The Land of the Night Sun: Book One of The Jade Necklace by Ian Gibson

Author:Ian Gibson [Gibson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-17T22:00:00+00:00

Itzel is losing not only her balance, but also what little patience she has left. “No, you’re not getting any more, and that’s that!”

Chaac stops pounding his hands and feet. “Why not?”

“I’ve already offered you something, so now you have to help me,” she tells him. “Those are the rules.”

The toad’s frown droops down and creases his fat face all the further. “I hate rules. Rules make me hungry, and I’m sad when I’m hungry.”

The rain is still so loud that Itzel has to shout at him. “I need your help, but we can’t talk with all this noise! And I’m soaking wet!”

The toad gives a slight nod to the cloudy sky above them, and the rain dies back down to a drizzle, and the constant litany of chirps and croaks gradually fades into a respectful silence. “Speak, mortal,” the Rain god tells her, although with great reluctance and disappointment in his voice, as if wanting her to hurry up now that there’s no more promise of food.

“There’s a big fire in the rainforest, and Kukulkan sent me here to ask for your help,” Itzel says. “Can you help us?”

“Kukulkan sent you?” Chaac squints his goggled eyes, creasing his fat cheeks. “Why should I help that bully of a snake? He pays no attention to his Underworld, yet somehow always manages to find the time to hunt me down and swallow me whole in the land of the living. I bet he takes pleasure from eating frogs! He’s nothing but a big bully!”

Itzel remembers Kukulkan’s complaints about Chaac’s incarnation in the South, who always slips into the land of the living at any opportunity. “Maybe he’s doing that because you’re going there too much?”

“Too much?” the toad rasps angrily, spitting all over the lily pad—Itzel and Quashy have to take a few steps back so they’re out of range of the spray. “And who’s the judge of that? Kukulkan? I go there because the food is so tasty—after you’ve tasted food in the land of the living, everything here just tastes off and stale and… dead—so why not go as much as I can up there? I can never have too much tasty food! Here in the Underworld all they have to offer the great Chaac is corn. Corn this, corn that! Corn, corn, corn! I’m so sick of corn!” He sticks out his tongue, then lets out a thunderous belch that ripples across his broad mouth.

Itzel thinks he didn’t have any problem shuffling down her corn tamales, in spite of what he says. “What do you want?”

Chaac licks his lips, and the crazed look shortly returns to his round eyes that almost pop out from the tops of his pudgy cheeks. “Chocolate. I want chocolate!”

“Chocolate?” she asks. She remembers that he licked up the chocolate she had dropped from her cup while she stood outside her grandmother’s hut—at the time he was just an unassuming, small frog—and she thought it was quite odd that a frog liked chocolate. What

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