The Serpent Dreamer

by Cecelia Holland

  In the morning in the gloom of dawn he woke and lay there pretending to be still asleep and looked around as much as he could without moving. The leather men were still sprawled out around their dead campfire. Beyond, he saw another camp, the people there beginning to stir. When he raised his head a little and looked, in all directions, he saw only other camps, other fires and other people.

  The leather men at his camp woke, and the one named Temuscah came over to Corban and nudged him with his foot. “Wake up. We are taking you to the Itzen.” He held out some thin cakes of maz.

  Corban stood up, reaching for the food. They had taken his knife, when they caught him, and now Temuscah wore it sheathed on a cord around his neck, like an amulet. Chewing maz, he followed the leather man out of their camp, out onto the plain.

  Only a few days ago the bison had covered this place. Now they were gone. The broad plain was filled instead with clumps and straggles of people. All that remained of the bison herd were their dried droppings, which he noticed these people were using for their fires.

  They walked past a row of strange kettles, covered with skins, that he guessed were the drums. The men around them wore rough pelts cast over one shoulder, like a badge. Corban slowed, watching them, but Temuscah pushed him on.

  He walked along looking at all the people in the camp. Many were leather men, togged out in their breastplates, leaning on their long spears. Many others were unarmed, men and women and even children, sitting in little groups, some still sleeping. They clung together, avoiding the leather men, who seemed to tilt over them.

  His belly clenched. He lifted his head, looking up before him, where Temuscah was taking him.

  He was deep within the camp now, and there ahead of him, in the middle of it all, was a cluster of tents, set in a square, all thronged around with people. The tents were high-peaked at the centers and spread wide on four sides, and as they came closer he saw they were made of leather strung up on poles.

  Mostly leather. Here and there, he saw, startled, the tent wall was of something finer than leather, softer, that fluttered in the gentle air. Cloth, he thought, and broke away from Temuscah to see.

  The leather man shouted, and leapt after him. Corban stood, resisting the tug on his arm, within reach of the side of a tent, looking at woven cloth, old, very old maybe, but some light woven cloth, finer than wadmal, even finer than linen.

  Temuscah yanked him back off his feet, so that he fell sideways into the dirt. The leather man roared over him. “Come! Don’t you dare disobey me!” He kicked at Corban, who dodged him, on all fours, scrambling away. Then someone strode up behind Temuscah, someone who stood head and shoulders over him.

  “What is this?”

  Corban stopped scrambling and looked up, and his mouth fell open. He was looking at a living copy of the golden head. The high topknot was wound around with braided stuff. Rings hung from the broad shapely ears. As he gaped up, the big man frowned down at him, ignoring Temuscah and his friends who babbled and bobbed up and down all around him and made gestures of respect.

  Corban stared back. This man was taller by far than even Miska, who was tall; and he was heavyset, too, with stocky arms and long well-muscled legs and a chest like a tree trunk. His face was golden skinned, his nose long and hooked, his eyes wide inside painted curlicues that covered his temples and forehead. His mouth curved in a sneer of contempt. He said, “What is that?” and pointed at Corban.

  Corban started up, and then Temuscah and the others leapt on him. He let out a furious yell, fought and kicked and butted at them, to no use. They pinned him down and yanked his shirt off, and then hauled him up bodily before the golden man.

  “See?” Temuscah cried. “He’s got fur all over him—and he has no skin!”

  The big man grunted at him. He reached out to tug Corban’s beard; Corban struggled, snarling, humiliated. Another huge golden man walked up beside the first. This one had a ring through his nose as well as his ears, and heavy bands of beadwork around his upper arms; he was older. They spoke, in a language Corban had never heard before, and all the while prodded him and pulled his hair, and laughed. He set his teeth together, waiting. It occurred to him he should be joyful, because these were surely the Itzen.

  The big man who had noticed him first now nodded to Temuscah. “Yes, go in and take him to Tok Pakal. Wait.” He reached out and took hold of the sheathed knife hanging around the leather man’s neck. “What’s this?”

  Temuscah’s hand fluttered up, reaching after the knife in the big man’s grasp. “It’s mine, Qikab Chan, please.”

  Corban said, “It’s mine.”

  The two Itzen swung toward him, their large dark eyes wide. The second man tapped the first on the shoulder and said something, his gaze resting on Corban. The first still gripped the sheathed knife in his fist; he jerked hard, and the cord around Temuscah’s neck snapped. Temuscah yelped, his hand flying up to the nape of his neck. Then the big man, Qikab Chan, Temuscah had called him, gave Temuscah a shove in the chest.

  “He’s going with us. There will be something for you, at the proper time. Go.” He reached out and gripped Corban by the upper arm; before he muscled him off, Corban looked over and saw Temuscah, behind their backs now, his cheeks quivering with pure rage. Then the big men were hustling him off toward the tents.

  Qikab Chan, Corban thought, letting the big man haul him along; he wondered if that were a name or a title. The big man’s strength impressed him; he could barely keep up with the long strides, his weight half off the ground in the solid enormous grip.

  They went through a gap between two tents, into the wide square space in the middle. This area was crowded with people, swarming everywhere and all talking at once. Corban, looking around, saw to his surprise that even here most of them were ordinary, local men, like Temuscah; there were only a few of the Itzen.

  All those were like these two, strapping big men, wearing decorated skirts and face paint, heavy loops of horn or bone in their ears and noses. Corban caught mere glimpses of them, because Qikab Chan was dragging him on toward the biggest of the tents.

  In front of this pavilion was a strange monstrous frame, a boxy shape of wood and leather twice as tall as even these men, and Corban realized he had seen it during the march, or something like it, moving ahead of him like a kind of ship. He leaned against Qikab Chan’s towing hand, staring at it, and the big man yanked him on again. Even so, he saw that the great contraption, which looked like a giant half-enclosed throne, was made mostly of leather, like the tents, but also of some older stuff. Fragments of feathers, and shells, and cloth, here and there, like relics. Or maybe the leather was a kind of patch, had grown, slowly, like moss, over something older.

  The giant chair was behind him. Qikab Chan was hauling him through the wide entry into the tent, where people went in and out in a steady pushing, weaving stream, the wings of the tent pulled back on either side. Inside was so full of people even Qikab Chan had to stop. Corban stood beside him; his gaze went to the knife, still in the big man’s hand, and his fingers curled, wanting it.

  Then Qikab Chan was giving the knife to someone else, someone Corban could not see. Even when he went away through the crowd, this person was invisible: only the parting and shifting of the people letting him be revealed, making a trail that led into the back of the tent. Corban looked where he was going, into the rear of the tent.

  Here, on a raised place covered with mats, on a bench shaped like an animal, sat a man in a tall plumed helmet, or maybe a crown. Other people stood around him, slightly tilted toward him, eagerly attentive, and yet he sat at ease, his gaze stretched out across the tent at nothing and nobody, as if he were the only man there. As if nothing could happen without his word. Then the person who had taken Corban’s knife got free of the crowd and came into sight, approaching the platform, and Corban saw he wasn’t invisible after all, but only very short, hardly waist-high to most men.

  Corban muttered something. Qikab Chan’s hand tighte
ned on his arm, a warning. Corban raised his eyes again to Tok Pakal.

  He was older than Qikab Chan, Corban guessed, although the ages of the golden men were hard to guess. His face and arms were mottled with paint. The heavy rings that hung from his ears looked like real gold, not the bone in Qikab Chan’s ears. Over his chest he wore a great fan-shaped collar, and Corban thought much of this was gold too.

  Now the dwarf was giving him the knife. The dwarf, tiny, misshapen, was himself dressed much like Tok Pakal, with a little collar, a little plumed hat, even the same red-trimmed bands around his legs just below his knees.

  Qikab Chan pushed on Corban’s arm; they moved up to the very front of the crowd. Up there on the platform, Tok Pakal had the knife, and he drew it out of the sheath. Qikab Chan murmured under his breath and Corban saw he had not realized that the knife came out of the sheath, and laughed.

  The hand tightened around his arm like jaws closing. He stiffened, resisting, his teeth clenched, determined not to give in. Pain shot up and down his arm; he thought the bone was about to break.

  Up there, Tok Pakal turned toward him, and spoke in that other language.

  The hand abruptly left his arm. The pain subsided. The people around him were all staring at him. Tok Pakal was staring at him from his high seat. Corban stood motionless, rigid, angry, unwilling to obey anybody now, and Tok Pakal, seeing him balk, thinking him perhaps stupid, turned and took a scrap of food from a dish beside his chair, and held it out and clicked his tongue, as if calling a dog.

  Corban bridled up, furious, his head flung back. Behind him, Qikab Chan growled, “Go! Fool!” and shoved him, and he went one step forward under the shove and then stood his ground, out in front of everybody. All around the tent voices rose, a confused hubbub.

  Tok Pakal’s gaze remained on Corban all the while. His eyebrows rose. He tossed the food back on the plate, and said a word, and the babble abruptly hushed. He looked out in another direction, and shifted on his bench, one arm braced on the flat seat, his interest gone. Someone else came quickly up to him, speaking into his ear.

  Corban looked around him, curious. Qikab Chan stood just behind him, and now reached for his arm, but the other man with him suddenly pushed Qikab Chan’s hand aside. He said something in the other language, beckoning toward Tok Pakal, and then toward Corban, watching over his shoulder, and then gesturing up, and Corban saw as plainly as if he understood the words that he was telling Qikab Chan that he had given Corban to Tok Pakal now, and couldn’t hold him. Qikab Chan’s mouth curled down and his eyes glittered. Corban went quickly away through the crowd.

  He glanced back toward Tok Pakal as he did, and saw his knife again, lying there on the broad bench. The flat animal head on the end of the bench looked a little like a cat. He circled toward the knife but while he was still far from the bench another man came and picked it up, holding it carefully in both hands, and took it away. Corban followed, moving through the crowd after the knife.

  The people hushed and drew back as he went by, but nobody stopped him. They stared at him. He felt hot under his shirt, itchy, as if their looks raised a rash on his skin. Gladly he saw that his knife was leading him to the far side of the tent, where there were fewer people. There several mats had been laid down, as if marking a special place, and in the middle of the mats a man sat cross-legged. The man Corban had followed was just laying the knife down on the ground at the edge of the mats, he backed away with a reverent gesture.

  Corban stopped; the people standing around him moved hastily away. Corban’s attention anyway was fixed on the man sitting cross-legged, who had a long sheet of something on his knees, and a brush in his hand, and was drawing.

  To see this carried him back through years, back to the island, to Benna sitting on the island, drawing the world around them. For an instant he hung in some timeless place, almost there. He came back to himself again; he saw the sheets beside the cross-legged man, and edged his way closer to see what was drawn on them.

  He would know the Itzen, he thought, better than words, if he saw what they drew.

  The sheets lay on the mats lengthwise; standing at the edge and tilting his head he could see them plainly. The heavy marks on them puzzled him at first, since they didn’t appear to be drawings after all, not like Benna’s anyway. He frowned, his gaze searching the dense blocks of lines, and then something else rose from his memory, blocks of lines marching across the flat face of the rune stone of Jelling, and he knew this was writing. This man was a scribe. These people made books.

  He stepped back, gathering this in, looking around him. The strange pieces of cloth in the walls let in more sun than the hide, filling the tent softly with light. He looked toward Tok Pakal again, with his golden earrings, his golden collar, his animal bench, his calm arrogance.

  I have seen this all before, he thought, and pushed the idea away, a trap, false knowledge. He had seen nothing before. His gaze strayed again to the strange patching of the walls, the leather overgrowing the cloth, a new thing eating an old one. Then, by his elbow, someone said, “What are you looking at, Animal-Head?”

  Corban twitched, his gaze drawn down. At waist-level to him the dwarf’s big lumpy face was tilted steeply up above the squashed body. Corban sank down on his hams, making himself the same height as the other. He said, “Don’t call me that. Who are you, anyway?”

  The dwarf grinned, showing gapped teeth like pegs. “My name is Erkan, although it was something else once. Don’t be so quick to renounce what they call you. The Itzen love monsters.” He smiled contently, his lips wrapping around his face. “They take very good care of us.”

  Corban said, “That’s nice to know.” He glanced toward his knife again; the man with the brush was turning it over in his fingers.

  “Where did you come from?” Erkan said. “Nobody has ever seen anything like you before.”

  “You’re all idiots,” Corban said shortly, bringing his gaze back to the dwarf ‘s face. “If I shaved off my beard you’d see I’m like you underneath, or mostly.” There being few words for this in the local tongue he had run off into dansker and Irish, and Erkan blinked at him, and gave a little shake of his head; Corban expected him to make some sign against the evil eye. Corban snorted at him. “In my old country they threw people like you around for a game. Tell me about these men. Who is Tok Pakal?”

  Erkan shrugged. “My own people hit me and kicked me. Then they took me to the Court of the Sun, and now I’m the happiest man in the world.” He nodded toward the back of the tent, where Tok Pakal was. “He wants to see you.”

  “Is he their chief?”

  Erkan waggled his head from side to side. “Well, he is chief of those here, for this trip, and he is high in the Great House at Cibala. But of all, no. In Cibala, Itza Balam holds the serpent wand.” His face sucked hollow at the name, and now he did make a motion with his hand that Corban knew for a sign against evil. Then he was brisk again. “Come on, now, Tok Pakal is very subtle, very nice, and aren’t you hungry? He’ll see you’re fed.”

  Corban said, “All right. Take me to him.” He straightened up to his full height, gave one last glance at his knife, there on the scribe’s mat, and went after the dwarf.

  C H A P T E R S I X T E E N

  Tok Pakal was talking to another of the Itzen, the older man with the nose ring whom Corban had seen before with Qikab Chan. The dwarf pushed in between the two big men with the comfortable familiarity of a child, or a dog.

  He spoke, and Tok Pakal laid his hand on the dwarf’s head, exactly like patting a dog. He sent the older man away, listened a moment to the dwarf’s patter, and then turned toward Corban.

  His look was full of welcome, his eyes brimming with curiosity, his mouth widely smiling. He said, in the local speech, accented heavily, “Well, I see you are a wise man, please, come join me.”

  Corban found himself moving forward even before he thought about it, drawn to this friendliness. Face to face with Tok Pakal, he said, “Wise I’m n
ot, but I am a man.”

  The mild, intelligent face before him smiled broader. “I’m sorry if it seemed otherwise to me. What is your name?”

  Corban told him. Tok Pakal’s eyes searched over him, noting everything He said, “I’m sorry to say it, but this name makes no sense to me. Where are you from?”

  “From the east. Far to the east.”

  “There is nothing to the east but forest.”

  “No—if you go far enough, you come to a great water, and beyond it are other lands. That’s where I come from.”

  Tok Pakal blinked at him, and one hand rose, tapping his fingertips to his lips. “I have heard of a great water to the north. Not to the east. This is to be remarked on.” He nodded to Corban. “There are many men like you there?” With a word he reached his hand out, and the dwarf scampered away and came back with the knife. “What is this? Not the knife itself, of course, I see that.” Tok Pakal took the knife from its sheath, and touched the flat of the blade with his finger. “What is this it is made of?”

  “It’s called iron,” Corban said, and struggled helplessly against the membrane of language. “Cooked rock.”

  “Aha. Your people made this? Because I have seen nothing like it anywhere in this country. The little people certainly have nothing like it.”

  “I brought it with me when I came here. Many of our tools are made of this.”

  “Aha,” said Tok Pakal, and fell still. He raised his eyes to Corban, who suddenly had the strange feeling they looked at each other through a hole, like a window, between two worlds.

  The golden man said, “Do you have books?” He used a word Corban had never heard before, but as he spoke, he gestured toward the scribe, and his writing.