Mayan December (12 page)

“Nix?”

Nixie turned to find her mom handing her one of the cheap clear plastic rain ponchos that she always bunched in the bottom of her pack. Nix stopped and gave her mom a hug. The hour had surely almost passed, and they still had a ways to go. She couldn’t let them stop and think, let them get all adult and turn around. “We have to hurry.”

“But we
can
all stay dry,” her mom noted, using her mom-voice.

For answer, Nixie pulled the poncho over her head and turned back. Her legs were tired, but she made them move a little faster.

The air stayed hot and damp and the clouds above Nix felt like anvils that could fall and crush her.

The poncho made her feel like a sandwich in a plastic bag in the sun. She bunched it up over her shoulders, walking so fast she was nearly running, pushing her way through the small trees that poked up in the middle of the path.

The trees thickened, becoming a wall decorated with strangler figs and flowers. The tall buttressing roots of kapoks grew across the remains of the sacbe, becoming barriers up to a few feet tall in some places.

What remained of the road was a white stone here, clutched in a twisting root, and another one there, half-buried under dirt and rotting leaves.

The clouds emptied on them, a waterfall of rain. They huddled under the tree canopy while the rain sheeted the more open sacbe behind them as if glass covered it.

“It’s the end of the railroad,” Ian said.

“Why would they stop a railroad in the middle of the jungle?” Peter asked.

Her mom answered. “Because they ran out of chicle contracts.” Nixie’s mom looked at her sadly. “We’ll have to turn back.”

“Not,” Oriana interrupted, “until this stops.”

They couldn’t turn back. They were too close. The rain wouldn’t last long. Fifteen minutes or so. The Yucatan’s daily splash bath. In an hour, the jungle would look as dry as when they started. Nixie struggled up onto a kapok root, balancing on one foot, trying to look through the dense jungle. This hadn’t been cut in years, maybe hundreds of years. She couldn’t see a path.

She closed her eyes.

CHAPTER 22

Late afternoon sun slanted through the trees. Hun Kan’s mud baskets were nearly empty, and Ah Bahlam still hadn’t seen the jaguar again. Julu flew above them, always staying nearby.

They had found one pool so far today, a small rushing sliver of water beside a thickening in the animal trail they followed, the lips of an underground river kissing the sky.

“We’ll be late,” Hun Kan said.

Yes. They should be arriving tonight, and have two full days of preparation before the equinox. “If we get there at all.”

A human call floated through the jungle. He stopped, feeling Hun Kan stop beside him. Bandits? Or the people-of-unrest? Monkeys chattered above him and Julu fluffed his feathers, muttering softly in the language of birds.

Hun Kan took his arm, and he looked into her eyes, finding a trace of fear, but more of determination. He smiled to see it, happy she was the one who had been spared to accompany him. A fierce companion.

It was hard to tell the direction the single voice had come from. They could stop, but waiting might not avoid any enemies. What would Cauac do? Or his father, for that matter? He was stuck between Zama and Chichén, and needed to choose between a sorcerer’s way and a warrior’s.

Perhaps, in this, the two ways were not far apart.

He closed his eyes, feeling Hun Kan’s hand still resting on his arm. He drew a picture of the jaguar in his head, letting it fill him, black spots on a black coat, until he could see the eyes. The yellow-gold orbs in his mind stared at him, unblinking, full of power and purpose. He would be like the cat, whether it came to him in the flesh or not.

Ah Bahlam started forward again, slowly, being careful to keep his steps uneven and not to snap twigs. He ghosted forward, following the thin tracks of a pig family he had been hoping would lead to more water and perhaps a meal.

It did not take long to come to a dusty fork where animal tracks mixed with humans. Bare feet, and so people of the jungle, whatever kind.

Should he follow the pigs or the people?

He stood in the fork listening to his breathing, to Hun Kan’s, watching for a sign.

None came, except a deep conviction that this was
his
choice. In fact, Julu, too, had disappeared, a further sign that he must decide. He wanted to keep Hun Kan safe, but safety might not lie in either direction.

He followed the people.

He was destined to be a Lord of Itzá, and anyone this close should pay tribute to Chichén. Perhaps he would learn something that his father needed to know, bring information back to Chichén. If not, well, they could have died yesterday and instead they had been saved. That was something to trust in.

The human tracks were fresh. The path was wider, allowing for slightly faster travel.

Dusk had made the forest-of-shadows taller than the living trees, when he smelled burning wood and heard the deep, measured rhythm of many drums. They slowed, keeping even their breath low. The sky was nearly dark when he detected the murmur of humans and the crackle of bonfires.

He led Hun Kan in a circle around the people, carefully, staying unseen. The flat ground kept them from being able to see anything, and the thick undergrowth made walking silently hard and slow. They were close enough to hear men calling back and forth to each other and the thunk of new wood being thrown on the fires.

He looked up, searching for a thick trunk with good handholds and strong upper branches. The last of the light let them shinny up a kapok tree, using the twisted vines of a strangler fig for handholds. They surprised three green tree-frogs with bright red feet. A good sign, the frogs.

He clambered out on a sturdy branch, followed by Hun Kan, seeking a clear view through the thick forest. Her breath blew warm on his thighs, then his shoulder, as she inched carefully up beside him.

Flames flickered and lit the rising smoke from below, turning it blood-red. Copal had been thrown on the fires, and the scent of it drew him into the memory of other ceremonies, small ones for blessing the morning hearth and large ones for blessing the year’s crops. Dizzy, he squinted, trying for details.

He looked over the roofs of rough palm-thatched huts and storage buildings that edged a large manmade clearing. On the far side of the clearing, the dark hole of a deep cenote was edged in golden light. From here, he could not see the water, but such hard cliff edges nearly always led to deep pools.

Warriors danced circles around the fires. Ragged warriors. Tens, many tens of tens, a full hundred or more, bodies glistening in the last of the day. And around them, more men, older and younger and all ragged. People-of-unrest.

The number of them took his breath away and he gripped the branch tighter. He listened, trying to make out what was happening, but the voices were a jumble. Power filled the clearing. Many kinds: The raw power of shamans—an angry power calling out to the gods, the complex power of the cenote and the jungle, and the simple power of so many men. They were not gathered here for nothing. All this power and anger was directed at Chichén, at his home, his family.

This was more news than he had expected to gather.

Hun Kan gripped his hand, then pointed. Her eyes were wide and dark, her jaw clenched. He looked in the direction she looked, following her brown and shaking finger.

Nimah. She had been painted blue, dressed in white robes, decked in yellow and white winter-blossoming orchids, and stripped of all other ornamentation.

He saw no sign of Kisa.

Between Nimah and the cenote, a small wooden platform had been built.

She had been prepared for sacrifice.

Ah Bahlam swallowed, nodding at Hun Kan to tell he had seen. Smoke blew the scent of the fires to them.

Nimah’s blood would strengthen these people greatly, add to the threat they presented for Chichén. It made him dizzy to think of it, and to think of the danger to Hun Kan. To him.

Hun Kan’s gaze slid back to Nimah. She was completely still. He had seen Hun Kan and Nimah together at Zama, sometimes swimming and other times gathering flowers or roots or sitting in the sun weaving baskets. They had laughed like two young girls laugh, and sometimes wore each other’s clothes.

Hun Kan would know there was nothing they could do, not two people against a small army. This must be Nimah’s fate. Her Way.

When he had imagined what might happen to the two women who had been captured, a full sacred sacrifice for the good of an enemy had not crossed his mind.

They should leave now, and use the last scrap of light to see by. He could protect Hun Kan from Nimah’s sure fate and Chichén from the damage that could be done by losing Hun Kan, too.

He swallowed hard and gestured to Hun Kan to back down the trunk. She looked blankly at him for a moment, her face pale. Then she shook her head and mouthed, “No. I need to see.”

He understood. Without them to witness, Nimah would go to her death with no friendly spirits to mark her passage. He licked his dry lips and resettled on the wide branch, watching.

It would not take long. The cracks between day and night held the most potential for communion with the gods. Hun Kan drew in a sharp breath as two men came forward, taking Nimah’s hands. They led her to the front of the platform and laid her down, and two other men came to take her feet, so that she was well pinioned.

She did not scream and the platform was too far away for him to see if she cried or moved her lips in prayer or trembled.

A man dressed in a quetzal feather headdress, a polished bronze chest-plate that might have come from any of the warriors they’d traveled with before the ambush, and a simple leather skirt with matching leggings walked out of the smoke from the nearest fire and stood beside Nimah. A priest. Or a man who styled himself as one.

The false priest should be killed. But he couldn’t do it from here. Not with Hun Kan to protect.

The priest stood beside Nimah until the entire clearing stilled, all eyes watching him, waiting.

Drums began a heartbeat rhythm, soft and sure, a promise to the gods. The Priest began to chant and the crowd returned his words, as proper as if the ceremony happened at the grand Chac-Mool in Chichén. The sound made Ah Bahlam shiver and sweat.

He wanted to reassure Hun Kan but couldn’t take his gaze from the scene below them. His stomach lurched and he felt dizzy. He smelled the tree they clung to, the moss above his head, the sweat and fear and hope of the men and women below them, the acrid fires. He clutched the tree harder, digging his toes in to keep from sliding free of the branch. He blinked and his vision sharpened and grayed all at once. The lights of the fires fuzzed to indistinct brightness. Light appeared also over the people, and a brightness enveloped Nimah.

The jaguar’s vision.

This could be his fate, or Hun Kan’s. Here, or at Chichén. They could be called to do what Nimah did, to give up their lives with honor.
If that is ever me, let my death serve my own people.

Ah Bahlam pulled his own small knife out and held it poised over the place he had cut in the ceremony with Cauac.

The priest’s arm came up and his obsidian blade caught the last flash of the sun god’s rays. As it fell, quickly, to pierce Nimah’s pale chest, Ah Bahlam brought his own blade down on his arm, whispering,
Gods of Chichén, take this sacrifice to the glory of Chichén, twist it away from any use meant to harm us
.

The priest held Nimah’s heart up triumphantly, cupping it with two hands. At that same moment she cried out, the last cry she would ever make, the cry coming moments
after
the priest raised his hands full of her severed heart.

The four men holding her took her four limbs and tossed her body into the cenote at the same time that the priest cast her heart onto the nearest fire.

Noise rose, the crying and calling of many voices reaching for their gods, so Ah Bahlam did not hear Nimah’s body hit the water.

When Ah Bahlam looked back at her, Hun Kan’s cheeks were damp and her eyes burned with fierce anger and loss. But she, too, had not cried out. He reached a hand back and wiped the water from her cheeks. In that moment, a terrible purpose seemed to flow between them, a bond deeper than any he’d ever felt with anyone. Her eyes told him she felt it, too. “We will bring this news,” she hissed quietly.

“Yes.”

A few moments later, they dropped to the forest floor, and began edging slowly away from the clearing.

Someone nearby called out, “Stop!”

He took off, racing, checking to make sure Hun Kan followed. Their baskets fell to the side of the path, crunching together. Starlight threw faint shadows, helping them step around twisted roots and depressions in the jungle floor.

Their pursuer called out sharply, clearly trying to bring others to help him. Ah Bahlam caught sight of him once, a big man with long hair, a spear in one hand.

The trees and underbrush seemed to rise up against them, threatening to trip them or tangle them in roots.

Ah Bahlam called on his inner jaguar yet again, trying to see like the cat did, to have the dark be as much a friend as the light.

Other voices cried out, more pursuers. But only the one was still close.

The great cat roared. Behind them. Between them and the others.

Ah Bahlam didn’t hesitate, or turn. He raced as fast and hard as he could. Julu appeared in front him, Julu who did not normally fly at night.

He followed the bird and trusted the cat to keep their back path free. He breathed the jungle, felt it, heard and felt its creatures. He knew where each root was, each bush, each down tree, each hole in the limestone floor. He was Hun Kan and the jungle and the bird and the cat. One being, with one purpose. To get two humans home to Chichén Itzá.

CHAPTER 23

Alice watched rain obscure the path they’d just rushed down and hide the top of the trees so only the five of them seemed bright colored and alive. Water stuck like jewels to Nixie’s hair and Oriana’s, dripped from Ian’s dreads and Peter’s hat. It fell so fast it pooled in the hollows of the porous limestone under their feet.

She’d been so sure they’d find Ian’s bead.

But the dream was years from this broken road, and Peter’s words kept sticking in her head. A single stone bead in a jungle was worse than a needle in a haystack.

At least a needle would be shiny.

Nixie had been so sure of herself, and dammit, Alice had
trusted
that sureness. She blinked again, feeling the close-in walls of the torrent holding them here at the end of hope.

Maybe they could come back tomorrow and find a way to start from here. Except there wasn’t time. When she’d called to put the Secret Service people on hold for a day, the woman she’d talked to had been incredulous, and had barely promised to let Alice come in the next morning, early.

Alice put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, squeezing softly through the clear plastic of her poncho. Surely Nix was disappointed, crushed.

Nixie didn’t turn around.

Alice let her hand fall, willing to wait Nix out at least until the downpour stopped. As she turned back to watch the rain, Ian came up beside her, circling her loosely with his right arm. She stiffened, then let out a deep breath as Ian reached for Oriana with the other arm. Safety in numbers.

Peter hooked himself to Oriana, and the four adults stood together looking down the road they’d come up, everyone in a different colored plastic poncho, no more than bags with hoods, and holes for their arms. If there was someone down the road to see, they’d look like jelly beans.

The constant backdrop of cicada song had stilled. Water splashed on the plastic, on their heads, dripped from the roof of the trees. Ian pulled her in closer, smelling like jungle and salty sweat and the freshness of water. She closed her eyes, accepting the pressure of his arms in the group embrace. Conscious that her own arms and torso were still stiff, she took a deep breath and relaxed. She heard water and his breath and her breath; all of the other jungle sounds in abeyance, waiting.

The water stopped.

Cicadas and birds sang.

She opened her eyes to a clear blue sky, dizzying blue, and pearl white stones in neat rows under her feet. Nixie, behind her, gasped. “Let’s go!”

The four adults let loose of each other in a tangle of arms, turning. The wall of trees might have never been. In front of them, the sacbe stretched clear, clean and fresh, the jungle to either side tamed, but taller and closer in.

Nixie was already loping down the white road.

Peter yelped. Oriana gasped. Ian touched Alice’s arm, propelling her the only way a mother could go.

After her daughter.

Oh my god. She bit back a screech and grabbed for Ian, who clutched her as he whispered, “We did it. She did it.”

The road under Alice’s feet was solid, more solid even than the dream, as solid as reality. She dropped down and touched a stone, feeling its rough edges. “Wait, Nix!” she called.

Nixie stopped and turned, her face glowing with excitement. “We don’t have much time!”

You’d think she was at Disneyland instead of back in a hostile past. “Wait,” Alice said, and lifted her still-soaked rain gear over her head. One by one, the others also stripped off their bright plastic ponchos.

“Come on,” Nixie encouraged.

Alice glanced up at Ian, who was looking all around him. “It’s magic.” He must have felt her gaze. He looked down at her. “We’re here for a reason. Let’s do it, since I’d bet we can’t get back until we do.”

She shut her mouth on an argument about that idea. She didn’t buy it, but the look on Nixie’s face demanded a mother’s strength. She took a step, and then another one, and didn’t fall down. This time was real like her own except it smelled better. Another step. And then Nixie was smiling at her and she caught up to her daughter and stood beside her, looking up the white road.

They followed Nixie in a line: Alice, Oriana, Peter, and in back, watching behind as well as in front, Ian. Their warrior. His presence gave comfort even though she had no illusions of safety. They could never outfight either band of Mayans, formal warriors or ambushers.

The jungle around them was taller, but drier, showing signs of stress: brown branches, fewer new shoots. Certainly it had not rained here today, maybe not for days. But life still teemed. Monkeys tracked them from the treetops. Bright red and green birds—parrots and macaws—startled Alice repeatedly, flashing across the sacbe in jewel-colored streaks. More, many more, than in 2012.

It had been time to turn around, in that other time, the one where their phones collected worldwide news from the air and they had a car tucked safely by an
Authentic Mayans Here
sign. In this time, they kept going, the following of Nixie inevitable.

Peter’s eyes were too wide for Alice to imagine he could find his tongue anyway, and Ian and Oriana had gone into deep states of alertness.

Alice focused on Nixie, on a bob of her hair that had escaped her ridiculous big clip, on the rise and fall of her hips, on the bright blue of her shirt, her feet handling the smoother by far, but still uneven road. Step, step, skip, step, step, long step, step-step, step.

Stop.

Alice nearly ran into Nix. Oriana and Peter fetched up at her back and Ian stopped beside her. Peter gasped out, “What? Is this—?”

Nixie held up a hand to silence him and focused on Alice, her eyes the blue of the sky here in the past. She whispered, “Recognize it?”

Alice blinked. She walked a few feet up the road and then turned back. “It’s where we came in. From the dream.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “Okay, how do you know what time you’re in? We’re in?”

Alice was far more curious about whether or not there would be a pile of dead Mayan warriors around the bend. The questions related, though, at least a little. “We don’t,” she said. She suddenly wanted to finish this, get the bead and get back. Except if they got the bead from this now, then what? If the dream was a promise, then what did it mean to find the bead? “Nix?” she said. “Are you scared? Do you think we should go home?”

Nixie swallowed and chewed on her lip. Finally, she said, “I feel heavy here.”

Alice knew exactly what she meant. Stuck. She nodded and took Nixie’s hand, the memory of the dream-carnage thick in her throat. This was no dream.

They walked around the bend.

There were no bodies. Red ants coated the white rocks, carrying blood-stained twigs and leaves and other small things. Each ant was half the size of Alice’s little finger, and the river of them all was as wide as she was tall. Alice swallowed and held Nix close to her. “They’re cleaning up.”

Ian dragged a downed tree and threw it over the ants. “Hurry,” he said, demonstrating, walking along the wood above the insects.

Nixie and Alice followed. By the time Peter stepped from the wood onto the white road, thin pulsing veins of ants swarmed over the tree. Ian dragged it back, off the road, and Alice smiled in silent approval.

Just past the ants, past the scene of the fight, the pile of quarry rocks stood just as it had in their dream. Alice reached a hand out and put it on Ian’s arm. “That’s it. That’s where we dreamed we were.”

He grinned at her, looking pleased, then stopped in the middle of the road and looked around, as if absorbing the location.

Her good expedition camera was deep in the bottom of her pack. “Nix? Do you have your camera?”

“Of course.” Nixie sounded more excited than awed now, as if passing the ants had freed her of some dread. She snapped pictures of the scene with and without people, directing, sure of herself.

Peter and Oriana took phone pictures.

Alice tensed when Nixie ran back to kneel near the ants, capturing them carrying bloody leaves. When she came back, her eyes shining, she looked up at Alice. “Ready?”

Peter had only lost a little of his shell-shocked look. “Maybe I better find it. I wasn’t in the dream and I haven’t been in the past.”

Alice glanced at Ian. He nodded softly and climbed up near the top of the rock pile, choosing a vantage point much like theirs had been in the dream.

“I want to find the bead,” Nixie protested.

“You can take pictures,” Alice replied, using her best dig-boss voice, the one she’d developed last summer keeping piles of barely post-grad students in line.

Nixie settled on a flat spot on a stone just a little above the egg-shaped rock so she could get a nice, easy picture of Peter. She spotted the disturbed place where she’d dug the hole and pointed to it.

It only took a few moments to find the bead. Peter held it up, his gaze into the camera deadly serious, his face white. Late afternoon sun coated even the dull stone of the carved bead in soft gold. He whispered, “It was just where she said. Okay. So this has to be the past. Okay.” He looked at Alice. “You were right. No alternate universe could be so like our past today. Okay?”

He was clearly scared, but heck, so was she. It didn’t help anything. “Yes, Peter, we’re time-traveling.”

Her immediate concern was getting the hell back. She still felt—how had Nix put it?
Heavy in this world
. The warm, too-dry air stuck to her skin, the chalky limestone dust made her want to sneeze, and all of the sounds were wild.

It was late . . . everyone sun-painted like the bead in pre-dusk pale gold. Oriana had gone over to Peter and taken the bead in her hand, and Nix was snapping a picture. “We should go,” Alice said, looking up at Ian. “We got what we came for.” Maybe not enough proof for anyone else, but enough for her.

“We can’t get back to the car without walking the jungle at night,” he said. “The old sacbe and the rusted tracks would be tough in the dark.”

“We’re time-traveling. How do we know we won’t get back in the morning there?”

“Want to try it?” he asked mildly.

She shivered. She didn’t really want to stay here. The fight had been here, and she didn’t want to run into the ambushers—or the jaguar—any more than she wanted to trip on old metal right now. It would be really dark soon.

Primitive dark.

Starlight! My god, she could see the ancient stars. She didn’t want to go back, after all. Not yet. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t.” She climbed up the stones easily, her feet remembering where they had gone the night before. She found a flat rock to lean against, a foot or so from Ian, close but not touching. “I suppose the people here won’t have night vision glasses and semi-automatic weapons,” she said, making sure she was speaking too softly for Nixie to hear. “But I saw them kill each other.”

Ian stared silently out over the jungle. Even though his features softened in the fading light, there was unmistakable readiness in him. “My journeys before were preparation. The bead was just proof. I made it then, and we found it now. But why you and Nixie? She’s a kid and you don’t believe in magic.”

“Tough to deny it right now.”

“But you’ll try to deny it when you get back.”

She winced. “I hope not.” She watched Nix and Oriana trying to catch more pictures before the day faded entirely. Nix’s blonde head and Oriana’s dark one made a pretty contrast from above like this. Peter seemed to have become a little more like himself; he had his little computer out and was furiously taking notes. “But what is there to learn here? These people were as bloody as we are. And based on what we know so far, they weren’t noble savages. The Lords of Itzá chased power as surely as any of our worst leaders. So what’s the message?”

“Maybe that’s why you. You’re enough of a cynic to report accurately. And you’re an expert.” Laughter floated up toward them from below. “And maybe Nix is just innocent.”

She bristled a little as his use of her pet name for Nix. She scooted a little bit away from him, and immediately felt better. He noticed, and gave her a long, silent look, but didn’t say anything.

Another reason she was here had clicked in her head. “I’m touring Marie Healy around Chichén day after tomorrow.”

He stilled, then grinned broadly. “The climate change conference.”

“Right. I think I’m touring them all.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. “It’s the chance of a lifetime. How many people get to talk to the leaders of the whole damned world?”

She should be as awed by it as he was, as delighted. It was downright strange that she wasn’t. “It’s just . . . it’s not as important as figuring this out, and keeping Nixie safe. Besides, if I don’t get back tomorrow for more meetings with the Secret Service, I won’t be touring anyone.”

“Mom!” Nixie called up, delighted.

Just at Alice’s eye level, a quetzal bird perched on a branch still quivering with the weight of its landing. Alice blinked at the bird. “Hello,” she said, feeling a bit silly.

The bird preened, and looked from her and Ian down to Nixie, calling
keow-kowee-keow
. Its voice had more strength than beauty, a contrast to the bird itself, which seemed to be perched precariously. The combination made her laugh. “Too bad I can’t take you back with me.”

“It’s the bird-man’s bird,” Nixie called up. “So I know they’re safe. It would be sad if they weren’t.”

Alice bit her tongue. Birds with feelings (real or imagined) were no stranger than anything else that had happened in the last day. She stood up. “Are we all agreed to spend the night here and walk back with first light?”

Peter was rolling up his computer keyboard. “Can we get back?”

“I’m sure we can,” Ian said, standing next to Alice and surveying the area. “But I don’t want to pop back into the jungle on our side at night. Do any of the rest of you?”

Alice didn’t think they even could go now. She still felt solidly here. But something in the back of her head, her heart, didn’t mind. What a gift to be here, in this time. “I want to see the stars. This may be my only chance to ever see them the way the old Mayans did.”