by Ian Gibson
Quashy nods, and Itzel still wishes she knew what a baktun was.
“But you have no arms or legs,” the captain says. “What kind of thief has no arms or legs?”
“One with a tail,” Quashy says with a smug smile. “Don’t forget the tail.”
Nine-Hands grits her teeth and clenches her many fists that tremble furiously. “This is the Banded Bandit? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“The ‘banded’ part makes sense though,” a spider monkey whispers to its captain while pointing to the coati’s very distinct ringed tail.
“I always suspected it was a cacomistle,” adds another. “I was very close!”
Quashy blinks at them. “What’s a cacomistle?”
“It doesn’t even know what a cacomistle is!” exclaims a spider monkey.
“Neither do I, to be honest,” confesses another.
“That definitely rules out the cacomistle theory then,” the other concludes, “as I imagine a cacomistle would know what a cacomistle is.”
The captain throws up all her arms in aggravation with her troop. “Great, so we’ve established it isn’t a cacomistle! Nor even a coati with arms and legs! Now stop debating theories and arrest that thieving coati!”
Quashy frowns. “How did you know I’m a coati? I’m wearing a mask.”
The monkeys exchange confused glances again, wondering if he’s joking or not. Some of them are grappling with Itzel’s arms, so she tilts her head leftward, indicating the one who’s swinging away with her necklace.
“Quashy, it’s getting away!” she screams.
The coati launches himself through the trees in pursuit, shooting out his ringed tail to impossible lengths and pulling himself forward by retracting it, almost as if it were a magical grappling hook, and he swiftly closes the distance between him and the spider monkey fleeing with the jade necklace.
The spider monkeys marvel at the limbless coati’s tree-swinging stunts.
“It’s poetic though, isn’t it?” one says. “That our captain’s archenemy has no arms or legs, while our captain has arms and legs to spare?”
The spider monkeys nod to each other. “Oh, yes, that is very poetic,” they whisper.
Nine-Hands hangs from the branch with her tail and points to the coati with all her hands and feet. “Stop chattering and go after him, you buffoons!” she orders her troop before swinging to another tree by her tail to pursue the thief. She passes by several howler monkeys sitting in the branches, munching on leaves and spectating the chase with great interest. “Get off your tails and help us too!” she yells at them.
One of the howler monkeys cups its ear with its hand as if pretending that it can’t hear the captain. “What?”
The other howler monkeys wail in laughter.
“Call for back-up!” Nine-Hands snarls at them. “And I’ll deal with you later!”
The howlers begrudgingly spit out the leaves and howl into the forest, their calls blaring as loud as horns.
Half of the troop shift their attention to the acrobatic coati, while the rest restrain Itzel. She struggles against them, but there are simply too many, tugging at her arms, legs, and hair, dragging her up the riverbank. Her snake-stick hisses at them, and a few screech and flinch in fright, but they’re shortly upon her again.
“Let me go!” she screams at them.
The spectating howlers in the treetops turn their attention to her.
“She’s the one who brought the rain!” one of them howls.
“And helped us save our shrine from the fire!” howls another.
They begin pelting the spider monkeys with a colourful barrage of fruit—figs, mangos, guavas, bananas, sapodillas, nances, tamarinds, and practically anything else they can use as ammunition growing in the trees of the Howling Forest. The spider monkeys let go of Itzel and retreat up the trees to take cover.
She uses the distraction to start running towards the sycamore holding the rope bridge. She sees more spider monkeys crossing over on the rope, so she turns to run deeper into the forest, but there she sees yet more spider monkeys swinging through the trees towards her, having responded to the calls of the howlers. With nowhere else to go, she runs to Rocky Creek, hoping that there might be some rocks over which she can cross the river, or as a last resort she might be able to swim across more easily than the wider and fiercer Forked Tongue River.
Quashy settles on a branch when he gets close enough, swirls his tail over his head like a lasso, and flings it out towards the spider monkey, whipping its hand and snatching the jade necklace in one swing. “I’ll be taking that, thanks!” Before the spider monkey can even react, the coati has already turned back and disappeared into the thick forest canopy.
“Give that back, you thieving coati!” screeches Nine-Hands as the brown and white blur speeds past her. She takes four small blowguns out of her pouch and, one after another, holds them to her mouth and blows darts at him in rapid succession, but Quashy’s simply too fast and dodges them all deftly.
“It’s not theft—it’s confiscation!” he retorts as he makes his escape.
Nine-Hands screeches and drums her blowguns against the branches furiously.
Itzel reaches the riverbank of Rocky Creek and raises her head to look at the first thing that nabs her attention—the massive ceiba tree known as the Mother of Trees. Gaps between the rain clouds have widened enough for her to behold it in all its splendour, with its branches spreading wide and shrouding the cursed forest in its great shadow. She stops gawking at it and turns her attention to the river before her, but she finds that the rocks are too spread out for her to cross Rocky Creek here. The current is strong here too, and she’s worried it might carry her into the Forked Tongue River where she’ll have no chance of fighting against it and might very well be carried all the way back to the Lake of Tears—if she doesn’t drown long before then, of course. But the monkeys are closing in and her time is running out.
“Quashy, where are you?” she whispers to herself. She’s wondering if he’s been arrested by the spider monkeys, or if he did succeed in stealing it and has simply gone off with it. Either way, she’s worried.
“Pssst!” hisses a voice.
The snake-stick points at a nearby tree, and she finds the coati there, hanging upside-down by his tail from one of its branches, with the jade necklace in his grinning mouth.
“I believe this is yours, my lady.”
“Quashy, you’re incredible!” She takes the jade necklace and puts it around her neck again, safely tucking it inside her dress. “Thank you so much!”
“It’s what friends are for.” He drops to the ground and bows his head. “And it is my speciality, after all. Maybe someday you’ll be as good as me, my thief-in-training.”
“I’m not sure about that mask though.”
Quashy pouts. “I have a secret identity to protect.”
She can’t imagine there are many coatis roaming around Xibalba with no arms and legs, and especially not many with magical tails that can stretch to such incredible lengths, but now isn’t the time to argue about it. “We need to cross the river!”
The spider monkeys swing to the trees next to them, now in much greater numbers than they had contended with just a moment ago.
“The human girl and coati thief are officially traitors to King Kukulkan!” the captain announces. “Escorting you back home was a courtesy, human girl, but we don’t show courtesy to traitors.” She points at them emphatically with as many arms and legs as she can spare. “Seize them both and take them to Mount Kukulkan at once!” she orders her troop. “The god-king will pass judgment on them for their treason.”
The monkeys begin climbing down the trees, and with reinforcements coming to join them, Itzel and Quashy find themselves surrounded on all sides save for the river behind them.
“I wish you knew how to swim,” Itzel whispers, stepping closer to the water.
Quashy whispers back, “Sorry, but I don’t have arms or legs and I have
n’t quite mastered the eel stroke.”
She looks at the black forest on the other side of Rocky Creek. Even though there’s a river between them, it’s the closest she’s ever been to it. The blackness between the trees instantly seizes all of her attention like a spell, and the trees ahead of her bend their trunks and branches, unfurling like curtains to reveal a path into the forest, inviting her to come inside.
The spider monkeys approach them, but Quashy slaps them back with a wide swing of his tail.
“You’re cornered now,” Nine-Hands tells them. “Surrender yourselves.”
But Itzel’s locked in a trance and doesn’t hear her. She steps into the shoal of the river, her eyes fixed on the bewitching blackness, her body moving towards it whether she wishes it to or not.
“What are you doing?” Quashy whispers. “Stop looking at it!”
A white turtle emerges from the water next to her feet, bearing a familiar black dot painted on its shell. “One!” it chirps loudly.
The turtle’s appearance somehow manages to snap Itzel out of her trance. She shakes her head and looks down at the water. “One Turtle!”
“Hello again. It looks like you could use a way across,” One Turtle says. “You can count on us!”
Itzel doesn’t hesitate to step on One Turtle’s shell. “One!” she says.
The river turtle starts to swim away from the shore.
She reaches out her hand to Quashy. “Come on!”
Quashy is hesitant at first, but after glancing back at the terrifying sight of Nine-Hands scampering towards him like a big tarantula, he wraps his tail around her arm and retracts it, pulling himself to her just before the spider monkeys are upon him.
A couple spider monkeys climb along an overhanging tree branch and try to take her snake-stick from her, tugging at the red scarf in its mouth.
“Let go!” she shouts as she tugs back.
The snake-stick suddenly opens its mouth, and both spider monkeys tumble backward and splash into the river, holding the red scarf between them.
Another turtle’s head pokes out of the water. “Two!” it chirps.
Itzel hops to it. “Two!”
She steps on the other river turtles as they appear, counting their respective numbers together:
“Three!”—“Four!”—“Five!”—“Six!”
With a running leap, two more spider monkeys land on the first turtle’s shell.
“You aren’t counting!” One Turtle scolds them before submerging into the river.
The monkeys slip and splash into the water, screeching and flailing their arms helplessly. Their comrades wade in the shoals to help them out of the river. A few spider monkeys draw and aim their blowguns, but Nine-Hands is quick to slap the blowguns out of their hands with her many arms.
“You fools! You might hit the Counting Turtles!” she chides her troop. “Numbers are sacred, do not forget! If you do them harm, you will bring a curse upon us! We might all forget how to count. And what a waste my twenty fingers and twenty toes would be, if I could no longer count with them!” she gasps in horror at the mere thought, while wiggling her multiplicity of fingers and toes.
When Itzel reaches the twentieth and final turtle, she’s able to hop to the other shore, and all twenty turtles swim to her.
“Thanks again, Counting Turtles!” she tells them.
“Don’t thank us—thank the seer!” they all say in unison, and, just as they did on the lake, the turtles disappear into the water one by one in reverse order, with the twentieth announcing, “Minus twenty!”, the nineteenth following, “Minus nineteen!”, and so on they go, until only One Turtle remains with its head above water.
“The seer will see you now,” One Turtle says. And with a chirp of “Minus one!” it vanishes into the water with the others.
The spider monkeys are all stuck on the opposite side of the riverbank, many of them soaking wet, chittering frustratedly.
Their captain, however, remains perfectly coolheaded as she reaches into her pouch. “I didn’t want to resort to this with you, seeing as you’re still alive, human girl, but you leave us no choice.” She takes out her blowguns again and with a complex, acrobatic shuffle of her many arms and legs she reloads them all with darts. “The turtles are gone now. Draw your blowguns!” she orders her troop.
The rest of the spider monkeys put their blowguns to their mouths and blow on them, firing darts across the river, but their efforts are in vain as the river is still too wide and they’re unable to shoot them from such a distance.
Quashy laughs. “Those are never going to reach us!” He waves his tail tauntingly.
Nine-Hands narrows her big black eyes framed by white circles that make her look like she’s wearing goggles, then connects her four small blowguns together to form one long blowgun.
“That’s not going to help you!” the coati taunts her from afar.
“It’s not for me,” the captain responds with a smirk. “Bring in the artillery!” she yells to her troop.
The spider monkeys part ways, giving space to a band of howler monkeys who descend from the trees behind them and scuttle to the shore. Nine-Hands arms one of them with her extended blowgun, and the other spider monkeys link their blowguns together and hand them to the howlers also.
“You better help us now,” Nine-Hands tells the howler monkeys, “or I’ll report you to the god-king himself! It doesn’t matter if she brought the rain and saved your shrine. To go against the King Kukulkan’s command is treason.”
The howler monkeys scowl at her and raise the blowguns to their mouths.
“Uh-oh,” Quashy says, suddenly struck with terror.
Itzel is just as uneasy. She remembers what a howler monkey managed to do to the trumpet on the summit of Mount Kukulkan—they have such powerful breath that they would most certainly be able to blow darts much farther than just the width of Rocky Creek.
“Run away and we will open fire!” Nine-Hands warns them. She then turns to her spider monkey troop and points upriver.
Several spider monkeys carrying ropes around their shoulders start running farther up Rocky Creek. Itzel guesses that they’ve been sent to find the nearest river ford over the rocks, and that they plan to use these ropes to bridge the creek, just as they had done with the Forked Tongue River.
“Ready!” yells Nine-Hands to the artillery of howlers.
She turns around to look at the path that has opened into the thick, shadowy jungle, framed by the tree branches that beckon her inside. “We have to go in there,” she tells Quashy as she sprints towards it.
Quashy is still clung tightly to her arm, but protests, “No, no, no, not a good idea at all! If we go in there, we’ll never find our way out!” He covers her eyes with his tail. “Don’t look!”
Itzel’s sprint slows. “We don’t have to go inside,” she says. “We can just hide behind one of the trees on the edge.”
“Aim!” yells the captain.
“Also not a good idea,” Quashy says nervously, but he lowers his tail reluctantly so she can see again. “But it’s a better one at least.”
“Fire!”
The first volley of darts whizz through the air towards them. Itzel runs and screams, and her snake-stick leaps out of her hand, spreads its wooden wings wide, and strikes several of the darts in mid-air to shield them. The other darts fly past them with blinding speed and pierce the trees lining the edge of the cursed forest. Itzel ducks behind a cacao tree on the eaves of the black forest.
“Keep your back turned to the forest at all times,” Quashy warns her. “Whatever you do, don’t look into it. I’m not going in after you if you head in there.”
Itzel nods. They both carefully peek around the tree trunk to check on their assailants. Much to their surprise, the howler monkeys are all on their backs, howling and whooping as they scramble back to their feet—they must have fired the blowguns with such force that they’ve all flown backwards from the recoil. The spider monkeys are fumbling thr
ough their pouches to give them more darts to reload their blowguns, which at least buys Itzel and Quashy some time to figure out their escape before the second volley.
Quashy loops his tail around the tree trunk and takes out one of the darts stuck in it. He sniffs the tip of the dart. “I’ve heard about these darts. They’re laced with the venom of Kukulkan himself. If it hits you, it’ll put you into an eternal sleep. That was a close call.”
Itzel looks worriedly at her snake-stick, whose wooden wings are covered in holes and scratches, but its eyes are still wide open. She gathers it must be immune to the venom since it’s powered by Kukulkan’s magic—moreover, it’s a stick, and she makes the educated guess that sticks don’t tend to succumb to snake venom anyway. That said, the darts really did a number on its wings, judging from all the scrapes on them. She’s grateful that it protected them, but she can’t expect it to do it again without suffering much more damage. “What do we do now?”
Quashy looks across the fork in the river to the watchtower. “Hold on tight.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to see if I can at least swing you across the Forked Tongue River. It’ll be a long-shot since you’re heavy.”
Itzel glowers at him. “I’m not heavy!”
“Then you can run into Gibnut Forest. You already know where the pathway is. Just make sure Kinich Ahau doesn’t see you. Meanwhile I’ll work on untying their rope bridge so they can’t come across. How’s that for an escape plan, my thief-in-training?”
She smiles at him. “Thanks, Quashy. We do make a good team.”
They hear the captain yelling from the opposite shore again, “Ready!”
She puts her snake-stick under her armpit and holds Quashy tightly with both hands as he swirls his tail around.
“Aim!”
“Wait, not yet!” Itzel warns Quashy.
But Quashy shoots out his tail regardless, aiming and extending it towards the tower.
“Fire!”
A second flurry of darts strikes the trees around them. Quashy yelps and hurriedly pulls his tail back within the cover behind the trees.
