by Bill Ransom
We will eat well here, he thought. The Roam will have a chance to pull together.
Afriqua Lee made that tiny clicking noise with her tongue just when he noticed a peculiar odor on the breeze. Before he could react, the wild-eyed tapir burst from the brush ahead of them. Its path dead-ended into a stone wall, and they were blocking two hundred kilos of churning fear.
Just as he’d said, they stepped aside, let it charge between them, then they turned as one and each placed a dart between the tapir’s ribs. Inertia carried it another dozen meters before it crumpled without a squeal.
In the stillness that followed, Rafferty heard Ruckus again, somewhere above the jungle canopy, hollering his alarm call, and then his flocking call. In the same moment, dozens of crow voices rose around them, with dozens others echoing in the distance.
Afriqua Lee started towards the dead tapir, but Rafferty stopped her with a hand motion and put his finger to his lips. Once again, that odor on the breeze.
Spleef, he thought.
He remembered Nebaj, and the constant smell of burned spleef at his camp, mixed with the thick incense of copal that the Roam called “pom.”
Now Afriqua Lee smelled it, too.
Something about the regular angularity of the three hillsides now made sense to him.
Temples, he thought. Overgrown temples!
Ruckus sounded his distress call again, and a cacophony of crows filled the air. All else was silent.
Rafferty motioned for Afriqua Lee to follow him back up the trail. The stone wall was not a cliff face, but a wall of cut stones. One layer of stones had been delicately carved into skulls, no two alike.
Stoneworks littered the jungles of the southern highlands, former ceremonial centers and cities of the old Roam. This, the oldest, was the temple of the gate of Xibalba. Talk of it frightened the old folk, and they had been vocal in their fears about the stake-down here.
Maybe they were right, he thought.
On the left the stonework abutted the dirt hillside. Rafferty followed the wall to the right, working his way under the overgrowth, and Afriqua Lee followed. She’d switched to a multiple-fire magazine in her weapon. That dampened the punch, but she could fire twenty darts without reloading. He made the switch to multiple himself, and Afriqua Lee smashed a scorpion on the wall next to his neck.
He flashed her the sign of the martyr for “thanks.”
Another half-dozen paces and they encountered a steep stairway. The wall continued on the other side of the stairs and disappeared into the brush. The odor of spleef was much stronger here, and the granite stairway was neither overgrown, nor dirty. Someone had recently swept it clean. Rafferty raised his eyebrows and indicated the stairway.
Afriqua Lee shrugged, glanced around, then pointed her weapon up the stairway.
Rafferty smiled.
Afriqua Lee blew a hair from her face and smiled back.
I love you, he thought, and hoped that she felt it.
Crows gathered in twos and threes in the jungle canopy above the steps. Their raucous cries squawked louder as he and Afriqua Lee approached the top.
The only sounds were the crows, the rustle of trees in the breeze and the stream about a hundred meters away. They crept to the last set of stone stairs on their hands and knees, and peered over the top with their weapons ready.
Six jaguar priests sat in a column of smoke-twined sunlight at a stone table set with chairs and pipes for seven. Rafferty recognized an aged Nebaj among them. Spleef-smoke and pom lay over the scene like hot mist. Dozens of crows took their turns attacking the somnolent priests, flapping at their faces and pecking at their eyes. The priests did not even fight back out of reflex, but stirred towards waking. The small guard troop busied itself flailing clubs at the crows in defense of the helpless priests. The stubborn crows kept it up.
Dream, he thought. It’s got them.
He’d been in a stone place before, a table and chairs much like this. . . .
Rafferty glanced back at Afriqua Lee, who arched a quizzical brow.
“This looks familiar,” she whispered, “Maryellen’s dream, the marble columns and the stone table and chairs.”
“But this is granite,” he said. “And we’re not dreaming.”
She rubbed the stone step, just to be sure.
A series of put put puts exploded the rock beside her and sprayed fragments into her face. Rafferty snapped off a low, fast shot and blew up the guard’s knee. A clip of darts unloaded from the raider’s weapon into the sky, then he threw it away in frustration and grabbed at his wound with a shriek.
Afriqua Lee followed her roll down the steps with a pair of quick shots that knocked one raider over backwards and broke another’s arm.
Body armor, Rafferty signaled. Watch out!
She popped an orange marker into the heavy ferns where the first raider fell and positioned herself behind cover. Rafferty finished a quick sweep and she swept once herself. Something black dropped to the stone plaza behind Rafferty’s back.
Afriqua Lee signaled Ruckus to him, and pointed.
Rafferty lay down his weapon and picked up the limp bundle of black feathers. He frowned, then set the dead crow on the top step of the gray stone temple.
He shook his head and signaled back, No, not Ruckus.
The crows stepped up the fury of their mysterious attack. Rafferty scooped up his weapon and scanned the sky for Ruckus. He spotted the crow’s ruffed-up silhouette high up a tree that bordered the ruins.
He looks sick, or. . . .
Suddenly the crows’ attack made sense.
“Ruckus on the dreamways,” he muttered in amazement.
Rafferty heard cries in the brush beneath him, the flat-toned discharge of hunting darts and heavy thuck of full-combat explosive tips.
“Must be leftover raiders,” Afriqua whispered. “What about those priests?”
“What about them?”
The crows were wearying, but they had forced the lethargic priests to come around. Clearly, the ones who came to a consciousness awakened in extreme, searing pain. Rafferty knew that pain all too well, as did Afriqua Lee.
“They’re not going anywhere,” she said, “but are you sure they can’t . . . you know . . . dream us dead or something? And what about the Jaguar, won’t he come looking for his little pets?”
“If we stop the priests, we stop the Jaguar,” Rafferty said. He leaned his back against the vine-covered stone of the temple.
Rafferty sucked in a deep breath. No one was sniping their way. A few wild shots from across the acropolis snapped off branches, intended for crows. The battle cadre of the Roam silenced those. From his vantage point at the rim of the acropolis, the six priests made easy targets.
“No,” he whispered, “they can’t hurt us. We need them alive if we’re going to learn anything, but it’s more important to stop the Jaguar.”
He hand-signaled Finn to go in silently. Presently, two of their men crested the acropolis, then four, then a dozen of the Roam circled the priests and trussed up the somnolent captives without a fight.
“Easily done,” she laughed, and they joined the others with the trussed-up, lethargic priests. The skinny Nebaj was one of them. As the sleep-disorientation left him, the young priest’s face contorted into absolute fear.
“This is the power center,” his voice rasped, “you can’t do this.”
“Your power days are over,” Rafferty said. “Besides, you’re just the instrument. We want the Jaguar. . . .”
“You don’t understand,” the priest hissed, his voice thick with the influence of the dream. “He protects himself . . . you are killing us. . . .”
A flash of light vaporized both of the priest’s eyes and in the same instant his skull was engulfed in white-hot fire. Within seconds the peculiar fire consumed all of the priests, leaving only their porcelain bones, each inside its own halo of blackened stone.
But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together,
&nbs
p; Nailing heaven and earth together—
So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.
—Ted Hughes, Crow
Maryellen wrestled the wheel and her pickup slewed down the muddy ruts of the driveway. A hump of black muck scraped the truck’s underbelly and tugged once, twice as the back wheels spun. She gunned it and lurched astraddle the ruts, nursing the pickup along in the early morning drizzle barely faster than she could have walked.
“Please let the bridge be there,” she prayed. “Please let the bridge be there.”
She didn’t know what kind of god to pray to, anymore. They all looked so petty and so human.
The cabin was still visible in the rear-view mirror when she could no longer tell the driveway from the muddy outflow of the stream. At this point the drive crossed an old logging road, and the water beyond looked too deep for the pickup. It didn’t matter; the bridge was gone.
She pounded on the dashboard.
“Dammit!” She pounded again. “Dammit!”
She swiped at the tears that betrayed her frustration.
“Think,” she ordered herself. “Just think for a damn minute.”
A shot slapped the side mirror off the truck in a spray of glass, and reflex popped the clutch and cranked her wheel to the right. Her tires spun smoke and hot muck. The old truck wallowed for an eternity before grabbing enough traction to make the turn into the woods. Maryellen stayed as far down in the seat as she could as she guided the truck up the steep grade. A spider-web of logging roads crisscrossed the hillsides around her. Most dead-ended in the hills, two led out.
Which two?
The rut she was on led upstream, and she knew that another bridge crossed only about a mile upstream. That bridge was higher, and crossed a deeper part of the canyon, so maybe it would still be good.
But if she went back to the valley, what would she say? That her father wanted to kill them?
“It’s not his fault,” she whispered, and prayed that it was true.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Eddie was curled up into a tight ball, bouncing in the bed. She saw no sign of her father or his car.
One of these roads runs all the way to Oregon, she thought.
Going back to the valley meant bigger trouble, that was clear. If they tried to run and hide, they’d be caught. The pickup would give them away on the highway. If they could stay in the hills, below the snow line. . . .
She remembered a trip with her father, coming back from Portland, when they’d tried logging roads all the way and got through. She had been eleven then, and had slept all the way.
Which ones dead-end?
She couldn’t remember. Maryellen had fished here with her father a few times, but never far from the cabin. She never seemed to know how they got where they got, it was one of the mysteries of her father. He knew these hills as well as he knew his rifle, and she didn’t know them at all.
“No,” she said to herself, “we’ve got to get to town. He’ll just track us down out here.”
Maryellen reminded herself that she didn’t know her father any better than the roads—at least, she didn’t know this maniac that he’d become.
The Jaguar.
She shuddered with the chill that his name conjured in her spine. She knew this had to be the Jaguar’s doing. He hadn’t been able to get inside herself or Eddie, but he’d found a way to her father. The Jaguar had broken through in his long hunt and it was his breath from her father’s mouth that sent the ice down her spine. He must have known they’d planned to hunt him out to free Rafferty and the Roam.
“He found us, Eddie,” she said. “Now what do we do?”
She approached the lip of a gravel slide that nearly filled the bare track of a road and stopped the truck. She leaned her forehead on the cool steering wheel for just a moment.
“Too many people falling apart,” she said. “I should have known.”
Maryellen knew the secret of classmates falling hysterical in second grade. Her dream-burglaries, her petty trespassing cost her classmates sleep, and the lack of sleep changed them. Maryellen and Eddie had figured that out separately, but by then incredible damage was done, much of it to themselves.
In school, or among family, or with her few friends—the same wierdnesses, the same personality changes erupted when she’d been dreaming inside their heads, and so she’d stopped. Taking their sleep made them crazy. And being crazy hurt them, she knew that, now. Maryellen remembered how her father looked last night, how hollow-eyed and driven he’d looked the day he beat up Eddie.
The dreamway insanity had to be the Jaguar’s doing. Maryellen learned not to make the people closest to her crazy. Eddie had learned the same hard lesson. So, for that matter, had Rafferty and Afriqua Lee. Maryellen knew that she hadn’t been dreaming her father’s dreams. Eddie would have confessed to her out of principle if he’d linked up with her father on the dreamways.
That left the Jaguar, whoever he was, safe in his bed somewhere, trying to kill them by using her father as skillfully as her father would use his rifle.
He, and his rifle, were somewhere behind them and she knew better than to think that he’d give up a hunt.
The slide left a pile of gravel in the roadway from the uphill slope on her right. The slope dropped away about a hundred feet to her left before disappearing over the lip of the canyon and into the foaming roil of the stream. Halfway up the misted hillside, the roar of the swollen river drowned out her pickup’s noisy engine.
The bridge is good!
Just a short distance past the slide, the road dipped down the slope to meet the wooden bridge that squatted with its skirts in the current.
Maryellen looked back again at Eddie, limp as a bag of laundry beside the spare tire. She considered bringing him into the cab, then thought better of it.
“You’ll have a better chance back there,” she said, as though he could hear. Talking to him made her feel less exposed, and not so much alone.
She took a hard look at the churning river, and swallowed. Nobody would have a chance down there. But if she didn’t admit it. . . .
She put the truck in compound low and nosed around the lip of the slide. She had to drive off the road, downslope of the slide. The wheel spun out of her hands as though snatched by a giant. The hood of the truck dropped away and the back end of the truck lifted into the sky. The whole slope plunged away with the road.
The old truck rolled once, twice, then skidded to rest in some scrub firs and brush at the brink of the canyon.
Maryellen had grabbed the wheel in mid-roll, out of reflex, and held tight at arm’s length until the last of the loose gravel stopped skittering past her. She was conscious of the greater roar of the river and the fact that she sat on the ceiling of the upside-down cab. Her wrists hurt. The ravenous stream ate at the bank just a few feet away.
How long . . . ?
A crow sounded its hoarse alarm somewhere nearby, then another, a dozen.
“Eddie!” she whispered. “Oh, Jesus, Eddie!”
Maryellen crawled out the broken windshield and fought for balance as the mucky gravel shifted under her. She crawled under the upturned bed, but Eddie wasn’t there. She didn’t see him near the truck, so she scrabbled the slope on her hands and knees, calling his name. The river swallowed everything.
The crow found Eddie first, face-down in the gravel, half-buried. The right side of his face looked smashed where he lay on it, and the gravel was bloody under his scalp where a chunk of it peeled back to expose his skull from his right eyebrow to his ear.
He was breathing, and when Maryellen tried to move him to a more comfortable position he let out a terrible moan. His right shoulder was lower than it should be, and a piece of metal from the bed of the truck protruded from his right elbow.
“I’ll get you out of here, Eddie,” she whispered. “I promise, I’ll get you out. . . .”
A crow dove at her so hard that its w
ingtip brushed her hair, and she flattened over Eddie out of reflex. Looking up from the hollow, Maryellen saw her father huffing out of the treeline above her. She scrunched down even farther and was sure he couldn’t see them behind the gravel and the brush.
The sky was full of crows, as were the branches of the trees where the road came out of the woods to cross the slope. Her father batted at them with his rifle barrel and, in spite of their attacks, stopped cold when he reached the slide. She watched his eyes follow the tire tracks, the fresh gravel slide and the raw scar that the truck had made.
He scanned the slope once and his gaze went back to the truck. He took a couple of hesitant steps, glancing back down the road and then across the slide to where the road picked up. He straightened his shoulders as though he had all the time in the world, then began gingerly picking his way down the slope to the truck. He held his rifle as ready as his balance would allow.
Eddie moaned again, and stirred, but Maryellen pinned him down with her body and muffled his mouth with her hand.
He can hear us up there, she thought. Once he gets below us, the river will be too loud.
Her father passed within twenty feet of them, but his attention was on the truck and his precarious footing.
When he gets to the truck, he’ll track me back here, she thought. What can I do?
She searched the gravel for a fist-sized stone, and in a moment had a pile of about a dozen set within reach. She knew it was no match for his rifle, but it was all she had and she felt she might get lucky.
The crows had at him in a renewed attack, forcing him into a barely controlled run down the slope. At first Maryellen thought he would slide right past the truck, over the edge and into the river. She had been holding her breath, and now tried to catch up in short, silent gasps.
He slid right up against the bed of the pickup, rocking it slightly. He scanned underneath as she had done, then checked the cab. The crows kept at him, and he batted at them again. When he turned from the cab, his gaze followed her tracks upslope. She was sure that he couldn’t see her yet. He was downslope, that was to her advantage. She gathered her stones in close.