Alexander C. Irvine

by A Scattering of Jades

  “Well, you’ve cerrainly queered my negotiation with Pembroke there,” Barnum replied, frowning at the wagon’s flapping banners. “I hope that this show of yours is worth it.”

  “After you see this, Phineas, you’ll thank me for bringing it to you first.” Steen stepped around to the back of the wagon, looking again at the sky as he did so. He was unsure whether the heavy cloud cover would have an effect; if it did, Barnum might well walk away, or—if he was feeling petty—call the police and have Steen arrested.

  All over a simple case of answering the door when opportunity knocked, Steen thought. When Diamond had brought Steen information about Lupita, the opportunity for revenge was far too important to be subordinated to a traveling medicine show. Steen had secured advance wages from the company bursar and headed north on the river to see if Diamond’s claim was true.

  Barnum had been far more angry about the loss of his prized dancer than the trivial amount of money taken; he claimed lost ticket sales in excess of five thousand dollars. And, after the events at Natchez Under the Hill, Steen had thought the chances of Barnum hiring Diamond back very slim indeed.

  But now Diamond was back, he thought as he tied open the flaps on the back of the wagon, and it might not be a bad idea at all to have him working for Barnum again. It was something to look into if the demonstration went as he hoped it would, and Barnum bought the chacmool for exhibit at his Museum. The American Museum was safe ground of sorts, a place where Steen knew the chacmool wouldn’t be disturbed until it reanimated in December. The old Tammany collection, dating back to the time when Tamanend himself had still walked the earth, would attenuate the avatar’s power. Selling the chacmool to Barnum would also net Steen some much-needed cash. Money no longer flowed from the Tammany coffers the way it had before Martin Van Buren’s defeat in the 1840 presidential election, and that damned Croghan had driven a ruinous bargain.

  “Ten seconds,” Steen said, beckoning Barnum to stand beside him. The showman’s eyes widened as he looked into the wagon bed.

  The chacmool looked none the worse for its arduous trip from Kentucky. It lay on its back, the cloak of green quetzal feathers carefully arranged around it. Its hands were empty, crossed on the fragile skin of its chest; Steen had thought of mocking up some sort of weapon but decided against it. Barnum was an expert at spotting frauds when he cared to be, and Steen wasn’t altogether sure he wanted the chacmool armed, not until he was reasonably certain of a few things.

  Steen’s watch said twelve o’clock. The light seemed to grow brighter in his left eye, while in his right it seemed to bend, as if deforming under some incredible weight. Ants, hundreds of them, appeared from nowhere to crawl across the wagon bed, and then the feathers started to move.

  They twitched and swayed, slightly at first. Then the motion became more precise, a rippling that swept up and down the cloak in clearly defined waves. Barnum forced his attention from the phenomenon long enough to look at the sky, and Steen knew he was smelling rain.

  A dull creaking sound jerked Barnum’s attention back to the wagon. The mummy’s hands were moving; they uncrossed, slowly, and slid down its emaciated torso until they formed a crude bony cup over its navel. Its head turned back and forth, and the skin of its cheeks cracked and fell away as its mouth opened and shut. The bald head bent forward until the mummy’s chin touched its chest, and over the rustling of the feathers Steen heard a choked whistling in its throat.

  Then it shuddered and was silent, its head lolling back onto the wagon bed. The rippling of the feathers lost its pattern; the cloak twitched and quivered a few seconds longer, then it was still.

  Steen let the flaps drop and turned to face Barnum.

  “Easily enough done for a man who knows how,” Barnum said hoarsely. His eyes remained fixed on the back of the wagon.

  “You smelled the rain, Phineas,” Steen said, grinning. “You can’t tell me you didn’t smell the rain. And the fire.”

  A few stars glittered through the broken clouds and the canopy of leaves spread by the Shackamaxon Elm. John Diamond walked slowly to the base of the tree, trying to step quietly among the fallen leaves. He dropped the shovel from his shoulder and leaned against the cool bark of the old tree, fighting to still the muttering in his head. “Huehueteotl, huehueteotl moyucoyatzin, teteu inan, teteu ita.” Diamond gritted his teeth, but the words forced their way out. The Old God, he who created himself, mother to the gods, father to the gods.

  He looked around the massive trunk of the elm at the few lights still burning in the city. Had he spoken? The Rabbit alone knew, the Rabbit in the moon; the huehueteotl, Xiuhtecuhtli, had thrown the rabbit at the moon. It spoke with his voice.

  A kaleidoscope of voices rattled in Diamond’s mind, a thousand visions of the world to come and as many memories of lives left behind.

  Is he badly wounded?

  This is a mortal wound, doctor.

  Find Burr.

  That voice, the Burr-voice, returned often, speaking to itself, gibbering about lost opportunity until stronger speech drowned it out: Tlaloc, imacpal iyoloco. He Who Makes Things Grow, he holds us in the palm of his hand.

  “Imacpal iyoloco,” Diamond said aloud. “Sorry, Johnny.” He shook his head and began to dig.

  Rain began to patter in the tree’s leaves as soon as the blade of the shovel bit into the soft earth. Diamond wished he could feel the downpour, but the canopy of leaves kept most of the rain off. Thin rivulets streamed from low-hanging branches as the rain fell harder, though, and soon Diamond was as wet as if he’d been standing atop the Second National Bank. The rain made him stronger, even as the growing mound of earth at the base of the elm turned into mud and slid back into the hole he was digging.

  He kept doggedly at it, not even certain of what he was supposed to find. Lupita’s voice came frequently, but it was always faint and quavering, the words mostly lost among the myriad other voices that competed for Diamond’s attention. She had told him to dig here, that something was buried in the roots of the tree that Steen wanted very badly; that was good enough for him.

  I never wanted to be dead, Diamond thought, chopping through a root. And once I was dead, I damn sure didn’t want to come back, with no one but the moon to talk to. He felt like Tecuciztecatl, standing before the hearth that would ignite the sun; he knew what he had to do, but was afraid to do it.

  Steen had been right when he said that there were worse places than Tlalocan. But even leaving the paradise of afternoon would have been tolerable, Diamond thought, if he could have left it completely behind. As it was, he had been given a glimpse, and now the voices, the smells and colors of the place followed him.

  It was all Steen’s fault. Why was he getting the mask for Steen?

  But it hadn’t been his idea. Other voices were speaking for him, and he couldn’t always even move his own body. Imacpal iyoloco. Drowning him, Steen had turned him into a puppet.

  “Damn Wide Hat to hell,” Diamond panted, then he stopped and stood up. Wide Hat? He knew he meant Steen, but he had never heard the wagoner referred to by that name.

  “Sorry, Johnny,” he said bitterly. “No telling who’s in your head now.”

  The root snapped under a last thrust and the shovel struck something with a sharp clank. All of the voices immediately fell silent, although Diamond could feel their intent focus.

  He realized that he could see better at night than he used to; the scored corner of metal glinted despite the heavy rain and clouds, catching his attention before the rim of the hole collapsed and covered it again. He dropped to his knees, then flat onto his belly, digging in the mud until his arms were buried to the elbows. Water ran down Diamond’s neck and dripped off the tip of his nose as he worked one hand through the muck under the flat, heavy box. With the other, he scooped mud away behind him, finally exposing the lid.

  He seized the corner, the weight of his body loosening the walls of the shallow hole. Grunting, he pulled the box halfway loose, but the earth un
der him finally gave way and he slid forward. His head went briefly underwater, and he paused there a moment to rest. It was too hard to be on land all the time.

  Then he righted himself, got his feet under him, and jerked the box free. He pushed it up onto solid ground and hoisted himself out of the thigh-deep hole. It was rapidly filling with water, and he shoveled the rest of the mudpile back into it. The quagmire would be noticed in the morning, but Diamond planned to be far away by then.

  The pelting rain had cut visibility to a few feet, drowning the scattered lights that still burned in the city. Diamond decided that was a good thing; a black man digging at the base of the Shackamaxon Elm, where William Perm himself had made peace with Tamanend, would be sure to rouse suspicion.

  He laughed out loud suddenly. “What could they do to me? Sorry, Johnny—not much.” Diamond sat heavily at the base of the tree and inspected the box. Its lid was about twelve by eighteen inches and it measured maybe six inches deep, made of some kind ol lacquered wood. Beaten copper, green from long burial, reinforced the corners, and a pattern was carved into the lid. He held the box out into the rain until it was washed clean, then examined the picture.

  It was an engraving of a beast that combined features of man and jaguar, adorned in cloak and headdress. Diamond looked closer; its tongue appeared to be forked, and if he wasn’t mistaken its eyebrows were upswept feathers, smaller and thinner than those that made up the cloak. It was depicted from the waist up, puzzling Diamond until he turned the box over and saw that its lower half was engraved there.

  The box had no lock and appeared to open lengthwise, with the carving split by an invisible hinge. If the box was opened, Diamond realized, the engraving would be made whole. And what would happen then?

  It’s an engraving of the chacmool, Lupita said. The other voices murmured a nervous assent.

  “I know,” Diamond said aloud.

  You know nothing, Lupita said shrewishly. No Mexica carved that box, no Toltec or Olmec.

  “Lupita, if you’re going to rattle in my head, say something,” Diamond groused. He opened the box.

  The darkness inside it leaped at him with a snarl. An agonizing cold weight pressed on his forehead, and he reeled back, dropping the box and crying out like a child.

  Then, with a light push, the cold was gone. Diamond rolled in the mud, clutching his head until the pain subsided sufficiently for him to sit up and lean against the solid weight of the tree.

  Have to get wet again, he thought. Been on land too long.

  The rain had stopped. Diamond looked up and saw stars winking again through the elm’s dripping leaves, and he saw the Rabbit’s head peeking from the shadowed part of the moon. His teeth ached like they were all going to fall out.

  Idiot, Lupita said. Her voice was distant, quavering. Get the mask and go before Maskansisil himself strings your guts around this tree.

  I can go now, Diamond thought. Whatevet was in the box freed me, a little bit. I can do what I want.

  And Riley Steen, that means you can go to hell.

  Diamond looked for the box and saw only a canvas-wrapped bundle, lying amid leaves stripped from the tree by the pelting rain. Then he found the box where he’d dropped it on the filled-in hole. He nodded to himself; seemed like he owed old Wide Hat a bad turn or two, all things considered.

  The bundle seemed heavier by itself than it had been in the box, and the canvas wrapping was rotting where ir touched his hands. He shouldn’t put it back in the box again, he knew that.

  Diamond laughed again, thinking of how mad Steen would be when he didn’t show up in the morning with the mask. Then he thought of what he was going to have to do, and that wasn’t quite so funny.

  “Never wanted nothing to do with no magic,” Diamond grumbled as he thrust the bundle and box separately under his sodden coat and made his way down to the river. “Sorry, Johnny.”

  Panguetzaliztli, 13-Wind—October 14, 1842

  Aarchie Prescott awoke to the sound of cannonfire. He sat up in bed and squinted blearily out the window, half convinced he’d heard the sound in a dream. The cannon fired again as he kicked at the pile of blankets and clothing he slept under in the unheated room. His feet caught in the tangle and Archie tumbled onto the rough wooden floor.

  “Dammit,” he muttered, looking at his elbow. A thick splinter was buried half an inch or more under the skin. He picked at it, ink from his fingers rubbing off on the wood, then drew it loose. It caught for a moment, then slid free, and Archie shuddered as he flicked it into a corner. The feeling of it sliding out from under his skin, the idea of something actually inside him, made him violently nauseous.

  The cannon fired a third time, and Archie remembered the occasion. The Croton Aqueduct was complete, and New York was cerlebrating. After two hundred years of uncertainty, the city finally had a dependable source of water. Archie untangled his feet from the bedding and dug his trousers out of the pile. He stepped into them as he moved to the window, hooking his braces over his shoulders.

  He could see two blocks north, to the intersection of Leonard, where Orange slanted away to the right. It was just after dawn, but the street was already alive with wagon and foot traffic. Drunken laborers swayed out of basement grogshops, leering and shouting at the whores who jostled with newsboys for position on the corners. The paperboys thrust their sheets in front of everyone passing, even leaping onto the running boards of passing carts to harangue the drivers for a block or so before dropping off and returning at a trot. They hawked pamphlets and broadsides on temperance, abolition, the Oregon question, anything that would draw attention. And they waved copies of the Weekly Register, the Courier and Enquirer, and the Herald.

  Below the window, a group of boys had gotten up a game of town-ball, using shingles as bases and an unripe orange for a ball. As Archie watched, one of the boys connected solidly, splattering pulpy bits of citrus across the front of Emil Kornheiser’s grocery. The old shopkeeper ran out into the middle of the street, flailing a broom like one of the boys’ bats, and the teams scattered laughing into alleyways. There they would wait until Emil withdrew and they could steal another orange from his produce bin to start the game anew. Nothing ever changed in the Five Points; the beggars, the whores, the strange boy on the corner stroking his pet rabbit and watching the game of town-ball. They would all be there tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

  Archie had other plans. He felt strangely rejuvenated by his experience at the abolitionist rally, the unexpected collision of Protestant and Catholic, native and Irish, rich and poor. The tension of it captivated him. The very air of New York seemed in ferment: Romantic writers, Transcendentalist philosophers, suffragettes and abolitionists, Millerites and Fourierists and Owenites, all churning out visions of utopia. Archie, after nearly seven years of malaise, had once again been infected with desire to live. Today he would join New York in its celebration. He did not intend to waste the rare holiday.

  Bennett, in a rare act of generosity, had given employees with more than five years’ service the day off to enjoy the festivities. Archie had been a pressman with the paper nearly seven years; his uiniversary would be in January, twenty days after the anniversary of the fire that had taken his family from him. Even now, thinking of it brought the meaty stink of charred flesh rushing up from his memory.

  I survive it, though, he thought. Every day I survive.

  For seven years, anesthetized by grief and liquor, Archie had spent his waking hours running presses and then slept tangled in the sheets of a rooming house scarcely two blocks from where his home had burned the night of the Great Fire. Bennett had asked him, in the weeks following the fire, to write an eyewitness account, and Archie had. Since then, though, nothing he’d written would phase the irascible Scot, and until the gang breakup of the American Anti-Slavery Society demonstration, Archie had moved through his toneless days animated only by memories and the fading ghost of ambition.

  Like a dog returning to its own vomi
t, he thought from time to time. He was becoming the subject of a sermon somewhere. Old Man Miller probably published pamphlets about men like Archie. But Millerites were always littering the streets with broadsides and handbills. The last one Archie had seen offered Miller’s mathematical proof that the world would end in April.

  Thinking of William Miller brought Archie’s mind around to Helen and Jane. It was only recently that Archie had been able to quarry his memories of them, chiseling aside grief to find veins of happiness. Lake Champlain was one he kept returning to, and the time Jane had looked at the moon and for no discernible reason said, “Rabbit,” in her awed little-girl voice.

  “Where’s the rabbit?” Helen had said, and Jane had pointed in the full moon’s cratered face.

  “Well, carrots don’t grow on the moon, and I don’t think rabbits eat cheese,” Archie had said. “He must get awfully hungry.”

  They were still painful memories, even the ones—especially the ones—that had once been pleasant, but in seven years of looking for stories, Archie had found more than a few that matched his own for horror and pathos. If anything was to be had in New York, it was misfortune; fires, pox and cholera, starvation and murder. Archie sought it out, chasing funeral processions to gain perspective on his own loss. Part of him was convinced that if he saw enough, he might be able to believe that Helen and Jane were just two more corpses pulled from one more fire that rated a paragraph on the Herald’s, back page.

  “Schadenfreude,” Udo had clucked to himself the one time Archie had been drunkenly honest enough to admit his feelings. But Archie didn’t need any Teutonic aphorisms to justify himself. It was all very simple.

  You’re a bastard, Prescott, he thought, chasing others’ misfortune to forget your own. That small self-loathing usually disguised itself as ambition, keeping Archie far enough out of the bottle to hold his job.