by Ian Gibson
“She does exist!” she says insistently, very upset by his words. There’s no record of her grandmother here, yet this old man claims there’s a record for everyone!
“So you say,” the old man says suspiciously. “I sense truth in your words, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re not just pulling a fast one on me.”
“I’m not!” She stamps her foot on the floor, churning up plumes of dust and shreds of old paper. She can’t believe this! “Aren’t you the god of knowledge? I thought you know everything, but you don’t know where my grandma is!”
“I know where she isn’t,” he says with an offended huff, “and she isn’t here in my city. You can check with the chief of Sleeping Lake, if you’d like, but be prepared to be disappointed, as I very much doubt she’s there either. It is very curious to have a soul slip through the cracks like this. Very curious indeed.” He raises his head. “But what’s even more curious”—and for the first time since Itzel stepped into his hut, the old man turns to look at her, revealing an exceptionally long and pointed nose much like the beak of a stork—“is that I have no record of you, either. Tell me, my child, how did you come here?”
Itzel feels uneasy and steps back again. The old man seemed completely disinterested in her until now, but his tone has quickly become very nosy, and his small eyes very prying, reminding her a lot of how the Dead Queen spoke and stared at her when asking her the exact same question a short while ago.
“Oh, i—it was just a… mistake, also,” she stammers timidly. “I know you don’t make any mistakes, because you’re the god of knowledge and all. But I’m just a stupid little girl, as you said! I’m always making mistakes!”
“Hmmmmm,” Lord Itzamna drones again, tapping his fingers again and staring at her with round, bird-like eyes tucked beneath wispy white eyebrows. “Yes, you mortals do love to make mistakes,” he says quite matter-of-factly, and turns back to his desk.
Itzel breathes a sigh of relief, then walks to the doorway to leave.
“You have four more days,” he says over his shoulder.
She turns back to him. “Four days? What do you mean?”
“I am Lord Itzamna, god of knowledge. In other words, I’m not a fool. You’re not dead—I can smell it, not to mention I felt your warmth when I took your hand. You’ve slipped through here on what in your world would be the eve of the last day of Wayeb, and it’ll soon be midnight there.” He does some calculations on another sheet of paper. “In a little under twenty-three minutes of your world’s time, by my reckoning.”
“What does that mean?” she asks timidly.
“That means you have only four Xibalban days left, including this one, before the portal to your world closes and you’re trapped here, at least until the next Wayeb.”
“I’ll be stuck here for a whole year?” Itzel’s dismayed by this news. How will her family react to her having vanished out of thin air for a whole year?
Lord Itzamna shakes his head. “Oh no, silly girl, not a year at all.” He takes another fresh piece of bark paper, dips his quill pen in the ink, and begins scribbling on it. “Time flows very differently between the three worlds. They used to flow together as one, but when the World Tree that connected them was destroyed, a rift in time grew between them. Up in the heavens, it flows slowly, and down here in the Underworld, it flows fast, such that a day in the heavens is a sacred year in the land of the living, and a day in the land of the living is a sacred year here in Xibalba.” He draws what looks like two turtle shells on top of each other, then groupings of bars and dots above them, and shows it to her.
She knows that they signify numbers, but they don’t make any sense to her, and she’s scared to ask what the number means, because it looks like quite a large one.
“Of course, only a year would pass in your world,” he says, “but here you’ll be trapped for approximately ninety-three thousand and six hundred days, which is about, oh, a little over two hundred and fifty-six years.”
Itzel hangs her mouth open, trying to get her head around what he just said. Even a year feels like a lifetime for her, so she can barely comprehend how long two hundred and fifty-six of them would be!
“You’re alive now, but I can’t imagine you will be after two hundred and fifty-six years,” the old man says. “And once you’re not, you won’t be able to return to your world. Only the Death god could cheat death. Not even we other gods can, much less a mortal like you. And while you might have the Death god’s power in that jade stone you’re carrying, don’t expect to be carrying it for much longer. I know quite a few very important, very powerful people who’d very much like to have it.”
Itzel looks down to check her necklace, but it’s still tucked away and hidden in her dress. It’s impossible that he could have seen it!
“I don’t need to see it to know you have it, my child,” Lord Itzamna says, as if reading her thoughts. “It’s simple deductive reasoning. As I said, I’m the god of knowledge—not the god of stupidity.” He rubs his long nose as if deep in thought. “Hmmm. God of stupidity. I was about to say we ought to have one of those, but I just realised we already do—it's every other god but me. Especially that fat fool Chaac.”
For a very brief moment, Itzel feels an urge to defend Chaac in his absence, but after having met the Rain god and almost getting gobbled up by him, she’s not sure if he deserves any defending. She brushes the curtain aside and rushes out the doorway back the way she came. Only four more days! She looks to the sun’s position in the sky. It’s even less time than that, considering it already must be mid-morning by now. She thought she had time, but not so little!
“Pssst!” she hears as she rushes down the street of Lord Itzamna’s hut towards the plaza. She turns to find the same bright green hummingbird hovering in the air around the corner of the hut.
“Hello again,” the hummingbird whispers to her. “My name is Zunun. I’m sorry I couldn’t introduce myself earlier, but I was in a rush. I’m a messenger hummingbird for Lord Itzamna and Lady Chel.”
Itzel walks to her. “Did you have a sad message?”
“Sad? Why?” the hummingbird asks.
“My grandma said that hummingbirds bring good luck and messages of love. But you looked too sad to be bringing either of those things.”
Zunun lets out a sigh through her long, piped beak. “I used to send messages of love between them. But now I just send tedious progress reports of their work to one another. I think Lord Itzamna has even forgotten that he has a wife! He seems to think Lady Chel is a long-time work colleague who’s simply reporting her discoveries in plants and medicine so he can take note of them. He wouldn’t know otherwise as he never even leaves his hut. And Lady Chel refuses to see him—when she leaves her hut, it’s only to collect plants for her research.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Itzel says, glancing at the crowded street. “It was nice meeting you, but I’m in a rush to leave.
Zunun flies in front of her to stop her. “Wait. I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with Lord Itzamna. You think your grandmother might be in Sleeping Lake?”
“I hope so, at least. He said it’s the only other place she could be.” She doesn’t even want to consider the thought that she could be suffering in some hellish pit in the North.
“Sleeping Lake is high in the mountains and the remotest place in our land. It would be a long trek, especially for a little girl walking on foot with not much time left here.”
“It’s that hard to get to?”
“The people fled to that corner for a reason—so they could be far from the gods.”
Itzel lets out a resigned sigh. It sounds like a very long, gruelling journey, and she has to go to the rainforest soon, lest the vine around her arm grow any tighter—and quite possibly take her arm off.
The hummingbird smiles. “But you’re in luck!”
“What do you mean?”
“The chief of Sleeping Lake refuses to speak with Lord Itza
mna, but she has a messenger falcon whom I know well,” she whispers. “We birds all know each other, after all. I can pass a message on to her, asking about your grandmother, and the falcon can bring her reply to you.”
Itzel’s face brightens at the good news. Hummingbirds really bring good luck after all! “Really? You would do that?”
“Of course! The only problem is she wouldn’t risk sending her falcon across the lake because of the storms, so you can’t wait for the reply here.”
“That’s not a problem. I have to leave for the rainforest soon.” She points to the rain cloud that’s floating over the rooftops. “I’ve brought a rain cloud from the Rain god to put out the forest fire, and the longer I stay here, the longer that fire burns. I think it’s also getting impatient with me.”
Zunun is astonished, beating her little wings even more rapidly. “Chaac entrusted you as a rain-bringer? That’s incredible!”
Itzel shrugs. “I don’t know if he trusts me, but at least he didn’t eat me.”
“Then that’s perfect! There’s a watchtower in the rainforest, right beside the fork in the Forked Tongue River. If you put out the fires, you can go there and wait for her reply. I can tell the falcon you’ll be waiting there.”
Itzel wears the biggest smile on her face. “I would hug you if you weren’t a little hummingbird!”
Zunun looks up at the red hibiscus flower she’s wearing in her hair. “May I smell your flower?”
“Of course!”
She flies up to lick it with her long tongue and gives it a good sniff. “Another hummingbird licked from this flower recently! I can smell it. I hope it brought you luck, too.”
Itzel is now beginning to think it did.
“I’ll go to the city’s falconer immediately to send the message,” Zunun says, “as I know you’re pressed for time.” She flies away but stops briefly and turns back to her. “Oh, and good luck!”
Itzel waves goodbye, feeling a lot more upbeat—this time the hummingbird’s wish of luck sounded hopeful rather than dejected. She looks up at the rain cloud and beckons it to follow. “Let’s go!” When she takes a step forward onto the busy street, she bumps into someone again. She instantly recognises who it is without even needing to look up to see the person’s face—those tattooed legs are unmistakable.
The Dead Queen is not smiling this time, and her arms are crossed. “And what business did you have with the great and all-knowing Itzamna, if I may ask?”
Itzel is unsettled by the woman’s very different tone of voice compared to their last meeting—it’s at the same time prying and accusatory. “I was just asking if he knew where my grandma was, because I can’t find her.”
“Any luck?”
Itzel spots the hummingbird farther down the street—a little blur of green flitting high and unnoticed over the throngs of people. “I think so.”
The woman kneels and peers into her eyes again. Her stare makes Itzel feel cold inside, and she shivers without realising it.
“Tell me, Itzel…” the Dead Queen says.
Itzel lowers her head, unable to look her in the eyes anymore.
“… are you really dead?”
Itzel doesn’t like the woman’s stare nor her tone of voice, and they don’t make her at all confident about giving an honest and straight answer. Instead, she says, “I think so.” The moment she says it, she realises it didn’t make for a very convincing lie, especially as she’s so nervous in the queen’s presence.
The queen points to her necklace hidden inside her dress. “May I see what you have around your neck?”
Itzel begins to shake even more now—and she realises she’s doing it this time. She doesn’t know how to escape from this, so she nods reluctantly. Her trembling hands reach for her necklace as she slowly starts to take it out from the collar of her dress. Suddenly, there’s a loud crack of thunder coming from above, and in an instant a wave of panic washes over the street, as people scream and jostle and stampede around them.
“Another storm is coming!” one of them yells.
“Already? But Hurakan sent one not long ago!” shouts another, who sounds more exasperated than scared. “What has angered him this time?”
A young man holding a spear, who looks like a city guard, blows a conch shell horn, then calls out to everyone on the street, “Take shelter at once! Another hurricane fast approaches!”
Amid the panic, an older man flounders his way through the mob and bumps into the Dead Queen as she’s kneeling, but at once recognises her, takes a hurried bow, and apologises profusely. “My sincere apologies, Supreme Lady Xux Ek! There’s another storm headed our way!”
More people accidentally shove their queen as the hysteria grows. She stands up and looks to the eastern sky—from what she can tell, it’s oddly still clear, without a hint of darkness to it. What could have caused that thunderclap? When she looks back down, Itzel is gone. She looks around, but the little girl has easily vanished into the crowd. She grates her teeth and clenches her fist.
Itzel is already running down the street to the white avenue. Once she’s beyond the cover of the canopies, the little rain cloud drops down to the ground and floats beside her.
She whispers to it, “Did you do that?”
The rain cloud lets out another soft rumble.
“Thanks! You really saved me back there! I promise I’ll take you to the rainforest now. You must be getting impatient!” She wonders if the feeling a rain cloud gets when it needs to rain is like what she feels when she really needs to pee, and now she can understand why it’s starting to get so impatient with her. In this case she’s thankful for its impatience, as it proved to be the perfect distraction for her to make an escape from that scary warrior queen.
She runs down the white road, where many people stop what they’re doing and stare at her, as if worried by the sight of her running—usually if someone’s running like that, there’s a reason for it, and a city that’s constantly beset by angry gods is probably on edge a lot of the time. They then hear the conch horns blaring from the palace guards.
“Has Hurakan sent another of his storms?” one of them cries.
Itzel realises that a lot of people seem to be under the impression that Hurakan is a man when she actually isn’t.
She passes the food stall where the vendor graciously gave her a much-needed breakfast, and the woman spots her.
“Hello again!” she shouts with a big smile, seemingly unfazed by the panic that has struck most of the market around her. “I see my jicamas gave you a lot of energy!”
Itzel waves to her, then hops down the flight of steps and runs down the street back to Lady Chel’s hut—it’s easy to spot from a distance thanks to all the trees that magically sprouted out from the middle of the street just outside her doorway. She remembers to take her sandals off before entering. Lady Chel is very busy cutting the trees in the middle of the hut, branch by branch, to remove them. Much to her relief, Quashy is lying awake on the table, no longer wrapped in vines, and his wound has been treated. He waves to her with his tail when he sees her, and there’s a small strangler vine coiled around it.
“You’re back!” he says, very surprised to see her. He notices a similar vine wrapped around Itzel’s left arm when she waves back, and says dryly, “Oh good, so we’re both strangled by debt.”
“If you will help this girl to the Rainforest of the South, consider your debt repaid, coati,” Lady Chel says while shearing the branches. She looks at Itzel. “The girl is alive. And being alive is a very risky thing to be in the Underworld. There’s no telling what lurks out there that would love the opportunity to prey on living flesh and blood. She’ll need someone to protect and guide her.”
Itzel walks up to Quashy. “I guess you’re still stuck with me.”
“You know we had a deal, right?” he whispers to her.
She then remembers that Quashy wanted her to take something from the city for him—she had almost forgotten, given everything she�
�s been through since then.
“He’ll need rest,” Lady Chel says.
Itzel thanks her but looks very anxious when she turns to Quashy. “No time for that,” she whispers to him. “I’ll just have to take something from the market on the way out, okay? But we need to leave now.” She points her snake-stick at his snout, ready to tap him again.
Quashy recoils at the sight of the snake-stick. "If you turn me into a snake one more time!" he snaps at her.
“I don’t know how else to hide you!”
“I’ve just the thing,” Lady Chel says, overhearing them. She walks to them holding a wicker basket woven with bamboo. “Take this. I made this basket with a striped bamboo I like to call the ‘large coati tail’, so it seems fitting that it be used to carry a coati in need.”
“Thank you, miss plant woman!” Itzel says very graciously. She asks Quashy, “Happy now?”
“I can’t say no to a free ride,” he says while inspecting the basket. “Is it too small to fit in a coati-sized hammock? Just to make it more comfortable.”
The basket has a top to cover it, so when she places Quashy inside, she covers it so he won’t be seen. She carries it to the doorway and slips on her sandals, but as soon as she’s outside the hut, she stops. "Wait." She puts the basket down in the corner around the hut and opens it.
The rain cloud flashes angrily and rumbles at her in protest again.
“I know, I know! This will be quick!” she tells the rain cloud, then gives Quashy a very suspicious look. "Show me what you have under you."
“I don’t have anything!” Quashy says, seemingly offended.
Itzel glares at him. “Move.”
He sighs and moves over to reveal a woven hair sash with rainbow-coloured stripes, folded neatly so he could completely hide it underneath him. “But it’s so pretty,” he says, stroking the sash with his nose lovingly. “Look at all the colours. And it has stripes, so it matches my tail. It’s like it was made for me!”
“It’s not yours,” she scolds him, “and she even gave us this basket to help you! And it’s even made of striped bamboo!”
