Oaxyctl dared to look at the Teotl’s legs. External bones ran down the midnight black cartilage of its thighs. On each side of the Teotl’s hip, rain and pus quivered along the joints of tentacles, one of which stirred, coils shifting to reveal tiny jaws.
“I will do so.” Oaxyctl looked back down.
The Teotl shifted its grip and pulled Oaxyctl out of the mud. Oaxyctl struggled for air as two thumbs pressed down on his chest and the Teotl’s fingers on his back pushed his shoulder blades in. He dangled above the mud. Oaxyctl faced the god and panted. Here stood a being whose kind dwelled in Aztlan’s sacrificial pyramids. It wore a cape of flayed human skin, the empty, floppy arms knotted around the Teotl’s neck, feet twined around the tentacles by the god’s hip.
It shook rusted locks of hair and looked at him through oval steel eyes.
“We hunt men who may stop this invasion. Now we hunt the man who will try to go north,” it hissed. The silver jaw and gray gums did not move as the Teotl spoke. The whisper wormed its way past from deep in the fleshy throat. “You are to find a man, here. He has great secrets within him. You must get codes from him. Then you will kill him.”
“The man who goes north?” Oaxyctl gasped. “I don’t understand.”
The hand holding Oaxyctl’s chin up caressed his cheek. Blood ran down the sides of his neck and collected in the V of his chest.
“He will try to leave the land for north. This man is dangerous. But important.” The god puffed wet air. “Any moment now … we will push in greater numbers over these mountains. We will have men sacrificed before us in this land. We will destroy their gods, our ancient enemies. But we must have this man.”
“So how will I know him?” Oaxyctl croaked. His vision danced as he tried to pull a full breath.
“His name is John deBrun, and we think he lives near this town. We are sure of it. We smell it faintly. He has the secret codes that set free the Ma Wi Jung. Torture them from him or bring him back to us alive. That is your choice, for you can walk among the nopuluca as I cannot. He must not die before releasing the codes to the Ma Wi Jung.”
“Lord,” Oaxyctl shook in fear for his impudence. “May I have Jaguar scouts to help me capture him during the invasion?”
“You do this now. Only days remain before we begin to march again, and there are those who do not want to risk this man living, no matter what we may reap. They give no orders to save him, as I wish. They are weak-minded and miss potential. So we charge you with this mission. As we all invade, you find this man. Keep the human alive and obtain his secrets. Do well, you will be rewarded well. Fail …”
The god did not finish but let go with a snort of steam. Oaxyctl dropped into the mud, his legs folding painfully under him.
“Remember.” The god turned around. “The Ma Wi Jung codes. I will be near you again.”
Oaxyctl inhaled deeply and watched the Teotl walk back into the forest. Somewhere near the trees it slipped into the shadows and Oaxyctl was alone.
He lay back into the mud. Without thinking he put a hand over his heart. It still thudded. He was alive. He’d thought he was dead when he’d crossed the mountains and the mongoose-men captured him, and he’d thought he was more dead when the god had landed in the mud in front of him, yet he was somehow still alive.
It was almost the end of rainy season, but the heavy clouds opened up anyway. Oaxyctl lay still in the downpour and began shaking. Several hours later a Brungstun mongoosesquad circled him. Their guns hung easily by their sides, dangling from leather straps, and their canvas clothes dripped rain. Their unshaven but quite human faces looked down at him with suspicion. Oaxyctl cried with relief to see them.
But even now he realized there was still nowhere to hide. The Teotl could walk almost anywhere, Jaguar warriors would be coming over the hills any day now. The gods still commanded him. There was nothing he could do against this.
Nothing.
The mongoose-men tied his hands and dragged him off to Brungstun. Oaxyctl shook all the way there.
CHAPTER FOUR
John sat at the table the next morning, buckling his hook’s metal cup tight onto the stump of his hand. He levered the straps until they bit into his wrist’s calluses and looked up to see Jerome in the doorway.
“Hey, Son.” John smiled.
Jerome blinked. He picked up a piece of bread and some cheese from the counter by the stove. He had something on his mind. “You always have to do that?”
John nodded.
“You wrist all scar up. It hurt?”
“Sometimes.”
Jerome took that as a good enough explanation.
“You ready for a good sail?” John asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah, man.” Jerome waved the bread in the air. “Ready for sure!”
“Good.” John packed a bag with extra bread and cheese wrapped in wax paper, added a bottle of ginger beer, and picked up a heavy canvas bag, brown and stained with use, from the stairs. Dry salt crusted the two loop handles. “All right, let’s go.”
They walked out and waved at Shanta, hanging clothes up to dry on the line in the yard. Shirts and pants flapped in the wind.
“Take care,” she called. “And bring me back plantain to fry up.”
The walk to Brungstun took twenty minutes, the footpath passing by boulders near where John sometimes watched the ocean below explode up into the air, spraying and hissing as it turned into a tangy mist when it reached him. Then the rock under their feet turned to dirt, and then into a shiny rock road made by the old-fathers that followed the coast’s curve through Brungstun to Joginstead, where it stopped. Brungstun houses, pink and yellow with sheet tin roofs, lined the road’s edge.
Brungstun nestled in a carved-out nook in Nanagada’s coastal cliffs that dipped down into a natural harbor. The rocky trailing edge where the Wicked High Mountains entered the water protected the small village from the ocean’s worst, and the jagged offshore reefs made a natural breakwater that made a large area around Brungstun safe for fishing. The Wicked High Mountains themselves protected Brungstun and the rest of Nanagada from the Azteca.
John and Jerome passed a farmer selling fruit along Main Street, and Ms. Linda waved at them and asked Jerome if they had any sweet tamarind. She would bring some by, she said. The post master told John the telegraph was down, yet again, and he hoped it would be back up soon. He asked John to pass the message on if he was going to Frenchtown. It took another twenty minutes just to walk down the slope of Main Street to the boats as people chatted with them. Five thousand people lived in Brungstun, and they all knew John.
“Here we are, finally,” John said. “Jetty number five.”
His small boat yanked at the pier cleats while the ones out at anchor bobbed, their masts swaying. Water stretched out for miles beyond the harbor, dark in some places, light in others that indicated reefs just under the surface. In the hazy distance, rock chimneys jutted above the water.
Jerome dropped the two bags he’d carried with him. “It windy.”
“No worry,” John replied, stepping into the fifteen-foot wooden boat, Lucita. Water splashed around the bottom. He leaned over and grabbed the calabash-gourd bailer. As he scooped out the water lapping over the floorboards, he continued, “It’s a good day for a sail. Sharp and steady.”
Still somewhat dubious, Jerome said, “We won’t capsize or nothing?”
John held up his hook as he walked forward and put the two bags under the bow’s lip where they would stay dry. “I swear by the hook.”
Jerome laughed. He sat down on a wet seat. “Okay then.”
The snappy wind leaned Lucita over. They passed through the forest of anchored boat masts. The harbor steamer paddled by, going the opposite direction. The passengers on their side waved at John and Jerome. Jerome held on tight to his seat and didn’t move. He jumped at every unusual crack of the sail and squeak of floorboards.
John skirted some smaller reef, then sailed north. Eventually he tacked and
turned northwest for Frenchtown.
After half an hour he tacked again, pushing the tiller over and ducking the boom as it flew by his head, ropes and blocks rattling. It snapped taut and they continued forward. John shifted to the higher part of the boat.
The water lightened into aquamarine. John let the sails out with his good hand controlling the mainsheet, his hook on the tiller, and Lucita slowed. Another reef. He dodged the boat left toward darker blue, and thus deeper, water. Jerome relaxed, leaned over, and trailed his hand in the water. “How far Frenchie Reef?”
“Not too far.” People who didn’t sail needed patience. John sighed. You didn’t just get in a boat and show up somewhere.
In the distance a long line of white breakers roared. John skirted them and followed another reef line, edging up against the wind until palm trees magically rose from the clear water. Frenchtown, Salt Island.
John closed his eyes and looked at his mental map of the area around the Lucita. Sharp, clear, and in his mind’s eye he could rotate it around to examine it from different directions. The Wicked High Mountains rose to John’s left in the west, splitting the continent in half as they ran north and south. They trailed off into the sea to make a commalike curve of rock chimneys and reef. Inside that protective curve lay Brungstun. Among the reefs were the flat islands the Frenchi lived on.
It was all an impassable, jagged maze. No ships ever got out from this protected area into the ocean. No ships got in. In this safe basin the Brungstun and Frenchi fishermen existed.
“Mom say the water dangerous. Story does say that old metal airships from the old-fathers fell into the harbor water. We could wreck on them.”
John opened his eyes and nudged the tiller to adjust their course. “I’ve never seen that. Just the reefs I need to watch out for.”
Nanagada’s coasts were too rocky and clifflike to land on. Except for fishermen in Capitol City’s great harbor, a few traders from Baradad Carenage on Cowfoot Island on the continent’s other side, and the fishermen in this protected area, no one sailed the ocean. The towns settled on inland lakes or rivers. Safe, with calm weather and easy wind.
John smiled as a gust leaned the Lucita over. They didn’t know what they were missing.
Lucita pulled into Frenchtown’s flat, still water. Huts clustered on the beach’s edge, and bright-colored fishing skiffs lay canted on the sand.
The water depth shortened to three feet. John moved forward and pulled the daggerboard up. It sat in a little well just behind the mast and dripped water as it slid out. John could see water, and the sand beneath it, passing under his boat. Without the extra ability to point into the wind, Lucita skittered sideways.
John ran back and grabbed the tiller. He expertly wobbled the boat the rest of the way to shore and dropped the sail as the Lucita’s bow hit the beach.
Then he grabbed Jerome and threw him into the water.
“Hey, man!” Jerome stood waist-high in it, dripping wet.
“Hey, you.” John jumped in after him. Jerome splashed at him as John pushed the boat as far up the sand as he could.
“DeBrun, that you?” someone called.
“Yeah.”
Troy, a fisherman, sat in his boat with a paint tin. Troy’s white skin flaked from sunburn. His straight blond hair hung down to his shoulders. No locks, just limp strands. “Where you been all this time?”
“Busy fishing. Have to make a living.”
Troy laughed.
John couldn’t help looking at the bad sunburn on Troy’s pale skin. Frenchies could put on an accent so strong he had trouble understanding them. But they were very white. That was uncommon. On Cowfoot Island off Nanagada’s southeastern coast, and northeast up the peninsula in Capitol City, yes, he had seen some white people. But that was it. John reached over the prow and pulled out the canvas bag.
“More paintings?” Troy asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.” Troy put down his brush and hopped out onto the sand. He looked down at the canvas bag. “I go trade with you.”
Jerome wandered down the beach toward several Frenchie children. His darker skin color stood out, oddly enough. He joined them kicking a leather football down the beach, laughing when it hit the water and stuck in the wet sand.
John smiled and followed Troy in toward his small beach store. Two old, wizened Frenchies sat on the porch smoking pipes. They nodded as he passed, then continued playing dominoes, enthusiastically slapping the ivory pieces down with sharp bangs. Once inside, John set the canvas bag on the counter. Wooden shelves of tinned food lined the back wall. A few burlap sacks leaned against the counter’s foot.
Troy opened the bag and pulled out the two paintings.
“I like this. Is a righteous picture,” he said. A ship listed at sea, mast broken. Giant waves smacked at it. “This other one”—Troy pointed at a sketch of the Brungstun cliffs—“I sell me cousin that.”
“Those took a lot of work,” John said.
“I won’t go thief you, man.” Troy reached under the counter and pulled out a gold coin.
John sucked his breath in. “You’re too generous.” Frenchies dove along the reefs to supplement their fishing. Sometimes they found strange machines that had fallen from the sky in the days of the old-fathers and would strip them for any precious metals they could find. “You’re making carnival very sweet.”
“Is a time to enjoy.” Troy smiled.
“You coming to town?”
Troy laughed. “I know I go see you there, right?”
John chuckled with him and looked at the sacks on the floor. “I’m going to need some salt.”
“I get you a sack. Hold up.” Troy disappeared and came back out with a hefty bag he dropped on the counter. John made to go pay for it, but Troy held up a hand. “You coin no good with me.” He smiled.
“Thank you.” John grabbed the sack as Troy cleared his throat.
“John … the painting. They ever help you memory yet?”
John looked down at the burlap between his fingers. “No. Not yet.” He wondered if Troy bought his paintings out of pity. “Maybe they never will. You still buying?”
“Anything for an old friend, John.” Troy smiled.
John hefted the sack. “Thanks, Troy. See you at carnival.”
“See you at carnival, John.”
When John stepped back out of the shop, he paused. The two old men had stopped playing dominoes and stared at the sky over the water off the Wicked Highs. Three bloated metallic slivers crept their way back toward the Azteca side of the Wicked High Mountains, circling around the mountain chain over the reefs and rock chimneys.
According to legend and some older folk, Nanagadans once lived on the land on the other side of the Wicked Highs. The coast over there was just as inhospitable, so no Azteca ships ever took to sea. But small airships could climb over the peaks, and larger airships sometimes skirted out over the ocean to fly over Nanagada. Dropping spies into the jungle here, no doubt. John usually saw one a month when out fishing.
The old man nearest to John harrumphed and slapped down a domino. “They running more and more of them things these days. I already see five this month. Watch and see if Azteca warrior don’t soon start walking over the mountain to cause trouble.”
“Them feather-clot won’t be coming over the mountain anytime soon,” his partner said. “They had a whole army that try that once on Mafolie Pass. The mongoose-men gun them down something wicked.”
“Yeah. Maybe that true. Hey. You lose you game.”
“What?” The other old man was startled.
John walked out onto the sand. He knew he lived close to the mountains and that the Azteca lay on the other side. It took something like this to remind him how close the Azteca were. Sometimes, when John wondered where he’d come from, he imagined he was a Nanagadan spy who had been trying to escape from the Azteca at sea and been shipwrecked.
That was just a fantasy, though. Thinking about Azteca made him nervou
s. “Come on, Jerome,” he said. “We have to go now.”
Seeing the Azteca blimps stole any positive feelings from the day. He wanted to go home.
CHAPTER FIVE
People peered out their windows to see the excitement as Dihana and thirty ragamuffins marched the two blocks to Capitol City’s waterfront. A drunken fisherman paused at the street’s corner, swayed, then retreated back into the alley’s shadows when he saw them.
The ragamuffins slowed down in front of warehouse fifteen. A trio of mongoose-men guarded the large doors, deadly long rifles held in the crooks of their arms. They surveyed the street and the ragamuffin force with cold calm.
“Is better you wait up some,” the first mongoose-man said.
Dihana shook her head. “I am the prime minister of this city, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails.” Over a hundred thousand people lived inside Capitol City’s walls and she accepted responsibility for them all. “You tell me I can’t go where?” She’d learned that particular verbal tone from Elijah, her father, well before he’d died and she inherited the position of prime minister.
The mongoose-man nearest the door cleared his throat. “Let she through. Alone.”
The rusty side-access hinges squealed as the mongoose-men pushed the door open. Dihana walked through, her skirt filling out and brushing the sides of the doorframe with the motion.
In the middle of an empty expanse of dirty concrete floor, a man stood over five dead bodies. Blood settled in several footwide pools underneath each victim. Knife strokes had left tattered and sliced shirts on both the dead and the alive.
One corpse’s throat still seeped blood from a bullet puncture.
“General Haidan.” Dihana kept an artificially calm composure. The mongoose-men’s leader usually stayed out beyond the city’s immense walls. “What the hell have you done here?”
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