The Land of the Night Sun: Book One of The Jade Necklace

by Ian Gibson

  But Kukulkan remains silent, continuing to look very impressive with his upright posture and grave, weighty stare, despite his aching head and crushed feathered crown.

  “I think he means that if you want to put out the forest fire, you’ll need to go eastward across the lake and ask Chaac of the East for his help!” shouts the howler monkey who fled up the pine tree. “You’ll need to offer him something to eat, too!”

  “You’re not supposed to explain my riddles!” Kukulkan yells at the howler in his mountain-shaking, godly voice.

  The pine tree topples over from the winds of his voice, and the howler monkey retreats down the side of the mountain, shouting, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “Chaac of the East?” Itzel asks Kukulkan. “You’ve lost me. I thought Chaac was still in my world. Are you saying there’s more than one Chaac?”

  Kukulkan lets out a frustrated sigh and decides to explain in clearer terms. “Most of us gods are fourfold. We split ourselves into four to rule over each of the four corners of Xibalba, and Chaac of the East is the strongest of the four Chaacs. You must go to the Wetlands of the East and make an offering to him, and perhaps he’ll help you to contain the fire. At least, he better seeing as he’s partly responsible.” He then shouts to the howler monkeys, “And next time don’t explain my riddle!”

  The howlers all poke their heads up from the opposite side of the mountain. “Yes, King Kukulkan!” they all shout together with their loud but quivering voices.

  Kukulkan turns to the great lake behind him. “The lake is always being blasted by storms from the East, but the howler monkey’s trumpet call appears to have blown the latest storm away. You won’t have much time before another storm rolls in, so you must make haste.” The giant snake god swerves and curls his long body around the mountain summit to fly away.

  “You’re leaving?” Itzel shouts at him frustratedly, hoping he isn’t already going to start ignoring her again. “You're asking for me to go all the way across the Underworld, but you won’t do anything to help? You’re a giant flying snake god!”

  Kukulkan halts and swoops his head back to the summit. “What?” he bellows thunderously, again rattling the whole mountain with his mere voice, rocks skipping, sliding, and rolling down its slopes.

  The howler monkeys huddle together on the mountainside, cowering and ducking their heads to hide from him again, and some are carried with the rockslide to the mountain path below.

  “You want me, the great Kukulkan, to help you?” thunders the giant snake, baring fangs several times Itzel’s height. “Who do you think you are, little human girl?”

  His voice almost blows Itzel off her feet, but she digs the bottom of her walking stick into the ground to catch herself. “I’m Itzel!” she shouts back at him.

  Kukulkan closes his terrifyingly large mouth and raises one of his grey eyebrows. “Did you just… shout at me?”

  “Only because you’re shouting at me!” she says in her defence.

  One of the howler monkeys pokes up its head from over the edge of the summit and howls at them, “Would everyone stop shouting?”

  “YOU’RE ONE TO TALK!” counters Kukulkan, hollering his deep, divine voice with such force that the whole mountain quakes even more violently now, and Itzel fears that it might very well collapse beneath her feet if the shouting match continues.

  The offending howler tumbles backward with a screech, but a few of the other monkeys in its troop just manage to catch it by its tail before it falls into the clouds below.

  When the tremor calms, Kukulkan’s serpentine eyes again fall upon Itzel. “Asking for help from the gods requires offerings, little girl. What could you possibly have to offer a god in return?”

  Itzel inspects what she has on her person. She looks at her red bracelet, and then down at her sandals. “I have this bracelet my mother gave me. Or my shoes?”

  Kukulkan narrows his eyes, clearly unimpressed by her offer. “What use would I have for a bracelet or shoes?” he says. “I’m a snake with no arms or legs!”

  She remembers her small bottle of perfume that the peccary merchant had given her, which she’s kept around her neck. She takes it out from behind her dress collar and presents it to Kukulkan. “What about perfume?”

  Kukulkan glowers at her. “Perfume? I fly high in the sky above the world where no one can smell me. What would I need perfume for? Also, are you implying that I stink?”

  Exasperated, and having nothing else on her, she tosses her wooden walking stick to him. “Have this stick then.”

  Kukulkan stares in puzzlement at the stick, then his eyes shoot her a very severe look. “Well then, answer my riddle and perhaps I’ll help you.”

  “But the monkeys already answered it,” she says.

  “Another riddle!” he hisses, before shouting to the howler monkeys hiding from him, “And if you spoil it this time, I’ll throttle your throats till your heads pop off!”

  All the howlers frantically cover each other’s mouths with their hands, just in case the temptation arises for any of them to utter a word—they’re worried that the mountain on which they’re standing will founder into the ground otherwise.

  Kukulkan wears a wry grin—it’s the first time his face has broken into a smile during this whole encounter—and tells her his riddle:

  “I am carried on the head and dipped into the land of the dead. What am I?”

  Itzel crosses her arms and tries to think of things that are carried on the head and dipped into something, while the feathered snake flicks out his tongue, his eyes wide and eagerly awaiting her answer—though he’s probably hopeful that she’ll get it wrong, so he won’t have to offer any help at all.

  She remembers the howler monkeys comically flopping about as they struggled to balance their pitchers of water on their heads, so she decides to take a guess. “A pitcher?”

  Kukulkan angles his grey-feathered eyebrows and glowers at her disappointedly.

  She can’t tell if that’s good or bad. “Was that wrong?”

  The snake’s eyes flash brightly and strike the stick with a bolt of green lightning, and the stick dances around of its own accord like it’s come alive. “This will help you on your journey,” he says as he flies away, diving headfirst into the clouds, with the rest of his long, winding body taking quite a while to follow suit.

  “I got it right!” Itzel proclaims, holding her hands high in rejoice, although she’s still clueless as to what she’s actually been given by answering correctly.

  The howler monkeys clap their hands to applaud her, and she walks to the stick to pick it up. As she holds it in her hand, the stick magically takes the form of a wooden snake with a sharply crooked neck, and sprouts little wings just below its head, as well as small turquoise gems as its eyes, which are framed by a crest of red feathers. It looks almost like it’s alive, yet it’s clearly still a stick—just a stick that looks an awful lot like it might strike or hiss at her if she were to provoke it.

  Just as his tail has finally dipped below the clouds, Kukulkan raises his head over them again. “Oh, one more thing—hand over the jade stone to the monkeys. A little girl like you shouldn’t be holding on to something of such immense power.” With that said, his head again vanishes into the wispy sea of clouds.

  The howler monkeys have returned to the top of the mountain, now that Kukulkan has left and it’s safe for them to re-emerge without receiving any more thunderous threats, and they’re busy tinkering around with pieces of the broken trumpet with a newfound curiosity, after having finally realised what it was there for in the first place.

  “We must apologise for the king’s bad mood, miss,” one of the howlers tells Itzel. “He’s been the Lord of the Underworld ever since the Death god lost the position, and he complains a lot about the work.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “Is it a lot of hard work?”

  “Well, yes,” answers another howler, before scratching his head contemplatively. “But now that I th
ink about it, he doesn’t actually do any of the work at all, though that doesn’t stop him from complaining about it. Oh! Speaking of hard work, we brought a gift for you!” It points to the footpath up the mountain as a howler trundles up to the summit carrying a bunch of bananas and presents them to Itzel.

  “A GIFT FOR YOU!” it howls at her.

  Itzel is at the same time stunned by its kindness and loudness—fortunately its fellow monkeys scold it for yelling, and it hurried covers its mouth, so by the time her ears stop ringing she’s able to express her gratitude without incurring any deafeningly polite acknowledgements.

  “We thought you might be hungry,” one of them tells her. “And we wanted to thank you for your advice on forming a chain to pass our pitchers along to douse the fire. It’s been helping tremendously. We howlers never thought to make monkey-chains and monkey-ladders before!”

  “Nor the value of being quiet!” says another.

  “But not too quiet!” one is quick to point out. “Don’t want to be mistaken for a spider monkey!”

  All the howlers chitter in concurrence, and Itzel’s beginning to suspect the howler and spider monkeys might have some kind of simian rivalry, and she’d rather stay neutral in it in spite of all the help the howlers have given her. Thinking she could use a rest after such a long climb—not to mention she’s famished and finds the cool air up here very refreshing—she sits down on a nest of pine needles and plucks a couple bananas from the bunch to eat. They don’t taste quite as nice as she’d expect ripe bananas to taste, like they’re just a bit blander, but she doesn’t mind so much as she’s starving. While she eats her bananas, she stares with great curiosity at the peculiar snake-shaped stick that Kukulkan begrudgingly gifted her, especially as it darts its eyes around and even flicks its tongue out several times. What kind of stick flicks out its tongue? Moreover, what kind of stick has a tongue to flick out in the first place?

  Meanwhile more howlers gather by the trumpet, collecting and fumbling around with its broken pieces, as if trying to figure out how to put it back together, feeling largely responsible for the ancient instrument’s explosive demise.

  When Itzel feels she’s rested enough, she gets back to her feet and brings the serpentine stick to the howlers so they can take a look at it too—as they seem to work closely with Kukulkan, they might know what’s so special about it. “Do you have any idea what this does?” she asks them, holding up the stick.

  One monkey takes it from her hand and inspects it extremely thoroughly, sniffing its length from top to bottom and bottom to top, and tapping it on the ground. Kindly covering its mouth with its other hand, it concludes, “It's a stick that can turn into a snake and back!” It hands it over to another monkey to assess it.

  “Oh, but it can also turn other sticks into snakes and back! Or anything that's at least somewhat snakelike to begin with!” the other comments.

  Itzel wonders how much use that’ll be.

  One monkey asks its comrades, "I thought sticks like this could do something else too?"

  The howler monkey holding the stick hands it back to Itzel. "Nah, I think that's it!"

  Itzel looks at the snake. “It’s a stick that’s a snake. I guess I’ll call it a ‘snake-stick’.” She then almost drops it, as the snake-stick flicks its blue tongue in and out at her again, but there’s something endearing about the way it does this, as if it were expressing approval of the name, and, if anything, she finds it surprisingly cute. She waves to the howler monkeys. “Thanks for all your help, anyway. And thanks again for the bananas.” When she says that last part, it occurs to her how odd it is for a monkey to give bananas to a human, when usually it’d be the other way—though as far as oddities go, it’s low on the list of ones she’s encountered here in Xibalba so far. In fact, she can’t even decide what’s been the oddest thing up to this point, as there are far too many options to consider, and from what she’s gathered, she has quite the adventure ahead of her still.

  The monkeys bow their heads as she leaves, and most of them return to knocking the pieces of trumpet wood on the ground in utter bemusement, but a few of them run after her.

  “Hold on, miss!” a howler monkey shouts to her.

  Itzel turns around. “Yes?”

  The howler opens one of its hands and covers its mouth with the other as it speaks, “King Kukulkan said you needed to give us the stone of light!”

  “But I need it to get home.” She also thinks it might come in very useful for something else equally important but decides it better to not mention it.

  The howler monkeys look at each other as they think of what could be done about this conundrum.

  Another monkey tells her, “Once you’ve brought rain to the rainforest, the gods will be strong enough to move all those rocks blocking the Cave of Echoes! And one of us will wait for you at the entrance to the cave to escort you home using the stone!”

  The howlers clap and chitter excitedly, very proud of themselves for having found a solution.

  But Itzel doesn’t want to hand it over, especially as she has another intended use for it—something that the monkeys would almost certainly feel the need to report to the king of the gods. She thinks for a moment, unsure of what to do or say, while the monkey still has its hand open to her, expecting her to give them the jade necklace to hold on to. At a loss for ideas, she simply tells them, “I’d prefer to hold on to it myself, until I leave, if that’s all right.”

  The monkeys all look at each other again, befuddled by her act of rebellion.

  “We have a direct order from King Kukulkan, miss!” says one of them.

  “Actually, you don’t,” Itzel tells them. “He ordered me to hand over the stone to you, but he didn’t order any of you to take it.”

  The monkeys again exchange perplexed glances and scratch their heads.

  “What does that mean?” one asks, clearly clueless as to what to do in this situation.

  “It means I’m going to keep the stone for now, and you’re not disobeying your king,” she tells them slyly.

  “But you’re disobeying him!” whoops a howler, hopping up and down in a fluster.

  Itzel thinks for a moment. “He said to hand over the stone to you, but he didn’t say when, so I’ll hand it over when I leave.”

  The snake-stick hisses in apparent protest.

  Itzel whispers to it, “I promise, all right?”

  It then flicks out its tongue, as if satisfied by her reassurances.

  The monkeys look at each other one last time, and the monkey with its hand opened to take the necklace hesitantly lowers its arm to concede to this. “If the magical snake-that-was-a-stick is all right with it, then I suppose we monkeys can’t object!” it concludes.

  “And King Kukulkan made it pretty clear that snakes outrank monkeys!” another monkey shouts.

  They all howl and whoop in agreement.

  One monkey asks, “But do snakes-that-were-sticks outrank monkeys too?”

  “That’s a good question!” replies another. “We must ask King Kukulkan!” And it runs over to the eastern edge of the summit and starts howling at Kukulkan, who has re-emerged from the clouds in the distance, but the giant feathered serpent ignores the howler monkey, no matter how well it can carry its howls. It looks at the trumpet hopefully, but upon being reminded that it’s in pieces, it just slumps over in defeat.

  The monkeys leave Itzel and scamper to the far side of the summit to join their comrade in trying to get the Great Feathered Serpent’s attention. While they’re occupied with howling at the sky and not making any headway, Itzel uses the opportunity to quietly skulk down the footpath until she’s out of sight. The rest of the howlers are still too concerned with the broken trumpet to even notice her leaving.

  The Sleeping Crocodile

  The path takes Itzel back below the blanket of clouds, and once she wraps around the mountain, the heat of the Sun beats down on her again—she had almost forgotten about how oppressive it is down here
. It doesn’t take long before she’s forced to retreat into the shade.

  Why is the Sun so hot in this place? It must be hotter than even the hottest day she’s experienced in her world, and as she lives in the tropics, she’s not unfamiliar with very hot days. Once she reaches the shaded side of the mountain, she peers downward. Climbing up the mountain was difficult enough, even with the help of the howlers, but going down at such a steep angle would be impossible without falling. “What do you think, snake-stick?” she asks, not really expecting an answer.

  The snake-stick’s forked tongue flicks in and out again, and she realises it’s going to take her some time to adjust to having a stick that’s capable of doing that. She decides that the slope is too steep near the summit, but she remembers that it levels out to a gentler angle farther down the mountain, so she resolves to just put up with the heat as best she can. She also develops a deeper appreciation of why the whippoorwill’s wife is as cranky as she is, if she’s been dealing with this for hundreds of years, whereas Itzel’s had about enough of it after just one morning.

  She makes one more clockwise loop around the mountain before hearing a rustle in a bush beside the footpath on the shaded side, and a strikingly familiar ringed tail lunges out from the leaves at a blurring speed to curl around her snake-stick.

  “A treasure from the gods! I must have it!” squeaks the coati, yanking the stick right out of Itzel’s hand before she even has time to react, much less know what happened in the first place. It then slithers down the mountain path, quickly disappearing out of sight around the bend.

  “Hey! Give that back!” she shouts at the thieving coati, running after it in a hot temper. She had been kind enough to let it go, and even let it take all those precious stones, yet it has clearly been following her all along, just to wait for another opportunity to steal something from her!

  But when she rounds the corner, she’s surprised to find the snake-stick batting its little wooden wings to fly back to her, with the coati dangling upside-down helplessly from it by its tail—not unlike the situation it found itself in when she caught it in her rope snare. She crosses her arms and glares at the coati angrily, tapping her foot. “You again?”