The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  Besides, with the merchants lining its perimeter and the dancers gyrating in its center, there was no straight way across the courtyard to the street. It was going to be difficult enough finding my way to the women’s rooms. I had to slip through whatever gaps I could find, trying to blend into the background as well as my bizarre costume would allow, and hoping that Kindly, at least, would not see me walking right in front of him.

  Half blind as he was, he probably would not have recognized me if one of the dancers had not wandered into my path, forcing me to step quickly aside and put my foot in the middle of the neatly ordered display in front of him.

  “I’m sorry Excuse me,” I blurted unthinkingly.

  “Hello, Yaotl,” the familiar old cracked voice responded. He had recognized my voice and I had no choice but to return his greeting.

  “Kindly. You’re not drinking tonight, then?”

  Twilight gave his filmy eyes a pale gleam.

  “At my own banquet?” He sounded shocked. “How could I? Besides, I have to sacrifice at midnight—need a clear head for that. And before you ask, I’m not on the mushrooms either. Bloody things give me the runs.”

  So he and I were probably the only completely sober people in the house.

  “If you were looking for my daughter,” he went on, “I shouldn’t bother. She won’t see you.”

  I looked toward the women’s rooms. They were dark, but who might be stirring in there? “I’d rather like her to tell me that herself.”

  “A man going into the women’s rooms, uninvited? In the middle of a feast? And a slave, to boot? Unheard of!” He did not raise his voice, but there was an edge to it that told me I would get no closer to Lily before I was stopped. I remembered the burly warriors who had been recruited as servers for the evening. Part of the reason they were there was to break up any mushroom-induced fights among the guests, and any of them would have been more than equal to the task of subduing one scrawny slave.

  His tone softened a little as he asked: “Why did you come here, Yaotl?”

  “To ask your daughter to help us find Curling Mist,” I said, and then added, “and to ask her why she helped him when he tried to kill me.”

  “And would you believe her if she said she did not?”

  “I don’t know I think that’s why I have to ask.”

  His answer seemed to come from a long way away “No one in this house bears you any ill will.”

  I glanced down at him again, but he was not looking at me any more.

  “Please don’t try to see my daughter.” His eyes were fixed on her doorway. “It would only distress her further, and there is nothing she can tell you—believe me.” He looked up again and smiled weakly. “Besides, she’s still in semi-mourning. Do you know she can only wash her hair once every eighty days until Shining Light returns? She won’t want to be seen by anybody right now!”

  “All right.” I turned to go.

  The old man’s dry, cackling laugh surprised me. “Oh, Yaotl, don’t sulk! Look, I have a present for you.”

  “Save it,” I said dismissively, with a look that took in all the riches spread around him. “I’m a slave, remember? You need this to buy off your friends, the warriors.”

  “No I don’t! This stuff is a token. They expect us to lay it out here just to show we haven’t forgotten who’s in charge. When the warriors really want something from us, they ask for it in advance and we give it in private. Look—you should take something. The rest of them will just pillage it otherwise, and when they get it home they’ll have no idea where it came from or why they took it. So why not? These feathers, now—they’re my family’s particular speciality. Why not take a bunch?”

  Against my will I found myself accepting the bundle of long red feathers that he pressed into my hand.

  “They’re very soft.” I felt I had to say something about them. “What are they, red spoonbill?”

  “No, scarlet macaw.” He grinned up at me, as proud as a small boy who had just caught a frog. “They’re good, though, aren’t they? Where do you think they came from?”

  “I don’t know.” I wanted to give the feathers back, but the moment for doing that had passed as quickly as it had come. “Somewhere in the far South—that’s where these birds live, isn’t it?”

  Kindly chuckled. “Nearly. That was where we got the idea, but we grow them ourselves.”

  I had a wild vision of a family sustaining itself on feathers sprouting from its members’ own rumps, until I realized what it was Kindly had meant.

  “Really?” I was fascinated in spite of myself. “You mean you keep the birds here? How come I never saw or heard them?” Plenty of people kept finches, little twittering creatures that were quite at home hanging from the sides of houses in wicker cages. Parrots, I thought, must be a different matter. It would be hard to keep a parrot without the whole parish knowing about it.

  “They went the same way as the rest of the merchandise,” he said bitterly. “So where they are now, only the gods and my grandson’s boyfriend know. But it was useful having them close at hand: it meant we could pluck a flight or a tail feather whenever the feather-workers needed one, and we saved ourselves all the effort of catching the birds and then packing the feathers and sending them home.”

  I examined the bunch of feathers in my hand. In the twilight their rich, dark red reminded me of dried blood. “I thought the only person in the city who kept these birds was Montezuma.”

  “Oh, I expect he has a houseful. And good luck to him! They’re almost more trouble than they’re worth. Of course, having live birds to pluck feathers from is a good idea, and apart from the fact that they eat their cages they’re not hard to keep, but …” His talk dissolved into a rueful chuckle.

  “The noise?” I offered.

  “It’s worse than noise,” he confided. “They talk!”

  I had an odd sensation in the pit of my stomach. “Talk?”

  “Why, yes. You can train them to talk, but … Hey! Where are you going?”

  I ran, darting this way and that to avoid the hurtling bodies of the dancers, looking for my brother.

  2

  I stared into the jostling, swirling crowd, but in the gathering gloom there was no way of telling the dancers apart. I took a deep breath and yelled at the top of my voice, to be heard above the drums, the flutes, the conch-shell trumpets and the stamping feet.

  “Lion!”

  None of the dancers even missed a beat. I was torn between relief and frustration. None of the assembled warriors seemed to have heard me, but where was my brother when I needed him?

  I took another breath, but it caught in my throat as a man fell out of the crowd.

  He was at my side in seconds. At first I could not work out how he had recovered from the sacred mushrooms so fast, but then it was obvious. He had not had any, preferring to keep his wits about him.

  “What?” Lion demanded, as I led the way indoors, out of the way of the gyrating bodies in the courtyard. We found ourselves in the same room as the Chief Minister, but, judging by the way his chin was bouncing on his chest, his mind was somewhere else. There had obviously been enough mushrooms left over for Handy too, since his head was moving in vague circles and he was dribbling.

  “I’ve found the sorcerers.”

  “That’s more like it! Let’s pick them up and get out of here. Where are they?”

  “On a boat! Young Warrior and his son must be holding them there. The sorcerers trained a bird to call for help, though, and let it go …”

  My brother stared at me suspiciously. “Have you been at the mushrooms?”

  “No! Look, you remember what that offering of Shining Light’s said, before he died, about a big boat? Everyone thought it was a prophecy—something to do with those pyramids on canoes the Emperor told us about—but it wasn’t! He was just trying to tell us where he and the others had been held. He wanted to tell my master, because he knew old Black Feathers was looking for them, and he thought he w
ould save them from Young Warrior. I’m so stupid, I didn’t realize it until just now, when Shining Light’s grandfather told me his family breeds birds. Big birds with red tail feathers—birds that can be trained to talk, Lion! And I saw one on the lake, that day I was kidnapped by Young Warrior and Nimble!” I groaned as I realized where I had seen signs of the bird, or others like it, since then: displayed among the stakes at the ball court, right in front of where Nimble and I had been sitting, and on the pitch at Tlatelolco market where Young Warrior had accosted me: the pitch belonging to Shining Light’s family. “The sorcerers must have been coaching the birds and they managed to let them go, or they got away, while Young Warrior and his boy were out abducting me. And it was the boat they were being held on, the big boat, that I came up under when I fell out of Young Warrior’s canoe, only I didn’t realize it at the time: I must have swum further under the water than I thought. That’s where Young Warrior’s warehouse is. It’s not a big roomy place in the merchant’s parish. It’s in some sort of narrow, confined space where you’d have to use a knife if you wanted to kill someone because there’s no room to wield a sword. It’s a shelter on the deck of a boat, out on the lake!”

  “If you can tell me where the boat is,” said a low voice that was like cold water trickling down my spine, “I will owe you more than my life.”

  Lion whirled as if he were still dancing. I turned around slowly.

  Lily stood facing us in the doorway. Her eyes shone in the torchlight. I noted from the heavy rabbit’s-fur mantle drawn tightly across her shoulders that she had been out, and not hiding in the women’s rooms after all.

  My tongue seemed to have turned into a lump of wood. All evening I had been seeking this confrontation and now it had come I could not get the words out. In the end I managed to say “Lily” in a voice so thick the name was barely intelligible.

  Lion recognized it, though. “Lily? You’re Shining Light’s mother? Yaotl here reckons your son’s boyfriend’s holding a lot of sorcerers prisoner on his boat!” My brother was not known for his delicacy of manner.

  Lily looked at me levelly. “He’s not my son’s … Yaotl, you said that to me once, but you were wrong. Shining Light wouldn’t be interested in Curling Mist—not in that way, anyway. Whatever that man’s hold is over my son, it’s not that. He …” She caught her breath before going on. “Shining Light likes them younger—he’s more likely to have wanted the boy. I think Shining Light may have done the father’s bidding for the sake of the son, at least in the beginning. I don’t know. I’ve never met Curling Mist.”

  “Nor has anyone else, except me,” I said dryly. I felt a sudden rush of self-pity. “Young Warrior doesn’t go near anyone else—you, my master, Kindly—he sends the boy to see everyone else, but I’ve met him three times—and each time he’s done his best to kill me!”

  “Is he still holding your son hostage?” my brother asked.

  Lily hid her face in her hands and stood for a few heartbeats with her shoulders heaving silently. Then she took a deep breath and looked at us both, blinking rapidly.

  “I told the boy what you told me, Yaotl—about the girl in the marketplace. He said … he said it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Go on,” I said grimly.

  “That was the evening of the day you told me about the girl. He said I would have to … that his father would come to the house the next day, and …”

  “And you had to tell the slave to let him in. You let that bastard in to attack me! I nearly died! Constant did die!”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” she cried. “The boy didn’t tell me he meant you any harm. He just said there was something he had to know. My son’s life was at stake!”

  “So was mine!”

  “Yaotl,” my brother warned me, in his best imitation of a soothing voice.

  “And where were you?” I yelled. “Couldn’t bear to watch, is that it?”

  She seemed to flinch, as if I had slapped her, before screaming back: “Where do you think? I was trying to find my son! The boy told me to go back to the ball court in the morning, and I’d find him there, only”—her voice suddenly turned into a long, descending wail—“he wasn’t there!”

  I wondered why that was. Perhaps my would-be assassin, piqued by his failure, had managed, in his flight from her house to the ball court, to overtake Shining Light’s mother, and had got her son back on board his boat, hoping the young merchant might still be useful if he wanted to make another attempt on my life. It seemed more likely that Young Warrior had never intended to honor the bargain Lily had made for her son’s freedom, and she had set out that morning on a fool’s errand. As much as I resented what she had done I felt a twinge of pity.

  “Lily,” I began gently, but Lion interrupted me.

  “Before you two wake the Chief Minister up, let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re saying we have to look for a boat—a big one?”

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  “Where do we start, then?”

  “It was in a cove on the western side of the city,” I said, “but that was days ago. They may have moved it since then.”

  “So it could be anywhere on the lake? On any of the lakes?” Lily’s voice was low with disappointment. Young Warrior had chosen his hiding place well: finding one craft among the many thousands plying the vast complex of lakes around the city could be almost impossible.

  “What does this boat look like?” Lion asked me.

  “I don’t know. I scarcely saw it—I was busy being kidnapped at the time, remember.” I thought for a moment. “If it’s being used as a warehouse, it must be unusually big—like one of those seagoing craft the Mayans have, carved from a whole trunk, or even several lashed together. And that means it won’t move very far or very fast—especially if it’s just Young Warrior and his boy handling it. I don’t think there’s anyone else working with them.” I glanced at Lily, who did not demur.

  My brother gave her a shrewd look. “Madam,” he asked, his tone carefully polite, “did you report to the boy this evening?”

  “Sir—of course I did!” she snapped back defiantly. “I had to tell him Yaotl was here.” She caught my expression. “Oh, don’t worry—he won’t come here tonight. There are too many people about.” So much for my plan to lure Young Warrior out of hiding, I thought.

  “You must have had a prearranged meeting place.”

  “Yes. On the Tlacopan causeway, at the nearer end. He’s there regularly, at dusk, in case I need to report anything. I have to get there before they pull the bridges up, though.”

  Lion and I looked at each other, the same calculations running through both our heads. If Young Warrior and Nimble lived on the boat—and how else could they guard their hostages?—then the boy must return to it every night. But if he needed the bridges open, that meant he had to cross the causeway. So the boat could only be moored on the western side of the lake, opposite the city, not far from the mainland end of the causeway.

  “What do you do if you’re late?” I asked.

  “I don’t see him at all that evening. I’d have to wait until the following night, unless we’ve arranged something else, like the ball court.”

  “So he has to be on the other side of the causeway by nightfall.”

  “There are lots of little inlets and places you could hide a boat on the edge of the lake,” Lion pointed out. “How would we know where to look, especially if he keeps moving about?”

  “But he won’t move the boat every day,” I said, “and I don’t think Nimble would want to go blundering around there after dark. There can’t be that many places close enough to the causeway where you could hide a boat that big.”

  “We need a boatman to tell us where to look,” Lion observed. “Where are we going to find one at this time of night?”

  I stared at him. “What do you mean, ‘at this time of night?’ No one’s going anywhere now. Send a squad of warriors first thing in the morning.”

 
“No time,” said my brother. “We’ve got to get to those sorcerers before your master does.”

  “We have to go now,” said Lily quietly.

  “But you can’t go!” I protested. “This is men’s work—warriors’ work!”

  “My son is on that boat,” she said simply. She turned on her heel and walked away. “You can do what you like. I’m going to find a boatman!”

  “Come on,” Lion said as he set off after her.

  I had taken one step toward the doorway when a familiar voice stopped us all in our tracks.

  “Not so fast! Just where do you think you’re going?”

  Lord Feathered in Black was sitting up. He was bright and alert. I stared at him in confusion for a moment before it registered that he, like my brother, had obviously felt the need to keep a clear head, and had not taken any of the mushrooms. No wonder there had been some leftover for Handy. My master must have heard everything that had been said around him while he was pretending to sleep.

  Lily glared defiantly at him. Lion and I looked at each other the way two small boys might if they were caught stealing squashes.

  “So my sorcerers are on a boat, are they?” my master gloated as he rose, a little unsteadily, from his seat. “Let’s go and pick them up, then!”

  We made a strange party, all looking for the same things—a boatman and a boat, to take us to where the sorcerers were—but at odds over what we would do if we found them. We worked our way along the landing stage outside Lily’s house in a wary silence, while the noises of the banquet faded behind us and the water lapped loudly in the space under our feet.

  Finding a boatman turned out to be as easy as finding a boat. Some of Lily’s guests, including my master, had sent their canoes home, but others had left theirs tied up against the landing stage. Many of their crews had been left as well, to wait with their charges until their masters were ready for them sometime after daybreak. Most had curled up and gone to sleep in the bottom of their boats, but we eventually found one awake.