by Ian Gibson
She smiles slightly. “Thanks, mister peccary.”
“You should know that people here don’t really keep track of their birthdays so much as their deathdays, but I guess you don’t have one of those yet.”
Her smile plunges into a horrified frown. “I really hope not.”
“Can’t say I’ve encountered living folk here in a very long time,” the peccary says musingly, then seems to quickly dismiss the thought. “Anyway, as it was recently your birthday and I’m feeling extra charitable, I’ll give you a free sample of one of my perfumes. What do you say?”
“Um…”
But before Itzel can even answer, Ek Chuaj turns his head to indicate the sleeve on the pack hanging over his other flank. “I have samples in there.”
She opens the sleeve and takes out a very tiny wooden bottle, only about as tall and wide as her thumbnail. She opens it to smell what’s inside, and her nose is pleasantly surprised by an elegant mixture of floral and fruity scents. "That smells really nice! What’s it called?"
"I think it smells like a rainbow, don’t you? So, naturally I decided to call it ‘Fruity Farts’."
Itzel raises an eyebrow at that. “I don’t get it.”
“Rainbows are cloud farts,” he explains, though his tone makes it clear that he feels like he’s stating the obvious. “Didn’t you know that?”
“If you say so,” she says, deciding it better not inquire any further about it. She smiles politely and puts the cap back on. “Thanks, mister peccary."
Ek Chuaj grins. “That’ll be two hundred cacao beans.”
Her smile evaporates. “What?”
“It costs two hundred cacao beans.”
“You said it was free!”
The peccary looks just as confounded as she is. “The sample is free.”
Itzel nods. “Okay, then.” And she starts walking away.
But Ek Chuaj waddles after her. “But you still owe me two hundred cacao beans for the bottle it’s in.”
Itzel is becoming aggravated now. “Listen, mister peccary, your perfume smells very nice, but I don’t need it and I really must be going.” She holds the small bottle in her hand, offering to return it.
Ek Chuaj stares blankly at the sample in her hand, then at her. “Samples are non-returnable.”
“Ugh!” She groans impatiently, returns the tiny bottle back to the sleeve in which she found it, and stomps off at a brisker pace.
“You can’t return it! You have to pay!” he snorts angrily. “Thief! The great and charitable Ek Chuaj has been robbed blind of his precious perfume! I’ll report you to the spider monkey police!”
Itzel turns around to walk away, half-heartedly waving her hand as she leaves. “Go ahead.” She notices that the peccary has left a long trail of his supposedly precious merchandise along the ground. “Oh, and by the way, there’s a hole in one of your packs,” she says while her eyes follow the trail into the treed hills ahead.
Ek Chuaj gasps in dismay, then hops and spins around. “A hole? Where? Where? Where? Where?” He tries to turn to see where the hole is—as it turns out, peccaries aren’t particularly good at turning their large, short-necked heads very much to see what’s behind them—but in the midst of the panic, he loses his balance, lurches sideways a little too much, and plops into the river, with the tall stack of packs splashing into the water along with him, frightening away all the fish. “Help! Help! I can’t swim!” squeals the peccary while lying upside-down in the rocky shoal of the river, his snout poking out of the water, and his four scrawny hooved legs thrashing and splashing about helplessly.
Itzel stares at him sceptically, having noticed that the peccary is in very shallow water and wouldn’t need to know how to swim anyway. She wades into the water anyway to help him back to his feet. “Are you sure you’re a god, mister peccary?” she asks him.
The peccary spits out water. “Of course I’m a god!” he snorts very self-assuredly, giving himself a good shake and trots around in circles while raising his nose high. “A highly respected god, at that!” He trips on one of his bottles of perfume and tumbles over sideways. “I meant to do that,” he’s quick to inform her, trying to get back to his feet, but he’s clearly too dizzy and discombobulated to manage.
Itzel puts her hands on her hips and gives him another doubtful look, before kindly dragging all of his packs back to shore, one by one—they’re heavier than she thought, and she can hear all the perfumes bottles clanking inside them as they’re jostled around—while the peccary just lies there, sprawled on the ground on his back with his portly belly bobbing up and down as he pants heavily in exhaustion.
“I owe you one,” he tells her.
She places out her hand in front of his snout. “That’ll be two hundred cacao beans.”
Ek Chuaj glowers at her, still lying upside-down.
Itzel smiles and waves farewell.
“Wait!” He scrambles to his feet and with his snout he nudges a small glass bottle of perfume that had dropped out when he toppled over. “You can have it. It’s a travel-sized bottle of my best-selling fragrance.”
She stops and looks at the peccary sceptically. “Is this actually free?”
Ek Chuaj nods, so she hesitantly accepts it. It’s a very small bottle, only about twice as large as the sample, but it conveniently comes with a long string that’s been strung through a loop in the bottle’s cap, like it’s meant to be worn around the neck. She’s not all that surprised that the peccary has made perfumes that can be carried around easily to be used in a pinch, considering just how much importance it seems to place on smelling nice. She opens it and gives it a sniff but immediately recoils—it smells of pine, yet it’s so pungent that it makes her eyes water.
“I make that one from various parts of the pine tree, but the special ingredient is its sap,” he says. “So, naturally I decided to call it ‘Pine Pus’.”
Itzel scrunches her nose in disgust. What’s with these names? She kindly declines and returns the bottle to one of his packs.
“What?” He pouts disappointedly. “You don’t like it?”
“Could I have the other one?”
“But Pine Pus is my bestseller!” He sniffs a few of the bottles on the ground. “Let’s see. Butterfly Burps, Mint & Mould, Citrusy Snot, Essence of Earwax—these are all bestsellers, by the way. Here! This one’s my Fruity Farts.”
She picks that bottle up, puts the string around her neck, and tucks it into her dress along with her jade necklace. “Thanks, mister peccary.”
“I’ll consider it an investment,” says Ek Chuaj. “I want to invest in you not stinking.”
“That’s very sweet of you,” she says over her shoulder as she walks away. Then, while examining her belated birthday gift of perfume, she whispers to herself, “Not really what I was expecting a god to be.”
“Keep it safe,” Ek Chuaj warns her as she leaves. “There's an infamous thief known as the 'Banded Bandit' who robs travellers in these lands. In fact, I'd say theft is the second most serious problem, after body odour!” And he sets about to collect all his bottles of perfumes strewn across the riverbank, but not before sniffing himself. "Yuck, I smell of fish!" He spots a large catfish in the river and asks it if it would like some perfume.
Itzel continues walking alongside the river and sees a hill ahead covered with trees, most noticeably a tall mahogany tree. They’re still green and have mostly been untouched by the flames, and the layer of smoke that’s been hanging in the air around her is gradually beginning to clear, and it’s even getting ever slightly cooler. She can see the trail of various little sundries left by the peccary—mostly bottles of perfume, but also quite a few ceramic pots and bowls—leading up and over the hill. He must have lost a lot from that hole!
She ascends the hill towards the mahogany tree, following the peccary’s trail of lost goods, and breathing in the fresher air and the tree’s scents. She’d normally be astonished by a tree as tall as this mahogany, were it not for the c
eiba tree as tall as a skyscraper which she can still see over the wildfire’s smoke. As she gets closer, she notices that there’s writing carved into the mahogany tree’s trunk—ancient glyphs whose meaning is beyond her comprehension, much like the ones she saw on the long piece of paper the peccary kept to record the date.
“Who goes there?” drones a deep, bass voice.
Itzel jumps back, her heart almost skipping a beat from the shock. It sounded very much like the mahogany tree just spoke to her. Do even the trees talk in the land of the dead?
“I said who goes there!” cries the tree impatiently, its thick trunk reverberating from the sound of its own voice.
“I’m… I’m I—Itzel!” she splutters nervously, unsure how to introduce herself to a tree, and whether or not they even care about human names at all. “And… you?”
“I am the Thunder Tree!” booms the tree, its branches stirring and its voice sounding like a pounding drum. “What are you doing here, little human? Can’t you read?”
“Yes, I can,” Itzel tells the tree, glancing at the glyphs on its trunk. “But I can’t read what this says.”
“It says ‘No humans allowed’!” the tree says with another angry shake of its branches.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Thunder Tree!” She hurriedly backs farther away from the temperamental mahogany tree just in case it was to decide to attack her somehow. “I didn’t know that!” she says embarrassedly, although she also has to wonder who carved the glyphs in the first place, if no humans are allowed here—and she can’t imagine a tree could have done it, even a talking one.
“Have you come to cut me down, little human?” the tree says accusingly.
“No!” she replies hastily. “I’m not here to cut down any trees! I was just lost, that’s all!”
“And where is it exactly that you are trying to go?” the nosy tree asks. “Can’t you find the city?”
“City?” she asks. She didn’t know there was a whole city here, too.
“A city is a treeless jungle where humans live!” the tree blares with its thunderous, pounding drone. “How does a human not know what a city is?”
“I know what a city is!” she shouts back. “I just don’t know which city you’re talking about!”
“There’s only one city here, so I didn’t think I needed to specify which one!” the tree snaps at her testily.
Itzel wonders if her grandmother could be in such a city, but it won’t be much use looking for her just yet without a way to return home, seeing as that cave-in would prevent them both from doing so. “I’m not going to the city yet. The howler monkeys told me to find a feathered serpent first to ask for its help.”
“Ahhh,” the tree hums understandingly, its tone of voice softening abruptly. “You have spoken with the howler monkeys. They are very wise. The wisest of monkeys, in fact. Far wiser than those shifty spider monkeys. Never trust a monkey that can’t howl, I always say!”
She finds that derisive remark about spider monkeys awfully familiar but shrugs it off. She wonders if a tree would be helpful with directions at all considering it can’t move, but she decides to ask anyway. “Do you know how to get to the mountains from here?”
“Yes,” the tree answers. “Just follow the river uphill and you’ll come to the Steps of Rock and Water. Climb the steps and you’ll enter the mountain pine forest. And if it’s the Great Feathered Serpent you’re looking for, then continue along the river for a while and you’ll eventually find his mountain on the right-hand side—I mean, right-branch side—of the river. It has a pathway up to the mountaintop. It’s difficult to miss, miss!”
“Thanks, Thunder Tree,” she says, waving to it as she heads downhill.
“You’re welcome, miss,” it says politely. And then, even more unusually, the tree sounds like it clears its throat, and with another angry rustle of its branches and deep thrum of its trunk, it booms scoldingly, “But never come back here, little human! No humans allowed here! Read the signs next time!”
“I’ll remember!” she assures it, while running a safe enough distance away in fear that the capricious mahogany tree might get angry again and collapse on her. “What a strange tree,” she remarks quietly to herself while thinking of its odd switching back and forth in tone of voice—although she shortly remembers that any tree that talks should automatically be a strange tree.
She then glimpses something in the bushes that looks to be a long snake—ringed with bands of white and a ruddy brown—just as the head of it curves behind a fallen tree. It’s so long she can’t even see where it begins or ends, and she immediately wonders if this is the feathered serpent that the howler monkey was talking about, so she quietly steps closer. The tail is bristly, as she can see, so that could mean it’s covered in little feathers. But as she approaches it, very quietly and cautiously, she notices that the snake isn’t feathered, but furry. She doesn’t know what it is anymore—could it be not a snake at all, but instead a very long tail?
She picks up a stick, hides behind a tree stump, and pokes the tail with it, just to observe what happens.
A small, furry animal’s head peeks over the fallen tree and shouts at her, “I’d appreciate it if you don’t poke my precious tail with sticks, thank you very much!”
Itzel drops the stick and raises her hands to show she means no harm. “I’m sorry! I thought you were a snake!”
“Do I look like a snake to you?” it asks.
The animal glaring at her has a long, narrow, protruding snout tipped with an upturned black nose, with a patch of dark brown fur on its head and white circles around its eyes, which reminds Itzel an awful lot of the masks that robbers wear in cartoons or old-fashioned cowboy films. In a way it looks to her like a cross between a raccoon and an anteater, and it doesn’t take her long to recognise it as a coatimundi, as she’s seen them at the zoo outside her city—although she can’t recall them having tails anywhere near as long as this, so she still questions whether or not it belongs to it. “You’re a coati!”
“I know that already,” responds the coati. “And you’re a human girl, but I assume you already know that too. What are you doing here? Are you lost?”
“I’m just passing through. I was told to go to the mountains.”
“Then you’re going the right way, at least,” the coati says. “That mahogany tree marks the western border of the Howling Forest. You’ll soon be in the mountain pine forest if you keep going west.”
“I know,” she replies. “The tree told me.”
The coati gives her a look that makes her wonder if it thinks she’s crazy. “You spoke to a… tree?”
“Yes,” she says, though now she’s beginning to doubt herself. “Is that not normal here?”
“Well,” the coati says, “I’ve been in the Underworld for a very long time and can’t say I remember having any conversations with any trees.”
Itzel points to the tall mahogany tree. “That tree shouted at me.”
“Ohhh,” the coati says, looking at the mahogany tree. “Yes, that one does that sometimes. I was wondering what all the shouting was. That’s not the tree, though. It’s just a howler monkey pretending to be a tree.”
“What?” she cries. “I thought it was the tree this whole time!”
“Nah, it’s their sacred Thunder Tree,” the coati explains. “Its wood carries sound very well, so the howlers can bounce their voices off of it even from a distance. One of them was just trying to trick you.”
Itzel’s face crumples into a frown upon realising she had just been played for a fool by a ventriloquist howler monkey.
The coati whispers, “If you want a piece of advice, I’ve got a good one for you—you need to be extra, extra careful in this place. You need to have eyes on the back of your head. Maybe the top of your head too. Just have eyes everywhere, actually. Lots of tricksters about.”
“Thanks for the advice,” she says with a nod, recalling the peccary’s attempt to trick her out of money—or cacao beans, mor
e specifically. She looks down at the coati’s exceptionally long tail that she thought was some kind of furry snake. “What’s with your tail, by the way?”
“What about it?”
“You have a lot of it.”
“You can never have too much of a tail,” argues the coati, all the while wagging the very tip of its tail, which happens to be much, much farther from its head than the average coati’s head-to-tail distance.
Itzel’s not sure if she agrees with the coati’s words, as it looks like an excessive amount of tail to her. She starts heading back towards the river, as she remembers the howler advising that she hurry before the rise of the “Day Sun”—whatever that’s supposed to mean—and she shouldn’t spend any more time dawdling with the local wildlife. “I need to go. Nice to meet you, mister coati.”
The coati’s head follows her curiously from behind the log. “Why are you going to the mountains anyway?”
Itzel stops and turns back to it. “I was told by a monkey to find a big snake with feathers. Have you heard of it?”
The coati perks its ears. “You mean Kukulkan?”
She shrugs. “I guess so.”
“There’s only one big snake with feathers around here. What business does a human girl have with Kukulkan?” Then its ears prick up, its eyes twinkle, and a wave of bristling fur runs down the length of its bafflingly long tail all the way to the tip—the effect is like a long, curling line of dominos knocking each other down, except reversed in time so that they look like they’re pulling each other up—until all of it is as spiked as a porcupine’s. “Are you going to him to make an offering? What do you have on you?”
From the coati’s reaction, she can’t tell if it’s getting excited or electrocuted, but can only guess it’s the former. Before a word even manages to escape her lips, the curious creature decides to approach her, and it does this in the most unusual manner—instead of simply walking on the ground, as she would expect a coati to do, it slithers through the soil and fallen leaves, undulating its slender body and long tail much like a snake. Once it’s close enough, it sniffs her leg very brashly with its long and narrow snout—it’s the second talking animal in a row that has sniffed her without even asking first, and she really hopes she doesn’t get any insulting remarks on how she smells this time. While it’s occupied with smelling her, its tail does another incredible thing—it shifts through the carpet of leaves on the ground, then spirals around and retracts into the back of its body to become a tail of a length that’s much more expected for its kind. The whole display reminds her of her father’s measuring tape being stretched out to full length and then snapping back into its roll, except the coati’s tail accomplishes it with a lot of graceful, spiralling swooshes, and the stripes of it make the motion almost hypnotic to look at.
