by Ian Gibson
"You'd have a shifty spider monkey!” another responds. “I don't trust a monkey that can't howl!"
Yet another adds, "Normally we howler monkeys would be serving the gods as a communications system across the land, since our howls carry far—we call it the Howler Network—but I guess we're just firefighters these days!"
“Firefighter monkeys more than howler monkeys, really!” the other responds.
“And we try not to howl so much!” one howls. “At first, we tried fighting the fire by howling at it, but it turns out that howling at fire just makes it hiss and crackle at you angrily and spreads the flames even more!”
“And the spider monkeys haven’t even bothered to help us!” says another.
“They’re just jealous because they don’t have a shrine!”
“And can’t howl!”
The howlers all explode in a ground-shaking din of chittering laughter, and Itzel’s teeth are chittering too—not because she finds anything particularly funny, but rather the noise is making her jaw move in ways she doesn’t mean to. She walks briskly to the hilltop, and as she nears the stone shrine, she thinks she hears a dull, bass drone coming from it, so she puts her ear against it to listen. The whole shrine then vibrates with a deep, loud blare like a horn, and she jumps back, startled, covering her ears. She feels even her stomach is churning over from the sound, and that the shrine’s walls might very well crack open and collapse from it. But the blaring sound gradually dies down, until the shrine falls into silence again.
The howler monkeys notice her reaction.
“That’s our god in there!” one informs her. “He’s practising how to whisper instead of howl! He only does it inside the shrine, because he’s worried that his voice will destroy this corner of Xibalba if he utters so much as a single word outside of it! He’s hard of hearing too—made himself half-deaf from the sound of his own voice!”
“If you think we’re loud, you haven’t heard him!” another howler monkey shouts. “Not that I have either, because my ears would have flown off my head!”
Itzel slowly backs away from the walls of the shrine and tries to get as far from it as possible, for the sake of her poor eardrums.
“Fire! Fire!” shouts a howler as it points to flames creeping up the hill towards the shrine, like invaders laying siege to their last bastion.
The howler monkeys all panic at the sight of it. Some dart up trees in fright, others start running around in circles screaming and whooping, and the rest are bravely trying to extinguish the encroaching flames, but just end up tripping over and spilling the water everywhere except for the place where it’s actually needed. One accidentally spills their pitcher on Itzel’s dress. She tries not to react, and instead covers her ears as well as she can in case the monkey screams an apology. Fortunately for her ears, the monkey is too busy chattering its teeth in terror to be apologetic.
She watches the pandemonium unfolding around her, like she’s in the middle of a circus but isn’t part of the show. She can barely think because of all the ruckus, but when she sees the monkeys stumbling with their pitchers, an idea springs to mind. She climbs back to the top of the hill and shouts, “Be quiet, monkeys!”
All the monkeys stop what they’re doing, or not doing, or trying their very hardest to do, or not do, and look at her without so much as a peep—not that they’re even capable of making just a peep if they were to open their mouths. The rowdy hilltop has at last fallen into silence, and she hears only the crackle of the fire dancing up the hill towards them, as well as the low-pitched drone thrumming from the stone shrine.
Now that she has their attention, Itzel tells them, “You can’t walk while carrying your pitchers, so I think I have an idea that could help you. There are many of you, so why don’t you all form a line from this hill all the way down to the river, and pass the pitchers along from one monkey to another instead of carrying them the whole way up yourselves?”
The monkeys open their mouths wide, but they’re speechless, and they look at one another.
“We’ve never formed a line before!” shouts one howler. “We try to keep our distance from each other for the sake of our ears!”
“That’s why it’s very important that you don’t howl at each other when you’re forming a line,” she tells them.
“You mean we have to stay quiet?” another monkey asks, as if the mere prospect of keeping its mouth shut for a long time had never occurred to it.
“Yes!” Itzel says loudly, although still making sure to not scream. “Please, try to stay quiet. It’s easy for us all to panic when everyone is shouting all the time. If you’re quiet, you might be able to work together. What do you think?”
Many of the howler monkeys turn their heads towards the fire, and are about to scream again, but instead they catch themselves before doing it and cover their mouths, nod at each other with a renewed sense of purpose, and point downhill towards the river. Many of them scamper downhill and, while it’s a disorganised clutter at first, Itzel’s pleasantly surprised that they’re gradually getting the hang of what forming a line would be like. In short order, they’re steadily passing their pitchers up the hill and dousing out the fire before it reaches the shrine.
“THANKS, MISS!” screams a monkey at the top of the line, but the monkeys beside it recoil and wallop the offending monkey for disturbing their coordinated effort, and the inner—and especially outer—peace they’ve finally achieved.
Itzel waves goodbye to them and continues onward, walking down the hill away from the flames, and returns to the river to follow it. The smell of fire in the air is getting stronger now, and the smoke is getting thicker. She comes to another clearing and sees a wall of raging fire before her, much larger and scarier than the narrow tendrils of flame that the howler monkeys had to contend with. The forest around her is covered in ashen white—at first glance she almost thought it was snowing—and the fire stretches all the way to the riverbank now, coating it in black smoke. There’s not a single tree that hasn’t been charred or entirely consumed by it. She starts coughing, and the smoke is stinging her eyes.
“I can’t follow the river into this!” She looks around to see where to go from here, but then looks up and sees beyond the clouds of smoke a gigantic ceiba tree in the distance, towering high above the fire, and growing far taller than any tree she’s ever seen. She can’t even think of a word to describe just how huge the tree is—it must be as tall as a skyscraper, its branches spreading far and wide. She’d spend more time gawking at it in awe, were it not for the suffocating smoke that’s burning her eyes and throat. She takes a step back but hears a very faint voice squeaking from below:
“Hey, watch it, lady!”
She looks down to find trails of ants near her feet. She recognises them as leafcutter ants—the ones she’s often seen during her treks in the forest, carrying little leaves in orderly marches. These ones have formed two trails that are marching in opposite directions—in one trail they’re carrying little water droplets, which they’ve somehow managed to hold together, and they’re being very quiet and disciplined about it. She thinks the howler monkeys could have learnt a lot from these ants.
She finds one ant standing aside from the trail, who’s squeaking, “Come on, ants! Put your thorax into it! This fire isn’t going to put itself out! We haven’t got all day!”
“What are you all doing?” she asks.
“Haven’t you heard of us? We’re the famous Leafcutter Ant Fire Brigade, the rainforest’s best firefighting force! And we’re fighting the fire, of course. That’s our job.” It turns back to the other ants and squeaks, “Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, lieutenant!” they all squeak together.
She looks at the terrifying flames ahead of them that show no sign of retreating. “It doesn’t look like it’s going well. Do you need any help?”
The ant lieutenant snaps, “What? Of course not! We can handle this! We’re the Leafcutter Ant Fire Brigade!”
All the ants cheer proudly.
“This fire doesn’t know what it’s up against!” claims the ant lieutenant, and for a little squeaking ant it certainly seems very confident about its brigade.
Itzel is quite sceptical about all this but decides to leave it be. She doesn’t even know how to help them anyway, considering how large the fire is. She’s still surprised that she managed to help the howler monkeys tackle their fire, considering how unruly a bunch they were. “Do you know how to get to the mountains from here?” she asks the lieutenant.
“That’s easy enough!” the ant says. “Simply follow the trail of ants on the left. They’re marching to collect more water, and their trail will lead you to Rocky Creek, and if you continue upriver, you’ll reach the mountains. It’s quite a trek though, especially for an ant!”
Itzel’s relieved those instructions are at least fairly straightforward. She thanks it and starts following the marching ants on the left of the two trails.
She hears the ant lieutenant squeaking behind her, “March, march, march! What else do you have six legs for? If you think they’re for dancing, then you’ll be disappointed! Take it from me—I’ve tried!”
Sweet Scents and Sly Stripes
She trudges along over the ashen ground and through more smouldering remains of trees, following the leafcutter ants for a very long while—much longer than she was expecting a trail of ants to go—and the ground slope upwards, so she starts to feel exhausted and, above all, thirsty, but the wall of flame to her right eventually retreats to reveal a river with large rocks in it, and she runs towards it. Its banks are an oasis mostly unharmed by the fire, though the smoke still lingers thickly in the air.
The orderly leafcutter ants are scooping up droplets of water from the river and turning back round towards the fire.
“Luckily the river spirits have done a good job protecting these banks of Rocky Creek,” squeaks one of them, noticing the relief on Itzel’s face to see something green instead of charred black or ashen white.
“Though they wouldn’t have managed without our help,” adds another ant. “There would be no rainforest left at all were it not for the Leafcutter Ant Fire Brigade!”
The ants cheer, and though Itzel’s not any less doubtful about their effectiveness, she thinks they at least have the right attitude. She hops on one of the rocks on the bank and cups her hand into the crystal-clear water to take a drink and wash the soot off her face. The water is refreshingly clean, as well as brimming with fish, including some strikingly large catfish. Do catfish talk here too? As she contemplates this, her nose picks up a very strong, scent that penetrates the layer of smoke. It smells flowery, almost like perfume. She turns around to discover a peccary—it’s much like a pig but hairy and squat, with a clumsily large head in proportion to the rest of its body. It’s standing right behind her so that its snout is in her face, which gives her quite the startle, and she almost falls backward into the shoals of the river.
“Would you like some perfume?” it asks, its squashed snout twitching as it sniffs the smoky air.
It’s wearing a pack saddle and has an extremely tall stack of packs, many times the height of the peccary itself, balancing on its back—in fact, the stack is so tall that the peccary is constantly lurching on its tiny legs, back and forth and side to side, just to keep its load upright, and Itzel’s unsure how it’s even able to carry half as much as it does. It reminds her of women she’s seen in her grandmother’s village who can balance stacks of pots on their heads, except they’re a lot more graceful about it than this peccary. She also notices, rather oddly, that the peccary is wearing a very thick layer of eyeliner around its small eyes. Seeing any eyeliner on a peccary at all would have been odd enough a sight for her, much less one who’s clearly overdone it.
“I sell perfumes,” the peccary says with a friendly snort.
“I don’t think I need any perfume, thanks.”
The peccary frowns. “But you stink.”
Itzel darts a sharp look at the wobbly peccary. “Funny to hear that from a pig!” As she tries to get up from the ground, the peccary stuffs its snout under her armpits and sniffs each one. She slaps the snout away and shouts, “Hey! That’s rude!”
“It’s ruder to stink,” snorts the peccary, very forwardly. “So… would you like some perfume?”
Itzel points to its towering stack of goods balancing on its back. “Is that seriously all perfume?”
The peccary turns its head to look up at its unwieldy stack of goods, then turns back to her. “Body odour is a very serious and widespread problem here.”
Itzel gets to her feet, and the peccary sniffs her more.
“You’re still alive,” it remarks with surprise. “I can tell. You definitely stink, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say you reek. Not yet at least.”
Her face goes crooked, as she’s not sure how to take that. “Wow, thanks, I guess.”
“You can thank me by buying some perfume,” it says, rather insistently.
Itzel slaps her forehead. “I don’t have any money to buy your perfume.”
The peccary frowns. “What’s a traveller doing without any cacao beans?” Its black-rimmed eyes inspect her. “Nor bags. Nor even a pocket! Not proper attire for a traveller, I’d say.”
Itzel looks at the white dress she’s wearing and has to agree with the peccary, but when she threw on the dress, she didn’t know at the time that she’d be end up trekking through the Underworld in it. “I only put this on for my birthday.”
“It’s your birthday today?” the peccary asks.
She’s about to answer that her birthday was technically yesterday, as it must be past midnight by now, but she then realises that she might not even know what day today is, as she blacked out when she fell into the cenote and has lost all sense of time as a result. “It was Saturday, the fifth of February,” she says at last, not knowing how long ago that was. “Do you know what day it is?”
“Of course I do,” the peccary says, surprised that the girl even needed to ask. “As any self-respecting merchant would. It’s important to keep count of the days to keep accounts of my many, many sales. My perfumes sell like hot corn tortillas, you should know.” It turns its head to indicate the pannier slung over its right flank. “I’ve written today’s date on a paper in there. Would you be a dear and get it out for me? I can’t handle paperwork with hooves.”
Itzel opens the sleeve and finds a folded piece of yellow-brown bark paper inside. “Then how did you write the date down with hooves?” she asks, as she expects it must be very difficult to hold a pen in a hoof.
“Because I’m a god,” the peccary says with a pompous snort.
“You’re a god?” she asks dubiously.
“Yes, of course I am! Don’t you know me?”
She shakes her head.
The peccary frowns disappointedly. “I’m Ek Chuaj! Haven’t you heard of Ek Chuaj the Great and Charitable?”
She shakes her head again. “Sorry, mister peccary. I only know about a feathered snake. Oh, and the Sun god! Kinich Ahau?”
His piggish snout twitches in annoyance. “You only know about the flashy gods. I might not be flashy, but I work hard to make a living for myself in the land of the dead, unlike those scroungers!” He looks around nervously and then whispers, “But don’t tell any of them I said that.”
She nods and whispers back, “I promise.”
“Anyway, just like all the other gods, I can take a human form if I so desire. But I can’t bear my load on just two legs, so I travel as a peccary instead.”
Itzel watches as the peccary wobbles around, constantly trying to rebalance his tower of packs on his back, and she doesn’t think he can bear his load on four legs either. As she begins to open the paper, it unfolds itself as a long vertical strip with a series of flops and flaps until it touches the ground. It has many elaborate drawings on it—she guesses them to be glyphs of an ancient script—each of them depicting objects or creatures that s
eem both familiar and alien to her. They’re neatly arranged in two columns, as well as so many rows that she doesn’t bother to count them all. “Which part is the date?” she asks.
“All of it,” Ek Chuaj answers with a succinct snort.
Itzel widens her eyes as they skim from the top of the strip of paper held at eye level all the way to the bottom lying on the ground. “All of it?”
“In the land of the living they keep the days using the Long Count,” the peccary explains. “Here in Xibalba, we use the Very Long Count.”
Judging from the sheer length of the date, she thinks a more appropriate name for it would be the “Very, Very, Very Long Count”.
Ek Chuaj clears his throat with an “ahem!” followed by a snort, then proceeds to read the very long date, “The Very Long Count reads that it is the Fifth Age of the world, and by Xibalban reckoning, it’s been three thousand and ten baktuns since the fall of the Stink Lord—”
“I just wanted to know if it was Sunday,” says Itzel, who wasn’t expecting such a longwinded answer to a question as simple as what day it is.
“I’ve never heard of such a day before,” the peccary confesses. “Unless you mean the Sun god’s day? His day is four days from now.” He grunts annoyedly. “I wish they gave me a day. All the flashy gods get one. Anyway, if you’re talking about living time, I’m afraid I don’t keep count of that, as there’s no use for it here in the Underworld. The dead keep time very differently, because they perceive time very differently.”
She lets out a sigh. She hopes it’s Sunday in her world, and not already Monday, as she dreads the thought of already missing a day of school, not to mention the thought of returning to her parents after disappearing for so long. Whatever day it is in her world, she doubts this long strip of paper will provide an answer that she’ll understand, so she carefully folds it up and tucks it back in the sleeve.
“So… happy belated birthday?” Ek Chuaj says with an awkward grin.
