Author: Christine Morgan
Date: 2022-07-29 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Horror
Description: Majestic sun-temples. Mystic cenotes. Sacred ball-courts. Ritual sacrifice to blood-hungry gods. Mighty jaguars, feathered serpents, obsidian, jade, and gold. Join Splatterpunk Award Winner Christine Morgan's dark muse on a journey inspired by the mythology of the ancient Maya, with these six stories ready to… RIP YOUR HEART OUT
Publisher: The Evil Cookie Publishing

RIP YOUR HEART OUT

©2022 by Christine Morgan

Nine Jaguar-Feather (Smashwords 2012)

The Sun-Snake (Zippered Flesh 2 2013)

Soft-Walker (Not Your Average Monster 2015)

Sharp Obsidian (Double Barrel Horror 3, 2020)

Children of the Turtle (original to this volume)

Jade Thunder (original to this volume)

All rights reserved.

Cover, layout and interior

K. Trap Jones

All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

www.theevilcookie.com

Table of Contents

———

NINE JAGUAR-FEATHER

THE SUN-SNAKE

SOFT-WALKER

SHARP OBSIDIAN

CHILDREN OF THE TURTLE

JADE THUNDER

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NINE JAGUAR-FEATHER

“Ugly Ulli! Ugly Ulli!”

The jeering boys were my own age, but some of them had already earned their first marks of manhood. They bore the ritual scars of young warriors, the tattoos proclaiming their skill in the hunt.

I would never win such marks.

“Ulli fetches water like a woman!”

Fierce Macaw and Crested Macaw sprang in front of me, blocking my way. Large and strong, they were alike as two corn-kernels and had always been the loudest, most constant of my tormentors.

They stuck out their tongues so that I could see the still-healing wounds where stingray spines had been driven through the soft flesh.

I would never be allowed to let blood, either.

“Ulli Round-Head! Ulli–”

“Stop that!”

The voice was a girl's, but it was sharp as an obsidian blade. And, like an obsidian blade, it cleanly sliced the mocking cries and laughter.

We all turned. Red Flower Hummingbird, in her brightly woven huipil, stood on the steps leading down from the high palace. Her brother Clever Sun-Fox was behind her, grinning with amusement.

“And you shouldn’t call him Ulli,” Red Flower Hummingbird went on. “It’s not nice.”

Most of the boys were properly abashed, shifting and muttering and shuffling their feet. Fierce Macaw made an indifferent, swaggering shrug to show his insolence, and prove to the others that he was not afraid of a girl, even if she was the Chosen. “It’s his name,” he said.

“No, it isn’t.” She stamped her foot.

“Isn’t it?” Crested Macaw widened his eyes, all innocence. He looked at me. “Isn’t your name Ulli?”

Curtly, I shook my head.

“Oh.” Crested Macaw shared a glance with his brother, both of them smirking. “What is it, then?”

My lips pressed tight together.

“What did he say?” Fierce Macaw cupped a hand by his ear. “Did you hear anything?”

“Nothing,” Crested Macaw said. “He must have no name. The adults call him One-Slave, but that doesn’t seem very nice either.”

“Then we’ll have to go on calling him Ulli,” Fierce Macaw said.

My hands were clenched into fists. The same lifelong, familiar, useless brew of anger and humiliation bubbled inside me, making me shake so hard that my burden of gourds rattled together on my back.

I did have a name! A fine name, a proud warrior name, a man’s name!

Or so I had been told. Once. Long ago. By Five Yellow Coati, an old man who had known my parents. He had died and now no one knew it but me. And I could not speak it.

“You will go away and leave him alone,” Red Flower Hummingbird said.

“Or what?” challenged Crested Macaw.

Clever Sun-Fox cleared his throat. “Or Seven Thunder-Eagle will want to know why his water hasn’t been fetched yet. Without the water, there won’t be the sacred drink. Without the sacred drink, there won’t be the ceremony tomorrow. Without the ceremony…” He trailed off, but raised the plucked arches of his eyebrows.

Several boys murmured, sounding nervous and unhappy. None one wanted to risk the wrath of the gods. Or of Seven Thunder-Eagle, who knew and spoke their will.

He, like me, had no twin.

Once, though, he had. A sister. Moon-Water Maiden. She’d died young and all of her power had gone to him. He’d had a family. He had become high priest.

Me?

I was a slave.

I had been born alone, and I was a slave.

A brotherless, sisterless, motherless, fatherless, voiceless slave.

The boys dispersed. I nodded my thanks to the Chosen and hurried on my way, the empty gourds clunking and clattering at the end of their cords.

The sky was blue, the sun yellow, the land green. The flowers that gave the city its name–Axcanan–bloomed red and rich like great spills of blood over the limestone-whitened buildings.

Men and slaves toiled in the milpas with digging sticks and stone-bladed hoes, sweating under the heat. On the walls, spear-warriors stood tall and majestic in their headdresses, the dried heads of slain enemies tied at their waists.

From the hom, the great ball-court, came the thuds of bare feet on hard-packed earth, of wooden hip-yokes striking the ball, of bodies slamming heavily down. I could hear the players’ grunts of effort or pain, and their cries of frustration or victory. I did not linger to watch. The game of pokatok was one more pleasure and honor that would forever be beyond my reach.

Besides, I hated the ball. The hard, round, heavy ball. It was made from thick sap leached from the weeping-wood tree. The ball was called ulli.

I trudged past women grinding corn on flat rock metates, cooking, making baskets and weaving colorful cloth. Their chatter was as loud, lively and constant as that of monkeys and macaws. Earrings gleamed as heads nodded, jade decorations flashed from point-filed teeth as they smiled.

The adults barely noticed me, but the children did. The children always did. The young ones who stayed with their mothers–little boys playing in the dust with wooden toys or play-weapons, little girls with dolls or bits of yarn to weave on their own toy looms–stared at me with wide eyes and open mouths.

They did not need to fear me. I wished I could tell them that, but of course, I could not. And I did not blame them for their stares. Had I been one of them, I would have done the same.

Sudden pain stung my ankle. I jumped, and looked down, expecting to see a wasp or an ant. There was only a small jagged-edged stone. It had left a reddish mark above my sandal cord, but had not broken the skin. A boy nudged his friends, then flicked a second stone at me. It bounced past my foot. All three of them snickered, until a woman barked a rebuke.

I went on, the harness-strap digging into my forehead, the gourds clattering together with their hollow sounds.

Ahead was a place where wide, deep basins had been carved into flat terraced stone plateaus. Girls with long wooden paddles stirred corn as it soaked. Unmarried girls, wearing huipils and jade earrings like grown women. Girls my age. With their high, sloping foreheads and crossed eyes, each was more beautiful than the last.

It almost hurt to look at them.

An ancient grandmother, Two Sky-Owl, scolded them when they paused to gossip and giggle. My face burning, I lowered my head and hurried past.

No warrior’s marks for me. No wife. No sons, no daughters. No gloriously violent death to win me entrance to Heaven. My death, like my life, would be low and mundane. Xibalba waited for me. Only Xibalba, the underworld, with its cruel gods of pestilence and pain.

I neared the edge of the city, where the walls of Axcanan butted up against steep and rocky hillsides. Carved and painted stone heads–jaguars, gods, eagles, serpents–frowned out from tangles of vines and red flowers. Birds twittered and flapped, and somewhere off in the distance, a monkey shrieked a warning cry.

I had been born alone, I would live alone, and I would die alone.

The shame of my single birth had killed my mother. The loss of her had killed my father. Their families wanted nothing to do with me and would have left me to starve, rather than take a child so unlucky into their homes and hearts.

Unlucky? Unnatural… even cursed. I did not even have a voice with which to cry or speak. I should not have been allowed to live.

But Seven Thunder-Eagle said that it must be the will of the gods. He saw to it that I was fed and tended enough to survive.

And so I was. Enough to survive.

I came to a cleft in the steep hillside, a cave entrance flanked by twin stelae carved with images and symbols. The pillar-slabs of stone rose twice my height.

There had been no one to care for me the way other babies were cared for. No one to bind my skull between boards to coax the soft bones into an appealing shape, and dangle a bead from my brow so that my eyes would grow crossed.

Perhaps they all expected, even hoped, that I would sicken and die anyway. I had not made it that easy for anyone. I’d been healthy and strong from the very start, almost as if in defiance. Healthy and strong, and ugly.

Ugly Ulli. With my round ball of a head and my forward-staring eyes. My ears had never been pierced. My skin was blank and dull, and would never be marked by anything but the most ordinary of accidental scrapes and scars.

No manhood ceremony would be held for me. When I had first been old enough to walk, no obsidian blade had sliced my foreskin into strips to make the Fringed Serpent.

No stingray spine would pierce my tongue and let my blood fall onto the bark-paper to burn and carry my prayers to the gods in the smoke.

Did the gods even know my name?

They must. It had been spoken, if only that once, by Five Yellow Coati when he’d told me what my parents had planned to name their firstborn son. While I’d never been able to say it myself, I had written it. I often drew the symbols in the dirt, so that I wouldn't forget.

It would never be carved in stone, made eternal on a stela. When I was gone, no one would have any reason to remember.

Nine Jaguar-Feather.

That was my true name.

The breeze from the entrance was cool and steady and moist, like a calm exhalation that went on and on. It felt soothing against my face. I could hear water dripping, the sound echoing up from far below.

Moving between the stelae, I stepped into the shadows and paused so that my eyes could accustom themselves to the gloom. The path was steep and a single misstep might send me tumbling to the bottom with a broken neck.

Would a fall like that, I wondered, be a violent enough death to avoid Xibalba? Or would it be a certain route there, given what lay beneath?

The narrow tunnel slope was lined with a long ladder-stair, made from peeled logs bound together with twists of vine. The echoing plinks and plunks of water became louder as I descended. I could hear the soft lapping of ripples. Drops fell on my cheeks and the back of my neck, clammy touches trickling over my skin.

Woven through the liquid melody of the cenote, like strands of paler thread in dark blue cloth, were other sounds. Sounds that sometimes seemed like rustling movement, and sometimes like whispering voices.

The ladder-stair ended. I moved over wet, slick stone, setting my sandals carefully with each step. Damp, chilly air swirled around me. Enough daylight reached down from the opening above to make the water glimmer.

I heard a splash, as of a leaping fish. But nothing lived down here. Other cenotes around Axcanan were life-places, surrounded by dense greenery, teeming with fish and frogs and turtles. Those were where the women went to draw the water to soak the corn before it was ground and cooked and eaten–if they did not, the gods visited sickness on the people.

This cenote was a death-place. A well into the heart of the world. Depthless blue shading away into black. No plants. No creatures. Not even insects.

Only dark water and stone.

I shivered despite myself.

Again, something splashed. I heard a hiss, and a low noise like a chuckle. It made my throat tighten and my stomach squirm. The surface undulated, rippling, lapping, sloshing up to the rim where I knelt.

I still saw nothing.

Quickly, I dipped one gourd after another, holding them under so that the water rushed and gurgled in to fill their hollow cores. Having to submerge my hands made me feel uneasy. It was water, only water, and nothing was going to sting me or bite me or grab my wrist or surge up from the deep with a sudden lunge and yank me down and drown me…

My shivers intensified and I nearly dropped a full gourd.

In the silence of my mind, I chided myself. Perhaps I could not be a man, but that did not mean I was a child. It wasn’t as if I had never been here before.

When the gourds were stoppered up with clumps of grass mixed with clay to keep them from spilling, I slung them on my back and climbed out. The sun was a glare, the white walls blinding, the colors leaping into my eyes and making me squint.

Once I was above, the dark cave behind me, I felt foolish. I was glad no one had been there to witness my senseless moments of shivering and fear.

Weighed down by my heavier burden, I trudged through the city toward the palace of the Chosen. It rose above the rest of Axcanan’s buildings, its sculptures and stelae brilliantly painted and sparkling with pieces of jade, obsidian and other precious stones.

Everything was being made ready for the ceremony. I slipped around busy groups of women preparing the feast, and men bringing armloads of offerings. I glimpsed Clever Sun-Fox fidgeting and complaining as he was made to try on his rich new robes adorned with shining blue-green queztal feathers. He caught my eye, and wrinkled his nose in long-suffering, then grinned and winked.

I was going to miss him. And Red Flower Hummingbird. Of all the Chosen I’d known while serving Seven Thunder-Eagle, they had been the kindest to me. They’d never mocked my ugliness, or my silence. We’d almost been friends, if a slave could be said to be friends with the Chosen.

Tomorrow, a new pair of twins would be brought to the palace to sleep on the softest beds, wear the finest garments, and dine on the sweetest fruits and most succulent meats. The new Chosen would be permitted to enjoy the frothy brew made from cacao, and have all the honey they desired.

Would they be as kind, as friendly? I doubted it. Most of them had taken arrogant delight in the power of their position. If it was their will, I could be beaten with sticks or knotted cords, and given only the leftover scraps to eat. I’d endured that before.

Seven Thunder-Eagle was waiting for me, tall and lean. He kept the hairs plucked from his face, eyebrows and head, which made his large hooked beak of a nose appear even more prominent. The lobes of his ears had been split and he wore large jade disks in them. Every single one of his teeth was filed sharp, and drilled, and set with jade.

As always, the sight of the mark on his neck unnerved me. It was not a scar or tattoo, not the mark of a man or a warrior. It was a dark blotch, blue-black against his brown skin. It looked like the smudged print of a tiny hand. And that, he’d told me, was exactly what it was. The infant handprint of his dead twin, Moon-Water Maiden.

I emptied the gourds into a large clay basin, and Seven Thunder-Eagle put me to work chopping and grinding and mixing. It took half the night, the priest burning leaves to inhale the smoke, his voice rising and falling in the rhythms of prayer. When the sacred drink was almost ready, he sent me staggering off to collapse onto my blanket.

My sleep was thin and troubled. I woke with a startled gasp to the sound of hide-covered drums and conch-shell trumpets. My body ached. I felt unrested. And I was late. The eastern sky was already streaked pink and orange. Soon the sun would rise, shedding its fiery rays to touch the carved stone pillars of Itzama and Ixchel. In the west, the full setting moon hung above the horizon, yellow-white as a picked skull.

I scrambled into clothes and sandals, and rushed to retrieve the basin from where it had been left to simmer over a bed of embers. The clay was warm to the touch, the liquid reduced to a thick syrup. Wincing at the heat baking through into my palms, I hurried up the rear steps and emerged onto the platform atop the palace.

My arrival was barely noticed by the throngs below.

Every man, woman, child and slave in Axcanan had gathered. Warriors and nobles stood on the steps of the pyramid, arranged according to rank and wealth. The rest of the people jostled for position, trying to get the best view. Everyone gazed upward, at the pillars, at the twins in their quetzal-feather robes and elaborate headdresses. And at the tall form of the priest between them, arms outstretched.

Seven Thunder-Eagle shot me a look as quick and piercing as a dart hurled from an atl-atl, but did not pause as he proclaimed, in powerful rolling tones, how the god Itzama and his sister-wife Ixchel had chosen this place to be their worldly home, and how their twin sons had married the twin daughters of a great king, and so given rise to our people.

I knew the story, and I scurried as unobtrusively as I could to the double chacmool, a sculpture in the shape of two stone figures reclining on their elbows with their heads turned. The sun-crowned head of Itzama faced east, the skull-crowned head of Ixchel faced west. The flatness of their middles made a shelf, where I placed the warm bowl.

Clever Sun-Fox managed for once not to grin. He held a properly solemn, somber expression for the benefit of the onlookers. He did give me a slight upward eye-roll and shake of his head, as if inviting me to see how silly he looked, his cheeks striped with red and gold rays.

Red Flower Hummingbird glanced at me, and her lips quirked in the faintest of smiles. I nearly couldn't bear how beautiful she was, in all her finery, with the white and blue marks of Ixchel painted on her face.

I retreated, knowing what came next and already feeling a throb of anticipated envious pain.

Signaled by Seven Thunder-Eagle, the Chosen stepped forward. Each held up the dyed and decorated ceremonial stingray spines. Together, they tipped their heads back, opened their mouths and stuck out their tongues.

The spines stabbed. The blood flowed. I was close enough to see their involuntary tears, but neither of them so much as uttered the smallest stifled cry.

Twin scarlet streams dribbled into the basin, mixing the blood of the Chosen with the cacao, ground chili peppers and corn and spices, ashes, water of the cenote, and whatever other secret ingredients Seven Thunder-Eagle had added after sending me away. The sacred drink was complete.

At a nod from the priest, the twins dipped their cupped hands in and drank. Only I was close enough to see how they shuddered, how their faces twisted. Red Flower Hummingbird gagged, and hesitated, but a severe scowl from the priest made her finish draining the dark, muddy liquid. She and her brother held up their stained palms to the crowd. A collective cheer arose.

Nodding, satisfied, Seven Thunder-Eagle dipped his own hands, drank, and showed his palms. From off in the jungle, a flurry of birds took sudden shrieking flight. Macaws, vivid red and yellow against green. They whirled in chaotic patterns above the palace and then scattered across the brightening sky.

Blinking owlishly, Clever Sun-Fox looked at his sister. Instead of his usual grin, he wore a vague and somehow empty smile. A strange bubbling laugh welled up from his throat. He tottered. His heavy headdress made his head wobble alarmingly. He laughed again.

Red Flower Hummingbird swayed, unsteady on her feet. She gazed at her hands as if she’d never seen such amazing things before, then slowly brought them to her face. The touch smeared her cheeks with the drink’s stain, and smudged the painted marks. Her expression was confused, troubled.

A burning, fevered light had come into the eyes of Seven Thunder-Eagle. He raised his arms high and turned toward the rising sun. “Itzama!” he cried. “God of the heavens, god of the sun and the skies!”

“Itzama!” the crowd responded.

Clever Sun-Fox tottered again, then stumbled. As he thrust out his hands for balance, he struck the clay basin. It skidded to the edge of the chacmool, where it teetered precariously. Everyone below gasped.

I gasped as well, sure that the bowl would fall and shatter, broken pieces bouncing all down the side of the pyramid, the dregs of the sacred drink spraying across the stones.

But Seven Thunder-Eagle was quick. He snatched up the bowl before it fell and shoved it at me in a hard, furious gesture. I caught it, thought for an instant I would drop it myself, and then had it firmly in my grasp. My heart drummed frantically in my chest. Some of the liquid had splashed up over the side and splattered onto the back of my hand, but I had not let it fall. I set it carefully aside.

“Itzama!” Seven Thunder-Eagle cried again. “Here is your Chosen!”

He seized the laughing Clever Sun-Fox and whirled the boy around, bending him backwards across the flat middle of the chacmool. Clever Sun-Fox’s headdress fell off. He goggled upside-down at the city.

Without thinking, I brought my hand to my lips and lick-sucked away the dark, warm, sticky droplets. The taste was revolting, like a brew made from ash-pit scrapings and raw meat, coating my mouth with the oily film of peppers and spice, and the faint bittersweet tang of cacao. It stung. It burned. I could feel it sinking into my tongue, seeping down my throat.

I immediately realized what I’d done and terror swept me like a wind. But no one had seen. No one was looking at me. Their attention was on the priest, and on the long knife he’d drawn.

Black light glinted on obsidian. Clever Sun-Fox whooped like a monkey, waving his arms in the air and kicking his feet so that the jade disks adorning his new sandals flashed, and the hem of his quetzal-feather robe flipped up over his knees.

It seemed to me that the sacrificial blade was ablaze… that the burning in Seven Thunder-Eagle’s eyes had become real and encompassed his entire head in a seething orange glow… that his ceremonial robes were made of flame.

He slashed.

The sharp edge went through flesh as easily as it might have sheared a tender young leaf. A deep cut, deep, nearly to the bone. Clever Sun-Fox’s waving arms stiffened. His hands clawed at the air. His wild, whooping laughter drowned in a gurgling scream.

The blood was a fountain, leaping high. Then it was a flood, a waterfall, spilling down the steps.

A small, plaintive sound came from Red Flower Hummingbird. She was staring at her brother, whose feet had stopped kicking, whose arms dropped limp as loose vines.

As I looked at her, she changed in my sight somehow. The smudged marks on her cheeks seemed to blaze like cold fire. The setting full moon behind her head outlined her in shadows and turned her face into a hollowed skull, the face of a corpse, when the brightness of the rising sun should have been full upon her.

“Itzama!” Seven Thunder-Eagle brandished the knife.

“Itzama!” came the ecstatic echo from the crowd.

“The god of sun and sky is pleased!”

“Itzama!”

Then the priest turned toward Red Flower Hummingbird. He gestured with the hand that still held the bloody obsidian knife.

Her sandals scuffed as she moved obediently to him. I could see the horror in her gaze, but it was sunken, submerged. She trembled as she moved past Clever Sun-Fox’s sprawled body.

Seven Thunder-Eagle began leading her down the steps. The crowd parted ahead of them, and followed behind. Women took up a chant. Drums thumped. Gourds filled with dried cacao beans rattled. Someone blew a wavering tune on reed pipes. The procession took the same path I had taken just the previous day.

As they neared the stelae flanking the cave entrance, Red Flower Hummingbird faltered. That filled me with dismay. She had always been kind to me, and was almost a friend. I had hoped to see her go bravely and proudly to this great honor.

I pushed closer, so as to be ready if Seven Thunder-Eagle beckoned me to help him. Sometimes, the Chosen girls resisted, or fought, or tried to flee. Some needed to be dragged screaming into the cavern. A few years ago, Five Conch Shell had even fainted and had to be carried. I did not want to see that happen to Red Flower Hummingbird.

Then I stopped short.

The dark opening was not dark. It was filled with light. But no light like anything I had ever seen. This was a strange and smoky glow… shifting, eerie and the color of twilight. Shapes seemed to move within it.

Red Flower Hummingbird, her breath frantic, was pulling at Seven Thunder-Eagle, trying to get away. He had her by the wrist, tugging.

Everyone else muttered disapproval at her reluctance. I saw her parents avert their faces in shame.

I rushed up, weaving my way past people. The twisting smoke-shapes unnerved me, but I kept going, all the way to the cave entrance. I could not believe that no one else seemed alarmed. It had never been like this before.

The priest nodded brusquely at me. “Hold her.”

I stared at him. Didn't he know that something was different? That something was wrong? Didn’t he see it? Didn't anyone see it?

Then, like a hard blow, I understood.

The sacred drink.

Seven Thunder-Eagle saw. He knew. No one else did, because no one else had tasted what was in the bowl. Only the priest, and the Chosen.

And, this once by mistake, me.

It showed us the place as it truly was, as it always was.

“Hold her!” He repeated it in a snarl.

Years of long habit made me do as he commanded. I grasped Red Flower Hummingbird’s other wrist. She sobbed once, weakly, but the will had fled from her and she let herself be drawn into the sloping tunnel. Into the eerie smoke-light that rose from the cenote like mist.

Blue shadows flowed across the stones. The glowing surface rippled, heaved, lapped. The sounds were the same as I’d heard before, but this time I could see what made them. I could see the sinuous bodies writhing, sleek scales glistening. They hissed. Eager, hungry hisses.

“Ixchel!” His voice was strong, carrying up the passage to those gathered outside. "Goddess of the night and dark waters! Here is your Chosen!”

I thought of all the times before, of the girls brought down to this cave and sent plunging into the cenote. I thought of the way so many of them had struggled, frantic, as if trying to escape terrors that only they could see.

Now I knew the truth.

My grip loosened. But Red Flower Hummingbird was motionless, transfixed by either the drink or dread, or both. She stood beside me like a sleepwalker. Her lips moved enough to form one word, but in that moment she was as voiceless as I was.

“Please,” she mouthed.

“I said hold her, you fool!” Seven Thunder-Eagle cuffed me on the side of the head.

I thought of how he had watched avidly from the rocky rim as the girls had each finally gone under, vanishing into the bottomless black.

Unable to reply, I pointed. At the churning water. At the long, supple, rearing shapes. At the curved fangs and quick, flicking tongues.

Rage contorted his face as, finally, he understood what I must have done.

“They demand sacrifice,” he said. He spoke low, urgently. “If we do not give them what they want, they'll dry up the cenotes, punish us with drought. The crops will fail. Now push her in, Ulli!”

I pushed as hard as I could.

I’d never known until then just how strong I was.

Quetzal feathers crumpled under my hands. His feet flew up, his body pitched sideways. He only managed one startled exclamation before he went in with a tremendous splash.

As the sleek, hissing, glistening shapes swarmed over him, I seized Red Flower Hummingbird and pulled her away from the edge. We clung to each other, not wanting to see it but unable to look away.

Seven Thunder-Eagle thrashed and flailed. Fangs pierced him again and again. Muscular coils wrapped his body. His screams bubbled as water rushed into his gaping mouth.

It took a long, long time.

But finally, there was silence. The cenote still glowed from deep within, still cast its eerie shadows over the cave, but the surface was as smooth as jade.

Red Flower Hummingbird gazed up at me. I gazed down at her. She didn't speak, and I couldn’t.

At last, I ran my fingertip along her face, scooping away the smeared paint and sticky liquid. I turned to the cave wall and found a flat spot, where I carefully drew a symbol.

She touched it, frowning. Then she smiled.

We emerged into daylight to find the crowd waiting, tense and expectant. They’d heard the screams. They knew the ceremony had not gone as planned. And now, seeing us, it was plain that no one knew what to do next.

No one except for Red Flower Hummingbird.

“The gods have chosen a new priest,” she said, and pointed to me. “His name is Nine Jaguar-Feather.”

THE SUN-SNAKE

In Kukmatlan, the Great City, the Festival of the Sun-Snake neared its culmination.

For thirteen days, the People had celebrated with banquets and sacrifices, dancing and games. Trade goods and tribute came from every province, from the small coastal villages to the remote settlements in the cloud-forests. The marketplace bustled with activity. Artisans demonstrated their crafts, displayed and sold their wares. Poets, speech-givers and riddle-makers entertained the crowds.

For thirteen days, travelers had come to the Temple of Kuk, which climbed skyward in a stepped pyramid to a high platform where rayed-and serpentine-engraved stelae marked the calendrical and astrological positions of the sun.

For thirteen days, ritual bloodletting was done, stingray spines or threads-of-thorns piercing lips, ears, cheeks and tongues, the heels of new infants, the foreskins of boys becoming men, the labia of girls becoming women. The scarlet drops fell upon corn-paper, which was then burned to let the wafting smoke carry these offerings of nourishment and devotion to the gods.

For thirteen days, the Hom, the sacred ball-court with its high walls and stone rings, had resounded with the whack and thud of pokatok. Just as each province sent its tribute, each province sent its team, made up of their best young athletes and warriors. When one team emerged victorious, its individual players competed against each other in contests of speed, strength, sport and skill.

Now, only two remained standing.

They were not brothers, but could have been, both of an age and of a height, straight black hair cropped to equal length, muscular brown bodies gleaming with sweat. Barefoot, unadorned by jewelry, they wore only white loincloths bordered in embroidery of red and yellow.

Makchel and Tlinoc exchanged proud, anxious smiles.

Whichever of them won this final challenge, they knew they had already brought great honor to their families and their village.

Spectators looked on from the seating areas above the walls. These were the nobles of Kukmatlan and the wealthiest provinces, richly dressed, stylishly tattooed, teeth glittering with inlaid disks of crystal and precious stones.

The God-King himself was there, ancient and wizened in a jaguar-skin mantle, his face seamed like the shell of a nut but his wise eyes very alert beneath his quetzal-feathered headdress. His wives, sons, daughters and grandchildren sat with him, flanked by slaves holding woven shades on poles.

There, too, aloof and untouchable, were the Corn Maidens.

Only the most beautiful of noble-born girls, whose heads swept up and back in flawless elegant lines from skull-binding since infancy, whose eyes crossed the most appealingly from having strung baubles suspended between them, only they would be selected.

Their garments were long loose huipils of gold-beaded strands hung from collars of stiff green maize-leaves. More gold hung in bangled clusters at their earlobes, around their necks, and at their wrists and ankles. In their hair were ornaments of gold, jade, and feathers of green and yellow.

A temple priest approached the young men. He carried a turquoise-decorated wooden box containing the ceremonial atl-atl and javelins. The target, a painted deer-hide stretched over stacks of bundled grass, had been set up at one end of the ball-court.

Tlinoc threw first. It was a good throw, good form, good distance and aim. The javelin’s gilded tip struck the edge of the second sun-circle. The onlookers murmured their approval.

Makchel threw next, with three short running strides and a powerful heft of his arm. The javelin traced a smooth arc and lodged just within the boundaries of the innermost sun-circle.

Amid cheers, Makchel and Tlinoc fell together in a hearty embrace of congratulatory back-slapping. Women tossed flower petals. Men scattered fistfuls of dried tobacco. A few daring children scrambled down the walls, rushing to try and touch them for luck.

More priests emerged to lead the young men out of the Hom. The nobles, God-King’s family and Corn Maidens followed. Warriors armed with spears and fringed shields cleared a path through the immense and busy Sun Plaza. The procession grew as others joined in, forming an excited throng.

A steep flight of shallow steps climbed from the temple pyramid’s base to its height. At the top, awaiting them, stood Yaxcoatl… the High Priest of Kuk, the Guardian of the Sun-Snake.

Though short of stature and squat of build, round of face and of belly, bow-legged, Yaxcoatl nonetheless presented an imposing figure, resplendent in his mantle embroidered with patterns of interlocking red and yellow winged snakes. The fiery gold of his headdress blazed in the brilliance of the summer sun nearing its zenith.

A living sun-snake, scales shining, draped in sinuous loops and coils around the High Priest’s neck. Its slim, forked tongue flicked at the air. A feathery frill surrounded its head, and more feathers made winglike ridges in twin lines to either side of its body.

Makchel glanced back down, dizzied by the view. The steps plunged away at a severe angle toward the crowded plaza below. All around him were the buildings of Kukmatlan–the God-King’s palace, temples to the other gods, the Law-Court, the houses and monuments, the walls and stelae covered in glyphs that told the grand history of the People.

He could not recognize any friends from their own village in the mass of upturned faces and colorful clothing, but knew that they would be there. They had come bearing tribute, and they would go home bearing word of this glorious honor.

One of the priests guided him to a spot between two tall sculptures, winged snakes that faced inward with chunks of rough crystal gripped in their fanged jaws. The crystals flashed in the strong noon sunlight. Makchel stood feeling the sun’s strong rays on his bare shoulders.

Tlinoc went to the altar and lay down upon it. He turned his head once to grin with delight at Makchel, then lifted his chin to the sky. A deep breath of pride swelled his chest.

Yaxcoatl’s powerful voice rang out in prayer. His teeth, the incisors filed to points and studded with disks of crystal, sparkled. The sun-snake at his neck writhed and slid. Four strong temple priests took hold of each of Tlinoc’s limbs, while a fifth held a basin at the ready. The Corn Maidens chanted a song of praise.

Obsidian glinted glass-black. The knife parted Tlinoc’s flesh. A single cut, sure and swift, opened from breastbone to armpit. The blood had barely begun to gush when Yaxcoatl plunged his hands into the gap of the ribs.

A choked gasp erupted from Tlinoc’s throat. His eyes bulged. His back arched. His legs tried to kick but the priests held his ankles.

With a wet sound like the ripping of sodden, heavy cloth, Yaxcoatl wrenched a pulsating knot of muscle, gristle, and spurting veins from the ribcage. He thrust it aloft toward the sun, shouting to Kuk.

The heart throbbed wildly in the High Priest’s grasp. Red blood ran down his arm and rained in thick splatters over Tlinoc’s shocked face and aware eyes. The sun-snake, with another quick flick of its tongue, sampled the offering and found it acceptable.

More blood gushed up from the gaping hole in Tlinoc’s chest, coursing over the carved stone sides of the altar, trickling along channels in the platform’s floor. His head rolled to the side again. His gaze found Makchal, his expression a mix of exaltation and bewilderment.

Then he went limp, staring past Makchal into a world the rest of them could not yet see.

***

They burnt Tlinoc’s heart in the basin, burnt it to blood-ash and charcoal.

To this, they added a liquid made from fermented corn paste, the venom of a sun-snake, sea salt, water from a sacred cenote, and medicines gathered in the deep jungles.

It tasted of life and death.

Makchel’s mind reeled. He laughed. He screamed. He wept. He moaned.

His perceptions both sharpened and dulled.

He saw each fine line of the feathers in Yaxcoatl’s headdress in the tiniest, clearest detail, but the sun and sky overhead melted into a glimmering puddle… he heard each subtle golden bead-clink as the Corn Maidens moved, but the sounds of the Great City were faraway and distant as the sounds of the sea… he smelled the strange, cold, spicy scent of the snake but not his own sweat…

…and he felt every deft slice of the sharp, brittle blade…

…but it did not hurt.

There was pain. Makchal knew that there was.

How could there not be pain as the obsidian knife slit his leg in a single long shallow stroke from the top of his inner thigh to the sole of his foot?

How could there not be pain as other incisions were made, leading out crossways from the first so that a sheet-flap of skin could be peeled up like a damp leaf, peeled up and folded back, revealing raw muscle that seeped sluggish blood onto the bed of corn-paper underneath him?

How could there not be pain as the same was done to the other leg, the skin-flap of that one peeled and folded the other way?

He felt it, every thin cut, every flaying and peeling sensation.

He felt it when they slathered the exposed flesh with an ointment boiled from bakalche bark, herbs and rubber-tree sap… gluey, sticky, stinging like fire-nettles, soothing like the cool balm of aloe…

They pressed his legs together and pulled the skin-flaps taut to seal the joining seams, the Corn Maidens stitching the edges with needlework more delicate than the finest embroidery. Priests wrapped him from hips to toes in a plaster of cloth strips and clay.

Makchel dreamed while waking and spoke while sleeping. The skies wheeled above him, light and dark, sun and stars, the gods of the Thirteen Heavens passing in rapid succession. The Lords of Night stalked him, hungry jaguars with jaws poised to rend and devour.

The priests split his tongue. They did not pierce it with a stingray spine, or pull a thread-of-thorns… they split his tongue’s end with the obsidian knife, so that it forked and curled.

Through shaving, plucking, and scouring by porous stones, all the hair of his head and body was removed.

Where his eyebrows had been, and through his lips, they affixed rows of tiny golden hoops.

The outer cartilage of his ears, they trimmed off, so that only a small ridge remained around the openings. They did the same with his nose.

When they broke the dried clay plaster and unwrapped the cloth strips, his legs had melded together into a single limb from the loins and buttocks on down.

Next came the scarification, more deft knife-work, hundreds of small semi-circular cuts in his skin… the cuts then packed with a gritty powder of ash, gold flecks, and ground corn… the scars healing into raised marks in a pattern of scales.

More hoops of gold were pierced through his foreskin, and rounded gold beads inserted beneath the skin of the shaft, until the length and swelled girth of his manhood was knobbled, textured like ripe maize.

As he climbed step by step to the temple’s great height, now each new cut, scar and piercing was another step bringing him closer and closer to the gods.

So was each feather, as they embedded the pointed quills into him one by one. Scarlet and yellow and orange… set into his naked scalp to form a crest of bright, fiery plumage… tracing his jawline to make a feathery frill… in rows along the backs of his arms from shoulder to elbow to wrist.

He was the Sun-Snake.

The god embodied.

His joined legs could support him to balance upright, but not walk. Temple slaves carried him from place to place on a litter. He slept in a luxurious bed heaped with rushes. The nobles of Kukmatlan brought him rich gifts.

The Corn Maidens served him banquets unlike anything Makchal had ever known in the humble village life he’d led before. He feasted at dawn on porridge sweetened with agave and honey, at noon on rare fruits, at dusk on meat and fowl and shellfish, and at night was given all the frothed brew of spiced cacao he could drink.

The Corn Maidens bathed him and oiled him, sang to him, danced for him, and eagerly saw to his other needs as well. His split tongue plied and savored their succulent flesh; the penile hoops and beads enhanced each thrust’s intense pleasure.

On sacred days, he breathed the smoke of burnt offerings to speak divinations. He listened at the Law-Court as judgments were passed. He appeared with the God-King when ambassadors from other empires visited, or when conquered enemies were sacrificed.

He was the Sun-Snake.

The god embodied.

***

The warm summer went on, the rains regular, the weather favorable.

In the milpas, where the field-workers toiled with their digging sticks, the corn and amaranth grew tall. The beans thrived.

On their vines, squash and melons fattened toward ripeness.

In their temple chambers, so did the Corn Maidens, bellies great with child.

The harvest was plentiful.

The dry season came. The lakes fell. The rivers shrank.

Atop the Temple of Kuk, the priests tracked the movements of the sun. They followed how it rose and set in relation to the positions of the stelae, and the winged snake sculptures, and the rays engraved into the stone.

They kept the calendar.

The days shortened.

Each one saw the sun’s rising and sinking paths passing closer to the solstice markers.

Until the shortest day of the year…

***

In Kukmatlan, shadows lengthened. Darkness pooled in the streets until only the tops of the highest structures remained touched by daylight.

A crowd filled the Sun Plaza.

All that day, they had fasted, and prayed. They had taken no tobacco. All that day, they had gone without washing, without cleaning their teeth with salt and charcoal. They dressed in their simplest clothes and flimsiest sandals. They wore no jewelry. Even the God-King and his family appeared as humble as any peasants or slaves.

Every lamp and cookfire in the Great City had been extinguished. Every clay oven for the baking of maize-cakes had been left to go cold.

The temple priests chanted and the Corn Maidens sang, swaying into a frenzy as the smoldering red-gold ball descended. Yaxcoatl led them, overcome with such fervor that the tears poured from his eyes.

He uncoiled the snake looped around his neck, holding its body aloft. With his filed, crystal-set teeth he severed the head, whipping the flailing body by the tail so that its blood sprayed out and fell like red rain.

For this was the moment… the cycle… the year’s end…

To bring back the light, or be cast into Night forever.

Makchel raised his feathered arms and lifted his face to the last rays of the setting sun as it came perfectly poised in the center of the solstice marker’s engraved stone ring.

Gold gleamed and flashed from his facial piercings, from the crown of gold hoops at the end of his jutting, engorged erection.

He was the Sun-Snake.

The god embodied.

The oils with which the Corn Maidens had anointed him ignited.

Fire swept over him, surrounded him in a blazing corona.

A cry of exultation burst from his throat.

A powerful push of his serpentine lower body launched him from the high platform into the open air, arms outstretched as extended blazing wings.

He hung there a moment as if suspended.

Then he arced into a long dive, trailing streaks of flame.

His burning body plunged into a mound of kindling, dried grasses and corn-paper sprinkled from the sacrificial bloodlettings.

It flared into a conflagration, a sudden roiling heat, sending sparks and embers spinning up in a whirlwind.

The ancient God-King, supported by two of his wives, came forward to light a ceremonial corn-stalk torch from the bonfire. He touched it to the torches of his sons, who then turned to touch theirs to others. The nobles of Kukmatlan, the chiefs and the warriors, the wealthy merchants… torch by torch, the fires increased… spreading outward through the plaza like sun’s rays, branching off into the streets like snakes of flame… until the entire Great City glowed its defiance against the Night.

And the People celebrated the rebirth and the renewal of another year.

SOFT-WALKER

We are the Corn-People

We are the Blood-People

We are the God-People

Made from Blood and Corn

Tuapecmal imbued his voice with all the confidence he could muster as he led the morning’s chant.

But the listless villagers only mumbled their responses. Most did not even bother to look at him, keeping their gazes downcast rather than lift them to the sun rising behind the altar-stone.

A haze hung already in the sky. Not a breath of breeze stirred. The surrounding jungles fumed a green and sweaty steam. Any relief the cooler shade beneath the trees might promise was made a lie by the steady, droning, teeming hum of biting flies, chinche beetles and mosquito.

The men leaned heavily upon their digging-sticks, as if at the end of a long work-day rather than the beginning. In the milpas where they grew their crops, the earth lay parched and dusty. The women all looked weary, when they had not yet begun their ceaseless treks to and from the deep cenote. Empty buckets carried down rough steps hewn from cavern limestone, full buckets brought back up. Fretful younger children tugged at their sisters or grandmothers.

Tuapecmal raised the offering-bowl of atole, the drink brewed from honey-sweetened cornmeal. It was very weak, very watery. The gods might not be pleased, but what else was there to do? He did not know. He was no priest. He was no prince.

They had tried the ritual bloodletting, piercing the flesh of every person in the village with spines of dried and sharpened corn-stalk, dripping it onto scraps of corn-husk paper and burning it to waft as smoke. The hunters had trapped a live tapir, which had been adorned with flowers and thrown into the dark sinkhole that led to Xibalba.

Finally, in desperation, Great Ixlat their leader ordered his own son taken to the altar-stone. Ixatalan was the best of them, a fine youth, strong and handsome, a hunter and a skilled player of the ball game, loved by all. He went bravely to his fate, with his last words imploring the gods to have mercy and bring favor upon the People. Then the obsidian knife, wielded by his father’s hand, had cut the beating heart from his breast.

Such a noble sacrifice, the People believed, must appease the gods!

It was therefore a terrible surprise to them when, a few days later, they woke to find the Great House empty. Ixlat, his queen, and the high priest were gone, along with most of the household and many treasures of gold, jade, and quetzal-feathers as could be carried.

Their leader-king had abandoned them.

Abandoned them to suffer, to wither under the heat of the worst dry season they had ever known.

Had the gods abandoned them as well?

No one wanted to believe it. Were they not the Corn-People, the Blood-People, the God-People made from blood and corn? Were they not the favored ones? The chosen of all creation?

So it was, so had it always been, so had they been told. How Sky-Heart, in loneliness, made the world, filling it with plants and animals… but when those could not sing his praises, the other gods suggested he give life to creatures that could think and speak.

First, Sky-Heart had formed the People-of-Mud, but they sat and did nothing, and he let them melt away in the rain. Next, Sky-Heart fashioned the People-of-Wood, who walked and talked but were empty in the head, so he destroyed them with flood and fire.

Then, at last, Green-Maize-Woman brought Sky-Heart the ripe corn, and showed him how to grind the grain upon the flat metate, and wet it with his own god-blood, and from the resulting clay-paste he shaped the first true People. They honored him with sacrifices, sang his praises, and were faithful and good.

Each day, they reaffirmed this in their chant to the rising sun. As they had done this morning. As they did every morning.

Yet, now…

Could Sky-Heart have turned his back? Did the god no longer watch over his creations? Would he not protect them from injury and sickness? Had they failed to please him? Had he not been entertained by the ceremonial ball-games? By the offerings?

Why did he leave them to the cruel predations of Black Macaw, Bringer-Of-Thunder-Without-Rain, who had countless hungry, greedy offspring?

Or did Sky-Heart test the People? Test their loyalty with hardship, so that if they won through, they would be rewarded?

Tuapecmal had no answers for these many questions. He had no answer for why it was that the villagers looked to him. All he had been, before, was Ixatalan’s closest friend, the prince’s inseparable companion since boyhood.

Now, Ixatalan was dead, the life bled from him on the altar-stone.

And all, it seemed, for nothing. The three eldest of Black Macaw’s brood–called Drought, and Blight, and Swarm–continued to plague the People. Their myriad younger siblings swept down in feathered numbers to peck the corn-grain from the new stalks or the fresh-planted milpa rows. They tipped over baskets, raided any grinding metate left unattended, and the bolder ones might snatch pieces of corn-dough from a child’s hand.

They were relentless in their thievery. Relentless.

The village women had tied cloths on lines in hopes their wind-stirred waving might scare the birds away. But with no wind to stir them, the cloths hung limp, fading in the sun’s glare, gathering field-dust.

When chased off or struck at, the birds returned at once. Barking dogs did not deter them. Nor did boys throwing rocks. The flap and flutter of their wings was mocking laughter. Each caw and chirp was taunting insult. Trick-likenesses of men, made from cornstalks, sticks, and rags, only provided places for them to perch. There, they preened and chattered.

The sun climbed higher. The day warmed further. The offering of atole that Tuapecmal had poured upon the altar-stone dried to a smear, explored by buzzing flies. He returned the bowl to the Great House, then stood there in its vacant, unaccustomed silence.

He closed his eyes, though not with any foolish hopes that, when he again opened them, he would see it as it used to be.

Tears stung behind his eyelids. A lump felt lodged within his throat. Tightness gripped his chest, as if his heart–the heart he would have gladly given up, taking Ixatalan’s place on the altar-stone beneath the obsidian blade–was caught in a god-fist. His breath shuddered.

“Tuapecmal,” whispered a voice.

A familiar voice. A voice he knew. A voice he loved. A voice he never thought he’d hear again.

A voice that, although known and loved and familiar, sounded different somehow. Cool and dark, damp, with a hollow echo that made him think of the deep cenote.

His eyes opened. While he still did not see the Great House as it used to be, neither did he see it as he knew it was. It, too, was now cool and dark. Shadows rippled on the floor like the surfaces of pools.

And, like an upright reflection on the rippling surface of such a pool, the vague image of his friend appeared before him.

“Ixatalan,” he said, or tried to. His mouth mutely shaped the name.

“Tuapecmal.”

It was Ixatalan, it was. Not as Tuapecmal had last seen him–back arched, head back, arms splayed, awaiting the cold, sharp touch of the sacrificial knife–but as Tuapecmal remembered him best. Smiling. White teeth shining. Leaning, almost lounging, at his ease. His gaze welcoming and warm.

A breechclout swathed his lean hips, its ends beadwork-decorated. Around his shoulders, he wore a strip of jaguar-skin knotted at the chest. Jaguar claws hung from it, pale curves against his unmarked, muscular flesh. Another such strip of jaguar-skin bound his black hair back from his high brow.

Yes, it was Ixatalan.

The tears he had withheld threatened to return. A single one succeeded, trickling down Tuapecmal’s cheek. He slowly extended a trembling hand. Ixatalan’s folded around his, fingers insubstantial as smoke. The sensation of that spirit-touch sent a chill through him.

“You must help the People,” Ixatalan said in his cool and hollow voice. “They look to you now.”

“Me?” Tuapecmal shook his head, uttering a ragged laugh. “Why me?”

“They know you were dear to me, dearer than any friend or brother.”

Another god-fist seemed to clutch at Tuapecmal’s heart, to crush it with grief.

“But, Ixatalan, what can I do?”

“If Black Macaw’s hungry children are not driven away, the People will starve.”

“We’ve tried. There are too many. As soon as we plant more grain, they peck it from the earth. They devour the corn faster than it will grow!”

“Then find another way.”

“How? They are bolder than ever. Nothing frightens them.”

“Nothing?”

Tuapecmal paused. He again felt a chill course through him. He could not speak.

“Nothing?” Ixatalan said again. His familiar smile changed, the white teeth still shining, but shining in narrow, elongated points. His warm and welcoming gaze changed as well, becoming less welcoming and far warmer, a warmth like the smoldering glow of an ember. “In all the old stories, what does Black Macaw most fear? Who is Black Macaw’s dreaded, hated foe?”

“In the stories?”

“When Seven Deaths sent Black Macaw to kidnap Green-Maize-Woman’s daughter. Surely you remember. Black Macaw carried the girl high into the Great Kapok tree, where she could not get down. And Green-Maize-Woman asked the creatures of the jungle for their help.”

“Ah yes.” Tuapecmal said, recalling how they had listened raptly to the tales when they were boys. “Root-Sniffer, the wild pig, was willing but could not climb. Loud-Howler, the monkey, was the best climber but too noisy. Only Soft-Walker, the jaguar, could do both.”

He understood then the change in aspect that had come over Ixatalan’s features, the long teeth, the ember-glowing yellow eyes, the spotted fur that seemed to sweep along his chest and limbs, as if the jaguar-skin he wore grew to cover his body.

“And Soft-Walker,” Ixatalan said, his whisper almost a growl, “climbed the Great Kapok tree, frightened away all the birds that Black Macaw had left to guard Green-Maize-Woman’s daughter, and rescued her before Seven Deaths could come to claim her. Since that day, Black Macaw and Soft-Walker were sworn enemies. You know what you must do.”

Tuapecmal nodded. “But what about you, Ixatalan?”

“Soft-Walker the jaguar goes between the worlds,” he said, not quite in answer. “Soft-Walker goes by day and night, by land and water, by earth and tree, and between underworld and heavens.”

As he spoke, his image began to fade and his voice to turn more ghostly. Tuapecmal sought to cling to his friend’s hand, but there had been nothing of substance for him to grasp in the first place, and his fingers curled in on emptiness until they touched his own palm.

“Stay,” he begged.

Then a dark sleep fell over him, and when he roused he found himself sprawled on the Great House’s floor. Ixatalan, if he had ever been there, was gone. The vision, if vision it was, had ended.

He made a new likeness out of corn-stalks, sticks and rags. This one did not have the shape of a man, but was half again the size. It stood long and low upon four legs, with a thick tail of strung-together corn-cobs and a round-eared head carved from a lump of wood.

Into the hollows for its eyes, Tuapecmal set disks of polished jade. Into its gaping jaw went sharp white teeth, and into its cloth-padded paws went hooked slivers of honed obsidian.

Last of all, he wrapped the likeness in a spotted jaguar-skin, which Ixatalan had given him as a gift. He hefted it onto his shoulder and carried it through the village.

The People stared at him as he passed with his awkward burden. It was a crude, clumsy, shabby thing. They must have thought that he’d gone mad. No one spoke to him, though they murmured to each other behind his back.

He did not care. He did not speak to them, either, or acknowledge their astonished looks.

In the milpas, birds flitted and hopped from row to row, scratching at the dirt, pecking for planted grain. They perched on posts, flapping their wings, fanning their tails. They puffed their chests. They strutted. They chirped, cawed, called, and chittered. Their droppings splattered white and greenish-black.

Men swung at them with their digging-sticks, cursing. Boys, armed with nets and stones and branches, chased them off again and again. Dogs ran around, barking, yipping wildly. When disturbed, the birds rose scattering in a bright flurry of colored feathers, but no sooner had the disturbance moved on than they went back to what they had been doing.

Thieving. Feasting. Gorging themselves on the corn.

Some even flew at the men and boys and dogs, darting at their heads, battering with rapid-beating wings, jabbing with beaks and talons, drawing thin lines of blood. It even seemed the birds licked at the redness, lapping it up with thirsty greed.

The Corn-People… the Blood-People… Tuapecmal thought as he approached.

A flock descended on a girl who had been bringing the laborers a midday meal. Her basket tumbled into the field, spilling thin rolls of corn-dough stuffed with a cold mash of boiled beans and squash. She shouted furiously at the birds, slapping with both hands, until a scarlet-banded one gouged a deep wound in her cheek. Then she fled, wailing and sobbing, with her arms crossed over her face.

The largest of the birds was a brilliant blue macaw with jagged yellow markings and an insolent plumed crest. It screeched, shifting from claw to claw, atop the tattered remnants of one of the man-shaped likenesses.

That one–Blue-Lightning-Crest, Tuapecmal decided he would call it–must have been their leader, a favored child of Black Macaw. Its cries seemed both mocking and triumphant as it watched its brethren tear apart the spilled bounty of squash and beans and corn-dough until not a scrap was left.

Blue-Lightning-Crest broke off its screeches as Tuapecmal brought his burden into the dusty rows. The plumed head tipped to one side. Black eyes glittered, fixed on him. The other birds also ceased their noise. The sudden hush made Tuapecmal shiver despite the sun’s heat glaring through the haze.

Men with digging-sticks and women with buckets also stopped to watch, heads tilted in much the same inquiring manner. A dog yapped, took a step, then sat on its bony haunches with its tongue lolling.

He felt foolish. The skin-wrapped likeness was not fearsome. It was absurd. It more resembled an oversized child’s toy made from twigs than it did a jaguar. He set it on the ground and it promptly fell over.

A single harsh and jeering caw from Blue-Lightning-Crest was the only sound. Tuapecmal’s face burned with shame. He righted the likeness, balancing it on its four padded cloth paws. The disks of polished jade shined blankly. Its jaw gaped at nothing. Its corn-husk tail drooped in the dirt.

Tuapecmal sighed. He crouched beside his ridiculous construction, elbows braced on his knees and his head hanging. His shadow puddled beneath him.

What had he been thinking? He must have dozed off in the Great House, had a dream, and mistaken it for a vision or spirit-visit. He sighed again. The ground upon which he crouched had been recently turned, for all the good it did. Already, the ravenous birds had pecked up most of what had been planted. Glimpsing one that they’d missed, he pinched up a tiny, dry, wrinkled piece of corn-grain. He rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, sighing a third and heavy time.

“I am a fool,” he said to the jaguar-likeness. “If Ixatalan could see this, he would laugh until he split. What kind of Soft-Walker could someone like me create?”

He stuck the grain of corn into its mouth as if feeding it, and only further proved his foolishness by pricking his finger on the point of a sharp tooth. He winced at the quick stab of pain, got up, and turned to trudge away with shoulders slumped and head still hanging.

A streak of blue and yellow glided past him. He looked back with dull and useless anger, already knowing what he’d see. Blue-Lightning-Crest alit on the stick and corn-stalk spine of the likeness, claws plucking at the spotted skin. The bird’s wings ruffled proudly. It waggled its tail-feathers and shifted its stance, as if debating where first to void its splatter.

The dog that had been sitting with tongue lolling gave a startled yelp and lurched backward, kicking puffs of dust. A bare heartbeat later, the corn-stalk jaguar whipped about with all the sinuous strength and speed of a living jungle-cat. Its jaws snapped shut on Blue-Lightning-Crest’s neck. The teeth sank deep. The bird flapped and shrieked in pain. The jaguar shook it in a furious, violent motion. Blood splashed the earth. Blue and yellow feathers flew. Hollow bird-bones cracked.

Then every other bird gathered around the milpas took in terror to the air. The sky darkened from the masses of wings and bodies. The air splintered with a thousand panicked cries.

Tuapecmal ducked, raising his arms to shield his face. A couple of birds smacked into him and fell dazed into the rows. One pecked at his ankle and he stamped it flat under his sandal.

When it seemed safe to do so, he lowered his arms and looked. He saw others doing the same, digging-sticks let fall, buckets of cenote-water overturned. The dogs had dashed from the fields. Villagers called out alarmed questions.

And the birds…

The birds, except for those few feathered corpses such as the one he’d crushed, were gone.

The corn-stalk likeness of a jaguar stood just as he had placed it. Unmoving and unmoved, jade-disk eyes gazing blankly at nothing. But thick red wetness, and flecks of blue and yellow, stuck to its wooden jaws. Shredded tufts and entrails, and a lone stiffened claw, were all that appeared to remain of Blue-Lightning-Crest.

“Soft-Walker,” Tuapecmal said, without realizing he intended to. He glanced at his finger. He thought of the piece of grain he’d been putting into its mouth when the sharp tooth pricked his flesh.

The Corn-People… the Blood-People…

They gathered, the People. They stared at him again. This time, the stares were of a very different nature. None suggested he might be mad… unless they all were, because enough of them had seen it too. The jaguar, that swift strength and lithe grace. The large blue macaw ripped to tatters. The milpas, deserted of the countless birds.

No one spoke.

Perhaps no one could. Perhaps no one had to.

The first to move was an older woman, not a grandmother but not far from it, with scrawny but tough brown arms and legs and a grubby huipil with faded embroidery at collar and hem. She retrieved the buckets she’d been using to bring water from the cenote, peered into them, tutted, poured the dregs, and swept the rest of the villagers with an impatient look.

They resumed their labors.

All the rest of that day, and the next, and the next day after, the People worked in the milpas. The men turned the earth, dug the rows, planted what they still had saved to plant. The women carried water, bucket after cool bucket from the deep cenote.

And the birds did not return. Not in their previous numbers, coming nowhere near the village or the fields. Some might be seen in the jungle, quick flashes of color against the green as they darted from tree to tree. Their calls and cries could still be heard, but distant.

Soft-Walker remained in place. Tuapecmal cleaned the bloodied feathers from the jaguar’s muzzle. The girl who’d been taking the men their meal that day, the girl with the wound upon her cheek, collected the other blue and yellow feathers to fashion into an ornament for Tuapecmal to wear.

More days passed.

The green corn grew in abundance. The hunters had good luck, killing wild pigs and deer. The guava bushes fruited. A boy, searching the storerooms, found a jar of old cacao beans that had been overlooked when Great Ixlat and his household left the village.

It soon became the custom to, following the morning chant, take small gifts and offerings to Soft-Walker. The best cuts of pig-meat, the sweetest and ripest guava, garlands of jungle-flowers, strings of beads, other trinkets.

Then, though, came a day when the sky was thick and yellow-tinged. The air hung heavy, hot and oppressive, not damp but dry and somehow brittle. Everyone woke thirsty, lips chapped, skin cracked, throats rasping, tongues parched in their mouths. They could not void their bladders. The nursing mothers found their milk would not pull. The crying babies shed no tears. The women who went to the cenote found that the constant water level was constant no more, but had sunk low until their buckets had to scrape the limestone bottom to come away even half full.

The People gathered worriedly in the shadow of the Great House. Their anxious gazes turned to Tuapecmal for answers. When he went out to the place where the jaguar-likeness stood, amid the rows of sprouting corn, the People followed.

A shrill caw fractured the heavy air. A shape flew from the jungle, a bird-shape, thin and ungainly, a vulture-turkey long of neck and scraggly of feathers. Where the shadow of its ragged wings passed over dense growth, the leaves and foliage withered and turned brown.

Its face, they saw as it flapped closer, was that of a hideous old woman, pinched and sneering, a hooked beak where a nose might have been. Shriveled teats dangled against her scraggle-feathered breast.

Drought had come.

Drought, one of the three eldest and strongest of Black Macaw’s thieving brood.

“Do not let her get near the corn!” cried Tuapecmal.

The villagers rushed to comply, the men with bows and arrows, the boys with sticks and stones, even the girls and women seizing whatever was at hand. Shouting, they hurled their weapons at the ugly, flapping creature.

She cawed again. Several corn-stalks dried up, husks curling and flaking, the tender young and budding ears seeming to sizzle. A dog jumped at Drought, biting off a mouthful of tail-feathers, and dropped instantly dead with its hide shrunken to its bones as if it had been buried in hot sand for many years.

Tuapecmal ran into the field. “Soft-Walker, help us!” Remembering what had happened before, he pushed his hand into the tooth-studded muzzle, slicing his flesh and letting fall some grains of corn.

A sudden force drove him flat into the earth. The jaguar-likeness vaulted over him. Its stick and corn-stalk body, wrapped in the spotted hide, sprang up out of the growing corn, and brought down the vulture-turkey in a frenzy of jaws and claws.

The hideous bird-woman shrieked. Soft-Walker snarled. Blood, dust, shredded corn-husks, tattered feathers and stringy meat flew.

In moments, it was over.

The jaguar-likeness once again stood motionless. Drought was a bony, shrunken carcass at its feet. By the time the People composed themselves, by the time Tuapecmal had their best hunters pick up the scrawny body to burn it to ashes, a thick cool band of clouds had formed.

An unseasonable, gentle rain fell all the rest of that day, and for many days thereafter. The corn grew higher and healthier than any in the village had ever seen. The cenote filled to brimming. Creeks ran swift in creekbeds, leaping with silvery fish.

Then the sky one morning dawned an infectious greenish-grey. The People were stricken miserable with running sores and wet, itching blisters. Blotches speckled the jungle leaves. The guava fruits sagged, soft and rotten. The creeks turned a sickly color skimmed with foam, and in them the fish floated with their dead eyes bulging.

Blight came.

Blight, another of Black Macaw’s three fearsome eldest children, shed filth from beneath his tail and his moist corpse-grey wings. He was as fat and bloated as Drought had been thin. He stank of rancidness. His cries gurgled with phlegm. Pus oozed, dribbling, from the nostril-slits in his scabrous beak. Instead of birdlike talons, he had pale fingers with peeling nails and more pus oozing from beneath them.

On the corn, which had been nearing ripeness, dank spots began to flower. The corn-flax went dark and slimy. The husks sloughed off like boiled skin.

Again, as the People rushed out with their weapons, Tuapecmal went straight to the jaguar-likeness. He cut his palm on a sharp tooth and made another offering of corn and blood, asking for Soft-Walker’s help.

And, again, Soft-Walker gave it.

With a powerful bound, the likeness launched itself from the field. A swipe of its obsidian-bladed paw gashed open Blight’s drooping underbelly. Guts dumped out in a putrid pile. The sound as Blight struck the ground and burst was something that threatened to haunt Tuapecmal’s dreams for the rest of his life.

Once Blight was dead, the People stopped itching. Their sores and blisters healed. The green jungle leaves lost their blotchy speckles. The rotting guavas dissolved to foamy mush and firm, new ones fruited. The creeks ran clear again. The fish no longer floated dead against their banks.

As for the corn… the dark, dank spots upon the corn… these did not vanish but blossomed into the rich and pungent huitlacoche, a savory delicacy richer than any mushroom.

But, their troubles, the People realized, were not yet over. Some days after Soft-Walker killed Blight–that body, also, was burned–they woke to a sky tinged the murky orange-brown of smoke from a thousand fires.

At first, they noticed nothing else out of the ordinary. Then they became aware of a low, pervasive, constant hum. It swelled into a buzzing drone. The sky dimmed further as an immense mass roiled into a whirring, advancing cloud.

Swarm, the last and angriest of Black Macaw’s eldest children, led the way with wings spread wide. His torso was that of a warrior, painted with battle-stripes in yellow and black. Atop his head streamed a crested headdress redder than fresh blood. Instead of a feathered tail, he had a venomous stinger like a spear, and where a bird’s beak would have been, serrated pincers glistened.

This time, the People did not attempt to make a stand. They fled and hid in terror from the teeming cloud of insects–biting flies, wasps, mosquito, ravenous far-leapers. They fled also from the tide that seethed along the ground–fire-ants, scorpions, worms of a hundred legs, shiny-shelled chinche-beetles.

Fleeing and hiding did little good. Through the tiniest of cracks, the insects streamed in determined lines. They bit and stung. They descended on the milpas, settling onto the corn-stalks, nibbling and gnawing and devouring.

Tuapecmal ran through them, half-blinded, swiping insects from his face and eyes, spitting them from his mouth, choking. They crept up his nose and into his ears. They crunched beneath his sandals. They burrowed in his hair. When he stumbled, his knees came down hard upon them. He crawled past rows of corn. A legged worm longer than his forearm scuttled over the back of his hand.

His head collided with something wooden and hard. Not able by then to see at all, he groped for it. His fingers found the familiar carved contours, the rounded ears, the smooth disks of polished jade set for eyes.

Sucking what thin breaths he could through gritted, insect-filled teeth, he thrust a fistful of corn-grains into the jaguar’s mouth. Sharp points raked his knuckles, drawing blood, cutting him to the bone.

He gagged and spat. His words emerged in a garbled croak.

Yet, it was enough.

Soft-Walker heard, and answered.

Tuapecmal felt the jaguar-likeness shoulder past, knocking him off-balance. He threw himself flat, pressing his face into the soil, everything inside of him an endless silent scream as the horde engulfed his body.

His last thought, as his senses left him, was one of relief.

His next thought, an untold time later, was one of confusion. He had not expected to ever wake again.

Yet, wake he did, and soon saw that Soft-Walker once again had saved them. The seething insects were gone, having barely had a chance to more than begin their crop-rending feast. Of Swarm himself, the only signs remaining were the red feathers of his war-crest, and the spear-length of his disembodied stinger.

The jaguar-likeness stood motionless, in the same place, though the spotted skin wrapped around its body of sticks and corn-stalks was partially torn. Many of the People had been stung and bitten, but the welts and bumps were already melting away.

In the days that followed, the corn flourished like never before. It promised a harvest of untold wealth and prosperity. So much early-ripened that they almost could not pick it fast enough. The baskets in the storerooms overflowed with grain. The stone metates were busy grinding from dawn until dusk. The women made thick cakes of corn-dough filled with pork and guava. They baked in a corn-meal coating fish stuffed with the savory huitlacoche. The atole-drink was sweeter than they had ever tasted.

Tuapecmal saw to it with diligence that the best portions were saved aside and offered to Soft-Walker. The likeness went on being regularly cleaned, adorned in flower garlands, beads, and ornaments.

Men skilled with chisels carved scenes of Soft-Walker’s victories upon limestone stelae, setting these up one to either side. Cloths decorated with intricate embroidery and featherwork hung between the stelae to serve as shades.

All was well, until the morning that the sun did not appear. It rose, but could not be seen through turbulent dark clouds. From every direction rolled the ominous rumble of thunder-without-rain, and high behind those same dark clouds flashed flat sheets of deadly light.

“Black Macaw is coming,” Tuapecmal said.

They had little time to prepare. The women and the children, the aged and the infirm, and all the more vulnerable among the People, took shelter within the Great House. The remaining men–hunters and warriors–gathered by the milpas, near the jaguar-likeness.

Tuapecmal poured a pouch of the best new corn into his palm. It heaped there, ripe, full, smooth and golden. As the storm closed in, thunder growling with rage and intensity, he slashed his other palm against a pointed jaguar’s tooth. He hissed at the pain, the red blood welling, then cupped his hands together.

“We are the Corn-People,” he said to the staring disks of polished jade as he dropped the red-soaked grains into the wooden mouth. “We are the Blood-People. We are the God-People, made from Blood and Corn.”

Above them, a darker shape unfurled from the clouds. Vast black wings spread across the sky. Terrible thunderous winds whipped from them, lashing at the jungle treetops. Where talons might have been, clawed yellow forks of lightning sparked and crackled. More lightning made up the beak, which clacked a shattering thunderclap, and outlined the white-yellow blazing eyes.

The corn-stalks bent like rippling reeds, bowing away as Black Macaw swooped down. The lightning-talons clutched the tops of the carved limestone stelae to either side of Soft-Walker. The decorated cloths that had been hung as shades ignited into flaring smolders. The stone stelae themselves split with jagged lines.

Men cried out in fear, averting their faces. Tuapecmal alone met the thunderbird’s deadly, baleful gaze.

Then, with a sharp, snapping pop and flash, Black Macaw transformed, diminishing in size but not in presence, standing with one foot braced atop each of the stelae. Only the blazing eyes remained the same, white-yellow and almost too bright to look upon.

Black Macaw’s shape now was that of a goddess-queen, robed in blackest feathers, adorned in gold, with a high feathered headdress and living lightning-bolts gripped in either hand.

“You dare,” she said, and her voice was thunder. “Wretched clumsy dolls of dough, you dare?! You dare to call yourself the People, the God-People, the chosen? All the seeds and grains and fruits of growing things upon the world should belong to my children! Sky-Heart and Green-Maize-Woman had no right to–”

Soft-Walker moved with sleek and silent speed. In that moment, the likeness was no humble, crude construction wrapped in a tattered skin, but flowed into a huge shadow-jaguar with shimmering jade-green eyes and teeth like daggers.

The suddenness of its pounce caught Black Macaw by surprise. She made a wild and ungainly leap, screeching in fright. Her black feather-cloak billowed. She stabbed with her lightning-bolts and only struck scorched craters in the ground. Attempting to land again upon the stelae, she lost her footing and tumbled into the corn.

The jaguar hunkered, fangs gleaming, long tail swishing with anticipation. As Black Macaw lurched awkwardly upright, indignant and outraged, Soft-Walker swung a paw in a playful, batting gesture. A playful, batting gesture filled with obsidian-sharp claws.

She screeched again and turned to run. The jaguar gave chase. It sprang and swatted, sending Black Macaw spinning in a storm of shed feathers. Soft-Walker stalked and chased her all the way to the edge of the village.

Seizing at the flapping edges of her torn cloak, Black Macaw flung wide her arms. They blurred into long wings, beating madly at the air. Sputtering tendrils of lightning snaked out, crackling around her fleeing, changing shape.

“Go, and do not come back!” roared the jaguar… or Ixatalan through the jaguar’s throat. “You and your greedy children will leave these People in peace!”

As the bird flew frantically skyward, the dark storm clouds swirled in a spiraling maw like a gaping mouth. Black Macaw vanished into it. The clouds were sucked in after her. With a final earth-shaking blast of thunder, the day was abruptly calm and clear.

The jaguar-likeness had returned to its normal state, between the cracked stone stelae. The scraps of burnt cloth, the scorched craters, and the shredded feathers strewn throughout the corn-field told the men they had not imagined what they’d seen.

From then on, the village was untroubled by Black Macaw or her hungry brood. The only birds that came near were of the ordinary sort.

The corn grew better than ever, healthy and lush. The harvest was more prosperous than any in living memory or legend. The People had more fruit and fish and meat than they knew what to do with. No sicknesses or injuries befell them. They discovered a new grove of cacao trees. A woman gave birth to twins.

Word of their wealth traveled. They made the Great House into a temple, and brought the ragged and weather-beaten likeness of Soft-Walker there. They asked Tuapecmal to rule over them, but Tuapecmal refused.

Then, their former leader-king, Great Ixlat, returned to the village. News of their prosperity had reached him; he was eager to be home again among them, his People, so favored by the gods. He returned with his wife-queen and high priest, and household, and the many treasures and valuables that had so mysteriously vanished with them.

“Show me this jaguar I’ve heard tell of,” Great Ixlat commanded. “This protector, this guardian of yours.”

Tuapecmal obliged. But Great Ixlat was not pleased to see that the likeness had an honored place in what had been his Great House, was not pleased with the humbleness of it, and was very much not pleased with the way the People looked now to Tuapecmal.

“I will not have this here,” Ixlat said. “It has served its purpose. Take it away.”

In an eyeblink, Soft-Walker leaped upon Great Ixlat. It knocked him to the floor and pinned him there as everyone, stunned, looked on.

“Murderer,” it said, in Ixatalan’s voice. “Son-killer.”

“Ixatalan?” cried Great Ixlat, sweat beading on his brow. “Ixatalan, my beloved son? Is it your spirit that speaks to me?”

“My spirit, from the underworld, where I was shown the truth. You made no sacrifice, but rid yourself of what you thought was a rival. Beloved son? You hated me. You’d gone old and fat and weak, Father, and you hated me.”

A swift paw swiped, obsidian claws splitting the skin of Ixlat’s chest from collarbone to quivering belly. The leader-king screamed as flesh parted to expose the pale cage of bone. Blood ran like flooding water.

“You feared the People would come to love me better,” said the jaguar. “So, you killed me, and called it sacrifice, and abandoned them to their fate.”

With that, as Ixlat continued to scream and plead and gibber, Soft-Walker’s carved wooden jaws bit into his ribs. Bone cracked and gristle crackled. The jaguar’s muzzle burrowed deeper. Its teeth closed around the frantic pulsing knot of meat that was Great Ixlat’s heart, then tore it free in a single triumphant motion.

The heart twitched for a moment like a landed fish, then shuddered and went still. The blood that had been spurting from its trailing severed veins slowed to a dribble. Ixlat lay dead, eyes wide and blank with horror.

The likeness of the jaguar took a single step and fell in upon itself, nothing but a bundle of sticks and corn-stalks draped in a shabby spotted hide. It trembled. It stirred. Stirred, then moved and heaved.

From beneath the jaguar-skin, emerged a hand… an arm… a body, young and strong and handsome… whole and alive.

Tuapecmal, sobbing with joy, stepped forward to help Ixatalan to rise. They regarded one another for a moment, Great Ixlat’s body at their feet. Then, as the People began to cheer, they laughed together, and embraced.

SHARP OBSIDIAN

They came in the dark sleep of Uh’Chuul, when the goddess-moon turned her face away and the god-sun journeyed in the underworld.

They came in the blackest black of midnight, and blood did not placate them.

Screams did not placate them.

Only death. The death that they brought with their tails, their long thin tails.

Stinging like scorpions.

Tickling like quetzal-feathers.

Hot as a white-burning ember.

Colder than the deepest cenote-water.

Xialque ran.

She ran until her legs ached and her lungs throbbed. Until her heart felt as if it must burst within her chest like an over-ripened fruit.

Stones cut her bare feet. Roots struck at her shins and knees. Branches lashed the arm she held bent over her face. Leaf-thorns and barbed vines snagged at her cotton huipil, at her skin and hair.

She ran until she thought she could run no further, and then she ran some more.

T’lat, panting, begged her to stop. If only for a moment’s rest, just to let him catch his breath–

A moment’s rest might be too long. The breath he caught might be his last.

Their mother would not forgive her if she let anything happen to T’lat. Whatever else, she had to look after her brother.

So, ignoring his pleas and protests, she tightened her grip, all but dragging him along.

The air hung heavy, damp and fuming, aromatic. All around them chirred and whirred the sounds of countless insects. Somewhere, night-birds warbled. Monkeys and macaws whooped.

By daylight, Xialque knew this path as well as any near their village. Now, in this blind darkness, it was an unfamiliar terror. Each step risked a fall, a striking snake, a jaguar’s lethal pounce.

Yet, she ran and pulled her brother with her, fleeing from terrors far, far worse.

What had been opened?

What had been let loose?

She remembered the stories told by her elders, stories of Xibalba and its many evils… rivers of pus, houses of slicing blades, ball-courts where human heads were used to play the sacred ball-game of pok-a-tok… the twelve demon lords and their servants… the spirits that lurked in unswept corners or along lonely roads…

Ahead, through tree trunks and dense foliage, she glimpsed the flicker of a torch.

Behind, she heard only silence, though she imagined the whispery rush-flap of strange wings.

Or did she imagine it?

Had they followed?

The zotz’ah?

If that was what they were?

She dared not look back.

T’lat stumbled and cried out. Xialque yanked him up again. A dog began to bark, and then another. Voices rose, questioning.

More torches joined the first. She saw the hunt-camp clearing, wild pigs gutted and hung by their hind feet, flies buzzing over offal piles. A few men and youths had been on guard against hungry scavengers drawn by the butchering-smell; the rest now sprang from their blankets, seizing weapons. The women who’d accompanied the hunters, to cook maize and squash, huddled near the fire with sticks and flint knives.

The sudden appearance of Xialque and her brother, not some prowling jaguar menace or raiding band from an enemy village, came as a shock.

Itz’hil reacted most swiftly, pushing past older hunters, catching Xialque as her legs finally gave way. He was the priest’s nephew, lean but handsome, and sometimes brought her little gifts of shells or pretty stones. She clung to him and gasped her desperate tale as T’lat sprawled sobbing on the ground.

The sinkhole… not a new cenote but something else… the slabs and pillars down in it, carved like stelae but of such hideous design… framing a dank opening, a gap into the earth… and what had emerged from it… zotz’ah, zotz’ah… clawing and terrible but silent, and dark, so very dark… the cloying-sweet scent… the clammy, resinous touch… the tickling sting, both hot and cold, both numbing and agony…

They all only stared at her in concerned confusion. What she was saying made no sense to them; of course it did not, how could it? When it made no sense even to her?

Zakab Jaca, Great-Spear-Warrior, their chief and her father, knelt beside T’lat and lifted the frightened child to his chest. A strip of jade-beaded deerskin bound his hair back from the high slope of his brow, inset crystals glinted from his teeth, and the ends of his dyed-scarlet breechclout were trimmed with fringe and feather-work. Around his neck on a cord, he wore pig-tusks and the claws of jaguars, trophies from his kills, separated by sun-disks carved of obsidian.

She did not know how to tell him what had become of her mother, what had happened to their village, their home. How lovely Yachel, gentle-natured, called Good-Rain-Bringer-Woman, had turned into a vengeful goddess-spirit at the end, saving her children at the cost of bringing the full fury of the zotz’ah upon herself.

Nor did she know how to tell Itz’hil about his uncle. The two had never shared much affection between them, N’huatak wanting the youth to be priest after him, while Itz’hil preferred the hunt and the ball-game, but they were still each the other’s only family, and now N’huatak was gone.

In her mind, again, she saw it… the old priest amid the screaming confusion of the village… his hands shaking but purposeful as he lit the fire in the bowl atop the stone altar… his voice also shaking but purposeful as he called out to the gods… the creatures looming over him, the zotz’ah, wings spread and tails lashing… how he’d held aloft his sacrificial knife, the blade black-glittering, so sharp it would slice in half a single strand of hair dropped upon its edge… the point finer than the finest needle…

How the zotz’ah had paused, hesitation in the silent tilting of their faceless heads… how, with no eyes they seemed to closely watch the priest, even draw back… how N’huatak gripped his lower lip, pulling it down to expose the tender inner flesh and eroded, inlaid teeth… then pierced his lip with the needle-sharp obsidian point, dark red blood beading… dripping onto the corn-paper, then dropped into the flames…

And how, as the bloodied corn-paper charred to ash, smoke twisting skyward in offering to the gods, the largest of the looming creatures slapped the burning bowl aside. Another struck N’huatak with its whip-thin tail across the wrist. He cried out. The sacrificial knife clattered to the altar-stone and shattered, then fell in pieces to the ground, where the nearest zotz’ah recoiled from it.

Then several of them had seized him, seized the old man’s scrawny limbs in their claws… beat their wings with a wind that blew sparks and fire through the village… and bore N’huatalk, struggling, off into the sky to not be seen again.

Before she could try again to put such horrors into words, the excited barking of the dogs became a wild howling. Some stood stiff-legged, hair bristling on end, spit flying from snapping jaws. Others spun in circles or threw themselves rolling in the dirt. The torches hissed and sputtered as if in a wet gust of wind, and the flames of the camp-fire flared bright.

The zotz’ah had followed, after all.

Figures came from the forest shadows, looking more like shadows themselves come to life than any living things… black, thick and slick and black, a congealed-seeming black, as if coated in resin, some dark cousin of the golden sap that flowed from a copal-tree.

Wings of naked, membranous skin flexed against their backs. Short but wicked clutching claws curved from their forelimbs. Their tails coiled long and slender, supple, whiplike, ending in wispy, quilled spines.

Narrow twists of horn, almost graceful in their beauty, swept up and spiraled down to frame the faceless heads. Where features of any sort–eyes or noses or mouths–should have been, there were only smooth and sunken hollows.

Their scent wafted, cloying-sweet, sickly, a stench of rotting berries and spoiled honey, if honey could spoil. They made no sound whatsoever, but for the shifting rustle of their wings.

Xialque did not know who threw the first spear, only that a spear flew, and sped fast and true. The flint point plunged into the midsection of one of the zotz’ah. The spear stuck there, wooden shaft quivering.

And, just as before, when the men who’d stayed behind came to the village’s defense, the zotz’ah tilted its hollow facelessness down as if to examine this peculiar object lodged in its flesh… then curled its clawed fingers around the spear-shaft and yanked the point out. No blood spilled, or life-fluid of any sort. The wound was merely a blacker blackness, a hole that welled up, refilled, and was gone.

The zotz’ah let the spear drop. Its eyeless gaze seemed to seek whoever had thrown the weapon.

Their chief did not wait to see what it would do next. He gave T’lat to one of the women, told them to run, brandished his own hunting-spear, and shrieked a war-cry.

Many more war-cries answered. More spears flew. Men raised clubs and knives as they charged.

Itz’hil leaped up, urging Xialque to follow the other women. Since he had set aside his spear when he caught her, he drew a short knife he wore strapped to his thigh. She recognized it as one given to him by his uncle, in hopes of encouraging him toward the priesthood. The obsidian blade gleamed darkly from a bone hilt set with gold.

A dog, driven to fear-mad frenzy, raced at one of the zotz’ah, snarling and biting. Teeth ripped resinous black skin. The dog fell back at once, yelping, yipping in misery, as if the taste was even worse than the scent.

Zakab Jaca shouted to Itz’hil to get his daughter to safety, then rallied his men to press their attack. Itz’hil tried to lead her from the camp, but Xialque could not turn away from the sight of the battle.

It was worse here than it had been at the village. Worse here, because these were proud hunters and warriors, armed men whose courage and strength had never failed.

Gripping his hunting-spear in both hands, Zakab Jaca drove its broad flint point all the way through the body of a zotz’ah, until the tip jutted from its back. If anything should have been a killing thrust, that was… but when he wrenched the spear out, the gaping wound flowed together like seeping, sluggish black mud.

Wood and stone struck, struck again and again, finding their marks with deadly accuracy and force… yet again and again the wounds filled, the wounds healed, the zotz’ah were unhurt.

Then the men began screaming.

Screaming as their weapons proved useless.

As hooked claws seized them, held them.

As long, thin tails twined and curled… sinuous and supple… the wispy, quilled spines at their ends sting-tickling along napes of necks, backs of knees, inner elbows, soles of feet… trailing ember-hot numbness and deep cold pain…

Men screaming, screaming as they fell, the zotz’ah crouched over them, lowering faceless hollows toward terrified, agonized faces.

Xialque knew what came next. She had seen it. Had almost felt it, surely would have if not for her mother’s intervention. If she lived to be the most ancient of elders, she would never forget the smothering stench of rotten berries and honey, or the thick wet gum-bark sensation of that loathsome dead-black skin.

Although still featureless, still without eyes or nose or mouth or any other orifices, the zotz’ah had seemed somehow to inhale… and threads of something like steam, a warm red-golden mist, had begun rising as if the very essence of her life were being drawn up from her body. The essence of yellow maize and crimson blood, from which the gods had made their favored people.

It would have taken her that way, drained her, breathed her, devoured her, and there’d been no way to resist. But then Yachel had come… beautiful Yachel who wore polished jade and obsidian around her graceful neck... gentle Yachel attacking with the ferocity of a she-jaguar protecting her cubs... diverting the attention of the zotz’ah long enough for Xialque and T’lat to crawl free.

Itz’hil had by now given up trying to pull Xialque away. He let go of her arm and dashed toward his friend, Acan, pinned struggling beneath one of the zotz’ah. The knife jutted from his fist like a shining black fang. He yelled a war-cry, burying the sharp blade between the creature’s flexing, naked wings.

The zotz’ah–still silent, still making no sound–uttered a shrill, earsplitting screech. Xialque fell to her knees, hands pressed to her head. She saw Itz’hil drop senseless to the ground. She saw Acan go limp, a haze of red-gold mist hanging above his face.

Most of all, she saw the zotz’ah… and then she did not see it. One moment it was there, the next it whirled horribly in upon itself like dark water spinning down a narrowing hole, and was gone.

She ran to Itz’hil, who lay where he had fallen, his loosening fingers uncurled from the knife. She snatched it up–instead of feeling warm from his hand, it felt briefly both hot and cold, stinging and numbing. Then it was as it should be again, the bone handle fitting her palm.

N’huatek and his ritual bloodletting… the zotz’ah had not been defiant of the sacrifice or the gods… they had feared the actual weapon, the sharp obsidian, the rare and sacred black stone.

It, and only it, could hurt them.

All other wounds would heal.

Claws caught at her huipil. She spun to find another zotz’ah there, reaching for her. Its tail slid tickling against her leg. Xialque thrust the knife at the creature. It flinched back as if surprised and frightened.

The blade went in with effortless ease, meeting no resistance. It might have been a stick waved through a cloud of smoke. A jolt like lightning-shock shot up her arm and all through her body. She felt herself knocked backwards by some unseen blow.

The silent screech of the zotz’ah nearly shattered her skull. It seethed blackly and roiled, and vanished in upon itself in a diminishing whirl, just as the other had done.

Xialque lay stunned for a moment, staring up at the vast sky above the clearing, at the pale streak of a plumed star that had recently appeared. She remembered her father and N’huatek discussing whether or not it portended the gods’ favor for a hunt… and now she wondered if it had portended something else.

She staggered to her feet again, rubbing her limbs in hopes of hastening the return of sensation. As she did so, she looked around.

At the center of the camp stood Zakab Jaca, rallying his remaining hunters in a last stand of clubs and spears as the zotz’ah closed in. He showed himself to be most worthy of his title, Great-Spear-Warrior, stabbing with the flint point, slamming the wooden spear-butt into faceless hollows, blocking swipes of claws by catching them upon the shaft.

Hunted beasts or war-enemies would have fallen like harvests of maize before him. The zotz’ah only kept coming.

One swept its snakelike whip of tail at him, the quilled spine narrowly missing his throat. Zakab Jaca seized its writhing black length with one hand, twirled his spear-shaft in the other, and slashed with the edge of the spearhead.

The tail sheared in half. No blood or other fluid came from the severed, flailing stump. The piece in Great-Spear-Warrior’s grasp seemed to melt like liquid fog.

The zotz’ah reared up as if in renewed rage. Its tail re-sprouted, whole. Its claws reached for his chest, as if to rip the ribcage open and tear out the strong and throbbing heart.

Voicing a war-cry of her own, Xialque rushed to her father’s side. He was aghast at the sight of her, having thought her sent to safety, but his expression changed to fierce, triumphant pride when she drove the obsidian blade at the zotz’ah, sinking it haft-deep into the creature’s belly.

Again, the jolting lightning-shock went through her, hurtling her back, but Zakab Jaca steadied her before she fell. He, and the surrounding men, winced at the pain of its silent death-screech, staring in wide-eyed amazement as its form swirled and scattered into nothingness.

The other zotz’ah retreated, tails flicking in uneasy consternation. Grown men, hunters, warriors armed with clubs and spears… but it was a girl that frightened them, a girl with a small but sharp black blade.

As one, they launched themselves skyward, spreading their naked batlike wings. They flew high in a spiraling flock and sped away in the direction from which they’d come… the direction of the village, and the sinkhole beyond.

There followed a quick counsel among the survivors, who now understood Xialque’s story all too well. Zakab Jaca acted swiftly, giving orders. Some were to go protect the women who’d escaped the hunt-camp, others were to care for the stricken and the dead.

As for himself, he would give chase. He would pursue, and avenge. At his home, he kept his ceremonial chief’s spear and war-knife, with long blades hewn from the sacred stone… they were too richly adorned with jade and gold and quetzal-feathers for ordinary battle, but, for this one, they should more than serve.

Itz’hil, now recovered, would accompany the Great-Spear-Warrior as acting priest in his uncle’s stead. Xialque, who refused to be left behind, and who knew where the sinkhole was, would guide them.

Night waned toward dawn as the three returned to the village. What greeted them was worse than Xialque had imagined. Life-drained corpses littered the ground, bearing no visible injuries–they might have looked serene, even sleeping, if not for their terror-wracked faces.

A few had lived, hidden or fled into the forest, and wept over their loved ones as the sun-macaws began their raucous calls. Of N’huatak, the only signs to be found were the brittle shards of the old priest’s fine-pointed knife beside the altar. And of Yachel… nothing at all. Those who’d seen what happened after she saved her children from the zotz’ah said that, like N’huatak, she’d been seized up in the obscene clutch of their claws and carried off.

No one voiced the hope they might yet live, but it was with a quicker and more determined pace they made for the sinkhole.

It gaped there, a dark maw in the earth, edged with crumbling soil and trailing straggles of leafy vine. The morning light reached far enough into its depths to show the stone slabs and pillars, oddly misshapen stelae carved with strange images, with symbols that hurt both the eyes and the mind.

Torch in one hand, obsidian-tipped spear in the other, Zakab Jaca descended with careful steps. Itz’hil and Xialque followed. The scent of the zotz’ah, that cloying sweet-rot stench, suffused their senses with every breath.

At the bottom, they found a tunnel of sorts, low-ceilinged, lined with more carved stelae. Upon them were depicted mural-scenes of winged, long-tailed creatures, flying over jagged peaks and through crooked caverns, bearing people and animals in their claws. Their destination seemed to be a vast cenote, or underground lake, where…

What were those monstrous beasts lolling in the shallows? Puffed and splashing, bulging with eyes and tooth-ringed mouths? Who was the manlike, godlike figure, riding upon an enormous shell pulled by awful, malformed fish?

Xialque did not know, could not guess, did not want to know.

A gleam caught the torchlight, glinting from the broken necklace of jade and obsidian Yachel had always worn. Zakab Jaca picked it up, his face grim, his eyes bleak.

They went on.

The passage ended at a chamber with an immense carved stone disk set into its floor. Its engravings, its pattern, had a hideous, chilling familiarity.

Rings within rings… days and years and seasons... countings of the cycles.

Itz’hil went ashen as he compared its calculations to their own calendar–here the sun, and moon, and there an ominous plumed star.

In the center of the immense stone disk was an opening, a well-shaft, a narrow throat stretching away to bottomless eternal blackness.

It was, they understood, an entrance. Not to the underworld, or even to the torments of Xibalba, but to someplace far, far worse.

And yet, they had to go through.

CHILDREN OF THE TURTLE

They will come from the sea.

Spoken by no voice and heard not by his ears, the feeling was as of shallow surf upon beach-sand. The words an inward foaming rush, tumbling his thoughts before them like shell-shards and small stones in disarray.

He gasped and snatched back his fingertips from the markings. And, again like the shallow surf receding in its outrush, drawing sand-grains with it, the words were gone.

“Jicotea?”

That word, his name, was voice-spoken and heard by his ears. Yet he could not at once answer, his mouth and throat dry as sun-bleached brittle palm grass.

“Jicotea?” Anani said again, her tone one of concern. “What is it?”

She stood above him on a slight rise where the beach gave way to trees, a laden guava-basket propped against one slim hip. Green lines and yellow dots of paint decorated her skin, and she wore an amulet of caoba-wood on a cord around her neck. The amulet had been carved into the shape of a water-flower, her namesake.

His own amulet was a turtle’s likeness, and made from turtle-shell… far smaller, rougher, and lumpier than what he’d just discovered washed ashore. This other, larger, smoother shell could only have belonged to one of Atabey’s sacred deep-swimmers.

And an ancient one, by its size. The shell’s width was almost greater than he could span with his boyish arms, its heaviness such that he could not lift it, could only and with all his strength drag it up onto dry land.

Such a thing must be an omen, though whether favorable or ill, Jicotea knew he was not fit to say. But their mother’s mother’s brother, in whose house they lived, was a wise adviser to the chief, and would want to see this find. This find, and the peculiar markings etched into its sleek, pearlescent underside. Images that, when he’d touched them…

He reached out again, his hand moving almost before he realized his intent, and brushed the same topmost row of unfamiliar designs. And, as before, in the tumbling rush like surf foaming pebbles on on the sand, the words filled his mind.

They will come from the sea.

“Jico–”

Whatever else Anani may have said–what was he doing, he should know better, had he never listened to the priests?–Jicotea ignored as he ran his fingertips along the second row of symbols. His thoughts foam-flooded with different words.

Strange to look upon.

Strangely adorned.

His sister’s scolding might have been from a far distance. Of course he knew better, of course he had listened to the priests… but this was not a living deep-swimmer, nor even its whole carcass… he had not hunted it, had not killed it… no flesh clung to it, not so much as a scrap… the flesh that was as forbidden to them as were the sacred eggs.

Atabey surely would not punish him merely for touching this empty shell! Perhaps Atabey wanted them to find it. Wanted him to find it! Why else should the Great Mother Of The Waters set it ashore here, on this very day?

Proud. Fearsome. Powerful.

They will offer you gifts.

Gifts of wealth and treasure.

Wealth and treasure?

How could anyone object to gifts of wealth and treasure? He was the youngest of many brothers, the smallest and the weakest, not yet adept at fishing or hunting or any manly craft; by the time he was grown enough to be introduced to the societies of island men, the best and most influential of connections would all already have been made. Only through some extraordinary means could the likes of scrawny little Jicotea ever hope to gain prestige.

He eagerly stretched his fingers toward the next line of markings, but Anani jerked him backward by the shoulder and he fell on his rump in the wet sand.

“Have you been sniffing yopo-seeds?” she demanded. “What’s the matter with you?”

“The shell,” he said, scooting crab-ways to avoid her pinching grip. “Look at it. It has markings. Touch them. They make words!”

“You have been!”

“No! No, It’s true! Words like zemi-symbols in your head!”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “When I tell–”

“Try! See for yourself!” He pointed at the shell, resting upended like a large flattish basin, wobbling with each low nudge of the waves.

Her lips turned down in a skeptical scowl, but she did glance at it… and when she saw the markings, sand-spatted and glistening with water-beadlets, her expression changed to blinking surprise.

“They do not look like any zemi-symbols I have ever seen,” she said, pressing her palm over her amulet. “Not even the ones chiefs and priests pierce with cuttle-ink into their skin.”

“But they are. Or… something. They have meaning. They make words. Touch them and see.”

“If this is a trick,” she said, setting down her guava-basket, “I will put worms into your hamaca some night while you sleep.”

“It isn’t!” He squirmed, watching anxiously as she crouched and extended a cautious finger toward the first row of markings.

Almost immediately, she yanked back, uttering a gasp just as he had done.

“You heard them? The words?” Jicotea asked.

“They… will come from the sea...” Anani whispered.

“Yes!”

“As if someone spoke within my head.”

“Yes! And there’s more! Gifts and wealth and–”

“Tss!” She shushed him with a sharp hiss. Her hand trembled as she ran it gently over the second row of markings, and then the third, and the fourth.

Jicotea wanted to protest as she reached the fifth–he had found the shell, after all!–but this too was something he knew better than to do. She was their only sister; some day when he was grown, it would be Anani who spoke for him and on his behalf to the councils of women.

So, he blew out a long breath, drummed his heels, and scooped trenches in the sand to watch the water seep up into them from nowhere. He collected some interesting chunks of coral, a tiny but sharp shark’s tooth, and a sea-worn piece of glass.

Nice, but hardly gifts of wealth and treasure.

When he glanced up, impatiently, Anani’s expression was such that he dropped his new trinkets in a careless scatter. She had lost her healthy color and her eyes were wavery and wide.

“Did you touch them all?” she asked him. “All the markings?”

He shook his head. “Only to there. Why? What more is there? What is next?”

“We need to show this to someone. Quick, run to the village and–”

“But I want to know!”

“Jico–”

“Please, Anani? They will tell me I’m too little, too young, but I did find it first!”

She hesitated. He tried his most plaintive expression, the one that had often swayed her into giving him an extra slice of guava or letting him play war-clubs with Kowo when he should have been helping dig yuca-root.

It occurred to him this babyish ploy might not serve his cause of arguing against being treated like a child, but by then it was too late… and Anani already had relented. She turned the great deep-swimmer shell’s inner surface toward him.

“Tell me what it… what you…”

As she struggled with her own words, Jicotea understood. She wanted to know if whatever rushed into his mind when he touched the markings was the same as had rushed into hers, if their experiences matched the way twinned halves of oysters or mussels did. The claims of a small boy and an as-yet-unwed girl might have more strength together than either would alone.

He set his fingertips upon the markings again, and skimmed them down the rows.

They will come from the sea.

Strange to look upon.

Strangely adorned.

Proud. Fearsome. Powerful.

They will offer you gifts.

Gifts of wealth and of treasure.

Would it be gold? Jewels and jewelry? Bountiful crops of cassava, sweet-cane, tabako? Spices, silks, and silver from the far-foreign places they’d heard of only on the rare occasions neighboring tribesmen visited their remote and isolated island?

Be warned.

His grin of eagerness twisted into a puzzled frown. Be warned? Why should anyone have to be warned about wealth and treasure?

They will want much in return.

They will want sacrifice.

Sacrifice, he understood. Sacrifice, such as when women threw offerings of fresh fruit and cassava-bread into the ocean before giving birth… such as when fishermen poured fresh water over their canoes in hopes of warding off the wrath of Atabey’s angry storm-self-sister, who controlled the juracán.

Obedience and servitude.

Obedience, he also understood. Obedience was doing what his mother and elders told him. This other mind-word, though–servitude–cast only unclear shadow-meanings. Unclear but ominous. He didn’t like it.

Tribute and worship to their strange gods.

Strange gods?

He had heard of tribes on other islands who held strange beliefs… who kept the bones of their ancestors within their homes instead of returning them to the ocean to be reborn… who thought the soul flew out on a body’s final breath to become a bat… even people who believed that the first women had been made by wood-birds because the first men were lonely.

Wood-birds! Even a boy Jicotea’s age knew how Atabey had sent the first men sacred swimmers to be their turtle-wives! From the eggs of those unions, laid in sand-nests on the beach, all the peoples of the islands were descended… and their own tribe, in particular, from the hero-leader of the first men, whose turtle-wife had been a great swimmer-queen of the deep.

“There are more,” Anani said.

More. Yes. Many more rows of markings, etched down the center of the sacred deep-swimmer’s shell, stretching almost from the top edge to the bottom. Jicotea, no longer sure he did want to know after all, nonetheless was unable to resist going on.

They will take your children.

Your young men.

Your women.

They will make use of them.

Change them in body and mind.

Turn them from your gods, from your ways.

Be warned. Be warned.

Now he wanted to stop, wanted to push the shell away and stop the surging foam-rush surf of words. To throw it back into the water, let it float away to wherever it had come from, or to some other shore, some other island. Or sink, and be lost forever.

Instead, his fingers slid inexorably along, even as he shivered.

We have seen the birth of their offspring.

Thin-blooded and strange.

In their skin. In their eyes.

Unnatural-born. Hungry.

Waiting for the call.

“Anani...” He heard and hated the sound of his whimpering, shameful whine.

“Keep going.”

They cannot be stopped.

Our best weapons, feeble.

Our strong warriors, weak.

Their vengeance, terrible.

The shivers became shudders. He thought now of stories he’d heard the older men tell, as they gathered at night to drink corn-chicha and smoke. Stories passed down from their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers.

Stories of fierce peoples who cooked and feasted on the flesh of their fallen foes, and stretched ceremonial drums with their skin… who filled the skulls of dead enemies with dried beans for use as music-shakers… who painted themselves with blood and their arrowheads with poison.

This seemed, somehow, foreboding even worse.

Your families. Tribes and villages.

Lost. Gone. Changed. Destroyed.

Your islands left to the wild dogs, the picking crabs.

Empty and desolate.

Or stories of angry zemi-spirits, evil magics, curses and plagues, killing-spells. Of juracán’s wind and waves. Of deep-monsters, Maw-Tooth and Snake-of-Claws, of Lusca’s many long arms crushing canoes and dragging fishermen to their doom, and yaboa-birds screeching as they snatched up helpless hatchlings or babies left unattended.

Be warned. They will come.

They will come from the sea.

White-skinned, strange, pale.

In great ships of smoke and thunder.

Bringing sickness, corruption.

Ruin, greed and death.

May Atabey protect you.

It is too late for us.

Jicotea lifted his hand from the last of the markings, and looked at his sister. He did not repeat the rest of the words to her, but saw he did not have to.

They would come.

They would come from the sea.

JADE THUNDER

On the fifteenth day of Ik-Tzakal, blood and ashes rained from the sky.

We had no forewarning. The year-keepers, who marked the great stone calendars with each cycle short and long, found nothing in their calculations. Neither did the star-watchers, who tracked each moon-phase and season, each planet in its course, each far-wandering comet.

The People had been thriving, untouched by hardship or plague. Untouched by war, as well. Our armies met only in pok'a'tok, the sacred ball-game. We had peace. We had prosperity.

Then came the fifteenth day of Ik-Tzakal.

Then came blood and ashes from the sky. From the clear, blue, cloudless sky.

It stank of burnt meat, of the smoke of sacrifice, of a heart still-beating cut from a warrior's chest and cast into a blazing fire. The smoky flesh-stench filled the air. Filled our lungs and nostrils, filled our mouths with the taste of death.

The falling char-dust sifted everywhere, like coarse-ground corn flour, coating every surface. It chafed our skin, caked our hair. It stung our eyes and made our tears weep dark crimson trails. Wherever it touched water–streams and deep cenotes, uncovered jugs and cistern-basins–the liquid became tainted.

Terror struck the People. We rushed to our rulers, begging protection. We rushed to the priests, begging for answers. Had we offended the gods, angered them somehow? Did they so reject our offerings of blood-letting burnt upon corn-paper that they now rained back down upon us every drop and scrap? How could we placate them? What had we done?

But the priests knew no more than did the year-keepers and star-watchers.

Further offerings were made, desperate sacrifices... to no avail. Still it came down, heavy and thick.

The wide streets, the terrace-stepped temples, he market-places and ball-courts, the humblest huts and the loftiest royal dwellings... all were shadowed with the dusty red-black soot. Farm-fields suffocated, corn-stalks wilting, bean-vines struggling, squash half-buried. In the orchards, the xocolatl fruits rotted, speckled with blemishes. Bloated, floating fish clogged undrinkable streams. Pigs sickened, fowls died, and wild game vanished.

Prosperity quickly became a thing of the past.

And peace?

We no longer had peace.

Never mind between cities or kingdoms; we no longer had peace between neighbors, friends, families. Foodstuffs and goods were hoarded, clean water became more precious than jade or gold. People raided and looted, stole, fought, raped, and killed. Many fled, leaving meals unfinished and valuables behind.

We breathed the gritty red-black dust. Our lungs strained and labored from it. We coughed up bloody, ashen, claylike wads. Anything we ate or drank, no matter how carefully we kept it, carried that charred-meat taste. Was it poison? No one knew, but it could in no way be healthy.

For the very old... or the very young... the ill and infirm... to spare them the suffering, the pain and anguish... to spare them the misery... the hopeless dread... to die with tearful kindness, to die by loving hands... rather than by murder, by violent attack...

What greater gift, in this sudden doom-time, could a mother give her child? Or a daughter give her aging parents? Or a loyal wife her crippled husband?

Now they were gone. My child, my parents, my husband.

Now they were gone, and I was alone.

***

I ventured out when the smoky reddish haze of daylight stretched toward sooty scarlet dusk. I went with a damp cloth tied over my mouth and nose, and rendered fat smeared under my eyes. An old huipil, colorful embroidery faded, flapped its hem threadbare at my shins. My hair was tucked into a disheveled, indifferent knot beneath a length of once-white cotton worn like a hooded wrap.

My feet scuffed through drifts of red-black ash, stirring gritty clouds. My woven burden-basket rested empty against my back, hopefully to be heavier upon the return trip. I held my trusty pok’qua; it had been years since I’d used the stout stick of hardwood with its rounded copper head, but it felt familiar and comforting in my grasp. Its solid weight could, I knew from experience, crack a human skull.

I had been a round-shield-girl in the War of Feather-Princes; I had picked up Claw-Stone-Club’s weapon when he fell, and killed six of Yellow-Crested’s men. I had been a hip-strike woman for Jade Thunder. Whatever I was now, I remained far from defenseless.

Dogs, already gone half-feral, slunk between buildings or hunkered and watched me with baleful yellow glares. Somewhere, a mad voice rose and fell and raved in senseless chanting. I heard a muffled, pained, wracking cough, all too familiar from my parents’ suffering. I also heard, or thought I did, a baby crying; my heart clenched and my breasts throbbed, and grief bent me double.

It had been a final kindness. A gift. Loving hands.

I had made the right choice. The only choice. Hadn’t I?

Drawing as full a breath as I could stand, the sodden burnt-blood taste warm and humid through damp cloth, I continued walking. The house where Seven-Born and Dances-Like-Birdflight and their sons had lived was not much further. They’d been ink-makers, as we were makers of corn-paper, both of our families doing good business with the scholars and the priests.

I reached it unobstructed, found it not yet looted. The disarray was from hectic grabbing of whatever possessions they could not bear to leave behind. I did not search for jewelry or ornaments. Anything of value now would be in the kitchen.

The water-bags were all gone, but the stone cistern-basin still held some... better yet, the basin had been lidded, the water almost as pure as if fresh fetched from the cenote. I drank until I felt glutted, then filled and stoppered as many jugs as I could find. There were too many to carry, so I put two in my basket and hid the rest.

A small corn-sack, a pot of dried beans and another of fruit-pieces, a sizable squash just past overripe, a few strips of cured pork and fish, and a salt-rock made for the rest of my bounty. Picking up my pok’qua again, I went cautiously to the door.

The shadows had lengthened, turning the haze to bloodied gloom. I no longer heard the coughing or the crying, but the raving chants continued. Someone sobbed steadily in the distance. More distant yet, but very briefly, someone screamed. The dogs I’d noticed earlier had slunk elsewhere or gone into hiding. I started for home.

Halfway there, I saw movement further down the street. An indistinct group of figures, moving from house to house.

I want to think I knew, even right then at that moment, that they were not right. I want to think that, to believe it.

But my thoughts were only of raiders and robbers, what they might want, what they might do.

What I might do, or have to do.

Whether these were strangers or my own neighbors mattered little anymore. The bonds of the People had broken.

I clutched the pok’qua, hefted its reassuring weight.

A woman alone... but I was no ordinary woman. I had been a hip-strike-woman, and in my youthful prime I had been one of the best. Strong. Fast. Tough. Ruthless. Able to block a hard-struck olli-ball or take an opponent's flung elbow without flinching... knock me to the stone floor ten times and I’d get up eleven. They had called me Spotted-Cat because I would end my games mottled with fist-sized bruises. On the sacred court, I often led Jade Thunder to victory. Had we been men, the ultimate prize of altar and obsidian blade would have been ours long since.

Perhaps that had been some years ago, before marriage, before motherhood... but not so many years as to make me weak or slow or soft.

As for ruthless?

I always did what had to be done.

If these approaching figures menaced me, my answer would be a well-swung pok’qua. To the kneecap or the nose, the throat or groin or chin. A single blow would drop even the most desperate raider.

A shift in the wind whirled gritty red-black dust past my face. Amid the usual charred meat smell was another stench, wet and raw and terrible.

The wind also brought their voices to my ears, and ordinary apprehension deepened toward an unnameable emotion. Because the voices, like the stench, were wet and raw and terrible. The only word I heard clearly was the word skin, uttered with a strange and loathsome menace.

They had reached a small house belonging to Twist-Numbers, but it could not be on business. There was no business of lending and account-keeping now… and no business but the worst kind could be the intention of anyone who stank of fresh butchery, whose voices rasped and gurgled as if slit throats had learned to speak.

I hung back, watching, wary. Telling myself that Twist-Numbers might not even be home, might be dead or fled like so many others. A miser who kept to himself, the only living being for which he showed any compassion was a tamed monkey, upon which he doted on like a grandmother with a favorite grandchild.

The foremost figure of the group smashed down the door. I heard shouting–the frantic false-threats of one who was no warrior, get out or you'll be sorry–and knew Twist-Numbers was home after all.

They rushed inside. The shouts became a cry of horror. I heard a spate of violent, chittering shrieks, ended in an abruptly-silenced squeal. Then Twist-Numbers wailed the way I hadn’t let myself even when my child’s struggles ceased beneath my hand.

Whatever fate the monkey had met must have bought him a chance to run, and he took it. He burst from his house, swift for such a plump little man, fear lending him speed. He ran down the street, arms flailing, clothes flapping, golden ornaments winking in the hazy gloom.

I do not think he saw me, partly hidden by the corner of a building. He just ran in my direction, screaming as if every torment in Xibalba were close upon his heels.

Then I got a good look at the creatures that pursued him, and understood it to be not far wrong.

They were Skinless.

With the shapes of men, the size of men, the forms of men... large men, muscular and strong... but men from whom the living skin had been entirely flayed, leaving them more naked than naked... exposed flesh seeping fluids, pearling beads of blood... cords and sinew... glistening fat... their lidless eyes staring round from sockets, their lipless teeth gaping in savage grins.

The rusty red-black grit clotted on their moist tissues like mud, then somehow sank into it, swallowed the way dry earth swallows water. They ran, chasing Twist-Numbers. They ran, stinking of slaughter and raw meat.

They ran, and no matter how much speed fear had lent to Twist-Numbers, the Skinless ran far faster.

The leader, the one who’d smashed down the door, raised an arm. In his fist he gripped something resembling a hairy, sodden, dripping rag. He flung it, and it whipped wetly through the air. It struck Twist-Numbers in the back of the head with a sloppy smack, its ragged ends slapping around to cover his face. Blinded, his screaming suddenly muffled, Twist-Numbers tripped and went sprawling.

I had taken my share of hard falls, full-length to the stone floor of the sacred ball-courts, and sprung up again unhurt. Such was not the case for Twist-Numbers. He landed badly, with the crunch and snap of bone. His screams, though muffled, reached a note that might have stunned zotz-bats from the sky. He rolled and writhed in pain, groping for the entanglement wrapped around his head.

It was a pelt, I realized. A monkey's pelt, intact from scalp to tail and all four clever hand-paws, as if sliced down the belly and yanked off in one piece.

Twist-Numbers managed to fight loose of it and hurled the pelt away. It hit the ground almost at my feet and splattered thick liquid warmth against my legs.

I did not need to wonder further what had happened to his precious pet.

The same thing happened to Twist-Numbers himself an instant later.

The lead Skinless loomed over him, a malevolent chuckle working through throat-gristle. The same fist that had flung the monkey's pelt clenched into Twist-Numbers’ chest, and with one tremendous heave, stripped his whole skin right off.

His clothes tore apart. The skin itself split along the back, along the bumps of Twist-Numbers’ spine, then just unpeeled from his torso like the rind of a ripe fruit. Also like a ripe fruit, juices sprayed. Long sleeves of skin turned inside-out from his limbs. His fingers seemed to be trying desperately to cling to themselves, stretching and stretching before snapping loose. His face elongated into a distorted mask, holes at eyes and nose and mouth, ears sliding forward along his cheekbones, black hair tugged down over his brow.

The sound of it, of skin parting from flesh ... the sound of it, even through so much agonized screaming... was the worst and most unimaginable thing I have ever heard in my life.

Triumphant, the Skinless reared up, waving his gory trophy. Hot blood flew, further reddening the ashen dust. Twist-Numbers thrashed, his skinned body still alive. His naked, peeled hands twitched an insane spider's dance. His raw heels drummed. Layers of whitish-yellow fat quivered.

A few foolhardy neighbors, drawn by the screams and shouting, had come out to look. The other Skinless set upon them before they knew what they were seeing. More screams pierced the air.

I had unslung my basket and set it aside without conscious decision. The cotton wrap followed. My pulse thundered and my breath quickened. Sky-lightning sang along my nerves. I stepped from my concealing corner, pok’qua riding ready in my grip.

The leader of the Skinless had his attention fixed on his prize, on Twist-Numbers’ skin. He raised it, shook it, sniffed it. He licked it. He rubbed it against himself as if luxuriating in its texture, the way a queen might when gifted with a jaguar pelt. I almost thought he’d try to don it like a garment, though it would never fit. He swung it around his shoulders instead, tying the arms at his neck so the rest flapped capelike down his back.

Behind him, Twist-Numbers convulsed in pooling dark-red mud. Urine squirted from the peeled and shrunken mess that had been his genitals. I may not have liked him, but no one deserved such a death. The quick kindness I had shown my husband and parents would have been far preferable.

Then the Skinless noticed me. Visible sinews drew his facial muscles into a vicious leer. Perhaps because I was a woman. Perhaps because I was taller than Twist-Numbers, longer of leg, broader of build. My skin would be a larger trophy, and the Skinless meant to have it.

Or so he believed, as he rushed me.

My stance was set, feet braced and knees slightly bent, weight balanced.

His hand drove at my chest, fingers curled to clench a fistful of skin and rip it from my body the way he’d done to Twist-Numbers.

I smashed his arm aside with a brutal pok’qua blow and met him with a pivoting full-force hip-strike.

Skinless or not, from whatever Xibalba torment-house had spawned him, he went flying like anyone else. He hit the wall and his flayed flesh left a wet blotch-mark on the dust-covered stones. A similar blotch marked my huipil across the left hip, a spreading stain from the impact. I’d felt the hot, spongy squish of it soaking through the thin cloth. It was as revolting as the sight and smell of him, revolting as the very fact of him.

He rebounded, staggered, and dropped.

That would have been the end of it for any normal opponent; his arm hung crooked, the elbow bent in ways it had never been meant to go, splintered bone-ends jutting through the raw meat of his forearm.

This was no normal opponent. He got up. He shook himself like a dog caught in a rainstorm. If he felt pain, he did not show it. In the rounded owl's-orbs of his lidless eyes was no fear. Annoyance, perhaps, and anger... but no pain, and no fear.

And no caution. He rushed me again, as blatant an attack-charge as before. Coming in high, reaching for my head with his other hand, as if to seize me by the hair. I felt a sharp tug at my scalp and had a sudden image of myself as a small girl, helping my mother to husk corn.

I ducked low, wincing as tangled strands tore free in his fist. I slammed my shoulder into his slab-muscled abdomen, and used his charging momentum to try and flip him. It almost worked, but he was too heavy, and we both went down. On the way, I managed to land my knee in his crotch–the spongy squish and give of that was the most revolting sensation yet–and scrambled away. Something ripped, but it was my huipil, not my skin.

Springing to my feet, I brought the pok’qua up in an under-handed arc. The solid copper ball connected with the bottom of his chin. His jawbone cracked. Pottery-shards of teeth scattered. A chunk of his bite-severed tongue plopped into the dirt. His head snapped backward so hard his neck should have broken.

But still he fought. He kicked out, surprising me, trying to sweep my legs, clipping an ankle. I stumbled and almost fell. The Skinless lunged with his good arm. He caught my wrist. From fingertips to elbow, I went numb, I went chill with wasps and fire.

A yell burst from my lips. Not a scream. A yell.

The pok’qua saved me yet again; as I lost hold of it in the fiery numbing wasp-sting chill, it flipped and struck his shoulder and jarred his grasp. I pulled free, ragged ribbon-strips of skin sloughing loose, leaving braceleted bleeding furrows.

There was no time for cradling my injury. I threw myself past him, grabbing for my pok’qua with my other hand. In one lithe move from the old days, I rolled into a crouch and swung with all my strength.

The side of his skull caved in like a gourd pounded with a rock. His right eye bulged, straining from its socket. A lumpy gout of blood and brains went oozing down his neck. He pitched over sideways and that should have been the end of it.

Should have been.

He kept moving. Clumsily, hitching and scrabbling, but he kept moving. Kept reaching for me, groping at me. I flipped the pok’qua and used it like a metate grain-pestle, hammering and crushing and grinding until his hand was bone-splinters and red mush.

It did not stop him. He would not die. He would not die. He should not have been living, and yet he would not die.

I beat at him with the pok’qua, bludgeoned his head into shapelessness, pulverized his limbs, and the raw mutilated mass continued heaving, trying to claim my skin. I fractured his breastbone. I staved in his ribcage.

Finally, I just knelt full on his chest and held him down. My wounded arm had regained some function and sensation, so, with both hands I seized two ribs and wrenched them apart. I burrowed into the slick wet heat of organs to find the pulsating blood-knot of his heart.

The priests made this look easy. The priests had sharp-edged obsidian knives to cut the stringy veins and tendons and fatty tissue webbing.

When I finished, though... when I stood... he was dead. A flayed and splayed and mangled carcass.

All seemed to have gone very quiet. I heard no more screaming. Only the feeblest whimpers from a few lingering survivors, whose peeled and trembling bodies littered the carnage-filled street.

The rest of the Skinless were advancing on me.

I turned toward them with their leader’s heart gripped, throbbing, in my hand. They hesitated. I held it out. The naked muscles of their faces contorted into expressions that might have been fear.

I squeezed. Blood coursed slow and thick down my arm. I clenched my fist. Tough heart-meat squirted up like fruit-pulp between my fingers.

The Skinless shrank back. They each carried their own grisly trophies, the skins of many of my neighbors. But there was uncertainty now in their staring lidless eyes. Uncertainty, and apprehension.

And, yes, I believe it... fear.

As they retreated, I let them go. I let them think I let them go, but in my own rapidly-pounding heart, locked safe within my breast, I knew the truth was that I could not fight them all. Not now. Not alone.

Once they were gone, swallowed up by the shifting dusty gloom and shadows between buildings, I sank to my knees. A shuddering like many earthquakes felt pent up deep inside me. A shriek too large to pass my throat felt lodged under my lungs.

I refused to give in to either. I gasped breaths of the choking, char-tasting air. I picked up my pok’qua again, and hurled the crushed heart far from the Skinless corpse with its gaping, opened ribs.

Twist-Numbers was dead. Finally, mercifully, dead. So were most of the others who'd foolishly rushed from their homes and had their skins torn from them for their curiosity.

I had a sudden, terrifying thought–suppose the skinned became the Skinless? Suppose they rose up to attack?

That brought me to my feet again.

But the dead, so far at least, showed no further signs of moving.

Those not yet dead, however, were another matter. Some tried to crawl. Some dragged themselves in piteous, senseless circles. Some lifted shaking, raw-fleshed, skin-stripped arms toward the sky. They uttered mewls and whines, hurt-animal noises instead of words.

All I had to offer was the final kindness. Armed with just my pok’qua, it was not clean. No part of this was clean. But it was quick. Unlike the Skinless, a single sure blow to the head ended their suffering.

No more neighbors emerged as I went about my task. Perhaps there were no more left alive, or perhaps they stayed safely hidden. Perhaps, peeking out, they did not recognize me. Looking as I was–blood-drenched, wild-eyed, in my torn and stained huipil, hair hanging in straggles around my face–even I might have appeared to be a torment sent from Xibalba.

***

Full night had fallen by the time I reached my door. I’d retrieved my burden-basket, barely remembering what it held. It seemed so long ago, that journey. So seemingly important then, so meaningless now.

What was the use? The rain of blood and ashes from the sky was not going to stop. The rain of blood and ashes had been only the beginning. The rumors I’d heard, the talk, the tales I’d wanted to dismiss...

The house sat empty. Empty, dark, and quiet.

It no longer felt like home. It had not since the day I did what had to be done.

I did not bother with a barricade, after seeing how easily the Skinless had smashed in Twist-Numbers’ door. I tied the latch shut with a length of cord and stacked empty pots in front, so that the noise of breaking would further alert me if anyone tried to come in.

Then I shed my ruined huipil and unbound my tangled, knotted hair. I washed with the gritty, tainted water from my kitchen cistern-basin. I scoured and scrubbed with rough cloths, and wrung them until red streams ran across the floor.

Gritting my teeth, I tore off the dangling skin-strips from my wrist. The wounds there were still seeping, oozing if not bleeding freely. They had gone puffy and swollen, tender, hot to the touch, as if already ripening with infection. I rinsed them, slathered them with agave-balm, and bandaged my arm. It would have to do.

I ate without true appetite. I slept a fitful, wakeful sleep with one ear poised for crashing pottery, more screams, or other disturbances. In the morning–or what passed for it, the sun still hidden, the rain of blood and ashes still falling–I rose and dressed again.

Not, though, in any huipil this time. I brought down from a high shelf a bundle of garments I’d not worn in years. Here was the long green-dyed loincloth, stitched with yellow and black thunderbolt designs, sewn with jade and copper beads. It wrapped my hips and buttocks, drew up snug between my thighs, and tied low at the belly so its yellow and black-fringed ends dangled toward my knees. Here was the black leather breast-binding, decorated with green and yellow parrot’s feathers, and flat disks of polished jade.

My belly was softer now, somewhat sagging, etched with birther's lines. My hips, always wide and full, had gained yet more width and padding. My breasts, heavier than they’d once been, strained at the broad leather straps.

The embroidered headband-headdress, however, fit just as well as it had when I was a girl. So did the arm-bracers and shin-guards, scuffed from many battles. And the feathered anklets with their flashing copper bangle-bells, though I did not put those on but stuffed them in a pouch instead and hung it from the leg-belt for my pok’qua.

I streaked my face with charcoal and zig-zagged marks of powdered jade. I picked up my round shield, also feather-decorated, painted with thunderbolt designs. Normally, it would just be ornamental, carried into the ball-court as we made our entrance...

Jade Thunder, with the bright sun shining down hot upon us. With our ankle-bangles clashing at each vigorous stride, at each thump and thud of our bare feet on the dusty stones. Fierce and fearless, ferocious, savage, beautiful. To the cheers and roaring of the eager crowds who filled the tiered seats above us.

Oh, with the hoop-rings jutting out from the court walls... the scents of roast corn and roast pork and frothy pulque... excited children waving their own toy olli-balls... men who might not be there so much for the game itself as for the chance to watch us leap and run near-naked... the high blue sky, the white steps of the palace-temple against lush jungle-forest.

And in would come our opponents, Red Fire Volcano or Scorpion Sting or the Floodwater Women... each in their own brilliant colors, with their own feathers and warpaint and shining baubles... lean legs and strong bodies, powerful, athletic. We would jeer and taunt, challenge, threaten, make rude gestures, single out particular rivals, give good show. We would promise, and deliver.

The white-sashed officials with their shrill whistles carved from monkey-bone... the hard and solid olli-ball formed from rubber-sap... running, kicking, throwing... elbow-strikes and hip-strikes... violent impacts, bone-jarring falls...

To be sure, there’d be some cat-slapping and hair-pulling, of course; roll-tussle wrestling with occasional torn clothes. But most of it was brutal, vehement and serious.

I had been Spotted-Cat, mottled head to toe with bruises.

Now here I was with new bruises from my fight with the Skinless. New bruises and a bandaged wrist. Older, heavier. Widowed and orphaned by my own hand... made childless by the same... but armed and battle-ready, my pok’qua victory-blooded.

Ornamental or not, I slipped my arm through the shield-straps and settled it in place.

***

The streets were thick with red-black soot, the sky like rust, the air a gritty char-stinking haze. As before. As ever, since the fifteenth day of Ik-Tzakal. It occurred to me that I did not know today’s precise date. I was no year-keeper with the great calendars to mark the days... and, perhaps, it no longer mattered. Perhaps the cycles had all ended. Perhaps everything had.

Where the corpses had been, the skinned corpses of my neighbors and that of the Skinless I had slain, there was little to be seen. I suspected the half-feral packs of dogs had been at them during the night, and mounded ashen drifts covered much of what was left. No sounds came from the surrounding buildings. No more coughing, no more chanting, no more crying baby. Just the sifting rasp of windblown dust.

The city, our mighty city, seemed desolate. A city not even of the dead. I found myself wanting to shout, to call out for anyone, anyone at all, and see if there was any answer. But I held my silence as, squinting against the falling blood-ash, I made my way toward Jade Thunder House.

As I walked, I did hear the occasional distant voice or noise, enough to assure me that, somewhere, more of the People yet lived. How many, in what state of health, in sanity or madness, I did not know.

Ahead was a wide shop-lined plaza where green gardens once had grown, where water had once sparkled in massive stone-carved cisterns, where farmers and villagers and traveling merchants could sell their wares. It had been sunlit and happy, a bustling lively commerce center. There had been music here, laughter and excitement.

Now it was a blood-ash wasteland. The gardens were brown and withered, the cisterns clotted with red claylike mud. The noble images of kings and jaguars had become dusty, leering masks. What looked like sticks or bones littered the ground, half-buried. Shriveled flowers bristled from hanging baskets. A family of large, bold rodents gnawed at a body sprawled face-down in a doorway.

But, there, at the far end, rose Jade Thunder House. Like the rest of the city it stood dust-caked and desolate, its proud stonework obscured. The banners–yellow with black and yellow edging around the emblem of black cloud and jagged jade-green thunderbolt–flanking its central stair entrance were faded, threadworn, stained.

Otherwise, however, it looked much as I remembered. I crossed the plaza wasteland with a faint stirring of hope, though I cautioned myself that it might be as empty as anyplace else. Empty, abandoned or worse.

If there was still Jade Thunder...

I had to know.

And so, I headed for the building, peering up the central stair at the dark rectangular gap of the entrance for any signs of movement or life.

My heel came down on something hard and brittle under a gritty drift. I heard and felt a cracking crunch as it gave way beneath my weight. My foot dropped as if into a shallow hole, jarring me off-balance. Protruding jagged edges gouged at my ankle.

I thought of stick-filled burrows, of wooden fish traps and piles of broken pottery. What had I stepped into?

Even as I bent my head to look, whatever it was suddenly moved. Moved on its own. The jabbing edges clamped tight, pinching painfully.

I jerked backward. I nearly fell. My ankle remained caught.

Caught and held. Gripped.

By... long, thin, pale twig-things... jointed, bent, and bony... like spider legs, like segmented scorpion tails... like skinny albino monkey fingers... like curved branches and spindly rough coral.

It had me. It had my foot and ankle, clenched in a whitish cage-fist.

A larger shape heaved beneath the dust. Heaved up from beneath the dust, runnels spilling away with dry whispering snake-hisses. Spilling off it and spilling through it.

Through a moving, living, fleshless thing, a skeletal framework of mismatched bones stuck impossibly together into a monstrosity of vertebrae and limbs.

So many limbs, of different sizes, clicking and grating... studded with jutting spurs of claw and split-hoof and horn...

So many skulls... human, animal... bare jawbones gnashing... bleached beaks nip-clacking... blunt teeth, sharp teeth, wicked pig’s tusks, fangs... hollow black eye-sockets shining with a strange unnatural blue fire...

And it had me, this thing, this Fleshless. I had stepped into the snare-trap of its grasp and it had me.

I yanked my leg, half-thinking that now I’d have an anklet of bleeding wounds to match my skin-furrowed wrist. Instead, the Fleshless let go, the way a mean boy might when playing tug-rope, and I went over with a yell. The yell ended abruptly when my backside hit the ground. My jaw clacked shut. I almost bit my tongue in two.

The Fleshless continued digging itself up, shedding grainy ash and dust. All around me in the plaza, the other half-buried jumbles of sticks and bones I’d noticed earlier began to do the same. Each was different. Some were long and low-slung, like centipedes, with many stubby legs. Some were tall and gangly-stilted, or broad and hunched with bony plates. Some went upright like men, but men with extra arms, elongated fingers tipped with pointed quills.

They clattered and crackled and scraped as they moved. In their skull-sockets, those eerie blue flames burned.

I lunged to my feet again, and I came up pok’qua swinging. The heavy copper ball cradled in the wooden club smashed through bones, shattered them, sent chips and splinters flying.

The Fleshless surrounded me, closing in. Claws snagged my shawl-wrap; I twisted out of it and let them have it, and they fought among themselves, shredding cotton. A spine-whip tail of knobby vertebrae lashed for my head. I blocked it with my shield–ornamental or not, it worked.

Another pok’qua blow, and a skull went spinning through the char-dust air. A heel-kick, and some sort of weirdly-branching double-kneecap crunched, toppling a Fleshless with hooked bone-blades sprouting from its chest.

But they kept coming. More and more of them, erupting from the dust, reminding me of dried corn kernels in a pan of hot sand over the fire, bursting up in strange new shapes.

I ducked. I dodged. A second lash from that knobby spine-whip broke my shield, the wooden ring-frame snapping, the leather splitting with a heavy rip. I shook the wreckage from my arm and met a leaping Fleshless head-on with a hip-strike violent enough to drive its skull down into the middle of its ribcage.

The dry rattling noise of their bones... the grind and grate and clack as they moved, as they fought...

I leaped and kicked, I bashed with my elbows and my knees, I struck with both hips, I swung again and again with my pok’qua. Forget Spotted-Cat; I’d be Shadow-Cat, purple-black all over.

If I survived.

Then, suddenly, there was a sound so familiar I almost couldn't believe it–the whirring whish! of an olli-ball hurled hard and fast. A Fleshless next to me, a nightmarish construction of claw-scythes, exploded like a bristle-thorn seed-pod. Sharp shards pricked my skin, but I barely noticed.

Someone yelled in ferocious challenge. A female voice, a youthful one. I heard the whish! of another throw, then the pok! of a good solid bounce off the stone side of a cistern.

I saw the olli-ball carom in my direction. Without thought, I spun-jumped, and felt the fleshy thunk of a sweet-spot hip-strike. The olli bashed through two stilt-like legs on a gangly Fleshless and it went over in a jackstraw jumble.

Three figures raced toward me, through the haze and blood-ash. Three women–no, three girls. Had I been so young when I first came here? Had I ever been so young?

One of them, startlingly pretty, could have been a royal flower-maiden or daughter of noble parents. The elegantly sloped shape of her head spoke of board-binding in infancy, and her eyes had the comely inward-crossing aspect gained from suspending baubles above the brow.

Few flower-maidens or noble daughters, however, would have been dressed as she was, or have their hair cropped so raggedly short. Nor, despite her crossed eyes, was there anything wrong with her sightedness, or her aim.

She scooped up the still-rolling ball and flung it in one smooth motion. One smooth, powerful motion; she must have been the one to throw them before. The olli went pok!-a'tok! in a bouncing ricochet, taking out two more Fleshless, and she caught it on the rebound.

The second girl was a bean-stick, tall and thin, all leg, flat-chested as a boy. It seemed she should be awkward at her height and age, but she moved agile, lightning-quick. Her bangled anklets jingled with each barefoot running step. On her arms, she wore sturdy leather elbow pads set with overlapping scales of copper disks.

I thought I recognized her; on the court, she was called Nose-Breaker. Watching her whirl and slam her armored elbows into two boar-skull faces in rapid succession, dislocating the jawbone of one and cracking a tusk off at the root of the other, I could see why.

The third, stocky and round-cheeked, looked barely old enough for moon-blood. A much-too-big-for-her huipil had been hiked past her chubby knees and clumsily cord-belted. She might have been mistaken for a tag-along little sister or spectator from the stands, the pok’qua she carried dismissed as a toy.

Until, of course, she skidded to a well-braced stop, brought the pok’qua around in a two-handed swing, and obliterated a hunched monkey-shaped horror from the waist up. The girl flashed a savage grin full of bright gold-adorned teeth as bone fragments flew in all directions.

Whatever their age, it didn’t matter.

They were Jade Thunder.

We were Jade Thunder.

And we took on the Fleshless. With hip-strikes and flung elbows, with knees and heels, pok’qua and olli, even with fists... because this was not the sacred game... there were no rules, no white-sashed officials with their whistles... this was life-or-death, survival... this was battle, this was war.

We demolished them.

We beat and battered and bludgeoned them until the plaza was strewn with scattered, fractured bones. Until every skull we saw was caved in like an eggshell, and nothing else moved.

Did that mean we’d won?

Unlikely. But it did mean we lived. We survived. For now.

I looked at the girls, and they looked at me. I saw they weren’t as young as I’d thought after all. Young, yes, but I’d been no older when I carried Claw-Stone-Club’s shield against Yellow-Crested’s army.

To my surprise, they–Nose-Breaker, Teeth-of-Gold, and Storm-Queen–knew who I was. They remembered Spotted-Cat, had seen me play, had heard about me from Hips-Like-Iron, their trainer. Hips-Like-Iron, whom I’d trained myself, years ago.

Where, I asked them while we climbed the central steps to the entrance, was she now?

They told me how, shortly after the fifteenth day of Ik-Tzakal, Hips-Like-Iron had gone to seek answers at the palace. Gone, but never returned.

As blood and ash continued to rain from the sky, as terror had seized the People and panic filled the streets, others began leaving Jade Thunder House. One by one, or in groups... to find their families, or flee the city, or join in the looting and fighting... until, eventually, only these three remained.

We went in. The silence and emptiness was unnerving. This had always been a place of activity, of raucous noise. The inner walls had echoed pok’a’tok day and night, olli-strikes and shouts, laughter, motion. Now it was a ghost, a dead-spirit of itself.

Why had they stayed? Why hadn’t they left when everyone else did?

Because each, I learned, had no real reason to go. Storm-Queen had defied her noble parents, who’d wanted her to marry an aged quetzal-priest. Nose-Breaker came from a small, remote farm-village, much too far to travel. And Teeth-of-Gold was an orphan, whose aunt and uncle already had eight children of their own.

Some defenses had been arranged, barricades put up, even before the Fleshless had first clawed their way up from the earth. The litter of broken bones I’d noticed in the plaza were remnants of earlier attacks, which the girls had done their best to fend off. There were corn and beans in the store-room, and a well-shaft for water, and nowhere else they would rather be.

So, the girls had stayed. This was home to them, as it had once been to me.

Then, today, they’d heard my yell. They’d seen me, with my headdress and shin-guards, my ornamental shield, my fringed green loincloth and black leather breast-binding, my face-paint and pok’qua. And they’d rushed to help without hesitation, because I was one of them.

Whatever they might have known about my family, my husband and parents and child, they did not mention. Nor did they ask. I suppose they didn't need to. I had come here, hadn’t I? Come here injured and alone. That said enough.

Like me, it seemed they’d been waiting to see what happened next. To see if the choking red-black dust finally stopped falling. To see if the gods might relent and spare us... or if the unleashed torments of Xibalba would destroy us all.

***

The next day, we had our answer.

The rain of blood and ashes had stopped.

But the sky was not blue, the air was not clear, the sun did not shine. From world's edge to world's edge in a seething dome above was bilious fire in sickly hues. Plague-flames shedding horrible, pestilential light.

And the plaza stretching before Jade Thunder House had changed. It was a plaza no longer. It had become something in its way as familiar... making it all the more a nightmare.

It was a ball-court. A sacred ball-court, but made of bone. Bone for the walls, for the broad game-floor, for the rising stands. Bone for the olli-hoops. Bones for the poles holding shade-canopies over the raised boxes where nobles would sit. Shade-canopies made, themselves, of raw and stretched human skins.

I stood with the girls at the top of the stairs, the four of us gazing out at this new sight.

From the stands came a rustling, a host of whispering sighs. Mist-smoke ghosts filled the seats. I saw Seven-Born and Dances-Like-Birdflight and their sons, and knew their attempt to flee had not saved them. I saw Twist-Numbers, holding his cherished tame monkey, feeding it tidbits of fruit. I saw my parents, and my husband with our baby in his arms. Gasps from the girls told me they recognized their own loved ones among the crowd.

A figure strode into the center of the court, a dread-god whose body was half Skinless and half Fleshless, on one side bare but jewel-studded bones, and on the other flayed meat and tendon, glistening red. He wore a loincloth made of the soft scalps of children, and was crowned with a headdress of quills and quetzal-feathers.

He beckoned to us.

We did not move. I heard the quick breaths of the girls beside me, could almost hear the drumming of their pulses, their hearts pounding in pace with mine.

This was a challenge. An invitation.

Come and play. Come and play the sacred game.

Warriors appeared behind him. Monstrous beast-men, with strange and shaggy bodies, with the aspects of jungle-animals–a boar, a howler-monkey, a zotz-bat, a sleek jaguar. White-sashed faceless officials stepped silently onto the court, beneath the jutting ring-hoops. Instead of whistles, long hollow stingers protruded from where their mouths should have been.

The great game, the great sacred ball-game, pok'a'tok this one last time.

The dread-god hefted something, held it up. Something rounded but irregular, oversized. Not a standard olli made from rubber-sap, but...

Storm-Queen uttered a brief, anguished cry. Teeth-of-Gold lunged forward, but Nose-Breaker caught her by the shoulder and held her back.

It was a head, a woman's severed head.

The severed, but still-living, head of Hips-Like-Iron.

Her eyes glared with fury. Her face twisted in rage. As the dread-god casually tossed her head from hand to hand, she bit and snapped at him. He seemed amused.

My palm, sweat-slick, gripped my pok’qua. I imagined having to use the club of wood and copper on Hips-Like-Iron’s head. I imagined walloping it the length of the court, sending it at the beast-men, blocking their hits. I imagined having to hip-strike it. How it would sound, how it would feel. If she would try to bite me.

If her head would fly true... how it would bounce... how well it would fit through the olli-hoops...

This last time. This one last time. Win or lose.

The dread-god gestured up toward the grandest of the skin-canopied boxes. Another figure waited there, a man-shape of living obsidian, all sharp edges and stern features, with fingers like blades. The ceremonial robe of a priest flowed from his glinting black shoulders.

In front of this obsidian priest was an altar. As we looked on, he held a hand over it and gently ticked its stone surface with the pointed tip of each finger in turn. Brittle clinks rang through the fuming stillness. One, two, three, four.

I understood.

Win or lose. For the four of us, in this final sacred game.

Not life or death, no. This was death or death, death either way.

Lose, and it would be the torments, the nightmare-houses of Xibalba, suffering and misery, agony, punishment.

Win... for the stone altar, the obsidian blade. Win, and the knife, the cut, the heart-sacrifice, the ultimate honor. To move on as other champions and game-chiefs had done, here at the end of days, even though we were not men.

I glanced at my youthful companions. I saw no fear in their gazes. Only grim determination, fierce eagerness, unflinching resolve. Teeth-of-Gold cracked her knuckles, her savage grin flashing in the fire-sky’s poison light. Storm-Queen lifted a defiant chin. Nose-Breaker tightened the straps on her armored elbow-pads with two precise tugs.

So I turned again to the dread-god, and I nodded.

We would play.

This one last time.

We would play and fight and die together, for we were Jade Thunder.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christine Morgan divides her writing time among many genres, from horror to historical, from superheroes to smut, anything in between and combinations thereof. She’s a future crazy-cat-lady and a longtime gamer, who enjoys British television, cheesy action/disaster movies, cooking and crafts. Which latter two led a podcast to refer to her as “The Martha Stewart of extreme horror,” so, make of that what you will!

Her short stories have appeared in over a hundred anthologies. Her novels include the historical pioneer blizzard snow monastery White Death, the Splatterpunk Award Winning Lakehouse Infernal, the totally trashy Spermjackers From Hell, the deep-sea chompy Trench Mouth, the splattery western The Night Silver River Run Red, and others.

She also takes on editing and proofreading gigs, was a longtime contributor to The Horror Fiction Review, and has twice earned an Honorable Mention from Ellen Datlow in the Year’s Best series.

Christine currently lives in southern California, where she is her mother’s full-time live-in caregiver. She is always glad to hear from readers, as well as other authors and hey, agents, publishers, movie people, It’s all good!

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