The chacmool paused before answering. “You had a dream. A dream of paradise, yes? The girl, Nanahuatzin, must be taken to that place if we are to succeed at our task.”
In the silence that followed, Stephen heard the faint drip and murmur of water echoing up from the river. The adrenaline rush he’d felt during the chimney down Crevice Pit was still fresh in his mind, the feeling that the moments when he was most alive took place surrounded by limestone walls. Dr. Croghan insisted every day on building roads, improving the hotel, doing everything he could to open the cave to a flood of visitors who would destroy its peace. Many times Stephen had sworn to himself that he would do anything to keep the cave as it was when he’d come five years before. Now here was his chance.
But was it worth a girl’s life?
“Far more than this cave is at stake,” the chacmool said. Could it read his thoughts? “A new world waits to be born. You are a slave now, and have always been; what price would you put on a world in which you could breathe free? A world in which your children would never know the whip or the auctioneer’s bark?
“Greatness exacts its toll in lives. Through the girl Nanahuatzin, a world of men will be born and the world of master and slave will pass into memory.”
“I—”
“Decide, Stephen,” the chacmool commanded. “Time grows short.”
His Christmas talk with Nick Bransford replayed itself in Stephen’s mind. Got to get them big ideas out of your head, Nick had said. Best leave that other alone. Dr. Croghan ain’t gonna let you go to Africa.
For you, Nick, Stephen thought, and in that moment he could almost believe himself. You and all the others like you.
“What do you want me to do?” he said.
Archie sat in the bow of the Daigles’ boat, trying to soak the lingering unease of nightmares out of his mind in the warm morning sun. The sun was well up, but the boat was strangely silent, and when he stood he felt tired, as if the sun was setting rather than rising.
He couldn’t remember any of the dreams, which was strange. Lately his problem had been remembering—and experiencing— dreams too much.
“Good morning!” he sang out, trying to banish his willies with forced good cheer. “Made any of that wonderful coffee, Marie?”
For a long time, no one responded. Then, instead of a smiling Marie, it was a solemn Peter Daigle who stepped through the curtain that partitioned off his family’s sleeping area. “Good morning, Archie,” he said quietly.
“Something the matter, Peter? Where are the girls?”
“Inside. And they’ll stay there until you’ve gotten off.”
Peter’s voice was barely a shade away from open hostility. Archie couldn’t for the life of him understand why, when they’d spent the previous evening laughing and joking around a cooking fire, Marie leading them in choruses of French folk songs. Archie had sung right along with them, although he knew only a few words of French, and the entire time he’d been quietly awestruck. He couldn’t remember ever spending such an evening sober. The memory of it amazed him still, seeming at once distant and present— like a comforting vision one could return to for shelter in unpleasant times.
And now Peter, at least, seemed to have forgotten it completely. Archie was struck by a sense of loss, as if Peter’s change in attitude had stripped the memory of all of its beauty. “Peter,” he began, “what’s the—”
“What’s the matter?” Peter snapped. “Archie, I swear to you on the Virgin, you nearly ended last night underwater. If I did not believe you were at heart a decent man, I would have—”
He stopped himself, and walked up to where Archie stood in the bow. “I don’t want the girls to hear this, especially Sonia.”
“What did I do?” Archie asked, hating the pleading tone in his voice. But something much more important than a disagreement between two men was happening. Archie had a terrible intuition that he was being excommunicated from the happiness he’d felt at the memory of the past evening, and he didn’t even know what he’d done.
A sudden slippage seemed to fracture everything around him, and dream memories began to slip through the cracks.
“What you did was not so terrible,” Daigle said. “My uncle Michel used to walk in his sleep, and I knew you were sleeping even as you spoke. But what you said … I have a pistol, Archie, and I tell you again, you nearly did not survive this night.”
“I’m sorry, Peter. Christ, whatever it was I did, I’m sorry. Please.” Archie felt even more dislocated as he spoke, asking for— begging for—forgiveness when his accuser wouldn’t tell him what this was all about. Don’t you realize what this time has meant to me? he wanted to shout.
But all he could do was repeat himself: “What, Peter? What did I do?”
“You stepped through that curtain last night, flung it aside as if expecting to catch your wife with a lover. Marie and I awoke at once, but the girls, they sleep like the dead. This is God’s grace, I think, for they are fond of you, my girls. They don’t understand why I keep them inside this morning.”
Peter looked out over the river. He started to speak, then shut his mouth. Archie waited him out, desperately anxious but not wanting to hurry him.
Finally Peter turned to look at him. “You have a knife there, in your belt,” he said. “You held it last night.”
“Peter, in God’s name you can’t believe I wanted to hurt you,” Archie began. Peter shushed him, casting a nervous glance back toward the closed curtain.
“This is not about me,” he said. “A fight between you and me, that would be simple. It is Sonia I am concerned for.”
A cold lump swelled in the pit of Archie’s stomach as a fragment of the night’s dream reawakened in his memory. Jane, dressed as the chacmool, recumbent on a flat stone altar with a blissful smile on her face. Her unmarked face.
Smiling up at him as he stood over her, watching his own hands raise the knife.
“Never,” Archie whispered. “I would never harm Jane.”
“Archie!” Peter snapped. “If you do this again—who is Jane?”
“I meant Sonia.” Archie’s voice trembled, and he could feel the feather talisman coming alive, beating in time with his heart.
“Who is Jane?”
“My daughter. She’s about Sonia’s age, and I—I haven’t seen her in a very long time.” Archie sat back down, fearing that the dream-dislocation would unbalance him. His mind teemed with grotesque images—skeletal hands fumbling for life in dark waters, the hungry warmth of blood coursing over his hands.
“Please tell me, Peter,” he managed to say. “Did I threaten Sonia?”
Peter sat facing Archie. “No. You held the knife turned inward, toward yourself. But you spoke to her … no, that’s wrong. You weren’t speaking to any of us. You looked at her as you spoke, never taking your eyes from her. And your hands, they looked like you were fighting the knife, forcing it toward yourself instead of someone else. Whoever you were speaking to, you were fighting them too.”
Peter’s speech slowed as if he were choosing each word with extreme care. “I believe you to be a good man, Archie,” he said. “I have intuitions about such things, and follow them. I didn’t—I don’t believe that you wanted to harm my girls.” He took a silver crucifix from his pocket and kissed it, looking again at the curtain before going on.
“My fear was that you would lose your struggle, and whatever possesses you would bend you to its will. You are possessed, Archie. A demon has gotten inside you, and you must cast it out. If I were a priest, perhaps I could help you … but perhaps not.” Peter lapsed into silence, turning the crucifix over in his hands.
Some of the panicked weight began to lift from Archie’s chest as Peter’s anger cooled a bit. “Why wouldn’t a priest be able to help me?” he asked.
“It is not a Christian demon inside you,” Peter said. “You did not appeal to God for help, and the names you spoke are not written in the Scriptures. I cannot say those names, I think, but—who
is Nawazee?”
“Nawazee? I don’t know.” But even as he said it, Archie realized that he did know, and he began to understand what had happened. “Nanahuatzin,” he said.
“Yes. You called Sonia by that name. Who is that?”
“That’s Jane,” Archie said. “I don’t call her by that name, but—someone else does.” Archie was certain now. The chacmool had been speaking through him during his dream, just as he had taken its role in his vision of the sacrifice. Can it control me now? he wondered. Can it make me see dreaming things as real? And if it can, how can I begin to fight it?
But he had fought it, at least last night. God only knew what would have happened if he hadn’t; very likely his body would be snagged like Maudie’s wreck on a sunken log in the Ohio. And that, Archie realized, was exactly what the chacmool had wanted. It had tried to kill him again; it feared him for some reason. Why?
Casting about for an answer, Archie remembered something Tamanend had said: He Who Makes Things Grow has an enemy. This enemy is your ally. Who is this ally, Archie wondered, and how can I make the alliance work for me?
The answer had to be somewhere in the information he’d gathered since the day in February when he’d spoken to Phineas Barnum. He turned inward to the problem, forgetting Peter Daigle and everything else around him, and there it was: the answer swam up out of the tangled morass of Aaron Burr’s Wallam Olum commentary.
Xiuhtecuhtli. Lord of Fire and Time. If Tlaloc controlled water and earth, it was only natural that Xiuhtecuhtli should be opposed to him.
Everything began to fall into place for Archie: Steen’s fear when the boy’s rabbit had burst into flame, the incineration of Archie’s ear when the Geek bit it off, the knife. Most of all, the knife. It was a token of Xiuhtecuhtli, just as the feathered medallion was Tlaloc’s; Archie couldn’t bear to be without either because he stood in some no-man’s-land between the two gods. That was why the chacmool had tried to kill him or, failing that, drive him mad. He was a thorn in its side, an unknowing agent of an opposed principle. If it couldn’t use him, it wanted him dead.
And it had nearly succeeded the night before.
“Peter,” Archie said slowly, “why didn’t you just kill me last night?”
“I have never killed a man,” Peter said. “Always I hoped I would never have to. Last night it seemed I would, but I could not pull the trigger. If you had moved at one of my children, or Marie or me—then I would have shot you dead. But instead I watched you wrestle your demon. I did not want to send you to hell, Archie. Your demon would have ridden your soul straight into the pit.”
He laughed without humor. “Perhaps I am simply a coward. But I wanted you to live and free yourself.
“I wish you luck and God’s grace, Archie,” Peter finished. He stood and offered Archie his hand. “May you find your daughter.”
Archie shook Peter’s hand, blinking tears out of his eyes. God’s grace, he thought. The grace of the Daigles is what will save me, if anything can.
“There is coffee,” Peter said as he returned to his family. “Also yesterday’s bread, if you would like breakfast.”
“Thank you,” Archie said, his voice breaking. “I would.”
He spent the day alone on the deck, poling along and trying to fill in the blank spaces in his deductions. He carried two tokens, one from Tlaloc by way of the chacmool and the other marked just as Jane was, by the fire of Xiuhtecuhtli—who seemed to go by several names. Burr had also referred to the god as huehueteotl, Ometeotl, and the Old God.
But the knife seemed to have a double valence. If it had been somehow consecrated by fire, that fire had been burning at least nominally in Tlaloc’s service. What did that mean?
On the river, traffic grew heavier as they approached Louisville. Even though he knew it was ridiculous, Archie found himself scanning the decks of passing steamers for Rufus. The old sot had been in the water well before the explosion that tore Maudie apart; if he was any swimmer at all, he would easily have made the bank and been picked up by a passing vessel or hiked his way back to Marlon MacGruder’s.
The three slaves, though, hadn’t had any such chance. Archie hoped Gatty was answering for their shackles in whatever forum awaited him in the afterlife.
Strange thought, that. Archie had never considered himself a particularly religious man, but he supposed he’d become a sort of accidental Christian simply by growing up in America. It had never occurred to him to think of things in terms other than heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. Or Purgatory, which was where he’d been since the morning’s exchange with Peter. In the last months, though, his experiences had raised uncomfortable questions.
Whatever the truth was, Archie decided, the specter of Gatty answering to Tlaloc rather than a fatherly Jehovah satisfied his newfound taste for revenge. But on the other hand, Tlaloc might well reward the kind of perversity that defined men like Delbert Gatty. The kind of perversity that led men to buy and sell and shackle one another.
I’m thinking like an abolitionist, Archie thought, and he supposed his experiences aboard Maudie had made him one. Certainly watching three men die had forced Archie to take an opinion regarding the shackles that drowned them.
Woolgathering again. What was it about river travel that caused his mind to wander so? It was something he would have to guard against. The chacmool would be only too happy to step into gaps in Archie’s awareness, and Archie knew he wouldn’t always have the kindness of men like Peter Daigle to rescue him. Something about the slavery question kept drawing his attention, though, but he couldn’t quite say what.
It was late afternoon when Peter steered into a side channel of the Ohio and tied up to a short pier on the Louisville waterfront. Marie and the children—even Sonia—came out to bid Archie Godspeed, and Ramon rushed up to give him a quick bashful hug.
Peter shooed the children back into the makeshift cabin, then clapped Archie on the shoulder. “Again,” he said, “luck and God’s grace.”
Marie handed him a small bag. “A bite to eat,” she said, “and maybe a little something else as well.” Coins clinked as Archie slung the bag over his shoulder and again he found himself brought to the verge of tears by a simple act of kindness. Last night they would have killed me to protect themselves, he thought. And today they’ve forgiven, and given me food and money.
He made no effort to hide the catch in his voice as he thanked them again. “What can I say?” he stammered.
“Hush,” Marie said. “Take it, Archie, and take with you our blessings as well.” She straightened a twist in the bag’s strap. “Go now. Find your daughter.”
Archie stood on the dock and watched Peter and Marie pole through the dead water back into the main channel. He lost sight of them as they joined a line of craft waiting for passage through the locks at the Falls of the Ohio, but he stood watching for a long time anyway.
I never wished them luck, he thought. And they still have the mountains to cross.
A large flatboat laden with tobacco tied up where the Daigles had been, and Archie had to move out of the way of its unloading. He walked along the waterfront looking for stage offices. It was probably too late to leave that night, but he thought he might be able to buy a ticket for the next day’s coach to Mammoth Cave.
And what would he do then? Secure a guide and ask to see the chacmool? Strange black fellow, wears green feathers? Changes into a jaguar sometimes?
If I have to, he thought, that’s exactly what I’ll do. But actually he doubted it would come to that. The chacmool would certainly sense him coming, and the feather token would likewise alert him to its proximity. After that, it would simply be a contest of wills.
But wasn’t today the first of the, what, nemontemi? The bad-luck days? Archie counted off the days since he’d encountered Tamanend. The ceremony was to take place at midnight on the second of April—the first moments of the third, really. Today was Wednesday the twenty-ninth; yes, it should be the first unlucky day. A tiny b
it of good fortune amid all the chaos. The chacmool would be passive these next five days, not wanting to risk queering the conditions for its ritual.
If he could find Jane before Saturday, he might be able to just steal her away. The calendar wouldn’t cycle around for another five hundred twenty years, and the chacmool would just have to wait for another little girl born at midnight on April third, what? a.d. two thousand three hundred fifty-one. He and Jane would live out their lives together, and perhaps an earthquake would bury the chacmool so that future Riley Steens could never dig it out.
Thinking of Steen brought out the flaw in Archie’s plan. The chacmool might not be able to act during the five nemontemi, but its accomplices were under no such restrictions. Or were they? He didn’t know. Steen could be keeping Jane hidden away somewhere, or Royce could be waiting along the turnpike to finish the job he’d started in December; Archie no longer held any illusions about being able to surprise the chacmool simply by turning up alive.
I still don’t know enough fot certain, Archie thought, moving through the crowd toward what appeared to be a ticket office. Have to fly on blind intuition.
Get to the cave, then. That was the first order of business. Everything else would sort itself out once that was accomplished.
The agent at the first window Archie approached sold tickets only for an express to Nashville, but he directed Archie to the offices of the Mammoth Cave line, only a hundred yards or so west. “Believe they’re closed up now,” he said, “but you might check in the morning.”
Archie thanked the agent and walked to the Mammoth Cave stage’s office window. The sun was dropping, and so was the temperature. He thought he would see if he could buy a ticket that evening and then hope Marie Daigle’s gift was enough to purchase a hotel room for the night. If not, he could sleep outside. He’d grown used to it, and the weather was getting a bit more congenial.
The window was closed, but a schedule posted next to the counter stated that the Mammoth Cave Stage ran daily at eight o’clock in the morning, for a two-dollar fare. Digging in the bag Marie had given him, Archie found that he had nearly ten, most of it in silver.
Alexander C. Irvine Page 30
