Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny

by Bohnhoff, Maya Kaathryn

  “We are our memories,” he adds after a moment. “The world you live in is...mist and shadow to us.”

  The feeling is mutual.

  “What about Makepeace? He’s planning to take over the place and chase us all out — including you.”

  “We can do nothing, Taco Del, merlin. John Makepeace’s presence is disturbing to us, but it is Wiwe who stops our voices from speaking to you...to each other.”

  “I was wondering about that,” I say. “How come you’re speaking to me now?”

  “Diablo,” he says, and his hand drifts downward toward his feet, beneath which the Doug sprig lies upon the stone. “You have brought with you a token of the spirit of our sacred Mountain — of my Mountain.”

  Doug? Well, this is a surprise.

  “But Doug was born on the Farm and grew up in a pot,” I explain. “How can he be a token of the sacred Mountain?”

  Pedro seems to shrug in a misty, foggy sort of way. “These things happen.”

  “Okay, so this ritual stuff — Chen needs the whole enchilada, right? And you want me to stop him, right?”

  “You must find the shaman’s tools before he does.”

  Sounds simple enough. I get a sudden clue.

  “Wait...you said the shaman stuff held you here, right? So, if I were to find it and take it to the sacred Mountain, you’d be able go there, right? And then...would it matter about the bones?”

  He’s silent for a moment and I know I’ve hit on something. But his next words aren’t what I think I’m gonna hear at all.

  “Burn them.”

  My mind does a neat somersault. “B-burn — ?”

  “The implements — you must burn them. Destroy them. Then, they will be forever safe from Wiwe.”

  “But-but, what’ll that do to you guys?”

  “I don’t know.”

  This honesty is not comforting. “I can’t do that. Not if you guys will....” I have a horrible image of 5,000 Ohlone spirits going poof! in a puff of holy smoke.

  “My world is lost,” he tells me. “If you would not lose your own, you must do as I say. John Makepeace is not your worst enemy, shaman. Nor is he ours.”

  I believe him. I do. But I can’t help myself; the thought of saving our bacon while the Dolores are at the bottom of the Bay makes my stomach hurt.

  “Find the magics and destroy them,” he says again, as if he can read my thoughts. No surprise there. “If they remain in this City, all is at risk.”

  I got my mouth open to continue the argument, but suddenly there’s no one to argue with. It’s like he’s been sucked up by a vacuum. I can’t believe how close I come to shouting out loud. Fortunately, I realize I’m hearing the voices of live folks and don’t do this. Instead, I hunker down low to the ground and get the hell out of there.

  My first thought when I crawl out of the hole is Doug. I head right for the alley. The first thing I see when I turn the corner and squeeze past some crates is Doug sitting in his wagon in a spot of moonlight. This makes me realize the fog has lifted and thinned a lot. It’s a wu gao huichen — high and billowy. It’s as if the narrow alley has squeezed the frothy stuff up between its high walls. Ghostly puffs hang just over my head. The place is dead quiet except for the scuffle of critters.

  I am immediately on my guard. In videos, this is where the music goes all creepy and you, the Watcher, are s’posed to be thinking, “It’s a trap, you ditz! Don’t go in there!” So, I am thinking this at myself, but since I am playing the role of the ditz, and as Doug does not seem alarmed, but only happy to see me, I do go in there.

  Doug is downright chipper, considering, and I am wondering where the other merlin is, when I hear him somewhere above me along the wall.

  “What’s up in there?” he asks and his voice echoes softly off everything.

  I realize he is sitting up on a rusting fire escape almost behind me. Good thing it wasn’t a trap, I guess. I turn and squint up at him, but all I can see is a pair of scuffed up boots at about eye level, and a dark, hunkered shape above that. This boy sure loves his sense-o-mystery.

  “It’s not good,” I say, and am swallowed by sudden despair. “I heard John Makepeace saying he was going to dig up the Dolores and dump their bones into the Bay. The Dolores,” I add, “are the Ohlone spirits that — ”

  “I know,” he interrupts and shifts on the fire escape so it groans and clanks. The sounds bounce around dully under the blanket of gao huichen. “Why the hell’d this goony alien want to do shit like that?”

  “Tourism. Survey says his folks won’t want to walk on dead folks, and there’s a regular carpet-o-corpses under that place.”

  “So, for that, he’s gonna feed them to the whales?”

  “Whales aren’t carnivores,” I point out, “or scavengers either, for that. I guess tourism is big on the outside.”

  Now the fire escape shrieks. “So, we got us a quest then, eh?”

  This stops my brain in its tracks. We? So, now I got a sidekick? I sit myself down on the end of Doug’s wagon and focus my eyes on the other merlin’s boots.

  “More to it than that. He don’t want us to save the bones.”

  “He who?”

  “Pedro. Pedro Alcantara. He’s sort of the head Whisperer — a shaman...sort of. He says we got bigger problems than that.”

  Lord E’s merlin makes a noise like a cat hocking up a fur ball. “And what might those be?”

  “There’s this old Chinese shaman guy — ”

  He moves further down the stairs, making them groan again. Now I can see his knees.

  “Master Chen?”

  Why, I wonder, does everybody else seem to know more than I do? I have this feeling that when I tell him about the weird shrine/art gallery and the religious artifacts, he’ll just say, “So what?” Then it occurs to me to wonder why I’m telling him anything at all.

  I glance at Doug, whose branches drape across my shoulder. He’s comfy as a clam. I wriggle my butt down into the wagon and tell the other merlin everything I know about Chen.

  He doesn’t say, “So what?” when I stop talking. He says, “Shit,” with much gusto. “And I thought he was just playin' at this shaman business.”

  My Alice bone twinges. “How d’you know about Chen, if I might ask?”

  “He’s been a visitor to the court of my lord,” he says. The tone of his voice adds he doesn’t think much of his lord. “Looking for objets d’arte, especially religious stuff. Lord E's had smeagols crawling through every church and temple in Potrero-Taraval along side those creepy ninjas. They came up with some stuff. I thought he was just a collector at first, then I got the drift that he was playing at being a wizard. My ...sources say he’s about trying to re-invent the Tong along the lines of the olden days. Wants to topple the current order — or lack thereof — and set himself up as Emperor.” He pauses for a moment, then adds, “It was him put the bug in Lord E’s brain about takin' the Wiz. I figure he was hoping our respective lords would take each other out or at least demolish each others’ forces pretty good. Which didn't happen, thanks to you.”

  I am so staggered at this revelation, I can only woggle. I finally manage to fill my lungs with air.

  “Are you...are you sure?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I am yet suspicious. “You said sources. What sources?”

  He chuckles. “I got someone in the Tin Hau. A friend.”

  I accept this for the moment. “I thought he was looking to sell our sacred stuff off to Makepeace for his tourists until I talked to Pedro,” I admit.

  “So, what’s the quest?” he asks.

  “I gotta get the Ohlone’s sacred stuff and...Pedro wants me to burn it.”

  “Zhende? And that’s supposed to call off Chen? What about Makepeace? How does he get had?”

  “He doesn’t.” Suddenly, I can’t sit down. “Don’t you get it? Makepeace isn’t the Big Demon, Chen is. According to Pedro, this guy can get our souls, not just the place they live. Pedro sa
ys the magic stuff's gotta be burned.”

  “So...what, you wait till Chen gets ‘em and burn down the Tin Hau?”

  Now the very idea of burning down a House of Worship, even to save souls, tastes like bad kim chee, but with all that sacred stuff inside....

  “That...that’d be one way to do it.”

  “But it won’t save the Gam Saan from Makepeace. And it won’t save the Dolores, either, will it?”

  I shake my head.

  “This sucks, Del.”

  “This is not news,” I say.

  “Isn’t there anything we can do about Makepeace?”

  We again. Like we were Frodo and Samwise, Scully and Mulder, Dr. Who and the companion de jour. I am bewoggled by his willingness to fraternize with one-time enemies, but happy to have an ally. And I wonder if something I been thinking might just be worth something. I start pacing around the wagon.

  “I had an idea,” I say. “But Pedro got real testy when I mentioned it.”

  “Give over,” he says and the fire stair whines.

  “Okay, it’s like this: Diablo is their sacred Mountain — the Dolores’, ni dong. It’s where the shaman met the first Spaniards. It’s where they’re from, spiritually speaking, it’s where the sacred things are from, too. If we can get the sacred stuff all together — or even some of it, I think — and get it to the Mountain, the Dolores’ spirits will be able to go there too.”

  “You sure about this?”

  “Pretty sure. Pedro said they were bound here because the shaman’s things are here. So I figure, if they’re on the Mountain, muy better, right, because then they got the power of the whole Mountain behind them, too. Then they’ll be in control of their own magics, or maybe the Mountain will, and Chen won’t be able to use them.”

  The fire stair honks like a goose. “Wo dong! I get it! All the sacred energy sort of...lines up — the Mountain, the shaman stuff, the Dolores....”

  I am equally excited by this prospect. “Only they won’t be Dolores any more. They’ll be free.”

  “Still leaves us with Makepeace,” he observes. “But two out of three ain’t crap. What do we do?”

  I am struck by two things, standing there in the dark, dirty, foggy alley. One is that there really is a We here, the other is that We haven’t got a clue.

  Nineteenth:

  Who Are We and What Are We Doing?

  I try to calculate how long it will take me to hustle back to Embarcadero, round up reinforcements and get back to the Mission. Then, of course, I got to get everybody under the fence and into the church, et al, without raising the alarms.

  “D’you s’pose the ninjas know where to look?” Hector the Ersatz Merlin asks.

  I gotta figure they don’t, of course, ‘cause they have not been jawing with actual witnesses to the events of centuries ago and I have. This gives me hope We might have some time after all.

  “I’m going for help,” I decide.

  I leave Doug with my new amigo, Hector, whose name I will certainly not forget and which I will most certainly abuse should anything happen to the Tree.

  I am just to the Potrero side of the Trench when I sense I’m being scoped. I know I should just keep hustling (after all, we are engaged in détente, so I supposedly can come and go as I please without fear of Potreran ill will), but I stop and peer at the sneaky mist that’s wandered into my back trail.

  “Jeez-Louise, Taco Face! You are so not-street-savvy. How’d you manage to stay alive for so long?”

  Lieutenant Cinderblock seems to rise up from the street. My wife rises up behind her.

  “By looking as feckless as possible,” I say, and Firescape asks, “Where the hell have you been? You got idea one what I been imagining?”

  She is close to tears and I am immediately plunged into sticky, steamy guilt. I feel a sudden kinship with our crustacean population. A good quest should distract her from what she’s been imagining, I imagine, so I drop one on her.

  “I’m okay,” I say, “but we got one big job to do. I talked to the Whisperers again, only this time face to very face...as it were.”

  Cinderblock and Firescape share a LOOK.

  “I talked to Pedro. Pedro Alcantara. The shaman in my dreams.”

  Firescape’s eyes say she is getting it. I explain further as we jog back to the alley where Hector waits (I sincerely hope) with Doug. By the time we reach the alley, I realize I would be more surprised to find no Hector and Doug than to find Hector and Doug.

  My faith is not betrayed; Hector and Doug are just where I left them. I am most pleased with this, of course, but it occurs to me, when the General and the Lieutenant go all prickly on me, that I have neglected to fill them in on an important development. I do some quick filling in and they become less prickly, though my wife is suspicious when she hears that, once again, Hector is prepared to Tree-sit while the three of us return to the Mission.

  “You really got no problem with this jake?” she asks me just before we dive under the lilac.

  “So far, he’s been an upstanding citizen,” I reply. “And Doug is okay with him.”

  Again, the LOOK passes between Hismajesty’s knighties. “You coulda told me that before I embarrassed myself,” Firescape informs me. “I never, never, would have threatened to whack off his cajones and lob them into the nearest sewer if you’d given me a little advance notice.”

  “Ditto,” says Cinderblock.

  Talk ends here. We are quiet as any of the thirty-two known varieties of fog once we are inside the walls of the Mission. I see no ninjas; hear no ninjas; feel no ninjas. I am surprised, when we ooze into the church (with me Chouyan-ing like a house afire) that there are no ninjas here, either.

  For a minute I’m afraid this means Something — like as in, we are too late and they’ve found what we’re all looking for. But then Cinderblock, who’s on point, signs me that they’re scopin' the graveyard and the crypt.

  I try to squash my apprehension and murmur a quick prayer that the rest of the treasure is still where Pedro’s memory says it is. While the ninjas scurry around amongst the tombstones, we go straight for the altar.

  It’s darker than dark in here, and the air is close and cold and heavy. I get out the foglite. It helps a little. I have forgotten a few things about the altar. Like, for instance, that it is very big and made of very solid stone.

  “How are we supposed to get inside?” Firescape signs and whispers.

  This is a good question. It had not occurred to me that when the padres buried the shaman stuff under their altar, they meant it to stay there for all eternity, amen. I am about to become very depressed when I realize that the altar is not quite all very solid stone. There is a front piece on it made of three bronze panels held together by a bronze frame.

  “That solid, too?” asks Cinderblock, then answers her own question by thumping the middle panel with the butt of her AK. It makes a satisfyingly unsolid clank.

  Neon, I think, when my heart stops pounding in fear that ninjas will soon be all over us. I hunker down in front of the panels and start poking. When that does squiddle, I try prodding. Ditto. I try pulling, and get a wiggle and an itsy-bitsy groan of protest from the bronze frame. Before I can ask, Firescape and Cinderblock are down on their knees, knives out, prying at the panels.

  I don’t have a knife ‘cause a merlin’s only weapon is his magic — that’s part of the code of merlinly ethics. So the only useful thing I can do is pray. I decide a Remover of Difficulties will be most effective.

  It is, but not in any predictable way, which is often the case with prayer — one of the Almighty’s more playful aspects. Before the prayer has quite slipped off my whispering lips, a presence makes itself known.

  “Howdy,” it whispers. “Need help?”

  “Jeez-Louise, merlin,” fires back Cinderblock, twitching in the dark. “You got a death-wish, or what?”

  She ignores the fact that if Hector’d been an enemy, he’d’ve had the drop on her.

  I do
not ignore the fact that if Hector is here, Doug must be somewhere else.

  “What have you done with the Tree, Hector?” I ask, my heart pumping something cold into my veins. I hold his real and secret name as if between two fingers, ready to give a good pinch.

  “Relax, Del,” murmurs Hector, with some mirth in his murmur. “The inestimable Tree is with your good friend, Creepy Lou. Caught him pokin' around the lilac bush. Figured you wouldn’t want the alarms going off, so I thought I’d give him something useful to do. What’s holding things up?”

  I let go of his name and gesture with the foglite at the altar so he can see what’s holding things up. He leans into the light a bit, his face shadowed by his cowl and a lot of hair that pitches over his eyes. I can just see that he has one of those pointy beards like the Three Musketeers wore. Jeez, talk about affectations. Makes his face look saturnine, which I think means like the god Saturn. Never seen him. Musketeers will have to do as a reference point.

  The Musketeer pokes his fingernail under the edge of a panel.

  “Huh. You tried prying this up?”

  “Yeah. Just about broke my knife blade,” says Firescape.

  “Too hard for a knife blade.” Hector pulls a screwdriver out of somewhere and wedges it in under a corner of the panel.

  It takes a while of wiggling and prying and yanking, but at long last, one screwdriver, two knives and twenty fingers (counting thumbs) make the panel come loose with a sharp metallic ka-chunk!

  Cinderblock, who has gone to guard our flank, hisses and jerks in the darkness. Above, pigeons flap crap onto us.

  I push the little foglite inside the hole we have left in the side of the altar and follow it up with my head. I don’t know what I expect to see, but it is not what I do see which is absolutely nothing.

  I pull my head out of the altar in a hurry, ‘cause the air is pretty rarified in there.

  “There’s nothing in there,” I whisper.

  It seems no one believes me. One by one, they grab the light and poke their heads into the hole. Then we sit back in silence looking at it, until Lord E’s Musketeer-merlin says, “Huh. 1907.”