by Ian Gibson
“Remarkable, isn’t it?” One Reed asks her as they walk towards the lake.
“It is!” she replies. “But why doesn’t everyone live in there?” she asks, as it looks like there’s plenty of room inside the city for everyone to be protected by the storms.
“Because we’re peasants,” says Seven Deer. “Only nobles are allowed to live within the walls.”
“Why are there rich and poor people?” Itzel asks, very confused by this. “Everyone’s dead!”
“No matter how rich or poor we were in the life before, most of us start the afterlife with nothing but what we’re buried with,” One Reed answers. “Some of us climb our way up, but most stay at the bottom.”
“Even if the bottom is underwater?” Itzel asks, staring at the flooding and the swathes of corn and debris floating in the water.
“That’s just the way things are,” One Reed says grimly. “In life and in death.”
They continue downhill, wading through the water. The level comes up to Itzel’s waist, so the woman offers Itzel a piggyback ride the rest of the way, until they can’t walk any farther. One Reed finds a canoe upside-down—it’s clearly made for humans rather than little forest spirits, being much longer and wider than the one he’s carrying over his head. With his wife’s help they flip it over, and he places the little canoe near its stern, easily fitting inside, and then beckons them to hop in. He pushes off the ground with the oar and rows as hard as he can, as if he were competing in a race, first around the stone dike and then eastward across the lake.
Itzel stares into the water. She sees many schools of fish swimming about, at times so many that it doesn’t look like there’s much room for them. She’s seen them with more room in an aquarium, yet this is a huge lake. “They’re so many fish! You could probably just fish from the shore and not even worry about taking a boat out onto the lake!”
One Reed laughs. “Farming is in my blood. Anyway, it’s too sad to go fishing. Farming keeps me busy, but with fishing you’re often just waiting, and you’re alone with your thoughts. And being alone with your thoughts on this lake is too sad for me.”
“Why is it sad?”
“Just look more closely,” Seven Deer tells her, without looking in the water herself.
As Itzel stares in the water for a while, she notices that a lot of the fish aren’t bumping into each other when they touch, but instead appear to be swimming through one another as if they were just ghosts. Suddenly, almost half of the fish just vanish completely. “What happened? A lot of the fish just disappeared!”
Seven Deer smiles, but Itzel can see a sadness in her. “This lake was made with the tears of the dead who wept so much that their memories escaped them,” she says. “That’s why we call it the Lake of Tears.”
Her husband adds, “And that’s why the water’s a bit salty.”
Seven Deer gazes thoughtfully across the lake. “Sometimes what you see under the surface is real, other times it’s just a forgotten memory of a past time. That’s why you often see so many fish. Some are there now, but many were there a long time ago. If you stare into the water long enough, you can even see your own forgotten memories. Some of us look into it to remind ourselves of the lives we once had long ago, before we came here, but doing so brings more sadness than joy. Everything fades with time, and this world is no different. You’ll see that for yourself.”
Itzel is silent for a while, then says, “I don’t know if it’s right for me to ask, but… how did you and your family all… you know...” She immediately regrets bringing it up.
One Reed just laughs at her awkwardness. “However it happened, it’s something that we chose to forget. The answer lies somewhere deep in this lake.”
She notices that neither the man nor the woman has looked into the lake even when she pointed at the fish in it, and now she knows why. They all remain silent for a while afterwards, and Itzel still feels ashamed for even asking them a question like that. A light breeze rolls over them, and One Reed stands up for a brief moment, peers into the eastern sky with a look of great concern, then breathes a sigh of relief when he doesn’t see any storm clouds, sits back down, and resumes rowing. The wind had carried a sound with it—Itzel thought it sounded like whispers.
“Did you hear that too?” she asks Seven Deer.
“Voices from the East are carried downwind,” Seven Deer replies. “We can even hear voices in the storms, carried all the way to our city. Many voices, but one voice above all.”
“Hurakan,” One Reed says. “God of the four winds.”
“I think you mean ‘goddess’,” Itzel corrects him again.
“She sounds like a very masculine woman to me,” One Reed says with a frown.
“Or a feminine man,” Seven Deer muses.
“Well, the gods can be fluid with their genders sometimes,” her husband says, “so not much point arguing about which one Hurakan is, as it might change like the weather. There is much anger in him, or her, and the whole city can hear it when the storms come.”
“What does she say?” Itzel asks.
“She speaks harshly about a scarlet ibis,” Seven Deer says.
“Very harshly,” One Reed adds. “Sometimes I have to cover the children’s ears.”
“A scarlet ibis? What’s that?” Itzel vaguely remembers flipping through a bird book and seeing something like that, but she can’t be sure.
“It’s like a stork, but with strikingly red feathers,” Seven Deer explains. “Very beautiful birds.”
Itzel raises an eyebrow, wondering why a storm goddess would be ranting so much about a stork. She sees the Night Sun is over the horizon now—it's not quite so bright yet, so she's able to look at it, and notices how it oddly still flickers, ever so subtly. She points to it and asks One Reed, "Why does it do that?"
He looks up to where she’s pointing. "Are you talking about the Night Sun?"
She nods. "It flickers like a lightbulb." Upon saying that she realises the people she’s with probably don’t know what electricity is, much less a lightbulb.
One Reed shrugs. "It's always done that. And don’t look right at it—not good for your eyes."
“When the Moon disappeared from the sky, the Night Sun rose in its place,” Seven Deer explains. “We believe the Sun god made it to keep watch over the Underworld even at night. Maybe it flickers because he gets little sleep.”
Her husband laughs. “I can understand what that’s like!”
Having seen the state of the corn fields, Itzel can understand why the farmer must get little sleep. It must be a hard life—or hard afterlife, rather. It would have never occurred to her that the afterlife would require so much hard work. She would have thought most people had already worked hard enough in the life before it.
“It also takes a zigzag path across the sky,” Seven Deer says, pointing to the sky above them. “At noon, the Day Sun passes directly over the Isle of the Dead at the centre of Xibalba, as it takes a straight path from east to west.” She then points southward, to where the black smoke of the forest fires looms just over the horizon. “But the Night Sun rises in the East, then zigs to the southern sky, where, at ‘midnight-day’, it passes directly over the Mother of Trees in the rainforest, before zagging back and setting in the West.”
Itzel finds this all very confusing. “I think you just need your moon back, like the one in my world.” It certainly would make things a lot simpler to have a moon than a sun that shines when it’s supposed to be night, and flickers, and even zigzags. What kind of sun is this that does all these things?
Seven Deer puts her hand on Itzel’s knee. “This is your world now, Itzel. Best you get used to having an extra sun around.”
Itzel forgot for a moment that she’s pretending to be dead like they are, and as such wouldn’t have “her world” to return to anymore. She looks again at the Night Sun, now rising ever slightly to the right of the bow of the canoe that she assumes is pointed eastward. Maybe it’s already starting i
ts “zig” to the southern sky? It flickers again, and although the flash lasts for just a fraction of a second, she could have sworn she saw something appear in its fiery disk when it dimmed. It happened so fast that she would have missed it had she blinked. She can't be sure, but it looked very faintly like a bird flapping its wings. She rubs her eyes, wondering if that was a mirage, too.
The lake is quiet again, and the air has fallen dead—she’s beginning to worry that it could be the calm before the storm. She stares dreamily across the lake, no longer looking beneath the water either, and the stillness of it almost pulls her into a trance, and Seven Deer even has to grab hold of her because, without her even realising it, her body is tipping over and was about to fall overboard. Itzel embarrassedly thanks her.
“Don’t worry,” Seven Deer says with a comforting smile. “Happens all the time on this lake, especially to newcomers.”
Another breeze blows, this time carrying the chirps of insects. And they’re becoming louder the closer they get to the edge of the wetlands, to the point that One Reed finds it difficult to talk to the others without shouting, so he starts whistling to himself. Itzel almost bounces off her seat with joy when she hears him. He’s whistling a tune that she’s heard before! It’s an old song, and she remembers it as the same song her parents were singing and humming to when it played on the car radio during their road trip to her grandmother’s village. His wife begins whistling it too.
“You know this song?” Itzel asks her. Then she joins in whistling.
"Not bad!" One Reed shouts to her over the loudening chirps of crickets and croaks of frogs.
Itzel laughs. She strangely feels a relaxing sense of comfort, despite travelling across a lake of sad memories in the middle of the Underworld where a superstorm could hit at any moment.
"Whistling makes all the time on the farm go by just a bit more quickly," he says.
“But how do you know this song?” Itzel asks Seven Deer. It’s an old song, but she and her husband are clearly from a time long before even the radio.
“Little things from the living world trickle into here,” she tells her. “Like pieces of paint from a picture that’s otherwise chipped and faded.”
It starts to drizzle lightly, although the air is mostly still except for the occasional breeze that rolls and whispers over them, and their canoe nears the eastern shore—insofar as it could be considered a shore, at least, as there seems to be no clearly defined margin where the lake ends, and the lagoons and creeks of the wetlands begin. They pass clusters of reeds poking out from the lake water, and Itzel points to a single, lonely reed growing aloof from the other reeds.
“Mister One Reed, look! It’s one reed!” she says.
Seven Deer slaps her knee and laughs. “I wish I had thought of that joke first!”
“Very funny,” One Reed says. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to spot a herd of exactly seven deer? Especially as we don’t get any deer roaming on the island, much less seven of them!”
“Keep waiting, my love,” Seven Deer tells him with a chuckle.
Judging that they’ve closed enough distance with the marshes, One Reed puts down the oar and gets to his feet to strut up the canoe towards them. “This is where we must leave you,” he says to Itzel. He takes out her little canoe and places it in the water, kindly holds Itzel's hand to help her hop into it with her striped snake in tow, then passes the pair of dwarf-sized oars, the bundle of tamales wrapped in the banana leaf, and lastly her snake-stick to her. “The wetlands tend to be quieter and calmer during the night-day, when Hurakan is perched asleep in the great Red Tree in the far corner of the East, but from what I gather, he—sorry, she—is a very light sleeper, so if the wind ever picks up, find shelter at once. And I’m serious. Don’t stay out in the open.” He says this last part very gravely.
“There’s a saying here,” Seven Deer adds to his words of warning. “If you hear the crack of thunder, it’s just thunder. If you hear the cry of an eagle, it’s just an eagle. But when you hear them both together, run. Run not just like the wind, but faster.”
Itzel bows her head to them both. “Thank you so much for this. You’ve really helped me.”
Seven Deer bows her head also. “May Kukulkan watch over you."
Her husband wastes no time in leaving. Instead of turning the canoe around, he simply switches himself to the bow so that it’s now become the stern and starts paddling feverishly back where they came from—clearly worried that another storm could still come at any time.
Itzel waves goodbye, sits down and picks up an oar, but then remembers something. "Oh, right!" And she taps Mister Scales with her snake-stick, turning him back into a coati with a burst of green sparkles.
Quashy breathes a sigh of relief. "I almost thought you'd forgotten to turn me back!" he whispers, peeking over the side of the boat to watch the farmer rowing away with his wife, and when he thinks they’re far enough he feels he can relax again. He looks down at his chest. “Where’s my necklace?”
Itzel removes the beaded necklace from her wrist and throws it to him, and Quashy deftly catches it with snout and drops it down to his neck.
"Did you see it too?" she asks him.
"See what?" The coati pricks up his ears and pokes his head over the side of the canoe to scan the bottom of the lake. "Did someone drop something into the lake? Where?" He then rushes over to her side of the canoe.
She sighs. "No, Quashy. I thought I saw a bird in the sky where the Night Sun was, but it was only there for a moment. I was just asking if you saw it too."
With a terrified jolt, Quashy’s at the bottom of the canoe, cowering and looking across the eastern sky. “A bird? Where? What kind of bird? Was it a giant eagle? Please tell me it wasn’t a giant eagle!”
Itzel’s taken aback by the coati’s reaction. “I don’t know what it was. It was there and gone again in a flash.”
“A flash?” he yelps. “Of lightning?”
“No,” she answers, confused as to what possible connection a bird could have with lightning. “What are you so worried about?”
“Hurakan!” Quashy whispers timidly. “I’m worried about Hurakan! She brings the storms! And she takes the form of a giant eagle!”
Itzel remembers that the tapir had mentioned something about an eagle the first time they met, shortly before he stormed away without even a goodbye—he had accused her of having been sent by an eagle to attack him. Does his ex-girlfriend have a habit of sending people to ambush and attack her boyfriend? What kind of break-up did they have? She’s glad she’s not in the least bit interested in having a boyfriend herself, because this sounds like madness to her.
While still curled up in the bottom of the canoe, Quashy raises his tail straight up in the air.
“What are you doing?” she asks him.
“Checking the wind,” he says. “Hurakan doesn’t normally bring storms during the night-day, but if the wind picks up, we’re not sticking around here.”
“Is it really that bad?”
The coati gives her a very vigorous nod. “Hurakan is a force to be reckoned with. Some say she’s as powerful as Kukulkan, but without the self-restraint. When the gods need an apocalypse, they call on her. She already has a few under her belt.”
Itzel hopes they don’t encounter her, as it occurs to her that she doesn’t have a clue how to behave around someone who’s been responsible for even a single apocalypse, much less several. Should she try to make small talk? Good night-day, Miss Hurakan! How are you? Destroyed any worlds lately? No, it’s probably better not to ask that last one, as it might encourage her. She then realises she’s still unsure as to whether Hurakan is even a miss or a mister. “The farmer’s family thought she was a man.”
Quashy’s eyes almost pop out of his head, and he shakes his head and squeaks, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!”
“What?”
“Never tell her that!” He pokes his head out of the bow of the canoe to check that the eastern sk
y is clear. “That’s how the last apocalypse happened!”
“Ah, good to know.” She concludes that if she meets her, it might be best to just not say anything at all.
There’s a narrow creek cutting through the tall reeds that sway back and forth in a gentle breeze, and she starts rowing the canoe into it. As they enter, the ceaseless chatter of insects and frogs saturates the air around them. She thinks of the crowded market in the centre of her city that she goes to with her mother almost every Sunday—the noise here might even be louder than the busiest day at that market, and she already finds herself missing the peaceful calm of the Lake of Tears.
The Sacred Lily Pad
Fireflies blink in the shadows between the reeds, hidden from the red light of the Night Sun—some flash remarkably bright, and it reminds Itzel of the first of her series of dreams where she was running through a dark forest, and the fireflies had transformed into many little eyes staring at her.
"I've been having weird dreams," she tells Quashy—she has to speak quite loudly to be heard over the noise of the chirping, even though the canoe is very small, and Quashy is hardly more than an arm’s length away.
Quashy perks up his head. "Really? Me too!"
Itzel glares at him. "I don’t mean about ancient treasure, Quashy.”
