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

by Ian Gibson

  “The more you move, the more it’ll hurt,” says Lady Chel.

  Itzel tilts her head forward just enough to find that her whole body is completely wrapped in thorny vines, and she’s bound to the table with them, unable to even move her arms and legs, much less sit up.

  “You needn’t worry, my child,” Lady Chel says in her very dry, wooden tone of voice. “It is with my plants that I am able to treat your wounds. But they’re also to prevent you from running away before you accept to repay your debt.”

  “What do you mean?” Itzel asks.

  “We gods don’t do anything for free. I treated your wounds, so now you’re in my debt. If you don’t repay it, you’ll be consumed by the vines and will become one of my plants.” The woman gestures to all the plants in her hut, which grow fruit that look like small body parts.

  Itzel shudders at the thought. She’d prefer to stay human and not become one of the old woman’s creepy-looking house plants—or any plant, for that matter, even if it’s a much prettier one. “But I don’t have anything to pay you with!”

  “I don’t expect you to have something for me,” Lady Chel says. “I expect you to do something for me.”

  Itzel groans, partly from the dull pain lingering in her head, but also because she doesn’t want to be stuck spending her time here doing errands for gods. She should be looking for Quashy, and her grandmother! But given that she’s tightly bound to a table in vines, she’s not in much of a position to argue.

  The old woman squints, like she’s thinking very hard about what Itzel’s repayment would entail, and her face is so stiff that even an expression as subtle as squinting the eyes manages to crack and splinter her bark-like skin. “Usually, I’d send you to the Rainforest of the South to sow seeds in its sacred soil,” she says, “but the forest is on fire, so there isn’t much point in that. I’ll have to send you to somewhere in the West.”

  “But I’m trying to put the forest fire out!” Itzel shouts, so frustratedly that she pricks herself on the thorns again and lets out a yelp. She’s never been so horrified to have been treated by a doctor before and hopes her father doesn’t behave this way towards his patients.

  “Shout at me again,” the old woman says, her bark brows furrowing severely, “and I’ll give you a good lashing with my vine whip, and I’ll use the thorniest one.”

  Itzel freezes, as the threat seems very real. “Sorry, miss.”

  They both hear a rumble from outside—it sounded like thunder, except softer and smaller.

  Lady Chel slowly shuffles over to her doorway. She’s hunched over and holds a crooked, gnarled stick to walk with. She brushes her rainbow-coloured curtains aside to take a peek out her doorway. She then slowly shuffles back to the table with Itzel. “So you are. It seems there's a little rain cloud waiting for you outside."

  “Really?” Itzel is astounded by this news, as she thought the cloud would have vanished completely in the storm. The last time she saw it was when the winds carried them to the lake, but by that point she was so dizzy from tumbling mid-air that she lost track of it.

  “You must be a very special one indeed,” the old woman says. “I haven’t seen Chaac entrust anyone as his rain-bringer for a long time. He must be fond of you.”

  Itzel very much doubts that, unless Chaac thinking that she looks like a tasty meal could somehow be interpreted as him being fond of her.

  Lady Chel touches the vines binding Itzel, and they unwind and shrink to free her, but the thorns graze and prick her as they unwrap, so she again winces in pain. As soon as she’s able to, she leaps off the torture table to get away from it as quickly as possible, and, upon realising she’s just in her underwear, embarrassedly runs over to her white dress to quickly throw it on. She notices she’s clean now, when before she was covered in mud—Lady Chel must have even bathed her too. When she puts her left arm through the sleeve, she sees a small vine wrapped around the top of her arm, just below her left shoulder. She tries to pull it off but has no luck—its hold on her is too strong.

  “What’s this for?” she asks, raising her left arm.

  “To ensure your debt is repaid,” Lady Chel responds.

  Itzel touches the vine. It’s hugging her very tightly, and if it were any tighter and thornier it wouldn’t just be uncomfortable, but painful. She wonders if there’s a trickier way that she could remove it. She glances at her snake-stick leaning against the wall, but the old woman catches her looking at it.

  “Don’t expect Kukulkan’s magic to work on my vines, at least not without serious repercussions,” Lady Chel warns her. “If you transform my strangler vines into snakes, they’ll become constrictors, and I assure you, they’ll have no intention of loosening their grip.”

  Itzel raises her hands innocently. “I wasn’t going to anyway!”

  “There’s no way out of their stranglehold except by repaying your debt to the plants that healed you,” says the old woman. She points to her doorway with her branch-like finger and instructs her, “Bring in your rain cloud, my child.”

  But instead of heading for the front doorway, Itzel starts hopping up and down and grating her teeth. “Um… miss plant lady... I really need to use the...”

  Lady Chel turns her pointing finger to a curtain covering a doorway on the back wall. “In the back garden. Make sure you wash your feet before coming back in.”

  Itzel quickly takes her jade necklace hanging from her snake-stick’s mouth, puts it around her neck, and discreetly tucks it inside her dress. By the back wall she finds the little glass bottle of floral perfume she was given by the peccary merchant, as well as the canteen that the farmer’s family had given her, so she takes those too. She opens the curtain covering the backdoor and finds herself in a small jungle. She hasn’t seen such a variety of plants within such a small space before, and some of them have leaves so large that she could easily roll up in one like a big tamale.

  The thought of tamales reminds her of Chaac trying to eat her, and suddenly the idea of rolling herself up like a tamale doesn’t sound so fun anymore.

  Butterflies of all colours clap their delicate wings between the flowers and leaves—the most striking among them being the large blue morphos—and they glitter in the thin rays of sunlight streaming through layers of very fine netting placed high above the whole garden, as if to protect it like a greenhouse. Droplets of water sprinkle from the netting like a fine mist, and she wonders if it’s the old woman’s way of protecting her garden from the heavy rainfall carried by all the storms. She steps on a narrow, tiled path through the thicket and comes to a fountain of water in the middle. She takes a drink from it, then hops over to a small outhouse nestled in the plants. When she’s finished, she washes her hands in the fountain and finds a little jar of mashed root next to it, which she’s pleased to discover can be used as soap. She then uncorks her calabash canteen and fills it up from the fountain.

  She notices a tall mirror tucked in a nook between the plants circling the fountain, helped up by vines and framed by leaves. She walks up to it to look at herself in its reflection. It’s the first time she’s been able to properly see herself in the white dress her grandmother gave her, as her grandmother never kept mirrors in her hut—she was superstitious about them, as she was about most things. She’s glad her grandmother will finally be able to see her in it, especially now that it’s no longer covered in dirt and mud. Before she leaves, she takes a moment to smell some of the flowers. It reminds her a bit of the perfume the peccary had given her, so she opens it and dabs a few drops on her neck. Maybe her grandmother will comment on how nice she smells, too.

  She brushes her hand through the large leaves on her way back to the hut. She wishes every visit to the bathroom took her through a small jungle like this. Her bathroom back home is very ordinary in comparison. It makes her think of how her brother always forgets to put the toilet seat down when he’s done peeing.

  She’s reluctant to admit it, but she’s even beginning to miss Miguel�
��just a little bit.

  She comes to the doorway, where a little stream of water pours out from a sloping trough built into the back wall of the hut. It leads from a large, mossy stone cistern elevated above the roof, clearly built to collect the rainwater—she imagines it’s always overflowing thanks to all the thunderstorms that come here. She washes her feet in the stream before opening the curtain to step back inside.

  “I hope you washed your hands and your feet,” Lady Chel tells her in a very nagging tone. She’s weaving on the backstrap loom, and a small green hummingbird is fluttering over her shoulder.

  “Yes,” Itzel says, grateful that she thought to wash her feet too—she really doesn’t want to be lashed with a thorny vine for not doing so.

  “Good,” says the old woman, and she whispers to the hummingbird for a moment, who then zips through a small hole in the wall near the front doorway without so much as looking at Itzel, like it’s in a terrible hurry.

  “You smell nice,” Lady Chel says, her eyes still fixed on her loom.

  “Thanks,” Itzel says, surprised by the compliment, especially coming from this surly old woman. She smiles, but the old woman isn’t looking at her anyway.

  “And what does Ek Chuaj call that one?”

  Itze’s face goes crooked and she hesitates to say it. “Fruity... Farts.”

  Lady Chel shakes her head. “That peccary has a good nose for scents, but not for names.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “At least that one is mild. Ek Chuaj has lost either his sense of smell, or of subtlety, as his latest batch of perfumes are horrendously overpowering. I know precisely when he’s coming to the city to sell them because I can smell him from all the way across the lake.” She shakes her head disapprovingly. “I might be the goddess of flowers, but I still think there’s such a thing as too flowery.”

  Itzel laughs, as she’s still tickled by the thought of a peccary who overcompensates for his kind being naturally stinky.

  “What’s your name, my child?” asks Lady Chel.

  “Itzel.”

  “It’s a good name. You’re named after me.”

  “I am?” Itzel's surprised to hear this, as her mother never told her that.

  “They call me Ix Chel, which means ‘Lady Rainbow’.”

  Itzel smiles broadly. “My name really means ‘rainbow’?”

  “Yes,” says Lady Chel, giving Itzel a cursory glance before her eyes return to her loom, “but it’s nothing to smile about. Rainbows are ill omens. They’re the flatulence of the Rain god Chaac.”

  “What?” cries Itzel, who thought the peccary was just being poetically disgusting when he told her that. “But... but they’re so pretty!”

  “Even pretty things can have ugly origins,” says Lady Chel in her stern, lecturing tone. “But at least you smell nice.”

  Itzel’s face scrunches with disgust. She’ll never be able to look at a rainbow the same way again. She grabs her snake-stick and looks for her sandals, eventually finding them next to the doorway—it's clear that the old woman’s hut has a “no shoes” policy so that visitors don’t dirty her colourful rugs.

  Itzel steps outside and puts on her sandals, and the little rain cloud appears from around the corner and rumbles softly to greet her. “Good morning, rain cloud! I’m surprised you made it back after you were blown away. But then again, I guess clouds are used to storms, aren’t they?”

  The rain cloud rumbles softly again, as if to concur.

  Lady Chel puts down her loom, takes her walking stick, and shuffles over to a corner of her hut piled with bags of seeds and soils. “Bring it in, my child, but it better not drizzle on my rugs, or I’ll lash you both.”

  Itzel reaches her hand into the rain cloud—it feels softer than cotton, but cool and wet. She pushes the curtains open and guides it through the doorway into the hut. The old woman is turned away from her while she’s gathering something from one of her bags. She glances over her shoulder at Itzel, and her face shrinks into an angry labyrinth of furrows and knots.

  “No shoes inside!” she yells. “Or you’ll get a sound lashing!”

  “Oh, sorry!” Itzel sheepishly takes her sandals off and steps back to leave them by the doorway. She comes back in and brings the small rain cloud to Lady Chel.

  Lady Chel turns around to them. In her wooden hands she’s cupping a pile of yellow powder, and Itzel smells it—it must be flower pollen. The old woman brings it up to her wrinkled mouth and blows the pollen into the rain cloud, and the rain cloud does quite a strange thing for a cloud—it sneezes violently, and the sneeze pushes it backward across the hut, and it drizzles accidentally on her rugs.

  “I told you not to do that!” Lady Chel snaps, the leaves in her hair rustling madly.

  The rain cloud lets out a very low and mild rumble as if it were apologetic—Itzel’s surprised by just how expressive a rain cloud can be from mere rumbles.

  Where the rain cloud has sneezed and rained on the rug, little plants are already sprouting out from the floor. They grow at such a dizzyingly fast pace that Itzel’s eyes lag behind their growth as they follow them upwards all the way to the ceiling, where they pierce through the thatched roof. She gawks at them. Whatever magic is in that pollen really works, and it works quickly!

  Lady Chel angrily taps her walking stick against the floor. “This is why I didn’t want it to rain on my rugs! I’m going to have a lot more shearing to do now. As if I didn’t already have so much to do!” She turns to Itzel. “When it rains on the forest, it’ll rain down this pollen I collected from the flowers of the Mother of Trees, and the trees will grow quickly in its sacred soil. If the rain cloud doesn’t sneeze all the pollen away, of course. I wasn’t expecting a cloud to have allergies.”

  The rain cloud puffs up like it’s about to sneeze again, but luckily it seems to have contained it this time, as it slowly shrinks back to its normal size. Around it a fine mist wafts in the air, which shimmers in the pale light of the early morning coming in from the window and refracts it into all the colours of the rainbow. Lady Chel is not in the slightest bit pleased when she takes notice of it.

  “None of that in my house!” she scolds the cloud, who immediately rumbles an apology. She shakes her head disapprovingly at it and turns to Itzel. “If you do this for me, you can consider your debt repaid.”

  Itzel looks anxiously at the vine wrapped around her left arm.

  “But you’ll keep that, as insurance.”

  Itzel whispers to the rain cloud, “Please try to not sneeze.” As she sets off toward the doorway, the old woman stops her.

  “I believe this is yours,” she says, holding up her hand, and a red hibiscus flower blossoms from her palm. “It blew through the curtains during the storm. Perhaps it was finding its way to you.”

  Itzel has the biggest grin on her face. She didn’t lose the flower in the storm after all! On top of that, the flower now looks like it was just freshly picked, instead of a flower that was not only drenched in rain but had even at one point found its way up a giant tapir’s nostril. The old woman must have breathed life back into it with her magic. Itzel thanks her and puts the flower back in her hair.

  “It suits you,” the old woman says. “You look like a—”

  “Forest spirit?” Itzel says.

  A very subtle smile creeps up the woman’s wooden face, and her eyes and cheeks furrow so much that it looks like it’s not accustomed to smiling at all. “Yes,” she says. Then her face hardens again. “Now get out before your cloud sneezes again. This is my house, not a jungle.”

  Itzel finds that last sentence an odd thing to hear from the goddess of plants, and wonders if she’s lived in the city for too long. She bows her head and leaves, saying over her shoulder, “Let’s go, cloud.”

  The Daykeeper

  She steps outside onto a paved street with the little rain cloud drifting behind her, and she looks up and down the street. It’s almost completely roofed by canopies of fabric that hav
e been mounted and stretched across the width of it to provide much-needed shade from the oppressive Day Sun, and presumably all the rain from Hurakan’s storms, too. To her right, the street leads to a flight of steps up to an elevated road, which she guesses to be the wide white road she had seen when she passed the city entrance with One Reed and Seven Deer the night before—or the “night-day” before, as they call it here, but she still finds such a term utterly nonsensical.

  She’s about to set off in that direction, but much to her dismay, the little rain cloud sneezes again and blows itself backward, drizzling over the road. She stops and gawks as yet more saplings sprout out from small cracks within the concrete, and a few other passers-by stop whatever they’re doing to watch in awe as the saplings quickly smash through the concrete and shoot upward into tall trees, ripping and poking through the canopy of fabric.

  “Please don’t do that, rain cloud!” she pleads with it. “I might lose an arm!”

  She waits nervously for its sneezing fit to stop, and then they head down the street towards the city centre, the little cloud following her loyally like a sheep following its shepherd. It’s early in the morning, and luckily the heat of the Day Sun hasn’t quite set in yet. There are many people out and about—some are standing on the thatched roofs of their homes to assess and repair the damage, while others are busily sweeping the debris from the streets and dirt from their homes. Though there are some shallow puddles left over from the rainfall, most of the water has already drained into deep ditches along the sides of the streets and alleys, where it collects and flows out of the city through culverts at the base of the tall stone city wall behind her. She thinks her own city back home could really learn a thing or two from these people, as she’s never seen it looking anywhere near as clean and orderly as this place, and it doesn’t even have the excuse of being blighted by hurricanes on a daily basis!

  “The dead are so much cleaner than the living!” she whispers to herself.

  The city dwellers smile and bow their heads when they see her, and at first, she waves to them unconsciously, though shortly she realises that head bows seem to be customary here whereas handwaves aren’t so much, but it doesn’t take her long to adjust and get into the habit herself, especially as she wants to blend in.