Authors: Tobias S. Buckell
Crystal Rain (2 page)
THE WICKED HIGHS
T
he Wicked High Mountains loomed around Dennis and his men as they skirted house-sized, reddish slabs of rock jutting from the soil, avoided deep, echoing chasms, and paused at a tiny stream to fill their canteens.
he Wicked High Mountains loomed around Dennis and his men as they skirted house-sized, reddish slabs of rock jutting from the soil, avoided deep, echoing chasms, and paused at a tiny stream to fill their canteens.
Above the tree line the air cooled enough that Dennis could see his own breath. Yesterday he would have been amused. Today his huffing betrayed how fast he moved over the crumbling ground.
Dennis looked around at his men. Mongoose-men. Nanagada’s best bush warriors. They hopped from rock to rock with grunts. Some had long dreadlocks down their backs and full beards. Others had short, cropped hair. They came from all over Nanagada, and despite being smeared with mud and colored chalk to help them blend into the shadows, they had skin ranging from mountainside and Capitol City soft brown to south-coast dark black.
Each man dressed in gray: heavy canvas trousers, longsleeved shirts, and floppy wide-brimmed hats. All over this dull uniform sticks and leaves jutted out, glued on in random patterns.
Out of the jungle and on the rock they stood out like shaggy gray-and-green creatures.
Still, this was the quickest way to Mafolie Pass.
The second moon rose. A dim double-lit darkness would be far better than the blatant daylight they’d been running in. Dennis glanced at the sky. They’d be less likely to get spotted by an Azteca airship at night.
Earlier, many miles downrange of Mafolie Pass, they’d captured an Azteca scout. Much to their surprise, the Aztecan knew several code phrases. The mongoose-men had few spies among the Azteca. It was a rare encounter.
Most Azteca who came over the mountains fled for Capitol City: Nanagada’s farthermost northeastern point. As far from their past as they could get.
This Aztecan said his name was Oaxyctl.
O-ash-k-tul.
His teeth chattered. He had barely made it over the mountains. Shivering, hungry, and hardly understandable, he told them Mafolie Pass was under attack.
O-ash-k-tul.
His teeth chattered. He had barely made it over the mountains. Shivering, hungry, and hardly understandable, he told them Mafolie Pass was under attack.
“That happen sometimes,” the mongoose-men replied. Azteca threw various-sized attack parties at the pass randomly to test the thick walls and Mafolie’s perfectly placed guns, but the pass remained impenetrable. The mongoose-men based Nanagada’s defense from Mafolie Pass.
“Not from the pass,” the spy hissed, his back against the rough bark of a turis tree, his legs in the mud.
“Mafolie Pass the
only
place any big army able to cross,” Dennis objected.
only
place any big army able to cross,” Dennis objected.
The spy wiped his face with a dirty sleeve. “They dug a tunnel,” he spat. “You understand?”
They blinked. “A tunnel? Under the whole mountain? We would know about that.”
“Nopuluca
,” the spy cursed at them. “Azteca dug for a hundred years now. They fooled you into thinking they were still testing the pass while always digging. But they’re here. Believe me. We are dead men.”
,” the spy cursed at them. “Azteca dug for a hundred years now. They fooled you into thinking they were still testing the pass while always digging. But they’re here. Believe me. We are dead men.”
He’d begged water and food off them. They’d told him where the next low-mountain station was. Then the strange spy scrambled off down the mountainside.
“If we all done dead,” they called after him as he clambered down into the thick greenery, “why you come here? Where you think you going?”
But he had already disappeared into the bush.
Dennis and his mongoose-men broke their camp after a minute’s consultation, leaving anything they couldn’t carry where it sat, and started the run for Mafolie Pass.
The heavy morning mist made it impossible for Dennis to see more than a few trees ahead. Small animals skittered around them, noises amplified in the dimness. The mongoose-men relaxed a bit, back in the jungle now. They were still three hours from Mafolie Pass. Better they relax now and not fray their nerves before getting closer.
A twig snapped. Dennis signaled stop by flicking his wrist.
The group’s rifle barrels rose in quiet unison.
“Pddeeett?”
chirped a voice from deep in the mist. It sounded birdlike enough to fool any townie.
chirped a voice from deep in the mist. It sounded birdlike enough to fool any townie.
“Pass?” Dennis called out.
“Plain porridge,” came the answer. “No sugar.”
Everyone lowered their rifles. Their best runner, Allen, had dropped his packs and gone ahead yesterday to scout. Now he pushed through a pricker bush, sweat dripping from his forehead, and grabbed an offered canteen. He splashed water on his face.
“Come follow me.” Allen wiped his face on his sleeve, smearing dirt over his cheeks and breaking a leaf off his hat.
“Azteca?” Dennis asked.
Allen nodded.
No one slung their rifles.
Allen led them down through a ravine, then back up the other side. They followed him, leaning into the sharply angled ground, arms loose, zigzagging up. A small dirt road cut through the bush at the top. Next to it a stone sentry-house perched on the ravine’s edge. Thick moss clung to the cracks in the wall and dripped with condensation.
“You had see anything?” Dennis asked.
Allen shook his head. His baggy canvas shirt was stained with sweat over the chest and armpits. “It real quiet now,” he said. “Come.”
Together they walked forward. Allen pointed at a dead animal beside the sentry-house. Flies buzzed around it. Dennis walked over; saw a pair of hands bound with rope. “Look upon that.” He pushed the flayed body with his boot. He managed to roll it over, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell. He pulled his machete free from its scabbard strapped to his lower leg. “See that?” He pointed at the ragged hole between the corpse’s second and third ribs.
“Them cut through for him heart,” a mongoose-man said.
“Warrior-priest in a hurry, don’t want cut through no breastbone,” Allen added.
Dennis didn’t see an eagle-stone imprint. Some passing Azteca warrior did this in a hurry without the usual Azteca equipment. Typical of a small hunting party come over the
almost impassable Wicked Highs … but this was here in the heart of the mongoose-men’s world.
almost impassable Wicked Highs … but this was here in the heart of the mongoose-men’s world.
Allen pointed to the sides of the dirt road. “See that crush-up leaf and footprint? I guess a thousand come through. At least.”
A thousand. No small hunting party. A full invasion swing toward Mafolie Pass, but on
this
side of the mountain. Just as the spy had said.
this
side of the mountain. Just as the spy had said.
Dennis glanced down the road, imagining the tightly packed throng of bright feathers and padded armor marching down the mountains and into Nanagada. If they destroyed Mafolie Pass, Azteca could come over the mountains with ease. With enough time and supplies they could march anywhere in Nanagada. The Azteca would rule everything if no longer held back by the mountains.
“Got some decisions for we make.” Dennis squatted by the road. He leaned forward on the machete’s handle for balance. The dark blade dug into the dirt. “You all ready for some heavy reasoning?”
The mongoose-men stood in a loose circle around him. Two stood up on either side of the road, looking around the curve for any surprises.
“Mafolie Pass probably already run over,” Dennis said. “We late. So what next?”
Allen shuffled in the dirt. “No wheel imprint here.” He looked up at everyone. “These Azteca all moving on foot, seen?”
“Make sense, wheel don’t do you much good in the mountain.”
“They have no supplies with them. They moving light, moving quick. But they go have to get supply coming behind them if they want eat.”
Dennis thought about the hungry, tired spy. How much food could these Azteca carry? A few days’ worth at the most.
There had to be supplies on the way.
“Yeah. More Azteca go be coming down the mountain,” Dennis agreed. “We could choose to run down the mountain to warn people, or we can slow down Azteca supply.”
“Could do both, if we split up,” Allen said.
Dennis cleared his throat and looked around, an unspoken question in the air. Who stayed to face more Azteca, and who got to run down the mountain to do the warning?
They drew straws. Four men would split with Allen to run down the mountains and find the nearest station with a working telegraph. If all the wires were already cut, they would do their best to make it through the jungle to warn any towns they came across.
“Pddeeett!”
Dennis looked up. One of the men doing watch down the road. “Yeah?”
“Azteca!”
“Supply or warrior? How many?”
“Jaguar warrior party, no supply-men,” the lookout yelled back. Dennis’s stomach churned. A supply group would have been easy to ambush. “A hundred. They got clubs and packs and guns. A bunch of regular-looking warrior coming behind as well.”
Allen looked at Dennis and unslung his rifle. Dennis shook his head. “Leave. Now. We go hold them down a bit. You run. Get the word out. Hear?”
Allen nodded and shook Dennis’s hand. Then Dennis pushed Allen away and picked up his rifle. He jogged toward the bend as Allen grabbed his pack, strapped it on, and disappeared down the ravine with four mongoose-men following him.
Dennis slowed and inched his way up the roadside, using the heavy bush as cover. The lookout scrabbled his way over on his elbows and carefully parted a pricker bush for Dennis to look through.
Azteca feathers and standards flapped animal likenesses in the wind. The first scouts appeared down the road. Then the first row of regular Azteca marched out, a dust cloud rising around them.
“Some say a cornered mongoose the most vicious,” Dennis said. “We go be even more ferocious.”
The rest of his handful of men crawled into the bush near him. They dug around for the best hiding positions. One mongoose-man monkeyed up a tree, his feet kicking off loose bark.
Dennis raised his gun and sighted the lead banner carrier. “When you ready.”
A rifle cracked from up in the tree. The Azteca line slowed. The mongoose-men opened fire and the first row of Azteca dropped to the road. Dennis fired. The gun bucked into his shoulder. He blinked his eyes clear and reloaded, levering the still-steaming spent cartridge out with a practiced flick.
The Azteca return fire ripped through the bush around him. Pain exploded down Dennis’s arm. He grabbed his shoulder, trying to stop the blood spurting into the leaves around him. Feet pounded the ground as Azteca slashed through the branches at them.
Dennis heard more shots from his men, branches snapping, grunts, gasps, and screams as Azteca and mongoose-men fought hand to hand.
A light-skinned warrior jumped past Dennis, smacking him in the head with a club.
He struggled to raise his rifle with one hand, but it was knocked free. Two Jaguar scouts grabbed his legs and pulled him out onto the road. They aimed their weapons down at him.
Dennis lay there and looked up into the sky.
The mist had cleared away. Between the blotchy green leaves and branches he saw that a strong wind was pushing clouds rapidly through the sky, far above him.
Against the sound of the pitched jungle battle, the two rifles above him fired, one just after another.
John deBrun sat in a canvas chair and doodled on a piece of paper with his good hand. His left hand, a simple steel hook, rested with the tip dug into the chair’s wooden arm. He drew a semicircle on one side of the paper with a swoop of his quill. He did the same on the other side to form an egg. Then he shaded shapes onto it. Wicked spikes. Shadows in the crevices. John added water dripping from the spikes, a slight déjà vu moment flitting through him, and then held the piece of paper back at arm’s length.
Just a spiked sphere. That’s all. He set the paper on the floor.
Several other sketches lay on a varnished table in the basement’s corner. A giant metal bird with a beak that writhed into a human face. A half-finished sketch of a woman melting into a fiery sun.
The largest painting hung from the ceiling. John often lay beneath its chaotic blue ocean-wave landscape. When salt spray drifted in through his shutters, John recalled sailors’ screams and water streaming across the deck. Cold, frigid water.
Half-sunk into the earth, his house remained nice and cool, despite the heat outside. Wonderful protection as dry season came to the lowest slopes of the Wicked Highs. After all day fishing the Brungstun reefs, John often retreated down here. But even at the basement’s coldest, it never compared to the chills he got when looking at the painting.
“Hey,” said a familiar voice. The twenty-year-old memories of his sail north fled. John turned. His thirteen-year-old son, Jerome, sat on the stairs. “Mamma done cooking. You go come up to eat or what?”
“What’d she cook?” John didn’t sound Nanagadan. He’d spent enough years listening, but he kept to his own strange language patterns. Despite his son’s teasing. Or the inlaws’. It was the only thing he had from his past.
“Saltfish stew. Rice-n-pea,” Jerome said.
John loved Shanta’s cooking, but could never find enthusiasm for her weekly dose of saltfish. Just rice and peas for him today, then.
He leaned forward and stood with a grunt. The scars down his legs ached. Jerome grinned and ran up the stairs.
“He coming, he coming,” Jerome yelled, headed for the kitchen.
Shanta leaned around the corner, then turned her attentions back to the iron skillet of rice. Coal burned in the square stove’s bin, heating the kitchen’s confines. Her white dress shifted against her curved hips.
“What take you so long?” Shanta berated him. “I call you already.”
John sat down at the scarred table. A plate of fresh johnnycakes still glistened with oil in the middle of the table. John reached over and speared one with his hook.
Jerome turned in his chair. “He using he hook to eat he food.” Jerome grinned as he told on his dad. Shanta turned around and gave John a look. John avoided her eyes and pulled the fried dough off his hook.
Shanta set the skillet on the table. “Quit playing,” she warned.
Father and son exchanged meaningful mock glares, blaming each other for drawing Shanta’s irritation.
“You want to go into town with me, tomorrow?” John asked Jerome. Jerome scrunched up his face and thought about it.
“Yeah. Where?”
“I need to go out to Salt Island.” The salt bin had reached the halfway mark last week, and John needed to make some extra fun money as well; carnival started in two days. He didn’t want to be broke during the food fair. It was his favorite time of year. “If you help me, I’ll give you some money for carnival.”
Shanta filled Jerome’s bowl with saltfish stew and then nudged the pot toward John. He shook his head. She sighed and handed him the skillet of rice and peas. “Be back before dark. You know how I get when you out late.”
John nodded. It would be Jerome’s first sail out of the harbor. “We’ll be back in time.” Jerome kicked him in the
shin and John winced. “Don’t do that,” he warned in his best “danger” voice. It was halfhearted. Jerome had been a surprise after six years of marriage. Shanta had been thirty-six and they both had worried throughout the pregnancy. John doted on his son as a result. The strong emotions still sometimes startled him.
shin and John winced. “Don’t do that,” he warned in his best “danger” voice. It was halfhearted. Jerome had been a surprise after six years of marriage. Shanta had been thirty-six and they both had worried throughout the pregnancy. John doted on his son as a result. The strong emotions still sometimes startled him.
Later, once Jerome slept in his room, John helped Shanta with the dishes. She cleaned. He rinsed and set them on the rack.
“He excited,” Shanta said.
“Yeah, he’ll enjoy the trip out.” John’s hook hit a pot and clinked as he balanced the last wooden bowl on the other dishes. Shanta flicked the water off her hands. John moved up close to her when she turned. “Hello, Miss Braithwaite.”
“Mr. deBrun. How you doing?”
“Fine. Fine.” John kissed her and held her close; his tanned and weathered skin against her deep brown. “I thought about you when I was fishing today.”
“What you think?”
“How much you would have liked to salt those groupers we netted.”
“Hey! Man, why you tease me so?”
“’Cause I love you.”
“Ah.” She leaned into him. Then: “John?”
“Yeah?”
“When you painted … you remember anything?”
“No.” He kissed her hair and noticed several gray streaks. More and more had been appearing. Yet she never commented on the fact that when she’d met John, he’d looked older than her, and now he looked younger. “Don’t worry about it.” He loved her for caring. Shanta didn’t talk much about the gap in John’s memory. Yet sometimes it seemed to him she secretly worried about it more than he did. Did she want him to stop thinking about it because it always tore him up so? Or did she worry about some past secret that might be exposed that would tear them apart?
Shanta grabbed a towel and dried her hands. “I don’t want Jerome going sailing much after this.”
“Why not?” John took the dish towel from her hands and hung it up on a peg. “What harm is there in it?”
“I remember when they pull you up out the water. Twenty-seven years, John, but I remember. You all wrinkled. Strapped to some floaty thing …”
“You were young.” John remembered her standing on the beach. Then he remembered the gray streaks in her hair and regretted saying it.
“Huh,” Shanta snorted. “Twenty-two. Old enough to give you plenty grief.”
John had struggled with the fact he couldn’t remember anything before he had washed up on the beach. He had taken his name off the silver necklace around his neck with the name
John deBrun
written on it. Even though he didn’t speak like everyone else, he understood Nanagadans. Which meant he must have been exposed to the land before.
John deBrun
written on it. Even though he didn’t speak like everyone else, he understood Nanagadans. Which meant he must have been exposed to the land before.
John stayed to sail boats in Brungstun, hoping to regain his memories. He could picture maps in his head as if they were before him. He could navigate by stars, sun, map, and with his eyes closed. But he started out a horrible sailor. He had known nothing about winds or the tides or the waves and weather around Brungstun.
“He won’t be like me,” John said. “None of that adventuring spirit. He’ll grow up, be respectable. A town banker, right?” Shanta mock-punched his arm. “He won’t break any young girls’ hearts,” John teased, continuing. “Won’t leave for Capitol City …” Shanta’s grin disappeared.
After six years learning the sea with local fishermen, John had trekked to Capitol City with a small group of mongoose-men led by Edward, a bushman who became a close friend for the trip there.
Shanta stepped away from him. “Don’t talk about Capitol City, John. Not tonight. I never slept when you was sailing the ocean. I don’t want ever think you was dead again. You know how horrible—”
“I’m sorry.” John pulled her back to him in a hug. “I’ll shut up.” During the trip John had looked for clues to his past in other towns on the way north, and in Capitol City itself. He’d been offered a chance to join a trio of ships as navigator. The expedition was to see if there was land to the north, but in the
dangerous, icy waters of the north seas John had found nothing but death, and some fame as he navigated the single surviving ship back to Capitol City. He’d been forged into a captain and a leader during that horrible trip back to Capitol City from the icy north. Or maybe that had been something always in him. “I came back, right? I’m here now.”
dangerous, icy waters of the north seas John had found nothing but death, and some fame as he navigated the single surviving ship back to Capitol City. He’d been forged into a captain and a leader during that horrible trip back to Capitol City from the icy north. Or maybe that had been something always in him. “I came back, right? I’m here now.”
Shanta shrugged. She spun away from him. “No excuse for all that.”
“Let’s quit being glum. Carnival’s almost here.” He turned around with a large grin.
Shanta sighed. “You and carnival. Look at you. You like a little boy, all excited.”
John extended his good arm and danced a quick circle around her. “Just a couple days.” He smiled.
“Come on.” She smiled back and pulled him along. John followed her down the hall to their room. Shanta paused at the doorway. “It really cold there up in the north, like you say?”
“You could see you
breath.”
John imitated her accent to make her laugh and, at the same time, remembered that the cold had almost killed him. He helped Shanta unstrap the hook. She didn’t need help with his loose shirt, and by now he could undo the back of her dress with one hand.
breath.”
John imitated her accent to make her laugh and, at the same time, remembered that the cold had almost killed him. He helped Shanta unstrap the hook. She didn’t need help with his loose shirt, and by now he could undo the back of her dress with one hand.
“Please don’t go adventuring north again,” she whispered.
“Once was enough. Never again.”
They made love. She chased the chill out of him.
For the night.
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