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

by Ian Gibson

  Itzel’s eye twitches. That’s it? She’s wet, cold, and very annoyed, but she says it anyway, “I’ve come to speak.”

  Nothing happens.

  "You have to shout louder because of the rain, ribbit!" the little frog says.

  Itzel shouts at the top of her voice, "Chaac, I've come to speak!"

  The lagoon erupts in a big splash of water—so big that it throws many of the large lily pads aside.

  “Ugh!” a sodden Itzel exclaims, wishing she had brought her raincoat and boots, or at the very least an umbrella. She expected the wetlands to be wet—it’s not called the drylands for a reason—but not this wet!

  Large waves ripple across the breadth of the round lagoon all the way to its very edges, stirring the tall reeds that hem it and rousing the birds hiding within them into an agitated flurry of flight. A giant toad has leapt out of the water—a brownish orange blob against the sullenly grey sky—and bellyflops on the Sacred Lily Pad with a thunderous plunk, and the lily pad bounces and wobbles and billows from its impact, to the point that Itzel has to catch herself from falling into one of the many puddles pooling around her. The toad’s grand entrance is met with a concert of cheering croaks from the audience of frogs in the lagoon—quite possibly the only creatures who haven’t been scared away by the tremendous splash it made. It’s so fat that its belly bulges out, and its fat crumples into many folds, and even the lily pad buckles under the sheer weight of its monstrous size and looks like it might just sink into the lagoon with it, like a barge that’s carrying just a bit too much cargo for it to bear.

  The toad lashes out its long, sticky tongue and snatches up the third and final tamale. There’s a craze in its bulbous, goggled eyes when it looks at Itzel. “You have more to offer me, the great and slimy and hungry Chaac?” it says, licking its lips, which quiver with anticipation for more food.

  Once the waves in the lagoon finally calm, and Itzel stops swaying around atop the lily pad and feeling a bit too seasick to get a word out, she answers the toad with a shake of her head. “That’s all I have, mister frog.”

  The toad lets out a loud burp that ripples along the lips of a mouth almost as broad as its fat body. “I’m… a… tooooooad.”

  “Sorry. mister toad.” She doesn’t really know what the difference is anyway, except that maybe toads are ugly, fat, and warty, like this one is.

  The corners of the toad’s mouth curl downward to such a degree that its frown becomes comical—or at least it would be if Itzel and Quashy weren’t so wet, cold, and miserable that they’re unable to take much amusement from it. “Why don’t you have more tamales?” it says, taking on an almost accusatory tone.

  “Because you already ate them all!” she shouts at him angrily.

  “Give me more!” Chaac demands.

  “I don’t have any more!”

  Drool dribbles from the toad’s mouth, puddling on the lily pad below it, and the sky darkens, thunder crackles, and a flash of lightning kindles his glossy, ravenous eyes. He gurgles in his deep, godly voice, “More! More! Mooooooore!” The lily pad shakes underneath them as he pounds his hands and feet up and down, like a spoilt child throwing a tantrum.

  Itzel is losing not only her balance, but also what little patience she has left. “No, you’re not getting any more, and that’s that!”

  Chaac stops pounding his hands and feet. “Why not?”

  “I’ve already offered you something, so now you have to help me,” she tells him. “Those are the rules.”

  The toad’s frown droops down and creases his fat face all the further. “I hate rules. Rules make me hungry, and I’m sad when I’m hungry.”

  The rain is still so loud that Itzel has to shout at him. “I need your help, but we can’t talk with all this noise! And I’m soaking wet!”

  The toad gives a slight nod to the cloudy sky above them, and the rain dies back down to a drizzle, and the constant litany of chirps and croaks gradually fades into a respectful silence. “Speak, mortal,” the Rain god tells her, although with great reluctance and disappointment in his voice, as if wanting her to hurry up now that there’s no more promise of food.

  “There’s a big fire in the rainforest, and Kukulkan sent me here to ask for your help,” Itzel says. “Can you help us?”

  “Kukulkan sent you?” Chaac squints his goggled eyes, creasing his fat cheeks. “Why should I help that bully of a snake? He pays no attention to his Underworld, yet somehow always manages to find the time to hunt me down and swallow me whole in the land of the living. I bet he takes pleasure from eating frogs! He’s nothing but a big bully!”

  Itzel remembers Kukulkan’s complaints about Chaac’s incarnation in the South, who always slips into the land of the living at any opportunity. “Maybe he’s doing that because you’re going there too much?”

  “Too much?” the toad rasps angrily, spitting all over the lily pad—Itzel and Quashy have to take a few steps back so they’re out of range of the spray. “And who’s the judge of that? Kukulkan? I go there because the food is so tasty—after you’ve tasted food in the land of the living, everything here just tastes off and stale and… dead—so why not go as much as I can up there? I can never have too much tasty food! Here in the Underworld all they have to offer the great Chaac is corn. Corn this, corn that! Corn, corn, corn! I’m so sick of corn!” He sticks out his tongue, then lets out a thunderous belch that ripples across his broad mouth.

  Itzel thinks he didn’t have any problem shuffling down her corn tamales, in spite of what he says. “What do you want?”

  Chaac licks his lips, and the crazed look shortly returns to his round eyes that almost pop out from the tops of his pudgy cheeks. “Chocolate. I want chocolate!”

  “Chocolate?” she asks. She remembers that he licked up the chocolate she had dropped from her cup while she stood outside her grandmother’s hut—at the time he was just an unassuming, small frog—and she thought it was quite odd that a frog liked chocolate. What is with this frog’s obsession with chocolate? She’s immediately reminded of the rainstorm the Rain god brought shortly after she saved him from getting gobbled up by the green snake. “I don’t have any chocolate,” she says. She doubts she’d be willing to offer him any even if she had. Why would she offer something as nice as chocolate to a god who has caused her so much grief? The heavy rainstorm he brought trapped her family in her grandmother’s village, and her parents couldn’t take her grandmother back to the city to be treated in time. The more she thinks about, the angrier she gets—and being drenched from the rain isn’t helping her mood, either.

  “No chocolate?” Chaac frowns again—it seems any other expression is a struggle for him to hold and always ends up sagging down into the melancholic frown he usually wears, as if the corners of his mouth were simply too heavy for him to lift. “You come all the way here to ask me to do a favour for that bully of a snake? You’d need to give me chocolate to get me to do anything for him.”

  “Don’t do it for Kukulkan, then,” Itzel tells the giant toad. “Do it for all the plants and animals of the rainforest. The rainforest needs rain, and you’re the Rain god.”

  Chaac stares at her silently, as if acknowledging what she says to be true, until at last he breaks his silence with another loud, gurgled belch, and that gluttonous look returns to his glossy eyes and drool foams and spills over his lips. But now I have a craving for chocolate.”

  “I said I don’t have any chocolate!” she shouts. She can’t believe the Rain god’s stubbornness, and she’s never seen someone salivate so profusely before—like his mouth is a bottomless pool of drool!

  The giant toad stares at her with another frown. He then sniffs the air and beckons her over with his hand. “Come closer, little girl.”

  Itzel hesitantly takes a few steps forward.

  "Closer still, just so that I may smell you," says Chaac.

  And she takes one step closer, beginning to wonder if he can smell that she’s alive, just as the other gods were able
to do. She hopes this doesn’t mean the toad’s going to send her on some sort of food-fetching quest all the way to her land of the living and back—falling into a cenote once is enough for her.

  Chaac sniffs her. "You smell a bit like…" He takes another deep sniff, drawing the air in so strongly that it flutters her hair and dress.

  But she already guesses what he’s going to say. “Yes, I know, I smell like—"

  But the massive toad slurps his tongue, and his eyes open fiendishly wide. "...like chocolate!"

  Itzel flinches with a mixture of confusion and terror. “Chocolate?”

  Chaac shoots out his sticky tongue at her, and it sticks to her legs and drags her inward, tripping her over in an instant. She screams, scraping her hands on the lily pad to no avail, as it’s wet and slippery with rain—and the toad’s drool. Her snake-stick starts fluttering its little wooden wings as hard as it can to fly in the other direction, pulling her as she tightly holds on to it, struggling against Chaac’s powerful tongue. Quashy wraps his tail around her other arm and tries to pull her away too, but he and the snake-stick are far too small to resist the pull of the gigantic, gluttonous toad, and they shortly lose their battle. The tongue drags her, flailing and screaming, ever nearer to the toad’s dark, slavering abyss of a maw.

  A loud roar then pierces the air. "If you eat her, Chaac, I'll slice you open to get her!"

  Chaac’s tongue stops moving as his eyes scan where the voice came from, giving Quashy and the snake-stick precious time to help get Itzel free. A jaguar springs out from the reeds onto one of the large lily pads on the edge of the lagoon, like a sun peeking out from a mass of gloomy grey clouds.

  The tremendous toad can barely talk with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, but he garbles something unintelligible while looking at the jaguar with wide eyes, frozen in shock. Itzel manages to get one of her legs free from the sticky tongue’s grip, and she kicks the tongue with it repeatedly. Now that she’s freed one of her legs, Quashy and her snake-stick are finally able to wrest her from the tongue’s grip to save her from being the Rain god’s dessert, and she falls backward in a puddle of rainwater, or toad drool—she doesn’t know which.

  “Yuck!” she exclaims in disgust, swiftly getting back to her feet and desperately trying to wipe the Rain god’s copious slobber off her dress.

  Chaac recoils his tongue and closes his huge mouth, his eyes still fixed on the distant jaguar strutting across the lily pads towards him. “Of all the places I’d have thought to see you, my cloudy corner of the world would have been the last. What brings you here, Kinich Ahau?”

  Itzel quits wiping her dress to gawk at the jaguar. That name sounds very familiar to her. “Kinich Ahau? The Sun god?”

  “It is I, the blazing hearted,” the jaguar roars in a godly voice that fills the air over the lagoon, startling the few birds still hiding in the reeds by the lagoon, as well as the fish beneath them. “And if you’re thinking you can hide in your gloom from the fires of my wrath, Chaac the Slimy, know this—though I may have dusked, the Sun shall always dawn again!”

  “Gods are so dramatic,” mutters Quashy. Then, upon hearing Itzel gasp beside her, he asks her worriedly, “Are you all right?”

  Her mouth hangs open and her eyes are wide as they gaze upon the jaguar. “He’s so… cool.”

  The coati pouts, stricken with envy. “How can he be cool? He’s the Sun god!”

  The jaguar’s golden eyes are locked on the giant toad, its body poised like it’s ready to pounce at any moment if need be, much like a predator stalking its prey—although given the disparity in their size, the prey could just as well eat the predator instead. “And you, Chaac, shall leave her alone, for the girl is under my protection now.”

  The toad’s goggled eyes fall upon Itzel again. “Your protection? What’s so important about this girl?” He stares at her more closely now, and his eyes bulge in shock, like he now recognises her. “You. You’re the girl who saved me from Kukulkan’s fangs.”

  “Yes, that was me,” Itzel says, lowering her head and hanging out her tongue in disgust as she tries to wipe the toad’s saliva off her legs now.

  “What are you doing here?” the toad asks.

  “I slipped and fell,” she responds tersely, as she doesn’t even want to bother to explain it to a god that literally just tried to eat her. “Thanks to your rain.”

  Chaac closes his eyes and gives a wet, gargled grunt. “Blaming me when you should have been more careful? I’ll let that slide, little girl. And since you saved me from being eaten, I shall even spare you from being eaten, too. For I, Chaac the great and…” He pauses mid-sentence.

  “Slimy, my lord,” the little green spokesfrog says for him.

  “… slimy,” Chaac says very begrudgingly, “am a just and gracious god.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Itzel says with narrowed eyes and a crooked mouth.

  But when the toad reopens his eyes, the crazed look and hungry grin have returned, as he sets his sight on the unsuspecting coati beside her. “So instead, I’ll eat your friend!”

  Quashy’s ears perk up. “Huh?”

  Chaac shoots out his tongue past Itzel, snagging Quashy so quickly that he hadn’t even the chance to think of escaping.

  “No!” Itzel screams, and she drops her snake-stick to grab Quashy by his tail, trying to pull him out of the tongue's grip with all the strength she can muster. “Let him go! Let him go!” But she can’t manage to wrest him free, and with her arms wrapped around the coati, she only slides towards the enormous mouth along with him. “I won’t let him take you, Quashy! I won’t!” she cries, and she turns back to the snake-stick lying motionless behind them. “Help us, snake-stick!”

  The snake-stick’s turquoise eyes glow as it starts to bend and transform into a snake, and it hisses and strikes out at the massive tongue, chomping down on it with its sharp fangs. The tongue releases Quashy and quickly recoils into Chaac’s mouth, as the toad lets out a wail of pain, stomping his arms and legs.

  “Another nasty snake? I hate snakes!” He begins to sob from the pain in his throbbing tongue, tears cascading down his eyes and cheeks like waterfalls.

  In an instant, the sky thunders and empties an even heavier rain upon them all. It becomes so heavy that Itzel’s legs bend underneath the weight of the downpour. She’s never felt a rain like this—she could just as well be standing at the bottom of the grand waterfall spilling out from Mount Kukulkan. The pressure of it washes off all the sticky saliva slathered over her legs and Quashy’s fur—a fortunate side-effect, they’d think, if they weren’t feeling like it was going to crush them. Itzel sees Chaac sobbing, and it doesn’t take long for her to connect the dots—his crying is what’s summoning the torrential rain, as if the sky cries whenever he does.

  "Why are snakes so mean to me?" moans the toad.

  Even Kinich Ahau is struggling under the weight of the downpour—the jaguar jumps on to the Sacred Lily Pad, but the rain presses down on him so hard that he can’t stick the landing, and he slips, stumbles, and falls on his side, sliding right in front of Chaac. He tries to get back to his feet but can’t from the sheer weight of the rain. “Stop the rain, Chaac!” he growls. “Stop crying or I’ll...” The jaguar pauses and thinks for a moment. “...or I’ll scorch any food I see being brought to you!”

  Both the sobbing and the downpour stop at once. Chaac’s mouth hangs open as if deeply appalled by the thought.

  Kinich Ahau can stand up at last. “You’re not eating her or the furry snake.”

  Quashy is lying on the lily pad, having been almost flattened by the rain. He’s panting, with both exhaustion and relief, but still manages to perk up his head just to correct the jaguar, “I’m a coati.”

  “You would dare to burn my food?” Chaac asks.

  “To a crisp. To smouldering ash,” Kinich Ahau tells him.

  Chaac starts to cry again. “Why would you do such a thing?”

  Kinich Ahau growls at him impatiently, “W
ill you stop crying!”

  Chaac bawls even more loudly, strengthening the rainfall again. “Don’t scream at me! Why does everyone scream at me?”

  “Because you’re a big, fat baby of a god, Chaac!” the jaguar growls.

  “And everyone calls me names!” the giant toad wails.

  Itzel takes a deep breath to calm herself, knowing it’s better to not raise her voice with someone this sensitive. “Mister frog—”

  “Toooooooad!” Chaac corrects her, stomping his feet on the lily pad. “I’m only a frog when I need to be lean and slippery, but my largest and strongest form is a toooooooad! Can’t anyone tell the difference between a frog and a toooooooad?”

  “I’m sorry, mister toad!” she shouts, though her apology doesn’t come across as all that sincere considering her tone of voice. “We didn’t come here to be your food. Everyone in the rainforest needs your help. The forest needs your rain. Please.” She thinks for a moment, then adds, “And plenty of food must grow there when it’s not on fire! Like mangos, papayas, and... cacao!”

  Chaac stops his stomping and bawling. “Cacao? That’s what they make chocolate with, isn’t it?”

  “Yes!” Itzel says.

  “But chocolate down here isn’t tasty as it is up there,” says the toad. “I want living chocolate.”

  “If you don’t help me,” she tells him, “you won’t get any chocolate, from here, or there, or anywhere! Not a drop!”

  He lets out a sniffling croak, but he calms down—her argument seems to have worked on him. “Very well. Since I, the great and slimy Chaac, am such a kind and selfless god, I will help you.” A big tear gathers underneath one of his eyes, trickles down the creases of fat of his cheek, and lands on the lily pad, where it floats up into the air and forms into a grey rain cloud—except it’s the smallest cloud Itzel has ever seen, being only a fraction of the size of the massive toad that conjured it.

  She stares doubtfully at the cloud that’s scarcely larger than a sheep. “It’s not very big. Have you seen the forest fire?” She spreads her arms wide. “It’s a very, very big forest fire! It’s going to need a much bigger cloud than that.”