Keeper of the Rains

Hempen twine secured Ying’s stiff, black hair out of her face in a high bun while she leaned over a steaming basin, waiting for the boiling water to soften white cocoons for the long task of unraveling. Her best friend, Li, had complained, when he’d seen her set up shop, that she should be wearing silk, not making it. But none of the Teikao’i had worn the precious fabric since the Conquest ten years prior. Now silk, like jade, was sent as tribute through the world-puddle to Tlalli in exchange for the sparse rains the Tlallish gods cast off like table scraps.

Ying pushed the sleeves of her long, hemp tunic up over her elbows to keep them dry before plunging her hands into the cooling water. The cloth she wore was dull blue – one of the two colors still allowed to the Teikao’i – and embroidered with rough toads, lotuses, and lily pads, coarse reminders of the duty she’d inherited from her father. She started teasing apart a cocoon, coaxing out the long strand that would form a fiber in a silken thread. Then, a series of yelps broke the lazy susurration of noise in the busy street outside.

Ying dashed to the corner, heedless of the precious droplets scattered from her hands across the floor as she grabbed the wooden staff leaning against the intersecting walls. She whirled to face the little house’s only door, which burst open, slamming its full weight into the redbrick wall with a loud thump. She swung her staff at the man rushing in, bashing it against the arm he raised just in time to defend his face.

He cried out, cradling the arm to his chest and staggering back against the nearest wall.

“Damn,” he said with a pained chuckle. “You never change.”

“Li? What did you think you were doing, barging in without a knock?” Ying demanded before remembering the yelps that had alarmed her and looking out the open door at the street filled with gawking neighbors.

Li followed her gaze and hurried to shut the door with his uninjured arm.

“Li, what-”

“No time- Ying, they’re here.”

His stricken face supplied the gaps in his disjointed words.

“Tlallish?”

“Jaguar Knights.”

Ying’s fingers tightened around her staff.

“Good,” she said.

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean. We both knew this would happen. Time to make my father proud.”

Ying quickly crossed the room and plucked several loose bricks from the wall, then slung the bundle in the revealed cavity across her back. Even through layers of padding, a hard edge of green stone jutted into the soft flesh between her shoulder blades, putting the image of the Rainmaker firmly in her mind. For a moment, she lost herself to the memory of the last time she had seen it in its proper place, ten years ago, in the Sanctuary a half-day’s walk from the city. She had been only a child then, the night the Jaguar Knights had spilled through the world-puddle like a sea of blood to take possession of Teikao by destroying the Emperor’s bloodline and stealing the Rain-Giver’s blessing on her people.

Ying hid in the shadow of a gargoyle overlooking the Rainmaker’s Sanctuary, lying on her belly as green roof tiles pressed angry indentations into the skin of her chin, knees, and forearms.

The darkness of the night was barely troubled by the faint moon above and the flaring torches in the invaders’ hands. The Jaguar Knights set fire to the greenery in the Sanctuary, and Ying lay paralyzed and mute with fear as the threatening shadows beguiled her young eyes into believing their carved wooden helmets flesh and bone. She flinched as the sharp obsidian edges set into their clubs bit into the bamboo staffs of the guardians below, then into their soft flesh with sickening crunches.

She blinked away the rising smoke and tears blurring her vision only to see her father, the Keeper of the Rains, stand with his back to the Rainmaker’s pedestal as Knights approached. He whirled his staff furiously, knocking stones and darts out of the air. He jabbed the staff out, once, twice, and the nearest of the Jaguar Knights fell. He raised his staff again- and a bolas, hurled from the shadows, tore it out of his grasp.

A Jaguar Knight slammed his club into the Keeper’s face. He fell, leaving a scarlet smear on the pedestal supporting the idol he had sworn to protect, his lifeblood dribbling slowly down like sand in an hourglass. The Knights grabbed the unguarded idol while the one who had killed the Keeper knelt and pulled a short obsidian blade from his belt. He thrust it into the dead Keeper’s chest and tugged sharply, opening a cavity into which he thrust his hand. With his comrades howling around him, he pulled out the still-warm heart. He raised it to the snarling jaguar’s jaws, open in hunger, and took a savage bite. Blood spurted into the air.

Ying gasped, her silent terror finally boiling towards a scream, but smoke rushed into her open mouth, and only a weak cough escaped. The world blurred together, a hazy cloud of red and black all that remained in a place that had always before been green and blue with life, and Ying fell unconscious. She woke the next day atop the blackened shell of the outer temple, looking down into a pit of dirt and charred bones, the pond surrounding the shrine’s now-empty pedestal thick and red with blood.

Only a child at the time, Ying had barely understood the news of the destruction in the capital, where more Jaguar Knights had destroyed the palace and bathed in the blood of the Emperor and his children. The armies of Teikao had mustered too late to defend their home. They’d followed the Tlallish through the world-puddles to fight a losing campaign on hostile soil. But they had never reclaimed the Rainmaker. After months of drought, Teikao had finally bowed beneath Tlallish sovereignty. Since then, the Tlallish priests on their ziggurats had allowed scant showers to leak through the heavens’ seal and fall to Teikao.

Ten long years later, Ying was a woman whose dreams still bore the scars of the gristly scene she’d witnessed in her childhood. Now, she understood that there were human faces beneath the beastly battle-masks of the Jaguar Knights. And now, she had struck a blow against them. She had slipped unnoticed into Tlalli and retrieved the stolen Rainmaker from their king’s ill-gotten vaults. She had kept it safe and hidden for months, and if Jaguar Knights were seeking her now…Well, that nothing she hadn’t expected.

“You know what to do?” she asked.

Li blanched and looked up from the arm he’d been examining for broken bones.

“You’re not going through with it.”

“What’s the alternative? Sit still and wait for them to butcher me?”

“Keep it hidden. Keep your head down. Destroy it- or plant it on someone else if you have to!”

Ying covered her surprise with a weak smile.

“How ruthless. I always thought you liked our neighbors.”

“You know I’ve always hated Zhoulan,” Li joked.

The edges of his smile were brittle with forced levity, which quickly slipped off his grim face.

“You don’t have to do this. If you don’t run, they might not find you-”

“We’ve been over this, Li. I made the decoy for a reason. They’ll waste years looking for me if I slip away with it now-”

“But you won’t. Will you?”

There was no hint of a question in Li’s hard voice, and Ying scowled as he continued.

“You said you’d disappear with the fake, but you don’t mean for them to lose your trail. Don’t forget who found you the morning after your father died. I know that look in your eyes.”

“What look?” Ying demanded, raising her chin in challenge.

“The one that says you can’t see anything but blood and fire.”

“I know my duty.”

“Yes. Your duty is to protect the Rainmaker. And I think you’ve convinced yourself that you can discharge it by letting them catch you with the fake.”

“If a Jaguar Knight catches up to me,” Ying said, her voice laced with dark promise, “He’ll get more than he’s bargained for.”

“Because that’s all you really care about, isn’t it? They’ll have found the fake, they’ll stop looking for the real one, and Teikao will rise as the rains return in secret. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You’re throwing your life away for a shot at killing a Jaguar Knight. When will the living matter more to you than the dead, Ying?”

“When my father’s unavenged blood stops screaming from the parched dust of Teikao.”

Li hissed and laid a shaking hand gently atop the one Ying had wrapped around her bamboo staff.

“You know, better than most, what they’ll do to you.”

“I don’t care if they do,” Ying said, steadily meeting his gaze. “My father died losing the Rainmaker. I’m willing to die reclaiming it.”

“You have to know I can’t let you do that,” Li said, raising his free hand to gently cup her cheek. “You have to know how I feel about you.”

“No,” Ying said. She yanked her hand – and the staff with it – out of his warm grasp and stepped stiffly out of reach. Li let his hands fall silently in the gulf between them.

“I don’t,” Ying said. “It’s not your place to let me do my duty. So long as I’m alive, the Rainmaker is my responsibility.”

Li pursed his lips, his dark eyes shining with the emotions locked behind them. Coolly, he performed the salutation he’d neglected when he’d entered, holding his right hand vertically, flat as a blade, and pressing it thumb-first against his nose and forehead as he bowed.

“As you will, Keeper.”

Ying hesitated. She’d planned her departure a thousand times but never imagined it to end so coldly. She gave a brief nod, then stalked toward the door.

“Ying!”

The ice in Li’s voice had melted, leaving fiery desperation. Ying quickened her pace and threw open the door. If she looked back now, she might not leave after all.

Ying stepped into the street and froze with one foot still across the threshold as her eyes fell on a carved wooden mask bobbing above the heads in the crowd barely three feet away.

“Ying!”

The panic in Li’s voice and the rough hand grabbing her arm made it clear he’d seen it, too. Ying broke Li’s grip with a sharp twist of her wrist and jabbed her staff into his stomach, knocking him to the floor as the Jaguar’s snarling snout turned to face her with eerie accuracy. Ying angled her body to make it appear that Li had been trying to apprehend her. He coughed and gasped her name, but she was already running, elbowing shocked neighbors whose faces blurred to strangers’ with the speed of her passing. Shouts and thuds followed her as the Jaguar Knight plowed forward in her footsteps.

Ying ducked and rolled under a shrieking woman’s legs as an atlatl dart grazed her shoulder. She came up out of the roll and put on another burst of speed.

Old Man Su’s melon cart appeared in the corner of her eye, and she leapt onto it. It overbalanced, sending the round, pink fruits rolling into the street as Ying propelled herself up onto the roof beside her and ran across the green-glazed tiles.

She jumped the gap to the adjoining roof and quickly crossed it, dodging the bolas that shattered the tiles behind her left foot as the Jaguar Knight, slowed by the crowd, fell behind. Ying crossed one more roof before dropping down into an alleyway and cutting toward the city’s outer wall.

She took a deep breath and vaulted over it. The Tlallish shouts behind her indicated that the Jaguar Knight had spotted her, and she sprinted into the forest, grateful for the thick cover of the Cathaya trees.

Her heart raced twice as fast as her feet as she bolted west, toward the clearing that housed the world-puddles. Loud footsteps shattered the flimsy twigs of the forest floor behind her. The Jaguar Knight was gaining. Remembered fire flickered in the shadows Ying sped past, and she wondered if Li had been right.

Maybe I don’t have to do this. If I can just make it through a world-puddle to Irdomh or L’Abyisa…

They were populous worlds, and the Teikao’i entrances led straight into their major city centers. It would be easy to lose the Jaguar Knights if Ying could just make it that far. Maybe she wouldn’t have to fight the monsters of her nightmares, after all.

Praying desperately to the Rain-Giver, Ying barreled into the clearing that housed the wet portals between the worlds only to find two Jaguar Knights standing between her and the deceptively still waters. They’d been waiting, expecting her to flee.

One hurled a dart from his atlatl while the other ran forward, brandishing his obsidian-studded club, without a second’s hesitation. Ying only just managed to duck under the dart and brought her staff up to block the club’s strike with a sickening thud.

She almost lost her grip as the sound shot a surge of bile up her throat.

How many strikes had it taken to shatter the Rainmaker’s guardians’ staffs ten years ago, leaving their bodies vulnerable to the brutal Tlallish clubs?

Ying had no time to dwell on the past as the present caught up, the sharp crack of a snapping twig announcing the approach of the warrior who’d followed her from town.

He swung his club downward, and Ying threw herself to one side, shivering at the wind of the weapon’s passing less than an inch from her flesh.

The Jaguar Knights formed a loose triangle around Ying, snarling from behind the sharp wooden teeth of their carved helms.

Ying pivoted madly, whirling her staff in quick circles in a desperate attempt to fend off their attacks. There was no impact against her moving shield; the warriors were waiting for her to tire herself out.

Ying’s blood boiled with rage as one of them howled with laughter.

“Best give up now, little thief,” he said.

“I am not a thief,” Ying hissed.

Her palms grew sweaty as she twirled the smooth wood in her hands.

“Then what’s in the bag?” The Jaguar Knight asked.

“It belongs to the Rain-Giver. To the Teikao’i.”

“Your Rain-Giver is nothing to our gods. And our King owns Teikao and everything in it.”

“Come and take it then,” Ying snarled. “Unless you’re afraid of a little girl.”

The Knight scowled then, his white teeth flashing against his sun-darkened skin in a grotesque parody of his helm’s bared fangs.

“I’ll show you fear, little girl.”

He rushed her, and Ying raised her staff. The Knight’s club fell, and Ying staggered under its weight. Thin cracks raced along her staff, spreading out from the point of impact.

The Jaguar Knight drew back for another swing, his companions watching lazily. Ying gritted her teeth.

THUD.

The club fell again, a tiny wedge of obsidian breaking off in the wood of Ying’s staff.

While the Jaguar Knight raised his arm for another strike, Ying jabbed the butt of her battered staff forward into his stomach. He coughed, bending forward to compensate for the sudden backward force. Surprised, Ying swung her staff, but the warrior dropped to one knee. The staff whistled over his head, and he smashed his club into it again. The crack covered the last of his gasps.

The splintered wood trembled in Ying’s hands, only loosely held together by the force of her grip. Ying took a startled step back as the Jaguar Knight rose to his full height, swinging his club carelessly by his side.

She glanced desperately over his shoulder and noticed that the other two had drifted toward her back. If she could just get around this one, the way to the world-puddles would be clear. She could make it-

The Knights on the sidelines laughed.

“So, the little mouse knows how to bite,” the one fighting her said with a superior smile.

Ying growled and threw herself at him, swinging her staff down vertically toward his head. The Jaguar Knight swung his club through the air, and her staff broke in half, the length above her hands falling to the ground in bamboo shards. Ying let go, and the bottom half dropped as she ducked under the heavy club and jumped up at the surprised warrior. He gave a strangled cry and yanked a bloody lock of hair out of the back of Ying’s head as she sank her teeth into his thick neck and ripped out a mouthful of flesh. The taste and scent of copper washed over her first, then she felt the heat of the blood trickling down her throat. Finally, she registered the grit of the forest ground beneath her hands and knees, braced on either side of the corpse under her chest.

A sharp pain hit the back of her head. Then, all she knew was darkness.

The ropes biting into Ying’s wrists and ankles formed her first sensation upon waking. Then, she felt the cold stone of the altar beneath her back. Her vision wavered until the grinning face of the priest looming over her swam into focus. His hot breath brushed her cheek, and she turned her head away from its foul stench. Glimpsing the steep stairs climbing up the Tlallish ziggurat, Ying half remembered the hazy, jostling journey that had carried her dazed form up to its apex.

In the wide plaza beneath the stairs spread a crowd as plentiful as sand and as colorful as a bleeding sun. Distinct words were indistinguishable in the snarl of vicious voices that rose like a wave in Ying’s ears, intensifying the rhythmic pounding in her head. The voices ceased when the priest raised something brown and shapeless high above his head, and Ying squinted until she could recognize her knapsack.

Drawing out a tightly wrapped bundle of cloth and letting the hemp bag fall at his feet, the priest called in a grating shout, “Here, in the eyes of all the gods, the Teikao’i water tribute is restored!”

The people screamed in triumph, and Ying hated them.

“Theft,” she screamed, straining against the ropes and ignoring the hoarse scraping of her voice against the dried blood in her throat. “Theft, not tribute! You think, by stealing our rain, you buy our loyalty, but only our gods own that! The Rain-Giver’s people will not thirst!”

“Silence, heretic!” the priest thundered. “This Teikao’i rebel thought to defy our gods by stealing from the King’s own treasury! But her blood will sate them while her own gods waste away in thirst!”

The people cheered. Then, the priest raised a ceremonial knife high over his head, and the crowd of thousands fell silent. In the eerie stillness, Ying’s heart beat loudly in her ears, and she wondered how long it would keep beating after it was cut out of her chest.

It was worth it, she reminded herself. This was always the plan. After this, they’ll never seek the real Rainmaker – not until Teikao flourishes once more. And I took one of them down with me.

She tasted again the blood coating her tongue but could not picture the moment of her triumph. All she could see was her father’s face, smeared with sweat and blood, as his eyes widened and then glazed over before his killer sank his teeth into his heart.

The priest began to chant harsh, alien words that grated on Ying’s nerves like the ropes against her restless wrists.

“Tlaloc, father of the rains, see us shed this sacrifice, and slake your thirst.

“Tlaloc, father of the soft rains, send us showers to raise our harvests.

“Tlaloc, father of the harsh rains, send us floods to wash away our enemies.”

As the priest spoke, he raised a ceremonial knife high over his head. Its polished obsidian blade reflected a ray of sunlight directly down into Ying’s eyes, and she turned her head to avoid the blinding glare.

For a moment, fear dug its spectral blade deep into her chest, drowning out all thoughts but those of the agony to come. Then, in a spurt of scintillating clarity, Li’s face replaced her father’s. She wondered if he knew she understood his feelings. She wished she could have told him that she felt the same.

Looking down the steep steps of the ziggurat, Ying saw the people dancing in the square below, filling the air with sibilant susurrations as they repeated the priest’s invocation in a ceaseless round.

It was the last thing she heard before the knife’s jagged point dug into her chest.

She heard no more, then, but her own hoarse screams.

Li waited a week after the news of Ying’s death, just to be safe. Then, he pried the carefully wrapped parcel from beneath the floorboards in her abandoned house and carried it to the Rainmaker’s Shrine. Though the cloth-wrapped bundle was physically light, Li sagged under its weight, leaning against one wall of the shrine to catch his breath before solemnly straightening his spine and approaching the fire-blackened pedestal in its center. The vegetation had grown back with a vengeance, sprawling more thickly than it ever had before and curling possessively around the cylindrical plinth as if to reclaim it from the violence that had stolen its precious idol ten years before.

Li carefully unwrapped the bundle in his hands, pulling back the heavy burlap canvas to reveal a Lotus carved from a solid slab of jade. One delicate petal caught a ray of sunlight and reflected a face back at him. For a split second, he would have sworn it was Ying’s, not his own. Then a cloud covered the sun, and the image vanished.

The jade weighed down Li’s palms, and Ying's passionate voice echoed in his ears.

Well, that’s the real genius of it. Chasing the fake, the Tlallish will never realize the Rainmaker is back in the Sanctuary. And, once the people realize we don’t need them for rain, Teikao will rise again.

Li sighed past the tangled knot in his throat. Nothing could have persuaded Ying to stay. When it came to the Tlallish, she had seen only blood. Li supposed she’d gotten what she’d wanted, in the end. That knowledge hadn’t stemmed the bitter tears he’d spilled on his cot the night her death had been confirmed.

“I hope it was worth it, Ying,” he whispered.

Li placed the Rainmaker on its weathered pedestal and stepped back, bowing with the same deferential gesture he had last used the last time he’d seen Ying.

“I am Yu Li, chosen by Jiang Ying, daughter of Jiang Bo. I humbly offer myself to the Rain-Giver as the Keeper of her gift to Teikao.”

The Sanctuary sat silent.

Li wondered if the Tlallish gods had answered their people when they’d spilled Ying’s blood as an offering.

With a sigh, he turned away from the Sanctuary, walking back towards town. Thunder rolled over his shoulder, and his shadow shrank from the side of the road until it disappeared entirely. Li strained his neck, squinting into the dark clouds shrouding the sky just as a raindrop fell on the bridge of his nose. A light shower followed, more drops streaming down his face as if to hide the tears staining his cheeks.