Jaguar Read Free Page B

towards the stove with a gentle hand at her back.
    The coffee didn’t help. The baby came out with the cord wrapped twice around his neck and died. Her mother had already lost too much blood, she died, too. Afriqua Lee did not understand this until much later. She did understand that her mother and the brother she’d never seen went somewhere in the highlands to be with her father. She couldn’t understand why they all left her behind.
    By the time Afriqua Lee and Old Cristina stepped out into the new morning sun, the landscape had changed beyond recognition.
    “Holy Martyr!” Old Cristina whispered.
    The trees stood bare as winter, even the evergreens. The onslaught of the bugs had been too fast and there had been far too many of them. The men tried lighting a few fires, but it didn’t do much good. The trees were stripped anyway, and for every bug they killed a hundred took its place. Today, the surviving kumpania sat around the smoldering stake-down fire in a shocked and uncharacteristic silence.
    Fitting tradition, and following the Romni Bari’s instructions, the girl Afriqua Lee approached the fire with her mother’s favorite veil. She threw it about her shoulders in the same careless manner that her mother used.
    “My mother and my brother have wed the holy martyr,” she recited. “Help me to celebrate their fortune. Who brings a goat to the feast?”
    Tomas stood and dusted off his black work pants.
    “I will bring two goats. With twice the dancing, we will have twice the hunger, no?”
    A few of the blank faces stirred with smiles, and in moments the evening’s wake was planned. The Roam’s way was to celebrate, not to mourn.
    Old Cristina, the Romni Bari, spoke the morning prayer of joy. The children were dismissed from the assembly to their chores, except for Afriqua Lee. Now that she was alone she was an adult of the kumpania. She would settle into a tent with others and accept the ritual that governed her position. In her sixth year she was now her own familia and entitled to a vote in assembly. Her tent would be difficult to earn. She tried to listen, but the talk in her head drowned out the talk around the fire.
    “Amate, what does your radio tell us?”
    “Rumor, like we hear among ourselves. But some facts, too. The bugs are everywhere, they eat everything that grows. So far, they do not eat animals but maybe they will when they run out of everything else. There are no males or females. Either they are a hybrid, manufactured to destroy crops, or they have another form. . . .”
    “You know they are manufactured! ” Tomas spat out the large word in bitter syllables. “We all know the Jaguar does this, rips the fabric of the world and shovels in garbage to torment us. . . .”
    Afriqua watched the firelight, nearly invisible against the morning. The flame-dance that dissolved the log in front of her lulled her into the dream-world. In the dream she conjured the same face she’d seen inside the rip in the earth. This dark-eyed girl was someone she had glimpsed before in her dreams. She saw the girl’s father in a dream once, and wasn’t surprised that he had her own father’s face.
    When Afriqua Lee tried to dream her own father, she replayed the day that Amate brought the news that he had darted the archbivy of the jaguar priests. His skull would fry before sunup, of this the adults were certain. Zachary Lee had set out to stop the Jaguar at all cost. He had paid the cost.
    She cried out in her dream and woke herself. Someone had carried her to a bed in Old Cristina’s tent. The click and hum of magnetic servos lulled her back to slumber.
    Afriqua Lee was too exhausted to get out of her clothes before sleep caught her. She tried to dream the dark-eyed girl, but that pathway would not open. Instead, she dreamed that the Jaguar’s men came to the Roam and branded the grownups, Tomas and Maryka, and the child Nicola on the back of their right hands. Afriqua Lee felt the pain herself, as