The Seven Serpents Trilogy (15 page)

The serpents entwined about her I hadn't taken full note of until now. There were seven of them, all with many delicate scales that seemed to move as they caught the light, all with eyes that repeated the piercing, slumberous look of the goddess.

The smell of copal made my head reel. I took a step away and glanced up at the pure blue of the sky.

How could this Indian girl, a child, visit such a place, apparently every day, to worship the monstrous image, to lie prone before it and its writhing serpents, to bring offerings of fruit, to burn sweet-smelling copal? How? I asked myself. And what, what could she ever receive in return for such devotion?

 

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON THE GIRL WALKED OUT OF THE JUNGLE
, carrying a sheaf of green shoots, and went to where the stallion was grazing. She passed me without a glance as I sat in front of the hut, repairing my shirt with the newly acquired needle and thread.

Since he was not on a tether, I expected Bravo to bolt as she held out her hand. Instead, he allowed her to touch his muzzle, and when she offered him a handful of shoots he took them, switching his tail to show his thanks.

I had a sudden suspicion. It was Bravo she was curi ous and concerned about rather than me. The presents she had brought—the fruit, the weapon, the sewing things, the fire—all were bribes, means by which she had worked herself into my good graces and thus in a roundabout way into those of Bravo.

Proceeding with my task, I paid no attention to her. When I had finished with my shirt, she wandered over to where I sat. She still was barefooted but had braided her hair and set it on top of her head like a crown, which made her look older than she was.

Saying a few strange-sounding words but not to me especially, she glanced around at the meadow and sky, at last in my direction, and smiled stiffly. Then she walked away, taking her time, paused to touch the stallion's flank, waded the stream, and was gone, leaving behind her the sweet smell of burning copal.

The smell brought back the morning, the moments when I had stood in front of the stone goddess and won dered how the girl could possibly worship such a mon strous image.

I laid the needle and thread away and started to put on my mended shirt. The smell of copal still clung to it, so I went to the stream and spread it out on a flat rock. As I washed it with the clear-running water, I made a resolve. When the girl came again, as she surely would, I'd take her to the headland. There, by the wide sea, un der the open sky, before the cross, I would set her feet upon the Christian path.

It would be hard to do, since our languages were so different. But with patience, in time, I would overcome the difficulties. Hers would be the first savage soul I had helped to save. God willing, there would be more!

She returned the next morning, bringing the stallion a basket of fruit, which he disdained, and from afar cast upon me one brief glance and left. It was the horse that fascinated her.

She came back in the afternoon, while I was at work on Bravo's halter, this time with a bundle of palm shoots balanced on her head. When he had eaten them, she wandered over to me, walking gracefully with her head high, as if she were still carrying the bundle of palm shoots. I noticed, however, that, as she walked, she was a little pigeon-toed.

She pointed to the stallion and by graceful signs made me see that she wished to climb on his back.

It was then that I had what seemed to be an ingenious idea. She could mount the stallion, I let her know, but first she must do something for me. Without a word be ing spoken, we struck a bargain.

I put my work away and walked with her to the shore, and together we climbed to the top of the headland, to the great flat stone where the cross stood. I knelt and asked her to kneel beside me. The sun cast a golden light across the waters. The girl smiled, but it was a puz zled smile, as well it might have been.

Around my neck was a chain with a medal showing the figure of Christ on the cross, the only possession of mine that had survived the wreck. I took it off and put it in her hand; then I pointed to the cross I had built.

She still looked puzzled. She wrinkled her brows and glanced from the figure in her hand to the wooden cross, but made no connection between them.

“This is Christ,” I said, pointing to the figure on the medal. “This is Christ also,” I said and again pointed to the wooden cross.

She helplessly shook her head and turned away from me and said something in her outlandish-sounding tongue. I couldn't even guess at the meaning of her words, but their tone was clear.

Suddenly I realized that what I was trying to do was doomed to failure. I was asking a little savage, an igno rant girl, at least one who was untutored, to understand, by the use of a few simple gestures and by words she had never heard before, an idea, a concept that was of ten difficult even for those who were schooled.

I was being a fool.

Embarrassed, I took the chain, put it around my neck, and got to my feet. I would have apologized had I had the words, even one word.

But I recovered myself enough to sing a tuneful song about the Virgin and was pleased to observe that the girl listened to me. More than that, she uttered words which I took to be praiseful and by a movement of her hands showed that she wished to hear me sing again.

But these simple acts made me realize more than ever what could be understood between us and what not un derstood and not done. I wanted to bring Christ's message to the Indian girl and to those of her tribe who might come within the reach of my voice. The only way I could hope to accomplish this was by learning the lan guage she used, whatever it might be.

I did learn her name. It was Ceela.

 

C
EELA HELD ME TO MY BARGAIN
. N
O SOONER HAD WE COME DOWN
from the headland than she ran to where Bravo was grazing. She grasped his long mane and made a leap for his back, but he tossed his head and shied away. After I had brought him around again, I made a step with my hands and boosted her up. She took the reins, and off we went through the meadow, with me holding tight to the tether rope.

Arabian stallions are gentle and affectionate, much gentler than ordinary stallions. True to the breed, Bravo acted as if he and the girl were old friends. I don't know what Ceela felt, except that she sat smiling, with her skirts pulled up to her skinny knees, and held the reins like a proper horsewoman.

As for me, I nearly walked my legs off, but improved the time by taking a first lesson in what Ceela called Maya. I pointed to a rock and asked her for the word that meant rock in her language. We walked along the beach and I pointed out the sea, the waves, the shells, the gulls flying overhead. By nightfall I had accumu lated thirty words, taking the second step toward learn ing the language of those who lived on the island.

Ceela came back the next afternoon and rode until dusk, with me walking beside her as before, again pointing at objects and learning their names.

The Mayan language, I had found in two long les sons, was difficult. Unlike the other languages I knew, it was not based upon Latin but upon rules and sounds of its own. Thus,
cenote
, as I was to learn when I saw it written down by Spanish priests, the word for water hole, was pronounced with a soft
c.
The
X
in
Xul
, the word for the sixth month of the Mayan year, was given the sound of
sh;
and
Xux
, the morning star, Venus, was pronounced
shush
.

I asked Ceela for the word that meant horse. It was a joke, of course, but she thought seriously and finally gave me a long string of words that I didn't understand. In return I told her that Bravo was a
caballo.
She tried to say the word, failed, made a face as if she had eaten something bitter, and with a shrug dismissed the whole idea. She made it clear that Maya was the only lan guage worth speaking. I never again used a Spanish word with her.

When she was able to ride by herself, I walked along beside her instead of leading the stallion. After a week of this I decided to enlist her help in making a saddle that we both could use. She brought a deerskin, which we laid out on the floor of the hut and cut to fit Bravo's back. It had no pommel or cantle, but sewed together with an underlayer of cotton and feathers, a sort of fat pillow, it proved to be comfortable.

Ceela had not been inside my hut before, and what she saw while we worked on the saddle she didn't like. With the first heavy wind, she told me with words and mimicry, the entire roof would come loose and fly away. Also, in a rainstorm it would leak. Both things would happen unless I tied the palm leaves together in a certain way, which she showed me how to do.

The hut's greatest fault, however, was its lack of paint, inside and out. We talked about this problem for weeks, whenever she came to ride the stallion, which was almost every day.

She wished that I would paint the threshold, the beams that supported the lintel, and the lintel itself a bright sea blue. I had no objection until she explained that blue was the favorite color of the goddess Ix Chel.

“The one in the clearing?” I asked, trying hard to dis guise my feelings. “Ix...Ix...whatever her name?”

“Ix Chel,” Ceela said eagerly. “Blue is her magical color. It brings life and much happiness.”

Remembering the hideous stone image in the jungle, the eyes that held me with their evil glance, the snakes that coiled about the loathsome body, I felt like tearing at my hair.

“Ix Chel brings many children to people,” she said.

“I am the one who is living in this hut,” I answered. “It is my house.”

Ceela fell silent. She started to say something and stopped. There were tears in her eyes when she turned away from me.

Could she think, I asked myself, that one day she would live in the hut as my wife? Was this why she had given me so many presents, done so much for me?

Not knowing what to say, I took her hand in mine. It was very small and cold. But she pulled away, and the next moment she ran off through the meadow, crossed the stream, and was gone.

 

A
FTER THREE DAYS, DURING WHICH
C
EELA DIDN'T COME INTO MY HUT
, the language lessons continued, and I soon built up a good vo cabulary. It became possible for me to put sentences together, copying the nouns and verbs that I heard her use. Just as important, I began to think in Maya, not in Spanish, and in this time, thinking thus, learned something about the island and much about Ceela Yaxche.

She lived more than a league away, with her grand father, who was sick, her grandmother, and two unwed aunts, who were old, very old. When she was ten, in the middle of the night the top of the volcano had blown away, scattering fire in all directions. The fire and the dust and flowing rock had engulfed their
milpa
and left her mother and father and two brothers dead.

The fire and dust killed many others. The ones who weren't killed fled to the nearby village of Ixpan and be yond, all except what remained of her family. The grandfather, a stubborn and fearless man, built a tem porary shelter as near as he could to the old one and re mained there with Ceela's grandmother and two aunts, though the volcano smoked day and night, planning that someday he would return to his ruined home.

I learned that we lived on the Island of the Seven Serpents, which accounted for the seven serpents that writhed about the stone goddess Ix Chel. It was about twenty leagues from south to north, eight leagues from west to east, and at the far northern end stood a habita tion of many temples and many people called the City of the Seven Serpents, the place I had seen on my re turn from the volcano.

I also learned something that disturbed me greatly. The natives of this vast temple city were unfriendly, especially toward those who lived on the mainland to the west. Not only unfriendly; they went on regular raids to the mainland and returned with hordes of slaves, whom they sacrificed on their many altars, cutting out their hearts with stone knives.

When I discovered this, the task I had set for myself seemed far beyond my powers or that of a saint or of a dozen saints.

I learned that Ceela and her two aunts supported the family. The aunts wove dresses that Ceela took to the market in Ixpan along with wild honey she gathered in the jungle and put in gourds she had painted herself. The hours left over from these duties she spent with Bravo and me.

Ceela was not an untutored girl, as atfirstI had thought. Her grandfather had been a priest, before he became old and sick, with the responsibility for the vil lage festivals connected with planting and harvesting, for all the gods who watched over the fields, such as Chac, the god of rain; Hobnil, the patron god of beekeepers; Yum Kaax, god of corn; Xipe Totec, the terrible god of spring, whose effigy had to be clothed in the skins of sacrificial victims. Also the Thirteen Gods of the Upper World, the Nine Gods of the Lower World, and numerous others.

The grandfather had passed on some of his knowl edge to Ceela, so she knew the gods by name and spoke of them often. Of them all, however, she worshiped Ix Chel, the goddess of childbearing and the moon, whose magical color was blue. She wanted to paint the doorway Ix Chel's favorite color and I invited her to do so—to paint the whole hut blue, if she wished, though it was not to my liking.

One morning while I was grooming Valiente's silky coat, she appeared with three brushes, one of them made of bristles taken from a peccary, two brushes of palm thatch, and gourds filled with rock ground up into a powder. She mixed blue powder with water and daubed the outside walls and the doorway, threshold, and lintel; daubed them twice over.

Then she did something that astounded me. She painted the inside walls a shining white, and astounded me more by painting upon them pictures of Bravo graz ing in the meadow, Bravo running with his tail and mane flying in the wind. And, biggest of all, Ceela her self on the stallion's back, riding under a blue sky among blue trees.