The Demon of the Air by Simon Levack Page B

burned and buried with him when he died.
    Shining Light’s mother knelt on a mat beside the box. She greeted me with conventional courtesy.
    â€œYou are out of breath, you are hungry. Rest. Eat.”
    I sat opposite her, mumbling something polite as I gathered my
cloak around me. I accepted a honeyed maize cake and munched on it to give myself time to think.
    Oceloxochitl: it meant “Tiger Lily.” Kneeling, with her head inclined, lit only by whatever sunlight managed to slip past the screen at the doorway, she gave little away. By what I could see—the silver strands in her dark hair, which lay loose upon her shoulders, the lines etched in shadow about her eyes and mouth, her dark, unpainted skin and bright, unstained teeth, the somber, formal patterns of her skirt and blouse—I judged that she was a respectable woman in her early middle years and that she was in mourning. I presumed this was for her son, since I knew the merchants’ womenfolk went into mourning whenever their men set out on a long journey.
    â€œI am Lily. You are Lord Feathered in Black’s man? You are welcome here.” She spoke in a deep, clear voice, and deliberately, like someone used to choosing her words carefully.
    â€œThank you, madam. I am his Lordship’s slave, yes.”
    â€œWhat does the Chief Minister require of my poor household?”
    â€œI wanted to speak to Shining Light.”
    â€œThen, sir, you have come too late, and I am sorry your journey has been wasted. My son left on a trading venture yesterday.”
    When she looked up her gaze was steady and unblinking. There was no catch in her voice and no tears had left tracks on her cheeks. Only a hand, trembling slightly as it strayed toward the reed box beside her, might have betrayed grief or a need for reassurance.
    â€œWhy yesterday?” Disbelief made my voice sharper than I had intended. “Why on a day like One Reed?”
    â€œWhy do you think?” Her voice cracked like a dry branch collapsing on a fire. “He had to go away, don’t you understand? They’d have killed him if he’d stayed.”
    â€œWho’d have killed him—his creditors?” I remembered what the merchant’s grandfather had said about Curling Mist. Perhaps he was not the only one Shining Light owed money to.
    â€œI’m talking about the merchants! You were at the festival, weren’t you? You were there when that slave ran away and killed himself. It was the disgrace of it. My son knew he could never show his face among his own people again. He left the city the next day. He knew it was a bad day, at a bad time of year, and he had neither proper provisions
nor his elders’ blessing. He knew he could drown in the lake, be killed by robbers or eaten by bears or pumas, die of cold in the mountains or heat in the desert. We merchants have lived with this knowledge for generations. Shining Light’s own father was killed by barbarians.”
    She would not let herself cry or raise her voice, but I could not miss the way her fingers caught and twisted the fabric of her skirt.
    â€œYou don’t know where he went?”
    â€œHe didn’t say, but it may have been in the East—somewhere like Xicallanco. He talked about Xicallanco before he went.”
    Xicallanco! “A long way away,” I said, while I tried to remember where I had heard of the place recently.
    â€œOh, yes. The farther the better!”
    â€œI suppose,” I reflected, “by the time he gets back from a place like that, there’s a chance it will have been forgotten—the Bathed Slave and everything.”
    â€œHe won’t come back.”
    â€œYou think he’s gone into exile?”
    â€œI think he’ll die.” She whispered the words, hissing at me in a voice that sounded like air escaping between hot coals on a brazier. “The same as his father. He died when our son was a baby.”
    â€œI know.