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

by Ian Gibson

  Itzel doesn’t know what to say to get through to Hurakan, so she just screams the first thing that comes to mind, in hopes that it might distract her, even for a moment, “I met Cabrakan!”

  Hurakan turns to her, and the howling winds die down all of a sudden. “What did you say?”

  “I met your boyfriend!”

  "Ex-boyfriend!" shrieks Hurakan, her eyes open wide, but she relaxes her attack pose and folds her wings. “And what does that tail-chasing tapir have to say for himself?”

  Kinich Ahau stares at both of them, bewildered by Hurakan’s sudden change in mood.

  Itzel’s not sure what to say. She blurted it out without knowing that it would incur an interrogation. She ponders, then says, “I think he, um, misses you?”

  Hurakan’s head jolts. “Misses me? Are you pulling my one leg?”

  Itzel shrugs. She really doesn’t want to get mired in a couple’s squabble. “I don’t know, miss eagle. He just said you’re not paying attention to him.”

  But the eagle’s head quivers with rage, ruffling the feathers around her neck and unfolding her wings to spread them wide again, unleashing the winds with them. “I’m not paying any attention to him?” she shrieks, as loud as a thunderclap. “He’s the one that doesn’t even look at me anymore! Yet he’ll chase after any other piece of tail feathers! Do you know I once caught him leering at a scarlet ibis? What does that crooked-necked, spindly-legged bimbo have that I don’t? Apart from an extra leg, nothing! Nothing!” The winds wail with each flap of her wings. “I am Hurakan, the Heart of Sky! I came from the Time-before-time, I forged the stars, I gave the air that everyone breathes! I made the world, and I have unmade it! And that idiot has the gall to snub me?"

  A scarlet ibis! Itzel thinks she understands the problem now, though it’s difficult for her to think over the wails of the wind—and especially the eagle’s apocalyptic rants. “Miss Hurakan!” she shouts, as loudly as she can. “Maybe you don’t know this, but Cabrakan has problems with his eye—” But one of Hurakan's large feathers, carried by the wind, flies into her face, and her voice is completely drowned out by a storm of rants.

  Hurakan launches herself directly upward into the sky. “I don’t pay any attention to him?” The winds grow ever stronger, and bolts of lightning rip through the sky around them, kindling some of the few crooked trees that have miraculously managed to withstand her storms for this long.

  Kinich Ahau runs to Itzel. “Get on!”

  She picks up Quashy, hops on the jaguar, and rides him to escape the growing storm.

  “Don’t run from me!” screams Hurakan, and with one broad flap of her wings she unleashes a blast of wind that rips through the reeds towards them.

  Itzel and Quashy are sent flying off the jaguar’s back and into the reeds, and Kinich Ahau tumbles over, slides in the mud, and splashes into another pond. Itzel scrambles to her feet, runs to the pond and wades in it, trying to find the jaguar in the water to help him. Quashy stays low to the ground—not that he has any choice without legs to stand on.

  “Kinich Ahau!” she shouts. Bizarrely, she doesn’t see him anywhere in the pond, in spite of being shallow.

  Then she sees something emerge from the far side of the pond. It’s a spotted cat, but much too small to be a jaguar. It looks to her like a margay—no larger than a house cat. The margay turns to look at her with big eyes that have a familiar golden tinge to them.

  “Kinich Ahau? Is that still you?” she asks.

  Another blast of wind whisks her out of the pond, blowing her over the marshes as if she were as light as a leaf. She flails her limbs, and the snake-stick flutters its wings, but they’re both helpless against the force of Hurakan’s winds.

  “Grab my tail!” Quashy shouts, using the same trick to cast his tail out like a fishing line, slinging it towards her and extending it.

  Itzel manages to grab it, and Quashy lets the tail extend as she’s pulled farther away by the wind, so she doesn’t carry him away too, but he slithers through the rippling grass to the nearest tree—a logwood that has grown small and crooked like all the trees here—and hurriedly wraps his tail around its trunk.

  “I’ve got you!” Quashy shouts triumphantly, spinning around the tree trunk to secure it as tightly as he can, and starts to recoil his tail to pull her in.

  But another blast of wind hits the crooked logwood, uprooting the tree in its entirety, and lifting it into the air along with the horrified coati who’s now tied himself to it.

  “But who's got meeeeee?” he screams while spinning around the tree by his tail, so rapidly that he’s just a blurred ring of white and brown.

  The winds send them both hurtling westward across the Chattering Ponds. They hear whispers in the winds as they fly along the way they came:

  “Is she off again already?” the voices say. “She wasn’t here for long!”—“We should be more welcoming to guests!”—“Her ugly furry friend is leaving too!”

  “I’m not uglyyyyyy!” Quashy screams, having managed to take offence even amidst his panic.

  The small, grey rain cloud sails past them, rumbling its thunder anxiously and looking just as helpless in the stormy weather as they are.

  “The rain cloud!” Itzel shouts at it, worried that it might spill its precious rain over the lake, or even worse—that it might be carried so far away that she’ll never be able to find it again. She can’t imagine Chaac will be gracious enough to give her another rain cloud if she lost this one, considering how much of an ordeal it was to get just this one—she and Quashy almost got themselves eaten for it!

  Bolts of lightning crack and rip through the blackened sky, and one strikes into a cluster of crooked trees, bursting them into flames, and the winds sweep up and spiral the fire, stretching it out like long, red-hot tendrils.

  “That’s bad!” Itzel says when she sees the frightening fireworks. Hurakan must be especially angry this time!

  Then another crack and explosion! She gasps to find another bolt of lightning has ignited the branches of the logwood with Quashy tied to it. He lets out a loud screech but is spinning around far too fast to do anything else, as the fire eats its way down the trunk towards his knotted tail.

  Itzel looks at her snake-stick, who’s flapping its wooden wings helplessly. “Snake-stick! Help him!”

  The snake-stick hisses to acknowledge her plea. Itzel puts it close to the end of Quashy’s tail, which she’s kept a firm grip of in her other hand—it’s helped that she wrapped the excess around her arm, too—and the snake-stick transforms into a snake and coils down the length of the tail to reach the tree. It clamps down on the tree trunk with its fangs, and its eyes glow a bluish green, but it’s shaking its tail frantically, like it’s trying to use its magic but struggling to achieve anything because its task is beyond its capability.

  They’re carried to where the many arteries of winding creeks pour into the vast Lake of Tears, at which point the flaming logwood tree falls and splashes into the lake. The water douses the flames, with billows of steam quickly taken by the winds, which solves one problem while presenting quite another—Itzel, who’s still clinging to Quashy’s absurdly long ringed tail, doesn’t see any sign of neither the coati to which it belongs, nor the snake-that-was-a-stick.

  “Quashy! Snake-stick!” she screams while yanking as hard as she can on his tail.

  She sees bubbles frothing in the water around the tree, followed by a bright green flash beneath the surface, and then a brown serpentine head rises from the lake, belonging to quite possibly the largest snake she’s seen—or at least it would have been if flying feathered ones didn’t count—with branches sticking out of its head like clumsily enormous antlers. The snake wriggles through the water, and Quashy’s tangled tail slips off its smooth, wet skin. Itzel feels his tail become taut as it pulls back on her, and Quashy jumps tail-first out of the lake, retracting his tail to reel himself in towards her, having freed himself from the snake-that-was-a-logwood, with the small green s
nake-that-was-a-stick curled around the base of his tail.

  Itzel breathes relief when she sees them both. She wraps even more of Quashy’s tail around her forearm to secure it more tightly, while the green snake retraces its path up the tail to return to her other hand, and with another green flash, it transforms back into a snake-shaped stick with wooden wings and turquoise eyes.

  “That was incredible, snake-stick!” she tells it. “Did you really turn that whole tree into a snake?”

  The snake-stick flicks out its tongue proudly, then starts fluttering its wings again as the wind abruptly changes direction—instead of blowing them farther across the lake, it’s bizarrely coming directly from below them, keeping them aloft in the air over the lake, like flies hovering over a bowl of soup. Then they hear a dreadfully familiar cry in the wind—that piercing shriek of an eagle. Hurakan swoops down from the storm clouds and lands on the rippling reeds along the lakeshore with another of her clumsy crashes.

  “I’m sending you back right where you came from!” the eagle shrieks at the girl and the coati, helplessly twirling in the air over the lake. “And you can tell that two-timing tapir that when I say it’s over, it’s over!”

  “Miss eagle, please calm down!” Itzel screams in desperation, as the red hibiscus flower pinned to her dress flies away, claimed by the erratic wind.

  “Don’t tell me to ‘calm down’!” Hurakan screams back at her, spreading her menacingly large, dark wings. “That just makes me even”—she calls another blast of wind that whisks them away—“angrier!”

  “Whenever you open your mouth you just make things wooooooorse!” Quashy cries woefully at Itzel.

  “I’m sooooooorryyyyyyy!” she cries back, clinging to his tail as it’s stretched out again from the force of the wind, like a monstrous fish dragging out a fishing line.

  The gales are so strong that they’re already halfway across the great lake before they even realise it, and the snake-stick struggles to pull them out of its path, but the best it can hope for is to steer them once it spots the Isle of the Dead on the horizon. Itzel’s lost sight of the little grey rain cloud now, but she’s so dizzy and disorientated from her ceaseless somersaulting through the air that she finds it difficult to track where she herself is anymore, much less a small cloud in a storm.

  They hear Hurakan’s ranting in the wind:

  “Is he really such a coward that he sends a messenger to speak to me?”—“Why should I even give him the time of day after he ignored me for so long?”—“The nerve of him!”—“Calls himself a mighty mountain god! Ha! He’s about as mighty as a molehill!”

  They fly over the eastern shore of the island, heading straight for the city wall, and Quashy coils his tail round and round and uses it as a spring, cushioning from the impact when the wind smacks them against it, but Itzel loses her grip of his tail from the rebound. The snake-stick flies upward to carry her just over the high wall and glides her down into the refuge of the city. Quashy clambers up the wall to follow, but just as he reaches the top, his beaded necklace slips down his slender body and all the way down his long tail, too, and it drops on the sloping stone embankment at the base of the city wall.

  “My necklace!” he squeaks in dismay. Teetering precariously on the parapet of the wall, he drops his tail down to retrieve his precious necklace, but the moment he hooks the tail’s tip through it, he's blown off his balance and whisked away by the wind farther into the city.

  "Quashy!” Itzel shouts to him as she sees him flying overhead. “Throw me your tail!”

  But there’s so much debris flying around—the winds are even tearing off the roofs of the towers on the city wall—and she quickly loses sight of him. The snake-stick tries to steer as best as it can to land her safely in the city streets, but a gust whips down the wall and arcs upward, carrying them with it, and Itzel loses her grip and falls, tumbling against the wall of a hut. Her head is so dizzy and her vision so blurry that she can’t make any sense of what her eyes see, and all she can hear are the shrieking winds before her vision blackens.

  PART TWO

  Twenty-Four Minutes till Midnight

  “Itzeeeeeel!” Miguel screams into the rain. He’s standing in the open doorway of his grandmother’s hut, shouting his sister’s name as loudly as he can. “Itzeeeeeel!”

  His parents have gone up the northern path into the forest—the same path that the family always take for their walks through his sister’s “forest of good luck”. Some of the villagers have taken their flashlights and joined his parents to form a search party, whereas a few others are searching around the rest of the village in case she’s there.

  “You’re going to be in so much trouble, sis,” Miguel mumbles to himself. He shines the flashlight outside the hut in case he sees her coming back—wherever that might be from. He tries to shine it on the edge of the forest also, but the flashlight is small, and the beam is too faint to cover the distance—his father probably keeps this one in the glove compartment of the car to check inside the bonnet, not expecting to need one to go on a search for his daughter who gets herself lost in the forest at night in the rain.

  Miguel is flustered that he can’t go into the forest to help with the search more. He directs the flashlight inside the dark hut and looks at his baby sister tucked in her baby basket on their parents’ bed. He walks to her and finds that she’s surprisingly still sleeping very peacefully in spite of everything—he guesses all the cries of their sister’s name outside must have been drowned out by the rain. He lets out a frustrated sigh, turns off the flashlight to conserve the battery, and sits on their parents’ bed next to her.

  “I hope you won’t be this much of a pain in the butt when you’re Itzel’s age,” he whispers to her while sitting in the darkness. He doesn’t understand why his grandmother never liked having any lights in her hut at night—his mother said that she simply embraced the rustic life, but his father always grumbled about it, especially as he stubbed his toe a few times when needing to get up and pee during the middle of the night, when he forgot to take a flashlight with him. He sits there in silence, feeling restless, as he listens to the rain and peers out the window.

  Then he hears a croak.

  It sounded like a frog—they’re always heard chirping and croaking outside after nightfall—but this one sounded like it came from somewhere inside the hut. It’s too dark to see anything well, so he turns his flashlight back on and walks to the small bed he and Itzel have been sharing. He crouches down and finds the glass jar with the frog inside it, and now he remembers his sister whispering to a frog she was keeping under the bed—he had forgotten about it amidst all the alarm she’s caused.

  The frog croaks again.

  A Debt to the Plants

  Itzel opens her eyes. She feels her head aching—it’s a struggle even to move it—and her vision is so blurry she can barely make anything out, but she sees what appears to be the ceiling of a thatched roof hut. It looks a lot like her grandmother’s hut.

  “It was a dream,” she murmurs softly to reassure herself. “All just a dream.”

  The head of a white-haired figure walks into view to stand beside her. It looks like an old woman.

  All Itzel can see is a haze of a figure. "Grand...ma?"

  She closes her eyes tightly, then reopens them. She does this several times, and her vision gradually becomes clearer.

  “I am not your grandmother, my child,” the figure says as her appearance sharpens in Itzel’s eyes.

  The old woman looking back at her has small, cold eyes deeply inset in a face with skin so rough and wrinkled that it looks like the bark of a tree and spattered with green blotches that look to be mosses or lichens. Little leafed twigs sprout from her head of white hair.

  Itzel draws a deep breath. It’s still not a dream—unless there are people in the living world who look like walking, talking plants. “Who are you?”

  “I am Lady Chel, the goddess of plants and medicine.” She places her hand, w
ith its knurled, branch-like fingers, on Itzel’s forehead. “And you, my child, are a very interesting specimen indeed.”

  “Why?” Itzel asks, worried that she might have a fever. “Am I sick?”

  “No, you’re perfectly healthy.” The old woman retracts her wooden hand. “That’s what’s so interesting about you. You’re so healthy, in fact, that you’re not even dead. I haven’t seen a living person here in—well, let’s just say I’ve lost count of the baktuns.”

  Itzel would ask her what exactly a baktun is, but she’s too woozy to care about it just right now. She finds she can move her head slightly, so she turns it, and her eyes browse the room in which she finds herself. It’s awash with all the colours of the rainbow, with woven fabrics adorning the walls, floor, and hanging from the ceiling. It reminds her a lot of the stalls in the street market in her city, where women sell their meticulously woven textiles—she was always entranced by just how beautiful and ornate they are. A long loom rests against the wall, with a half-woven fabric on it, and she suspects that the old woman might weave all these herself.

  She spots her white dress—her birthday gift from her grandmother—hanging on a line to dry along with rugs and mantas. It looks like it’s been cleaned, as the stains of grass, dirt, and mud from her journey—especially through the wetlands—are nowhere to be seen, and it’s sparkling a bright white. Her snake-stick is leaning against the wall beside it, with her jade necklace hanging from its mouth.

  She also sees many plants—some of them are growing pale green gourds of a strange fruit that are shaped a lot like little hands and feet and ears, and even whole heads. What bizarre plants grow limbs? The sight of them reminds her of her limbless coati friend, whom she lost in the storm. “Quashy!” she shouts, and tries to get up from the table, but as soon as she budges, she feels sharp pricks all over her body. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” she cries in pain.