Alexander C. Irvine

by A Scattering of Jades

  “What’s all the jabbering about, then? Bring him out.”

  “He’ll come in a minute,” Nick said. “He found a mummy, just makin’ sure Mat and Fred don’t bust it up none.” Before Croghan could frame a reply, the rangy youth turned and loped back into the cave.

  Stephen sat on a rock just off the path and watched Alfred and Mat carry the carefully wrapped mummy to the hotel. They disappeared around the corner of the building, and Stephen slid gingerly to the ground, trying to ignore the throbbing in his right ankle and the high, persistent whine of fatigue keening at the base of his skull. Every muscle in his body twitched and trembled, and his hand shook as he drank from his flask.

  He tried to remember how he’d gotten the mummy up out of the cave, but his memory of the trip back was gone, lost somewhere in the exhausted maze last night’s excursion had become in his mind. Stephen heard Dr. Croghan’s apologetic voice explaining to Professor Tattersfield that all tours would be postponed a day, the professor graciously accepting the delay. He rubbed his hands across his face and walked himself step by step through the previous night. The lead away from River Hall, the winding crawl, the gold coin and the rush of exhilaration at having conquered Bottomless Pit, the triangular opening that looked too regular, too made. Reaching the lamp in and hearing the cacophony of the ghosts, feeling certain that it led somewhere, scrambling through the short tunnel into the domed chamber beyond …

  The room. Everything became confused in the room. Stephen placed his palms flat against his temples and massaged gently, trying to paint a coherent picture of the room in his mind. It wouldn’t come. Disconnected images thrashed in his head, fragments of odor and sight and sound, but he could make nothing of them.

  He remembered walls, squared off into terraces rising beyond the range of the lamp, the wall opposite him completely lost in the darkness. A stone block, its top face slanted with the high edge toward the invisible far wall. A dead man, a mummy, reclining on its slanted top, head sunk into its chest and hands cupped over its stomach, bare feet dangling over the block’s lower edge. Feathers, he remembered feathers. Long and green, they sprouted from the mummy’s shoulders and flowed over the stone’s sides. Its skin was tautly drawn over the bones of its face, strong teeth bared to the silent gloom. Deeply set stains on the stone’s carved sides and at its base seemed to trickle as the lamp’s flame guttered in the still air. Figures of snakes and birds, of men in bizarre masks, undulated under the wetly gleaming stains, their strange movements leaping out at him as the rest of the room faded into a shadowy indistinct mist. He smelled rain, felt it cool on his cheeks, heard it sizzle as if falling into a fire. An immense growl rumbled through the chamber as Stephen caught the hot meaty stink of charring flesh, and then the darkness consumed the weakly flickering lamp. Tlaloc.

  He heard the word as clearly as if it had been spoken, and the chamber began slowly to fill with a murky orange light, the struggling radiance of twilight or the last hour before dawn. The clean smell of falling rain warred in his nostrils with the wicked burning stench as the far wall resolved into a giant bas-relief of a masked and cloaked figure holding what looked like a lightning bolt in one hand. A line of human skulls trailed from the other, weaving between the figure’s dancing feet. Its slanted eyes were starkly outlined in red, its lips drawn back in a fanged snarl and split by some kind of bar. Feline ears lay flat on either side of a headdress worked with feathers and a repeated pattern of a crescent moon inside a setting sun.

  Tlaloc, macehuales imacpal iyoloco. The words tolled silently through the chamber, and Stephen understood them now: Tlaloc, He Who Makes Things Grow, he holds men in the palm of his hand.

  The figure on the wall grew indistinct again, the light falling only on the line of grinning skulls. One of the skulls spoke: Yollotl, chalchihuitl, in nelli teotl. The words echoed from the mummy on the stone: The heart, the precious blood, the one true god. The reclining figure turned toward Stephen with a grating creak of dry bones. He saw that its rictus grin had grown fangs, and its skull seemed flatter and broader, its legs drawn up and crooked, its cupped hands thickened into paws. It lifted its arms, and Stephen saw a human heart beating in the shadowed cavity of its belly. “Stephen.”

  Stephen looked up, squinting in the morning sun as if he’d just come from the cave. “Dr. Croghan?”

  Croghan looked disturbed and uncertain as he inspected the bowl of his pipe, turning it this way and that before he finally spoke. “How’s the leg?”

  Stephen noticed he was rubbing at his right ankle. Trying not to wince as he stood and tested it, he shrugged. “It’s fine. Good as new in a day or so.” In truth, his ankle throbbed fiercely. He wouldn’t be much good in the cave for a week.

  “Good.” Croghan paused a moment. “I’m afraid there won’t be any more of these solitaty excursions into the cave. From now on, you take one of the others with you.” Croghan mouthed the stem of the pipe, working it from one corner to the other. “Paying guests not included. If you want to chart new cave, there has to be someone with you to get you out of any trouble.”

  “Wasn’t no trouble last night. It just took longer than I expected.”

  Croghan’s jaw tightened, his lips compressing into a thin line around the pipe stem. “I will brook no argument on this point, Stephen. You would be difficult, I daresay impossible to replace, both in terms of skill and reputation. Shenanigans like your jaunt last night are far too great a risk to my investment. Understood?”

  Stephen stared at his feet, not trusting himself to respond.

  “Fine,” Croghan said. Stephen watched an ant scramble between blades of grass as the doctor turned back up the trail.

  Riley Steen examined the artifact he had placed on the windowsill of his room. It was a carved obsidian bowl approximately a foot across with a flattened bottom that allowed it to sit without rocking. The Aztecs had called it tezcatlipoca, smoking mirror, and Steen had liberated it from Harman Blennerhassett’s library after the Wood County Militia had finished in the wine cellar and gone off chasing after Aaron Burr. The glossy surface of the mercury filling the bowl cast a perfectly circular reflection of the sun on the ceiling, a good sign. It would cast no reflection of Steen at all, though; he tried not to think of that and returned instead to the delicate task that awaited him.

  Perhaps he had calculated correctly from Burr’s garbled commentary. Steen looked out the window, watching the two slaves carry the wrapped figure of the chacmool up the trail and around to the back of the hotel. He chuckled softly as he imagined what Croghan must be thinking: another desiccated savage, more free publicity for his precious investment. Mr. Croghan, he thought, you’ll never know the debt I owe you. You and your crew of cave-crawling niggers have made this easier than I ever dreamed possible. Burr had spent years fruitlessly searching for the chacmool, and now Steen had simply waited for it to show itself. Now he would take hold of the moment. Croghan needed money, Steen needed the chacmool: a mutually beneficial exchange. After conducting necessary business, Steen would take the chacmool back East and safeguard it until it reanimated in December.

  The only problem now was the girl. He had underestimated her, and she had escaped from him in Richmond almost eighteen months ago. But how many places could an eleven-year-old girl with disfiguring burns hide? He would find her.

  She knew, after all, that her father hadn’t died in the Great Fire seven years before. Therefore she had most likely returned to New York in search of him, and if she had, the Rabbits would soon enough locate her and return her to him.

  But back to the task. Steen stepped back, closing his eyes and moving from side to side until he felt the reflected sun shining directly into his face. Opening his eyes, he gazed steadily into the blinding glare for a full second. When he closed them again, the afterimage was bright and sharp, a perfect sphere with no darkened spot within. Definitely an auspicious sign, but he wished he’d had a chance to look at the moon last night around nine-twenty, when the ants on the
porch had so shaken Croghan. The chacmool must have awakened, if only briefly; it would be useful to know how long it had been able to sustain itself.

  But now, in the morning sun, it was dormant, and if Steen had any luck at all, it would remain so until he had it safely in New York. He ran through Burr’s figures again in his head, remembering the feel of the moldering book in his hands. Phineas Taylor Barnum, there was another man he owed a debt. If Barnum had not bought his American Museum’s collection whole from John Scudder, who previously had come into possession of the Tammany Society’s early archives and with them Aaron Burr’s other journals, Steen would never have been able to find his way to Kentucky.

  The journal Steen had taken from Burr back in 1806 held a partial solution to the puzzle of the chacmool, but Steen hadn’t put the rest of it together until he had gone through Burr’s papers in the basement of the American Museum—before he and Barnum had fallen out. Burr had dated the xiuhpohualli, the Aztec year-count, from A.D. 1011. Steen had been puzzled by the figure until he researched other accounts from Mexico and Pennsylvania, whereupon he discovered that A.D. 1011 was the year when Aztec records and those of the Lenni Lenape, the Delaware tribe of North America, coincided. The Red Record of the Lenni Lenape gave that as the year they had driven the people they called the Snake down into the “land of swamps.” Steen had been to Mexico and seen the ruins of Teotihuacan on Lake Texcoco, all but obliterated by the bustling squalor of the City of Mexico. Land of swamps; it was an apt description.

  The Aztecs recorded the date as the year in which they left the “northern paradise” and wandered until their hummingbird god, Huitzilopochtli, showed them the sign: an eagle perched on a cactus eating a snake. There they settled and lived until Cortes destroyed them. The Aztecs, believing him to be Quetzalcoatl himself returning from over the sea, had been betrayed by their own myths.

  Living amid a clutter of gods and ceremonies borrowed from the peoples they conquered, the Aztecs had blurred the distinction between those that were merely empty ritual and the few that had any real potency. Their Achilles’ heel had been losing sight of the old gods, the elemental deities whose worship began in the faded mists of Mesoamerican antiquity. And if Steen had read the old account correctly, the swathed figure lying amid wine racks in the hotel storeroom was one of those few, the very avatar of the ancient god of earth and rain whom the Aztecs had named Tlaloc. The god’s true name was lost, as was the name of its avatar; the Quiche Maya, hoping to tame it, had named the avatar Chacmool, or Red Jaguar.

  Steen was reluctant to accept Aztec history at face value. Their recordkeeping tended to be metaphorical, on the order of the Seven Days that began the Book of Genesis, and Burr himself was hardly more reliable. But even if the date 1011 was not accurate (and the appearance of the chacmool at this time strongly argued that it was), the fact that the same date appeared in both histories was definitely significant. Aztec and Lenape history agreed that the date was sacred, the beginning of a new cycle of fifty-two years.

  Such cycles were the basic unit of chronology in ancient Mesoamerica. At the end of every one, the gods grew fickle and great sacrifice was required to prevent them from destroying the world. Counting forward from A.D. 1011, one came forward fifteen cycles to 1791, the date of the American Museum’s founding with the Tammany collection and of the white man’s discovery of Mammoth Cave. The Tammany Society had been founded a few decades earlier, in honor of the Lenape chief Tamanend, and early Tammany braves had been the first Pathfinders, assisting the Lenape in their task of keeping watch over the threat of the Snake.

  Later, of course, the Tammany Society’s more immediate political goals had gotten in the way of such mystical altruism. Aaron Burr’s search for the chacmool had been every bit as perfidious to Tammany ideals as his attempt to splinter the Republic had been to the Founders’ idea of America. After Burr, Tammany Hall had forgotten its origins. Steen, however, had not.

  The next cycle would begin in 1843, April third to be precise. Jane Prescott’s twelfth birthday. It was a time when new gods could be created and old ones resurrected from the oblivion of forgotten worship. A time when the Pathfinders could be eradicated once and for all. A time when history could be written, when anything was possible for the man who knew how to avoid the errors of his predecessors.

  There was a respectful knock at the doot. Steen turned to stand in front of the mercury mirror. “Who is it?”

  “Nick Bransford, Mister Steen.”

  Steen recognized the name after a moment; one of the slaves who worked as guides to the cave. “Come in,” he said.

  The door opened and Nick stepped into the room, keeping one hand on the doorknob. “There’s a visitor for you, sir,” he said. “Colored man.”

  “A colored man?” Steen’s brow furrowed. What Negro would know he was here? “What’s his name?”

  “He called himself John Diamond, say he come from New Orleans. You forgive my saying, sir, he look like a drunk.”

  It took Steen a full ten seconds of gaping astonishment before he could gather himself to speak. “Send him up,” he finally murmured.

  As the door closed, Steen found himself fingering the chipped edge of the obsidian bowl. “John Diamond,” he murmured to himself. He hadn’t spoken the name in over a year, since he had drowned Diamond in a nameless tributary of the Mississippi River near Natchez Under the Hill.

  Steen replaced the carved lid on the tezcatlipoca; a chat with Lupita would have to wait. Portent after portent, he thought. Eighteen forty-three was going to be a very big year indeed.

  Quechalli, 3-Rain—September 21, 1842

  The morning sun was welcoming, and Archie Prescott left his room a good two hours before he had to be at the Herald to clean the presses and begin setting type. It did him good to walk the city on sunny days. The light banished the worst of the morbid affectations to which he found himself susceptible during the night. When he got out into the streets, amid the shouts and clangor of New York commerce, he was able to see beyond himself a little. Or perhaps he was just able to distract his mind from the enduring pain of loss.

  He considered himself a broken man. Not one of the poor raving wretches who limped aimlessly through the Whiskey Wards in search of some lost vision of themselves they’d lost through gambling or drunkenness, no. Just a man unable to make peace with the losses life had inflicted upon him. Archie had spent years trying to deny this to himself, but in the end he had to admit that something inside him had died along with Helen and Jane in the fire seven years before. It was better, he believed, to appraise oneself honestly.

  Sunlit days and the bustle of the city helped him, though, and Archie was not so self-pitying as to deny himself what pleasures he could still take. Walking was one such pleasure. Drink was another, chiefly nocturnal, indulgence.

  From inside the door of his rooming house, Archie peered into the street, resting his hand on the doorknob until he’d satisfied himself that the mad little street urchin who thought she was his daughter was nowhere in sight. This determined, he opened the door and walked quickly out of the Five Points. Out on Broadway, he felt better. He nodded at shopkeepers and pedestrians, bought a loaf of bread for his lunch, wandered south and west for a while before eventually doubling back and finding himself on Nassau Street.

  A young, balding man in a clerical collar thrust a handbill in front of Archie. “Are you familiar with Prigg versus Pennsylvania?” he asked.

  Archie’s first instinct was to brush the paper aside, but he checked the impulse. A journalist had to pay attention to voices in the streets. “Prigg versus Pennsylvania,” he echoed the clergyman. A Supreme Court decision. He remembered reading about it somewhere, in one of the papers, but couldn’t recall the substance of it.

  “I’m not,” he said, and accepted the handbill.

  “Imagine being born to slavery,” the divine said. “Reaching your majority amid the crack of the whip and the groaning songs of Africans yearning for the freedom Go
d ordains for every man. Imagine, then, that you steal away one night. You elude the searchers with their rifles and hounds, you survive a barefoot sojourn through the mountains of the Cumberland or the Tidewater swamps of the Carolinas. You avoid the pickets at the Ohio River, or the slave-catchers at the ports of Baltimore, Savannah, Charleston. You voyage north toward freedom and encounter kindness, sup for the first time at the table of dignity. You build a life for yourself, working and living as a free man in Philadelphia or Boston or here in New York, becoming the full soul that God intended. Would you not say, sir, that a man of such strength, of such fortitude, deserves the reward of freedom?”

  “Yes,” Archie said before he’d had a chance to think about it.

  “Then you must join us in protesting this outrage of Prigg versus Pennsylvania!” the divine cried. “The Supreme Court of this land, charged with upholding our constitutional and God-given rights, has sunk instead to the basest, most scurrilous pandering to those who value dollars more than souls. After Prigg versus Pennsylvania, those brave Negroes who survive the awful rigors of their boreal flight to freedom may be brutally snapped up and returned at any moment during the rest of their lives. When they’ve married, had children, become churchgoers and pillars of the Negro community, they must suffer the constant fear that a bounty hunter may lay vile hands upon them and spirit them away from home and family to the living death that is chattel slavery! Can such a thing be tolerated? Can we suffer such a gross abridgment of liberty in this, a free country under the eyes of God?”

  “But Prigg versus Pennsylvania was decided in March,” Archie said, remembering more about its specifics, “and the Fugitive Slave Act—”

  “Is an abomination in the sight of the Lord!” the divine interrupted thunderously. “The most execrable obtrusion of evil ever to afflict this continent! This was the test of Prigg versus Pennsylvania, and seven justices unfit to bear the appellation failed it. Are slaveholders pursuing their human chattel to be treated in the same fashion as banks, amassing their resources unimpeded by any but corrupt federal oversight? Are slaves so many gold bars, to be hoarded for the enrichment of a few wealthy men? Prigg versus Pennsylvania says yes. The Supreme Court has ruled that the right of a slaveholder to recover his property—property!.—outweighs the inalienable right of that property to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No Negro is safe when a slave-catcher can contest his citizenship, can call into question his very status as a human being. And no right-thinking citizen of the Republic can be safe when such injustices can be freely perpetrated upon our most helpless brethren. Have you, sir, ever heard the term blackbirders?”