Jaguar (34 page)

The blue disappeared and the lift went out of his wings and he had to swim for it. He saw himself asleep inside the woodshed and the small murder of crows on watch cackled him a welcome as he settled his dream-self comfortably on a dead branch.

This was new. None of the dreamways had ever shown him a flying view.

It’s Ruckus,
Eddie thought.
Rafferty must be in trouble, too, and Ruckus is our link.

Eddie couldn’t move his real body, though he could see it from the dream-perch a dozen feet overhead. His dreamer saw Maryellen’s father stagger around the corner of the cabin, rifle in hand, alternately stumbling and holding his head.

It’s the Jaguar,
Eddie thought.
He’s been on our dreamways and followed us here. Now he’s got Maryellen’s dad. He’s not drunk, he’s dreaming.

Eddie knew where Mel was going and what he intended to do. Once again, Eddie struggled to make himself wake, to move, to holler but nothing came. The crows rasped their alarm, and looked to his dreamer on the branch.

Mel Thompkins stumbled to the woodshed and could barely stand, much less hold his rifle steady. Eddie was surprised at the calm he felt, watching this man coming to kill him. Another blue wave broke over the clearing and Thompkins fell to his knees. He leaned back in a clumsy squat, his eyes awash in a quizzical expression. He cocked the rifle.

Ruckus,
Eddie thought.
It’s up to you, Ruckus.

Eddie’s vision flashed to the stone temple and the circle of jaguar priests. Ruckus raised the alarm and within a few moments gathered two dozen, three dozen crows. They swept down on the faces of the sleeping priests, pecking at their eyes and lips, slapping their wings against their faces.

The dreamer on the branch raised the same alarm. The crows at hand knew the rifle for what it was and they scattered themselves higher about the clearing to see what the human would do. Now, at the alarm, they raised alarm themselves and, following the dreamer, flocked against the human just as he lifted the rifle to his shoulder.

We were going to die there.
I remember the moon notching its way
through the palms and the calm sense that came
for me at the end of my life.

—Carolyn Forché,
The Country Between Us

Maryellen had nodded off with exhaustion, and she dreamed a twisted night of secret meetings and frantic runs down dark, stony corridors. She was not on the dreamways, but she felt the heavy influence of the other side pushing her through the night. Every time she nearly caught up with Afriqua Lee her father kicked open a door or banged on a window, screaming her name.

The rifle shot behind the cabin exploded her out of her dream and onto the floor. As she untangled herself from the blankets, a flock of crows behind the cabin squawked and screamed.

“Oh, God!” she said to herself. “Oh, no!”

First daylight, gray, but lighter than the black storm of the day before. Maryellen looked over the rail and scanned the cabin. Her father was not downstairs. She pulled on her jeans and shirt, scrambled down the ladder and out the open door of the cabin. She rounded the porch and saw him there at the entrance to the woodshed, kneeling with his forehead on the ground. Dozens of crows swarmed overhead, each one taking its turn to drop down and attack him before flying off.

“Eddie,” she called, her heart pounding harder. “Eddie!”

Her father writhed back and forth under the onslaught of the crows, keeping his face to the ground. The moaning that came from his throat raised the hair on the back of her neck.

“Eddie!”

The crows made no move against her. She made her feet begin the short walk to the woodshed. The birds settled into branches and onto the rooftops of the cabin and the shed—dozens of birds. The branches crackled under their weight and they squabbled for position on the roofs. A few continued their harassment of her dad, though he showed no intention of rising.

She found Eddie in the shed, unconscious, bleeding from his nose. She saw no sign of a bullet wound or other injuries, so she guessed that he’d been dreaming again.

She grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him to the pickup. Her father stayed still as she struggled past him. She kicked the rifle away, just in case.

Her dad’s Chevy Biscayne was crusted with mud, the windshield was shattered and a long scrape crumpled metal from front fender to back on the passenger side. He’d parked it close behind the truck to block it in. She set Eddie down in the driveway and checked the ignition, holding her breath.

“Shit!”

The keys weren’t there. They must be in her dad’s pocket. She looked up and saw that the crows had pinned him down again, and she didn’t want to take any chances.

“There’s a spare set with the truck keys,” she told herself.

As she hurried to the truck a flash of fear came over her.

What if he took them?

He hadn’t. She took the car key off the ring, moved the car out from behind the truck and, just in case, tossed the key into the woods.

Stuffing Eddie into the passenger side of the truck was too much for her. Pulling was easier, so she dragged him around the back of the truck, dropped the tailgate and pulled him by the armpits up into the bed. Muddy water saturated both of them. Eddie’s breathing gasped at times with the struggle in his mind. He grunted once, then lay in the bed sprawled and still.

The ride on this road ought to bring him around,
she thought.

Maryellen closed the muddy tailgate, jumped in and started the truck.

The more the patients deteriorate, the less sharp
is the line dividing dreams from the waking state.
Ultimately, in a severe deterioration the dream wins. . . .

—Benjamin B. Wolman, “Dreams and Schizophrenia”

Rafferty fought the raider forces for three nights and four days at the City of Eternal Spring. He and Afriqua Lee led a pincer movement that trapped the raiders inside a noose of fire, while their cutters and sprints fought flanking skirmishes behind them. The captive raiders faced their fate inside the city, and the jaguar priests scuttled back to the hills, and scatterings of raiders fled with them. Twice, when fatigue slowed his judgment, Afriqua Lee saved his life.

Who could be worthy of such a woman as she?

Rafferty vowed to make himself worthy. He repeated public vows, as well. Old Cristina defied tradition and married them as he piloted their van towards the stoneworks in the highlands. This morning, Rafferty fortified himself with another pail of the thick Roam coffee and watched a new dawn ooze from the tight fist of night. Though married, he and Afriqua Lee had yet to share a bed.

We will have our time,
he thought. He used that thought to drive away the other thought, the one that said,
The Romni married you out of tradition because she didn’t expect you to survive the jaguar priests.

No priests bloodied themselves in the battle at the city’s gates. Rafferty smiled. He had been plotting the priests and their movements for two years. He knew where they huddled together now, fortifying their power with spleef and frenzy-dancing. He knew that they did not expect the Roam to hunt them down.

Today the Roam had camp to stake down, scouts and guards to place, matters of the kumpania’s survival to tend to. Festivities of a marriage between a tentless woman and a gaje dreamer could wait, and so could their wedding night. Rafferty called Afriqua Lee “Old Relentless Tentless” when she took over the controls during his battle conferences.

“The Romni . . . ,” Afriqua said, “she must be afraid, to marry us like that.”

“Afraid that she’s going to die?” he muttered.

“No,” she said. “Afraid that
we’re
going to die. This way we can skip the preliminaries in our next lives, we’ll already be married.”

He grunted his acknowledgment of this truth.

Their scanner picked out the subtle blazes he’d laid for their trail, and their machine heaved its way along the highland track, what was left of it. The others jockeyed their rides close behind, with the battle cadre strategically deployed throughout the column, flanking, and to the rear. Each escort rode a single-sling sprint, capable of a two-minute brush run of the fifty-vehicle column.

“Do you think the Jaguar can live forever?” she asked.

“I saw him in a dream,” he said, “putting on the skins of other people’s bodies. I think he can do that.”

“But, don’t you think he would just be trapped . . . ?”

“
I
wouldn’t try it,” he said. “But what tricks has he has learned that we haven’t?”

Rafferty checked the next series of blazes, and his security system that was linked to them, the “white device.”

Surely they know of our win at the gates,
he thought.

None of the Roam’s communications intercept devices had picked up messages from the city to the highlands.

The pulse knocked them out during battle,
he thought, and his chest involuntarily swelled a bit.
The white should keep them cut off.

The white device, his security and communication system, gave back to the Roam something of what they had given him. A barrier to electronics from outside the Roam perimeter, the white doubled as a conduit for communications within.

“If this doesn’t work,” he asked, “will the Roam turn us over?”

“No,” she said. “The Romni said if they come for one, they come for us all, eventually. We stop them here or die.”

“We
will
stop them here.”

“Yes,” she said, and her smile whitened a dark portion of rosy dawn. “We will. The Jaguar underestimates us. The jaguar priests have never met the likes of the Maya Roam. And
you
have never met the likes of
me
.”

“Truth of a truth,” he whispered.

Rafferty set the galley for more coffee and took over the controls. They’d become so good at the switch that they easily opened up a lead on the rest of the convoy. They reined themselves in whenever the huntmaster clicked his radio twice.

Rafferty guided Old Cristina’s van into the clearing that he and the hunting cadre had prepared the day before, and pulled into the special spot he’d made for her tent under the ceiba tree. The van’s squeaks and rattles, and the thrash of loose rocks under its drive, fed into the silence of the white device. Rafferty sunk back into the pilot’s seat, then sipped a fresh cup of coffee.

“Just in time,” he said. “We’re going to need a
lot
of this stuff—today
and
tonight.”

Tonight, of all nights, he wanted to be free of the dreams. The ancient Roam’s track through the jungle had crossed with raider trails, and these days all the raiders were dream-puppets of the priests. Rafferty and Ruckus road scout the day before. The crow crisscrossed the territory, mapping it out. Other crows called back and forth, and Rafferty knew this for a good sign.

Electronics might fail in bad weather, but a crow just keeps on ticking
.

The hills of jungle that surrounded them hid dozens of stone ruins, and this flat spot had been an old stone plaza in a marketplace long dead. Rafferty and the battle cadre secured the Roam a position on the plaza, close to the stream. He marked corners for the Romni’s tent beside a low platform of stone slabs that formed a kind of a dais. Visitors to the dying Romni Bari could wait here in style.

The priesthood’s goons hunted them down, sniffing out some kind of trail on the dreamways. Rafferty felt it, Afriqua Lee felt it. The dogged pursuit of the jaguar priests already cost sixty deaths and two hundred wounded, the worst of it at the gates of the City of Quetzals. The winning strategy demanded sacrifice, to appear vulnerable enough to trap a careless raider force at the City of Eternal Spring.

“They want two of you,” the city’s radio crackled. “Leave them, and you are welcome.”

A most basic tenant of the accords, forged over two thousand years of preaching and war, promised the neutral, landless Roam sanctuary. Rather than demand entry on their legal rights and being seen as cowards, the Maya Roam turned and fought the henchmen of the priesthood. War, in the tradition of the Roam, signified a failure in both sides. War was not a pride, but a humiliation. Worse shame was to be bested in a deal with the
gaje
, and that’s how they perceived the violations of the accords.

Rafferty had dusted his sandals outside the City of Quetzals, the City of Eternal Spring and the others, once the Jaguar business was done. Without the Roam to supply them, to repair them, those cities would die. City walls promised stagnation, illness, squabbles and death for the Roam. Outside those walls, fists, darts, the nighttime blade and sheer numbers reigned supreme. The Roam usually floated somewhere between.

The question came up at the kris romani, the supreme judgment: “Should the young dreamers be put out?”

Old Cristina squelched such talk at the kris with a lift of her massive eyebrow, but now Old Cristina was failing and power moves rippled throughout the Roam. Swaggers, backtalk, the arrogant parking of tents out of position signified big changes ahead, jaguar priesthood or no.

Already at dawn, before Rafferty downed the last of his coffee, the camouflage net was spread, the dust of their path damped down, the white device block-and-relays switched on in the mobile tents of the Roam. The site would be invisible electronically as well as physically. Within moments of the last arrival, no one on a nearby lookout would sense a camp, or that the camp housed the last thousand souls of the great Maya Roam.

The old woman collapsed after their drive into the southern highlands. She sweated though she was cold, and she cried out from time to time. Her right arm curled uselessly beneath her and a steady drool slipped out of the slack right side of her mouth.

The flight had been strong because the Romni Bari had been strong. Rafferty thanked the stars that they had made the southern reaches, and the jungle. If worse come to worst, the Roam could scatter and hide here.

But it
won’t
come to worst.

The regrowth of highland jungle beat back the best of the Jaguar’s plagues. Scraggly country for a jungle, but the traditional hiding places served them well and hunting was good.