The Demon of the Air Read Free

summit still gleamed vividly in the sunshine, but the line of shadow creeping up the bloodstained steps told me it was not long before nightfall.
    â€œJust a bite, maybe. I have to get back. Can’t keep my master waiting.”
    We left the merchant’s offering where it lay. I gave the pathetic pile of flesh a last look as we walked toward the marketplace, but nobody came to collect it, even though I lingered as long as I could, still wondering about those strange marks.
    We sat beside the canal that bordered the marketplace and munched on our round, flat bread.
    â€œI wasn’t told much,” I said. “Go to the merchant’s house, join the procession, make sure the sacrifice goes according to plan. My master wanted me there because I know how these things are done. I guess he owed the young man’s family a favor. Do you suppose he expected this to happen?”
    â€œHow should I know?” Handy glanced over his shoulder at a corner of the marketplace where bearers and daylaborers could be found plying for hire at daybreak. “They took me on the day before yesterday. They needed a strong pair of hands, in case the offering got frisky.” Flesh flowed under the brown skin of his arms, making me glance wistfully at the bony claws holding my food. “Not much to
do in the fields, so I came here. Too many mouths to feed to be sitting around idle at home. A boy came up to me and told me I’d do.”
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    I had found Ocotl and Handy that morning at daybreak, waiting by the temple in Pochtlan, a parish in Tlatelolco, the northern part of the city. Ocotl sported an amber lip-plug, shell-shaped ear pendants and a netted cape, and carried a feather fan and feathered staves. He was tall for an Aztec, although it was hard to tell what he looked like beneath all his finery; and he had the cocksure manner of the young. His name meant a pine torch, or, figuratively, Shining Light, one who led an exemplary life. Handy wore what had once been his best clothes—an embroidered breechcloth with trailing ends, frayed at the edges, and a two-captive warrior’s orange cloak that had lost much of its color.
    There were two servants, whose charge was a heap of fine-looking cloaks that Shining Light had brought along in case he needed them for his slave’s ransom. He needed these because his offering’s journey to the war-god’s temple was not to be a straightforward one. All the offerings due to be presented by the merchants would be conducted first to the parish temple at Coatlan, where a crowd of warrior captives would be waiting in ritual ambush.
    The ambush was a curious part of the day’s proceedings, whose meaning was perhaps to teach the merchants that everything worth having had to be fought for. The warrior captives—men who were themselves due to die before sunset—would try to take the merchants’ offerings away from them, and the doomed slaves were expected to defend themselves with bird arrows. It was a real fight, fueled on both sides by sacred wine and the courage of despair, and if a warrior captive took a slave he would kill him unless the slave’s owner paid a ransom to the warrior’s captor. The ransom was always paid, since otherwise the merchant would have nothing to offer the war-god, and all his expensive preparations would go to waste.
    One look at the slave himself convinced me that his owner must have little notion of the value of money. He was not an impressive sight.
    He had been made to keep vigil at the temple all night and been plied with drink. His hair had gone at midnight and the fine clothes
he had been given the night before had been taken away at dawn, when his face had been washed and his skin covered with chalk to give it a deathly pallor. Now he looked twitchy and febrile, starting even at the gentle voice of the woman who attended him, his bather, as she whispered soothing words into his ear. There was not even a