The Seven Serpents Trilogy (57 page)

A breeze drifted through the courtyard, but it was still hot. The fans kept moving up and down after Zambac went to sleep. I had the servants put him to bed in the hammock that swung between two jacaranda trees. I waited until they left, then I tied up his hands and feet with cords I cut from the hammock.

I had nothing much to take. The streets were deserted, except for a homeless dog that followed me to the plaza. There he sniffed, about and finally lifted his leg on the statue of Cortés's horse and left. A small moon was riding along in a cloudless sky. By its light I found a canoe and paddled across the lake. I walked until dawn on the trail that led to Tikal, then slept for a while, then went on at a rapid gait.

 

I
STAYED IN THE RUINED CITY OF
T
IKAL THROUGH THE NEXT SUMMER
and another winter. I lived in a wing of a palace that was quite similar to my palace in the City of the Seven Serpents, even to its broken statues, stained walls, and vermin.

Ah Machika had his quarters in another wing of the six wings that formed the huge, star-shaped structure. After a week or so, when he made no mention of the gold he had told me about in such glowing terms, I brought up the subject one night at supper. I had come to Tikal to evade Zambac, true enough, but I had not forgotten the promise my host had made.

Ah Machika was apologetic. “I forget,” he said. “I am old and forgetful. Tomorrow, soon, we go and you will see that what I told you is correct.”

We didn't go on the next day or soon, though I mentioned the gold every few nights at dinner. I came to the belief that he was deliberately delaying the matter, fearful that if once I got my hands on the treasure I would take what I could carry and then disappear. It was also possible that the treasure did not exist. He valued the impression that I made on his subjects and the travelers who came by—there were many, since the town was not only on a main trade route but also at the gateway of the trail that led to Mount Chicanel, the Concealer, home of Tzelta, the sibyl.

In the distant past Tikal had been a flourishing trade center, larger than Quintana, situated as it was on the east–west trails between the Southern Ocean and the Sea of Caribs and other trails connecting it to Tenochtitlán in the far north. It had also been a great religious center, drawing hordes of Maya wor shippers. Now the trails were heavily used by commercial traders and known to the Spaniards.

Spaniards came in bands, mostly on horses, and well armed with muskets or harquebuses, even with small cannon pulled by mules. At first they were apt to be respectful of Ah Machika's army, for the soldiers with their crossed eyes and naked bodies coated with soot were fearsome to behold. But they never left without causing trouble. One band, told that there was no gold to be had, set up cannon and fired at the palace.

Ah Machika, who had never heard a cannon or seen an iron ball as big as his head flying through the air, fell on his knees and begged forgiveness for his poverty. I prevailed upon him to hold fast and not to tell them about the gold, that they would soon run out of powder, which they did. Whereupon he seized the Spaniards, arranged a feast day, and sacrificed them one by one to the hungry sun god.

There were mounds in Tikal ten times the number found on my island. They extended in a line more than a league wide and for twenty leagues, in what appeared to be a series of plazas faced by temples, government structures, and the abodes of the city's nobles—all devoured by vines and creepers, sunk beneath a quiet verdant sea, marked only by trees that grew from the rooftops.

I did no exploring. I was not tempted to restore any of the buildings near the palace in which I lived. And if I had undertaken such a rash task, it would have failed.

The people of Tikal—some two thousand were left of what must have been, judging from the vast numbers of mounds, a city of a hundred thousand—were content to farm their small
milpas
, eat corn cakes and red beans at every meal, drink copi ous amounts of
balche
, congregate on feast days, and have many children, of whom more than half died before they were a year old. Like the people of my lost island.

However, while I waited upon Ah Machika and his gold, growing more suspicious that he was gulling me, more restless day by day, from time to time weighing the advantages of throwing in my lot with one of the Spanish bands, of forcing Ah Machika to act, of even wringing the truth from him, if necessary, I had hours to spare. I spent them in an attempt to decipher the Maya past.

There were no books in the palace, such as those I had studied in the City of the Seven Serpents. I had to be content with the stelae scattered about in the plaza. Most were in good condition, but most of their glyphs dealt with dates—who ruled the city in a certain year, the length of his rule, and nothing else. There was no clue, no more than in the books I had studied before, to the great mystery.

The Persian empire had disappeared, as had the Assyrian empire, and those of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Ro mans, but not overnight. Why, in the matter of a few brief years, had the Maya suddenly stopped building their magnificent temples? Why had they quit constructing splendid cause ways, buttressed with cut stone, that led to the temples? Why had they deserted their palaces and elaborate edifices to disap pear into the jungle—as if the voices of the gods and of the stars they worshipped, speaking as one single voice, had com manded them to cease doing what they had done for a thou sand years. Or was it that they heard no voice, no command, that they had suddenly lost faith in the gods and the stars?

There was no sign here in Tikal, as there had been none on the Island of the Seven Serpents, in Chichén-Palapa, Quintana, or Petén, that earthquakes or famine or disease had weakened the Maya will to carry on the traditions that they had inherited. But there were signs, the same ones I had seen before, that the reasons for the cataclysm might lie with the priesthood. As elsewhere, the Tikal priests went about in dirty gowns, their long hair caked with filth—thin, dark figures who camped in the ruins and made predictions that didn't come true as often as they did.

We had a steady stream of these dolorous apparitions com ing from all directions, pausing for a night or two and moving on. During my first month in Tikal, two of them arrived by the north trail who looked to be twin brothers. They were a pair whom I felt I had seen before, possibly in Quintana. I had seen them, true enough, but not in Quintana. They came from the Isle of Petén, sent hither by Zambac.

I was awakened toward morning of a stormy night by a scuttling sound. I slept on a pallet near a window—one without glass, like all Maya windows—and thought it was a coatimundi, a snake, an iguana, or some other of the small animals that paid me nocturnal visits. I thought this until I felt a sharp pain at my wrist, something tugging at my finger, and caught the fetid breath of an assailant groping for my throat.

I lunged from my pallet, taking my attacker, who by now had a good hold on my neck, with me. His feet were dangling from the floor as I walked to the window and tossed him out. The second assailant had already fled. At dawn, as soon as he heard my story, Ah Machika dispatched a band of fast runners and captured the pair. He sacrificed them weeks later to the spring god, Xipe Totec, and sent a severed finger from each to Zambac in Petén.

Many months after this incident, when Ah Machika judged that I was getting ready to leave Tikal, he took me to the gold fields. Carried in litters, we traveled for hours until we reached a broad river. On both sides of the river were vast stretches of what appeared to be golden sand.

“There,” the cacique said, extending his arms in a kingly gesture. “Feast your eyes!”

The sun was overhead, pouring down upon fields of shining gold, windrows and swales and dunes of gold. There were no trails leading in or out of the glittering expanse. No sign of human tracks, though I did make out just beyond me the deli cate marks of a lizard's claws.

The scene blinded my eyes. It could not be. It was impossi ble that so much gold could exist in the world.

And it
was
impossible. I had taken no more than a step when I realized that I was treading upon thin, dustlike particles—not like those I had seen in the riverbed on Isla del Oro. It was not gold that lay before me, shimmering in the sun, but worthless pyrites—fool's gold.

I concealed my disappointment as best I could. “Wonder ful,” I said, clapping my hands together like a child. “The gods have been kind to you.”

“To us,” the cacique said. “We share the gods' treasure. The two of us.”

I wondered if he was being honest with me, if he really believed that the worthless stuff was gold. “You have never used it?” I asked him. “Made ornaments—beads or rings, anything at all?”

“Tzelta the sibyl forbade me,” he said. “Long ago now she spoke a warning not to touch the gold. Not to come near that gold until the day.”

“What day?”

“The day a white cloud from the sky came down and walked like a man…”

“I am the cloud?”

“You are the white cloud that walks,” Ah Machika said firmly, as though he believed it. “We share the gold, yes?”

“We'll melt it into bars,” I said. “Beautiful gold bars.”

“What will be done then?”

“We'll make ornaments of the bars. Rings. Necklaces. Gold plates to eat from.”

The cacique's black eyes danced.

I left Tikal early the next morning, promising him to return in a few days to help collect our gold. I harbored no ill will toward Ah Machika. I was only angry at myself for wasting months, a year, almost two years on the wildest of chases.

I took the south trail from Tikal, since the north trail would have led me back toward Petén. It was well traveled on this morning. Caravans were moving both ways, from as far north as Tenochtitlán and from distant places to the south.

Late that afternoon I came to a fork in the trail, where several Indian caravans were encamped. Upon inquiring, I learned that the left fork led to Panama. Further inquiry dis closed that the right fork led to the cave of the sibyl Tzelta, and that all in the encampment had visited her that day.

A small island to the north of the Island of the Seven Serpents housed a sibyl who counseled women who were either pregnant or wished to be. Married or unmarried, young or old, they poured in upon her from the mainland, from everywhere.

I had never had an occasion to visit this sibyl, but I was acquainted with her reputation for prophecy and miracles. I recalled that Ah Machika had visited the sibyl Tzelta. Al though I was not impressed with the advice she had given him, in a bitter mood, still blaming myself for time wasted, I de cided to take the fork that led to her cave.

I arrived there at dusk to find a dozen or more supplicants waiting to see her. The sessions went on through the night and through the next day. At dawn of the second day, I was led by two masked women dressed in yellow, diaphanous robes into an opening, no more than a crevice, in the face of a wooded mountain.

I was escorted down a passageway, at the end of which was a row of candles set into a wall. Below the candles, which gave off a curious scent, was an even narrower passage, one that required me to get down on my hands and knees.

The women left me, with instructions to crawl forward until I came to a room lit by only one candle. Here I was to lie prone, put my ear to the floor, and listen. I was not to ask questions. Questions resulted in misunderstanding. They led nowhere. They would not be answered. I was to give only my name and destination.

Crawling forward into a dark room not much larger than a closet, lit by one small candle set in the mouth of a grinning serpent, I lay flat on the stone floor and listened. At first all I heard was a buzzing in my ears, caused by exertion. Then my ears cleared and I heard the rapid beating of my heart. The beating grew faint and suddenly was enveloped in deep silence.

“My name is Julián Escobar,” I said, as I had been in structed.

There was no answer, only the distant sound of my words and silence again. I remembered that I had been told to give my destination. I had none. The silence deepened. Then I re membered that I had been told that one of the forks in the trail led to a place called Panama. I said the strange name in a shaking voice.

From far below me the name was repeated. It sounded like an echo of my own voice, yet it was the voice of a girl, some one very young and far away. I waited, scarcely taking a breath.

“That land where the great seas meet,” the sibyl intoned. She spoke softly, in Maya but with the accent of an Aztecatl. “What is it you seek in this place?”

I was silent, making certain that I answered her truthfully. I was not there in a musty cell, lying on a wet, hard stone, to give foolish answers.

“You are silent. You hesitate and chew your thumb, not knowing why you go to Panama?”

She no longer sounded like a sibyl but like a woman who, having encountered many Spaniards, was on the verge of anger.

“Being a Spaniard,” she said, “you will know that you go for one reason. Spaniards search for one thing. Not for love. Not for friends. Not for land. Not to plant crops and harvest them. They search only for gold and nothing else.”

“For gold, nothing else.” Then, forgetting that I was not to ask questions, I said, “Where can it be found?”

There was a long silence. I feared that I had incurred her wrath.

“Not in Panama,” she finally answered. “South from Panama, in another place, there's a man who is called Inca. Each morning this lord is carried to a sacred lake. He takes off his night clothing and priests cover him with sweet oils. Then he is covered with gold dust, even his face and private possessions. Then, as dawn breaks, he walks into the lake and washes himself. Every day of the year he does this, except when he is on journeys. His father did this and his grandfather also. At the bottom of the lake gold lies thick.”