"Mai" by J. lawrence

We stopped at a little river, near dusk as the sky turned red. Maiasar sat down on a green rock hardly big enough for her, and pulled her knees up to her chest cradling them, rocking back and forth and staring at the water.

I thought she was finally scared, that she’d finally realized that after five days of following a narrow twisting path, we were lost in the rainforest and would die here.

“Come look at it Jess,” she said, eyes never leaving the stream. I sighed and sat down with my legs in the cool water, and Mai shrieked and pulled me out.

“Just look,” she warned, voice quivering. I sighed again. Likely the only thing for miles that wasn’t scorching hot was five feet from my nose and I wasn’t allowed to touch it.

“Is it holy, or a bad omen?” I asked. Mai’s black eyes widened.

“It’s Santi’balq,” she said.

“This!” this wet little hole in that green slimy rock was the holiest place in the world?

“Yes!” Mai whispered with more force than I could credit.

“I don’t believe it,” said I, sitting down again. Mai squealed.

“Yes you do!”

She was getting weirder by the second.

“How do you say that?”

“You need to believe it, or the Santi will take your ciorto.”

I choked back a laugh.

“Which one is that again? My soul or my blood?”

“It means gifts, which is both. Cuorto is blood and caorto is soul.”

“Gah.”

They were all the same to my ear. Mai started rocking harder on her rock. Her eyes were about the size of her fists and beads of sweat started forming on her forehead. I could tell I was scaring her; she was just waiting for something to happen to me, for a bolt of lightning to seize me.

“Santi, sun and moon forgive me,” I said reluctantly, and Mai’s rocking abruptly stopped. She looked very relieved; her face relaxed, her eyes shrank. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then looked at me and didn’t blink. She never seemed to blink. Her gaze was always strong and clear and it made me nervous.

Her eyes jumped quickly to my legs and traveled down them, advancing my uneasiness as she studied every water droplet still on them from the quick dunk. I might’ve said something or moved, but for the fact that she was looking at the water, just the water. Then she reached out and touched it, ran her finger timidly down my leg letting wetness drip down her skinny brown arm. Her eyes misted over and she turned away from me, pulling up into a ball and clenching the wet fist.

She slept in a ball every night, so I lay down and closed my eyes.

I woke up the next morning to smoke, in my face, nose, eyes. Mai had hunted something; she must’ve been up before dawn doing it, because the poor thing was burning on a small pile of rocks, smoking terribly. For all its disgustingness, it smelled wonderful to me, who hadn’t eaten anything the day before except breakfast. Mai was nowhere to be seen, so I advanced on the smoldering carcass like a madman, ready to eat all of it, with or without her.

“No!” she shrieked, just as I’d just come up to it. “Don’t touch it!” she yelled.

I groaned. I wondered what I was allowed to touch.

“Do you eat the offerings to your god, Jess?” she scolded. “Don’t eat mine.”

Offering? It was so small, inglorious. A shriveled rodent on a pile of abandoned-looking rocks that smelled of burning fur was an offering? The corn and the last of the flat bread hanging on a ledge over the cave were an offering? The holiest place to the al’Santi was an extreme disappointment.

“We don’t give my god offerings,” I growled. “I want to go back to the village now.”

“No!”

“No, no, no! No more no’s, bring me home.”

Tears welled up in her black eyes.

“I’m staying here, Jess,” she said. “You can go back by yourself if you want to.”

She turned abruptly and hauled a dugout boat from behind one of the larger green rocks. I hadn’t seen it there before. Next she grabbed a pole shaved of bark and lathered the end with blood from the rodent offering, got into the boat, and pushed her way across the pool with her blood-smeared stick.

“Wait,” I yelled. “I’m coming.”

“Find your own way,” she called back, “I was wrong to bring you here. I can’t lead you to the gods, they’ll punish me too.”

I whimpered and coughed, then dove into the water, swimming after Mai.

“I thought it was bad to bring unholy ones to this cave,” I said. “Won’t they punish you for that?”

“No,” she said softly. “They will take your ciorto and be done with it. Anyone can come here, only some can leave. We al’Santi try to save the unholy ones, but sometimes they can’t be saved.”

The last phrase she said coldly, and looked straight at me, no blinking.

“The more unholy ones to come and die, the better for us. That is more cuorto to join the rest, and you know, and I know you know because I’ve told you, that if there is enough cuorto that the gods can spare some, it will rain on us and make the ground fertile.”

I slowed down my strokes to try to remember what cuorto meant, but I knew from what she’d said that it was blood. The water was colder and darker as I swam further into the cave, and I started becoming more and more scared. I turned to face the light of the entrance and froze for a second. For some reason leaving Mai was scarier than following her. I kept swimming.

Skulls lined the walls of the cave; alien letters were carved into the rock walls.

“Why skulls?” I asked.

“They are a link to the underworld.”

I shivered. I didn’t like so many links to the underworld.

“What does it say?” I asked minutes later, when letters still wound their way around the dark walls and a bad snake of fear crawled up my back.

“It’s our story.”

“Of De’sente and Iz’marao?”

She nodded consent as the boat landed on a small bank of sand with a scratching scraping noise that echoed through the cave. I shuddered.

“Tell me the story again,” I pleaded as I crawled up on land, wanting to stall her in any way possible. I didn’t even know what she had come to do, but I felt that the longer she stayed with me, the longer I had until I was sucked into the underworld like she had foretold.

Mai sighed and sat down on the wet sand, unable to leave me for the moment since I’d asked at another chance to become holy and be saved: to learn, understand, and accept the ways of the al’Santi.

“The world used to be a perfect ball,” she started, again watching the beads water roll down my body, obsessed with it. “The surface was smooth and shiny and perfect.”

She was rubbing her fingers on a necklace of jade, and on a fleck of black volcano glass, which I’d realized after the first telling I’d heard of this story, were what the al’Santi believed the world had been. I tried to imagine it, a swirling mess of green and black.

“It was the palace of the gods, who lived inside in a red sea. The gods were as perfect as their home, and they were happy and well.

“They played the centuries away with games and shows; the favorite entertainment was watching puppets play…”

“The puppets were people.”

“Yes, we were puppets.

“But one day two puppets got restless and started to play ball. The racket woke the gods, who sacrificed them, and buried them under the ball court.

“The other puppets stopped playing then. They were scared to upset the gods. But it pleased the gods that they could sit and watch their puppets, and made them mad when their creations would not perform for them. But we refused to play.

“So they made us a promise, that we could all be free to do what we please if only we would remember them and give back to them what they need. We are made of the sea the gods live in; from this we were created and thus will return, because if the gods’ sea dries up, they will all die.

“The gods give to us, by giving us holy ones freedom. We do not have to worry about being struck down by the gods like you unholy ones do. But we give back to the gods by trying to make unholy ones holy, and by sacrificing a few of our own willingly, so that we all may live without fear.”

She grabbed her piece of volcano glass and scratched my arm. I yelped, but she pointed calmly.

“Your blood is blue in your veins,” she said, looking at the blue webs in my wrist. “It is red in the open.” It continued to flow down my arm and drip from my fingertips. “It is red inside the earth, and blue outside,” she explained, gesturing at the water behind me, and referencing her story of the gods’ wet home.

“This place is under earth, but in open too. It is where the gods’ world meets ours. That is why this is holy.”

I expected her to stop there, but she continued.

“My mother was sacrificed there,” she said, gesturing toward a pile of skeletons, “and so will I be.” I jumped when she said that, so calm.

“What?”

“My mother was only half al’Santi, and my people blame that as the reason we have not had rain. If I sacrifice myself, and rain comes, they will know it was not her fault, because her cuorto is in my own veins.”

“Maiasar, don’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It makes no sense.”

“Why not?”

“You said yourself that unholy blood is good enough and the only reason you don’t kidnap and sacrifice the unholys is that you have to try to convert them.”

“So it’s definite that rain will come when I die,” she said, pain etched clearly across her face.

“No.”

“Yes.” She took her knife of volcano glass and ripped the skin of her chest, from her chin to her stomach so that a bloody line showed the symmetry of her body. I gasped.

“Can’t you at least do it quickly?” I pleaded. She was breathing hard and watching her blood trickle down her legs, and drip from her chin.

“No,” she said, just as calmly as before, though, even in the almost non-existent light, I could see that she was many shades paler. “Only the amount of courto that I shed can come down to the fields as rain,” she continued. “I will sit here until my veins run dry if it takes as much. Remember as you swim back to the exit that you are bathing in my blood, and that in coming here you tainted my mother’s holy cuorto too.”

By this time I was shivering madly. And I remembered her obsession with the water on my legs the night before, and as she was telling the story.

I stood over her as she died, waiting for every drop of blood to trickle into the water at our feet. I waited there with her dead body, shocked and helpless, until it drove me mad enough to step back into the water and swim away from my dead best friend.

And it rained for three days after.