Wild Cards 14 - Marked Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  Suzanne stared at Uman, not just because he had spoken in English but at the black bitterness in his words that ran deeper than she could imagine. The Daykeeper was no naive, untutored peasant who lived in a past he only dimly remembered. Only those who saw him and his people as expendable could see him like that.

  "Now you know why we're running so fast and so hard. I hate to admit it, but we could use your help." McCoy looked back down the trail as if he could see their pursuers. "If we can get to Belize, I know I can get these pictures into the world press. This is just a touch dramatic, but the lives of thousands of jokers depend on getting this film out. Not to mention what the proof of the army's genocidal practices could do for the native cause. Come with us. We've got to cross the Peten. Neither of us knows anything about the Lowlands. We need a guide, and your talents would come in very useful."

  "I already have a cause: Chotol. I'll get you out of the mountains but that's it. Once we hit the Peten, you're on your own." She slung her pack across her unencumbered shoulder and waited until the taltuza climbed on before shaking it into place.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Two more days and nights of travel with little rest brought them down out of the mountains and into the lower hills. At least twice each day, the helicopters had been overhead searching for them. Suzanne had to keep them out of clearings in the thickest navigable brush she could. They had kept moving around the clock, with only a few hours of sleep when the terrain allowed it. She used the eyes of the nocturnal animals to guide them. The flashlight was a giveaway for any searchers. She never mentioned it. The two men followed as best they could, stumbling over rocks and drop-offs they couldn't see when the moon was hidden. Uman continued to surprise her. When she watched him, he appeared to move slowly and awkwardly, but he was always there, never lagging behind. His main complaint was that she never allowed him enough time to read their possible futures with his tz'ite seeds or his crystals. She kept telling him they would have much more of a future if they kept moving. He didn't argue long.

  McCoy cursed softly and continuously when she took them off one path to cross the jungle to another. Still, he was careful not to break branches or leave other evidence of their passage if he could help it. In its way, it was frustrating. They gave her no excuses to abandon them. While they were in the Highlands, the days were warm, but the nights were bone-chillingly cold. Now, as they descended to the Lowlands, both days and nights were hot. The humidity made it difficult to draw a breath.

  She wished for Balam more than once. The food from the village was long exhausted. She and Uman collected fruit when it was possible. They took water from streams as they passed. McCoy was popping Lomotil as if it was candy to ward off any bugs he was picking up, although she was using water purification tablets in the canteens. Suzanne made sure they stayed away from any habitations. Spies could be anywhere. And even if a village held no spies, their presence was too dangerous.

  On the fourth day out, she got her wish. Balam suddenly appeared at the edge or her range. By the time she had made her way in to join Suzanne, the woman knew what had taken place in Chotol and how close the army was behind them, taking it from the jaguar's memories.

  The first soldiers she had seen were only members of a routine patrol. But Uman and McCoy had been tracked to Chotol within a few hours of their departure. Both Balam and the human sentries of the village gave advance warning so that there was no one in Chotol when the Kaibiles arrived. They searched every house for traces of their prey, destroying their contents as they went. The English-language books in her house excited them. That was enough to proclaim the village a haven for subversivos.

  When they found no one to take captive, they poisoned the well and burned all the houses. After that, they tried to find the villagers in the jungle but had no success - with one exception. Young Luis Ek had wanted to be a warrior, just as his ancestors had been. He had taken his ancient rifle and picked off two Kaibiles before they had taken him. He had been tortured to death. Balam's memories of his mangled body were so vivid that she had to shut Balam out of her mind. He was, had been, only twelve.

  Balam had killed two Kaibiles as well, and the traps had taken three more. But the destruction of their homes and their corn and bean fields would cripple their efforts to avoid work on the coastal fincas, the coffee and cotton plantations they had finally managed to escape. For at least a while, they would have to move elsewhere. The Kaibiles would not soon forget the death of their fellows.

  Suzanne was now a permanent exile. Her presence would mean the death of anyone with whom she was associated. With Balam at her side, she walked into the jungle. It was only there, with no humans near, that she allowed herself tears of grief at the loss of her home. She tried to blame it all on the two men she was helping, but she could not convince herself. The guilt was hers alone, despite her knowledge that the blame lay with the army, not with her.

  She returned in silence and refused to speak for the hours of a forced march down into the Peten. Only when neither McCoy nor Uman could walk further did she stop. She considered the options she had left. The most attractive was entering into a personal guerrilla war against the Kaibiles. Joined by Balam and others, she could cause a respectable amount of damage. She was willing to bet her life that she could escape detection. The problem was that she knew Uman and McCoy would never make it across the Peten alone. She was not even convinced that she could get them across the Lowlands.

  "Chotol?" Uman had the courage to ask the question after he caught his breath.

  "Gone. Burned to the ground." Suzanne glared at them, still wanting to make it their fault. "But the people survived. Only one casualty - unless you count the Kaibiles."

  When she gazed out into the forest after Balam, their eyes followed.

  "She is quite territorial."

  "So, what are you going to do now?" McCoy's hands were trembling as he eased the cameras off his shoulders. Suzanne tried to feel regret at how hard she had run them. She felt nothing. For the last few years, she had put the Bagabond persona behind her. Bagabond felt little emotion because it was not a survival characteristic. Bagabond could kill anyone she found a threat without hesitation. Not even Jack Robicheaux, the were-alligator who had joined her in the shelter under the streets of New York, knew what she had done before they met. Suzanne did not want to become that person, that feral creature, again. Guatemala had begun to heal her, but the damage was too deep for her old personality to have been entirely erased. Bagabond had just been buried. And the Kaibiles had dug up the body.

  "I thought I might undertake a rearguard action. Balam and I could do a lot of good." Her head twitched as Balam took down her kill, a deer. After feeding herself, Balam would bring what was left back to them. A small fire was safe here under the thick leaves of the trees. The smoke would not show if they put it out quickly. She picked up the driest wood she could find.

  "You could do more by getting us to Belize." Uman helped her gather fuel for the fire.

  "This is my home. Shouldn't I defend it?"

  "If this is your home, then your people are my people." Uman spoke patiently. "I think that the saints have chosen this way to ask for your help in saving our people."

  "Which 'our people'? Jokers and aces, or Indians?"

  "Why do you think it matters?"

  Suzanne was furious. She was being guilt-tripped by an Indian shaman. She hated being wrong. Nothing more was said until after the deer had been cooked over the open flames. The fire brought up images from her past, from New York and from the sanitarium. Few of them were good memories. To clear her mind, she sent it out around the jungle among the monkeys and the birds. They had no past to haunt them. At the very edge of the area she could read, she caught indications of the army. They were setting up camp for the night.

  "I got involved before. People got killed; some of them were 'my' people. Are you sure you want my help?" She leaned back against Balam's warm fur, trying to look bestial. She suspected it wo
rked from the look in McCoy's eyes.

  "We all have our nahuals, the animal spirits who accompany us in life. You just seem to have more of them, and the power to speak to them directly. A great gift." Uman was not at all discomfited by her display.

  "Okay." Suzanne sighed. Maybe she had become too human. Leaving the two men to their own devices was something she could not accept. "McCoy, they used to call me Bagabond, a particularly horrible nickname I always thought. If you use it, I'll hurt you."

  "Nooo problem." He dug into his camera bag. "You should have a couple of these, too."

  She snatched the two plastic film canisters from the air.

  "If only one of us makes it, something will get through." McCoy looked back at her without drama.

  "Four hours of sleep, then we move on." McCoy was already out. When she looked at Uman, she saw that he also knew how close their pursuers were. In the flat Peten, with the trees alternating with broad savannahs, it would be much easier for the helicopter gunships to spot them. Up until now, they had had a relatively easy time, moving east through terrain that could shelter them. Now they would be moving through country where the smoke from a fire could be seen for kilometers. Before, they could use trails that had existed for centuries, sometimes millennia, and avoid leaving signs of their passage. The land they were entering was sparsely inhabited. They would be cutting their own paths through thick undergrowth. The border with Belize seemed even farther away.

  Before Uman slept, she asked him why he had not gone to earth in the Highlands, where it would have been safer for him. He took his time in answering. As the fire died, the hieroglyphics that marked his body seemed to brighten and dim as they shifted. The priest brought his right hand down his left arm, fingers moving rapidly across the words as if he were a blind man reading braille, but without showing any sign of knowing what they meant.

  "That one had become my friend," he said, nodding at the sleeping McCoy. "He would have been killed if I had left him. And I, alone of my town, survived. I do not believe that this could have happened by some chance. The saints are protecting me. I must honor their desires. I could not honor them by hiding for the rest of my life."

  Saints had become a Maya codeword for the old gods, fit one way or another into the Catholic pantheon. As a lapsed Catholic, she was fascinated by the way it had been done over the centuries, with the gift of Mayan gods' attributes to the various saints. In her part of the country the fundamentalist protestants had made little progress in converting the people to their new Christianity.

  "But, if you don't reach Belize, your knowledge as a Chuchkajawib, a mother-father of the people, could be lost forever."

  "No. Those I have taught who then returned to their own villages will continue the rituals and follow the old calendar." Uman smiled across the tiny clearing, lit now only by the waxing moon high overhead. It was a sad smile, Suzanne thought, but not hopeless, only resigned. "I am told by my blood and my readings of the seeds that I am destined for a long journey. Perhaps it is the longest one, perhaps not. I can only hope that the ending of that journey will benefit my people. I will have no other memorial. My family and friends have vanished as surely as our ancestors a thousand years ago, according to the archaeologists. Myself, I think they are still here in each of us. I will not see our people vanish. Our stories of creation tell us of world upon world coming into being and then destroyed. It may be that it is time for ours to return."

  "I heard about the Hero Twins. They fought back to regain the ancient Maya lands and rights. Do you believe they could do everything it was said they could?" Suzanne had heard word-of-mouth, third- and fourth-hand tales of magic abilities and blood sacrifices. She had found it hard to credit.

  "Yeah." McCoy coughed and sat up groaning. "I never saw them personally, but I saw some very impressive footage of what they could do. I know the people who covered the Maya uprising. They believe. Me, I think maybe they were aces. Or maybe they really were the reincarnation of the heroes of the Popol Vuh. They came close. A lot of U.S. money went into defeating them. Some of that money was probably from the Card Sharks, but most of it was because Washington and a number of other countries in and out of this hemisphere couldn't let them win. Their success would have meant revolutions by native populations from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. Nobody wanted the American Indian Movement getting any ideas. Is there any venison left? I'm still starving."

  Suzanne cut some meat from the haunch she had wrapped and put beside her pack.

  "Thanks, babe." McCoy waved the meat at her before biting off a chunk. The taltuza hissed and the jaguar growled. Suzanne confined herself to a baleful glare. McCoy smiled broadly back at her.

  "Time for all good revolutionaries to shut up and get some sleep."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Twenty kilometers behind them, in an army camp of thirty Kaibiles, three helicopters landed. Two were gun-ships to be used in aerial reconnaisance. The other, larger, chopper brought two passengers. Even the fearless Kaibiles turned aside as they got off and made their way to the commanders tent. The stench was overwhelming, that of a long-dead animal left in the sun to rot. Forewarned by a downwind breeze, the colonel, sliding on his reflective Raybans, stepped out to meet his new allies. The smaller man introduced himself as Dr. Peter Marcus Alvarado, a New York associate of Dr. Faneuil. The effect of his perfectly tailored jungle fatigues was marred slightly by the two white smears of menthol beneath his nostrils. The second thing he did was proffer the colonel a small blue jar of Vicks VapoRub.

  The other man was the source of the vile smell. Crypt Kicker. Despite the heat, he was dressed entirely in black, including a mask and cowl. The mask was designed to cover one side of his face. At six feet, two inches, he towered over the others in the camp, but his body was misshapen. One shoulder rose above the other, and he dragged his left foot when he pulled himself across the ground of the encampment. What most caught the eyes of the Kaibiles was the flaming red cross on his chest. Speculation ran the range between an agreement between militant Protestants and the government, the return of General Efrain Rios Montt's regime to power, or perhaps a radical right Catholic movement, as to who had supplied him. Answers were not forthcoming.

  "Our troubles can be contained as soon as they start across the Peten Lowlands." The Kaibile colonel spoke with great confidence. "The helicopters will spot them. We know they aren't far ahead anyway. The Indian and that gringa he picked up will be slowing him down. Our only real threat would come from any subversivos he might contact in the area. Of course, they are as likely to kill them as not, anyway. Animals."

  The short norteamericano nodded without as much enthusiasm.

  "What do we know about the gringa?"

  "Ah, another aging hippie out to save the world. We get them all the time. They like the climate, I think. Disgusting. This one hasn't tried to convert anyone or make any 'improvements.' She has not even endeavored to turn anyone to communism. That's why she was allowed to stay. Harmless, but potentially useful as an information source - under the proper stimulus - or a hostage." He ran thumb and forefinger over a perfectly-groomed mustache, now striped with the white VapoRub. Behind his sunglasses, his eyes moved to the gangling walking corpse who stood before him silently. The grass turned brown beneath his feet, and marked his trail through the camp. "I'm sure my Kaibiles, my tigers, will be able to eliminate this problem, but perhaps you will find it educational."

  "Ah heah one a those fugitives is a devil-worshipper." Crypt Kicker spoke, although it was difficult to understand more than every other word with the Texas accent and what sounded like a cleft palate birth defect. "Witches can't be suffahed to live. Bible says so."

  The other two men were silent. Neither could think of a reply.

  "Get a few hours of sleep. We'll be after them at dawn. My aide will show you to your tent. Tents. Food is available in the mess."

  "That would be for me. The gentleman accompanying me requires neither rest nor food. But thank you,
Colonel. Your hospitality is appreciated."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Suzanne took a break from cutting a path through the underbrush to wipe away the sweat pouring down her face. It was beginning to occur to her that a woman who would be forty on her next birthday had no business in the middle of a rain forest. Avoiding a fer-de-lance was not normally recommended as an aerobic exercise. Her hair was pulled up into a knot on the top of her head. She and Uman were taking turns at the machete. McCoy had given it a try once, but he could not manage the rhythm that put enough strength behind the swings to make any real headway. Despite Uman's "handicap," once more he turned out to be as able as she. With one hand braced against the bark of the ceiba, she used the other to wave away flies.

  "Trouble will overtake us soon." Uman came up behind her and grasped the handle of the machete to pull it from its resting place in the trunk of a lightning-felled mahogany. "From the sky, I think."

  As fatigue took its toll on everyone, language skills seemed to evaporate. No one used more words than he or she had to, regardless of the language being spoken. Last night's four hours of sleep had done little to refresh any of them.

  "Helicopter gunships." McCoy came up to join them. He was drenched with sweat.

  "One, maybe two. Lots of ground to cover." The taltuza waddled over and she extended an arm for it to climb.

  "North." From Uman, it was both statement and question.

  "We're about to hit a logging road." She rolled her shoulders as she looked back at the trail they had hacked through the jungle. It might as well have been outlined in neon. It was probably safe from the air because of the jungle canopy, but if anyone spotted it from the ground they were dead. "We've got to stop making it easy. It's a trade-off. We'll make more time and they may well lose our trail if we can hide where we turn south and east again. But we'll be much easier to spot from the air. My ears will protect us there."