Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (60 page)

The paths I have worn through scrub and brush are so familiar I don’t pay attention to where my feet land as I trot down to collect the herbs. I look at the dawning sky instead and at the mountainside above me, still burrowed in the blanket of clouds it pulls over itself to bide the night. If the old woman’s visions are true and the message carried by the northerners prophetic, I wonder if the mountains themselves might be roused to arms at what is coming.

I find the patch of snake’s broom first. It is tall, with tiny yellow florets topping the bony stalks. It is a useful plant: we decoct it for massages that reduce swelling after childbirth. I pray before I start picking, and then I’m careful about how much I take. Plants are like villages, dependent on each other for well-being. Even far-flung seedlings know when their colony of origin has been decimated, and they stop thriving.

I move on to the stand of chicken herb, a styptic. The properties of the two plants partnered call up memory of my mother. If someone had mixed them – three parts chicken, one part snake – and administered a bolus, maybe her blood would have stopped flowing during my birth.

It is farther to go to get thunderer, and harder work to dig the roots from the earth whole. But it is important to do it well. The old woman long ago predicted that plague would anticipate war, and so it has. Fully a third of the people have died after burning so hot their bodies erupted in pustules – like volcanoes opening second and third vents to release what boils within. Thunderer, given in the right measure to the newly afflicted, is our best defense.

A light step and moist exhalation sounds midway through excavation of the third root. I look up. The doe’s eyes are dark and liquid, but the rest of her – small body, white pelt, reddish skin stark inside big ears – is me in animal form. She snuffles again, then butts my hand.

“I’m not done,” I tell her.

Her regard is steady, unblinking.

“Oh, all right,” I say. I put down my digging tool and get to my feet. I take off at a run behind the doe. She stops every so often and rises on her hind legs, feints toward me, then tears off in the opposite direction. We pursue each other, away and back, in a dance we’ve done together for as long as I can remember.

When I am too winded to continue, I drop to my back on the ground and close my eyes. I stretch my arms out to take advantage of the tender heat the Sun floods down this early in the day. I feel the doe nibble on my hair, then step away to a patch of something more savory.

I don’t know how long I stay like this, but too soon I hear her footfall again. She is an excellent timekeeper; I must go back, she’s telling me with her approach, to finish digging that root.

Only, when I open my eyes, it isn’t the doe who stands over me.

The boy is older than me, but not by much – fourteen at most. He’s a noble; his sandals and breechclout are bright with decoration.

“Where am I?” he says. Then, “Are you a white demon?”

I’m a girl, and as common as dirt despite my unusual look, so I shouldn’t venture to fully meet his eyes, much less with challenge. But I’m annoyed that he’s confused me for one of the gnomes that live under our mountains and hills. I’ve seen the carved white demon masks and there is nothing uglier.

“No,” I say. “My name is K’antel. And how is it that you don’t know where you are? Did someone knock you about the head and scatter your thoughts?”

“I was walking alongside my father’s house in Utatlán,” he says, “and after enough steps, I was in this clearing.”

He is a liar.

Utatlán, where the king’s fortress-palace stands and warriors are massing in preparation for war, is a two- to three-day trek from here. He does not have the look of one who has walked that far.

He casts himself on the ground next to me. That’s when I see it. The way the light sneaks through his flesh.

I scramble up. “You better come with me,” I say. “And hurry.”

He scowls. It turns his eyes shiny and hard, like the shells of the big, black beetles I find when I upturn certain roots.

“Nobody talks to me that way,” he says after a moment.

“I know,” I say, “but we don’t have much time. I must get you to the old woman. Else, you’ll wake from your trance in Utatlán and whatever wisdom your spirit knew to seek here will be lost to you.”

He shakes his head again but gets to his feet. “Maybe yours is that wisdom.” There is an odd sort of challenge in his voice as if he’s daring me to admit I think more highly of myself than I should.

When I don’t rise to the taunt, he says, “Lead on. I’ve seen you run, I’ll labor to keep up.”

I do, and he does, and he is a beautiful runner even when his feet don’t know the way.

The old woman knows, as she always does, when someone approaches our compound. She meets us with two cups of steaming liquid. Mine is frothy with honey, ground squash seeds, and corn. His will undoubtedly have some addition dictated by her foreknowledge of his arrival.

“Tekún Umám,” she says, then inclines her head a little in acknowledgement. I start. The boy isn’t just a noble, he’s royal. The prince.

“Umám,” he says. “I haven’t earned the Tekún.”

“It’s not earned,” the old woman says, “and you’ll vouch for it soon anyway.”

He catches a sigh before it fully leaves his lips. “Your granddaughter has made me run my heart out to be beneficiary of your wisdom before the trance that brought me here breaks.”

The old woman looks at me with her crooked eyes and for a moment I’m scared she will tell him that I am not her granddaughter, just a girl she’s cared for because she did not want to see me abandoned to the wild. But she doesn’t. She walks over to the fire pit, and we trail her. The smoke huffs up as if she has thrown something flammable on it; she follows the smoke with her eyes.

“Son of kings,” she says, “you know my gift of doubled vision just from looking at me. Your gifts are more carefully hidden. Tell me what they are.”

“I have a strong arm for sling or spear,” Umám says after a moment. “And enough breath to be a good shot with the blowgun.”

When she doesn’t say anything, he adds, “Warriors follow my lead without hesitation.”

“What else?” she turns to fix her eyes on him.

“He runs like the wind,” I interrupt.

“I wasn’t asking you,” she says.

Under her continued scrutiny, he finally answers, “My nahual isn’t like any other.”

“How?” she asks. I’ve never heard the old woman impatient before, which makes me search her face. Her crossed eye is where it always is, huddled near the inner corner, but her other eye… it’s in a mad shimmy from one corner to the other.

“My nahual lives outside and inside,” he says slowly.

The old woman nods, falls into thought.

“The message from the north warns that, like that great kingdom, ours will fall to the foreigners,” Umám says presently. “My father’s spies say there are not many sent forth to take down the K’iche’, but I fear they will try to gather our enemies to their ranks on their drive down.”

“Perhaps if your forefathers had not made enemies of so many…” she starts acidly, but doesn’t complete the comment

“I have been given many visions already,” the old woman says after a moment. “The foreigners have sent their hawk against you. And while hawks are swift and cruel when they hunt, smaller birds still dare harry them and drive them away. Even when those birds normally crave only song and peace.”

He stares at her. “You know which my nahual is.”

She nods.

“I would have preferred a jaguar. Like my father.”

The old woman’s smile is mocking. “Because yours is more commonly associated with women? I have known some with this same animal twin and I assure you, there is courage in it. Have you ever seen what happens to these birds when they are caught from the wild and caged?”

“They die,” he says.

“They choose death over subjugation,” she corrects.

“I have seen far into the future,” she adds. “Your name is still alive, even on the foreigners’ lips. And your nahual takes wing, they say, to fly higher than the eagle of the North or the condor of the South.”

“In truth?”

“In song,” she says. “Which holds a different kind of truth.”

After a long silence she asks, “What do the priests and advisors say to your father?”

“To fortify Utatlán when I march into battle. To make the capital like a trap that will close around the foreigners if I fall.”

Then, “I’m ready to bleed, but I don’t want to fall.” For the first time he sounds like a boy. Like me, he’s waiting to transition fully into adult status, and the wait is by turns too long and too short.

“There is no reason to dwell on falling, only on leading your warriors,” the old woman says, but absently, as if she is thinking of something else at the same time. “There will be others, in any case, who will help you stand.”

“Others?”

“Us,” she says.

He laughs – a contemptuous sound like I haven’t heard from him before – and shakes his head.

The old woman turns her back on him and returns her eyes to the smoke. “K’antel, lead Umám back to where he stumbled upon you. And while you’re there, retrieve the tool you left. It might not look like much but none other can do what it does.”

We walk silently down the path as the Sun turns the fierce side of his face toward us.

“Those last words weren’t meant for you, were they?” Umám says when we’re nearly to the clearing.

“She must expect better of you than she does of other men,” I say, looking up at him, even though the angle makes the Sun get in my eyes and they start to water.

His expression grows concerned.

“I’m not crying,” I say irritably. “It’s just the Sun.”

After a moment, he nods. “I am sorry to have laughed at you.”

“You think we haven’t heard worse?”

He reaches for my hand, wraps his fingers loosely around two of mine. I’m so shocked he’s deigned to touch a commoner I don’t pull away.

His lips move to shape words but then thin to nothing and he’s gone before saying whatever he intended.

Somewhere in Utatlán, the prince is coming out of his trance.

Achiotl is a hard, intensely red seed, smaller than a kernel of corn. Grinding it to a fine powder is hard work. Normally we wouldn’t pulverize the seeds, we’d just crack them to coarse chunks and set them in water to soak, then use the liquid to treat headaches and mouth ulcers, or to dye cloth.

But the gourds full of seeds aren’t for village use. We are grinding them into powder to send to Utatlán, so Umám’s warriors can paint themselves red before battle. The couriers who carry the demand for tithe bring news in trade. Reports place the foreigners at a good distance from us, though moving fast. The leaders ride on animals like we have not seen before – bigger than the great cats that live in our mountains, with hooves three times the size of the ones on deer.

We know animals. They are our neighbors. We dance them, and gratefully accept the gifts they offer the people. Gifts like no other people receive: their spirits twin with ours. The arrival of an animal with unknown strength or weakness and no tie to us is no small matter. With every crush and slide of stone on seed I think on what this might mean.

We grind on our knees, pushing a heavy stone roller over a flat rock base held not even a hand’s length above the ground. The old woman’s stone base is much more beautiful than my plain one. The front edge has a carved bowl to catch the pulverized matter, and beneath that, where mine has only a conical foot, hers has the carving of a coatimundi with legs splayed above and tail coiling below. I know her nahual is a coati, but the grinding stone is much older than she is, harking back to the first of our ancestors.

“When I journey to the tree of life, it will be yours,” she says when she catches me eyeing it.

I shake my head. “I was just wondering what use is a coati, or a small doe, against an animal like the one the spies have described?”

“Chssst.” It is her expression to shut me up, or to let me know I’ve said something so wrong a correction must follow. “The gods have given the people many gifts,” she says. “Never think the gifts they’ve given others are greater or better.”

“Stronger.”

“The people are like this stone,” she says, slamming the end of her roller hard against the base. Its thwack is loud as thunder in the thatched, open-walled pavilion where we do some of our cooking and most of our herbcraft. “Like the heart of the world, we do not break. No matter if we’re the ones crushing, or the ones bearing the weight.”

“Have you seen which we will be in the coming war?” I ask.

But she doesn’t answer because just then we hear the rustle of dry corn husks. When we look up Umán is there, head dragging on what hangs from the rafters. This time he wears an embroidered double length of cloth over his breechclout. It is ceremonial clothing, so his trance must be taking place during a ritual enacted by the priests in Utatlán.

“You have found us again,” the old woman says, stilling her stone roller.

“This time by intention,” he answers.

“What would you have us do for you, young lord?”

He shifts from one leg to the other. “I have been able to gather eight thousand men to me, and as many slingshots, bows, and spears. I have need of your sight to tell me if that is enough.”

“And if I say it isn’t?”

“Then I will go to our closest enemies with the offer of riches if they will join with us against the foreigners.”

The old woman gets up and walks over to the house. When we follow her inside, she’s on her knees in front of the small, elaborately painted chest that sits next to the larger, plain one that serves as our everyday storage.

“Go with K’antel to the river,” she says to Umám. “Take the largest gourds and bring back enough clay slurry to fill one of our soaking troughs. Then go to the village fields. Make offerings in gratitude for the corn – you yourself, not K’antel – and come back with enough ears to fill the drying cribs. When you have done all this, I will have your prediction for you.”

“I hadn’t intended to stay that long,” he says.

“You hadn’t intended many things, and yet they are demanded of you.” She lifts the lid of the chest and pulls out a handful of beeswax candles dyed to the colors of the four directions and lays them on the ground next to her.