“Who is she?”
“I’m…,” she started before I interrupted her.
“You don’t need to know who she is. This is between you and me. You deal with me, only. We don’t know where the Mask is. If you can’t accept that, then we have no further business,” I said.
The jaguar stood, put his ears back and then snarled at us.
“Tough guy, huh? Come take our scent, big fella,” I said with the confidence that I had gained in interacting with the spotted jaguar. Truth was; I didn’t know squat and this huge jaguar could be on us before I could do anything to stop it. The one thing I did know was not to show him fear and be ready to shoot him if I had to. The second thing I had to show him was trust.
The big cat crouched and snarled again.
“Come on,” I said.
As he started to creep toward us, I could feel Hannah trembling. “I’m going to pee in my pants, I swear, Max.”
I didn’t take my eyes off of his. We were locked in on each other. I knew I could get a round off holding the shotgun down like I was next to my hip but I had a good feeling about this. “That’s it. Come on.”
He stopped about five feet in front of us. That was as close as he would come. My eyes never left his.
“He’s so beautiful,” Hannah said.
“Yeah, right,” Shane said. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Max.”
“Watch the stick, Shane,” I said without taking my eyes off the jaguar. “Come smell them. Know their scent,” I said to Gabor.
“Max, no,” Shane said.
The jaguar came over to within a couple of feet of Hannah and Shane. He scrunched up his face as he took in Hannah’s scent. She was leaning into Shane and trembling. He stepped forward on one paw and licked her shin.
“They will not harm you. Do not harm them. If you protect them, you can live here safely and I will protect you and this woman also.”
The jaguar stepped into Hannah’s leg and rubbed his body against her as he walked past her. He circled behind us and returned to the woman.
Magali nodded her approval. “What business is it you speak of?” she asked.
“If we find the Mask, I will give it to the Mayan people; it belongs to them. In return, I only ask that you tell us its history and its significance to your people. And, most importantly, you don’t harm anyone on this ranch or my family ranch.”
The woman nodded her acceptance.
“Did you destroy the capstone?” Hannah asked.
The woman nodded again.
“Why on earth would you do that? It was a valuable piece of history.”
“Let it go, Hannah,” I said to her.
There was no point in letting the woman know we knew what it was she was trying to hide on the capstone. I figured the river in Guatemala had nothing to do with the Death Mask she was looking for on the Pape Ranch and I had a possible deal going with her.
Hannah gave me a dirty look. Man, I thought to myself, Shane was going to have his hands full with her. One moment she’s scared shitless, seconds later she’s indignant at being shushed. The jaguar stood up, looked at us a moment, and then walked down to coolness of the dry creek bed.
“Tell us about the Death Mask,” I said to the woman and focused on her walking stick now that the jaguar was gone.
“Wait, Max. I’m sorry, I really have to pee really, really bad,” she said and headed toward a big willow tree near the creek. “I’ll be right back. Don’t start without me.”
“Better go with her, Shane.”
I shrugged my shoulders at the woman after they left, like what are you going to do‒the girl had to go. I knew the feeling. Unfortunately, it usually hit me a few seconds after I fell asleep at night.
Hannah went behind the tree while Shane pretended to stand guard. It seemed like it took her forever, but after a few minutes they returned. “You were going to tell us about the Mask?” Hannah said as she walked toward us.
The woman didn’t answer her.
“What’s your name?” Shane asked her.
“It does not matter anymore.”
“Yes, it does. You told me your name was Magali,” I said.
“That is what the jaguar still calls me. His name is Gabor. He was a stone carver by trade and worked for the great Scribe Ub’aah at Copán. He was here to collect something that belonged to him,” she said and gave Shane a hard stare.
I got the impression she didn’t like him. “Okay, Magali. I’m Max. This is Hannah and Shane. Tell me why you and the young girl, Angelina, have sought me out. Why me? And how did you find me?”
“Angelina was my child. Itzamná took all of my children from me. I carry their souls with me in this basket. Wherever I am, I am reminded that I did not obey him. I search only for the Mask to escape this curse. It was Gabor who brought me here.”
“We’ve already told you we don’t have the Death Mask. Why do you think it would be here on this ranch?” I asked her.
“Our people, the Maya, came from the otherworld which lies below,” she said and swept her hand over the land around us. “Everything that we are, or will become, is from the grace our gods bestow upon us and who still dwell in the earth deep below the surface. Our ancestors are there waiting for us when we die. The Maya began below the earth within the life-giving waters that flow beneath our feet.”
“You’re a long way from home,” I said to her.
Magali smiled and shook her head that I did not understand. “The otherworld is beneath our feet and so is Itzamná.”
“Are you saying the Edwards Aquifer we are standing over now is connected to the Sac Actun and the Dos Ojos cave systems in Mexico and they extend all the way to the Yucatán and Guatemala?”
Magali nodded. I had no idea what Hannah was talking about. I just remembered something about a sacred cenote that Angelina had mentioned and I had looked the word up in the dictionary. We had the same formations here in the Texas Hill Country, but we called them sinkholes and limestone caverns.
“The otherworld of our ancestors is below us. Because you cannot see the water does not mean that the water does not flow and is all one lago grande below us.”
“What does that have to do with Angelina and why she came into my life?”
“She came to you because Itzamná knew you were protecting the sacred waters of our gods and ancestors.”
“Not me,” I said. Some people, including my good friend, Doc, had tried to convince me to join the grass-roots political movement to save the Edwards Aquifer, but I had declined. I had other more pressing needs at the time, namely solving the Pape Ranch Murders, and I knew it was a lost cause.
“The ecological reclamation of your ranch, Max. You were trying to help preserve the aquifer by reducing the surface water runoff and planting grasses that would retain the rainwater for the aquifer below,” Shane said.
“Maybe, but that’s a real stretch,” I said to him. I still wasn’t convinced. “Magali, you said your daughter was seeker of information. What did she want from me?”
Okay, I knew I was still a little obsessive about the girl, I realized that. Angelina was one of those failures in my life that I felt some serious guilt about, much like my daughter Elizabeth. I could have done better.
“I do not know,” Magali answered.
“You know she died, right? Down in Mexico,” I said.
“Yes, her soul is with me waiting to join our ancestors. We all die, even you.”
I ignored the veiled insinuation, but she was right. I forgot at times that I would not live forever. As Paul Simon once sang, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
“Angelina wandered onto my ranch after her mother died from a rattlesnake bite,” I said in an attempt to elicit more information about Angelina. “That was you, right?”
The woman went somewhere in her mind and seemed to lose focus for a brief second. “Kukulcán,” she said to no one in particular. Then she came back to us.
“The Maya
n feathered serpent god, Kukulcán,” Hannah said. “A lessor god, but still a powerful god in the serpent deity of the Maya. Even the Aztecs worshipped him later in the form of Quetzalcoatl.”
Like I knew what she was talking about. “So, what do you really want with me?” I asked Magali. I was not convinced that it was just the Death Mask she wanted. My instincts told me something else was at work here and I should be leery of what this woman said.
“I want only the death mask of Wak-Chan-K’awill so that I can be free of this curse, nothing more. Gabor has found his stone but Itzamná still has need of him.”
“What’s so special about his Death Mask?” Hannah asked.
“Wak-Chan-K’awill was Lord of Tikal.”
“That was in the sixth century, during the wars with Caracol and Kalak’mul. And, Dos Pilas,” Hannah said to me.
“You know Maya history,” Magali said.
Hannah was pleased. “Some. Tell us more, Magali,” Hannah urged.
I could tell Hannah was getting into this to the point she was ignoring what was obvious to me. She was accepting the woman at face value, whereas I doubted everything about her. If she wasn’t a spirit, then she was also not some transient woman in the ordinary sense of the word that had gone off the rails and was just passing through like most illegals. No, I could tell that Magali was an intelligent woman and she was playing us for something. She was either a con artist or she was as he had told me, a spirit, cursed to wander this part of Texas looking for a jade Death Mask. I leaned toward the latter and wanted Hannah and Shane to believe with me.
“Lord Wak-Chan-K’awill of Tikal supported the ascension of Yajaw Té Kinish II to Ruler of Caracol, and then he was betrayed by him. Lord Wak-Chan-K’awill attacked Caracol in his anger at betrayal and was killed in battle. Yajaw Té Kinish II, Lord of Caracol, then conquered the great city of Tikal. Those inhabitants of Tikal that weren’t killed or taken as slaves scattered into the mountains until Tikal paid Caracol great tribute,” Magali said.
“That was sometime around 562 A.D. and Tikal was a magnificent center of Mayan culture. Some estimates put the population at about seventy thousand, give or take,” Hannah said to me. “But with the new LIDAR Survey they completed last year, new estimates of the size and extent of the city put the population at a quarter million. Can you believe that? That puts Tikal and the Maya civilization right up there with Egyptian and Chinese civilizations; certainly greater than anything in Europe at the time.”
“The jade death mask of Tikal’s Ruler brought much honor and power to Caracol’s Ruler. As the conqueror of Tikal, the Lord of Caracol became one of the most powerful kings of the Maya empire.”
“Powerful, yes, but not a smart enough of a ruler to establish a dynasty that would stand the test of time,” Hannah said. “A few centuries later the Maya population began to decline.”
Magali nodded that she was correct. “Yes, just as you will, even if you don’t see it yet. The Maya people paid a heavy price for not interpreting correctly what the gods were telling them. For generations after the fall of Tikal the descendants of city scattered throughout Guatemala and inter-married with other Maya as well as the next conquerors of their land, the Spanish. But always, there was the legend and the sacred duty of the pure Maya from Tikal to retrieve the death mask of Lord Wak-Chan-K’awill and restore the glory of Tikal and the Maya.”
“I doubt that could happen in today’s world,” I offered. I couldn’t think of any lost civilization that had ever resurrected itself from the past, maybe with the exception of the Chinese today, but what did I know beyond watching the news.
“How do you think the Mask got here on the Pape Ranch?” Hannah asked.
“The Spanish conquerors found the hidden death mask of the twenty-first Ruler in the dynasty of the great Mayan founder Yax-Moch-Xok, known as Lord Wak-Chan-K’awill, at the city of Kalak’mul. They took it.”
Well, duh, I felt like saying, but I didn’t. The Spaniards and the Catholic Church pretty much took everything of value that wasn’t hidden and buried and then destroyed everything else related to the heathen Mayan culture. The question I had was why the Jesuits had taken it with them on their caravan? I couldn’t imagine a Priest in the fleeing caravan with all its gold was interested in Mayan antiquities. Was jade worth the weight of gold on a pack mule? I kind of doubted it. Magali was leaving something out.
“I don’t think you’re being very honest with us,” I said to her. “Why is a jade Death Mask really so important to you,” I asked her and then thought of the Shroud of Turin. Even though it had been ruled a fake, I’d pay good money to go see it if I was a tourist.
“The Death Mask of Lord Wak-Chan-K’awill must return to the city of Tikal so that the prophecy can be fulfilled.”
Hannah and I looked at one another, thinking the same thing. “What prophesy?” she asked.
“I do not know. Itzamná has not told me,” Magali said and then stooped to pick up her staff. She walked away from us to join the jaguar in the creek bed. Had we insulted her? I doubted it, and didn’t really care. I was going to sell the ranch and the new owner could deal with the woman and her quest.
. . .
“You know, the limestone hills of the Texas Hill Country hide many secrets, not the least of which is that the area was traversed and settled thousands of years before the Spanish Capt. Alonso Alvarez de Pineda mapped the Texas coast around 1519. A recent archeological find near Austin, Texas uncovered a spear point dating back 15,000 years ago. That would suggest the abundant rivers, streams, and underground springs sustained native peoples long before the Comanche Nation arrived,” Hannah said to us as we walked back.
“The geological formation of the Hill Country is not that different from the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico where limestone caverns and underground rivers sustained other Mesoamerica peoples and allowed many to flourish throughout history. Recent LIDAR imagery along with digital photography would suggest the extent of Mayan habitation and influence through Yucatán and Guatemala during the Mayan Classic Period rivaled that of other Eastern and Western civilizations of the same period. With such a large civilization, trade would have been inevitable. It’s conceivable that some Maya may have reached this far north into Texas.”
“Oh, come on, Hannah. That’s a real stretch. They would have had to go through Mexico and the Aztecs,” Shane said.
Hannah only shrugged.
“The water beneath the surface gave rise to belief systems that included a deity of gods who dwelled deep below in the labyrinth of limestone caverns; and a life above ground that evolved around the proper management of the water resource. While the Maya became great architects, engineers, astronomers, mathematicians, and warriors, at their soul they were a religious people. They believed in many gods, but it was the water that allowed the Mayan Civilization to flourish. When the rains that filled the porous underground limestone aquifers and rivers stopped, the Maya were helpless in dealing with the changes in climate. Their prayers and sacrifices did little to stem the draught year after year. And like all civilizations throughout history that lost what sustained them, they went to war, sacrificed their young, found faith in new gods, died off, migrated, or were eventually replaced by peoples who could adapt better.”
“Hannah, now just stop. You sound like you believe that woman,” Shane said.
The boy was going to shoot himself in the foot again, I could tell. “You need to keep an open mind,” I cautioned him.
Hannah nodded to me for the support and then skipped ahead of us and turned to face Shane as she walked backwards on the dirt road. “There was nothing the Mayan people or their gods could do change the near extinction of their culture when the climate changed and the rains diminished over the decades. Most who survived the territorial wars and mass migrations to more habitable locations, eventually assimilated with their neighbors, while others hunkered down through the centuries and clung to the old ways. And through it all, the gods still lived on beneath
the surface, in the cenotes, in the underground rivers, in the labyrinths of sinkholes in the limestone bedrock, and waiting for the Maya people above to rise once again to their former greatness so they could be worshiped once more,” she said to Shane.
Shane wasn’t buying it, but Hannah obviously was. I thought she had a pretty good handle on the history of the Maya. She playfully pushed Shane in the chest with her hands. “Oh, come on, Shane. Don’t you see, history is repeating itself? She just told us.”
Hannah was a woman who lived in the moment and I knew right then and there, unsure as I might be about Magali, I was going to help that boy find his bliss. I knew where it was, even if he didn’t.
A little while later, we spotted George waiting for us where we’d left him. I wasn’t going to admit it, but I was glad for the ride back. I was worn out.
“It was so unbelievable, George. The jaguar actually licked me. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
George looked at me for more explanation.
“Did you find out what she wanted?” George asked.
“She’s looking for an ancient jade death mask that belonged to the Ruler of Tikal in the mid-sixth century. That’s what the space below the capstone was for,” Hannah said.
“Maybe,” I offered. “Until we can find out more about the Mask and talk to the woman again, let’s not mention that we know about the Motagua River in Guatemala. You guys do some research tonight on the internet and we’ll meet at the Meeting Center at nine in the morning. Also see what you can find out about the Gabor character she refers to.”
. . .
As soon as George and I walked into the house, Katie was on him like a mosquito.
“Are you really my brother?” she asked and gave him her mother’s eye that she had perfected so well while on the Lummi Reservation. When he hesitated, she said, “Pick me up,”
George did as she commanded. When she was eyeball to eyeball with him, she said, “Well?”
He grinned at me. I left them to work out their new relationship and went to find Sunny. “Let’s see,” I heard him say. “I’m pretty sure I’m your half-brother.”
The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 23