The Seven Serpents Trilogy (31 page)

And She did attract them. They came, bringing small gifts, and decked Her brow with jungle blooms. But when the first light shone in the east, they pricked their fingers with thorns and offered their blood to the sun.

Then one morning after I had prayed and sung the Salve Regina and watched my audience raise their bleeding hands to the east, I was struck by a singular thought. I was dismayed that it had not come to me be fore.

Why, I asked myself, was I there before a pagan crowd, praying on my knees, raising my voice to heaven in their behalf ? I was still a student. Never having been ordained, I was not permitted to say mass and conduct rites. In all truth, I was pretending to be a priest, when in fact I was simply a callow seminarian.

It was then that there came to me out of my readings, long ago, in my first year at the seminary, a thought put down by Augustine, bishop of Hippo.

“God,” he said, “judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”

Thus it must be true that evil exists because God has willed it. If this were not true, then there would only be good to choose from, which is no choice at all.

God had created the Maya as He had created all beings. He must have allowed them, therefore, to dwell in darkness, worshipers of a hundred idols, ten times a hundred. In His wisdom, He had given them a choice between good and evil.

Myself, I could point the way, as I had done, between the two kingdoms, one of eternal love, one of the sulfurous pits of pain and despair. But who was I to do more? After all, I was only a seminarian, a neophyte without the mission and the authority of a priest. It was better to stand humbly by and let God's power quietly possess them.

Or so I reasoned in an effort to forget that I had failed to end their bloody rites.

After that, I turned my back on the barbarous rites of sun worship, no longer blaming myself for acts I could not prevent, and spent more time in the palace, studying the books brought to me from the archives.

Most of them had been assembled in the years 1034 to 1146 AD. These were the years that interested me, since during this period the Maya quit building their beautiful temples and began to abandon their cities one by one.

What had happened to bring this exodus about?

I satisfied myself that they had not met with disasters, such as earthquakes and floods and wars, or with crop failures that led to starvation. Something else had come upon them and not suddenly.

It was my suspicion that slowly, over a period of a hundred years, the cities had decayed from within. Judging from the hundreds of priests that swarmed through the Temple of Kukulcán clad in filthy gowns that they never changed, the decay might have been caused by a loss of faith.

Furthermore, could the ancient priests have used the stars to make a prediction or a series of predictions—as wrong as the one about the battle of Tikan—that caused the populace to turn against them? When they could no longer trust the priests, did they revolt, with hold their labor, and stop worshipping at the temples? Or, for some strange reason, had they turned against the gods themselves?

It was a great and fascinating mystery. It had a great bearing on the very things I was trying to accomplish.

I was interested in how the city had been governed during its years of splendor. And who governed it? What taxes were collected, and from whom? What work was required of the common man? Did it have alliances with other cities? What was the nature of the goods it bought and sold? What did the city look like before it was en gulfed by the jungle?

To my disappointment, I found no answers to these questions.

The scribes who painted the books were only in terested in the names of the rulers, the battles they fought, the number of captives they took, their victories—shown by a glyph of a temple with smoke rising—and the stars. The stars that ruled their lives from birth to death.

I set about recording the history of the island from the hour I had appeared, since no records were being kept at the moment, except by the astrologers who nightly read the heavens.

I had difficulties in finding recorders and was forced to settle upon a man who was nearly blind but was ac quainted with the Mayan glyphs, and on Ceela Yaxche, who did not understand the glyphs but could paint. As she became more skilled in the use of Spanish, I pro posed to have the books put down in both Castilian and Maya.

We had difficulty with paper. The early books, those painted four centuries before, were painted on fawnskin, which was as smooth as velvet and pleasing to the eye and touch. Since the art of making it had been lost, we settled for a coarser paper made from the bark of the fig tree.

Events worthy of being painted were gathered by Ah den Yaxche.

I still did not trust the old man. At any moment he could change his mind and decide that for the good of the city it was his duty to expose me. But I finally permitted him to go into the streets and bring back what ever news he could find. He gave me the information, which was usually meager, and I decided what should be painted.

The only news of importance that he brought in during late summer and the month of November came from the constable of the stockade where Don Luis de Arroyo was kept.

Don Luis appeared at the palace punctually every day to teach the class in Spanish, but at night, with the help of two companions, he had used his time to dig a hole through the bottom of his cage and a tunnel that led out of the stockade. The dirt that the three removed, using their hands until their fingers were worn to the bone, they concealed in the depths of the latrine.

On the day when the old man gave me this news I had Don Luis brought to the palace. “Señor,” I said, “I un derstand that you are a good teacher of Spanish.”

Arrogant as I had ever seen him, though his elegant clothes were now threadbare and at my request his scabbard was empty, Don Luis smiled.

“Your students like you,” I said. “They seem to have learned something of our mother tongue.”

He made a slight bow.

“Otherwise,” I said, “I would see that your heart is removed. In two weeks, there's a festival to honor the goddess Ix Chel. An excellent time to attend to this matter.”

Don Luis smiled again. “A bad time,
amigo.
I still have much to teach the little savages. Their tongues have been twisted out of shape by such words as
Tlancualpican
and
chalchitiuacuecan.
I will need another year, at least, to get them into proper shape.”

The temple's huge drum noted the hour of twilight, five resounding booms that shook the walls and the stones of the floor.

“A different sound from the silvery bells of Seville,” the young nobleman observed. “Do you ever think of them? Probably not, now that you have the big drum to remind you of the hours.”

He began to pace the room, his hand resting on the empty scabbard. Shadows were falling and I could not see his eyes, but they must have shone with a bitter light. He stopped and came close and stood looking down at me.

“I hear,” he said, “that you never leave this gloomy place. That you spend your time here poring over the books I see scattered around, and on your knees in prayer. And pray you should! For you deal with crea tures that are barely human.”

“Creatures who are barely human,” I said angrily, “don't build beautiful temples. Nor do they keep track of time—the months and years and centuries—better than we Spaniards do.”

Don Luis blinked in mock surprise. “I am pleased to hear you speak as a Spaniard. I was afraid that you had begun to think of yourself as an Indian. I thought you had forgotten that you were born on my farm and studied in a seminary that my great-great-great grandfather built.”

Don Luis began to pace again through the cavernous room, a hand on his empty scabbard. He paused at a window and glanced out at the cliff beyond the lake, where a full moon was rising. Emboldened by my si lence, he came back and stood over me.

“These barbarians listen,” he said, “they dumbly lis ten while you sing the Ave Maria. Then they go back to their huts and sing the monstrous songs they learned in the cradle. They look at the picture of the Virgin, our Protectress, and titter among themselves because she is not cross-eyed and slant headed. The crosses you erect here and there are like the Mayan cross except that one has bulbous ends and the other hasn't. The Indians see no difference between the two. Ours is the cross of Christ. Theirs is a sign, a marker, to show where two roads come together. And for the Indian, this is what the cross will always mean. Not what, with all your exhortations, you wish it to mean—not the symbol of salva tion and life everlasting.”

Quietly, hiding my anger, I motioned the guards to take him back to his cage. At the far end of the room he pulled away and turned to face me.

“Do not forget,” he said, “through all this masquer ade, that you are still a Spaniard and a Christian.”

“And do not forget,” I said, “that if you dig more holes in your cage, you will likewise dig your grave.”

“Your own may not be long delayed,” he answered. “There are those who at this moment are quietly preparing it.”

“You among them!” I said.

He was taken off, leaving me in an anger that persisted through supper. It changed into a spiritless mood that lasted until one of the servant girls, who had given birth to a boy, brought him forth to show me.

Kneeling, holding up the infant, she said shyly, “You see I have not put his head between the boards. Nor has he a dangling bead to gaze at.”

“Why is this?” I said.

“Because,” she said, “I want him to look like the Lord of the Evening Star.”

There was nothing I had done, the prayers I had prayed and the crosses I had erected, that meant so much to me as these words spoken by the kitchen maid.

I did not let this happening blind me to the angry threat that Don Luis had shouted as he left the chamber that morning. Chalco was surely behind the plotting, but there were others among his assistants who might also wish me dead.

The dwarf treated the threat more seriously than I did. He took it upon himself to appoint a food taster to sit at table and sample all the food that came in. Al though this protected me from violent poisons that acted immediately, it did nothing about the poisons that re quired weeks, even months, to work their way.

“There are no such poisons on our island,” the dwarf assured me when I reminded him of this fact. “We have neither mercury nor arsenic. Everything is sudden here, like the poisons the Indians use to tip their arrows. It kills a monkey within seconds, a man in minutes.”

I soon grew tired of the food taster—a toothless old man who wore earrings that rattled as he moved his jaws, who made munching sounds when he tasted, and smacked his fat lips when he finished. Tired of waiting for him either to be seized by deathly spasms or to go on eating.

After he was dismissed I forgot about the warning Don Luis had shouted at me. Then unexpectedly on a bright morning while larks were singing in the flame trees just outside the window, as I was about to use the movable toilet that one of the servants had brought in, I was forcefully reminded of it. Looking down I saw below me the glint of two shining eyes, the flick of an or ange-tinted tongue. It was a water snake, not much longer than the length of my middle finger, but a deadly snake, the one the Indians called Seven Curses.

The servant was dragged in and queried, but he knew nothing about the snake. He had received the cabinet from a servant, who had received it from a servant, who had taken it from someone else, and so on. We never found the culprit.

I took precautions against this bizarre incident hap pening again but quickly forgot that my life was in dan ger. My spirits were enlivened by a second woman who came to show me that she no longer put her child's head between boards or dangled beads before his eyes.

Someday I would rule over a citizenry that was no longer slant headed and cross-eyed. I had made a small start on that long road.

 

I
HAD MORE THAN A START, HOWEVER, ON THE FIRST OF MY EXCAVATIONS
. The workmen brought from Tikan, Uxmal, and Zaya, numbering nearly two thousand, had already cleared a road leading from the plaza through a jungle of thorn bushes and creepers to the outskirts of the buried temple.

A stand of cypress trees had sprouted from its roof, with a nest of spiny agave clustered around their trunks. These had been cut away and burned. Columns that had fallen over the centuries and lay hidden under mounds of moldering leaves had been dug up and put aside to use again. A wide staircase, the main one of three that led into the temple, stood revealed, glistening white as the day the
antiguos
who built it put down their ham mers.

To my great surprise, however, what was thought to be a temple turned out to be not a temple but a mam moth observatory. Because it was built with a rounded, shell-like dome, it reminded me of a snail. I therefore named it
El Caracol
, and thus Ceela put it down in the book of excavations she had begun for the year of our Lord 1519, in the reign of Kukulcán, God of the Eve ning Star.

El Caracol rested on a platform twice my height, which in turn sat upon one somewhat shorter. The whole edifice measured 106 paces in length and half that number in width. It was made of fitted stone, ochre in cast, and still retained some of its original color—a light sea green—and around the doorway, yellow bands in the shape of sleeping serpents.

A winding ramp led upward to a circular room, pierced by four apertures facing the cardinal points of the compass—north, south, east, and west. It was through these slits in the stone that the priests had watched the stars and made their observations.

At the foot of the ramp a passage led down to a wide landing, to a second landing, and a third. Here, when the dwarf and I were inspecting El Caracol for the first time, we were confronted by a pair of alligators larger than life, carved from sandstone and fitted with green jade teeth, crouching on either side of a massive door, their open jaws enclosing a human head.