by Ian Gibson
“I told you to wait!” Itzel scolds him.
“We’re right on the edge of the witch’s forest!” he says impatiently. “We can’t stick around here any longer! I don’t know about you, but I want to keep my eyes!”
She takes another peek around the tree trunk—the howler monkeys are again on their backs from the recoil of their fire, but the spider monkeys are helping them back to their feet. “Now’s our chance,” she says. “Quick!”
Quashy tries to take aim again, but his head wavers woozily.
“Quashy, what’s the matter?” she asks worriedly.
He brings the rest of his tail up, and they’re both horrified by the sight of a dart stuck in the end of it.
“At least the Banded Bandit went out with one last theft,” Quashy says. He regards Itzel with glazed eyes. “Bury me with treasure, please. As much as you can find.” He slumps over in her hands.
Itzel falls to her knees, puts the coati on the ground, and hurriedly removes the dart. Quashy collapses backwards, hitting his head on a fallen cacao pod.
“Quashy!” she cries as she holds his head upright. “How can I treat it? Tell me!”
He moans drowsily, “Probably... a plant… can help...”
“Yes, you’re right!” She remembers that Lady Chel, the medicine woman who treated her, had told her that there’s a plant to treat almost anything. “Do you know which one? Tell me where to find it!”
“I know... where to... find it…” he mumbles, his numbed tongue drooping down the side of his slobbering mouth.
“Where?” She nudges him to try to keep him awake. “Where, Quashy?”
Quashy’s eyes slowly close. “In the crypts... lies the fabled treasure... of past kings...”
Itzel shakes him frustratedly. “I’m not talking about treasure!”
But he doesn’t respond. He lies motionless except for the slow rises and falls of his chest from his weakened breaths.
“Quashy!” She removes the cloth wrapped around his head—it was a silly mask, anyway—and fans his face with her hand. “Quashy, wake up!” She hugs him, beginning to cry. “Quashy, please, please wake up!”
She feels a weight press down on her shoulders, and a sharp chill crawls down her spine. She’s felt this sensation before, in her dreams. She freezes and holds in her sobs.
“I see you,” a familiar voice calls to her from behind, coming from deep within the black forest.
“But I’m not looking at you,” she says, firmly turned away from it. “Leave us alone.”
“Still you choose to look away from your path forward,” the voice says. “Yet only by following the path will you be able to open your eyes fully, as well as the eyes of your sleepy friend.”
“You’re using a spell on me. I almost fell off that tower, then almost drowned in the river, all because of you.”
“It is no spell of mine,” the voice responds. “Those who enter my forest do so only because they want to, even if they are yet to know it themselves.”
“I don’t want to,” Itzel says bluntly.
“Yes, you do. Tell me, when I told you to follow the snake, did you get out of bed, run outside in the rain, through the puddles and mud, down the path of your ‘forest of good luck’ against your will? Or because you wanted to?”
Itzel is quiet.
“Only between these leaves will you find the answers you seek, Itzel.”
Itzel stands up, keeping her back to the forest, trying her utmost to not turn to face it. She peeks around the trunk of the cacao tree—the howler monkeys have readied their blowguns again, staring across the river and waiting patiently for any sign of movement. A few of them step dazedly into the river, as if they’ve been enchanted by the black forest also, but they are swiftly met with smacks on the backs of their heads from Nine-Hands to snap them out of their trance before being dragged back to shore. She looks to her right—more spider monkeys are racing along the riverbank towards her, having managed to ford the river over the slippery rocks.
“And if we go in there, will we come out again?” she asks the voice in the forest.
“I can guide you,” the voice replies. “But only you have the eyes to see your own way out.”
Itzel doesn’t find that answer very reassuring, but she knows she’s run out of options. She sees the cracked cacao pod by her feet and has an idea. She pries it open with the tail end of her snake-stick, scoops out the white flesh inside, takes out the beans, and wraps them up in the black cloth that Quashy was using as his mask, and holds it up as a sack. She hopes she might be able to leave them as a trail so she can find her way out of the forest again. At least it’s better than going in there with no plan at all.
“Open wide and say ‘ahhh’,” she tells her snake-stick, opening her mouth wide.
The snake-stick does the same—except of course that it makes more of a “hsss” than an “ahhh”—and she puts the ends of the sack in its opened mouth. The snake-stick clamps down on it, holding it tightly in its mouth. She picks up Quashy’s limp body and slings him over her shoulder. She takes a deep breath, shuts her eyes tightly, turns around, and steps into the black forest.
Itzel’s adventure in the Underworld will continue in...
BOOK TWO
The Lord of the Underworld
Table of Contents
A Brief Introduction to the Underworld
PART ONE
The Place in the Shadows
A Birthday Trip
The Tale of the Hero Twins
Thirty-Two Minutes till Midnight
A Forest of Howls and Flames
Sweet Scents and Sly Stripes
The Little Man with Backwards Feet
The Tapir and the Woodpecker
The Serpent in the Clouds
The Sleeping Crocodile
Night-Breakfast with the Dead
Drifting on Memories
The Sacred Lily Pad
The Heart of the Storm
PART TWO
Twenty-Four Minutes till Midnight
A Debt to the Plants
The Daykeeper
The City of the Dead
The Old Man and the Desk
The Flight to the Pier
The Isle of Maiden Rock
Counting Turtles and Raindrops
Riding the Sun
Iguana Lounge
Twenty-One Minutes till Midnight
The Hands of Kukulkan
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