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

by Ian Gibson

“I really must go,” she tells him, turning to him as she walks away, but keeping her hands behind her back to ensure that he doesn’t see them.

  But the little man snaps at her, bearing razor-sharp, tar-stained teeth in his wide mouth, “Stop and listen!” He brings his flute up to his mouth, but he fumbles with it, almost dropping it, and can barely manage to hold it to his mouth properly—it must be difficult to hold and play a flute with no thumbs, after all.

  He blows into the mouthpiece, and it’s the most painfully dreadful tune Itzel has ever heard. In fact, she could scarcely describe it as a tune at all—just a loud, screeching noise, like nails on a chalkboard, almost as if he were doing it on purpose just to annoy her. She wants to cover her ears but keeps her arms firmly out of view.

  He drops the flute midway through the “tune”, and looks rather embarrassed about that, although he should actually be far more embarrassed by the horrendous noise that he claims to be music. It seems like he’s just given up at this point, because he decides to stop playing and takes a bow. Itzel’s relieved that it’s over abruptly.

  “What can you pay me for my song?” he asks her, shaking his bag of treasures.

  She shrugs her shoulders, with her arms still carefully placed behind her back. “I have nothing on me, sorry.”

  He eyes her suspiciously. “What are you hiding behind your back then?”

  “Nothing,” she says, but there’s a detectable nervousness in her voice.

  “Show me, show me!” he demands.

  Itzel shakes her head. “I have nothing to show! Why would a lake spirit have anything to pay you with anyway?”

  The little man gnashes his razor-sharp teeth and narrows his beady eyes. “Why would a lake spirit not know where her own lake is either? No, I’m suspecting you’ve been lying to me, little girl. I’m beginning to think you’re a human child, and you’ve heard about me, which is why you’re hiding your thumbs from me.”

  “I’m not!” she insists.

  “Is that so? Then show your thumbs to me!” the little man shouts, spitting out the words angrily, and almost spitting on her in the process.

  Itzel thinks to run, but she knows she wouldn’t get far with him riding an ocelot, and if she climbed up a tree, he’d probably just eagerly wait for her at the bottom. She has an idea—she remembers the trick her father did for her baby sister, where he pretended to take off his thumb. She slowly shows him her left hand, first clenched in a fist, but she opens it, revealing her thumb that was hidden inside.

  The little man licks his lips, and starts stumbling towards her while still facing her, but as his feet are facing the other way, he doesn’t walk any better forward than he does backward. As he walks towards her opened left hand, Itzel brings out her right hand, grasps her left hand’s thumb with it, and pretends to take the thumb off, hiding the actual thumb in her closed fist, making it look like she’s somehow just taken it off completely. The trick clearly works on the little man, because he gasps in shock, and then lunges forward to her right hand, ignoring her left one now. She closes her right hand, turns, and pretends to throw her thumb in a nearby bush.

  He runs after it, swivelling around first so he awkwardly scuttles backwards again, and he does it so frantically that he drops his little bag of treasures that he was holding, and with that same hand he unsheathes his bright red machete to hack at the bush madly.

  “Where is it? Where is it? I can’t find it!” he screams amidst a crazed flurry of swings of his machete.

  Itzel is about to run, but she sees the ocelot standing there, its tail between its legs, and looking so absolutely miserable, and begins to have second thoughts. But her hesitation means she loses precious time, for the little man gives up in his search for her thumb in the bush and turns back to her.

  “Give me your other thumb!” he rasps, brandishing his machete menacingly at her.

  Itzel pretends to take off her right thumb with the same trick, and then she turns around and pretends to throw it all the way down the hill. The thumb-hungry little man swivels around again and rushes after it, stumbles and drops his machete to catch his fall against a tree, but then pushes himself off the tree to scamper downhill, all the while snarling madly. He trips yet again from the steep incline of the hill and starts tumbling all the way down in a clamour of raspy snarls and grunts.

  Itzel runs to the ocelot, who cowers at her, but instead of harming it as it seems to expect of people, she unties its muzzle and harness.

  “You’re free now,” she says, urging it to leave at once. “Run away, quickly!”

  The ocelot stares at her, as if for a moment it doesn’t even know what to do with this newfound freedom, but then it follows her advice and scurries away, leaping into the thick cover of bushes.

  Itzel peers down at the little man at the bottom of the hill. His large hat is crushed from the fall, and he’s apparently having a great deal of difficulty getting back to his feet—he must be dizzy from all the rolling around.

  “You make a fool of Tata Duende?” the man growls at her. “It was a trick all along! You didn’t take off your thumbs at all! But I see through your tricks now! I’m coming up to get you!” He thrusts himself up to his feet and tries to run uphill backwards but tumbles back down. “I said I’m coming up to get you! Just wait there!” He scrambles to his feet again, but flops around and falls headfirst into a bush, his legs flailing around feverishly. “Come down here and give me your thumbs!”

  Itzel collects whatever she finds that might be useful to her—the small machete, the bag of treasures, and some rope used to bridle the ocelot—and then she runs down the opposite side of the hill, feeling a lot more confident that he won’t be able to catch her now without the help of the ocelot—especially as he’s having such a hard time even getting back up the hill in the first place.

  She comes back to the same river and follows it upstream until she reaches a steep cliff. Many small waterfalls cascade down the river like a staircase made of rock and water—she has no doubt that they’re the Steps of Rock and Water she was told about. The rocks beside the river form a flight of stairs to the clifftop, but just the sight of the climb exhausts her more than she is already, so she decides she’ll rest here. She sits by one of the small, stepped waterfalls and opens the bag she took from Tata Duende, spilling its contents in the palm of her hand. All kinds of stones and metals were inside—she recognises crystals of silver and beads of turquoise, but among them are others of red, light pink, and black. “I bet that ‘Banded Bandit’ would love to get his hands—well, tail—on these.”

  She stares at the stones for a moment and looks at the rope. She wonders if she could set a trap to catch the thief, if he’s so enamoured with shiny things as Tata Duende claimed.

  “Just sitting around crying isn’t going to get me home. I’m going to have to be smart,” she thinks.

  She puts the stones back in the bag and walks to a tree by the river. She ties a loose loop on one end of the rope—the way her grandmother had taught her—and lobs the looped end over a branch. She collects some dry leaves and places them in a big pile, and then in the centre of the leaves she pours out the stones from the bag, and places the loop of the rope around it, hiding it in the leaves. She then sits behind the tree and patiently waits.

  And she waits. And waits.

  She looks up at the clear red sky, and the Sun. It’s a fair bit dimmer than the Sun she’s used to, but it’s still too bright to look directly at it for any more than an instant. She’s never seen the Sun shining red like this before, but while gazing at the sky for a long time she notices that strange flicker it does. It’s very subtle, and she wonders if it’s just her eyes playing trick on her. The sound of the waterfalls beside her starts to make her very sleepy, and she finds it a struggle to keep her eyes open. Eventually she closes them and dozes off.

  She’s awoken by a rustle of leaves and looks around the tree to see a very familiar ringed tail creeping around the stones, trying to sweep the
m together so it can wrap around and take them in just one swoop. She quickly pulls the rope and snares the tail, which drops all the stones. She hears a yelp from a bush, and the tail retracts, but as it’s snared in the rope hanging from the branch and isn’t going anywhere, the coati’s body just flies out of the bush where he’s been hiding and dangles upside-down from the branch also. He has the jade necklace around his neck, and it falls to the ground below him, along with his own necklace.

  “Nice try.” Itzel appears from behind the tree, casually walks to him while he’s flailing around helplessly, and takes her jade necklace back from the ground beneath him. The coati pouts at her, putting on the same affectedly pitiful act he tried on her before.

  “I’m not falling for that this time,” she tells him.

  The coati instantly drops his act. “You’re cleverer than I had taken you for. I can respect that.”

  She starts to walk away, but then turns to him as he’s dangling upside-down from the rope by his tail and swaying from side to side. She sighs, picks up the machete that she kept with her behind the tree, and cuts the rope to let him free, making sure to hold her necklace very tightly in her hand. He drops to the ground on the pile of stones and leaves, and quickly picks up his own necklace with his long snout and starts to slither away like a furry snake.

  “You can have the stones,” she says.

  He turns to look at her, but is clearly intimidated by the machete she’s holding, and just slithers away without saying a word. As he does so, his tail extends out from behind him and wraps itself around the stones, dragging them with him. Another clever trick—the coati’s even mastered the art of fleeing and stealing at the same time.

  She opens her hand and looks at the jade amulet. It has a lustre to it that glints a spectacular green in the contrast of the red sunlight—"a little too spectacular,” she thinks, so when she puts it around her neck again, she quickly tucks it into her dress to not call attention to herself.

  She climbs the steep staircase of rocks towards the clifftop, but her legs quickly start to ache from all the walking, and she’s reminded that she’s been walking almost nonstop since she arrived in this mysterious land, and certainly much longer than she’s ever spent walking through a forest before. She pushes herself to go just a bit farther, even though she feels so tired her legs feel like they’re turning to jelly. As she goes higher, the air at last loses the persistent smoky scent from the wildfire, and a fine mist hangs in the air with a cool, light drizzle. She takes shelter under an outcrop of rock, and judges that she’s about halfway up the stone steps by now. It’s very quiet except for the occasional hoot of an owl—not something she was expecting to hear seeing as it's light out—as well as the sound of the many stepped waterfalls in the river, which again shortly lull her to sleep, holding the machete tightly in one hand and her jade necklace in the other.

  The Tapir and the Woodpecker

  She’s running through a black forest, or at least that’s what she assumes it to be as she can hardly see anything at all, but she can feel the branches and leaves graze her arms and legs as she runs. She looks up to the sky and catches glimpses of a full moon peeking through the ever-smaller gaps in the treetops, but soon even that is swallowed by the blackness. The farther she runs, the denser the black forest becomes, until eventually the trees are so crowded together that she feels like she’s drowning in a black sea, as she can no longer distinguish one tree from another, nor where the ground ends and the trees begin.

  Two enormous, glistening eyes open in the blackness and stare at her, again reflecting the light of the jade stone on her necklace, and she feels their gaze is so strong that it’s piercing through her. She tries to run away from them, but no matter where she turns, the eyes are in front of her.

  “Is this another dream?” she shouts at the eyes. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to see,” the voice says, and the large eyes close.

  A tree falls near her with a loud crash. She wakes up and instinctively checks if the necklace is still around her neck. She breathes a sigh of relief when she sees it tucked in her dress, sits up, and looks at the sky. To her surprise, it’s much brighter now, and no longer has the otherworldly red tinge to it. It looks so much more familiar, like what she’d expect a daytime sky to look like, and for a brief moment she wonders if she’s somehow back in the “real” world, and not the bizarre world with a red sun, talking animals, giant trees, and thumb-eating dwarfs. But she sees the same rocky river and its many stepped waterfalls, and she’s still holding the same machete in her hand that she took from Tata Duende, and her hope immediately vanishes.

  She’s still in Xibalba, and there’s still no waking up from it.

  She walks out from underneath the outcrop of rock, and through the wispy clouds she can see the Sun peeking over the pointed peaks of the pine trees. It’s a yellowish white, like the Sun she’s used to, and she can already feel the heat from it on her cheeks, although judging from where it is, it must be early in the morning. But if it’s morning now, then what was it before? And why was the Sun red before, but not anymore?

  She hears another distant crash that sounded like a falling tree, and this time loud grunts and snorts accompanying it. The clamour seems to be coming from above her, so it must be in the mountain pine forest lying at the top of the stone steps. She continues her climb up the rocks, clambers over the clifftop, and comes upon a misty, shaded valley hemmed by hills with pine trees. It’s very quiet up here, with the only sound being the gentle flow of the river beside her, but the peace is again interrupted by the noise of yet another crash, which, just as the ones before it, is swiftly followed by a grunt and a snort. The noise echoes thunderously throughout the valley and stirs the morning dew off the trees. She realises that the ruckus, though loud, is still very faraway, as the bare stone walls of the valley seem to be carrying the sound quite a distance. As low-hanging clouds drift past, a great mountain reveals itself, looming far above the foothills. Could this be the mountain with the feathered serpent? She resolves to continue following the river, as she expects it will lead her to this mountain, and also where this peculiar noise is coming from—which she can’t help but feel curious about.

  She walks along the rocky riverbank for some time, hopping over jagged crags and crunching on carpets of pine needles, all the while the crashes and snorts grow louder as she draws nearer. Once she finds that she’s gotten close enough to finally be able to see the source of the crashing and smashing and snorting, she scales a boulder cropping out sharply from the bank and hanging lopsided over the river, as she reckons that she’ll get a better view of what’s going on from the top of it. Once she’s high enough to look upriver, a giant beast can be seen pacing back and forth along the far bank. She recognises it straightaway as a tapir, as it has a long snout and a dark brown body with a rounded rump and looks somewhat like a cross between an elephant and a cow.

  But it’s huge! Far larger than any tapir she’s seen, including the one she saw in her “forest of good luck” just outside her grandmother’s village. It must be almost as tall as her house! It’s trotting around and rubbing its sides against the rocks, and whenever a tree happens to be in its way, it simply stomps right through it and knocks it down, snapping it in two with its large hooves. The tapir is so massive that it must consider many of the pine trees to be little more than prickly twigs.

  Itzel wonders why it keeps smashing into the trees. Is it doing it on purpose, or can it not see well? She climbs down the rock and tries to get closer, and the closer she gets, the more she realises just how tremendously huge the tapir is. “Now this must be a god!” she whispers to herself. This was what she was expecting a god to be like—with a presence so large and imposing—unlike a peccary who wobbles around from an unwieldy load on its pack saddle, and wears thick eyeliner, and sells perfumes at extortionate prices. She wonders if this could be the tapir that the howler monkey had mentioned, who could clear the rocks blocking t
he cave for her. The excitement propels her forward.

  The tapir blares out another snort and smashes into yet another pine tree, causing a bee nest to fall on its head. “Ow, ow, ow, ow!” it grunts as the swarm of bees fly out of the nest and sting it, and it charges around smashing against more rocks and trees, with each crash echoing through the otherwise quiet and peaceful valley, along with its cries of pains from the bee stings.

  Itzel is now beginning to doubt if this is a god after all. Or maybe it is, and the gods of Xibalba aren’t quite what she was expecting them to be.

  The giant tapir smashes into tree after tree with the bees following close behind and buzzing angrily. A woodpecker with a bright red crest descends from one of the nearby trees to fly around the tapir too, flapping its wings as if similarly angered by its wanton disregard for trees.

  “Will you stop doing that?” the woodpecker shouts at it. “There won’t be any trees left in this valley if you keep smashing them down!”

  The tapir snorts and seems to ignore the woodpecker.

  Itzel comes to a short but wide waterfall, where she sees large stones that she can hop on to ford the river. She jumps from stone to stone, and once she reaches the other side of the river, and while still keeping a safe distance from the destructive giant, she waves her arms and calls to it. “Good morning!” She still hopes she’s right that it’s indeed morning, but it feels to her like it is. The tapir clearly doesn’t hear her, so she shouts more loudly, “Good morning, tapir!”

  The tapir turns around and looks at her, then lets out a very angry snort. As it does so, Itzel realises she’s carrying the small machete, so she panics and throws it on the ground away from her. The tapir scrapes its hooves against the rocky ground as if to charge. Itzel panics even more, and wonders where she can go now that they’re both on the same side of the river.

  She’s about to run back across the river where she came from, but in an instant the large tapir stampedes right past her, straight for the machete she just threw, and stomps on it, smashing it into pieces.