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

by Ian Gibson

  The queen is standing in the middle of the white road. She has an arrow notched and drawn in her bow, pointing it towards the street where her soldiers are running, but when she sees no sign of the girl, she relaxes her bow and tilts her head to ponder where she might have disappeared to. She orders her soldiers to start searching inside the huts along the street, but right after shouting this, her eyes fall upon the white road and follow it from one side to the other, as she envisions the culvert running underneath it. She draws her bow again, pivots around and sees Itzel running down the opposite street, and just before the girl disappears under one of the many canopies hanging across the street to provide shade, the Dead Queen looses her arrow. It arcs and rips through one of the canopies, landing a fair bit ahead of Itzel.

  Itzel gasps at the sight of it—that was too close for comfort! “She’s shooting arrows at me!” she screams.

  “That’s just a warning shot,” Quashy says reassuringly. “I’ve gotten plenty of those, trust me. But they must really want this plant back!”

  She sees the culvert at the base of the city wall, and runs towards it, making sure to stay under the protection of the canopies as much as possible. The culvert in the wall is much smaller than the one under the white road, and there’s no edge for her to walk on, so she has no choice but to jump into the ditch, and she stoops down as low as she can while keeping her nose above the water to crawl her way through. The wicker basket mostly floats in the water, so she pushes it in front of her as she crawls.

  “This is exciting!” Quashy says, wobbling around in the basket that’s half-underwater. “Feels like a real heist! We’re partners in crime now!”

  The rain cloud balks at the idea of having to squeeze through a tunnel that’s even narrower than the last one, so this time it simply ascends straight upward and floats over the city wall. It passes between a couple of city guards patrolling the wall, and lets out an angry, piercing thunderclap, which sends them both running away in terror. One of them blows his conch shell horn to call the attention of the other guards on the ground. The other instinctively draws her arrow and looses it at the rain cloud, although she’s not all that surprised to see that the arrow simply whistles right through it to no effect—but seeing as she’s not accustomed to attacking clouds, she’s at a loss for options.

  Itzel emerges on the other side of the wall, where the water in the culvert flows through a groove cut into the steeply sloped stone embankment on which the city wall was built, and she slides all the way down, where the water then flows into an irrigation ditch to water the milpas. She gets up and steps out of the ditch, and sighs when she sees her dress is soaking wet and dirty again already, after Lady Chel had just cleaned it for her, but she’s relieved that she’s at least made it outside the city. She sees the rain cloud descend to her from the city wall. The sky is darkening, and the thunder is growing louder as the latest storm fast approaches. The milpas are mostly empty as the farmers must have left them to take shelter. She runs through them, using the rows of cornstalks as cover.

  The Dead Queen reaches the end of the street where she had seen the girl run to, and the culvert she had crawled into. It’s too small for her to fit through, so she finds the nearest stairwell to the top of the city wall and runs up the steps. She finds the two guards there staring at the rain cloud as it flies over the milpas towards the pier.

  “Supreme Lady Xux Ek!” they both say in shock in the presence of their queen, and immediately take a reverential bow.

  The queen stares out into the milpas, seeing no sign of the girl, but she knows she’s hiding in there somewhere, as the rain cloud must be following her.

  “She’s with the small cloud!” she shouts to the wall guards in the distance, and they pass the word on along the wall. She takes off her quiver of arrows and throws them over the edge, then steps on the parapet.

  “My queen! It’s too high!” one of the guards warns her.

  But the Dead Queen ignores the warning. She jumps off and drops down the height of the city wall. She then hurls her bow high up in the air right before she lands on the steeply sloped embankment with a forward roll that eases the fall—all with the expert finesse of an acrobat—and catches her bow while sliding down the rest of the way. Just before hitting the ground she pushes off the bottom of the embankment so she’s already on her feet, fixes her calabash-shaped bun of hair that’s now leaning over her forehead, and sprints forward, dipping down without slowing to snatch up her quiver of arrows, which she slings around her shoulder as she dashes through the milpas directly towards the southern pier at a speed that one would expect more of a deer than a two-legged human.

  The two wall guards hang their mouths open as they see their queen disappear through the cornstalks, seemingly unharmed and unfazed by the long drop.

  The man breaks the awestruck silence. “I... bet I can do that.”

  The woman scoffs. “We both know you can’t.”

  The stalks of corn are rippling in the strengthening wind, and they’re so tall and dense that they block most of Itzel’s view of the shoreline, but once she reaches the end of the fields, she spots the pier and dashes straight towards it. She glances to her left and catches sight of more soldiers, who have rounded the corner of the city wall and are heading straight for the pier also—they must have heard the conch shell horn from the guards patrolling the city wall and caught sight of her rain cloud. They’re running much faster than she can, and even though they’re still quite far, she knows they’ll easily make it to the pier before she has any hope of taking off with one of the canoes.

  “I’m not going to be able to make it!” she shouts to Quashy when she sees them. The wind is blowing hard, but she finds herself almost thankful for it, as at least it’s cooling her off from the day’s heat.

  Fishermen are walking away from the pier, hurriedly hauling in their early morning catch before the storm arrives, and they stare perplexedly as a little girl runs past them, holding a stick in the shape of a snake in her armpit, carrying and screaming at her wicker basket, and being followed close behind by a small rain cloud.

  The rain cloud lets out a soft rumble to Itzel, as if to acknowledge the situation, and starts wetting the ground beneath it to leave a trail of puddles and mud, before rising in the air to fly towards the oncoming soldiers. It grows in size—at least ten times as large as it was before—and dumps rain on them as forcefully as a raging waterfall, and all the soldiers slip and fall in the sudden onrush of water.

  One of them drops his spear in surrender and kneels in the mud. “The girl has a cloud of Chaac!” he shouts. “We mustn’t go against the will of the Rain god himself?”

  But another soldier grabs his arm and hauls him up to his feet. “Supreme Lady Xux Ek ordered us to get the girl, so we’re getting the girl!” he shouts at him, before another gush of water from above sends him slipping headfirst into a puddle.

  Itzel reaches the long stone pier, looking over her shoulder as she runs to marvel at what her trusty rain cloud has done to help. The soldiers are covered in mud and still keep slipping whenever they try to stand up, and the rain cloud is returning to her with a triumphant flash of lightning and crack of thunder. But out of the corner of her eye she catches a glimpse of a figure running through the milpas the same way she came. She screams upon discovering who it is—the Dead Queen, who’s somehow managed to follow her all this way. She can’t even imagine how, as she definitely couldn’t have fit through the culvert. The queen nimbly jumps over all the puddles that the rain cloud left to thwart anyone following them.

  “Can you do anything else?” Itzel asks the rain cloud.

  The cloud flashes and rumbles again, then dissipates in a vaporous poof.

  The Dead Queen stops at the bottom of the pier, draws her bow, and aims. A thick white mist suddenly rolls in front of her like a curtain, blocking her view. She growls and looses her arrow anyway. It whistles through the air and pierces the back of Itzel’s sandal as she runs, causin
g her to trip over and drop the basket. The coati tumbles out of it but doesn’t hesitate to start slithering towards the end of the pier. Itzel holds up her foot and pulls the arrow sticking out of her sandal—what kind of crazy shot was that? She then notices the mist now shrouding the entire pier behind her, giving her some much-needed cover. She jumps to her feet and scoops up the basket as she continues running. The Dead Queen relaxes her bow and runs into the mist after them.

  The wind from the storm is gradually picking up, so Itzel doubts the rain cloud will be able to hold its mist together for long without being blown away. She reaches the very end of the pier, where Quashy is wrapping himself around a bollard. He quickly and deftly unties one of the smaller dugout canoes with his tail, while at the same time coiling along the mooring to get into the canoe—he is, after all, an expert at stealing and fleeing at the same time.

  “All ready!” he says. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Itzel climbs down into the canoe and realises she’s actually thankful—just this once—that the coati is so very good at stealing things, although she thinks twice about mentioning it. She puts down the basket with the seedling she got from Lady Chel, pushes the canoe off as hard as she can to get as much of a head start as possible, and begins paddling feverishly with the one oar it had inside. Her legs are aching from all the running, not to mention her fall, but it’s now her arms that have a lot of work ahead of them. Quashy tries his best to help by paddling with his tail, even if it doesn’t accomplish much.

  The wind is already so strong that the canoe lurches in the water, and the waves are taking them westward as she struggles to row southward, but at the moment she only worries about getting as far away as possible from the island and, most importantly, the Dead Queen.

  “Mister Rumbles!” she shouts. “We have to go!”

  The wind is blowing away the dense mist hanging over the pier, and it curls around as long, white tendrils that slowly regather into the little rain cloud, but despite its best efforts to fight against the winds, it’s easily being whisked away. As the mist draws open like a curtain, the Dead Queen appears at the end of the pier, her bow drawn and aimed directly at Itzel.

  Itzel glances over her shoulder and gasps at the sight of her. “That doesn’t look like a warning shot!” She’d row even faster if she could, but she’s already moving her arms as fast as they can possibly go.

  Quashy immediately ducks for cover inside the canoe. “Duck down!”

  The Dead Queen narrows her sharp eyes, turns their gaze to the approaching storm clouds coming from the East, and then, much to Itzel’s surprise, she slowly lowers her bow. A gust of wind almost knocks the woman off her feet, and she hears a godly voice that’s carried with it.

  “Next time you want to tell me something, come and say it yourself, you wimp of a tapir!” cries the angry voice of Hurakan, which fills the air around them. “Instead of hiding behind a little girl! What kind of god hides behind a little girl? You’re pathetic! Do you hear me? Pathetic!”

  The storm engulfs the lake in a monstrous swirl of dark clouds flashing with lightning and alight with fire, and before the Dead Queen can even think about unmooring a boat to pursue the girl, Hurakan’s rage-storm swooshes over the pier and engulfs her too.

  The Isle of Maiden Rock

  The winds and waves rock their canoe so violently that it’s on the cusp of flipping over. Itzel brings her oar in as she’s worried that she’ll lose it—it’s the only one that was in the boat—and she huddles down to the floor of the boat, finding it pointless to row in these waves. The only steerer now is Hurakan’s fury.

  “We’re going to capsize in this storm!” Quashy shouts to her over the wails of the wind while his tail is clung to her leg. “We’ll drown!”

  Itzel panics. The storm came much faster than she was expecting, and now she wonders if she should have just remained in the city after all—although the soldiers would have eventually found her. She didn’t realise the alternative would be drowning in one of Hurakan’s storms!

  “Getting caught in two of her storms in less than a day?” Quashy squeaks. “What bad luck!”

  Luck! Itzel remembers something, and takes out the basket from underneath the seat, opens the lid, and picks up the red hibiscus petal she kept inside—Lady Chel told her if she needed some luck, she could ask the petal for it. She clasps her fingers around it tightly and closes her eyes. “We need good luck,” she whispers. “Please!”

  A moment later, the canoe stops rocking, and the shrieks of the winds die down. Itzel and Quashy poke their heads over the sides of the canoe and witness the strangest sight—the storm continues to rage unabated, but its winds and waves are curling around the canoe, with the water beneath them perfectly still, and not even so much as a breeze in the air they’re breathing, like they’re being protected by some kind of invisible, spherical shield.

  “Um? What just happened?” asks the baffled coati.

  Itzel opens her hand. The red petal resting in her palm has withered black. “I used up a wish of good luck.”

  “Whoa, we’re in a luck bubble?” Quashy springs up and down in celebration. “I’ve never seen one before! It’s not going to last long though, so row quickly!”

  Itzel picks up the oar again and continues paddling while gawking in amazement at the dark storm happening around them, but not to them. It’s all very surreal for her, despite having seen quite a lot of surreal things lately. The farther she rows, the more the surrounding storm calms and the more the sky lightens, which at least gives them hope that they’re reaching the edge of the storm soon. After a while, Itzel starts to feel a breeze on her face, and the water gradually becomes choppier—she guesses this means the luck-magic is starting to wear off, but they’ve covered a fair distance in the meantime.

  “Guess we’re out of luck now,” Quashy says, peeking over the canoe.

  The waves begin to carry their canoe westward for a while, but at least there’s no longer the threat of capsizing, and Itzel eventually manages to wrest the canoe from the storm’s grip. She turns the boat southward and starts rowing that way, towards the black clouds of the forest fire, and is relieved that the canoe is finally going the way she wants it to without a fight.

  “I never thought Hurakan’s short temper would ever save us, but it did, in a way,” Quashy says. “Otherwise, those soldiers would have easily caught up with us.”

  Itzel puts down the paddle to rest a bit, now that they’ve reached calmer waters. Unfortunately, now that the storm clouds have cleared and the Sun is beating down on them, the heat is beginning to set in again.

  “Now that that’s over with, I have to ask,” Quashy says, pointing in the direction of the island they’re leaving, consumed in the clouds of the storm, “who in the thirteen heavens was that?”

  “The Dead Queen,” she says, before splashing her face with cold water from the lake, as she’s already feeling the heat again. She’s worried that very soon even the water in the lake won’t be cool enough to prevent her from fainting.

  Quashy retreats underneath the seat in the canoe for shade. “So that’s her. I should have guessed that, but I didn’t know what she looked like.”

  “You know about her?”

  “Who hasn’t? We’ve all heard the stories about the Dead Queen. Count yourself very lucky that you’re still alive, because if the Dead Queen wanted you dead, you’d be dead already.”

  “She had a clear shot of me from the pier, but she lowered her bow,” Itzel says, still shaken by the image of the woman with her arrow aimed at her.

  “She’s an expert archer,” Quashy says. “She could have done that shot with her eyes closed.”

  She raises her foot to inspect the hole in the back of her sandal. “She even shot me right in the sandal! That’s how I tripped. What a crazy shot!”

  “She’s definitely after you, but she must know you’re alive and want to keep you that way,” Quashy says. “Beats me as to why.”

 
Itzel thinks about how fast the woman could sprint—far faster than any of the soldiers with her—and how she leapt over the rain cloud’s puddles with ease, and especially how she shot her arrows. “Do you think she might be a goddess?”

  “No, she’s even scarier. They talk about her like she’s one of the gods, but she’s just a human. I thought they were just myths, but it looks like they might actually be true after all.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for starters, did you know there used to be a god of archery? He was the Death god’s chief warlord who led his armies of the dead for him.”

  “There was? He isn’t around anymore?”

  “Nope. What I’ve heard about the Dead Queen is that she has some kind of religious obsession with self-perfection. She’s spent her whole afterlife training herself, and she has a gift as an archer especially. Over time she got so good with a bow and arrow that whispers started going around that she might have become as good as even the Archer god. The Archer god caught wind of this, so one day he challenged her to a contest of skill. He had done it to set an example to everyone that mortals could never best a god, that no matter how good they might appear to be, they’ll always be a step behind. It was to put the Queen in her place.”

  “And she won,” Itzel guesses. Considering her impossible shot that hit her sandal, she wouldn’t be surprised.

  Quashy nods and whistles in a way that gives the impression that not only did the Archer god lose, but he was even soundly crushed. “As you can imagine, it’s very embarrassing for a god to be beaten at something they’re supposed to be the god of. Especially as that had never happened before. So, the Death god then wondered what’s the point of an Archer god who isn’t the best at archery anymore, and, seeing as he had the power to kill even a god, he sacrificed him. No more Archer god.”

  Itzel cringes. What kind of god would so freely kill other gods? As scary as the Dead Queen seemed, the Death god still sounds scarier. “Are you sure he didn’t then make her a goddess too? Like Kukulkan did for Kinich Ahau and his sister?”