Chapter 26

  Arturo hopped off the horse on a hilltop exposed and vulnerable to the Ministry spotting them while they slept, but allowing the brothers, well just Aquiles, an easier view of those murderous men come to take them. They’d been bickering, and abashment began eating at Arturo over his mood on the ride earlier. So, he agreed to the hilltop, not the hidden troughs between, but the top, where just about anyone could see them if they looked. At least, they both agreed to move a good distance off the road before stopping, so only those really looking would see. Those like the Ministry. He sighed to himself and didn’t push it further. He’d relented. He felt bad for yelling before.

  The ornery monk worked the saddle bags free. They had also agreed on not starting a fire, so they’d be eating cold meat and cheese. Arturo broke a piece of the sausage his brother handed him. It was incredibly bland stuff. Aquiles seemed to enjoy it.

  “It’s good to be out under the stars again. The beds in the Monastery were a little too soft,” Arturo said, trying to make small talk. He liked that sort of thing. It helped him forget the bad parts of his day, like shouting matches over circumstances of which even a bored mind watching sheep for months and wandering could not conceive. Aquiles just grunted in response.

  Arturo pushed it further, “I never thought I’d be a fugitive from the Ministry with my identical twin.”

  His brother grunted again, but conceded a few words, “Yo tambien.”

  Scant and odorless food mocked Arturo’s hunger. The view of the sky was more satiating, “You know, away from all the lights, the night sky is beautiful.”

  “I was never cared for astronomy.”

  He was beginning to dislike trying to have small talk with his brother. Aquiles bit into a hunk of cheese, and some crumbles broke off and fell to the ground. He spread his legs and bent over the stump he was sitting on to avoid the bits of food falling onto his clothes. A pang of sadness hit Arturo in his throat, and he shared, “My father did that exact thing when he ate. Nearly every time. He was so messy.” Through the waning light, Arturo saw Aquiles’ face sour. “Perdon, hermano. Our father.”

  “Please don’t tease me with a childhood I never had.”

  The words lingered between them.

  “I’m sorry you never met them.” The hat he’d left in the Monastery created a phantom warmth around his naked head. Arturo searched for the right thing to say, the right thing to ease Aquiles’ mood. “They at least got to meet you, even if you don’t remember it.”

  Aquiles kept his eyes down and nodded his head. “I suppose they did. Doesn’t really help now.”

  The man’s motions caught Arturo’s attention for the first time, his regular motions, the familiar motions, the way he lifted his legs and stood, the way he looked about, and at Arturo. He’d been so enamored by the situation that he hadn’t taken the time to really pay attention to Aquiles. He had his mother’s eyes and his father’s nose. Their. Their father’s nose. Sore pulsing swelled under Arturo’s touch, a crooked mess dirtied with dry blood, the nose he had, and another thing he’d lost from his parents that day.

  “When we’re rested and more level-headed, we can talk about what to do in the morning,” Aquiles said.

  “I’ve told you, I’m not fighting the entire pyramid. That thing I did in the hall was just a fluke. In the moment, you know?”

  Aquiles held a flat expression. “We’ll talk in the morning,” he replied, steady and indifferent.

  Worry ate at Arturo over the prospect of arguing further with Aquiles over their plan of action. Weren’t they just supposed to wait for Socorra or Josefa or someone to come find them? Arturo thought back to what Aquiles said earlier. There wouldn’t likely be a friendly search party looking for them. The brothers were on their own.

  They settled in, and in the expanse of rolling hills and skimpy trees, among the dry grass and colorful night sky splattered with a bruised rainbow, a cool autumn breeze drifted through their basic campsite and lulled Arturo into a deep sleep. A voice spoke in his mind in the last moments of consciousness, words that felt divergent and artificial in comparison to the real words the dog had spoken in his heart.

  Buenas noches, mi hijo.

  Arturo’s eyes fluttered open to the same dark sky they closed on. He expected to be woken by dawn, the usual stimulus that would wake his body while out tending the herd with Barto. A pinprick of light shot across the sky, painting a yellow streak in his vision. It flashed and burned away to nothingness. One of the dim green lights blinked in a lackadaisical walk amongst the still shining stars. He followed it with his eyes as it moved against that splattered black backdrop. He was lying on his back, arms cradled by dirt and grass, and he turned his head over to his brother. Aquiles met his eyes, and Arturo yelped, not expecting his brother to be awake as well. “Ay mierda, me asustaste.”

  Aquiles snorted and shook his head at him, then they sat up in unison looking around. “What woke you?” the grumpy monk croaked with a tired voice.

  Arturo craned his neck at his surroundings. “I don’t know, I just… woke up.”

  “So did I…”

  Aquiles began to get to his feet when a strong wind gusted through the camp, disturbing their belongings and kicking dust up into Arturo’s face. He spat it out of his mouth. “Something feels… not wrong… just different.”

  Aquiles nodded slowly, “I feel it too.”

  They both got to their feet, but they stayed low. And, in this, they could agreed without argument they weren’t fond of being seen by any supernatural, preternatural, unnatural thing, or any other thing. Arturo’s heart beat a stampede of hooves.

  A gust of wind tore through the camp now, and with it, the sun came blazing from the east over the horizon, that streak of yellow light magnified a hundredfold and bathed them, a baking heat on their scalps, and clouds passed in a swift sprint across the sky. The sun lurched to a stop just overhead. The clouds seemed to halt, but they kept moving as clouds should, only that was still compared to the frenzy before. Arturo’s heart stopped beating with the sun, fear over some direct interference of the Parents with their flight from the Capital.

  “You know, I’m barely surprised after everything else,” Aquiles said as he squinted up at the sun.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “What in all the good hells of the Parents is going on?”

  Another of the man’s grunts then, “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Just the hills and the trees.”

  As if in response, the trees blew away, dust in the wind. The small bushes collapsed in heaps of dirt, melding into the ground, and the strongest gust to pass through carried all their belongings away on currents of air. The saddlebags became little dots in the distance. They both walked to a rock jutting from the peak of the hill and clambered up its natural handholds. Across the shallow valley between their hill and the next, a river of dirt, dust, and stones flowed across the ground, silent in its stampede. It would have been unbearable to stand so close for the sound the tumbling rocks and dirst would make, but neither sound nor tumbling evidenced their passing.

  “What is-”

  “Please stop asking what’s going on. You’re putting me on edge.”

  “I think we damned well have the right to be on edge,” Arturo hissed.

  All around them, swift currents of earth passed between the hills like rapids in a rocky river. The sun beat on Arturo’s head with more heat than he’d ever felt in the worst summer days, but he did not sweat. It did not tire him. Almost, it felt… invigorating. Like the energy afforded by the syrups, but pure. Arturo hadn’t noticed until just then how soiled that syrup made him feel.

  The adjacent hill began to shake as if quaking beneath the footfalls of a giant. A great rumbling roar split the air, and both brothers shrank back. A shadow crested that shaking hill, four legs and a massive, graceful body. It defied the sun, moving on its own against the light, switching directions like it was unsure of the light source’s location, like the sun swung around on a line just above them in quick circles. Both brothers held their breath.

  From beyond the hill, a jaguar sauntered over the dirt and stone. It came to the opposing hill’s peak and studied Arturo with eyes he could feel bashing and tearing into the flesh of his chest, the paws of a puma in that look. It was brown and intricately spotted with rings of black speckled with white spots. Worst of all, it stood seven paces at its shoulder, at least.

  Aquiles let out a whimper, “What is going on?”

  The jaguar swung its head, a monolith of bone and jaws all of power, and flicked a tail as thick as Arturo’s legs. It growled at them, a landslide, cracking rock, thunder of a hundred storms. The growl cut off, but still it studied them. Under the energizing sun, everything in Arturo’s body screamed at him to move, to run, to flee for any cover away from this terrifying beast; but he was stuck, unable to pry his feet from the rock beneath him. The jaguar watched them, regal. Arturo shook with terror. He imagined the animal leaping the gap and landing between the brothers. One swipe from its great claws, and he would be shattered to pieces.

  Its ears perked up, and another gust of wind bit dirt and grit into Arturo’s skin. Aquiles shifted his feet bracing against the wind. The air cleared, and the jaguar vanished.

  Their own hill shook. The same as the one that had borne the beast, and the brothers spun around. They came face to face with a massive head bearing teeth as long as their forearms, sniffing at the air around them. The jaguar yawned and turned, pacing in a circle and pawing the ground. With a cacophonous boom, it dropped to its stomach and stretched its legs. The jaguar’s eyes blinked lazily in the sun, drinking in its heat. It growled again, but this time it seemed more like a purr. A thousand cats purring, but still a purr. The head swung back up to them and beckoned them down from their perch. Arturo glanced at Aquiles, and his brother glanced back, unsure of what to do. The jaguar’s eyes were a deep brown with a crown of yellow around the abyss of its pupils. It swatted at the ground in front of it, playful like the stray cats back home.

  The brothers glanced at each other again, then moved off the rock to approach the enormous cat. The barrel of its stomach rose and fell with its breath, fur and skin rolling up under its chin as it watched them. It yawned again and laid its head down. Arturo reached where it had pawed the ground and saw it had left a print larger than his torso. He was less afraid now, more confused, more curious. This animal had an aura about it, something Arturo couldn’t place, but it reminded him of the abuelas around the campfires cooking food for all the pilgrims. It felt homely.

  “You think it knows the dog?” Arturo whispered out the side of his mouth.

  Aquiles shot him a cold glare. “Is now the time?”

  “Now is always a time.”

  “Socorra taught you well.”

  The cat didn’t care to watch them, wholly unthreatened and comfortable here, king of its dominion.

  The jaguar lifted its head then, fluffy rolls of fur shifting with the movement. Its tail flicked, whacking the ground with hard thuds. The purr shifted back to growl.

  “Is he happy to see us?”

  The jaguar’s eyes flared, and it hissed like a howling wind at the front of a storm.

  “She!” Arturo corrected, “Is she happy to see us?”

  Back to purring.

  “I think, at least, she understands,” noted Aquiles. The jaguar licked its snout.

  Ts? jong

  Arturo froze midstep, and his brother froze right along with him. Those words were so much more familiar now that he had heard them before. They wrapped and caressed his body and made his muscles draw taught, his heart surged and warmed, and he wanted to cry for not knowing their meaning, and he wanted to apologize.

  “Do you know what they mean?” he cried.

  “I wish I did,” Aquiles cried back.

  Their words felt harsh and grating in comparison like they didn’t fit on Arturo’s tongue. The jaguar tilted its head back down the road rushing with silent debris towards the Capital. Her voice gripped them again, and if the dog’s was friendly, hers was a demand.

  L?a gu?h c?ng hniú ja ds? mi juanh-dsa Diú

  Arturo would do anything to understand. He felt like he should know the words. Why didn’t he know the words? What had he done wrong? He should have learned them. “That sounded like a question,” Aquiles observed, and that broke Arturo from his moment of grief. He replayed the sounds in his mind.

  He nodded. “Tienes razon. What do you think she asked?”

  “Something to do with where we came from maybe? Or maybe something about the Capital?”

  “Well, she understands us it seems. Why don’t we ask our own questions?”

  Dejected, Aquiles said, “I don’t think those unknown words will tell us very much.”

  “It won’t hurt.”

  Aquiles looked at him with the most incredulous face Arturo had ever seen. “It’s a jaguar bigger than a house, Arturo! I think it could easily hurt us!” The jaguar growled, and Aquiles conceded, “She!” He breathed slowly and warded her with outstretched hands, “She.”

  Purr.

  “Alright, we can take turns,” Arturo said with feigned confidence, he continued with his first question. “Who are you?” The jaguar looked up at the sun and flicked its tail.

  Diú

  The brothers took sharp breaths, still unused to the marvel of those words. Arturo spoke out the side of his mouth, “I think she said that word before.”

  Aquiles nodded and asked his question. “Can you help us?”

  Jan

  That sounded curt, but positive. At least that’s what Arturo told himself. He hoped that meant yes. Arturo’s turn. “Do you know that dog that was with us?” The jaguar’s purr grew.

  Jan

  This was progress, unless the jaguar was saying no, but Arturo would stay optimistic. Aquiles breathed in to ask another question, but the jaguar rose to its feet.

  Jái dsa na ds?i

  She drew herself to her full height, blocking out the sun and leaving Arturo’s face suddenly chill in the dry air. She bent down to meet the brothers, eye to eye. To Aquiles, she touched a titanic wet nose to his cheek, shaking him with a purr, and to Arturo she ran a rough, dripping tongue from his chin and into his hair.

  Ts? jong

  The wind, light, and sensation ended in an instant. Arturo blinked the bright light of the sun from his eyes as they readjusted to the darkness. He looked up at the once colorful sky, though it seemed gray now. He looked around at all their belongings right where they’d left them. The trees still stood, as weak and pathetic as ever, and their horse whinnied at them in annoyance for waking it. Arturo was standing in the exact spot on the hill as when his vision ended. He panicked, wondering if any of it was real. Arturo saw Aquiles, standing and staring at nothing, the same worry on his face that Arturo felt. Did Arturo so plainly write his emotions on his face?

  “You saw all of that too, right?”

  Aquiles watched him, eyes wide, “Si?…”

  “Ok good.” Arturo lowered his head, “It was just a vision though, wasn’t it.” He felt heartbroken.

  “I think so, hermano.”

  Arturo’s shoulders slumped. At least it wasn’t raining gore and a madman screaming bloody murder. He laid back down, wishing still he knew the words. His nose itched, so he reached his fingers up to scratch it. They came away slimy with drool from the lick. Arturo smiled, teeth shining brighter than starlight. Aquiles laughed happily at what must be the same realization.

  She was real after all.