Once I was in the totally rough hands of a soldier, and someone had fetched a torch from another room and relit the lamps, Palak started yelling at me and shaking the codex in my face. He was communicating brilliantly. I knew perfectly well he was saying I was a cheat and a thief and I’d sold him an inferior magic light in return for a valuable sacred book and I ought to die for it.
Me, I wasn’t doing nearly so well.
All I could really do was shrug and show him the button that turned on the flashlight and try to make him understand that it wasn’t my fault.
Like that was going to fly. Even I could see how lame I looked. And still there was no A.B.
If I ever needed back-up, this was it. “Field goal!” I hollered silently. “Field goal, A.B.”
Then I started yelling out loud, “Field goal! 911! Hey, Fuzz-bottom! Field freaking goal!”
So much for back-up— he didn’t come.
Two soldiers hauled me off and threw me into a tiny, dank, totally dark hole that could only be called a dungeon. I felt around to see what was in there, and nothing was. It was about the size of a large closet, with a wooden grate over the top. I figured this was probably my last night on Earth, and I tried to be peaceful, to somehow prepare for myself for death, but if you want to know, that’s a lot harder than it sounds, even if you know how to meditate. I was trying to do belly-breaths, counting them to calm myself down, but my heart wouldn’t stop thrumming. It was like a hammer in there.
But belly-breaths will do it every time. Finally I was thinking about nothing, nothing at all, which is pretty much where I wanted to be, when I heard a loud, angry yowling, like a wild animal somewhere in the distance. It was a wild animal, and I knew its name.
A.B. was in trouble.
Well, big surprise. Why else wouldn’t he have come back to the chocolate party?
I tried to talk to him: “A.B., I’m here in this nasty dungeon, awaiting sure and certain death. What’s up with you, by the way? Hey, if you’re not too busy, field goal!”
Nothing.
“Yo! A.B.! Field goal, okay?”
Dead silence. He must be too far away to hear.
But I knew what had to have happened The Alpha Beast needs humans for only a few things, and one of them is to open doors. Therefore, A.B. had to be behind one. The royal brats must have tossed him in some kind of kitty-dungeon.
So much for instant rescue. He wasn’t coming, at least not now, but there was always morning. I remembered the Twelfth and last Tactic of Combat: It’s not over till it’s over.
Okay, then, it wasn’t over. Prepare for your battles. That was another good one. There was only one thing I could do to prepare for battle and that was to sleep. That ought to be good in any case. If I was going to die, at least I could be wide awake for it. I’d more or less missed being born, and if the fat lady was about to sing, I didn’t see why I should miss that too. And there was always the outside chance I was going to get out of this. Very outside, of course, but hey, Haley was still alive. Hope sprang eternal. The tough had to get going. That kind for thing.
So I curled up and breathed myself to sleep.
The thing about a palace, a lot of people live there and they have to get up and have breakfast and dress the kids and stuff— all the things that happen on a smaller scale in a regular house. So it gets kind of noisy first thing in the morning. After awhile I woke up to more or less regular morning sounds. People walking around, cleaning up from last night, kids chasing each other, guys sharpening knives for the day’s sacrifices.
I thought about dying nobly. With dignity. People were always doing that in stories. The least I could do was give it a shot.
These people worshiped lots of gods, particularly the sun god. If I was going to be offered to them, I ought to get to know them a little bit. So I thought about dust to dust, which was a phrase I knew from Dad’s church, and becoming one with nature, maybe my atoms joining the others in the atmosphere, and wondered if I could just somehow think of it as beautiful.
Something I’d learned about the Mayans— some people saw their culture as evil. It was a politically incorrect thing to think, so it wasn’t said much, but I’d run across it. I’d met plenty of Mayans by now, and I didn’t think they were evil— really, really different from us, but not evil. They just had their own ways of thinking about things. So I tried to think Mayan.
If I’d been one of them, I’d have been happy about being sacrificed. I wasn’t really into that, but I tried to see it the Mayan way, and what I came up was that I hadn’t always done the best I could. But I could start now. Even if I only had a few minutes to live. I thought that if I were Mayan, I’d be a lot braver than I was because I’d know that I was going to die eventually, and I’d just accept death as a part of life. So I’d either die properly, or I’d use every skill I ever had, and I’d pull off the best escape you ever saw outside of a movie. Whichever it was going to be, I wanted to really do it well.
The only thing I felt totally awful about was never seeing my mom and dad and Haley again.
I hope this doesn’t sound too morbid. Because it wasn’t. Honest. Whichever way it went, I just wanted to put my heart in it.
Uh-oh. Heart. I wished I hadn’t gone there.
It wasn’t that long before they came to get me. But by the time they did, I was calm, and centered, and dignified, and maybe a little bit noble. Whatever was up, I was ready for it.
Prepared.
Two soldiers I’d never seen led me down the steps of the palace, and out to a plaza where half the town was gathered around an altar with one of those big carved stones behind it that the books call stelae. (I could never figure out how to pronounce this.)
Palak was already there, and most of my drinking buddies from the night before. They were dressed as grandly as ever, so maybe they hadn’t been gussied up just to welcome me the day before.
There was a lot of incense, and fire, and speeches. Especially speeches. Talk, talk, talk. And then more talk. Finally, Palak’s wife knelt and began pulling a thorn through her tongue, the same way I had in the dream, and Palak stood over her, just as my dream-husband had, and everything was quiet except for some drums.
It was early morning, just after dawn, and it was really beautiful. Peaceful, like this was the way things were supposed to be. And I understood that, for them, it was. Mrs. Palak was perfectly fine with what she was doing— giving herself to the gods (though that was a concept I personally had a little trouble with— I thought of it more as letting the molecules and atoms of her blood rejoin the earth and the air). I felt tears come, but they weren’t for her. I was moved by the beauty of the thing. No kidding.
It has to sound crazy— we’re so different now!— but take my word for it, it was beautiful.
When she had pulled the rope with the thorns entirely through her poor, ragged tongue, the drums got louder, and two men stepped out of the palace. They carried a pole with an animal hanging from it, front legs tied together, back legs tied separately. Uh-oh, I thought, Cat Position Eight—Captured Tiger. It had to be A.B., but I didn’t get it— he was the Alpha Beast, for heaven’s sake!
How in the name of the sun god had he ever allowed this to happen? I knew for a fact that no two guys with a couple of ropes could ever do that to him if he wasn’t drugged or something. I was hoping for the “something.”
I tried to talk to him, but he was still too far away.
He was the first to make contact. “Warrior, are you prepared?”
“Does the Pope wear a dress?” I said. “And by the way, do you have a plan, by any chance?”
“Naturally: To get the book and go home.”
“Just when I’m having such a good time.”
“Observe. It’s going to get ugly.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.”
“Remember the rules.” The rules of fighting, he meant. He hadn’t called me “warrior” in a long time. It made me feel kind of good.
When they had
laid him on the altar, someone handed Palak one of those obsidian knives, maybe the one I’d used to cut the cake. The drumbeat was very slow now, and everyone was silent. Palak approached the altar. He was about a step away when A.B. broke his bonds, flipped to his feet, and morphed into a jaguar. I’m not kidding. One minute, he was a precious little fluff-puff, the next he was this huge, furious jungle cat.
A lot of people screamed.
He even scared me. And he sure scared Palak, who dropped the knife and took off running.
So much for dignity.
But the soldiers seemed to be pretty well-trained in the Tactics of Combat. About forty of them rushed him with spears and murdered him right before my eyes. Dropped him right there, with about a million wounds, before he could take out more than four or five of them.
Okay, so they’d killed him. He’d said things were going to get ugly.
But, all things considered, “dead” didn’t mean anything in this case, right? In a few minutes, he was going to shock the bejeezus out of everybody by getting up with all his wounds healed. I was totally psyched for it.
Tactic Seven was Pick the right time for your battles— like not when you have your period. And probably not when your back-up was temporarily dead. I tried to calm down and wait for him.
But the trouble was, they didn’t give him a few minutes. Palak, probably humiliated by his unmanly retreat, bounded up, cut A.B.’s heart out in about three strokes, and held it high, bleeding and steaming, in a triumphant salute to the people, who all started chanting, working themselves into a trance.
Not the king’s right-hand men, however. Four of them rushed forward with knives, made a few well-practiced incisions, and peeled A.B.’s skin off.
Right. They did.
They cut his heart out and skinned him right in front of me.
The four guys held up the bloody skin, and the people kept chanting. Then along came the royal garbage detail, and threw his carcass on the fire.
I was kind of wondering if all bets were off. I mean, could he come back if he didn’t have a body?
The butchers were still holding his skin high when it began to blow up like a balloon. Palak continued the heart-salute, his eyes closed in ecstasy. But all of a sudden A.B.’s heart popped out of the king’s hand like he’d squeezed it too hard. It landed inside the jaguar skin, and (I presumed) commenced to beat immediately.
Because A.B. was back! Jaguar A.B., that is, once again snarling, rearing, but covered with blood, and ten times scarier than in his last life— the one he’d left five minutes ago.
Nobody even screamed. They were frozen in place, too terrified to move a muscle.
“Tell them to look around them,” A.B. said.
He sure had it right about timing. You could have heard a feather drop at that moment. Whirling, I waved my hand in a circle, crying: “Look around you, Children of Uxmal. Check out the rooftops, subjects of Palak!”
They hadn’t learned English overnight, but if someone points, everyone else will look— it’s just human nature. And here’s what we all saw: Jaguars.
Jaguars that covered the city like wallpaper.
They were on top of the Great Pyramid, all over the Nunnery, and The House of the Turtles, and every other building in town. They were sitting in the trees, and marching into the streets like the Great Kitty Cavalry I’d lied to Cortes about.
Only, these babies weren’t figments of my imagination.
Can you imagine seeing something like that? If I thought the city was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen, I was a babe in the woods. You haven’t lived till you’ve seen a few hundred jaguars invade a city.
No one moved; no one uttered a sound.
Even the drums had stopped.
A.B. sailed gracefully off the altar. “Time to go, Warrior. Hop on my back and hang onto my ears.”
“But you hate to have your ears touched.”
“Hang onto my ears, girlahini!”
I mounted, snared ear, and boom! I was riding a jaguar. Now this is not as romantic as it sounds. You would not believe what a bony back a cat has, but that’s another story.
Everyone was still transfixed, unable to believe what was happening. I was focusing like crazy just on staying aboard, but I had to give directions. Thank the sun god I didn’t have to move my mouth to talk or I couldn’t have said a word— my teeth were clicking like castanets. “A.B., I had the book last night. It might still be in the party room. Everybody was pretty much out of it when we left.”
He didn’t answer, just flew up those steps, while everyone else waited to be mauled to death by marauding jaguars. But the marching jaguars didn’t attack. They sat down in Cat Position Two, becoming a silent army of furry guards that no one wanted to mess with, even people who usually thought of jaguars as clothes.
There were still plenty of people in the palace, and as we entered, they scattered, yelling in Mayan, probably something like, “Run for your lives. The apocalypse is now!”
Two or three servants puttered in the party room, picking up dirty cups, but posing no immediate threat. The good news was, the codex was there too, forgotten in the alcohol haze of the night before. The bad news was, so was the royal librarian, who’d apparently come to retrieve it. Ignoring both the cleaning staff and the scribe, A.B. tried to grab the book in his jaws, but it was almost too big for him. He had to make an adjustment to get his teeth around it, and during the second it took, the librarian drew a knife and rushed us.
A.B. lifted his face from the floor, the book in his teeth, just in time to get a knife in the eye.
I knew what was going to happen next. We had the book and we were leaving.
But in the split-second before we did, I wondered what would happen if A.B. lost one of his lives while time-traveling. Could even the Alpha Beast come back from that? And if not, would I tumble through time for eternity?
Let me say this: It totally seemed like it.
But after a season or two in hell, all three of us landed in the little Mayan hut where we’d stored the bag with the chocolate, the knife still in A.B.’s eye, the librarian still clutching it, the book still in the jaguar’s mouth, and me still on his back, frantically gripping ears with my hands, flanks with my knees. Spot remained exactly where we’d left her, contemplating the joys of rodent-torture in the laying-hen position. At the sight of us, she swung immediately into Cat Position Seven— Halloween Cat— back arched and fur fluffed.
I was pretty shaken. “A.B.? You okay?”
“Get this damnable librarian out of my eye!” he snapped back.
I slid off his back and tried to talk to the scribe, but the poor man was in shock. No matter what I said, he continued to sit perfectly still, eyes wild, totally paralyzed. I finally had no choice but to put my hand over his and pull the knife out of the Beast’s eye.
“Better,” A.B. said, and dropped the codex.
For a second, the only sound was Spot’s hissing and snarling. “Would you please shrink?” I said. “Spot’s blowing a gasket. Why didn’t you tell me you could do that jaguar thing?”
“Shape shifting,” he said, “is the technical term for it.” And he proceeded to demonstrate the process, turning back into a fuzz-pumpkin.
Instantly, Spot dropped her back and let her fur droop, but the scribe had a meltdown. Panicked, he slid on his butt to the far wall, whimpering like a crazy person.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” A.B. barked, “pour water on him.”
I had a better idea. There had to be a flashlight around somewhere— this was a house, right? I located a little utility area and rifled drawers till I found one, along with an unopened pack of batteries. I brought the two items into the living room, demonstrated that the light was in good working order, took out the batteries, showed that it no longer worked, then inserted the new batteries and turned it on again. “Got that?” I asked the scribe.
He looked at me like I was the devil. He wasn’t going to be himself for awhile, but I
figured nothing I could do was going to make it any better for him. Surely they had a potion for this where he came from. So I pried open the fingers of one hand, closed them around the flashlight, put the extra batteries in the other, and said, “We’re square, okay? One book, one flashlight. I’ll throw in the extra firepower. A.B., take him home, will you?”
“With pleasure,” the Beast said, leaping into the man’s lap. The guy’s mouth opened in a big “o”, like a scream, but no sound came out. “Now click those heels,” I told him, “and say ‘there’s no place like home’.”
I must have blinked. I don’t remember looking away; all I knew was that suddenly the man was gone, but A.B. wasn’t.
“How’d you do that?” I asked.
“The same way I always do it. I delivered the package and came back a split-second after I left. Bet you never even noticed I was gone.”
Right as usual.
But I had a question. “Listen, how come you couldn’t just do what you just did when you were in the pit— time-travel out and carry on as usual?”
“Good, Student. Excellent question. I might have gotten away with it. But it’s never good to do that when you’re out of your own time. We knew the legendary Zigaloo princess Deboreeno Diamondino had successfully stolen the book four hundred years before we met those chaps at Cozumel, did we not? So we had to be careful not to do anything to alter the outcome. I couldn’t run the risk of changing history, or we might not have gotten the book at all. Worse yet, might not have gotten back— or you might not have. What if I’d left the pit and found you guarded by someone who killed you when I arrived to effect the rescue? With time travel, you simply have to let events evolve as they do— or rather as they already have. So I had to do it exactly the way I did it the first time.”
“But how did you know you didn’t time-travel out the first time? You’re not going to tell me you remembered, are you? Because I know you couldn’t have. If you had, you’d have changed history by not doing it.”
Bad Girl School Page 26
