Emperor?”

“If you can’t sleep,” grumbled a voice out of the darkness, “then you can come here and turn me over before I get fucking bedsores.”

Talking to myself, I had woken my roommate up.

Patiyoh was his name-or rather, it was the name he had been known by for as long as I had dwelled in my master’s household. I was sure it was old Black Feathers’ idea of a joke, for it meant “costly.” He had once been a useful slave, but he had been crippled by a stroke years before, and now all he did was lie on his sleeping mat, consuming his master’s food and doing no work in return. He was safe enough as long as he gave his master no cause for complaint. A few of his fellow slaves, including me, kept him alive by small kindnesses, such as changing his soiled breechcloth from time to time and carrying him out into a secluded corner of the courtyard when the weather was good. The others did it because they knew they might one day find themselves in Costly’s position. I had my own reasons to feel indebted to the old man.

Seizing him by his bony shoulders and rolling him on his side took little effort. As I crawled back onto my own sleeping mat, however, I learned I was not going to get away that lightly.

“So, what’s old Black Feathers done to you now?”

“Never mind,” I mumbled. “Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t,” he said petulantly, “not since you woke me up. Now the floor under this mat is as hard as stone, and it’s not as if I can toss and turn until I get to sleep, so you’ll just have to keep talking to me, won’t you? Or have you forgotten what you owe me?”

“No.” I sighed. “I haven’t forgotten.”

What I owed this crippled old man was nothing less than my life. When I had come into our master’s household-after the Chief Minister had snapped me up as a bargain in the marketplace-I had been helplessly in the grip of the Four Hundred Rabbits, the gods of the sacred wine. The twenty cloaks my master had paid me for my liberty had gone on the roughest, sourest and cheapest drink I couldget. When the money had run out and I had given myself up to servitude, in accordance with the bargain my master and I had struck, I still had no thought beyond the next gourd. It was Costly who had seen me through it, whose wasted, bony arms had held me as I had shivered and struggled and cried out for just a drop, just a taste of fermented maguey sap on my tongue.

I could never forget what he had done for me. He would never let me.

I told him of everything I had seen and heard that evening. It took a long time, but the old man was still awake at the end.

“So old Black Feathers was banging on about his father again? You amaze me. I’ve known our beloved Chief Minister a lot longer than you have, young man, and if I had a bag of cocoa beans for every time I’ve heard one of those jealous tirades about his father, I could have bought my freedom years ago.”

“But Lord Tlacaelel’s been dead nearly forty years.”

“Yes, and his son’s never moved out of his shadow. Not surprising, is it? Four emperors deferred to Tlacaelel. He was their equal. Montezuma treats his son like a servant-even though one of his wives is old Black Feathers’ daughter! How often do you suppose our master has to listen to tales of his father’s exploits in war-or even worse, gets asked to tell them himself? And every time he visits that great big palace next to the Heart of the World he must tell himself: ‘If only my father hadn’t turned down the throne, all this would be mine!’”

“Our master’s jealousy isn’t really my problem,” I reminded Costly as I squirmed into a less uncomfortable position under my cloak. “It’s the sorcerers I have to worry about.”

“Don’t you think there’s a connection? What was it he told you-he wanted something that wasn’t his father’s?”

“True, but he also said the Emperor was afraid of him.”

“Why? He’s too old to be any threat. If Montezuma died tomorrow the throne would go to his brother, Cuitlahuac. Our Chief Minister and our Emperor both know that.” The old slave sucked noisily on his bare gums. “I’d lay odds old Black Feathers was lying to you.”

“He would,” I said dryly. “I’m meant to be spying on him, remember?”

The old slave persisted as I rolled over on my mat. “Whatever’shappened to these sorcerers, it’s not just because of some feud between old Black Feathers and Montezuma. It’s got to do with something our master wants-something his father never had. Now what might that be, I wonder?”