The Queen Jade

by Yxta Maya Murray

  “If she wants to go, we should go,” she said.

  “I do want to go,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Because that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? So get up.”

  She stood to her full height and walked over to a boulder between the trees and the riverbank. She sat on it, apart from the rest of the group. She watched me.

  I stayed on the ground. Sparkles of adrenaline rushed through me, though my legs did not seem to have any strength.

  “So—get up,” she yelled over at me.

  “I’m trying to.”

  “It doesn’t look like it. Do you think my father ever let me flop around like that? You think your mother took little naps in the jungle? And if she is here, you think she has days to spare? So if you want to get up, get up. If you want to do it—do it.”

  “Enough! Be quiet, Yolanda!” Erik yelled back. “Can’t you tell that she’s hurt?”

  But I saw her point. If my mother were really here, we probably did not have much time. I hauled myself to my feet and made myself begin to walk around.

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “I’m doing it. You’re right.”

  Yolanda watched me carefully, and when she decided that I was mobile, she stood back up. She slipped her backpack on.

  “That’s how I learned from my father,” she said, softly. “That’s how he taught me to make it through the jungle.”

  She began to walk along the river toward its mouth, taking care to pick her hat up from where she’d left it on the bank. I put my pack back on, too, and began to move. Then Erik and Manuel did as well.

  Now all of us set off again, back through the trees and past the loud, angry water.

  I didn’t get too far, though, before Erik lagged behind and pulled me back.

  “Let me just—” he said. “Just give me a second and let me hug you.” He put his arms around me and touched his cheek to the top of my head. “You scared me.”

  “It was bad,” I said.

  “Oh, Lola. Honey. Let me see what happened to your hip.”

  I unzipped my jeans; Yolanda and Manuel were ahead and couldn’t see.

  Erik crouched down and looked at the injury; the skin was banged and wounded above the hipbone, where the flank met the beginning of my waist. He peered down at himself, to where a rent had been torn in the lower sleeve of his left arm. He ripped off a piece of the cloth from his shirt and placed it over the spot.

  “That’ll help to protect you,” he said. “More than just your underwear and your jeans.”

  He touched my hip very lightly with his fingertips; just a very small caress. Erik looked up at me. He picked up my hand and kissed it with a great tenderness, and I kissed him back and warmed my cold mouth.

  “Erik.”

  He just smiled. He knew what I was thinking.

  “Come on, hot stuff,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  I took his hand, and only then did we begin walking, swifter, to keep up with the other two.

  CHAPTER 53

  This is it, this is where we’re supposed to start,” Yolanda said, putting down her rucksack, when we’d reached our original destination on the other side of the Sacluc. She glanced up at the men working in the forest canopy, who were peering down at us with an Olympian detachment. One fellow inserting taps into a chicle tree with a large knot in the center of its trunk began to make circular gestures with his finger around his ear, letting us know that he thought we were severely deranged. Another man shouted down something in the Quiche Maya language, which I couldn’t understand.

  Yolanda shouted back; they had a brief conversation.

  “What did he say?” I asked Yolanda.

  “That we’re—let’s see if I can do an accurate translation,” she said, bending down to check the holstered machete she’d tied to her rucksack. “Very complex language, you know. First, he hasn’t seen your mother. And second—let me make sure I’ve got this right. All those gerunds and diphthongs, quite tricky. Ah, yes. He says that we are … stupid idiots. That it’s. Stu-pid idiots.”

  “Oh.”

  “Forget that—this is the place where Tapia found the Stelae,” Erik said.

  “Here’s my best guess, in any event,” Yolanda said.

  “Well, that’s what we’ll have to work with, then,” I said. “And hope that Mom made the same guess, and so started from the same place.”

  “Has there been any sign of tracks, or anything like that?” Erik asked.

  There hadn’t been one sign.

  “They would have all been erased by the water,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yes, that’s probably right,” Manuel said. “No use searching for footprints at this stage. We should be choosing which way to go. North, south, east, or west.”

  I began to pull the maps and papers and the journal from my pack; there had been some leaking into their plastic wrappers when I’d been in the water, so there was more damage on their edges and some slight smearing of the ink of the text, but everything could still be read. I picked up the pages where Erik had written his decipherment of the first maze, and leaned on Manuel because of the pain in my hip.

  “The text here says that in three of the separate directions we’ll probably run into some bad luck,” I said.” ‘At one way lies a maelstrom in the hour of winter; at another lies the fierce jaguar protecting their young in the spring; at a third lies the drowning marshes during all seasons; and at the fourth, should you choose correctly, you shall find what you seek.’ We have to pick one of the directions, and then find a city, and then a dragon tree. And then we have to figure out the second maze, the Labyrinth of Virtue.”

  “Slow down,” Yolanda said. “First things first. I think we’ve figured out which way is the maelstrom in the hour of winter. South. So I think that counts out the Priest. Sorry, Manuel.”

  Manuel nodded. “You’re right. And I would prefer to avoid meeting more jaguars, and also skirt the routes with the marshes, if at all possible.”

  “So, now we’re down to three directions—three characters,” Erik said. “What I would like to do is take just a few hours so that I can go through the books and letters. I’m telling you, I remember something about this. Some detail I’ve forgotten. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “There’s no time to study,” Yolanda said. “We have to make a choice now. Juana won’t have the luxury of waiting if she’s trapped out here.”

  “I actually agree, Erik,” I said.

  “Well, if we’re going to jump into things,” he replied, “we should probably head north. I think Juana would have gone that way. I’ve read a lot about dwarves before, they’re very important in Maya literature. They were seers, counselors. It’s an obvious choice. She would have picked that direction.”

  “But this is what I was saying last night—the Dwarf is wily,” I argued. “Mom never would have picked him. He’s a spy. My mother would definitely have picked the Witch.”

  “But the King’s the owner of the Stone,” Yolanda said. “And he’s the one who brought it here in the first place. He’s the only one who would know where it is. And this is apart from the fact that I’ve been studying this jungle for years, and I’ve got the best theory. It’s got to be east, close to Tikal. What better place for a king to hide his treasure? That’s the ancient city—it was probably his city. And jade’s been found there, including the blue. It’s the logical choice. Juana would have known that.”

  “Then why didn’t you ever go there before?” I asked.

  She crossed her arms. “Dad’s the stubborn type, and he was so interested in studying the western part, the idea never caught on with him—he wasn’t very flexible, sometimes, especially when it concerned his work. … But besides that, he’s already been all over the west, so I know there are sinkholes there. I’ve also heard once of a big cat attacking a hiker in the area. And, as I think you’ve probably already figured out, the
jungle is not neatly carved up into ‘jaguar’ and ‘quicksand’ territory. We have to go on more than these stories.”

  Manuel, Erik, and I regarded each other.

  “We have to make a decision,” Manuel said. He turned away from us and began to look around, until he fixed on the men working in the chicle trees; in particular he paid attention to the fellow strapped to the tree with the giant knot in the center of its trunk. The tree was approximately three hundred yards away from where we stood. “When I was a boy, and my friends and I had disagreements about whether to go to the cinema or play baseball, we used to have racing contests to decide who would win.”

  “You can’t be saying …” I followed his gaze over to the tree, with the man dangling above the knot.

  “I certainly am. It’s a perfectly fair way to decide. My chums and I, we’d pick out some target, and whoever reached the mark first beat out the others.” He pointed to the chicle tree. “Why don’t we say, whoever touches the knot on that tree first decides which direction we’ll take?”

  “Whoever touches it first?” Yolanda asked.

  “Yes. The first touch. And the rest of us will follow, without any arguments.”

  “I’d do it, Dad—but my leg,” I said. “I can’t run a race, I’m not fit for it now.”

  “She does have a point, Manuel, it’s not really fair,” Erik said. Though I noticed that he was already half hunching down into a sprinter’s position. “I can run much faster than the women.”

  Yolanda did not enter the debate. Instead, she quickly bent down and unsheathed the machete that was strapped to her pack. Then she leaned back and raised the blade above her head. She flung it into the air so that it whipped like a propeller until it pierced the knot in the tree with a giant, violent whang.

  “Aaaaggggh!” said the man working just above, in its branches.

  “I touched it first,” she said, looking at us.

  “Dear God.”

  Erik stood back up. “You touched it all right.”

  The machete stuck out from the tree like Arthur’s sword.

  Manuel nodded, then squinted over his shoulder, toward the east.

  “Yolanda wins.”

  CHAPTER 54

  We walked due east from the river for two hours, past the chicleros who continued to announce their critiques of our mental facilities in their complicated language, and then, farther on, through unpopulated areas filled with patches of gorse, more mahoganies, ferns that stood as tall as men, and mists of bugs. A few white-tailed deer poked their heads through the fern fronds, looked at us, and then disappeared.

  “Tikal is a little over a day away from here,” Yolanda said. “I think a path used by the Maya ran through this area, once. But with the earthquakes that have happened here, and then the hurricane, it’s impossible to tell now.”

  The trees crowded all around us as we shoved forward, though in some patches several of the giant mahoganies had been felled by the hurricane, so there was no need to cut our way through. Quetzal birds sipped at the ponds that shone on storm-blasted ground, and flew away in a green explosion when they heard us approach. We climbed over soaked and spongy trees on the forest floor. The earth was uneven and pulp-soft, though Yolanda navigated the quags with quick steps. She continued to check her compass to make sure we headed due east, and kept urging us along.

  At about four o’clock in the afternoon, though, Erik said, “Where does she think she’s taking us?”

  I looked behind at him, over my shoulder. “East, like she said. Toward Tikal.”

  “This doesn’t look promising at all,” he said.

  “I don’t know, my boy, I think she’s on to something,” Manuel said. “You shouldn’t underestimate her. She’s been in this forest far more than the rest of us have. She’s a scholar of the region, and knows all the myths from Tomas.”

  “And she’s done a great job of getting us this far,” I admitted.

  “She—has,” he said. “But exactly how far are we supposed to go?”

  “Until we find Juana,” Manuel said, “or get nibbled on by jaguars or otherwise suffer the other curses warned of in those morbid little tales.”

  Of all of us, Manuel worried the most. He continued to walk ahead of me, but slower, and his face had begun to look sick. He was also sweating terribly, and twice I caught his hands trembling again.

  Yolanda ducked beneath the low branches of the trees and light-stepped over the gnarled roots and the fallen trunks. Her black hat flashed ahead between the stands of mahoganies, and several times she had to hold up her stride so that we could make up the distance. She was half smiling.

  “Finally—east,” she said. “But I wish my father were here.”

  After three miles, the flora began to thicken before us. We reached a very tall, unscathed barrier of juniper brush, and Yolanda whisked her machete through the luminous green wall. We found ourselves, then, in a high corridor of brambly bush, filled with not only the ever-present bugs but also a clean sharp scent, like gin. My hip continued to hurt all this way, and occasionally I had to knead my flank to prevent the muscle from seizing up. Manuel moved in that slow stalky walk ahead of me, tentatively reaching out his hands to bat away the thicket.

  “I have no idea where I am,” Erik said.

  “Just come on,” I told him. “There’s no use in tracking back now.”

  “I know, I just can’t stand not being able to see where I’m going,” he said.

  “This is almost it,” Yolanda said. “I think we’re about to hit a clearing.”

  About twenty minutes later, we did.

  The juniper forest opened into a low-lying savanna fringed by thin, lime-colored trees. The field bloomed all over with curling grasses and sedge bush and more ferns, as well as purple lilies that strewed their petals on the grasses. Needles of sunlight pierced through the treetops, burning the flowers with a hot color. Snakes slithered among the blooms. As we stood on the perimeter, we waved our arms to scatter the mosquitoes that congregated even more thickly in this area. A warm haze lifted from the forest floor, mixed in with the beams of light, and curled up into the gaps of the trees. In these gaps I thought I saw the glitter of yellow eyes.

  “What’s that?” Manuel asked, as we approached the clearing. “Did I hear purring?”

  “No, those are frogs croaking and—burping, actually,” Yolanda said.

  “Oh.”

  “But this is something,” she said, about the site. “I wonder if a ruin—a city—could be buried here. It might be the place.”

  “Then we should be looking for the dragon tree,” I said. “The king—this is what I remember from the Legende—he ‘fled his Mad city, passed the Dragon Tree, towards the East, and hid within a second Maze. …’”

  “If we believe what de la Cueva writes,” she said. “Then, yes, we should.”

  “Do you know what they look like?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not much in the way of dragon trees in Long Beach.”

  “Look for a tree with red sap,” Yolanda told us.

  “Red sap.”

  “That’s the signature of the dragon tree. The Dracaena draco.” She walked ahead of us toward the open patch between the fringe of elms and mahoganies, and the sunlight barred her body. She took one step, another, and then we saw that the ground that had looked so firm began to flow up her boots, and toward her shins.

  “There’s some soft earth,” she said, in a questioning voice, looking down—just as I heard a creaking and cracking in the wood behind us.

  “Is that another jaguar?” I asked.

  “Yolanda,” Erik said. “What are you doing?”

  “Dear girl,” Manuel interjected. “Come back here.”

  “Seriously,” I said, “did you all hear that?”

  “What?”Manuel asked.

  “There was a sound. Behind us.”

  Yolanda was still walking away, toward the clearing. She slipped and fell half into a substance more el
astic and depthless than mud, and the three of us ran toward her. Snakes and dragonflies slid across the surface of the stuff. Yolanda tugged herself up out of the sludge and crawled over to a piece of firmer ground.

  “That was disgusting, I can’t even tell you,” she said, but kept moving. “You people should be careful.”

  “And you?”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  We tried to maneuver around this plush earth, tripping over the lianas and ferns and avoiding the tendrils of mud that moved in a rippling fashion before they reared up and hissed.

  “That’s a snake,” I said.

  “Don’t touch it,” Yolanda said.

  “You think?”

  “How so very, very National Geographic,” Erik said. “I’m so excited I could almost scream, and I’m not even joking.”

  “Perhaps we should give up on this direction,” Manuel said. He was about thirty feet ahead of us, closer by Yolanda and the center of the clearing. Then he looked over his shoulder and stopped talking.

  Yolanda now also stared in the same direction, and her face was set in stone.

  “Is there an animal back there?” I asked again, and then stumbled.

  Right next to me, Erik’s foot slipped into some sort of sinking marsh. I was knee high in mud or sludge, and bent forward to test out some of the ground ahead of me with my hands. The area directly to my left did not feel safe.

  “Is this mud?” Erik asked. He was looking down. “There are deep pockets all around.”

  “Jesus,” Yolanda said. “Go away.”

  I turned my head toward the stand of thin trees out of which we’d cut our path.

  Lieutenant Estrada was standing behind me like a gruesome hallucination.

  He was striped with blood, and thin deep strips cut across his right arm, which dripped darkly onto the ground. He was so close I could see the precise crimson zigzag of his scar. And in his left, uninjured hand he held a gun.

  “That’s who shot the jaguar,” I breathed. “He followed us—that’s who we heard before.”

  “I didn’t get that beast—it got me,” Estrada said, holding up his battered arm. He glared at Yolanda. “But you’re not as fast as a cat, are you, de la Rosa?”