The Obsidian Mirror, page 4
Chapter 4
It was well after midnight on Sunday morning and the roads were eerily deserted. Neither of them felt like talking, so after an hour of quiet driving, Sierra switched on the radio, tuned to a National Public Radio channel. The news was on.
“The president announced today that he is launching an initiative called the “Clean Air for Americans Act.” Under the president’s proposed plan, funds will be earmarked for the construction of twenty-five new nuclear power plants in twenty states, including Alaska and Hawaii,” the announcer said. An audio clip of President Harmon’s voice followed.
“Nuclear power is clean power,” he said in the reverberating bass voice that was recognized around the globe. “Bringing twenty-five new nuclear plants online will cut America’s dependence on foreign oil by nearly twenty percent. Drilling for new oil resources in Alaska and along the coasts of California and Florida will reduce that dependence even more, giving Americans control over their energy destiny.”
The announcer continued, “President Harmon dismissed the issue of nuclear waste disposal, noting that subterranean storage has been proven safe by his Commission on Nuclear Waste Safety, which released its report simultaneously with his announcement. Given his party’s majority in both the House and Senate, it is unlikely that this initiative will meet with much resistance in Congress…”
Sierra changed the station. Chaco cocked an eye at her.
“”Don’t get me started,” she said. They had cleared the San Francisco Bay area and were heading for the Altamont Pass. The sky ahead was pink with a hint of the rising sun.
“He said he was a ‘green’ candidate, but everything he’s done has been the exact opposite of green,” Sierra complained.
“How do you suppose that he can get away with it?” Chaco asked quietly. He kept his eyes on the countryside rolling past them.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand how he can lie like that, saying that nuclear waste can be stored safely underground. I just don’t get it.”
“Well,” Chaco, said, plucking uncomfortably at the seat belt strap across his chest, “Why don’t you ask Q when we get there? He’s a very wise being, and he’s been around a long time. Ask him.”
Sierra tuned the radio to a music station. By the time they reached Altamont Pass, the suburbs and industrial parks had petered out. The morning sun showed that the grassy hills, bright green a few weeks earlier, had begun to turn the straw-gold of a California summer. Hawks soared above the fields of wind turbines that rose out of the grass like giant white pinwheels, while cattle grazed peacefully below, casting long black shadows down the hillsides. Then they started down the grade into the Central Valley. The land flattened out and the freeway ran straight as far as the eye could see.
“How about breakfast?” Chaco asked.
As far as Sierra could tell, he was always hungry. They stopped in Tracy, a town that apparently had competed for the largest number of chain restaurants and businesses—and won. Sierra pulled into the parking lot of Chik-Be-We, a national chain restaurant renowned for its iron adherence to blandness. She had a salad and Chaco ate two hamburgers with a side of French fries, then ordered more fries.
“How can you stay so skinny?” she demanded. “If I ate like that, I’d be completely circular.”
Chaco just grinned.
“Avatars don’t gain weight,” he said smugly. “Anyway, sometimes the pickings are slim when I’m Coyotl. Ever try gaining weight on a diet of mice and salmon berries?”
“Um, no. I’ll pass. Can we talk about where we’re going, now?
They pushed the dishes aside and spread out a map. Chaco pointed to a spot south and east of Sacramento. “We’re going there,” he said. Sierra peered at the spot at his fingertip.
“Where is that? It looks like the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s kind of in the boonies,” Chaco agreed. “But there are little gold rush towns and wineries. It’s the gold country—where they came and dug everything up, hoping to get rich. That was a bad time,” he said gloomily. “The Miwok people were my people, and they were about wiped out by the miners. And the gold diggers poisoned the land with mercury, too.”
“Mercury? Why did they do that?” asked Sierra.
“I’m not clear on the details. All I know is they used it to separate the gold from the ore, then dumped it. How do you think all that mercury wound up in the San Francisco Bay and in the Sacramento River Delta? But they don’t use mercury any more.”
“Oh. That’s good.”
“They use cyanide.”
Sierra felt they were wandering from the subject at hand. She had enough on her plate without taking on mining industry practices.
“So where do we end up today?” she asked.
“There’s a state park near Volcano.” Chaco pointed at the park on the map. “It’s called Indian Grinding Rock. It was sacred ground to the Miwoks. We can camp there.”
“Is it a real volcano?”
“Naw. The white settlers thought it was, but there’s no volcano. Anyway, all the volcanoes around here are dead. Or sleeping.”
“Well, there’s a bit of good news,” said Sierra. “I can get us there. Ready?”
As they were getting into the car, Sierra asked, “If you were around in eighteen-forty-nine for the California Gold Rush, just how old are you, Chaco?”
Chaco looked thoughtful.
“I don’t know. Thousands of years, anyway. Maybe hundreds of thousands? I don’t keep track.”
“You don’t look very old. In fact, you don’t look a day over twenty-five.”
Chaco twinkled at her. “The Trickster is perennially young. It wouldn’t do to go around playing pranks on people if you’re too old to run fast!”
“Yeah, well just don’t play any tricks on me, fella,” warned Sierra.
As they turned off the freeway onto Highway 88, the gray-green-brown flatness of the Central Valley began to disappear as the land began its long, slow rise to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. They drove through miles of orchards on either side: walnut, almonds, and cherry trees. The orchards eventually gave way to vineyards, heralding the approach of Amador County’s wine region.
The land hunched into low, rolling hills, growing higher with every mile. They began to see live oaks dotting the open grassland, spreading their heavy branches low to the ground. They skipped to the east of Sutter Creek, where the original gold strike had been made in 1849, drove directly into Jackson, then made an abrupt left turn in the center of town onto Highway 49. By the time they arrived at Pine Grove, the last town before reaching Indian Grinding Rock State Historical Park, they were in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The scenery alternated between rolling hills dotted with live oaks, scrublands, and forests thick with pines, black oak, and red-skinned madrone.
It was not long before they reached the entrance to the state park. They paid the overnight camping fee and in return received a small map. The ranger showed them where their site was.
“It’s a fair distance from the parking lot,” he said, marking their route in pencil with an X on their site. “You have to haul any water or wood into the site, but it’s worth it.”
Fortunately, the ranger station sold firewood, as it was not among Sierra’s camping provisions. Having completed that purchase, they headed to their site. As in most state park campgrounds in California, the campsites were located right next to each other, like tract houses. During the high season for camping, these enclaves became extensions of suburbia, with tots on trikes, teenagers playing hip-hop, and martini-drinking adults who apparently had tried to bring their living rooms with them in their bulging RVs. But in mid-May, the campground had only a few other campers, located far enough from their site to provide a pretense of privacy.
Setting up the tent and arranging the campsite took an hour or so. Sierra and Chaco worked well together, chatting as they set up camp. Finally, the tent was pitched and the site arranged to Sierra’s satisfaction. They snacked on cheese and crackers while they worked, washing it down with iced tea that Sierra had brought in a large thermos jug.
“Now what?” she asked Chaco.
Chaco scrutinized the afternoon sky.
“It’s too late to go see Q. We’d be walking in the dark coming back. Doesn’t bother me,” he said with a grin, “but you humans can’t see worth beans when the sun goes down. Let’s just relax tonight and go in the morning.”
This suited Sierra, and she and Chaco went to see the park’s main attraction, a broad expanse of flattish rock located near the visitors’ center. Smoothly rounded holes in the rock showed where the Miwoks had once sat and ground acorns. There were pictograms scratched in the rock as well, but it took a sharp eye to pick them out. Sierra imagined the women sitting on the warm rock in the sun, grinding acorns and gossiping among themselves. She wondered if each woman had her own grinding hole, worn gradually deeper by her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother before her. Then she realized that she could ask Chaco—and did.
“Well, I don’t think it was all that formal,” he replied, leaning on the zigzag log fence that prevented visitors from walking across the rock. “They had their favorites, I guess, but mostly, one would pick a hole and start working, then the others would settle down around her so they could talk.”
Sierra and Chaco spent a lazy afternoon walking around the park and talking. Chaco was a wealth of information, and he told her several funny stories about members of the Miwok tribe he had known. Finally, they headed back to their camp.
Dusk was falling, and the air began to chill. Back in Sunnyvale, the evenings would be mild, but in the Sierra Nevada foothills there was still a breath of winter.
“What’s for dinner?” Chaco asked.
“How can you be hungry again? We just had snacks,” Sierra grumbled, but she competently built a fire and began preparations for cooking as bats flew overhead and the moon rose in a cobalt sky. The other campers were quietly going about their own business, and as it became fully dark, it was almost possible to believe they were alone in the wilderness. A wilderness with hot showers down the road and toilets, of course.
Sierra and Chaco sat by the fire, eating the simple canned hash and salad she had fixed. Sierra relaxed, enjoying the crackle of the flames, making her front rather hot while the night breeze cooled her back. She scrambled up to find her windbreaker and to get a bottle of wine from her food locker, which sat to one side. It was unlikely there would be bears in this area, so she hadn’t bothered to secure it up in the trees. She’d stow it in the car before they went to sleep.
Settling back down by the fire, she poured wine into a blue- enameled coffee cup and passed it to Chaco, then took a cup herself.
“You said the Miwok were your people. What did you mean by that? I thought the Coyote stories were from the Navajo and the other Indians that lived in the desert in Arizona and New Mexico.”
She thought she remembered that from studying Native Americans in elementary school.
“I figure in The People’s stories from all over,” said Chaco. “The Miwok say I created them. Do you want to hear the story?”
“Yes.” Sierra hadn’t had anyone tell her a bedtime story in ages. She leaned toward him attentively.
Chaco spoke in his formal voice, telling the story in the third person, as though he were not a participant in it. “The world was peopled six times. The fifth people were the bird and mammal people, and Coyote was one of them. Coyote was very clever,” Chaco said, and not one muscle twitched in irony or self-deprecation.
“Coyote was very clever, and he created the land. Then he created the foods to grow upon the land. But he needed people to eat the foods. He gathered many wise men together and asked them what he should do and they said he should create a new People immediately so that the foods would be eaten. But Coyote wasn’t sure what kind of People he should create.
“He looked at his foot and asked, ‘Do you see my foot? Is that the kind of foot the new people should have?’
“’No,” said Otter, ‘Make a foot like mine.’
“Coyote looked at Otter’s foot. ‘Your foot is round, like mine,’ he said. ‘The new People can’t use round feet.’
“Then Lizard spoke up. ‘You are right. The new People won’t be able to pick up the food with round feet like yours. Look at my foot. I have five toes so that I can pick things up and use the bow and arrow and do all kinds of things that are useful.’
“Coyote said, ‘You are right, Lizard. Your feet are the proper kind.’ So Coyote made the new People with lizard feet, and arranged it so that their villages would be close together, and each man had a wife so they could have a child every year. And Coyote said this was to be the last creation of people on the earth, and he sent them off to live in every direction. He also spoke to every creature and told each what kind of life he would live from that day forward: frogs in the water and birds in the air and bears in the forest. And that is the way it has been from that day to this.”
Sierra got a bit confused between “people” and “People,” and she thought the story didn’t make much sense. She was about to ask about the preceding four peoples of the earth, but Chaco spoke first, as the fire sent a spray of red sparks into the air.
“There’s another one about how Coyote loses his penis,” said Chaco. “That one’s a lot funnier.”
“What…!” Sierra started to say, but before she could collect her wits, Chaco’s fire-lit figure suddenly shifted into coyote form and launched into the scrub at the periphery of their campsite.
Sierra sprang to her feet, heart pounding wildly, as she heard crashing and snarls in the bushes. Before long, the coyote came back, lugging a struggling figure in his jaws. He brought it to the fire and placed his forepaws firmly on a squirming creature like nothing Sierra had ever seen before.
As Chaco morphed back into human form, the firelight limned something the size of a pygmy goat, with thin arms and legs and fat, splayed toes like a salamander’s—except there were six toes on each paw. The creature’s huge orange eyes glowed in the light of the flames. Its skin was gray-green and hairless, and its watermelon-shaped head bore a tiny lipless mouth with slits where a nose should be. Its mouth was open, emitting piercing squeals.
“What the hell is that?” she yelped.
Chapter 5
Chaco grinned down at the creature.
“Mannegishi,” he said, looking wolfish even in human form.
“Man-a-whatee?”
“Mannegishi,” Chaco repeated. “Kind of like leprechauns, but uglier.”
The mannegishi stopped squealing as Chaco shifted his grip to one of its legs.
“We are not uglier than leprechauns,” it said with dignity. “It’s all a matter of taste. We happen to think leprechauns are fantastically grotesque. Only humans are nastier-looking.”
Overlooking the insult to her species, Sierra asked, “What in the name of…of whatever is a mannegishi? And how do you know about leprechauns? There aren’t any leprechauns in America. I mean, there aren't any leprechauns.”
Chaco looked at her with one dark eyebrow cocked.
“You’re sitting here with an Avatar and a mannegishi, and you still think there aren’t any leprechauns?”
“The horrible little things are all over the place,” said the mannegishi primly. “We have a terrible immigration problem in this country.”
“Never mind that,” growled Chaco. “What were you doing skulking around our campsite? What’re you up to?”
“Nothing!” protested the mannegishi. “I mean, nothing bad. I was sent to tell you something. Something important!”
“OK,” Chaco said. “Tell us.”
Like a chameleon, the mannegishi rolled one huge orange eye at Sierra, as the other eye remained fixed on Chaco.
“I’m not sure I should tell her. Can we speak in private?” asked the mannegishi.
“No, we can not,” Chaco said, tightening his grip on the creature’s thin leg.
“All right, all right!” the creature said, shrinking from Chaco. “The Big Q sent me. He said to tell you that Mahaha is on your trail.”
Chaco released the mannegishi’s leg.
“Mahaha!” he exclaimed. “Why is Mahaha after us?”
The mannegishi rubbed its leg where Chaco’s hand had gripped it. “You know. Tezcatlipoca sent it to stop you.”
Chaco went pale, discernible even by firelight.
“Don’t say that name!” he hissed at the mannegishi. “You give him power when you say his name. Call him Necocyaotl if you must speak of him.”
The mannegishi squatted lower to the ground.
“Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.” It stuck a stubby digit in its mouth and sucked it nervously.
“What is going on here?” demanded Sierra. “Who’s Mahaha?”
“Do you have any food?” asked the mannegishi. “I’m hungry.”
What is it with these things, thought Sierra. All they think about is food. Aloud she snapped, “Not until I get some answers!”
Chaco turned to her.
“Mahaha is a sort of ice demon. It tickles you.”
Sierra raised her eyebrows.
“Tickles you? Forgive me if I don’t swoon with terror. That doesn’t sound very scary.”
“When you were a kid, did anyone ever hold you down and tickle you until you peed in your pants?” asked Chaco.
“Well, yes. That was unpleasant, but it still doesn’t sound very frightening,” replied Sierra.
“Okay. Now imagine that the someone who’s holding you down is as cold as ice and as strong as steel. He has long, sharp fingers that reach into your body, then he tickles you until you go insane, and then he freezes you solid. Mahaha isn’t from around here. He’s an ice demon from the Arctic.”
“Oh,” said Sierra, who had an excellent imagination.
“This is bad news. We need to see Q as soon as possible, but I don’t think we can get started until dawn. You can’t hike up there in the dark.”
