A Kingdom Beneath the Waves

by Bowles, David;

  But I’m not here to learn about all the boring stuff they do. Bigger fish to fry. Heh. Gotta use that one on Carol.

  “Would you like to see construction in progress?”

  Johnny looked at the princess, giving a quick smile. “Sure! I’m curious about how you guys pull off these feats of engineering.”

  Surrounded by a half dozen aids and royal guards, they swam up and over a chunk of Tapachco, curving back into the city a little nearer to the magma streams. Teams of workers were tending coral gardens on the rocky outer wall.

  “This is part of the Atempan district,” Anamacani explained as they got closer. “Tapachco has experienced huge growth over the last sixty years since the eruption, especially out here on the edges of the city.”

  They slowed and drifted close to a team carefully binding coral to force it to grow in a vertical sheet. The wall of some building, Johnny guessed.

  “Wow. How long does it take to grow a structure this way?”

  Making a gesture of respect toward the princess, a strange salute that began with both palms against the forehead, a coral cultivator responded, “You must be one of the humans. The whole city trembles with news of your arrival. What you see before you is no ordinary bed of coral, sir. We have had thousands of years to breed notapachicah; properly fed and exposed to calcium-rich currents, it can grow a hand-span or more a week.”

  “Amazing,” Johnny replied, his eyes running over the bindings and stakes, the bladders being used by workers to pump nutrients into the water flowing among the pale fields of coral. Unexpectedly, he found himself reaching out toward the nearest cultivation, not with his hands, but with xoxal, the savage magic that was his birthright. The teotl inside the coral, its life force, responded to his questing touch. With a thrill of excitement, Johnny saw the connections inside the teeming colony, its will to grow, to tower, to seek the warmth and tenuous light of the magma streams.

  Not fully understanding what he was doing, Johnny poured his will into the coral, coaxing it to defy nature, to exceed breeding.

  The gaps in the short walls closed. They visibly began to grow before everyone’s eyes. Ten centimeters. Twenty.

  Creaking shouts of alarm came from all around, and Johnny pulled his power back. Engineers and workers rushed to examine the coral. Guards clenched their weapons tightly.

  The princess was staring at him. “Was that you? How are you able to do such a thing?”

  “Yeah, it was me, but I have no clue. Me and Carol, we’ve got this added set of abilities since we’re twin naguales. Xoxal, they call it. Savage magic.”

  Her expression grew serious. “Ah. Yes, I know of this power. No one has wielded it for a thousand years or more. I doubt my parents truly appreciate the importance of your presence in Tapachco. You and your sister should receive a greater degree of respect.”

  Yeah, that’s what I keep saying, he quipped to himself. But he refrained from being snarky. She was clearly on his side.

  “Thanks. They’re adults, though. That’s what they do, right? Ignore teenagers because we haven’t lived long enough to find wisdom or whatever.”

  Still pensive, she nodded in a general gesture of agreement. “Come. Let me show you the caves. Growing coral is important, but the truly vital crops are closer to the magma flows.”

  They dove past the city, her retinue in tow. The glowing bands loomed larger ahead of them, and the currents became stronger and warmer. One kilometer below Tapachco, they came upon a network of caverns. Guards at the entrance of each carefully checked caravans of sixgill sharks used to pull large nets full of harvested plants toward the city.

  “Captain Xicol,” Anamacani called as they floated closer. “Please accompany my handmaiden Ilancueh back to Tapachco. I need you two to find my cousin Mihuah and Carolina—kindly escort them here to meet us in the Cave of History.”

  One of her guards gave a salute in reply and gestured at the youngest of the aids. Together, they darted back the way the company had come.

  The princess led the rest of them into the cavern complex. Johnny’s jaw dropped at the extensive fields of kelp, seagrass, and other subaquatic plants. Growers and harvesters skimmed along the tops of the rows, glancing up briefly at the visitors passing overhead before returning to work.

  “How many people live in Tapachco?” Johnny asked.

  “Close to 12,000. We have crops growing in some ten caverns, with another dozen dedicated to fisheries and the care of other marine livestock. But there is a different reason I have brought you here. It is important you know what is at stake, given the information you brought us about my brother and his quest. If you are to truly aid us, you need the right context.”

  Intrigued, he followed closely as they swam for another fifteen minutes, entering a vast chamber that was empty except for a group of guards. As Anamacani gave them instructions, Johnny looked up at the glowing circle of light above—it seemed as if the surface of the ocean were right overhead, and beyond he swore he could make out the blurry forms of shelves and furniture of the sort humans use.

  “Come,” the princess said, touching his arm. “You and I will enter the Cave of History alone.”

  Rocketing upwards after her, Johnny burst through the surface and into the stale, thin, cool air of a somewhat human-friendly grotto. Anamacani had hauled herself onto the rocks that formed a lip around the pool…

  …and to Johnny’s astonishment, she shapeshifted into a young human woman with dark skin and dreads, looking something like a cross between a Maori and an Aboriginal Australian.

  She is still beautiful, he thought to himself.

  “You…but…how?”

  The princess smiled as she smoothed her garments over her new form and spoke to him in oddly accented Spanish. “I should have warned you, but I could not resist giving you a surprise. I am the royal family’s Ehcamatini or Air Sage. Every generation one or two of us are born with the latent ability to assume human shape. Inevitably, the Air Sage becomes the Royal Historian, charged with keeping our people’s chronicles safe and current. My Aunt Omelia served before me, taking over from a distant cousin who abandoned the post long ago. I was a child when she died and the court seers declared that either Maxaltic or I would take up her mantle. Two years ago, my abilities made themselves manifest. My brother hardly spoke to me afterwards—that is, until he asked for the Retelling.”

  Johnny emerged from the water, shifting into his normal self and wrapping himself in warm jeans, tennis shoes and a hoodie. “That’s freaking amazing, Princess Anamacani, though it sucks your brother is being such a moron.”

  “Please, Juan, call me Ana.”

  He nodded, trying hard not to blush. “Cool. My name’s actually Juan Ángel in Spanish. You should call me Johnny. It’s English, but that’s my nickname.”

  “As you prefer, Johnny.” The “j” was almost a “sh” the way she said it.

  Pulling his eyes away from her self-consciously, he looked around and finally noticed the hundreds of scrolls and tomes arranged in niches and on stone shelves throughout the Cave of History. Illumination came from an almost steampunk collection of gaslights fed by copper tubing that Johnny guessed brought up volcanic gasses from deeper in the complex of caverns. Strange plants climbed walls and curled around stalagmites. Tables and chairs stood in disarray in various spots, covered with parchment, vellum and writing utensils.

  “Whoa. My dad would flip if he saw all this. You guys have your entire history in here? How far back does that go? A couple thousand years?”

  Ana smiled and shook her head. “Come here. Let me show you.”

  They walked deep into the cave, past the gaslights. She lit a candle and made her way along a narrow ledge beside a bubbling sulfur spring. The scrolls gave way to clay tablets, then to slabs of stone.

  “Here it is. The First Document. You named it in my parents’ throne room. The Compact of Blessed Creatures, carved into this bit of granite 80,000 years ago.”

  Johnny peere
d at the strange hieroglyphs, unlike anything he’d ever seen in his father’s books or in history class.

  “Wow.”

  “Indeed. It is daunting, serving as the steward of all this knowledge, adding to it with my own quill.”

  “You, uh, do seem kind of young.”

  Ana laughed. “Yes, well, I have lived through but twenty-three years.”

  The chagrin must have shown on his face, because she laughed even harder.

  “Ceremonial years, Johnny. Seventeen solar years. Why, how old are you?”

  He found it tough to admit the truth, but did so anyway. “Hrm, thirteen.”

  Gesturing with her candle, she guided him back toward the brighter part of the cave. “You look older to me. Of course, I have seen very few humans, so it is difficult to judge. However, in a way, you are older than I am. The Atlacah live about twice as long as humans do, so in relative terms, I have lived less of my life than you.”

  They stopped at a table across which was spread a map of what appeared the entire Pacific Ocean. Five regions were marked and labeled in an odd script that reminded Johnny of Chinese or Japanese.

  “So you guys have been around for 80,000 years, huh? Where did you come from?”

  “From remarks you made in the throne room, I take it you know of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, correct?”

  “Oh, yeah.” His awkwardness faded. It was hard not to feel pride in his accomplishments, so Johnny didn’t even bother with false humility. “I’ve spent some quality time with the Feathered Dude’s animal soul, and I recently faced off against none other than Mr. Peg-legged Lord of Chaos himself, down in the bowels of Mictlan.”

  The look on Ana’s face was priceless. Johnny had clearly gone up a dozen or so notches in respectability.

  She swallowed heavily. “I see. Well, at the beginning of the Fourth Age of the world, the struggle between the brothers continued. A new sun was needed, but the gods wanted to avoid the disputes of the past. After a time they looked to Matlalcueyeh, the green-skirted goddess of water, wife of the rain god Tlaloc. Powerful enough to sustain the world yet sufficiently loving and gentle to care for her charges, Matlalcueyeh seemed an ideal candidate.”

  Johnny cleared his throat. “Uh, you don’t actually mean that she became the sun, do you? That must be a metaphor or something.”

  “To be honest, I cannot claim to understand the ways of the gods. Our priests tell us that the brothers agreed on her as the right choice, and she was somehow transfigured, becoming the governing force of the world, controlling the sun and all else that sustains life. The men and women created by the gods had many children, and those had many more, and the earth began to fill up with human beings whose praise and sacrifice sustained the sun and pleased the gods.

  “Much time passed in this way, it is said, idyllic and serene. Then the heavens began to fill with water. It is not clear precisely why or how, but our annals report that Matlalcueyeh wept for fifty-two years, her tears accumulating in the sky until it bowed with the weight of her sadness. The source of that weeping will be forever a mystery though circumstances suggest—”

  Johnny smirked. “Let me guess. Tall, dark and smoky was to blame.”

  “As far as we can determine, yes. He was, at least, the only god aware of the danger, for he forewarned an aging couple, making them store food in a hollow log and seal themselves within. Then the firmament shuddered, cracked, and ripped wide open. The heavens fell, flooding the sea-ringed world till it seemed a part of the cosmic sea, obliterated from existence entirely. Most people drowned, but Quetzalcoatl, rushing into the breach, attempting to staunch the tide, transformed a small number of survivors into merfolk, doughty sirens and tritons who dove deep to avoid the pounding storm.”

  “Your ancestors.”

  “Not entirely. One strand of my heritage.”

  She looked down at her legs and wiggled her toes. The gesture appeared at first playful, but then Johnny realized she was avoiding his gaze.

  “The real story of Tapachco begins after human beings arrive,” she said, her voice dropping almost to a whisper, “when the first shapeshifting twins in history betray each other and all they love, nearly destroying the world afresh.”

  Chapter Six

  It was hard not to like and trust Mihuah. The twenty-something diplomat had dismissed all but two of her aids, insisting that she and Carol were perfectly capable of protecting themselves within the confines of the city. Once they were free of the entourage, she had offered to braid the human girl’s hair, which kept floating in front of her eyes, before they set off. Mihuah’s own tight rusty curls were closely cropped against her ochre skin and posed less of a challenge.

  Their excursion had focused on major institutions, and Mihuah hadn’t held back in sharing gossip about the royal family, priests, politicians and even troupes of actors. Much of this was delivered in a vicious deadpan that had Carol giggling despite herself.

  “Below us you will see the largest collection of blowhards in the city,” she said, toward the end of their tour of Tapachco. She indicated a broad structure with an ochre-freckled hand. “Well, it is empty at the moment, since the Assembly of Calpolehqueh is not in session. But a few weeks ago, the heads of every district were united there, trying their utmost to undo millennia of tradition and precedent on bullheaded whims.”

  “Sounds like our politicians. Only we have a lot more than you.”

  Mihuah shot her a look of feigned pity.

  “You are welcome to remain in atlacatl form and avoid human politics in Tapachco, though I can’t promise the boredom won’t cause you greater distress. Ah! I spend a great deal of my time there,” she said, gesturing at a spindly tower. “The Palace of Ministers, where the executive council lives and works. My mother, Aquimichin—who is the Queen’s sister, by the way—is the Cihuacoatl, the minister of state. She is off visiting Unazoko now, so I am required to pick up quite a bit of slack. The deputy minister is awfully lazy, frankly.”

  Carol lifted a hand. “Hang on. That’s a lot of information. Unazoko—another kingdom of merfolk?”

  “Ah, apologies. Yes, a lovely, diverting city-state near your country of Japan. It is one of the Five Nations spread throughout the Pacific. We have lived in peace for several hundred years, thankfully. Of course, there are many other threats to our existence, the largest of which is humanity, no offense.”

  “None taken. We’re definitely a menace, even to ourselves. How do you do it, though? Keep your existence a secret from us, I mean.”

  “We have nowhere near as much magic as the Little People, but we do have a smidge. Enough to help us withstand even the crushing pressures of the Deep, for example. And you have already encountered our tzaccayotl, the glamor we use to disguise ourselves as other marine creatures. This is merely an illusion laid over our true forms, but it is normally enough. The danger of capture is real, so if we die beyond the borders of the realm, our bodies dissolve into nothing within an hour.”

  “Yikes. But, uh, I’m guessing that stuff happens sometimes, no? I mean, you guys show up in myths across the globe, and I just met a whole family that used to work with merfolk.”

  “Well, yes, of course. We have had official dealings with humans down the years, but the few of your kind who have betrayed our trust have been easily discredited in the eyes of their people. In addition, many guards and laws are in place to govern our behavior out in the open sea, though rogues will be rogues. As a measure of last defense, the court sorcerers are capable of influencing the weather around these isles and touching the minds of men to turn them away from deeper nearby exploration.”

  “Ah, I can see why diplomacy is so important. The Five Nations pretty much need to stick together, no, to keep humans out of Atlacah affairs? No wonder the Queen was so upset about Maxaltic dumping his would-be bride.”

  Mihuah’s lip quivered, and she turned her face away.

  Uh-oh, thought Carol. I just hit a nerve.

  “It was not the
first time he had done so,” the diplomat muttered, choking back emotion.

  “Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. I should just keep my big mouth shut.”

  Mihuah ran a hand across her tight curls, straightened her elegant yoke, and turned to face Carol with a wistful smile. “Oh, it is hardly your fault. I was betrothed to Maxaltic as a young girl, an arrangement between our families. He is a few solar years older, you understand. I grew up quite enamored of him, but he was a distant, almost legendary figure. Anamacani was born, and I often spent time with her. We would be sisters-in-law one day, after all, not only cousins. Our bond grew strong.”

  Mihuah looked off into the distance wistfully. Carol wished she hadn’t said anything. It was always uncomfortable, listening to the romantic tragedies of strangers. But she kept quiet and waited.

  “When the Queen decided that the realm was better served by political ties to Qucha Llaqta, she had the prince tell me in person. It was the first and last time we spoke in private. He was kind. But I was nonetheless devastated.”

  Carol was just about to ask the diplomat whether she had ever traveled with her mother to that kingdom when a high-ranking guard swam up, accompanied by a young siren.

  “Captain Xicol,” Mihuah said in acknowledgment. “Where is the princess?”

  The siren spoke up first, gripping her hands to a chest in a merfolk curtsy. “My Lady, Princess Anamacani has sent us to bring you to the Cave of History. She wishes to meet with you and Lady Carol.”

  “Just Carol, please. We’re not royalty or anything like that.”

  Mihuah gestured to her aids. “We will be accompanying Ilancueh and the captain. Please report our whereabouts to the Royal Guard.”

  Thankful for the reprieve from the awkward conversation, Carol marveled at the traffic moving back and forth from the distant cave complex. As they approached and entered, she was amazed at the extent of agriculture and animal husbandry.