Crystal Rain

by Tobias S. Buckell

“Could do both, if we split up,” Allen said.

  Dennis cleared his throat and looked around, an unspoken question in the air. Who stayed to face more Azteca, and who got to run down the mountain to do the warning?

  They drew straws. Four men would split with Allen to run down the mountains and find the nearest station with a working telegraph. If all the wires were already cut, they would do their best to make it through the jungle to warn any towns they came across.

  “Pddeeett!”

  Dennis looked up. One of the men doing watch down the road. “Yeah?”

  “Azteca!”

  “Supply or warrior? How many?”

  “Jaguar warrior party, no supply-men,” the lookout yelled back. Dennis’s stomach churned. A supply group would have been easy to ambush. “A hundred. They got clubs and packs and guns. A bunch of regular-looking warrior coming behind as well.”

  Allen looked at Dennis and unslung his rifle. Dennis shook his head. “Leave. Now. We go hold them down a bit. You run. Get the word out. Hear?”

  Allen nodded and shook Dennis’s hand. Then Dennis pushed Allen away and picked up his rifle. He jogged toward the bend as Allen grabbed his pack, strapped it on, and disappeared down the ravine with four mongoose-men following him.

  Dennis slowed and inched his way up the roadside, using the heavy bush as cover. The lookout scrabbled his way over on his elbows and carefully parted a pricker bush for Dennis to look through.

  Azteca feathers and standards flapped animal likenesses in the wind. The first scouts appeared down the road. Then the first row of regular Azteca marched out, a dust cloud rising around them.

  “Some say a cornered mongoose the most vicious,” Dennis said. “We go be even more ferocious.”

  The rest of his handful of men crawled into the bush near him. They dug around for the best hiding positions. One mongoose-man monkeyed up a tree, his feet kicking off loose bark.

  Dennis raised his gun and sighted the lead banner carrier. “When you ready.”

  A rifle cracked from up in the tree. The Azteca line slowed. The mongoose-men opened fire and the first row of Azteca dropped to the road. Dennis fired. The gun bucked into his shoulder. He blinked his eyes clear and reloaded, levering the still-steaming spent cartridge out with a practiced flick.

  The Azteca return fire ripped through the bush around him. Pain exploded down Dennis’s arm. He grabbed his shoulder, trying to stop the blood spurting into the leaves around him. Feet pounded the ground as Azteca slashed through the branches at them.

  Dennis heard more shots from his men, branches snapping, grunts, gasps, and screams as Azteca and mongoose-men fought hand to hand.

  A light-skinned warrior jumped past Dennis, smacking him in the head with a club.

  He struggled to raise his rifle with one hand, but it was knocked free. Two Jaguar scouts grabbed his legs and pulled him out onto the road. They aimed their weapons down at him.

  Dennis lay there and looked up into the sky.

  The mist had cleared away. Between the blotchy green leaves and branches he saw that a strong wind was pushing clouds rapidly through the sky, far above him.

  Against the sound of the pitched jungle battle, the two rifles above him fired, one just after another.

  CHAPTER TWO

  John deBrun sat in a canvas chair and doodled on a piece of paper with his good hand. His left hand, a simple steel hook, rested with the tip dug into the chair’s wooden arm. He drew a semicircle on one side of the paper with a swoop of his quill. He did the same on the other side to form an egg. Then he shaded shapes onto it. Wicked spikes. Shadows in the crevices. John added water dripping from the spikes, a slight déjà vu moment flitting through him, and then held the piece of paper back at arm’s length.

  Just a spiked sphere. That’s all. He set the paper on the floor.

  Several other sketches lay on a varnished table in the basement’s corner. A giant metal bird with a beak that writhed into a human face. A half-finished sketch of a woman melting into a fiery sun.

  The largest painting hung from the ceiling. John often lay beneath its chaotic blue ocean-wave landscape. When salt spray drifted in through his shutters, John recalled sailors’ screams and water streaming across the deck. Cold, frigid water.

  Half-sunk into the earth, his house remained nice and cool, despite the heat outside. Wonderful protection as dry season came to the lowest slopes of the Wicked Highs. After all day fishing the Brungstun reefs, John often retreated down here. But even at the basement’s coldest, it never compared to the chills he got when looking at the painting.

  “Hey,” said a familiar voice. The twenty-year-old memories of his sail north fled. John turned. His thirteen-year-old son, Jerome, sat on the stairs. “Mamma done cooking. You go come up to eat or what?”

  “What’d she cook?” John didn’t sound Nanagadan. He’d spent enough years listening, but he kept to his own strange language patterns. Despite his son’s teasing. Or the inlaws’. It was the only thing he had from his past.

  “Saltfish stew. Rice-n-pea,” Jerome said.

  John loved Shanta’s cooking, but could never find enthusiasm for her weekly dose of saltfish. Just rice and peas for him today, then.

  He leaned forward and stood with a grunt. The scars down his legs ached. Jerome grinned and ran up the stairs.

  “He coming, he coming,” Jerome yelled, headed for the kitchen.

  Shanta leaned around the corner, then turned her attentions back to the iron skillet of rice. Coal burned in the square stove’s bin, heating the kitchen’s confines. Her white dress shifted against her curved hips.

  “What take you so long?” Shanta berated him. “I call you already.”

  John sat down at the scarred table. A plate of fresh johnnycakes still glistened with oil in the middle of the table. John reached over and speared one with his hook.

  Jerome turned in his chair. “He using he hook to eat he food.” Jerome grinned as he told on his dad. Shanta turned around and gave John a look. John avoided her eyes and pulled the fried dough off his hook.

  Shanta set the skillet on the table. “Quit playing,” she warned.

  Father and son exchanged meaningful mock glares, blaming each other for drawing Shanta’s irritation.

  “You want to go into town with me, tomorrow?” John asked Jerome. Jerome scrunched up his face and thought about it.

  “Yeah. Where?”

  “I need to go out to Salt Island.” The salt bin had reached the halfway mark last week, and John needed to make some extra fun money as well; carnival started in two days. He didn’t want to be broke during the food fair. It was his favorite time of year. “If you help me, I’ll give you some money for carnival.”

  Shanta filled Jerome’s bowl with saltfish stew and then nudged the pot toward John. He shook his head. She sighed and handed him the skillet of rice and peas. “Be back before dark. You know how I get when you out late.”

  John nodded. It would be Jerome’s first sail out of the harbor. “We’ll be back in time.” Jerome kicked him in the shin and John winced. “Don’t do that,” he warned in his best “danger” voice. It was halfhearted. Jerome had been a surprise after six years of marriage. Shanta had been thirty-six and they both had worried throughout the pregnancy. John doted on his son as a result. The strong emotions still sometimes startled him.

  Later, once Jerome slept in his room, John helped Shanta with the dishes. She cleaned. He rinsed and set them on the rack.

  “He excited,” Shanta said.

  “Yeah, he’ll enjoy the trip out.” John’s hook hit a pot and clinked as he balanced the last wooden bowl on the other dishes. Shanta flicked the water off her hands. John moved up close to her when she turned. “Hello, Miss Braithwaite.”

  “Mr. deBrun. How you doing?”

  “Fine. Fine.” John kissed her and held her close; his tanned and weathered skin against her deep brown. “I thought about you when I was fishing today.”

  “What you
think?”

  “How much you would have liked to salt those groupers we netted.”

  “Hey! Man, why you tease me so?”

  “’Cause I love you.”

  “Ah.” She leaned into him. Then: “John?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When you painted … you remember anything?”

  “No.” He kissed her hair and noticed several gray streaks. More and more had been appearing. Yet she never commented on the fact that when she’d met John, he’d looked older than her, and now he looked younger. “Don’t worry about it.” He loved her for caring. Shanta didn’t talk much about the gap in John’s memory. Yet sometimes it seemed to him she secretly worried about it more than he did. Did she want him to stop thinking about it because it always tore him up so? Or did she worry about some past secret that might be exposed that would tear them apart?

  Shanta grabbed a towel and dried her hands. “I don’t want Jerome going sailing much after this.”

  “Why not?” John took the dish towel from her hands and hung it up on a peg. “What harm is there in it?”

  “I remember when they pull you up out the water. Twenty-seven years, John, but I remember. You all wrinkled. Strapped to some floaty thing …”

  “You were young.” John remembered her standing on the beach. Then he remembered the gray streaks in her hair and regretted saying it.

  “Huh,” Shanta snorted. “Twenty-two. Old enough to give you plenty grief.”

  John had struggled with the fact he couldn’t remember anything before he had washed up on the beach. He had taken his name off the silver necklace around his neck with the name John deBrun written on it. Even though he didn’t speak like everyone else, he understood Nanagadans. Which meant he must have been exposed to the land before.

  John stayed to sail boats in Brungstun, hoping to regain his memories. He could picture maps in his head as if they were before him. He could navigate by stars, sun, map, and with his eyes closed. But he started out a horrible sailor. He had known nothing about winds or the tides or the waves and weather around Brungstun.

  “He won’t be like me,” John said. “None of that adventuring spirit. He’ll grow up, be respectable. A town banker, right?” Shanta mock-punched his arm. “He won’t break any young girls’ hearts,” John teased, continuing. “Won’t leave for Capitol City …” Shanta’s grin disappeared.

  After six years learning the sea with local fishermen, John had trekked to Capitol City with a small group of mongoose-men led by Edward, a bushman who became a close friend for the trip there.

  Shanta stepped away from him. “Don’t talk about Capitol City, John. Not tonight. I never slept when you was sailing the ocean. I don’t want ever think you was dead again. You know how horrible—”

  “I’m sorry.” John pulled her back to him in a hug. “I’ll shut up.” During the trip John had looked for clues to his past in other towns on the way north, and in Capitol City itself. He’d been offered a chance to join a trio of ships as navigator. The expedition was to see if there was land to the north, but in the dangerous, icy waters of the north seas John had found nothing but death, and some fame as he navigated the single surviving ship back to Capitol City. He’d been forged into a captain and a leader during that horrible trip back to Capitol City from the icy north. Or maybe that had been something always in him. “I came back, right? I’m here now.”

  Shanta shrugged. She spun away from him. “No excuse for all that.”

  “Let’s quit being glum. Carnival’s almost here.” He turned around with a large grin.

  Shanta sighed. “You and carnival. Look at you. You like a little boy, all excited.”

  John extended his good arm and danced a quick circle around her. “Just a couple days.” He smiled.

  “Come on.” She smiled back and pulled him along. John followed her down the hall to their room. Shanta paused at the doorway. “It really cold there up in the north, like you say?”

  “You could see you breath.” John imitated her accent to make her laugh and, at the same time, remembered that the cold had almost killed him. He helped Shanta unstrap the hook. She didn’t need help with his loose shirt, and by now he could undo the back of her dress with one hand.

  “Please don’t go adventuring north again,” she whispered.

  “Once was enough. Never again.”

  They made love. She chased the chill out of him.

  For the night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Oaxyctl ran through the jungle toward Brungstun in the double-shadowed light of the twin moons that peeked out from between a break in the rain clouds. He was so close to safety since making it out of the mountains, skirting well wide of Mafolie Pass and a few mongoose outposts along the way. He’d come too far not to make it now.

  The padded cloth strips wrapped around his feet pulled loose. Round trellis leaves slapped him and left conical stickies and dripping sap down his chest. Oaxyctl slowed down and hopped, pulling one foot up to his hands. He tore the last piece of dirty white cloth off his right foot and threw it into the trees. The movement tripped him up, and Oaxyctl pitched forward.

  He threw his hands up and slid through sweet-smelling, half-decayed leaves. He scrambled over a root, caught his balance again, and wiped away dirt stuck to his forearms.

  He knew he was easy prey. He left tracks. Tracks all over the place: the footprints, the cloth, the broken twigs, and the dirt falling from his arms. Even if he left nothing to betray him, it would still follow. This was a desperate dash for freedom. Oaxyctl leapt over vines twining themselves over the ground and twisted past tree trunks he couldn’t put his arms around.

  Any magical abilities inside the tall, domelike ruins he’d stumbled on a few hours back had failed centuries ago. The men who had grown the buildings’ rock outer shells had died not long after, and no one would think to occupy a building of the ancients this deep in the jungle. Oaxyctl had hoped just to shelter from the rain for a night in them. But when he’d pulled himself over the glassy, slick stone and looked down, he’d seen flesh and metal hanging from a hook forced into the wall beneath him. A wall that he could have shot a gun at and not chipped. Two hearts lay tossed in the mud underneath. Oaxyctl had looked at the broken saplings and torn vines throughout the courtyard, claw marks in the mud, and known exactly what he saw.

  A Teotl, a god, was surely here.

  He had let go and slid down the side, not even noticing as he banged his chin against the lip, and run back into the forest.

  Now Oaxyctl burst out of the steaming, cool rain forest and into a copse. Mud stretched out before him for two hundred yards. Beyond that he could see tamarind trees waving in the gusting wind. Rain fell, and then poured down, in sheets. It spattered into tiny pools that collected in kidney-bean shapes across the sea of brown.

  He looked down at his bare feet. Cold freshwater rushed in to encircle them as his feet sank down into the mud.

  Footprints, Oaxyctl gibbered to himself. Footprints everywhere! In his mind’s eye he could see the long line of prints leading across the muddy copse he would leave as he ran.

  “Sweet, sweet, Quetzalcoatl.” He dug at his left hand with a fingernail. He scratched until blood trickled down into the skin between his index finger and thumb. Quetzalcoatl didn’t accept blood sacrifice. Many others demanded it, though, and Oaxyctl had to try something. He scratched and scratched until the blood flowed freely and mixed with the rain.

  “This is not even my land,” Oaxyctl said. “But I would fertilize it with my own blood for mercy.”

  A trellis tree snapped and shook in the wind. Oaxyctl jumped. He looked around, his eyes wide. The wind died. The world fell silent. In the distance a frog let out a long belching croak, then shut up.

  Oaxyctl broke from the protection of the forest and sprinted across the mud. The ground threatened to slip out from under him. He flailed his arms to keep balance. Hyperventilating and sloshing through puddles, he got halfway across the two hundred yards b
efore he heard a long, sharp whistle in the air above him.

  He froze.

  The Teotl landed in front of him with a wet explosion of mud that plastered Oaxyctl from head to toe and threw him backward from his feet. Oaxyctl sat up and huddled forward. He shook with fear and averted his gaze.

  He wasn’t scared of dying. No. He was scared of far worse. Oaxyctl feared the pain that was sure to come.

  “Notecuhu,” he whimpered. My lord. “Please, it is a great honor.” He crawled forward, not taking his eyes off the mud that almost touched his nose.

  Squelch, squelch. The sound of the clawed feet slushing forward sent shivers roiling down Oaxyctl’s gut. He tasted bitterness coming up his throat and his nose flared as he smelled rotted flesh. Face this like the warrior you are, he urged himself. Be noble. Meet an honorable death and give your heart willingly. He thought these things even though some deeper instinct in him raged to fight tooth and nail to the last gasping second.

  But that would accomplish nothing, Oaxyctl knew. His body tensed like rope about to fray and snap, and Oaxyctl steeled his soul.

  “Amixmähuih?” the deep and raspy voice of the Teotl asked.

  “I am not afraid,” Oaxyctl said.

  “Cualli.” Good. The Teotl wrapped two sandpapery thumbs around Oaxyctl’s neck. The four fingers rested on his spine. “Quimichtin. Spy. Traitorous creature, we know of your betrayal. But we are not done with you.”

  The Teotl cupped Oaxyctl’s chin with its other hand. It drew a long bead of blood up his neck with its second thumb. The hand was ribbed with tatters of pale, blueveined skin.

  “I was found out.” The Nanagadans had caught him and sent him back over the mountains to work for them. “What could I do?”

  The Teotl ignored his rationalization of double treason. “What you will do now is what I bid you. You know where other quimichtin are here, ones that you have not betrayed just yet. Give them away. The black human warriors that live on this side of the mountains will trust you and let you walk among them if you give them this information, and if you fight on their side.”