by Ian Gibson
Quashy looks at her. “A sibling rivalry and an ex-lover rivalry. That tapir really has his hands—erm, hooves—full of rivalries, doesn’t he?”
“And I’m staying out of it.” Itzel pushes the canoe off and hops into it. “We need to get going quickly.”
“Good idea. The lake might not be calm for long.” He then looks at her from the beach as the canoe drifts away. “Um, could I have a hand?”
“Oh, sorry!” Itzel rushes to the stern of the canoe, picks him up, and puts him in the boat too. She then sits on the narrow bench, picks up one of the dwarf-sized oars, and starts rowing.
The coati lounges peacefully in the canoe, his snout hanging off the side as he gazes into the water.
“Hungry for more fish already?” she asks.
“No, I’m looking for things people might have dropped into the lake.” He smirks at Itzel. “Thieving is my job, so scavenging is just a hobby.”
Itzel rolls her eyes.
“What? Don’t you have hobbies?”
“Well, when I’m not falling into the Underworld and rowing a canoe with a coati who talks and steals, I like to read, but—”
Quashy interrupts her, “What’s reading?”
“Do you not know how to read?” She then realises it’s a silly question, seeing as he’s a coati, but he does also happen to be a coati who can speak, so maybe it wasn’t too silly a question.
“I guess not, since I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s when you look at a book and—”
Quashy interrupts again, “What’s a book?”
She sighs. “It’s pieces of paper that—”
“What’s paper?”
Itzel groans. “Are you doing this on purpose?”
He grins, then turns his attention back to the water. “It doesn’t sound like something valuable.”
“I think it is. Anyway, I live in a city and have a lot of schoolwork, so I don’t do much apart from read. And I don’t really like the city much, honestly, so I prefer to stay at home. But when my family and I go outside the city—like when we visit my grandma in her village—it’s different. I’m always outside doing things. There’s so much to see in the jungle. But my brother is the opposite. He prefers being in the city. He plays football with his friends there all the time. I used to play with him, but then he got too serious about it, and it wasn’t fun for me anymore.”
Quashy is still staring fixedly at the water. “I have so many questions.”
“And…?”
“But I’ve already forgotten them.” He’s clearly distracted by what he sees in the water, remarking with a “Huh!”
“What is it?”
He perks his head up with fascination. “Looks like a human girl.”
Itzel puts down the oar and looks over the side of the canoe into the water.
“Where?” She doesn’t see anything in the water except for a lot of fish.
“Right there,” Quashy says, pointing with his tail.
But she sees nothing where he’s pointing, and wonders if he’s going crazy because of the heat.
The coati lowers his tail into the water, then pulls it back out. “That’s strange,” he says, “I don’t see her anymore. I was holding her necklace. It looked a lot like the one I have. Huh! I wonder if that’s how I got it!”
“Are you even daydreaming about taking people’s things?”
“Probably,” he says, apparently now bored with whatever he thinks he sees in the water and looks back at the great waterfall behind them—they’re now far enough away from it that the waves it makes have calmed, and the water beneath them has become as still as glass. “It’s so calm. If we have any luck, it’ll stay like this at least until we make it to the island.” He turns his gaze to the eastern sky, then jumps up. “Looks like I’ve spoken too soon!”
Itzel has been gazing at the great waterfall behind them too, but then turns to look ahead—in the distance they see dark clouds forming and hear the rumble of thunder. They weren’t there just a moment ago, so the storm must be coming in very fast. She starts paddling again.
“Paddle faster!” Quashy shouts in a panic.
“I’m paddling as fast as I can!” She wishes the coati could help her, but even though they have an oar to spare, she doubts he’d manage to hold it and paddle properly with just his tail—as useful a tail as it may be.
From the shore where they set off, they hear loud stomping and see trees crashing and falling. A familiar tapir emerges from the forest, bounding towards the water at great speed.
“Oh, here we go again!” Cabrakan booms with his godly voice, directing it towards the sky. “How many times must I tell you, I wasn’t checking her out!”
He’s far away from them now, as Itzel’s been paddling for some time, but his voice is so deep it seems to carry through the ground beneath them and stirs the water of the lake, rocking their dinky canoe from side to side.
“And I can’t believe we’re still arguing about this!” the tapir shouts to the sky—as if he were talking to the storm. “Leave me in peace!” And with the earth-shatteringly loud cry of “peace!” he stomps on the ground, sending a large wave that swells in the lake from his hooves.
The wave flows straight for their canoe, and Itzel pulls the oar in and hugs Quashy tightly as it carries them farther out across the lake, and once they’re finally over the crest of it, more waves shortly follow behind, each pushing them a fair distance before they’re picked up by the next one.
They’re carried for a remarkable distance his way—with lots of slow bobbing up and down on the waves’ crests and troughs, which quickly makes them both feel very seasick—until they can just barely catch a glimpse of the island Itzel had seen from the summit of Mount Kukulkan, as well as the dark, foreboding sky above it. She takes out the oar and starts to row again, despite still being carried by the waves, and feeling like she might throw up her half-empty stomach. “Do you think we can make it?” she asks, although she’s highly doubtful.
“I don’t think so!” Quashy says. “But I can try something. Hold on!”
He slithers along the bottom of the canoe and curls up and around Itzel’s body, and she drops the oar for a moment—despite the dire situation they’re in, she can’t help but giggle a bit when his tail tickles her as it brushes against her neck, ears, and face. He reaches the top of her head and looks out toward the island.
“What are you doing?” she asks, hurriedly grabbing the oar again.
“I think I see a tree.”
Itzel doesn’t quite understand the relevance of a tree that he thinks he can see in the distance. “And...?”
Quashy starts to spin around in place on the top of her head, ruffling her hair up as he does so, and then on the final spin he slings his tail forward, and it stretches farther and farther as it shoots off across the lake into the horizon.
She gawks in disbelief as the tail extends to such a length that she can barely fathom it came from a little coati, despite seeing it with her own eyes. “It can go that far?” she asks. She’s reminded of how fishermen swing their fishing rods when casting out their lines, and wonders if they’d cast their lines even farther if they were to spin around several times first before swinging, like Quashy just did—although having a magically infinite line to cast would probably help, too.
Quashy squints his eyes, trying his best to concentrate on the horizon despite the restless water, as he wobbles back and forth from the waves. Itzel imagines it must be difficult for him to aim his tail with such a far swing, even without having to balance on the head of someone sitting in a small boat in dizzyingly choppy water.
“Ha!” he announces proudly after tugging on his tail with his mouth. “I’ve got a snag!” He yanks on it more forcefully, slithers down Itzel’s body, and wraps his tail around the seat in the canoe. “Hold on tight,” he tells her, and begins recoiling his tail, except instead of the tail pulling in, their canoe is being pulled towards the island, and at quit
e a clip—the canoe rips across the lake as fast as a motorboat and bounces roughly up and down as it skims over the earthquake’s waves.
Itzel grabs as tight a hold as she can of both sides of the canoe so that she isn’t launched right out of it, and she feels like her stomach is jumping up to where her heart should be, and her heart is plunging down to where her stomach should be, and that her head might very well just pop off her shoulders entirely. All the while the coati is gnashing his teeth and squeaking and groaning from the strain, and she doesn’t doubt that pulling off such an incredible feat must be very painful for his tail.
Their small canoe eventually makes landfall on the island, and in good time, as it was lurched forward so sharply that it was just about to do a forward flip with them inside it. Right beside the shore lies a grove of trees where several hardy, broad-trunked cohune palms stand firm in the oncoming storm—in spite of their palm fronds looking bare and frayed by the strong winds they must so often endure— and nestled underneath their protection are many smaller trees, one of whose branches Quashy was fortunate enough to have hooked onto with his superbly useful tail. The thunderstorm has already shrouded the far side of the large island and will soon be upon them—the sky is darkening, and the winds are picking up—but Itzel thinks they might have just enough time to find shelter before it hits them. Quashy unwraps his tail from the tree to recoil it, but he’s panting and can barely move.
She picks him up to hug him. “Quashy! That was incredible! I can’t believe you did that!”
He doesn’t answer, apart from squeaks from the excruciating pain in his tail.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she tells him worriedly. “That must have really hurt!” She places him back in the canoe and drags it up the sloping shoreline to get away from the tall waves as they beat down upon the beach, especially as they’re now lapping ashore all the higher, as if chasing her farther inland like a pack of angry dogs scaring a cat up a tree.
She trudges hurriedly uphill beyond the trees to come upon vast fields of corn stretching into the distance on both sides of her, and all the way to the walled city ahead, their countless rows of cornstalks flowing and swaying in the strengthening wind. She can see many small huts scattered among the corn fields, but they’re all quite a way up, and she very much doubts she’ll make it to any of them in time before the storm hits. Luckily, she spots what appears to be a small farm shed nearby, almost hidden among the cornstalks—though its walls appear to be made just of mud, it looks sturdy enough. “Maybe we can take cover there,” she thinks, then starts dragging the canoe up the path, with the coati lying dazedly inside it, barely even able to lift his head over the sides of the boat to take a peek at what’s going on.
“We’ll have to sit out the storm here,” she tells him. “You’ll be able to get some rest, all right?”
They reach the shed just as the winds become so fierce and shrill that they sound almost like they’re wailing in anger, and the corn fields flash white from lightning just overhead. The shed is stocked with clay pots and urns, as well as what look to be farming tools like hoes and trowels made of stone—she wonders if it’s a shed shared between several of the farmhouses here. She pulls the small canoe inside—she has to turn it on its side to slip it through the doorway—then collapses to the ground in a corner, breathing a sigh of not only relief but utter exhaustion.
She tries to take a nap, and she’s certainly tired enough to, but the wind howls and the thunder cracks, and the walls of the little shed shake from the ferocity of the storm, so she finds it a struggle. She thinks about the rainstorm in her village, and about her grandmother. After the worst of the storm passes over them, she manages to catch just a wink of sleep.
Itzel’s in the black forest again, and she's surrounded by the countless eyes, glistening green and blinking and staring at her from the darkness—though it’s a familiar sight now, it’s not any less spooky to her than it was before. Still, she refuses to run this time, and decides to confront the eyes head-on. "Who are you?"
"I am the Thousand Eyes," says an ambient voice in the blackness. "Before me there was nothing but the blackness, and in that blackness my thousand eyes opened.”
Their gaze presses down on her, like the air has suddenly become too heavy for her to carry. She finds it difficult for her to even breathe, much less stand, under the pressure of it.
"Why did you bring me here?” she asks.
“Because I want you to see,” the voice says. “But you will only see if you come find me."
“Where are you?”
“You’ll see.” And all the eyes close in unison.
She’s woken rudely by the coati’s tail slapping her in the face, and she snorts and sneezes from the fur tickling her nose.
“Someone’s coming!” he whispers.
She looks out the doorway—it’s darker now, the familiarly yellow-white sun has reddened as it sets, and the rain has died down to a drizzle. There’s a man walking downhill along the path between the corn fields, wearing a loincloth and kilt—he must be one of the farmers. He seems to notice the trail in the mud that Itzel left when she dragged the canoe, as his attention then turns to the shed.
“You have to hide me!” Quashy pleads, struck with panic. “I’m not allowed on this island! If they catch me, I don’t know what they’ll do! I don’t have any more limbs to lose, except my precious tail of tricks! Help me, Itzel! Please!”
Itzel’s eyes scour the shed and come upon a tall ceramic urn for storing beans. She tips it over and empties the beans into a shorter, wider pot. “Hide in here.”
Quashy darts into the urn, and she stands it upright again.
“But there’s nowhere for me to hide!” she whispers as her legs tremble. “It’s a dead person!”
“Oh, really?” he whispers back from inside the urn. “A dead person? In the Underworld of all places?”
Itzel glowers at him—she wasn’t expecting sarcasm at a time like this.
The man enters the shed, his lean body silhouetted in the twilight. His eyes first fall on the small canoe, then follow the muddy footsteps on the floor to the corner, where Itzel is kneeling next to the urn. “Who are you?” he shouts at her accusingly. “And what are you doing in our shed?”
“Please don’t hurt me,” Itzel whimpers. She holds her snake-stick tightly, although she knows a stick wouldn’t make for much of a weapon.
“Are you stealing our food?” the man yells at her, pointing at the urn beside her.
She rises to her feet and stands in front of the urn with Quashy hiding inside. “No, I wasn’t stealing anything! I swear it! I was out on the lake and was washed up next to your farm.” She points to the canoe she brought into the shed. “I just needed shelter from the storm. I’ll be on my way now.”
The farmer notices the beans in the shallow pot in which Itzel had emptied them. He walks over to it to inspect them. “Why have you moved these beans then?”
Quashy whispers to her, “He’s going to find me! Do something!”
The farmer thinks he hears the sound of an animal and takes a broad step over the canoe towards her—it’s so small he manages to do that rather easily. “What do you have in there?”
Itzel turns around, raises her snake-stick, closes her eyes, and whispers to herself, “I hope this works.”
She taps the coati on his head with the bottom of the snake-stick. It’s followed by a flash of green light from inside the urn, and a very brief protest of “Ow!”, but when the farmer looks inside, he sees a snake with brown and white stripes and a necklace of stone beads.
“What’s that doing in there?” he asks.
“It’s my pet snake,” Itzel tells him. “Mister… Scales.” She probably could have come up with a better name, but she hasn’t really had time to think it through.
The farmer furrows his brows, his eyes deeply inset within a grave, angular face. “You have a pet snake?”
“Please don’t hurt him. He was scared of the lightni
ng, so I put him inside this pot. I’ll take him with me.”
“I’ve never seen a snake like this before,” the man says. “Is it venomous?”
“No,” she says. Then she lightly kicks the urn and mutters, “Just sarcastic.”
The farmer looks again at the snake curled up innocently inside the urn, with a beaded necklace around it that’s clearly too big for it. He’s baffled as to why a snake would be wearing a necklace—it would obviously just slip off since it doesn’t have any shoulders. Isn’t a snake basically just a head and a very long neck anyway? He then looks at the snake-stick the girl is holding, and his severe face softens into a smile. “You’re a charmer of snakes, I see. The Great Feathered Serpent must favour you.” He bows his head. “You have wearied yourself. Please, come and join my family for our night-breakfast.”
“Night-breakfast?” Itzel asks.
“We used to call it ‘dinner’, but it felt strange to eat dinner as the first meal after waking up, so we call it the ‘night-breakfast’. The days are too hot to do much outdoors, so we usually wake up just before the rise of the Night Sun."
Itzel finds the idea of a “night-breakfast” quite odd, but she’s at least glad it isn’t called a “night-day-breakfast”, because that’s just too much of a mouthful. She bows to the man also, then picks up Mister Scales and the beaded necklace from inside the urn. The necklace is small enough that it fits around her wrist like a bracelet, although it hangs very loosely. Mister Scales hisses, and her snake-stick hisses back at it, as if they were communicating to each other—she wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Quashy expressing disapproval of having been transformed into a snake. But she finds a sense of satisfaction that he doesn’t know how to talk as a snake, especially as it means he can’t say anything else sarcastic.
The farmer stops outside the doorway of the shed and turns around. He tenses his posture, and his face has become very serious again. “But first, one thing. Seeing as you’ve clearly come from across the lake, before I invite you into my home, I have to ask…”
