by Ian Gibson
The monkey blows into the mouthpiece, and the trumpet reverberates and cracks apart from the mouthpiece all the way to the other end, letting out a blare so powerful that Itzel feels her heart might leap out of her mouth and into the clouds. The force of the trumpet call parts the sea of white clouds as if a great knife had sliced through it, and, as it travels across the vast lake, it even manages to blow away the approaching storm of thunder and fire, revealing what looks to be a red-walled city on a distant island in the lake.
Itzel marvels at the sight of it. Could it be the same city that the Thunder Tree—or more accurately, the ventriloquist howler monkey pretending to be the Thunder Tree—was talking about?
The flying serpent finally takes heed—the trumpet blare sent a wave down its green feathers and rustled its wings—and it swerves its long body around to fly back towards them, diving headfirst into the white clouds with its tail following quite a way behind, until its enormous head emerges beside the summit and peers at them with large serpentine eyes—black slits in a deep yellow—and bares frightfully large, sharp fangs. “Who wishes to speak with Kukulkan the Great and Watchful?” he bellows with a mighty voice—it’s even deeper than the tapir’s, and even more irritable. “Can’t you see that I’m busy? This better be important!”
The monkeys nervously back away from the broken trumpet, and immediately they all point in Itzel’s direction far behind them, where she pokes her head out from behind the tree just to take a peek, but she’s too scared to step out from her hiding spot, and she’s already beginning to regret calling the snake god’s attention. She’s not normally afraid of snakes, but she had never encountered one so large it could devour a house.
Kukulkan quickly grows impatient, and shouts with his deep, godly voice that rattles the mountain to its core, “Or were you monkeys playing a prank on me?”
The howler monkeys jump in fright and scatter to hide from the wrath of the snake god.
Itzel draws up the courage to step out from behind the pine tree. “It was me. I asked them to call you.”
The giant snake examines her with his serpentine eyes and flicks out his blue forked tongue. He has a crest of regal feathers that adorns his head much like a crown. “A human girl? What are you doing here?”
Itzel steps closer. “I’m looking for my grandma, mister snake.”
“I am Kukulkan, king of the gods!” the snake booms at her. “Not ‘mister snake’!”
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” Itzel says, timidly taking another step forward. “I’m looking for my grandma. She fell into your Underworld.”
“I’m Lord of the Sky,” the snake hisses testily. “This isn’t my Underworld.”
Itzel is confused by this remark. “But the howlers said you—”
“The howlers say lots of things, and loudly!” snarls Kukulkan. “It’s best you learn to ignore them too!”
The howlers chitter among themselves. “But, Your Kingliness, you’re the Lord of the Underworld now!” one of them cries in their defence. “You replaced the Death god to rule it, remember? Besides, there isn’t much sky here for you to be the lord of anymore!”
Kukulkan glowers at the howlers. “This is why I try to ignore you loudmouths. You’re always reminding me of things I don’t want to be reminded of.” His eyes return to Itzel, who’s looking at him expectantly for help. “If your grandmother has passed, she will be in the City of the Dead at the centre of the Lake of Tears.” The snake turns his head, indicating the same island city that she saw earlier on the lake.
Itzel walks briskly to the eastern edge of the summit to peer at the distant city. “She’s all the way there?”
“The dead are all sent there,” Kukulkan says. “And you should be there yourself, instead of on this mountain wasting my time.”
“So that’s where you are, grandma,” she whispers to herself as she gazes across the lake—she finally knows where she must have gone to.
The snake lowers his head to look at the girl, opening its large eyes wide to display a great deal of frustration. “Is that really what you have summoned me for? I have better things to do, little girl.”
Itzel backs away nervously. “Not only that, Your Highness! I’m also here because the monkeys told me to see you about a problem. The cave I came from has fallen in, and I can’t get back inside because of all the rocks in the way.”
“You speak of the cave that brings the dead?” Kukulkan asks.
She nods.
He scoffs at her. “Not my problem. Besides, I’ve grown tired of the dead always coming here. I’ve had quite enough of them! Why don’t they go somewhere else?”
One of the monkeys shouts from its refuge in a tree, “But, my king, this is the Underworld! The dead are supposed to come here!”
“Why can’t they just skip this place and go to the heavens instead?” snarls the giant feathered snake. “The Underworld is a shambles. Just look at it! I was meant to be the Lord of the Sky, not the lord of a hole in the ground where the dead fall into. Why do they keep coming here?”
Another monkey pipes up, “The dead always come to the Underworld first, Your Loftiness! There’s no direct route to the heavens. That’s just the way the afterlife works!”
“Oh, why don’t we just send them all to oblivion then!” says Kukulkan, very aggravatedly. “We’d be doing them a favour, as anything’s better than coming to this wretched hole in the earth. Xibalba’s become too small to fit us all, and yet still the dead come by the boatloads!”
“Actually, Your Great-and-Featheriness,” the howler says, “they just come one by one in dinky little canoes now! There aren’t nearly as many coming here as there used to be!”
“Any at all is too many!” Kukulkan hisses. “I’m beginning to find this whole afterlife business extremely tediousss.”
“But, Your Sky-Highness, the Underworld has been around for as long as death has!” the howler reminds him. “It’s the way things have always been!”
Kukulkan looks away and says under his breath, “I’m tired of things being the way they’ve always been. And I’m even more tired of this job.”
Itzel is taken aback by Kukulkan’s complete disinterest in doing anything, especially as it was such a trek for her to get here to ask for his help. “But mister—I mean—King Kukulkan, I need those rocks moved because I need to get home.”
Waves of laughter ripple through the sparkling green feathers down the length of Kukulkan’s immensely long body. “There’s no getting home, little girl. This is your home now. It’s the land of the dead.”
“But I’m not dead,” she tells him tersely.
The ripples of laughter abruptly stop. “Not dead? How did you come here?”
She glances at the howler monkeys hiding behind the rocks and within trees, and some of them even poke their heads up over the far side of the summit. They also seem very interested in how she came here, too, if she isn’t dead.
“Well…?” Kukulkan says impatiently. “I haven’t got all day, little girl, be it a matter for the dead or the living.”
Itzel reluctantly takes out her jade amulet that she’s kept tucked inside her dress, and the longer Kukulkan peers at it, the wider his eyes grow, like he can’t believe what he sees.
“How did the stone of light with the power of the Death god fall into the possession of a little girl?” he asks.
Itzel is very taken aback by this. “The Death god’s power is in this?”
“Yesss,” hisses the snake. “That’s the very jade stone I used to trap his power long ago. It’s unmistakable.”
“Are you sure?” Itzel asks, still incredulous.
“Are you questioning the king of the gods?” the snake snarls at her, baring his fangs.
She steps back fearfully. “No, not at all, mister snake—I mean—King Kukulkan! But I thought that jade stone looked different. I thought it looked like the head of the Death god?”
“It did,” Kukulkan says. “At least until the Death god’s
power was trapped inside it. But as it quickly received many complaints, I used my magic to remould it into the shape it has now, of the Sun and Moon.”
“Complaints?” asks Itzel.
“It was too ugly.”
“Oh,” she says, remembering her grandmother mentioning its ugliness too. She looks at the jade pendant and finds the design of a crescent Moon tucked within a radiant Sun quite beautiful, so she’s relieved she has that instead of an ugly head of a Death god hanging from her neck.
“How did you come upon this stone?” Kukulkan demands.
“My grandma gave it to me.”
“Grandmother?” He stares long and hard at Itzel with his huge, round eyes, its pupils as tall black slits moving up and down as they scan her thoroughly from head to toe. Then his eyes suddenly narrow as if they’ve discovered something about her. “I know you. You’re the girl who took the Rain god Chaac. I saw it with my own eyesss.”
Itzel is unaware of having taken any gods at all, and if she had, she probably would have remembered it. “I didn’t take any gods, mister king!”
“Are you questioning the king of the gods?” he snarls again.
“No, sorry! I’m not! I just don’t remember taking any rain god.”
“You did. Chaac of the South is always slipping into your land of the living. He’s a slippery fool who likes to swim in the pools of water in the Cave of Echoes—the same pools of water that serve as portals to your world.”
Itzel remembers the glowing pools of water in the cave, and especially the one she had woken up in, where she saw images of her world on the other side.
“He usually takes the form of a slimy frog,” Kukulkan adds.
Itzel now realises that he’s talking about the frog she saved from getting eaten by the snake, which she then put in a glass jar, and tucked the jar underneath her bed. She had completely forgotten about the frog! If she had known it was a rain god, then she would have more likely remembered to release it. “I’m sorry, King Kukulkan! I didn’t know it was a rain god! I thought it was just a funny, strange, little frog that liked chocolate!”
“It was a funny, strange, little frog that also happens to bring the rain!” Kukulkan scolds her.
A frog that brings the rain! Itzel remembers the heavy rainstorm that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere over her grandmother’s village. Could she have brought the rain herself simply by saving a frog that shouldn’t have been saved? The rainstorm flooded the river so their car couldn’t cross the bridge to return to the city, and her grandmother wasn’t able to get the urgent care that she needed. It then hits her like a brick—did she accidentally cause her own grandmother’s death? Her body trembles at the thought of it, but she can’t help but think that she’s responsible for it now. Her eyes well up with tears. “Grandma, I’m so sorry.”
“Grandma?” Kukulkan asks. “Why are you apologising to your grandmother? You should be apologising to the gods!”
Although Itzel’s trying her best to not cry in front of the giant snake god, she clenches her fist with renewed determination. As far as she’s concerned, if she was the one who brought her grandmother here, then she must be the one to take her back home. It all rests on her shoulders. “Please, mister snake king, tell me what I can do to bring my grandma back!”
But Kukulkan just shakes his head. “The dead who come here can never be brought back.”
Upon hearing this, she can’t hold back the tears anymore. “There must be a way to help her, mister snake!”
“Not even I, the god-king Kukulkan, have the power to bring back the dead. Only the Death god had such power.” When he says this, the black slits of his eyes nudged downward ever so subtly, and just for a fleeting moment, as if to steal a glance at a particular thing hanging from Itzel’s neck, but the movement was so fast that Itzel could barely catch it.
But she did catch it, although she pretends that she didn't.
“There’s nothing that a little girl like you can do, much less a god,” Kukulkan says. “If she’s here, she’s here to stay.”
“But she’s only here because I saved that frog!”
“And that’s precisely why you must leave our world to return home at once, and you will release the frog that you saved so he can be brought back here and bring the rain with him!”
Itzel then thinks of the long drought that the howler monkey had told her about, and the wildfires in the forest, and all the hardworking monkeys, ants, and bees trying in vain to put out a fire that shows no sign of abating. She wipes away her tears, and asks, “Will that help the fires?”
Kukulkan tilts his head. “What are you talking about? What fires?”
Itzel stares blankly at him in confusion, wondering at first if the snake god has an odd sense of humour and is simply joking, but upon realising he isn’t, she indicates to the exceedingly obvious columns of black smoke darkening the sky to the south, easily seen from the summit of the mountain.
“Oh, it appears the rainforest is on fire again,” he remarks, rather half-heartedly, then turns his gaze to the howler monkeys and orders them, “The forest is on fire. Spread the word and inform the other gods at once!”
A howler responds, “Oh great and watchful King Kukulkan, that fire has been raging for one and a half of our sacred years! Everyone already knows about it!”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me?” hisses the snake.
“We thought you would have noticed, King Kukulkan!” says another. “As watchful as you are!”
Kukulkan draws his head back and remains quiet, as if rather embarrassed by not taking notice of it sooner, though he doesn’t admit to it.
“It’s been burning for one and a half years?” Itzel asks in astonishment. She’s lost track of time but can’t imagine she blacked out in the cave for a whole year and a half—she’d probably have woken up a lot thirstier, hungrier, and in need of a haircut. “But it can’t be that long since I put the frog in the jar. I thought it was just a couple days ago!”
Kukulkan turns to her. “You’ll find that time flows much faster here than in your world. For you, it was just a couple days ago that you captured the Rain god Chaac, but it’s been much longer for us in Xibalba. And the rainforest has clearly felt the time more than anyone.” He hisses angrily, “That slimy fool of a frog! He’s always slipping through to your world during Wayeb, and I’m always the one who has to bring him back!”
Itzel remembers what her grandmother told her about the five “unlucky days” of Wayeb. “That’s when spirits can cross easily to my world?”
“And the gods,” Kukulkan adds. “Especially now, on the last of your nameless days, when the portals are opened at their widest. On the other days, when they’re narrow, most of the gods cannot take forms small enough to slip through them. Except of course for Chaac, as a little, slippery frog, and myself, as a green snake.”
Itzel’s eyes widen as it dawns on her that Kukulkan was the persistent snake who was trying to eat the frog—though she also remembers having saved that snaked from being hacked with a machete by her father, but she doesn’t mention it—probably the snake wasn’t paying attention to that part.
One howler monkey chimes in, “You forgot the goddess of bees! She can take the form of a tiny bee!”
Kukulkan hisses at the howler, “Don’t correct me!”
The howler scampers away and clambers up a pine tree in fright.
Kukulkan turns to regard the wildfires plaguing the rainforest. “As you can plainly see, your actions have already had consequences here for some time. Indeed, from the looks of it, I fear those fires have grown so fierce that they’ve weakened all the gods of the South, and they’re now too much for Chaac of the South to handle anymore, so retrieving him simply won’t be enough. No, to truly douse this fire, I must send you on a quest.” He turns back to Itzel and does something quite spectacular—he arches his long body upward so that he looks almost like he’s standing upright atop the clouds, revealing just how truly gigantic this
Great Feathered Serpent is, with his shadow stretching westward across the cloud cover and creeping over even the distant misty mountains in the West.
As Itzel tilts her head upward to follow his, she feels so insignificant and so powerless compared to the king of the gods poised very magnificently over the mountain summit—or at least it was magnificent until the moment he raises himself so high that he appears to bump his head against an invisible ceiling with a loud thud, crushing his feathered crown.
“Ow!” he groans from hurting his head, then lowers himself to half the height, having realised he had overdone it with his towering posture.
“What was that?” Itzel asks him, wondering how he managed to hit his head on the sky.
“It’s the ceiling of the Underworld,” he says. “This is as high as I can go in this cramped little hole. I haven’t felt so claustrophobic since the Time-before-time when the world had yet to be made, and the sky and earth were still joined as one.”
“Oh,” she says understandingly—or at least pretends to be understanding despite not having a clue what he meant by any of that.
“Now what was I talking about?” Kukulkan asks them, having lost his train of thought from the bump on his head.
“The forest fire!” a howler kindly reminds him.
“What forest fire?” he asks. He glances to his left, following the direction in which all the monkeys are now pointing for him, which quickly jogs his memory. “Oh, yes, that one.” He clears his throat, and his lidless serpentine eyes bear down on Itzel as he tells her these cryptic words:
“To quench so many a spitting tongue,
you must go to where comes tomorrow,
drifting on memories old and young,
but look up lest you sink in sorrow.
Then follow the voices in the skies,
and lay food if you have the idea,
to beseech the fat giant who cries,
when he squats on the green tortilla.”
Itzel stares blankly at him. “I have no idea what any of that meant, Your Highness. Could you maybe speak normally and tell me exactly what you need me to do?”
