“I am not dressed as one of your women.”
“No,” he admitted, taking in the details of her plain cotton cloak, her shell necklace “But they will not stop to consider. It will not go well for you.”
“That is why you must stand. We must get away from here.”
“You saw my legs. Leave me! The gods have made their decision about me. Maker of Himself has decided.” Breath whistled through his crooked nose.
“You are as good as dead if I leave you. And if I save you, your life is mine.”
“The gods have decided.”
“No god attacked you, but men. You fought well. Swinging your great club, wearing your feathered helmet…how great a prize you seemed! That is why so many tried for you. Now stand.”
“But my legs…”
“The Red Crowns cut you many times, yes, but they did not sever the tendons. Up!” She picked up her spear, then strained to lift him. He made no effort to stand.
“Why should I go with you?”
“Because you’ll die if you stay!”
“If I’m to save myself, let me crawl after my own men.”
“I need you.”
His gaze on her was hard, speculative. “Need me for what?”
Nictay pursed her lips. She could tell him the truth, but the trials of her village meant nothing to foreigners. Once again, she would have to lie.
“Come with me, and I will make you a rich and powerful noble.”
He grimaced. “I am a Nacom of the Moon People. Would you make me greater than that?”
So he was indeed a great warrior. A veteran. A general. He was just what she was looking for. “I would make you a rival to the greatest Nacoms of the Middle People,” she said. “That jade you wear on your breast plate, the feathers of your helmet are nothing compared to the wealth my people take from the sea.”
The warrior grunted. “Who are you to offer these things?”
“I am a princess.”
The sound he made was like soft laughter, but bitter. “You haven’t the look of nobility.”
“Our customs are not like yours,” she said, “and I do not travel in my regalia. Why should I call attention to myself?”
“A woman alone is of interest whether she is high or low,” he said.
“And so I have come here by stealth. Will you quibble with me until the Red Crowns come? Stand! I have need of a warrior like you.” She strained again to lift him.
Shakily, he rose. He said, “There is no honor in bleeding to death in the jungle. Shell Woman.”
“You will be honored among my people. Alive.”
“As if I could walk all the way to the sea. I don’t have that many steps in my legs.”
“Take one,” she said.
Leaning against her, he took a step, trembling. He made a bitter face, as if embarrassed by his weakness. She had been about to offer to carry his club, but thought better of it.
“Another step now,” she said, looking over her shoulder toward the village. “And another.”
“Caan Cuy,” he said. “My name is Caan Cuy.”
“I am called Nictay,” she said. “The Princess Nictay.”
At home, her grandmother had warned her about lies. Shaking a half-shucked corncob at her granddaughter, she had said, “One day you will reap a harvest from them that you do not expect.” But how could Nictay fulfill the tasks that her visions set for her except by lying? Foreigners would not want to give her willingly what she sought when she ventured into enemy lands to spy. So she had pretended to be a trader from a non-existent city, a representative of a noble, offering cacao on terms that were almost too good to be true. Greed made the enemy merchants eager to offer her protection and information. They gave her gifts of city clothes, and she ended up looking more and more like who she pretended to be. She had lied her way to the valley of the Middle People, had seen their Island City in the center of a mountain lake. She had seen how powerful they really were. And she had learned that the Middle People had overrun and destroyed villages and even whole cities that opposed them.
When she first learned this, when she first confirmed the ferocity of the Middle People, she despaired. Not long ago, Nictay’s village had never even heard of the Middle People. Now, because of the Middle People raiders, Nictay’s people had been forced to take refuge on an island off the coast, but without fresh water, the island was no place to settle for good. Were Nictay’s people to be extinguished by this new enemy?
But Nictay had learned of more than the Middle People’s ferocity. She had discovered something that gave her hope. The Middle People did not sack all the villages and cities they warred against. Many people were driven from their ancestral lands, never to return. But the Middle People respected enemies who fought as they did, who traded captives in battle. If her people could learn these foreign ways, they might negotiate, if not peace, a sustainable enmity that would let them return to their own lands. The only costs would be some tribute, perhaps fish, and the obligation to fight the Middle People now and then in flower wars, losing a few villagers as captives for sacrifice. This was better than annihilation.
How could her people learn to fight Flower Wars, those ritual battles to exchange captives? The obsidian toothed war clubs were unknown to Nictay’s village until the first Middle People raiders had come. Nictay’s people fought and hunted with spears. They did not know how to block and attack with a shield, how to slash at an enemy’s legs and take a captive. They didn’t know how to fix the obsidian points into the club’s flat blade, like teeth in a shark’s jaw.
Certain that she must discover how to teach these new ways, Nictay returned to her village. She bled herself and fasted for a vision.
Then the First Mother has shown her the path she must walk. She must take a captive. Not one of the Middle People, but a warrior who fought like them. She must bring home a master of the obsidian club, some fighter from the southern peoples: the Jaguar Tails, the Red Crowns, the Dog Eaters. Or a Moon warrior, a man like Caan Cuy.
So it was that she had crossed jungle alone. She had seen a war party leaving the Moon city, and she had followed them to the Red Crown Village. Hidden in the jungle, she watched the battle unfold. Caan Cuy was brilliant, cutting at the legs of his enemies with the black teeth of his club, knocking them down with his shield. He might have taken many captives had the Red Crowns not ganged up on him.
It had all gone perfectly. Caan Cuy, her captive, a teacher for her people, had been wounded just enough to be left behind, but not so badly that she had no chance of saving him. He would be the teacher her village required.
They were slow. Caan Cuy’s legs stiffened on the second day, and he took even shorter, shakier steps. Then the rains came. Water fell in torrents through the canopy. Big drops pelted their skin like pebbles wherever they crossed a clearing open to the sky. In places, the mud was slick and greasy. In others, it was watery and sucked at their feet.
From time to time, she noticed that he would look toward the south as if considering a return to his own people. She would make up stories, then, of the riches that her father bestowed on warriors. She did not worry yet what Caan Cuy would do once he learned that her father was a simple fisherman, that there was no emperor among her people. What would he say when he found no stone palaces, when he saw that the only riches were in fish and fruit and shells? She would deal with that later. What mattered was getting him back to her people, pressing him closer to them and farther from the Moon city.
On the third day, Caan Cuy’s fever began. He stopped often to stare through the rain-grayed air, as if he saw enemies where there were only more trees.
They were hungry all the time. Nictay could not leave Caan Cuy to hunt for fear that she would not find him again. She crushed ants with her fingers. They were sour, and it took so long to gather them that they were hardly better than nothing.
In the middle of the fourth rain-soaked night, Caan Cuy groaned out, “Water!” He waved his hands before his fac
e. “Water!”
In the darkness, Nictay groped for the gourd. She brought it to him, but he pushed it away and said, “Too much water!” She made him drink anyway, and once he had taken a swallow, he drank eagerly. Then his hands flailed again against the rain. “Too much water!”
His fever made him careless. The next day, he just missed stepping on a yellowjaw serpent. Later, clumsy with exhaustion and walking ahead of Nictay, he stumbled and fell face-first into a pool. He had mistaken a mat of water lilies for solid ground. When he got his feet beneath him, he stared at the logs in the pool that moved toward him. But they weren’t logs. Crocodiles. Still he stood watching until Nictay had splashed in beside him to pull him back to solid ground.
His wounds no longer bled. Nonetheless, every day a little more of his strength left him, a little more of his wits drained away. When he dropped his obsidian-toothed club for the third time, Nictay picked it up and carried it herself.
“Sleep,” Nictay encouraged him at the end of the fifth day. “Soon you will be among new friends.”
She awoke to hear the whistling of his breath, which reassured her. But something was wrong. In the bluish phosphorescent light of the jungle, she saw black flowers blooming from Caan Cuy’s sandaled feet and her own hand. As she puzzled at them and willed herself to alertness, she felt the wetness on her hand, the faintest tickle of a tiny tongue. A bat. She closed her hand around it and flung it away. When she rose, the bats feeding on Caan Cuy flew off.
That was when she heard the nearby cough of a jaguar. Was it stalking them? She spent the rest of that night wide awake, listening, knowing that a spear was little discouragement to a hungry jaguar, but unwilling to resign herself to the cat’s mercy, unwilling to sleep.
In the morning, the rain continued, and Caan Cuy could not rise. Nictay yanked on his arms to drag him, inches at a time, through the mud to the base of a tree where he could sit up, leaning against the black trunk. She removed the leaves that bound his wounds and decided not the replace them when she saw the moldy splotches on his skin. The warrior’s eyes were glassy. Sweat beaded on his lips.
“We will rest today,” Nictay said, kneeling beside him.
Caan Cuy grinned at her, or grimaced. It was hard to tell. He let his head drop back against the tree trunk. An ant crawled close to his eye, but he made no effort to sweep it away.
They were still many days from the coast. “I would leave you and go for help, if we were nearer.”
The moon warrior shut his eyes. “I am dying,” he said.
“No!” Nictay pinched his chest, hard. He did not flinch or open his eyes. “You will live!” But she knew that as long as they lingered in the jungle rains, he would only get weaker. “Do you hear?” she shouted very close to his ear. “You will not die! I need you!” But what would he care about what she or her village needed? “You will not die!”
Caan Cuy did not move. He made no sound.
“I am a princess!” she shouted. “Great honors await you!” She shook him. “I forbid you to die!”
Laughter. Nictay held herself very still. She heard a woman’s laughter nearby. Where was it coming from? Nictay looked around. She saw nothing but leaves and vines. The voice seemed to come from in front as much as behind, from the left as much as the right, below as much as above.
The shells of Nictay’s necklace rattled as she jumped to her feet. “Who’s there? Show yourself!”
The laughter continued, then ceased. “Who am I?” asked a womanly voice, neither young nor old. “Why do you not tell me instead who you are. Who trespasses at my front door?”
Trespass? Front door? There was nothing here but dense jungle, as far as Nictay could tell. But if she had truly trespassed, then a show of righteous confidence might be best. Nictay stood up straight. “I am the Princess Nictay,” she said. She remembered what Caan Cuy had called her. Shell Woman. “Princess Nictay of the Shell Woman clan,” she elaborated. “If you have aid to offer, I would thank you to show yourself and offer it. If not, I would thank you to leave us.”
“Ah, a princess,” said the voice. “But why is your head shaped like a commoner’s? You don’t have the look of nobility.”
“Among my people,” Nictay said, “no mother shapes her child’s head.” That much, at least, was true. Nictay’s village was small. There were no nobles among them.
“And this man?” asked the voice. “Why does his head have a noble shape?”
“He was once from a band of foreigners who have been adopted into my clan.”
“Why do you forbid him even the respite of death?”
“He is a great fighter,” Nictay said, then added, “He is my general. I need him. He is Nacom Caan Cuy, leader of the shark warriors, captor of men, slayer of enemies.”
“Yet you carry the war club.”
“Women are warriors among my people,” Nictay invented. “We are captors of souls on the battlefield as well as in our houses. We know the pains of both battle and childbirth.”
“I had not known there were such people,” said the voice with a touch of mockery.
“Not heard of us? Not heard of the…the Highlands People? We are the greatest rivals to the Middle People. We are their closest enemy, and we are their match. Or haven’t you heard of the Middle People, either?”
“I know about them,” said the voice. The jungle around Nictay had been dark already, but now the gloom deepened. “I know about the Middle People. But you Highlands People…” There was mirth in the voice, “…you were unknown to me. Until now.” Nictay felt the ground tremble. The tree trunk that Caan Cuy was propped against seemed to swell, then flatten out against Caan Cuy’s back. The high canopy overhead receded, as if the whole jungle were growing taller, as if the sky were receding, or as if the ground where Nictay stood were sinking. Vines and ferns shrank back into the ground, leaving it barren.
“What is happening?”
The voice gave no answer. Nictay was sure now that she was dropping, that the ground where she stood was sinking deep into the earth. The last gray light dimmed to blackness, and still the ground trembled. When it stopped, the air was still. No rain fell. No insects churred. No night birds sang. And the blackness was absolute, without the blue phosphorescent glow of decaying wood or the green sparks of fireflies.
Caan Cuy breathed. Nictay heard her own heart beating. That was all.
Nictay knew now that the voice had been the voice of a goddess. She knew she should have spoken with more respect. Honesty would have served better than lies, though now that she had told such an inventive lie, she could hardly take it back. The goddess had seemed amused by what Nictay had said, and the truth now might anger her. If she was not already angry. Who can guess at the thoughts of the gods?
“Lady,” Nictay said, kneeling though she didn’t know if even a goddess could see in such gloom. In utter blackness, even a jaguar might be blind. “Lady, if I have given some offense, I am sorry. I did not know you. I did not understand your nature.” Her voice echoed.
No answer came.
The ground under Nictay’s knees was hard. She felt it with her fingertips, rapped it with her knuckles. It was not mud, or even hard-packed earth, but cold unyielding stone. “Lady,” Nictay said, “if it is shelter that you grant us, I thank you.”
Again, silence.
Nictay had carried no fire, or any means to start one. And now even if she could strike a spark, what could she use for fuel?
She stood. She waved Caan Cuy’s overhead. The ceiling, if there was one, was out of reach. Was this a cave? There might be drop-offs that she couldn’t see. She inched forward, tapping the stone floors with her toes before she shifted her weight. She waved the club before her, flinching when at last it grazed something solid. A wall. She felt it with her other hand. The wall was flat, with regular seams where great blocks of stone fit together. It was a made wall. This was not a cave, but a stone house or temple like the city peoples built.
Gingerly, she felt her way a
long the wall. It extended for a long distance without interruption, and when Nictay could no longer hear Caan Cuy’s breathing, she went back to him.
“Caan Cuy?” She found his form in the blackness and nudged him. He did not stir, but his breathing was regular and strong. She groped for the water gourd, poured a few drops past his lips, then groped about again. There was another wall opposite the first. She followed it in both directions, returning again when she could no longer hear Caan Cuy’s whistling breath.
She went back to him once more, tried again to rouse him. He groaned but did not awaken. She felt his neck. The fever had broken. Now if they did not die of thirst or starvation, he might live after all. She sat beside him in the blackness. At least here she did not think there were bats or jaguars. Here she might sleep in peace.
She dreamed many times of waking, of taking a narrow stairway back to the surface of the world. Then she woke to find herself still in the darkness. Or did she dream that, too? Were all her awakenings also dreams? At last she opened her eyes to orange light. Flames burned steadily against the high walls, far above her. She moved, and felt stiff as if from a week of sleeping. Her eyes were so dry, so crusted with sleep that it hurt to blink. Her tongue felt swollen, her throat papery. The pressure of her bladder was so painful, though, that she didn’t need to thump her breastbone to see if she were truly awake. She exhaled what would have been a groan if her throat were not so dry, and she sat up.
“There’s water,” said Caan Cuy. He was sitting with his back to the wall. Light danced in his dark eyes. “And food.”
She looked to where he pointed. Three water jugs and two bowls of fruit were against the wall. There were breadnuts, too, and palm hearts. Next to these was a shallow basin for washing. There was even a chamber pot.
“Someone’s looking out for us,” Caan Cuy said. “But who? Where are we? I don’t remember coming here.”
Nictay held her hand up to silence him. She drank from one of the jars, then took the pot down the corridor, beyond where the last flames curled up from the walls. In the half-darkness, she relieved herself. Leaving the pot behind, she returned to Caan Cuy, knelt beside the basin, and washed her shaking hands. She tore the yellow rind of a guava with her teeth and swallowed the pink flesh. She devoured a second one. A third. Then she sighed, far from satisfied, but no longer desperate. She looked at Caan Cuy. “We are guests,” she said. “Or prisoners. I do not know which.” She told him how they had come there, though she did not mention how she had lied to the goddess.
Thirteen Ways to Water Page 16