Charlie Hernández & the Castle of Bones

by Ryan Calejo

  Which, by the way, was insanely cool (at least to me) because I’d grown up hearing all about these little dudes. Now, this wasn’t the first time I’d run into a muki in real life; V and I had spied a whole bunch of them working in some kind of coffin manufacturing plant beneath La Rosa Cemetery back in Miami. But I’d never gotten this up close and personal with one, and I was actually feeling the same kind of tingly, nervous-excited rush I’d felt when my dad had first taken me to check out the hippopotamus exhibit at Zoo Miami. I had to fight the urge to reach out and pet the dude!

  “Tell him we’re looking for El Dorado,” Violet whispered to Saci.

  “You tell ’im!” he snapped. “They speak Spanish. I Portuguese!”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said, turning to the muki. “¡Hola, amigo! Estamos buscando the City of Gold.” I was trying to sound really friendly, but also trying to keep my cool; I didn’t want him to think I was some kind of silly fanboy (which I sort of was).

  A sprinkle of pulverized gold drifted down from the muki’s thick beard as he shook his head. “¿Qué buscan?”

  “The City of Gold? El Dorado? ¿Sabes dónde está?”

  “Ah, El Dorado… sí, sí. ¿Cómo no?” His tone was flat, his voice as rough as the rock he mined and as hard as the tools he used to mine it. He took another step toward us, the massive silver head of his ax hanging by his ankles. “But first I have a question for you, amigo.… Why have you come to this place? Do you intend to take the rest of our land? Or just to spill the rest of our blood?”

  I blinked. “What? No. We—we’re just looking for a friend.… We think she might’ve passed through El Dorado, that’s all.”

  “We mean you no harm,” Violet assured him. “We just want to find our friend, like he said.”

  Even with V working on him too, the muki didn’t seem to be warming up to us. If anything, he looked like he was getting angrier. His eyes narrowed in a not-so-friendly way. “That’s what your kind told us the first time. Before the dawn of the Sun Wars. But look around you.… My hermanos and I have been driven underground. You stole our cities from us. You stole our wealth. You even stole the sunlight from our eyes and its warmth from our skin. You forced us to make our homes in the deepest darkness.”

  “I tol’ you this was bad idea…,” Saci rasped into my ear. “I tol’ you, tol’ you, tol’ you!”

  Violet shushed him, banging him on the side with her elbow, as the muki said, “Tell me, enemigos, do you intend to finish what your ancestors started?”

  I heard myself swallow. Enemigos. He’d just called us enemies. I guess it was safe to say that this conversation wasn’t exactly heading in a pleasant direction.…

  So, instead of words, I tried offering the little guy a nice bright smile, the extra-toothy, extra-dimply one I reserved for my teachers when I needed a couple of extra days to turn in a homework assignment. Unlike my teachers, however, the muki was totally unfazed.

  “Look, if you could just point us in the direction of El Dorado,” Violet said, “we’ll get out of your hair—oh, or beard, in your case.… We just want to find our friend.”

  “No, you just want to find gold…,” said a new voice. “That’s what your kind craves most.” The fingers of panic began to close around my neck as three more mukis emerged from the darkness. These, too, wore miner’s outfits and hard hats and carried a mix of shovels and pickaxes. And they didn’t seem friendly. Like, at all. Convincing one skeptical cave dwarf to help us was going to be hard enough. But four…? Yeah, didn’t think that was gonna happen.

  Worse, we were now outnumbered. They might’ve all been a couple inches shorter than us, but they were carrying weapons and also happened to be incredibly thick, built like miniature fullbacks, which made me not like our chances so much.

  The oldest (which was the one who had spoken) held an old-fashioned oil lamp over his head, casting eerie shadows across the cave walls and over the folds of his craggy face. He said, “You crave it more than life itself.…”

  “Hey, that’s not true!” I objected, and then fumbled back a step, bumping into Violet as two of the mukis raised their heavy tools like they were getting ready to start swinging.

  Not good! I thought, and felt V’s fingers wrap tightly around my arm, which probably meant that she agreed. But right at that moment—thankfully!—I remembered one very important fact about mukis: these itty-bitty rock-smashers loved to make pacts! My abuela had told me countless stories of them striking deals with miners and making those miners insanely rich. Most of the stories centered around the miner not holding up his end of the bargain (which most of the time was as simple as never telling anyone they’d met a muki), and the mukis making him pay, sometimes causing cave-ins, injuring the miner, or causing a tunnel collapse to shut off access to the mine.

  But the point was, making deals with people seemed to be something they did for fun—like, it was ingrained in their DNA or something—which gave me a bright idea.

  “I wanna make a pact!” I shouted, and it was as if I’d spoken magical words.

  Instantly all four of them froze. They blinked their big shiny eyes at me, once, twice, then slowly began lowering their tools.

  ¡Muchas gracias, abuelita!

  “What pact would you like to make with us?” asked the one with the studded boots, leaning lightly on his pickax as he scrunched his thick black eyebrows together. His voice was still as deep and rough as before, but there was something else in it now—intrigue, maybe?

  “Simple,” I said. “You guys show us the way to El Dorado and we’ll make sure no one ever hears about this little meeting. Plus, as a bonus, we’ll throw in bagged lunches for everyone!” Now, that probably sounded ridiculous (no—I know that sounded ridiculous because Violet was giving me a look that was all like, Charlie, are you still on planet earth?). But if I knew anything about mukis it was that a) they valued their privacy above just about everything, and b) they had a thing for bagged lunches—they’d steal them from miners on the regular.

  The mukis considered my offer, gathering into a tight circle and whispering quietly among themselves while Violet and Saci watched them with funny looks on their faces.

  Finally a lady muki looked up at me and said, “What kind of bagged lunches…?”

  I glanced at Violet, hoping she had a bit more catering experience than me. “How about some bologna sandwiches, apples, and a few cartons of milk?” she said.

  Which sounded pretty good to me. Grinning stupidly—but nodding agreeingly—I turned back to the mukis. “Think that just about covers all the food groups! Whaddya say?”

  The mini ax-swingers went back to whispering; I could hear tell they were speaking Spanish but couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. A few seconds later the same muki turned to me again and said, “Will you throw in some buñuelos as well?”

  Violet and I looked at each other, sort of shrugging our shoulders and nodding our heads. I mean, it sounded fairly reasonable to me. After all, who doesn’t like buñuelos?

  “Sure, why not?” I said, grinning brightly.

  The muki holding the oil lamp grinned back at me. And just as brightly. “Then I think it’s settled,” he said. But right as he began to extend a tiny meaty hand in my direction (mukis always shake hands to finalize a pact), the muki standing beside him, the one in the studded boots, took a good long look at Saci, and I watched in what felt like total slow-mo as his huge steel shovel slipped out from between his fingers. It clattered nosily to the ground, the sound like thunder in the quiet of the cave. “Ay, madre mía,” the muki murmured, touching one suddenly trembling hand to his beard, “do my eyes deceive me, or is that truly Saci Pererê?”

  Saci laughed. Too hard. Too loud. “No, no, no, no, no… You are mistaken, hermano. I not Saci. I someone else. Someone you never ever ever meet before, okay?”

  The muki holding the lamp shone it at the nearest wall, throwing a square of bleary light over what looked like a WANTED poster. And whose face was gr
inning back at us from the WANTED poster? Saci’s. Who else? According to the poster, Saci was numbers one, two, three, five, and seven on their most-wanted list. Oh, man, what could he have possibly done to these guys? Replaced all their gold nuggets with Chicken McNuggets?

  “Dat’s definitely not me…,” Saci said, shaking his head. “Maybe some long-lost relative. Very handsome guy, though. Beautiful eyes. Silky skin.”

  “That is the rascal who took our Joya del Sol and replaced it with a giant hot-air balloon!” shouted one of the mukis.

  Saci let out a snort of laughter, then tried to cover it up with a cough.

  “¡Lo mató!” cried another muki, raising her silver ax, but the little miner with the oil lamp snatched it out of her hands.

  “¡Espera! We bring him back alive, and our reward will be great.… Then our people can throw a feast and boil him in front of our children!”

  “Guys, violence is never the answer,” I said, trying to pass on an important lesson my mother had taught me. “I usually want to strangle him too—believe me. But it’s not worth it.”

  One of the mukis smiled at me. “You speak muy wisely, amigo.…”

  “Sim, he is very wise!” Saci agreed. Then he leaned over and whispered, “The egg… Now is the time to use THE EGG!”

  “Amigo,” said another one of the little dudes, “take a look at your reflection in my shovel.… Tell me what you see.”

  There was something about the way he’d said “amigo” that I really didn’t trust, but not wanting to offend the dude, I leaned down to look at his shovel, and the last thing I saw was my own confused expression, and the last thing I heard was Saci begging me to bring out the egg, and then the backside of the muki’s shovel clunked against my forehead—

  And everything went dark.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Sometime later I woke to a strange noise. Tink, tink, tink. Tink, tink, tink. It sounded like someone was picking at a block of ice with a chisel.

  I groaned, opening my eyes, and had to squint against the harsh blast of yellow sunlight blazing down on me. For a moment I just lay there, listening to the soft tinking sounds, wondering where those evil little dudes had decided to dump my unconscious body. But as my vision adjusted, I realized the glowing golden circle above me wasn’t the sun at all, but the ceiling. Confused, I propped myself up on my forearms. I was lying on a cot, in one corner of some kind of ultra-luxury prison: smooth gold walls, golden cell bars, yards of golden thread sewn into the sheets and pillows underneath me—there was even a tiny golden toilet in the corner. Where the—

  “Oh, would you give it a rest already?” said a familiar voice. It was Violet.

  I turned and saw her sitting cross-legged in the opposite corner of the cell. She had her hair pulled back from her face in a fresh ponytail and didn’t really look all that worried, actually—mostly just annoyed.

  “You’re never going to get through,” she said. “You’re just gonna get us—” She broke off when she looked over and saw me sitting up. “Charlie!”

  She rushed over, crouching beside the cot.

  I rubbed the center of my forehead where I could feel a huge, swollen knot. Oh, right. The shovel… “Where are we?” I asked her. “And how the heck did we get here?”

  “They brought us over on mine carts,” Violet explained, “then locked us in this cell. You’ve been out for, like, ten minutes and change.”

  I heard that soft tink-tink-tink again and looked around for its source: Saci was kneeling in front of the golden cell bars, chipping away at them with a tiny chisel and an even tinier hammer. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He glanced my way briefly, then continued chipping away. “Trabajando.”

  “And what exactly are you working on, if I may ask?”

  “What it look like, bobo? I take these from one of the mukis after they knocked me unconscious. They got me right after you.”

  V looked confused. “Don’t you mean before they knocked you unconscious?”

  “No, I’m pretty sure it was after.… What can I say? It’s a gift.”

  I held up my hands. “So let me get this straight. You stole from the same guys who are currently getting ready to boil you for stealing from them in the first place?”

  “Ei! I no steal.… Saci ain’t no thief. I the greatest prankster that ever live! But dat’s the circle of life, you unnestand…?”

  “Actually, Simba, that’s not the circle of life.”

  “It’s the circle of my life.” He grinned at us. “Anyway, I figure, we all gonna die—what’s the harm?” And he went back to chipping.

  “Charlie, we gotta get out of here,” Violet said, looking like she might strangle him if we didn’t. “We have to get to El Dorado already; we’re running out of time!”

  “Get to El Dorado?” Saci glanced back at us, his eyebrows raised halfway up his forehead. “Look around you.… You in El Dorado!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  It took a second for that to sink in. Then Violet and I scrambled to our feet, climbing up onto the tiny golden toilet to peer through the even tinier window above it. And my jaw instantly dropped. All I could manage was “Whoa…”

  The view was incredible. From our little prison cell maybe twenty stories up, I could see a vast, gleaming city spread out below us like a sunrise—the golden city of El Dorado. It was way bigger than I had imagined, probably as big as any major city in the world, with giant golden archways, twisting mazes of bridges and roads, and fields of bright red and blue orchids. To our right, almost at the edge of what I could see, a river of gold—yeah, pure liquid gold—flowed from one end of the city, vanished beneath a stretch of golden hills, then reemerged, bubbling through a massive crystal fountain on the other end. To the left, skyscrapers, towers, and other tall golden buildings stretched hundreds of feet into the air, creating one of the most epic skylines ever seen. But at its center stood the most impressive building of all—a slim cathedral-like structure that made the Empire State Building look vertically challenged. Its soaring yellow-gold towers were inlaid with blue and red gemstones, and at the peak of its tallest tower was a bloodred ruby so huge that at first I had a hard time even processing what I was looking at. Roughly the size of a blimp, it radiated a clear, reddish light that seemed to sparkle over the entire city, reflecting off the golden streets, bouncing off golden roofs, and sparking tiny rainbows everywhere. El Dorado made Fort Knox look like some five-year-old’s piggy bank.

  “See dat big red gem?” Saci asked, squeezing in between Violet and me. “They call dat they Joya del Sol. Is nice, eh?”

  “Dude, so you took that thing?” I asked, gawking at it.

  “Not dat one—da one that was next to it. Its big sister.”

  It had a bigger sister? That I couldn’t wrap my head around. Not figuratively, not literally—in no way, shape, or form. “But… how did you move something so—so GINORMOUS?”

  Saci grinned like he’d been waiting all his life for someone to ask him that. “Simple. I use fifty feet of basajaun hair braided into a single strand, a basket of pine needles, two small fish, and the undying gratitude of an old llama.”

  “I don’t even know what to say to that.…”

  “I know. The gratitude of a llama is especially hard to earn,” Saci said solemnly.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I have an idea!” Violet said suddenly. “What if Saci just offered to give them their gem back? I mean, it’s probably sacred to them. I’m positive they’d be willing to cut some sort of deal.”

  “Yes! I like it!” I shouted, but Saci was shaking his head.

  “Impossível,” he said. “Already traded it.”

  “To WHO?” Violet and I yelled at him.

  “This nice old witch with a farm. She gimme oxcart full of sugarcane. The chewable ones!”

  Violet said, “You sold a priceless gem for some edible grass?” She sounded like she’d just been told—well, that he’d traded a price
less gem for some edible grass.

  “Ei, no one been selling sugarcane to Saci for long time now, okay? And you think you can get better deal? Then take da other one. Is right there!”

  Violet glared at him, then hopped off the toilet. “Gimme that chisel. I wanted to wait until Charlie woke up, but there’s a shot I can pick that lock.”

  “Not yet,” Saci said. “I wanna get a few more shavings.…” He held one up for us to see—it looked like a curly, solid gold pig’s tail. “Saci big fan of gold. It’s yellow. My favorite color, remember?”

  “I don’t give a rat’s behind what your favorite color is,” Violet snapped. “Give me the chisel or you’re gonna be the first dead guy to attend his own boiling!” And she lunged at him. They wrestled over it, pushing and pulling on each other until a squad of mukis appeared at the end of the hall, marching our way. Not regular mukis either—muki soldiers. Each one was completely encased in golden armor—old-school comb-topped helmets and breastplates, shirts of chain mail, and shiny five-fingered gauntlets. Golden swords hung from golden scabbards, which dangled only inches from the gold-paved stones that the soldiers’ gold-stitched sandals trod upon as they marched up to our golden cell, tried a little golden key.

  “No trabaja,” one of them said. “No es la llave.”

  “¡Te van a matar!” his buddy shouted. “¿Dónde la pusiste?”

  “¿Qué sé yo?” And they all took off running back down the hall, their swords scraping along the ground, their heavy golden armor clinking and clacking.

  “Charlie, what’s going on?” Violet wanted to know.

  “I think they lost the key to our cell.” Just then I became aware of a strange sound: a soft crunching, cracking noise somewhere close by. Like, very close by. “What is that?” I said.

  V made a face. “Sounds like… crunching potato chips?” And it sort of did.

  Violet was looking around for its source when Saci suddenly shot a finger at me.

  “It coming from him!” he cried.