The Land of the Night Sun: Book One of The Jade Necklace

by Ian Gibson

  “How did you do that?” she asks the coati, dumbfounded by what she just witnessed.

  “How did I do what?” the coati asks.

  “You shortened your very long tail!”

  “It can become any length I want it to be,” the coati says, “and I don’t want to keep it that long all the time—otherwise it’ll get caught in something, or, even worse, get stepped on. It’s very precious to me.”

  “Any length you want?” she asks. “There’s no limit?”

  “If there is, I haven’t found it yet,” the coati replies. “Speaking of precious things, what are you planning to offer Kukulkan? You know he’s not going to help you unless you give him something, right?”

  “I didn’t know that,” she admits. “And besides, I don’t have anything to offer.”

  “You must have something,” the coati says insistently.

  She holds up the little travel-sized bottle of perfume hanging from her neck. “I have this perfume?”

  The coati doesn’t look impressed. “I think if you offer Kukulkan perfume, he’ll just get offended.”

  “Then I don’t have anything. I just really need his help.”

  The coati squeaks a laugh and shakes its head. “You must be new here. I can tell.”

  “Because I don’t stink so much?”

  “What? No.” It starts sniffing itself worriedly, then says, “Was that some kind of hint? Oh, wait! You’ve been talking to the peccary, I’m guessing. That’s Ek Chuaj, the god of—"

  “Perfumes?” Itzel interrupts.

  The coati snorts a laugh. “You could say that. He claims to be the god of trade in general, but he’s been going through a perfume craze for as long as I can remember. He easily gets himself all caught up in the latest fads. He had a craze with eyeliner for a while too, but it didn’t quite catch on. Anyway, what I was going to say is that the gods don’t offer help to anyone unless you have something to offer them in return. That’s just the way it goes, I’m afraid. It’s the law of the Underworld.”

  Itzel throws up her arms to show the coati that she literally doesn’t have anything but what she’s wearing. “I don’t know what to do then, because I really don’t have anything.”

  The coati notices she has a necklace tucked inside her dress, and points to it with its long snout. “What about that?”

  Itzel reluctantly takes out her jade amulet. “No, this is very special to me. My grandma gave it to me.”

  The coati uses its tail to elevate itself to the top of the fallen tree so it can look at the stone more closely—apparently it can accomplish quite a lot with just a tail. “It’s so shiny!” it remarks, gazing at the stone very intently, as if hypnotised by its green lustre. “Is that green jade? It can’t be! How does someone like you have green jade?”

  Now that the coati’s whole body is visible, Itzel discovers that it’s missing all of its arms and legs. It also wears a small necklace—stringed with tiny beads of wood and stones—that keeps falling down its slender body because it doesn’t have any shoulders to keep it around its neck, so it had to pull the necklace back up with its mouth to adjust it when it climbed the log.

  “What happened to your arms and legs?” she asks it.

  “My arms and legs?” The coati looks at itself as if it needed to be reminded that it’s missing them.

  “Did you lose them in the fire?”

  It nods sadly and plops its long snout on the log, staring up at her with big, innocent eyes.

  “That’s awful!” Itzel strokes its head to comfort it. “I’m so sorry, little coati.”

  She feels something brush through her hair and over her shoulder, and when she turns her head, she finds the coati’s incredibly long tail has crept up from behind her without her noticing. The next moment the tail loops down her head like a furry, ringed lasso, then quickly back up again. She looks up at the looped tail in confusion, then down at her chest, where she immediately notices something is missing—her jade necklace! “How did you…?” she yells as she tries to take the necklace back, but the tail just holds it high above her reach, dangling it tauntingly while she tries to jump for it.

  “It’s my tail of tricks,” the coati says. It withdraws its tail holding the necklace and climbs a nearby tree by coiling up and around the trunk to a branch—it manages this remarkably adeptly, as well as a monkey could climb such a tree—where it then flings its tail to another tree and swings to it as the tail retracts again, and in this absurd fashion it manages to make a swift escape, swinging from one tree to the next up the hill.

  “Give that back!” she yells while chasing it, but the snake-like coati darts through the treetops far too swiftly for her to keep up with it and shortly disappears over the hilltop. She runs to the top after it, shouting into the distance, “That’s not yours! Give it back, you thief!”

  She gets no response, and it’s already out of sight. She finds it very difficult to breathe. She’s already lost her grandmother’s necklace! And even worse—if the eyes in her dream are to be believed, she’s lost her only way home, too. What’s the point of finding a feathered serpent about clearing the rocks from the cave, if she doesn’t have the key to the locked door inside it?

  It occurs to her that she had a brush with the very “Banded Bandit” the peccary had warned her about. Considering how easily it had gone off with her necklace and vanished, it’s clear to her that this coati has a history of theft as long as its tail. And when the coati had warned her that there are a lot of trickers in this place, she didn’t realise until now that it was actually counting itself among them.

  The Little Man with Backwards Feet

  “Now I’ll never be able to go home!” she bawls. “I’m stuck here forever! I might as well be dead!” She leans against a tree and buries her head in her arms to cry. She raises her foot to kick its trunk in despair but thinks twice about doing so—she’s worried this one might scream at her too.

  Then, just as she’s about to lose all hope that she’ll ever find that thieving coati, she spots a remarkably tall guanacaste tree at the top of a hill ahead—its branches span so wide that it looks like an enormous green umbrella. Maybe she could get a better view if she climbed it, so she resolves to give it a try, as at least it’d accomplish more than crying would. She sprints down into the dip between the hills and ascends the hill toward the tree, which she quickly climbs—and if her circumstances were any better, she would have been enjoying herself, as it's the first tree she's climbed since her last visit to her grandmother's village. She has a much better view of the land once she scoots herself along one of its branches to get a view through its thick canopy.

  She looks across the hills from her high vantage but sees no sign of a long brown-and-white tail, nor the thieving coati it belongs to. She still can’t believe she was fooled by such a petty trick. A coati using its cuteness to steal something from her! What kind of world is this where cute animals would be so devious? Moreover, what kind of coati has an interest in jewellery anyway? After considering the peccary with an obsession for perfume, the leafcutter ants under a delusion that single water droplets would have any effect on a raging forest fire, and the howler monkeys who talk only by screaming so loudly that she wanted to rip off her own ears, she’s starting to notice a trend—the animals of Xibalba are completely out of their minds.

  She peers over the hills, which soon give way to a steep plateau, upon which the broad-leafed rainforest turns into a pine forest. She glimpses movement on the next hill—it looks like someone riding an animal. The figure is wearing white clothes and a wide-brimmed hat and appears to be small and, much to her relief, human. Could it be another child? Whoever it is could be lost in the Underworld, just like she is!

  She climbs down the tree and starts running downhill towards the child. As she gets closer, she notices that the animal the small child is riding a spotted cat—not nearly as large as a jaguar, but not as small as a house cat either. It must be an ocelot, she thinks. She runs to
wards them, waving her arms. The child turns and spots her, and now she realises it's not a child at all, but instead a very small old man—unless of course a child could grow a long grey beard.

  "Leave me be!" the man rasps at her in a very hoarse and crackly voice, before kicking the ocelot as if to spur it like a horse and riding away over the hill.

  “Wait! Wait!” Itzel shouts to him. “Don’t go!”

  She runs out of breath from all this climbing and sprinting uphill, and by the time she reaches the hilltop, she’s just too tired to do anything else. There’s no sign of the little man on the ocelot anymore. She slumps down against a tree. She can’t hold in her tears this time and starts to cry.

  “I just want to wake up!” she shouts, tears streaming down her cheeks. She sees the red Sun overhead, painting the hills ahead in its unsettling red. When she looks back in the direction from where she came, she sees the glow of the forest fire and the black clouds of smoke billowing as they lift into the sky. None of this can be real! She hits the back of her head against the tree trunk in a desperate attempt to wake up, but all it manages to do is hurt, and it hurts a lot. She isn’t waking up. She isn’t going home. She starts to sob loudly.

  “Why were you chasing me?” a snarly voice tells her.

  She looks around the tree and finds that the very small man riding the ocelot has sneaked up on her from behind. She gets to her feet and backs away, startled by his sudden appearance. Up close, she realises just how small the man is—even a fair bit shorter than her. His head is in shadow cast from his large hat, but she can see that it’s very round, like the shape of a melon, with a pointed nose and a wispy grey beard. The brim of his hat stretches out so broadly that it somewhat reminds her of the umbrella-shaped guanacaste tree she had climbed when she first spotted him.

  The ocelot he’s riding is wearing tack like one would put on a horse, with bands strapped around its head, reins to steer and restrain it, and a saddle. It also has a muzzle covering its mouth which she guesses must prevent it from biting its rider. The poor creature looks haggard, like it’s both exhausted and starved, with patches of missing fur, and she feels great pity for the animal the moment she lays eyes on it. The little man clearly doesn’t treat it well, and she wants to tell him off for it, but he doesn’t look like the sort of man who would take criticism well, especially judging from the small whip hanging from one side of his belt. Hanging from the other side is a sheath, holding what looks to be a small machete with a red handle.

  “I wasn’t chasing you,” Itzel says nervously. “I was calling for help.” But upon seeing the man’s surly face and beady eyes, and his mistreated ocelot, she immediately regrets calling out to him at all.

  “Help?” splutters the little man. “Help for what?” He’s chewing on tobacco and spitting on the ground between his words—Itzel finds this habit very disgusting—and he kicks the haunches of the ocelot so that it steps closer to her. The poor, scrawny ocelot seems to be struggling to hold the man mounted on it, as little as he may be.

  The moment he kicks it, Itzel realises there’s something very strange about his feet—they’re both facing backwards! She hurriedly takes a step back away from him and the tree, trying to keep a wide berth between them, in case she'll need to run, although she has doubts that she could outrun an ocelot.

  “Ah, you’re a young girl!” says the little man after leaning forward to get a better look, and now seems relieved. “At first I thought you were another alux trying to catch me.”

  “What’s an alux?”

  “How have you never heard of an alux before?” He grimaces at her like he’s been personally affronted by her not knowing. “They’re dwarfs like me. Most of them live in the forest but look what’s become of their home!” He points to the fire in the distance, squeals a very unpleasant, crackly laugh, and spits on the ground again. “Serves them right!”

  She doesn’t understand why a forest fire is a laughing matter, and she’s starting to dislike this man more and more. She also notices, while the man was pointing, that his hand is missing a thumb. She glances at his other hand, holding the reins with which he steers the ocelot, and wonders if his thumb is missing on that hand, too, but she can’t see it yet. Backwards-facing feet and hands with missing thumbs—could this be the bad spirit her grandmother was telling her about? She immediately closes her fists to hide her own thumbs, and keeps both her hands behind her back, out of sight from him.

  “Unlike them, I was wise enough to leave the forest and become a travelling bard. I’m very good at playing the flute, and if you’re lucky enough I just might play a tune for you! By the way, what were you crying about, little girl? I heard you crying.”

  “Because I’m lost.”

  “You clearly are! Tell me, are you a spirit of the lake or are you a human… child?” He says the last word with a gleeful anticipation, licking his chapped lips.

  Itzel hesitates to answer. If this is indeed the Tata Duende her grandmother had spoken of, she’s not so sure she wants to admit to being a human child, and especially not a living one.

  The man inspects her with his tiny eyes peering out from the shadow of his hat. “I’m guessing a lake spirit, because humans don’t come around here anymore. Come to think of it, you remind me of an old woman of the lake I had seen not so long ago. She was crying too and wearing a white dress a lot like yours. Are you related to her?”

  These words manage to lift Itzel’s heart with hope, and she spends a moment worrying a little less about the future of her thumbs and a little more about this woman he speaks of—after all, her grandmother used to always wear a white dress quite like hers, albeit longer and sleeveless, and she was wearing it when she saw her fall into the cenote. “My grandma?”

  “She’s your grandma?” the man asks puzzledly. “I didn’t know lake spirits had grandchildren. Certainly, I thought they’d be more interested in devouring grandchildren than having any, but what do I know? I rarely go out on the lake much, what with the storms and all.” He glances down at Itzel’s feet when he says this, then scratches his beard. “And you don’t have feet like hers either.”

  She finds it an odd remark to make, but nothing about this little old man strikes her as normal, and she’s wanting to leave quickly in case he catches on to her being a human with edible thumbs. “How do I get to the lake?”

  “What kind of lake spirit doesn’t know how to get to the lake?” the man says incredulously. “It’s where lake spirits tend to belong!”

  Itzel shrugs. “As I said, I’m lost here.”

  He thinks for a moment. “Well, I can see how the fires have disrupted things a lot for everyone.” He points across the rocky river. “It’s that way. But you can’t get to it straight from here thanks to the wildfires.” He points to the steep elevation in the land spiked with pine trees at the top. “You’ll need to go up to the foothills of the mountains and cut through the pine forest to get to the shore. I saw her on an island in the lake. I don’t go out much that way because of the storms, but you know—fires here, storms there. Can’t avoid it all!” He giggles another horrid laugh and spits on the ground again.

  Itzel cringes in disgust at the little man. She’d like to part ways with him immediately, but she still has one more pressing question. “I’m also looking for a coati. It stole something from me. I think it went in your direction. Did you happen to see it?”

  “A victim of the infamous Banded Bandit, eh?” He hops off the ocelot—now that Itzel sees him standing, she reckons he must be less than three feet tall—and he takes out a small leather bag from one of the saddlebags. He rustles the bag, and it makes chinking sounds like many pieces of metal, stone, and glass are inside. “He’s tried to take my earnings before, and even went away with my hat, but I took it back!” He says this very boastfully, before spitting on the ground again. “Not sure what use a coati has for a hat. Or precious stones, for that matter, but it seems he takes a very special liking to them more than anything, which
is why I make sure he’ll never get the drop on me again! You have a lot to learn if you’re going to be wandering around in places like this, little lady of the lake. You need to have eyes on the back of your head!”

  Without her even realising it, she scowls at him when he says these last words—it was the same advice the coati gave her right before he went off with her necklace.

  He starts walking towards her, except he’s turned himself around and awkwardly shuffling backwards—as it turns out, he takes his own advice of having eyes on the back of one’s head quite literally, seeing as he’s always facing in the opposite way he’s walking.

  An uneasy feeling takes over Itzel as the old dwarfish man approaches her, and quickly she decides to start walking downhill towards the mountainous pine forest to get away from him. “Thanks for your help.” She’d wave goodbye to him, but he’s walking toward her while facing the other way, so there’s little point—and she wouldn’t want to reveal her thumbed hands anyway.

  “Why in such a rush, lake spirit? Your lake isn’t going anywhere!” rasps the little backward-walking man as he sidles up to her, swivels around so he’s facing her, and produces a flute from his pouch. “Wouldn’t you like to hear a song before you leave?”