Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(79)
“You see why I was intrigued.”
<Well, yeah. I mean, if you’re going to have a whole river full of pus, don’t you need a heck of a lot of infected wounds or boils or zits or something?>
“Or maybe just one giant, legendary wound like a spring, oozing pus into the darkness …”
<Maybe? You mean you don’t know where it all came from?>
“Some things are best left as mysteries, Oberon. In any case, I wanted to see these rivers if I could, because when you live for as long as I have, every new experience is something to be treasured. And this would be next-level amazing, a land created by human imagination rather than geologic forces.”
I sat down under the canopy of the rain forest and contacted the elemental Yucatán: //Query: Can Druid visit plane of Xibalba?//
It’s a good idea to ask such things. Realms of the dead often have rules about the living walking around.
//Yes// the elemental replied. //With protection//
I asked for such protection for a short trip, and Yucatán agreed, directing me to a cave in modern-day Belize that would serve as the portal to the plane. Once there, I bound a tree to Tír na nóg and told Faolan that he had two choices: I could shift him back to the north, where we first met more than a hundred years before, and say farewell, or he could wait for me outside the cave, for a possibly very long time. Under no circumstances could he follow me into Xibalba.
He challenged me immediately. <Why not?>
“Because it’s a land of the dead. The living don’t go there without protection, and Gaia will only protect me.”
<Is this because I smell bad?>
“No, it’s because this is the kind of favor Gaia does only for Druids. You simply can’t go. Stepping into a land of the dead means you’re dead. So what’s it going to be: Wait here, where there are jaguars and too many bugs to count, and I might not come back and you’d be stuck here—”
<You might not come back?>
“It could be very dangerous for me even with protection. I could run into something awful, and I’m just being honest. However, I hope it won’t take me long. But to finish my thought: You can wait, or you could just go back to the north, where you frequently say you’d rather be, and not have to put up with my annoying attacks of curiosity.”
<And do what? Fight with other wolverines? Get mauled by a bear? No thanks, I’ll stay here and you’ll come back fast,> he said.
? ? ?
<Aww! I’m kinda sorry I never met Faolan,> Oberon said. <I think we might have gotten along. He had a sensible attitude about bears anyway.>
“He didn’t like squirrels either.”
<Wow. I bet we would have been friends!>
The yawning mouth of the cave had moss hanging from the top like green fangs. I stepped past and through, bare feet on cold stone, and cast night vision to help me see in the dark.
To the living, Xibalba’s cave was normally just a cave, but to the dead it extended and changed. Yucatán opened that portal for me at the appropriate point, and the temperature, already chilly compared with that of the jungle, cooled further. The floor was strewn with skeletons, calcified and broadcasting a warning in their eternal repose.
For a hundred yards or so, I simply descended into the shivery damp and worried about my footing.
And then a clicking and dry, raspy susurrus warned me that something waited ahead; the passage turned and opened wider and I came to a river of black scorpions, strangely lit from below. No bridge, no ferry, just a wide expanse teeming with poisonous dudes—an apt metaphor, now that I think of it, for my few brief attempts to understand social media.
The river extended in either direction into darkness, and the scorpions seemed content to stay within the confines of their riverbank.
Yucatán helped me bridge it, creating a thin strip of stone to walk across. It was as awesome as it sounds, and I even said it aloud in the middle, with a goofy grin on my face: “I’m walking across a river of scorpions right now.”
I smelled the river of blood before I saw it—that sorta nasty metallic scent, you know, from the copper and iron in there, like dirty pennies. It burbled a bit, and parts of it were bright and oxygenated like arterial spray, and other swirls and eddies were darker as if spent from veins. It was more blood than Lady Macbeth ever had to deal with. Another stone bridge grew across it courtesy of Yucatán, and I stepped lightly over.
And then I saw the river of pus.
As with the others, something in the riverbed provided illumination, so it was glowing pus I was looking at, a pale-yellow flow with twirling fingers of darker yellow in it. The smell was of moist rot, the kind that blowflies grow fat upon, and indeed there were churning fists of squirmy maggots floating upon it, and clouds of buzzing flies hovering above it.
I felt no desire to move past it, and not only because the flies would probably pester me to the point of falling in the river. Nightmares waited on the other side: toothsome bats shrieking in the dark, and who knew what else. The Lords of Xibalba, no doubt. By all accounts they were not the hospitable type, and I didn’t want them to figure out I’d popped in for a nice long gawk.
But it was magnificent: three fantastic, impossible rivers imagined by humans and maintained by their belief. Sights like that renew my sense of wonder at the world, which flags from time to time.