Apricot brandy

by Lynn Cesar

  The ghost-snake clenched her, clamped her into herself, and she knew the earth around her, remembered all her long years of life and knew their tininess in this swallowing earth. This earth was a throat, a knotty tongue, a root-veined muscle clenching and tasting her, and Quetzal became a rivering knowledge of everything within the planet’s embrace.

  She knew with awe this planet, a Titan’s hand cupping her in the palm of forever. She felt terror and joy at the wonder of time without end. Dense granite made their passage through it arctic, almost frozen, till, pierced by veins of water, the brute rock yielded swifter transit. Then came strata of clay and coarse jumbled gravels, gravels even more richly veined with water… and they were in the aquifer, the deepest base of the ancient river-course. Here was where their Adversary would be rooted, in this catacomb of waters… .

  Little Arco Iris died at the hand of Itzam-ye, a woman of power from the mountains. For one morning Quetzal felt her quick little thieving hand— for the first time— gripped tight by a larger hand lying in wait in a pocket she’d thought undefended. It wasn’t the fierce strength of the capture that killed the little pickpocket forever, but Itzam-ye’s eyes, when the girl raised her own to meet them. Great melting eyes flanking the scimitar Mayan nose. Eyes like a fierce and merry beast’s, though that nose swept down to a bowed mouth of such age, of such sad knowledge… “Little daughter,” Itzam-ye said, “you will come to school with me.” It was Itzam-ye’s eyes, and her sad mouth, and the word daughter…

  “What will you teach me in school?” she’d asked, her heart already saying yes.

  “Everything,” Itzam-ye said.

  They took a camion out of town, bales and caged chickens and one or two surplus passengers heaped on its roof. Up and down mountains to one jungle valley, up and down mountains to another. That night in a poor farmer’s house, Quetzal stood beside Itzam-ye, who had blood up to her elbows as she brought a baby girl from her mother’s womb. Later, in the bed the family made for them, their stomachs filled with beans, fried plantains and rich coffee, Itzam-ye said, “Did this child come out watching and listening, daughter?”

  Quetzal thought and answered, “She was crying too much to see or hear anything.”

  “Just so, daughter. And I have taken you with me because I knew, the moment I felt your little hand in my pocket, that you were one who came out watching and listening.”

  A drumbeat, drumbeat woke her to herself, as the knife she gripped shook in that subterranean thunder. One gaunt old woman-soul at a giant’s door, one skinny old bruja with a knife and a few dead friends… Come back, little pickpocket, bring me your nerve… . For here in the water-veined stone and clay, she had come to the mighty trunk of the green god’s war-machine. Its rough-barked shaft, thick as a giant redwood, was the green dynamo, the siege-engine Xibalba was raising against humankind. They rivered up along it, the stone knife stabbing upward, sunward, as the shaft began to branch, wider and wider, intricately, slenderly, till they rose through a network of tendriling branchlets.

  Quetzal pulled back on her knife, pressing it to her misty center and hung there static amidst the weave. The earth seemed warmer and the faintest honey-tint of sunlight thinned its darkness. So dense was the woody network that it pierced her ghostly substance and she felt what flowed through these small branches: human sentience flowed through them, captured hearts and minds and DNA. These roots reached up into the plant life that clad the whole valley and that plant life at this same moment feasted on the valley’s human denizens.

  The green god’s siege-machine, then, was an inverted tree. Its roots fed on the upper world and the dragon-crop it bore would bloom below. That was where she must go, so downwards Quetzal thrust her knife, and downward once again they dove.

  By the time they had been six years together, Itzam-ye had shown her chosen daughter the coming-to-birth of every living thing in the mountains, from beetle to jaguar, from toadstool to tree, and in their seventh year together, Itzam-ye showed her what lay beneath all things that came to birth under the sun.

  Near a mountain’s peak, in the blaze of noon it was. Such a wealth of colors baked beneath a sun of flawless gold… the green-robed earth seemed to leap heavenward in sheer rejoicing at its own rich raiment, its own wealth of forms. “Look up into the branches of that tree,” Itzam-ye said. Seventeen or eighteen now, Quetzal was not quite still the doting daughter she had been these seven years past. The steely will within her had, in recent months, been flexing like a fencing foil. She wanted to go back to the city, or some other, larger city— to cross a sea or two. Her wits were keen, where might she not go? What not do?

  “Look into the branches of that tree,” Itzam-ye said again, a new note in her voice, so that Quetzal met her eye. The old woman said, “This is the last thing I will show you, daughter. Your own road begins here and you will walk it without me. And so you must see what I show you when you look into those branches. Your eyes must do exactly what your little hands did in people’s pockets long ago. Your hands stole they knew not what— whatever they encountered. When you look amid those branches, there is a mystery there you do not know and your eyes must snatch it and pull it into the light.”

  The fear the young woman felt at knowing she would be alone henceforth worked a kind of magic in her mind. She knew with sudden certainty that this earth, this sky swarmed with things she’d never seen, never guessed, and all creation seethed with miracles. She raised eyes of awe amidst the branches. The empty air between them seemed to stir, to hesitate… and there it was: draped across a half dozen limbs, its limber length arrayed in graceful arcs, bigger than the biggest anaconda she’d yet seen, was a serpent clad in shining emerald plumage. This feathered serpent seemed to smile, then leisurely rippled and poured its length along the boughs, and off the boughs, rivering gracefully into the air, and away. A young bruja— who in that moment received her name, Quetzal-coatl— was born. A young witch who looked about her, and found her sorcerous foster-mother gone forever.

  * * * *

  The stone knife dove and pulled the old witch back into herself, into by far the deepest place she had ever searched. The great rough shaft sped upwards past her plunge, while the grip of earth grew denser on her, its darkness absolute. Again the great shaft branched and branched again… inverted trees and boughs and limbs, rooted in sun and human flesh above.

  A dim green radiance glowed with nascent life that drew her stone knife, that began to pull her laterally, out along a branching, toward a constellation of glowing cocoons. These strange fruit stirred, like hatchlings struggling in their shells and she could feel their tremorings on all sides, a thousand distinct hungers clawing their shells from within.

  Now the knife rocketed and she streamed in its wake, her allied souls kindled like flames in her jet-stream. The stone fang hungered and, in that instant, fed. A gnarled pod longer than a man, slashed lengthwise, released a dense effusion of green blood. A crooked embryo thrashed in its throes and a soul burst out, a gust of mind and will and hope reborn. Again! Again! Quetzal’s ghostly vortex sucked in each soul as the stone blade arrowed on.

  But even though the knife went quick as thought about its harvesting, and the rope braid of rescued souls had grown two hundred strong, mortal danger had come instantly awake. For now far more fruit was ripening into dragons than the blade could forestall. Hatchling monsters swarmed from shattered pods on gnarled limbs that clawed up through the earth almost as swiftly as the witch’s troops could fly.

  Up those Resurrectors sped, escape their urgent mission now, though still the witch searched for the aura of one soul in particular— and just before pursuit grew too lethal to prolong her quest, she found the one she sought, and slashed her free.

  “Up into the air!” she cried. “Seize up my body and lift it high as we emerge!” They all geysered up from the seam in the warehouse floor. Their whirlwind snatched up Quetzal’s vacant flesh curled on the floor, lifted it to the ceiling and juggled it high. Her form da
nced laxly on air as she struggled back into it— a bit like dressing in free-fall— as out of the seam the first green dragons swarmed, crooked brutes twice a man’s size, lurching along on clawed limbs unequal in length and angle burl-like skulls all crudely jawed and fanged with nightmare thorns and studded with crude black gems for eyes. As they emerged the dragons emerged, clawed the air and hissed— knew their prey and knew it missed the witch afloat above their reach.

  “Listen!” Quetzal hissed. “Something else, something much bigger is coming! Smash the doors out! Hurry!”

  * * * *

  Marty watched the mayhem around him from farther and ever farther away. Panic had seized hold of a hundred and twenty men in a moderately spacious but utterly sealed enclosure. Panic indeed seemed perfectly sensible to Marty, from the viewpoint of his men, who were not Jack Fox’s chosen viceroys in the surface world. For these men, panic was undoubtedly quite rational. When one gazed, as Marty did, on the front doors, and viewed, on the outside of their bullet-proof glass, a dense screen of gnarly vines, thick as human limbs, sprouting from the concrete, sealing the doors immovably, and sprouting thence out of sight to cover the building’s roof just as densely.

  That the doors were bullet-proof was being deafeningly demonstrated as he looked on, officers discharging double-ought against them repeatedly to no effect, then using SWAT-team door-rams, persisting insanely in perfect futility, as if their repeated blows, by sheer force of protest, could make the impossibility of it all just go away.

  Marty stood watching, listening, waiting for his sign. He knew Jack meant to recycle the whole department. Marty gladly willed these men underground with himself surely still the chosen viceroy, only let Jack give him that sign, set his mind at rest…

  A prickly sensation rippled over his body. His face… it seemed to swarm with ants. He clawed it— and found green shoots, young grass under his fingernails!

  A mighty boom! echoed from the depths of the building, from down below the utility plant. A hundred cop faces turned as one in that direction. A long poised moment of listening— shotguns and battering rams held in suspension— and then the doors to the morgue blew open and a whirlwind came spinning through, a blurred vortex within which an old woman rode standing on air, her white hair unruffled by the cyclone that sheathed her. The witch! “Shoot her!” Marty shrieked.

  The cops’ astonished faces, turning to him, registered a new amazement. Their chief had become a Green Man furred with grass. He snarled, knocked a man senseless and took his pump-riot, but could not raise it fast enough, as the miniature cyclone rose. Marty had a half-second to see the witch give him the finger and the skylight exploded amid tatters of torn vines, the windblown witch hit the sky and was gone as the vines re-knit and then came dangling down into the station like seeking snakes.

  The morgue doors flew wide. The dragons came. Marty stood unflinching, peering from his green mask, refusing to think himself less than the commander of this carnage… and was confirmed. The rough-barked, thorn-fanged horrors, spotted with fungoid eyes, leapt on screaming men to either side of him. Shrugging off buckshot, they tore heads from shoulders and wolfed them down. By the dozens they came and Marty’s troops fled screaming before them. Those who did not already lie twitching as they were devoured— fled down to the garage, where Xibalba’s host swarmed after and whence more shots sounded, more men screamed. All while Marty Carver stood there, a Green Man now, but chosen still.

  Something new was coming from below. A massive tread that shook even through concrete floors. The morgue doors exploded, torn from their hinges by their old master, Dr. Harst. A Dr. Harst how different though, how huge, how rudely sculpted by the green god’s hand. He stood a full ten feet tall, his mouldy nudity grown monolithic, shelf-fungi jutting from his brow and jaw, scales of wort and toadstool crusting his cask-like torso, a gnarled mandrake root his crooked sex. His voice was a blurred rumble: “The god awaits— not a bone of you’ll be wasted, not a morsel of your brain, dear boy… ”

  He seized Marty whom— calmed by spinal rupture and tucked beneath his arm— he bore below.

  * * * *

  In the heart of town the fight raged fierce, Quetzal had conjured up the sirens’ voices from the otherwise useless cruisers all driverless in the county garage, and had wakened as well the bull-elephant voices of the fire engines in their station. The smash of shop windows, where her ghost-troops seized up tools and weapons, added to the din, which drew awakened householders from the core of town. Men, women, and children fleeing their panicked neighborhoods, where they had seen neighbors ensnared already, seen every tree, shrub, vine and blade of grass— all writhing, twisting, reaching out green limbs towards human ones. Where they, terror-struck, had seen less lucky friends shriveling like spider-prey amid green webs of stems, fronds, blossoms, branches, their faces fragmenting into the green explosion, their eyes strangely enraptured, their voices lifted eerily to utter visions of a world below, a world of root and spore and worm and seed, a sunless, fecund empire of the Green Titan everlasting, interweaving all.

  And as these refugees came wailing, stumbling, grieving to the heart of town, it was only to behold further horror and yet more surreal mayhem, for here the folk of Gravenstein encountered a swarm of different nightmares: elvish leaf-clad shapes erupting from plundered hardware stores, garden stores, gun shops, and all of them brandishing axes and chainsaws, and machetes and shotguns. And among these phantoms, directing them, a witch with stark white hair who stood, as did her troops, upon the air!

  But these flying horrors leapt to do battle with the rooted ones. They lopped the grasping branches of carnivorous trees, or swooped to amputate the limber arms of greedy vines that grabbed for the legs of the staggering refugees. And as these fought, the witchly figure cried counsel to the refugees: “Stay on the pavement! Arm yourselves! Take blades and axes and clippers. Hurry! Worse is coming! The dragons are coming! We must stand together! All must fight!”

  * * * *

  Sal had Helen and Skip in the back of his cab, and Cherry up front. In the middle of the street outside Cherry’s, amid greenery writhing on all sides, he siphoned Helen’s gas into the ten-gallon spares strapped in his truck-bed. He prayed his four-wheel drive and high suspension would cope with the green cataclysm he saw writhing everywhere. What he and Helen had just seen had put their planning on an end-of-the-known-world basis— not to mention the din of shouts and sirens and gunshots rising from the heart of town not a quarter mile away. There was a desert region a couple hours north of the county. They would head there.

  But the moment Sal fired up the engine, the gas was tromped by a foot not his own, and the wheel was wrenched to a different will. Swearing, he writhed helpless in invisible bonds as the truck burned rubber, whipped a U, and headed straight for the center of Gravenstein.

  They braked on smoking, shrieking rubber amid dozens of other vehicles crowding the main drag from curb to curb. Got out shakily and stood stupefied, as all the drivers around them had done, all dragooned here, it seemed, and all now utterly forgetful of that strangeness amid this wilder sorcery, these axe-wielding shapes of leaves and air felling trees that bucked and writhed, or pumping buckshot into vines that surged and seized like hydras, while above the battle, an airborne illegal alien perched on a whirlwind.

  “Attend me!” she cried. “You are all who have survived in town.” It was not a voice she spoke with, for Sal was sure her lips hadn’t moved. It was, he felt, the direct touch of her thought, commanding all of them at once amid the din. “And from those doors”— she pointed toward the police station—”something is coming even now! I cannot let you run! We must fight side by side! Arm yourselves and stand to the battle! We compel your cars. If you run, it must be on foot, and if on foot you flee, you’ll surely die.”

  Sal noticed a big man standing near him by a battered pick-up. Noticed him because the guy had slowly drawn his gaze from the impossible warfare all around him, and settled his dark eyes on S
al himself. Sal had seen this guy around town this last year or so— doing clearing and firewood cutting. Two big chainsaws were lashed in his truck bed. The guy said to him, “I’ve seen you at Fratelli’s over there, am I right?”— pointing to the market down the block, its tables fruitless, but the signs still up.

  “I’m his son, Sal Fratelli.” Unexpected tears jumped into Sal’s eyes.

  “I’m Kyle. Did you lose him, your father?”

  “Some fucking plants! He was— ”

  The guy squeezed his shoulder with a powerful hand. “I’m so sorry, man. This is— ” he waved his hand at the environing madness “— impossible. It’s just not happening, but… it is. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ve lost someone, too. I have to ask… . Your dad’s sign says Fox Fruit. Does that mean Jack Fox?”

  Sal nodded, his mind drifting outwards. This conversation seemed so strange, or any conversation in this transformed world! At the doors of the police station, the entire building overgrown with vines, a violent upheaval had begun. The vines buckled, quivered and recoiled: the doors’ panels of steel and heavy glass shrieked and cracked and sprayed fragments. Something was hammering its way out from within the station.

  “Yeah. Jack Fox. I picked it there, the fruit. From cut-down trees.”

  The man’s eyes seemed dazed with the same unreality that mesmerized Sal himself. What the hell were they standing here talking about? “Karen Fox. Was she there? Is she there now?”

  “I saw her yesterday. I think she said she was leaving town. I don’t know where she is now.”

  The station’s doors erupted. What lumbered out seemed too crooked-legged to move, till it lurched forward with the swift, eruptive lunge of a great Nile crocodile. Kyle turned to his truck bed. “You want one of these?” His hands flipped bungees free and he snatched up in either hand his two big chainsaws, as if they weighed no more than five pounds apiece.