Mayan December (3 page)

CHAPTER 5

Low lights illuminated the path under Alice’s feet. She knew loss. Viscerally. Her stomach cramped with it. Seven years ago, after Nixie’s dad died in Afghanistan, she’d cried for a year, every night after Nix went to sleep. The salt of the sea on the warm evening wind tasted like those tears.

Nixie had to be okay.

Maybe Nix was home now, worried about her. Maybe Oriana had found her. Maybe Nixie was sitting by the pool, feet in the water, waiting for Alice.

Maybe Nixie was okay.

Oriana stood waiting for Alice at the fork where they had separated, her brows creased and her slender arms crossed in front of her. She shook her head, driving Alice’s nerves closer to the edges of her skin. They started back, Alice still calling out, “Nixie! Ni-xie!”

The first ruin they had searched loomed as a dark shadow to Alice’s left. Oriana circled it. Alice wanted to race back to their room and see if Nix had returned on her own, but she followed Oriana anyway. Her dry throat gave her voice a plaintive edge as she called out, “Ni-ixie! Nix . . . ”

“Here, Momma.”

Alice stopped, disbelieving, hoping.

“Mom.”

She looked up, following Nixie’s voice. Her daughter sat on the top step of the small temple, dripping water onto the stones, her hair a draggled mess. She held something in her lap. Light meant to illuminate the temple doorway behind Nixie spilled up her face as she glanced down, highlighting her neck and chin, but hiding her eyes in shadow.

Alice raced up the thin, uneven steps, nearly falling, not caring. Nixie’s mouth dropped open as Alice bounded toward her. She quickly set down whatever she was holding and stood.

Alice reached Nixie, folding the girl tightly against her chest, head nestled between her breasts. Nixie’s damp hair soaked Alice’s shirt.

Something crunched under her right foot.

“Stop mom, you’ll crush it,” Nixie squealed. “Pick up your foot!”

Alice took a step back.

Nixie plucked a long slender object from the stones and held it up in the light, smoothing it. A quetzal feather. The base, where it went into the bird, had been cracked and flattened under Alice’s foot. “Mom!” she chided. “How could you?”

The adrenaline of her frantic search descended on Alice all at once, pouring sharpness through her teeth. “Where were you? Where did you get that?” It registered that Nixie didn’t smell of either chlorine or salt water. “How did you get wet?”

Nixie sank back down on the top step, holding the feather to the light, stroking the damaged quill as if her fingers could heal it. “It’ll never be the same. Never.”

“I was so worried.” Alice’s voice sounded too clipped and firm, but she couldn’t soften it. “Where did you go? I couldn’t see you. Your chip didn’t even register!”

Nixie leaned away as if Alice’s words were slaps, her face closing.

Oriana came up the steps and gazed from mother to daughter, breaking the uncomfortable moment with a wide smile. “Hello, you must be Nixie. I’m Oriana. We’ve been looking for you. We were worried.”

Nixie’s demeanor shifted, adjusting instantly to the company of strangers. A different girl, with a polite, composed smile. She held her hand out. “Pleased to meet you.” She glanced up at Alice, her eyes reproachful. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Heat rose in Alice’s cheeks and she looked down at the feather. A mystery. She shivered. “I’m sorry. I thought you were . . . lost. Let’s go back and you can tell me what happened.”

“Wait. I want to show you a place I found.” Nixie ducked under the stone lintel and stood on the far side, handling the long silky edge of the feather carefully so it missed the harsh stone. When she ducked back, her eyes were wide. “It changed.”

Alice bit at her lip. “What?”

Nixie shook herself, spraying drops of water from the ends of her hair. “I . . . I don’t know. There was a tall jungle and a cenote and a bird.” She stopped and walked through the doorway again and then back. “It was different. Really.”

Oriana bent down and poked her head through. When she stood back up she shrugged.

Nixie frowned, and climbed down without saying anything else, but she still looked puzzled. She led the other two toward the hotel.

Alice watched her back, treasuring her, searching for anything that seemed hurt or out of place or different. Except for the feather and the look of confusion, Nix seemed fine.

In the room, Nixie set her feather carefully in the center of the kitchen table. “I’m going to change,” she proclaimed without being asked.

Alice glanced over at the monitor. Nixie’s light burned right alongside hers, as if it had never disappeared. It was on her phone, too.

She busied herself pouring three glasses of iced lemonade, glad of something simple and comforting to do. She joined Oriana at the table. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Oriana smiled. “I’m glad I could help.”

“You’re hired.”

Oriana laughed.

Alice stared at the feather. It surely was a quetzal tail feather, but different from the one they had seen in town earlier. The edges were crisp and clean. Except for where she’d cracked the quill, the feather was perfect. She glanced at Oriana. “Do you want to stay?”

Oriana nodded. “If you don’t mind. If Nixie doesn’t mind. This might be a story worth hearing.”

Nixie came in and sat by her glass of lemonade. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

Alice softened her voice. “I know. Tell me what happened.”

Nixie glanced at Oriana, as if unsure what to say in front of a stranger. Alice spoke softly. “Oriana’s going to stay with you when I have to go to meetings, starting the day after tomorrow. She’s a diver, and she can teach you about the reefs here. Maybe she’ll take you snorkeling off the resort beach.”

Nixie’s eyes lit a little, and she took a long drink of her lemonade. “When you left, I went out. I thought maybe I’d go to the pool, but I decided to walk back to the ruin, the one you found me at. It was close, and I didn’t think you’d care, if I was careful.”

Alice would have said no.

“I went through the doorway on the top, and down the other side. There was a path.” She looked confused again. “But it’s not there now. The path was in the jungle, and there were monkeys and birds.”

Oriana drew in a sharp breath, but didn’t say anything. Her face had tensed.

Alice shook her head to clear of it of a sudden dizzy feeling. Had Nixie fallen and knocked herself out? The feather gave lie to that. And the blank map of the world. “What was down the path?”

Nixie talked about a cenote and falling in. As Alice listened, she felt more and more uncertain. But Nixie looked completely earnest as she told them about the bird, and the man. And she’d gotten soaked to the skin somehow.

Alice interrupted, “Did the man want anything from you? Did he touch you?”

“Only to pull me out of the water.”

Alice could always tell when Nixie was lying, and
she
surely believed her story. At one point, Oriana put a sun-browned hand over Alice’s on the table, glancing at her with open curiosity.

How come Oriana didn’t think this whole thing was crazy?

When Nixie finished her story, she blinked up at Alice, wanting something. Reassurance? Or simple acceptance? Alice wasn’t sure she could give either, but she managed to nod. All she could say was, “I don’t know what to think.”

Nixie leaned forward. “It really happened. I know it did. Oh, and my phone didn’t work, either. No bandwidth.” That fit with the broken locator. Where could Nix have been? Was she confusing the ruins? Well, no, she’d found her on the top of that one. Nothing made sense.

Nixie finished her lemonade and took her glass to the sink. “Can I watch TV? I need a break.”

“Sure honey, for half an hour.”

Nixie’s eyes brightened at the unusual permission.

Alice smiled faintly even though she still felt a little dizzy. What really happened?

Nixie settled on the big bed, picked up Snake, and turned on cartoons, as if she were a younger kid.

Oriana cocked her head toward the balcony. “Care to sit outside with me?”

“Sure.” They were out of lemonade. “Would you like some tea? Or a glass of wine?”

“Wine would be great.”

Alice poured two glasses of rich, dark red Syrah and the women closed the thick sliding door, muting the squealing television to background noise. It was fully dark, and the lights of the resort spread bright below them. A couple walked by one story below, hand in hand, and in the other direction, a mother chased three unruly boys ahead of her.

Oriana spoke first. “She could be telling the truth.”

“How?” Alice choked out.

“Does she lie to you?”

“No.” That wasn’t quite right. “When she tries, the lie might as well be written on her face. She didn’t look like she was lying tonight.”

Oriana let the quiet hang in the hot air for a few long moments, and then spoke just above a whisper. “I have this friend, Ian. He’s lived here a long time, maybe twenty years. Says he’s getting ready for the world to change.”

“Twenty years is more than most.” So many people had come down here hoping that being in Mayan country at the end of the baktun—the great divide in the calendar that would end in eight days—would change the world into a kind of paradise. Or destroy it. “What does Ian do?”

Oriana shrugged. “Sometimes he helps with digs, sometimes he teaches scuba, sometimes he tends bar. He doesn’t seem to need much.” Oriana settled back in her chair, her eyes on Alice’s face. “Ian says he’s been to an older time. He’s seen Chichén Itzá and Tulum bright with color and full of people from the past.” Oriana hesitated. “But he gets there a different way.” She paused again, sipped her wine, and swallowed hard. “He uses the same drugs he says the old Mayans used. Toad venom and psilocybin.”

At Alice’s indrawn breath she waved a hand. “Not regularly. A few times a year. In ceremony. He studies with a group of Mayan shamans. Been doing it for years.”

“But Nixie couldn’t have taken any of that.”

“Of course not,” Oriana said.

“I don’t understand it.”

Oriana sipped her wine, looking pensive. “But don’t you think there are things we don’t understand?”

Alice had spent that last decade of her life trying to understand the Mayans through the star-stories they left, and she still felt far away from really “getting” their culture. Of course she knew about the drugs. A lot of ancient cultures mixed ceremonial drugs with the sacred, it came up all the time. She’d even tried ayahuasca once, on a trip to Ecuador when she was still in college. After it made her violently sick, it gave her visions. Rivers and plants talking to her, plants singing inside her blood, reviewing her life with her, demanding she answer questions she couldn’t even ask. She’d been scared, and it had seemed like a whole lifetime before she could think clearly.

She had never done it again.

Finally, she said, “There’s a lot I don’t understand. Including this trip of Nixie’s.”

“It might help you to talk to Ian,” Oriana said. “I’m not sure I can find him, but if I can, is it okay for me to bring him over?”

“All right.” She’d be very busy soon, but she needed to find out what had happened to her daughter. It wasn’t as if she could just go ask the local police or anything. Not here. “Can you find him tomorrow?”

“I’ll try.”

“Thanks.” Alice took the younger woman’s hand. “And thanks for helping me look. Thanks for not thinking this is all crazy.” Even if it was.

Oriana smiled. “I love mysteries.”

DECEMBER 15, 2012

CHAPTER 6

Cauac stood with his wrinkled feet in the sea, looking out at the foamy whitecaps where shallow, bright blue waves broke over the reef. The night’s strange dreams still stuck to him like honey. They danced as clearly in his head as the sea in front of him. But no meaning clarified from the images.

He needed to be alone with the sea and the creatures in it that called him family. He needed to find his Way, his spirit companion, to salve his soul and regain balance before he sent his students back to Chichén Itzá. Tomorrow, there would be no time.

Cauac took a deep breath, filling his chest, his belly. He paused. Then he let the air out slowly, blowing the sticky dreams into the world. After he was empty, he walked slowly, steadily, into the ocean, focusing on the warm water lapping his calves, on the sand under his toes.

Cauac reached water up to his chest, and turned to look back at the busy grounds of Zama. The bright red, white, and blue stone buildings and surrounding walls stood out against a soft blue sky. It sat so close to the shore that even from a few hundred feet out in the water, he could easily make out the figures of priests, serving women, and local farmers as they moved about the grounds, some certainly already busy with preparations for Ah Bahlam and the others to leave in two days.

The simplicity of Zama fit his heart, his very self. He had grown up in Chichén, been prepared to join the worshipers of K’uk’ulkan there, and perhaps to eventually wear the Feathered Serpent as his Way.

This was better.

He walked farther out, and then swam slowly, the warm water cradling him. When he had swum far enough, Cauac turned onto his back. His broad chest, his face, and the tips of his toes bobbed above the water. He closed his eyes, forgetting the upcoming journey, the dangers waiting on the road, and those in Chichén Itzá. He focused on the very center of his being, drawing all of his energy to a single point, and emptying that point into the warm waters all around him.

A simple call, energy to energy, life to life.

It flowed from him through the waters, licked the surface of the reefs, touched the sea fans and sponges, rippled through schools of bright silver fish.

He waited.

The sea filled his ears, and the sun beat on his closed eyelids. Shallow waves bobbed him up and down, and he swished a foot here, a hand there, counterbalancing the water’s desire to move him toward shore.

Something bumped his right leg, just behind the knee, and he smiled up at the sky before turning and reaching for his totem animal. The great sea turtle had come alone this time, the one he called Great Old, nearly as long as he was tall. Great Old swam slow circles around him. Cauac watched, bobbing in place, admiring the fine patterns on the turtle’s head and flippers, gazing into his brown eyes. As the turtle circled, Cauac smelled his salty, thick shell, heard his soft slight breath. He offered his own breath, slowly kicking circles in place, the sky wheeling above him. Turtle, sea, sky, turtle, sea, sky, and them he saw himself, turtle, sea, sky, waves, himself, turtle, sea, sky, the beach at Zama, the waves slapping the shore in play, his tiny brown body, Great Old the same size, except round. Cauac became large, larger even the turtle, than Zama, than the sea.

Large as the stars.

Great Old nudged his right hand. Cauac curled his old, leathery fingers gently around the turtle’s mottled brown and sea foam carapace, carefully shifting his weight so both of his hands gripped the slippery back.

Great Old swam with him, carrying him gently, staying at the surface. Salty seawater rose up around Cauac’s face, sluiced across his back, and bathed his thighs, alternating waves of sun and water. He took a deep breath, tapped his head against Great Old’s house, and the turtle took him down. He opened his eyes to see the beginnings of the great reef below him. A school of groupers flashed away from them, and a bright blue parrotfish backed slowly into a crevice between two rocks. Blood-red sea fans and sun-colored tube sponges grew up from the sea floor. Cauac reveled in it all, holding his breath as long as possible, slitting his eyes for the best view. With great reluctance, he loosened his hands and floated up for air.

Great Old surfaced beside him, and Cauac smiled to feel the turtle’s steady watchful energy. Two old beings, he thought, spending the afternoon together. Old friends.

He knew, without questioning how he knew, that he would never see the turtle again. Maybe it was his dreams of strange pale people or the rumors of fighting that flooded Zama. The world was on the brink of change, maybe dangerous and ill change.

Cauac slid the hard calloused ends of his fingers gently along the full length of the turtle’s shell, an honoring and a farewell.

He swam slowly toward shore, washed in satisfied sadness.

Cauac climbed, dripping and nearly naked, from the water. A figure sprinted toward him along the rocky path above the white sand beach. He smiled to see his apprentice, Ah Bahlam, rushing so. Cauac let the young man come to him.

Ah Bahlam must have been watching, because the first words from his mouth were, “I wish I could call my totem so easily.”

“You can,” Cauac replied, “but you do not know it yet. What brings you in such a hurry?”

“I . . . I had a vision. A young girl, white as this sand, with hair like the sun and eyes like the sea.”

Cauac waited for more, working not to show the tightness crawling along his shoulder muscles or the heaviness in his chest.

Confusion showed in the young man’s eyes, and earnestness, as if he feared being disbelieved. “She came to the cenote, wearing strange clothing. Like the petals of bright flowers, but not. She sang to the water and then welcomed father sun, and then . . . then she fell in.” Cauac wanted to ask if she had drowned, but held his tongue. Best let the story come out in its own way.

“She swam back, and I helped her to climb free. She spoke, but not in words. I gave her one of Julu’s feathers from last year, and she gave me strange leaves.” Ah Bahlam’s smile looked uncertain. “Come, sit by me in the rocks.”

Cauac followed him up the beach under the watchful eyes of a family of iguanas. They climbed up a sharp, short bluff to sit on stones at the top and look out to the sea. Ah Bahlam shrugged his bow and arrows off his shoulder, setting them carefully on rocks the wind had blown clear of sand. He unrolled the leather pouch he kept his feathers in, so it lay open on a flat stone, and reached for a set of folded green and light orange paper like the tender books kept in the sacred temples, and like the books, filled with images. They were smaller, though, leaf-sized. Ah Bahlam held one up toward the sun. “Like her speech, I cannot read her pictures.”

Cauac took the paper from Ah Bahlam, running it through his fingers and staring out to sea, as if Great Old remained to give him answers. “Is the girl still at the cenote?” he asked.

Ah Bahlam shook his head. “She took the path, but when I followed, her footsteps simply stopped.”

A spirit who left tracks. “Start at the beginning, and tell me everything.”

While Ah Bahlam told his story, Cauac stared out to sea, listening to Ah Bahlam with one ear and to the gentle waves with the other, struggling to understand. The story made no more sense than his dreams had. He had feared the dreams concerned Ah Bahlam as well, and now he knew they must. Ah Bahlam had spent a year studying with Cauac. Other young men and women had also been sent to work with various priests, healers, and shamans like Cauac. But Ah Bahlam was special. Not because he was the eldest son of a powerful man who controlled the salt trade and sat on the high councils of Chichén Itzá. Because of—trust—a trust that Cauac had never seen in a student sent to him. A strong innocence.

Ah Bahlam would return to Chichén Itzá, where he might, or might not, be chosen to play in the winter solstice ball game that would define the new year. Afterward, unless he died on the Ball Court, he would take a place by his father’s side as an advisor, and perhaps, some day, help run the city.

The whole peninsula felt the tension between Chichén Itzá and Coba, and even more, between the thirsty farms and the great city. Protection agreements fell apart as bandits roamed the Mayan roads. This was a difficult time for leadership. All his life Chichén had stood as beacon and target, and now it was more of each than ever.

Maybe he had received a sign that Ah Bahlam would truly be a warrior-priest and not just a warrior. That he would help Chichén heal its relationship to the gods. Cauac cleared his throat, signaling for Ah Bahlam to listen to him. “I have dreamed of this beach covered with white-skinned people. Of men and women wearing the fins of fish swimming in the water and speaking to each other across far distances. I dreamed of stars set back the way they started, with the black dream place overhead and the snake of time eating its tail.”

Ah Bahlam shifted beside him, but held his silence. A good student.

Cauac swallowed. “I will continue to try to understand these dreams, and how they might link to your spirit girl with footprints from today.” He crumpled the strange paper in his hand, then opened it again, amazed at its strength. “I fear they mean you will have a great role to play.”

Ah Bahlam swallowed. “In the ball game?”

“You are a strong player.” He held the paper-leaf out to Ah Bahlam. “Maybe more than that.”

Ah Bahlam waved his hand at Cauac. “Keep that leaf. It is a gift. I will do my best to use all that you have taught me.”

He still looked shaken and excited. Perhaps at his vision, perhaps at their impending departure. Best to focus him. “Take a few hours this afternoon and return to the jungle.”

Ah Bahlam looked about to protest.

“Not so far. Just past town. Call your jaguar again, and ask it to help you understand the vision it sent you today.”

Ah Bahlam nodded. “I will go prepare.”

Cauac watched him walk away, wishing he had more time. Ah Bahlam had heart, and he had honed his body/self connection well enough to become a good warrior.

The gods appeared to be calling on him for much more than that, and yet Cauac couldn’t read what they wanted.

How could he know if he had done enough?