So Long Been Dreaming (49 page)

Sac Nicte recognized him too. She had seen him many times even without the help of sacred mushrooms or generous portions of the brew prepared by the goddess Mayahuel. She had seen him and she imagined the feel of his smooth skin but was not prepared for the richness of his voice or the headiness of his scent.

It was then and there that they had touched for the first of many times, before he even knew her name, before she had pulled him by the hand and taken him home to her Tata.

“I want the priest to tie our tlimantli and if he will not do so, I will do it myself,” she announced in a defiant tone.

“Have you gone out of your mind!” her Tata scolded. “He cannot marry into our clan because he is a kinsman of my brother.”

Sac Nicte smiled and, leaning towards her Tata, grabbed the old woman’s feet and squeezed them gently. “Didn’t you tell me that when my mother died you took me away from my father’s clan because their rank would not have allowed a child of theirs to have become a medicine woman? Didn’t you once swear to me that even though there was nothing more in common between us than the bonds of love and wisdom you were willing to spill your blood to spare mine? I’m not asking you to spill your blood for me. I am merely asking you to help me meet my destiny with Can Ek.”

The old woman nodded. “If I reveal your origins, the priest might be willing to bless your union, but your father will claim you first. And then I will lose you and you might lose your man. You must go away, my child.”

Sac Nicte held the old woman in a tight embrace. “You cannot lose me ever, Tata. You are the one who taught me that essential life and love can never leave you, because you are that.”

Three nights after that conversation, Sac Nicte and her lover left Tulum and made their long journey to Chichen Itza, under the cover of a dormant Ix Chel. In Chichen Itza, they hoped to blend in with the crowds that had thronged the sacred city to celebrate that moment when the day and the night are of the same duration, before winter arrives. It is known that on that day, as the sun moves over the horizon, the shadow of the great plumed serpent Kukulkan, Father of all of the Maya people, makes his ascent in seven laborious segments up the steps of the main pyramid. When he reaches the top, the 365 step which marks the completion of a solar year, a new cycle begins.

So Sac Nicte arrived in Chichen Itza with her man and their meagre rations of dry bread and peppers and ground chocolatl and some honey and a gourd which they filled with the sap of the maguey cactus to quench their thirst along the way. And they stood there in front of the pyramid, marvelling at the sight of Kukulkan and dreaming of a new life for themselves.

But love made Sac Nicte drop her guard. It is there that the mediators of the Lords of Xibalba grabbed her and dragged her across the main square and took her through the paved road that leads to the sacred cenote of Chichen Itza. She did not need to be a seer to know what awaited her. Nor did she wonder about Can Ek’s fate either.

Can Ek tried to stop the men from leading her away, but others materialized from nowhere and dragged him away too. Except that they took him up the pyramid, where Lord Kukulkan had snaked his way up in an eerie play of light and shadows, and gouged out his heart with a deft cut using an obsidian knife, as dark and sharp as his lovely eyes.

Sac Nicte stood before the cenote while the priests droned their drivel. She knew why she and Can Ek were chosen to propitiate the gods. They were recognized because of their uniqueness. She understood that to be different means to share the fate of kings, who are destined to taste the bitter drink of sorrow. So Sac Nicte and Can Ek were called to return to the whirlpool whence the powers of the universe have evolved.

She understood the hidden designs of nature and the eternal fires within all things. She also knew that the priests were wrong. They told her that she would return within three days but it was not true. Nobody ever returned from this cenote, which was a well so deep and green and airless that even the fish could not live within.

But Sac Nicte also knew how to count time and read the stars. She understood the circular nature of time. Time was really like a spiral, like a whirlpool, sucking you in and down until you resurfaced again, but in another form. When you measured time by the moon, you could count your holy days, and when you measured it by the sun, you could calculate the seasons of the harvest. But every fifty-two years, everything started anew. More than the sum of her age and that of Can Ek’s but less than her Tata’s.

Just as childhood and youth are the promise of form and old age the ruin of physical form, death is the fall into formlessness. Life begins with surprise and ends with a question. Would Can Ek’s heart live on in an eagle or a jaguar? Would her formlessness take another form, and if so, when?

All these thought forms disintegrated at the very moment in which she was thrown into the green pool. Before she went back to the liquid womb of the Great Mother. Before she left the dry world of illusion to return to the liquid depths of the primal source.

The water was warm and soothing against her limbs. She swam forever in a wonderful underground grotto which was mottled with light from holes that opened up to an azure sky. The sea bed was carpeted with undulating coral which swayed gently as fish passed by. The colours were pink and yellow and blue and green, comparable only to those you get under an electron microscope. The vaulted ceiling of that grotto was dripping with stalactites that looked like the strings of sugar candy from her Mexican childhood.

She was glad that she had conquered her irrational fear of water and learned how to scuba dive. A holiday in Cancun without this vista of marine life was unthinkable, honeymoon or not.

They had finally made it, her Kanuk and herself. They had met at a sociology congress in Mexico City and it was love at first sight.

Marriage had really been quite beside the point. But the Mexican government did not issue work permits to foreigners unless they were married to Mexicans and her Kanuk often spoke longingly about his home in Oka and his job in Ottawa with the Council of Native Peoples. They decided to commute back and forth, like migratory birds, until the children arrived.

So they had married to please their respective tribes and meet official requirements. This is why they were in Cancun, in a pyramid-shaped hotel where the food was good and the crowds abominable.

Their one concession to their sanity was staying as close as possible to the sea and visiting the Mayan ruins.

So this is how Maya came to be swimming in a lovely grotto which formed part of a network that turns into subterranean rivers and feeds the cenotes.

She got out of the water, dried herself, and applied sunscreen to her body before lying next to Kanuk. It never failed. The slippery oil on her skin and the sun beating on her pubis always seemed to arouse her. She turned to one side and with her index finger started tracing the moon-shaped scar under Kanuk’s left nipple. She then pinched his nipple gently, noticing that it had already hardened.

Kanuk stopped pretending that he was asleep. He kissed her hungrily and seeing that there were not many people around, he eased his shorts to one side and penetrated her right there near the ruins in Tulum. They then fell asleep in each other’s arms, like the tangled roots of a mangrove tree.

When Maya woke, she scanned her surroundings. Her eyes lingered over the temple perched on a hill and then turned to the sea. A couple of billowing clouds floated lazily over the water. The beach was almost empty. Everything appeared the same and yet it was not. In her mind, jaguars swished past uninvited. Butterflies fluttered in her belly. Obsidian knives ripped her heart. The sound of long-forgotten drums reverberated through her body.

Kanuk stirred. Maya turned to him and started tickling his face with a flower that she found lying next to them.

“Stop it,” he said, “or you will get me started all over again!”

“Thanks for the lovely flower,” she whispered.”I didn’t notice when you got up to get it.”

“I didn’t. Someone else must have given it to you.”

“You mean when we were making love? Or asleep? Look around you, the beach is almost deserted.”

“It is a strange flower. I’ve never seen anything like it. What’s it called?”

“It is called Sac Nicte,” replied Maya. “They say there was once a Maya princess by that name who ran away with her lover to the forest of Peten, fleeing her father’s wrath. When she died, this flower sprouted all over Chichen Itza, commemorating their love.”

Kanuk sought Maya’s eyes. “Why do you suddenly look so sad, Maya?”

“I just had a strange and haunting dream in which I recognized myself a long time ago. Kanuk, you’ve never explained how you got that scar under your left breast.”

“Oh that. It’s nothing, really. When I was a kid on the reserve, my friends were always pushing me to go deer hunting with them. I couldn’t bring myself to kill anything, so one day just to show them I wasn’t a coward I took a jagged can top and cut myself, hoping to gouge my heart out. I botched it up and the ambulance had to take me to a hospital in Ste Anne de Bellevue to get it stitched. Now that I’ve told you my secret tell me yours: who gave you that flower? Was it the guy who was ogling your breasts this morning?”

Maya kissed him gently on his round red lips and shrugged her shoulders.

“It was Sac Nicte herself,” she finally said.

“Who?”

“Sac Nicte, my secret twin.”

Tobias S. Buckell
is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who now lives (strangely enough to him and through many odd twists of fate) in Ohio with his wife Emily. He has published in various magazines and anthologies. He is a graduate of the Clarion East Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, a Writers of the Future winner, and a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer. His work has received Honorable Mention in
Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
. His first novel,
Crystal Rain
, will be out from Tor Books in 2005. Visit
TobiasBuckell.com
for more information.

Necahual
Tobias S. Buckell

We drop out of the wormhole towards a mess of a planet by the ochre light of a dying sun. From the cant of orbit, upside down and even then through virtual portholes, we can see tiny spots of white light blossom in the atmosphere.

Each one of those little blossoms of light is an impact. A chunk of rock with a controller vane on it, predestined for a certain target. It clears out the enemy’s ability to hit back above the stratosphere.

We’re liberators. And all the thousands and thousands of other pods dropping to their designated targets and missions all over this planet are liberators as well. We are like a deadly rain of flesh and metal.

I know from past experience that sunsets here on New Anegada won’t be the same for a long while. On another planet, far away in both distance and time, I used to sit on a porch and watch magnificent sunsets just like the ones that would soon appear here. The League had liberated my own world then, and now I am here to do the same.

“Man, we’re dropping the hammer on this backwater shithole,” the man across from me says. His white and blue exoskeleton wraps around his body. He looks like a striped mantis. Right now the exoskeleton is plugged into the convex wall of the pod, charging up while it keeps him from bouncing around as we skate atmosphere.

A single bead of sweat floats loose from his bulbous nose and hangs in the air between us.

“You know much about the target?”

Everyone wants to any know juicy details about them.

“Historical info only,” I say. “They call themselves the Azteca. But the Azteca of Mother Earth never even called themselves that. They were the Mexica.”

I wonder if the black man to the right of me has skin-flauge painted on. Hard to tell under the blue and white he’s wearing. It’s hard not to look askance at him. No one like him on the planet I came from. But at least he’s human, real human, and The League today will be adding another human planet, we’re told. If there are any aliens here, we’ll wipe them out, every last one, like they tried to wipe The League out.

“The warrior priests of Mexica were pretty brutal,” I explain. “They used to induce hallucinations by piercing their foreskins” – all the men wince – “and dragging a knotted rope through the tear until they saw visions.”

The woman to my left asks, “What is it going to be like when we hit?”

“I got the same report you did.”

The large island continent of New Anegada on the planet was also the name of the planet. This was confusing for conversation. But no one had consulted with the original colonists, who were mainly Caribbean refugees from Mother Earth. Half the sole continent was called New Anegada and home to the descendents of the initial Caribbean refugees. The Azteca claimed the other half, a group of humans ruled by aliens who set themselves up as ancient Aztec gods. Large mountains split them down the middle.

The entire system got cut off several hundred years ago, a forgotten incident, a sidenote of history. Then the wormhole that connected New Anegada to the rest of the worlds opened up again several weeks ago and shit hit the fan.