Angler In Darkness Read online

  “Mishibijiw?” Auguste repeated. He knew that name from his childhood. It meant something like Night Panther. It was a kind of monster. His mother had told him Night Panthers swam in the waters of the Underworld. They were part wildcat and part snake or something.

  “She fell from the sky a few days after the star burned in the daylight,” the old man went on. “She lay all night in the wet grasses, in a smoking lake of yellow metal. There was just a village here then, one little village of farmers who prayed to Corn Woman. The village of Red Horn and Wild Boy. And when the sun came up, the Mishibijiw began to burn. The brothers took pity and threw dirt over her to keep her safe. That was how she adopted them. They were her sons after that, and she gave them powers. The power to run fast as an arrow, to hunt like the puma, to see in the dark as though it were day. The moon became their sun.”

  “So what happened to the lake of yellow metal?” he insisted, knowing how an elder would go on if he were not kept focused.

  “It cooled and hardened. The brothers hammered it, and the men they chose to be their servants wore it. Soon the servants became priests. They tore down the village and the shrines to Corn Woman, and made the people worship the brothers and their new mother. That was how The City was born. It grew greater and greater. It filled this land. Like the Mishibijiw, it drank up the smaller villages, pulled all the tribes closer.

  They built a great lodge on the Mishibijiw’s mound, and over there,” he said, pointing to a ridgeback mound that stood like a buried barn to the east of the big one, “they brought the priestesses of Corn Woman and buried them in the ground for the Mishibijiw. She stretched out her arms and sucked them dry. And the brothers lived on top of the big mound in the great lodge with their servants, and built a wall around the mound. They told the people this would keep them safe from the Mishibijiw and the people were afraid, so they listened.”

  “Why didn’t they just kill the priests?” Auguste asked, reluctantly being drawn into the old man’s story.

  “They were afraid of the brothers and of the Mishibijiw.”

  “The brothers? You mean their sons?”

  “I mean the brothers, for they lived on top of the mound as long as it stood. That was another gift of the Mishibijiw. But like her, they had to suck blood. That was why they held the games.”

  “What games?”

  “Once a year they would send out their soldiers and priests. A great meet would be called, a festival of renewal and sacrifice. The villagers would send their representatives, their stickball teams and their chunkey players, and sometimes any Corn Women worshipers they caught, for there were still people who prayed to her in the fields. The priests would club these worshipers into a great hole on top of the sacrifice mound, and bury thema alive for the Mishibijiw. Then the games would be held in the big plaza.”

  He gestured to the sky. Auguste shuddered. Maybe there had been something more in the Asi, for it seemed like the sky rippled like a black pool, and the old man’s words conjured the great dark city to life.

  * * * *

  He saw it as it once was, in the full height of its power. It was not just a city, it was a thriving capitol; a center of trade and learning and culture, teeming with life. The great mounds bereft of overgrowth, the naked dirt as black as coal, rising above a maze of thatch roofs, above a haze of rich smelling smoke from thousands of pipes and cooking fires.

  There was the big mound, the Mishibijiw Mound, fully dressed in its youthful glory, capped as if with an ornamental headdress, a great platform ten feet high at its summit upon which sat a massive, palatial lodge with a forty foot high roof of bright yellow thatch. The mound was belted too by a high palisade wall of red cedar on the first terrace. The rotten dry steps were in their full red vigor, running neatly down the front like the piping of an officer’s coat.

  Upon all the mounds there sat similarly opulent lodges. Lesser homes dotted the landscape beneath, arranged in neighborhoods, an obvious distinction between classes Auguste had never heard of before in any native community. It was almost like a white city, where the upper castes surveyed the laboring classes from their high and mighty homes. But none of these homes, rich as they were, compared in size or glory to the brothers’ windowless lodge, which was painted with glorious red and blue patterns, pictures of the brothers and their servants, scenes depicting their many great deeds through the ages.

  He felt himself sink into the beaver blanket and the deep grass beneath as bronze fleshed figures moved between and over the mounds. Men, women, children, elders. Atop the sacrificial ridge, the priests in their glorious thunderbird regalia, decked out in feathers and shells, stood by as the tattooed, knot-topped warriors systematically clubbed a row of naked women, their heads bowed, their bodies smeared all over with white paint, eyes dark in the pale flesh, blood bright as it burst from their scalps. They tumbled one after the other into a trench lined with white sand. Some continued to shudder as the priests ordered the black earth thrown over them.

  In contrast to the victims, the shining, healthy skin of the churning multitude of men and women sweating beneath the sun on the red earth of the grand plaza below was blued with intricate designs and festooned with awls and bones and brilliant copper jewelry. They ringed the plaza, betting furiously, cheering at the action underway within. It was the same vision he had briefly glimpsed before, but clearer. More real.

  Hundreds of men yipped and yowled in a war-like din, waving sticks and elbowing each other, shoving their fellows down in the dust to be trampled by the rest as a leather ball bounced across one half of the playing field. A hundred more chased a rolling chunkey disc, with several smaller games going all at once in a barely contained chaos of activity and exertion.

  Feathered priests stood on platforms on the shoulders of slaves, flanked by fierce looking armed bodyguards, watching, refereeing the action, calling the winners aside, raising their arms in victory for all the gathered people to cheer them as heroes.

  * * * *

  “The games, the chunkey games. This very stone,” said the old man, handing the disc finally back to Auguste.

  He numbly accepted it, still reeling from the potency of the vision.

  “That was the brothers’ downfall.

  Far in the maize fields of one of the outlying villages, the Corn Woman worshipers conceived of a plan. Every year, twenty champions of the games were taken up on the Mishibijiw Mound to see the brothers.”

  * * * *

  Again, as the old man talked, Auguste seemed to see the scene unfold.

  The champion players, drunk on local spirits, draped in raiment that rivaled the priests’ own, were given golden stickball sticks and golden chunkey stones like the very one he had gotten from the boy. They were led from the plaza up one hundred and fifty six cedar steps, through the guarded palisades to the very crest of Mishibijiw Mound, to the foot of the brothers’ great windowless lodge.

  The slaves swung wide the tall lodge doors, painted with a pair of great red hands with staring black eyes in the center - the Ogee - the symbol of transition from this world to the next. The champions filed into the cool, sunless lodge, the people below straining to see within. The champions turned to raise their fists to their cheering admirers down below. Then the slaves closed the doors behind them.

  They were never seen again.

  * * * *

  “It was said that the champions were taken into the sky by the brothers, after being awarded every earthly delight,” said the old man. “They became as gods themselves, and their names were remembered with honor, inscribed on the temple walls by the priests. Life in the country villages was hard, you know. There was little meat, much disease. Men wanted to leave that life, so they trained all year for the honor.

  But really they were killed, and the brothers drank their blood to sustain their undying youth and powers.”

  The old man opened his shriveled hands.

  “No one but the priests knew this for certain of course, for no one ever
lived to tell. But perhaps Corn Woman told her worshipers, or perhaps the poorest tired of the oppression of The City. Who can say? Whatever the reason, in a certain little village Corn Woman’s people trained their twenty players very hard one year. The last year of The City.

  They came to the great festival. They competed against the best players of every other village. They won every time. The fools.”

  * * * *

  Auguste could see them. Scrawny crop growers with bad teeth. Farmers, not a warrior or a hunter among them. The other players, the city-dwellers, they laughed to see these little grim faced corn stalk men step into the plaza with robust giants twice their size. They derided their plain unadorned sticks and their shabby sackcloth aprons. But no one laughed as they outdistanced longer limbed opponents, knocked skulls, broke bones, and wielded their plain, unadorned sticks with unerring accuracy.

  * * * *

  How was he seeing these things? Auguste shook his head, blinked his eyes rapidly, ridding himself once more of the hallucination.

  “Old man, what the hell did you put in that Asi?”

  The old man chuckled slyly.

  “Why, what do you put in yours?”

  * * * *

  Auguste saw the twenty little farmers ascending the steps, not laughing and clapping each others’ shoulders as the other champions had done. Below, the peoples’ cheers were almost strong enough to carry them to the top of the mound. They were a roiling sea of flesh below, roaring their unrestrained approval. This little no-name village of skinny corn growers had dominated the games. Not a single champion was not one of their number. This had never happened in The City’s history.

  It never would again.

  Auguste watched their ascent as if among them.

  He passed through the palisades, sparing a quick glance at the burly guards who gawked with open admiration at them. He looked down and saw the familiar gold flecked chunkey stone in his hands, but strangely, they were not his hands. They were the ruddy scarred hands of a field worker, bare armed. His hard, lean legs, shining as they mounted each wooden step, protruded from beneath a simple sackcloth apron, dark with sweat.

  What was going on?

  He was atop the mound now, his brothers all around him.

  As the shaven headed slaves lifted the great bar from the red handled doors and swung them open to the darkness within, he turned and drove the golden chunkey stone deep into the smiling face of the nearest priest, smashing in his jaw, sending teeth and blood flying.

  As the man fell back into what would be a bone crushing roll down the long stair, his hand found the black flint dagger at the priest’s waist. The priest fell away and the knife was in his hand. He turned and ripped open the naked belly of a spear carrying guard, spilling his glistening intestines over his feet.

  One of his brothers caught the spear as it fell and rushed headlong into the great dark lodge. All around, the other eighteen champions had broken into perfect, unified action, seizing the guards and the slaves and the priests alike and squeezing the life from them, or wrenching their heads nearly completely around, or killing them with their own weapons.

  Fourteen rushed into the lodge, armed with flint knives, clubs and spears, even the golden stickball sticks they had been awarded.

  The rest turned to guard the palisade gap, each pausing only to inscribe a circled cross on their foreheads with the blood of the slain. Then they pitched the dead down the steep stair, forcing the huffing guards below to dodge the tumbling bodies as they rushed to ascend.

  Auguste was with those who went into the lodge.

  It was dim inside, after the outside brightness, and hard to see. Besides being without windows of any kind, the seams of the lodge had been sealed with mud or pitch. Not a single sliver of sunlight penetrated the cavernous gloom.

  There was a deep rooted reek about the place too, a musty, aged smell of undeniable decay.

  The first thing he heard was a shrill scream. Then he saw the man who had rushed in ahead of the rest. His spear had been driven up underneath his apron, between his legs, the point slashing open his cheek as it protruded from behind his collarbone. He could hear the blood raining down on the floor from the wound. Blood and piss.

  The man was suspended in the air, held aloft by the spear. A pale, mohawked figure in a seashell and fox skin robe, golden ear spools in the shape of scowling faces dangling on either side of his head, held the spear with one hand, a monstrous display of strength. His eyes were entirely black and red rimmed. He bared his teeth as he gave a high war cry. The teeth were like a dog’s, sharp and yellowed.

  It was Wild Boy. He flung the spitted corpse of their comrade right at them, bowling three of them over.

  Then Wild Boy was moving, so fast he could hardly be seen. He slapped one of them with the back of his hand, and the man’s head went spiraling off his shoulders into a dark corner. Another man broke his stone club across Wild Boy’s face and was punished by having his belly ripped entirely away from his bones and flung in another man’s face.

  Auguste saw him kill six of the fourteen in as many heartbeats. Slippery blood pooled quickly in the dark, like a lake of Asi on the floor.

  * * * *

  Why was he seeing these things? He retched, and vomited more Asi.

  The vision would not cease.

  It shifted momentarily from the gory scene to another place, an earlier time.

  He remembered a filthy, wrinkled old priestess crouching in the dirt of a squalid temple in a maize field, all the men of the little village, himself included, gathered around her, tired and sweating from the day’s intense training. They played the games as soldiers played at fighting before war. The sun shined in a warm beam through a hole in the temple thatch, and cast a circle on the ground. The old woman traced the circle with her finger, and drew a cross within, dividing it into four sections representing the four directions. The same symbol the men outside the great lodge on the Mishibijiw Mound had drawn in blood on their foreheads.

  She pointed one finger at the sun blazing through the hole.

  * * * *

  Three of the men in the dark lodge of the brothers turned from their fellows who had thrown themselves futilely at Wild Boy. They took out flint and little sacs of oil they had kept hidden in their loincloths. They rubbed the oil on the spear points, struck the flint, and when the tips of the spears burned (Auguste held one), they pulled back and flung the flaming missiles high into the air at the thatch roof far above.

  The roof ignited instantly, bringing rays of sunlight streaking into the lodge.

  Wild Boy howled. He tried to run between the beams, but the dying men who had attacked him held his legs and wrapped themselves around his torso. They tripped him up so that he couldn’t run. They died biting into him, locking their jaws onto his cold flesh. He tore their limbs and bodies away in desperation, so that only the heads and lengths of bloody spine hung like grisly ornaments from his legs and arms.

  But the sunbeams caught him. Wherever they touched, fire burst from his blood splashed flesh as if liberated. He fell to his knees, his head bobbing, then to his hands. He burned.

  Auguste, or the man he was in the vision, picked up one of the flaming spears that had fallen from the roof. He swiftly struck Wild Boy through the back, the point popping out of his chest. The flaming figure fell flat.

  Then he pulled the spear free and turned away. He ran through the dark, blood smeared lodge, hunting for Wild Boy’s brother, Red Horn.

  Suddenly the floor beneath his bare feet began to tremble. The boards shook and splintered.

  Auguste’s heart hammered in his chest now.

  From the floorboards dozens of giant gray snakes sprung. The snakes hissed a thousand hisses, for the underside of each one bore a dozen tiny dripping mouths, all fanged like Wild Boy’s. One wrapped around his bare leg as he tried to leap away. He felt the skin and muscle being torn from his calf. He plunged the flaming spear down again and again at the tendrils, but for each
one that recoiled and slithered back beneath the floor, four more emerged, biting him again and again. He screamed and jabbed.

  Finally the floor heaved upwards beneath his feet and he tumbled back towards the entrance in time to see the last of the defenders outside, a man he knew as a friend, leap at the last of the guards. They both fell into open air then disappeared somewhere over the edge of the great mound top, the guard screaming the whole way down.

  He crawled through the sticky blood and the twisted islands of broken bodies and saw the commanding view of the plaza and The City all around.

  The red earth below was breaking apart and people were sliding down beneath the ground a dozen at a time. The crowd was screaming, running.

  Fires were breaking out everywhere. The others from his village had done their part. The priests’ lodges were burning. The sacrificial mound was afire. But several of the mounds were crumbling. Bodies were cascading down their sides as the lodges on top collapsed and their occupants leapt to avoid being crushed.

  The avenues were clogged with people fleeing for the edges of The City. All around the great mound he saw people being pulled back in mid flight. The mounds were broken open in places, the black dirt spilling over great bunches of long, ropey gray snakes like the ones that had burst from the floor of the brothers’ lodge. These lashed out, sizzling and burning in the sunlight only to quickly seize up half a dozen screaming Indians and draw them back into the earth.

  Then he looked back into the lodge. Something slithered toward him from the darkness. A mass of the writhing, vine-like things, hundreds of maws snapping, thousands of teeth clicking and glistening in the shadows. The hissing filled his ears.

  They enveloped him, the sharp teeth sinking into every inch of him at once. He screamed in absolute horror as he felt himself drawn roughly back into the lodge, toward whatever lived beneath the great mound. Then the wood groaned and crackled and the flaming roof fell down upon him, the heavy burning timbers slamming into his head with such force that he seemed to be driven violently out of the vision.

  * * * *