Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  The rifle shot behind the cabin exploded her out of her dream and onto the floor. As she untangled herself from the blankets, a flock of crows behind the cabin squawked and screamed.

  “Oh, God!” she said to herself. “Oh, no!”

  First daylight, gray, but lighter than the black storm of the day before. Maryellen looked over the rail and scanned the cabin. Her father was not downstairs. She pulled on her jeans and shirt, scrambled down the ladder and out the open door of the cabin. She rounded the porch and saw him there at the entrance to the woodshed, kneeling with his forehead on the ground. Dozens of crows swarmed overhead, each one taking its turn to drop down and attack him before flying off.

  “Eddie,” she called, her heart pounding harder. “Eddie!”

  Her father writhed back and forth under the onslaught of the crows, keeping his face to the ground. The moaning that came from his throat raised the hair on the back of her neck.

  “Eddie!”

  The crows made no move against her. She made her feet begin the short walk to the woodshed. The birds settled into branches and onto the rooftops of the cabin and the shed—dozens of birds. The branches crackled under their weight and they squabbled for position on the roofs. A few continued their harassment of her dad, though he showed no intention of rising.

  She found Eddie in the shed, unconscious, bleeding from his nose. She saw no sign of a bullet wound or other injuries, so she guessed that he’d been dreaming again.

  She grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him to the pickup. Her father stayed still as she struggled past him. She kicked the rifle away, just in case.

  Her dad’s Chevy Biscayne was crusted with mud, the windshield was shattered and a long scrape crumpled metal from front fender to back on the passenger side. He’d parked it close behind the truck to block it in. She set Eddie down in the driveway and checked the ignition, holding her breath.

  “Shit!”

  The keys weren’t there. They must be in her dad’s pocket. She looked up and saw that the crows had pinned him down again, and she didn’t want to take any chances.

  “There’s a spare set with the truck keys,” she told herself.

  As she hurried to the truck a flash of fear came over her.

  What if he took them?

  He hadn’t. She took the car key off the ring, moved the car out from behind the truck and, just in case, tossed the key into the woods.

  Stuffing Eddie into the passenger side of the truck was too much for her. Pulling was easier, so she dragged him around the back of the truck, dropped the tailgate and pulled him by the armpits up into the bed. Muddy water saturated both of them. Eddie’s breathing gasped at times with the struggle in his mind. He grunted once, then lay in the bed sprawled and still.

  The ride on this road ought to bring him around, she thought.

  Maryellen closed the muddy tailgate, jumped in and started the truck.

  The more the patients deteriorate, the less sharp

  is the line dividing dreams from the waking state.

  Ultimately, in a severe deterioration the dream wins. . . .

  —Benjamin B. Wolman, “Dreams and Schizophrenia”

  Rafferty fought the raider forces for three nights and four days at the City of Eternal Spring. He and Afriqua Lee led a pincer movement that trapped the raiders inside a noose of fire, while their cutters and sprints fought flanking skirmishes behind them. The captive raiders faced their fate inside the city, and the jaguar priests scuttled back to the hills, and scatterings of raiders fled with them. Twice, when fatigue slowed his judgment, Afriqua Lee saved his life.

  Who could be worthy of such a woman as she?

  Rafferty vowed to make himself worthy. He repeated public vows, as well. Old Cristina defied tradition and married them as he piloted their van towards the stoneworks in the highlands. This morning, Rafferty fortified himself with another pail of the thick Roam coffee and watched a new dawn ooze from the tight fist of night. Though married, he and Afriqua Lee had yet to share a bed.

  We will have our time, he thought. He used that thought to drive away the other thought, the one that said, The Romni married you out of tradition because she didn’t expect you to survive the jaguar priests.

  No priests bloodied themselves in the battle at the city’s gates. Rafferty smiled. He had been plotting the priests and their movements for two years. He knew where they huddled together now, fortifying their power with spleef and frenzy-dancing. He knew that they did not expect the Roam to hunt them down.

  Today the Roam had camp to stake down, scouts and guards to place, matters of the kumpania’s survival to tend to. Festivities of a marriage between a tentless woman and a gaje dreamer could wait, and so could their wedding night. Rafferty called Afriqua Lee “Old Relentless Tentless” when she took over the controls during his battle conferences.

  “The Romni . . . ,” Afriqua said, “she must be afraid, to marry us like that.”

  “Afraid that she’s going to die?” he muttered.

  “No,” she said. “Afraid that we’re going to die. This way we can skip the preliminaries in our next lives, we’ll already be married.”

  He grunted his acknowledgment of this truth.

  Their scanner picked out the subtle blazes he’d laid for their trail, and their machine heaved its way along the highland track, what was left of it. The others jockeyed their rides close behind, with the battle cadre strategically deployed throughout the column, flanking, and to the rear. Each escort rode a single-sling sprint, capable of a two-minute brush run of the fifty-vehicle column.

  “Do you think the Jaguar can live forever?” she asked.

  “I saw him in a dream,” he said, “putting on the skins of other people’s bodies. I think he can do that.”

  “But, don’t you think he would just be trapped . . . ?”

  “I wouldn’t try it,” he said. “But what tricks has he has learned that we haven’t?”

  Rafferty checked the next series of blazes, and his security system that was linked to them, the “white device.”

  Surely they know of our win at the gates, he thought.

  None of the Roam’s communications intercept devices had picked up messages from the city to the highlands.

  The pulse knocked them out during battle, he thought, and his chest involuntarily swelled a bit. The white should keep them cut off.

  The white device, his security and communication system, gave back to the Roam something of what they had given him. A barrier to electronics from outside the Roam perimeter, the white doubled as a conduit for communications within.

  “If this doesn’t work,” he asked, “will the Roam turn us over?”

  “No,” she said. “The Romni said if they come for one, they come for us all, eventually. We stop them here or die.”

  “We will stop them here.”

  “Yes,” she said, and her smile whitened a dark portion of rosy dawn. “We will. The Jaguar underestimates us. The jaguar priests have never met the likes of the Maya Roam. And you have never met the likes of me.”

  “Truth of a truth,” he whispered.

  Rafferty set the galley for more coffee and took over the controls. They’d become so good at the switch that they easily opened up a lead on the rest of the convoy. They reined themselves in whenever the huntmaster clicked his radio twice.

  Rafferty guided Old Cristina’s van into the clearing that he and the hunting cadre had prepared the day before, and pulled into the special spot he’d made for her tent under the ceiba tree. The van’s squeaks and rattles, and the thrash of loose rocks under its drive, fed into the silence of the white device. Rafferty sunk back into the pilot’s seat, then sipped a fresh cup of coffee.

  “Just in time,” he said. “We’re going to need a lot of this stuff—today and tonight.”

  Tonight, of all nights, he wanted to be free of the dreams. The ancient Roam’s track through the jungle had crossed with raider trails, and these days all the raiders w
ere dream-puppets of the priests. Rafferty and Ruckus road scout the day before. The crow crisscrossed the territory, mapping it out. Other crows called back and forth, and Rafferty knew this for a good sign.

  Electronics might fail in bad weather, but a crow just keeps on ticking.

  The hills of jungle that surrounded them hid dozens of stone ruins, and this flat spot had been an old stone plaza in a marketplace long dead. Rafferty and the battle cadre secured the Roam a position on the plaza, close to the stream. He marked corners for the Romni’s tent beside a low platform of stone slabs that formed a kind of a dais. Visitors to the dying Romni Bari could wait here in style.

  The priesthood’s goons hunted them down, sniffing out some kind of trail on the dreamways. Rafferty felt it, Afriqua Lee felt it. The dogged pursuit of the jaguar priests already cost sixty deaths and two hundred wounded, the worst of it at the gates of the City of Quetzals. The winning strategy demanded sacrifice, to appear vulnerable enough to trap a careless raider force at the City of Eternal Spring.

  “They want two of you,” the city’s radio crackled. “Leave them, and you are welcome.”

  A most basic tenant of the accords, forged over two thousand years of preaching and war, promised the neutral, landless Roam sanctuary. Rather than demand entry on their legal rights and being seen as cowards, the Maya Roam turned and fought the henchmen of the priesthood. War, in the tradition of the Roam, signified a failure in both sides. War was not a pride, but a humiliation. Worse shame was to be bested in a deal with the gaje, and that’s how they perceived the violations of the accords.

  Rafferty had dusted his sandals outside the City of Quetzals, the City of Eternal Spring and the others, once the Jaguar business was done. Without the Roam to supply them, to repair them, those cities would die. City walls promised stagnation, illness, squabbles and death for the Roam. Outside those walls, fists, darts, the nighttime blade and sheer numbers reigned supreme. The Roam usually floated somewhere between.

  The question came up at the kris romani, the supreme judgment: “Should the young dreamers be put out?”

  Old Cristina squelched such talk at the kris with a lift of her massive eyebrow, but now Old Cristina was failing and power moves rippled throughout the Roam. Swaggers, backtalk, the arrogant parking of tents out of position signified big changes ahead, jaguar priesthood or no.

  Already at dawn, before Rafferty downed the last of his coffee, the camouflage net was spread, the dust of their path damped down, the white device block-and-relays switched on in the mobile tents of the Roam. The site would be invisible electronically as well as physically. Within moments of the last arrival, no one on a nearby lookout would sense a camp, or that the camp housed the last thousand souls of the great Maya Roam.

  The old woman collapsed after their drive into the southern highlands. She sweated though she was cold, and she cried out from time to time. Her right arm curled uselessly beneath her and a steady drool slipped out of the slack right side of her mouth.

  The flight had been strong because the Romni Bari had been strong. Rafferty thanked the stars that they had made the southern reaches, and the jungle. If worse come to worst, the Roam could scatter and hide here.

  But it won’t come to worst.

  The regrowth of highland jungle beat back the best of the Jaguar’s plagues. Scraggly country for a jungle, but the traditional hiding places served them well and hunting was good.

  Rafferty watched Ruckus ruffle himself into his hunting dance as the Roam positioned their vehicles for the streamside encampment. The crow was sorely tired of dried meat. As soon as he’d set up his van and seen to Old Cristina, he took Afriqua Lee by the arm and whispered, “Get your darts, meet me at the stream.”

  “I will meet you here,” she said, “for all the Roam to see.” She squared her dusty shoulders. “We are a team, you and I. If we choose to break tradition and hunt together, it’s time they got used to it.”

  Rafferty grinned.

  “Right. If they don’t like it, they can leave their plates empty. More for us.”

  Women of the Roam did not hunt, but Rafferty had seen how well Afriqua Lee popped a dart. He needed cover as he activated their defenses, and he trusted her. They would show the Roam a new partnership, a new tradition, a union that would outwit the Jaguar and his priesthood.

  Afriqua Lee stepped from the Romni’s tent, parked beneath a sprawling ceiba tree, and he thought that no woman in this world or the other could possibly be as beautiful.

  She had borrowed one of his hunting scarves to tie back her mane of curly black hair. The black scarf was trimmed with a small embroidered border of green quetzals. The green intensified when she wore it, and electrified the green in her eyes.

  Rafferty never wanted to lose a moment of his life together with Afriqua Lee. The matter had aired at a kris romani, during a trial of two traitors to the priesthood. The Roam feared their dreams, what their dreaming had brought down on their heads. Most of all, they feared the offspring of two dreamers, but the challenge to their marriage was beaten by the Romni Bari. The grumblings didn’t cease with the gavel and the token sacrifice of blood from the tongue.

  Ruckus squawked his impatience, and lifted off. They shrugged into their bandoliers of darts and charges, and followed.

  “The green-eyed girl goes hunting,” an old woman called after them.

  “Watch out for the trouser-snake,” another called, her cackle swallowed by the white device.

  Rafferty darted a large paca, eight kilos or more, a dozen paces from the camp. He motioned Afriqua to wait, then hurried back to hang the paca by a leg from the Romni Bari’s ceiba tree and bleed it.

  “Start on this one,” he told the onlookers, “there will be plenty tonight. Musicians, get your strength up.”

  Many of the men dropped their setup squabbles to gather up their darts and traps.

  Good, he thought. Now they’ll remember how to hunt.

  Rafferty had spoken once at a meeting of the kumpania, saying that their custom of trading with other communities was too dangerous, their route too predictable.

  “They’re not very smart,” he told them. “We can trap the priests if we think of me and my bride as bait. We’ll go a season early to the highland stakedown. It’s heavy jungle at its hottest, true, but we know they’ll be there, drumming up an ambush for us. Let’s not disappoint them.”

  Now was time to turn the tables. Rafferty sensed the priesthood close by, plying the dreamways, growing stronger.

  Afriqua Lee bounded across the camp in her long strides, another paca across her strong shoulders. She dumped it between the feet of Alma, the quick-tongued old woman.

  “I thought a little hot meat between your legs might cool you down,” she said, and turned on a heel to join Rafferty.

  The other women shrieked and laughed at Alma’s surprise, then hurried to admire the plump animal and to help her dress it out. By then, Rafferty and Afriqua Lee were already hunting the stream, setting out perimeter scouts and activating their defense.

  As morning wore on, they activated two white devices buried in switchboxes. These insured the Roam a wide radius of strategic cover. They needed one more switchbox farther upstream.

  Rafferty took a reading on the locator signals and checked the status of the “protect device” modifications that he had built into all units. Everything checked out. Rafferty planted several of the smaller, more potent protection units by themselves along their trail. The battle cadre could follow easily with their hand-held sensors, and these sensors would not trigger the protection devices as long as the scouts entered the correct code.

  A precaution.

  “I saw tapir tracks,” Afriqua whispered. “Up here, where I shot the last paca.”

  His gaze followed the direction of her pursed lips to a limp silhouette hanging head-down, out of reach of animals from below. The jungle beyond the dead paca walled them away from the extreme highlands. Trails throughout the region were notoriously
rocky and steep. The stoneworks lay nearby, where he anticipated finding the priesthood. No sign, physical or electronic, showed any defenses.

  They don’t believe it possible that we survived, he thought.

  Rafferty heard a call from Ruckus, but ignored it when he saw the fresh tracks at streamside. They spanned more than a hand, and a bit of dirt crumpled into one as he watched. The sunken earth still filled with water. He sniffed, and got nothing.

  “It must’ve climbed out here,” he pointed up the bank, “and probably went up that slope.”

  Rafferty planted the last of his protection units at the base of the backline switchbox. He activated the switch and received confirmation from the battle base at Romni’s tent. The return signal included coordinates for his nearest scout and cadre—less than a kilometer behind them.

  Good.

  Three hillsides sloped up from the other side of the stream. A tapir would love to doze in those thick, broadleaf ferns. Brush was a favorite place for tapir to hide, and a lot of brush fringed the uphill side of the ferns. The villagers called them “mountain cows,” but they didn’t look like any cow that Rafferty had ever seen. He’d seen one a few seasons back, on a trek through the southern highlands. It sniffed the air once with its flexible nose and trampled off into the thickest brush. The brush would knock a jaguar off its back, and made a dart shot nearly impossible.

  “Do you think our charges are heavy enough?” she asked. “Tapir hide is mighty thick.”

  “Load green,” he said. “I pressed them myself, they’re all heavy.”

  “But, still. . . .”

  “Still,” he smiled, “don’t shoot for bone. It’s best if we flank it and we both get a shot.”

  They tracked the tapir through its brush-trail and found dozens of paca dens along their way.