Alice put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, squeezing softly through the clear plastic of her poncho. Surely Nix was disappointed, crushed.
Nixie didn’t turn around.
Alice let her hand fall, willing to wait Nix out at least until the downpour stopped. As she turned back to watch the rain, Ian came up beside her, circling her loosely with his right arm. She stiffened, then let out a deep breath as Ian reached for Oriana with the other arm. Safety in numbers.
Peter hooked himself to Oriana, and the four adults stood together looking down the road they’d come up, everyone in a different colored plastic poncho, no more than bags with hoods, and holes for their arms. If there was someone down the road to see, they’d look like jelly beans.
The constant backdrop of cicada song had stilled. Water splashed on the plastic, on their heads, dripped from the roof of the trees. Ian pulled her in closer, smelling like jungle and salty sweat and the freshness of water. She closed her eyes, accepting the pressure of his arms in the group embrace. Conscious that her own arms and torso were still stiff, she took a deep breath and relaxed. She heard water and his breath and her breath; all of the other jungle sounds in abeyance, waiting.
The water stopped.
Cicadas and birds sang.
She opened her eyes to a clear blue sky, dizzying blue, and pearl white stones in neat rows under her feet. Nixie, behind her, gasped. “Let’s go!”
The four adults let loose of each other in a tangle of arms, turning. The wall of trees might have never been. In front of them, the sacbe stretched clear, clean and fresh, the jungle to either side tamed, but taller and closer in.
Nixie was already loping down the white road.
Peter yelped. Oriana gasped. Ian touched Alice’s arm, propelling her the only way a mother could go.
After her daughter.
Oh my god. She bit back a screech and grabbed for Ian, who clutched her as he whispered, “We did it. She did it.”
The road under Alice’s feet was solid, more solid even than the dream, as solid as reality. She dropped down and touched a stone, feeling its rough edges. “Wait, Nix!” she called.
Nixie stopped and turned, her face glowing with excitement. “We don’t have much time!”
You’d think she was at Disneyland instead of back in a hostile past. “Wait,” Alice said, and lifted her still-soaked rain gear over her head. One by one, the others also stripped off their bright plastic ponchos.
“Come on,” Nixie encouraged.
Alice glanced up at Ian, who was looking all around him. “It’s magic.” He must have felt her gaze. He looked down at her. “We’re here for a reason. Let’s do it, since I’d bet we can’t get back until we do.”
She shut her mouth on an argument about that idea. She didn’t buy it, but the look on Nixie’s face demanded a mother’s strength. She took a step, and then another one, and didn’t fall down. This time was real like her own except it smelled better. Another step. And then Nixie was smiling at her and she caught up to her daughter and stood beside her, looking up the white road.
They followed Nixie in a line: Alice, Oriana, Peter, and in back, watching behind as well as in front, Ian. Their warrior. His presence gave comfort even though she had no illusions of safety. They could never outfight either band of Mayans, formal warriors or ambushers.
The jungle around them was taller, but drier, showing signs of stress: brown branches, fewer new shoots. Certainly it had not rained here today, maybe not for days. But life still teemed. Monkeys tracked them from the treetops. Bright red and green birds—parrots and macaws—startled Alice repeatedly, flashing across the sacbe in jewel-colored streaks. More, many more, than in 2012.
It had been time to turn around, in that other time, the one where their phones collected worldwide news from the air and they had a car tucked safely by an Authentic Mayans Here sign. In this time, they kept going, the following of Nixie inevitable.
Peter’s eyes were too wide for Alice to imagine he could find his tongue anyway, and Ian and Oriana had gone into deep states of alertness.
Alice focused on Nixie, on a bob of her hair that had escaped her ridiculous big clip, on the rise and fall of her hips, on the bright blue of her shirt, her feet handling the smoother by far, but still uneven road. Step, step, skip, step, step, long step, step-step, step.
Stop.
Alice nearly ran into Nix. Oriana and Peter fetched up at her back and Ian stopped beside her. Peter gasped out, “What? Is this—?”
Nixie held up a hand to silence him and focused on Alice, her eyes the blue of the sky here in the past. She whispered, “Recognize it?”
Alice blinked. She walked a few feet up the road and then turned back. “It’s where we came in. From the dream.”
“Okay,” Peter said. “Okay, how do you know what time you’re in? We’re in?”
Alice was far more curious about whether or not there would be a pile of dead Mayan warriors around the bend. The questions related, though, at least a little. “We don’t,” she said. She suddenly wanted to finish this, get the bead and get back. Except if they got the bead from this now, then what? If the dream was a promise, then what did it mean to find the bead? “Nix?” she said. “Are you scared? Do you think we should go home?”
Nixie swallowed and chewed on her lip. Finally, she said, “I feel heavy here.”
Alice knew exactly what she meant. Stuck. She nodded and took Nixie’s hand, the memory of the dream-carnage thick in her throat. This was no dream.
They walked around the bend.
There were no bodies. Red ants coated the white rocks, carrying blood-stained twigs and leaves and other small things. Each ant was half the size of Alice’s little finger, and the river of them all was as wide as she was tall. Alice swallowed and held Nix close to her. “They’re cleaning up.”
Ian dragged a downed tree and threw it over the ants. “Hurry,” he said, demonstrating, walking along the wood above the insects.
Nixie and Alice followed. By the time Peter stepped from the wood onto the white road, thin pulsing veins of ants swarmed over the tree. Ian dragged it back, off the road, and Alice smiled in silent approval.
Just past the ants, past the scene of the fight, the pile of quarry rocks stood just as it had in their dream. Alice reached a hand out and put it on Ian’s arm. “That’s it. That’s where we dreamed we were.”
He grinned at her, looking pleased, then stopped in the middle of the road and looked around, as if absorbing the location.
Her good expedition camera was deep in the bottom of her pack. “Nix? Do you have your camera?”
“Of course.” Nixie sounded more excited than awed now, as if passing the ants had freed her of some dread. She snapped pictures of the scene with and without people, directing, sure of herself.
Peter and Oriana took phone pictures.
Alice tensed when Nixie ran back to kneel near the ants, capturing them carrying bloody leaves. When she came back, her eyes shining, she looked up at Alice. “Ready?”
Peter had only lost a little of his shell-shocked look. “Maybe I better find it. I wasn’t in the dream and I haven’t been in the past.”
Alice glanced at Ian. He nodded softly and climbed up near the top of the rock pile, choosing a vantage point much like theirs had been in the dream.
“I want to find the bead,” Nixie protested.
“You can take pictures,” Alice replied, using her best dig-boss voice, the one she’d developed last summer keeping piles of barely post-grad students in line.
Nixie settled on a flat spot on a stone just a little above the egg-shaped rock so she could get a nice, easy picture of Peter. She spotted the disturbed place where she’d dug the hole and pointed to it.
It only took a few moments to find the bead. Peter held it up, his gaze into the camera deadly serious, his face white. Late afternoon sun coated even the dull stone of the carved bead in soft gold. He whispered, “It was just where she said. Okay. So t
his has to be the past. Okay.” He looked at Alice. “You were right. No alternate universe could be so like our past today. Okay?”
He was clearly scared, but heck, so was she. It didn’t help anything. “Yes, Peter, we’re time-traveling.”
Her immediate concern was getting the hell back. She still felt—how had Nix put it? Heavy in this world. The warm, too-dry air stuck to her skin, the chalky limestone dust made her want to sneeze, and all of the sounds were wild.
It was late . . . everyone sun-painted like the bead in pre-dusk pale gold. Oriana had gone over to Peter and taken the bead in her hand, and Nix was snapping a picture. “We should go,” Alice said, looking up at Ian. “We got what we came for.” Maybe not enough proof for anyone else, but enough for her.
“We can’t get back to the car without walking the jungle at night,” he said. “The old sacbe and the rusted tracks would be tough in the dark.”
“We’re time-traveling. How do we know we won’t get back in the morning there?”
“Want to try it?” he asked mildly.
She shivered. She didn’t really want to stay here. The fight had been here, and she didn’t want to run into the ambushers—or the jaguar—any more than she wanted to trip on old metal right now. It would be really dark soon.
Primitive dark.
Starlight! My god, she could see the ancient stars. She didn’t want to go back, after all. Not yet. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t.” She climbed up the stones easily, her feet remembering where they had gone the night before. She found a flat rock to lean against, a foot or so from Ian, close but not touching. “I suppose the people here won’t have night vision glasses and semi-automatic weapons,” she said, making sure she was speaking too softly for Nixie to hear. “But I saw them kill each other.”
Ian stared silently out over the jungle. Even though his features softened in the fading light, there was unmistakable readiness in him. “My journeys before were preparation. The bead was just proof. I made it then, and we found it now. But why you and Nixie? She’s a kid and you don’t believe in magic.”
“Tough to deny it right now.”
“But you’ll try to deny it when you get back.”
She winced. “I hope not.” She watched Nix and Oriana trying to catch more pictures before the day faded entirely. Nix’s blonde head and Oriana’s dark one made a pretty contrast from above like this. Peter seemed to have become a little more like himself; he had his little computer out and was furiously taking notes. “But what is there to learn here? These people were as bloody as we are. And based on what we know so far, they weren’t noble savages. The Lords of Itzá chased power as surely as any of our worst leaders. So what’s the message?”
“Maybe that’s why you. You’re enough of a cynic to report accurately. And you’re an expert.” Laughter floated up toward them from below. “And maybe Nix is just innocent.”
She bristled a little as his use of her pet name for Nix. She scooted a little bit away from him, and immediately felt better. He noticed, and gave her a long, silent look, but didn’t say anything.
Another reason she was here had clicked in her head. “I’m touring Marie Healy around Chichén day after tomorrow.”
He stilled, then grinned broadly. “The climate change conference.”
“Right. I think I’m touring them all.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. “It’s the chance of a lifetime. How many people get to talk to the leaders of the whole damned world?”
She should be as awed by it as he was, as delighted. It was downright strange that she wasn’t. “It’s just . . . it’s not as important as figuring this out, and keeping Nixie safe. Besides, if I don’t get back tomorrow for more meetings with the Secret Service, I won’t be touring anyone.”
“Mom!” Nixie called up, delighted.
Just at Alice’s eye level, a quetzal bird perched on a branch still quivering with the weight of its landing. Alice blinked at the bird. “Hello,” she said, feeling a bit silly.
The bird preened, and looked from her and Ian down to Nixie, calling keow-kowee-keow. Its voice had more strength than beauty, a contrast to the bird itself, which seemed to be perched precariously. The combination made her laugh. “Too bad I can’t take you back with me.”
“It’s the bird-man’s bird,” Nixie called up. “So I know they’re safe. It would be sad if they weren’t.”
Alice bit her tongue. Birds with feelings (real or imagined) were no stranger than anything else that had happened in the last day. She stood up. “Are we all agreed to spend the night here and walk back with first light?”
Peter was rolling up his computer keyboard. “Can we get back?”
“I’m sure we can,” Ian said, standing next to Alice and surveying the area. “But I don’t want to pop back into the jungle on our side at night. Do any of the rest of you?”
Alice didn’t think they even could go now. She still felt solidly here. But something in the back of her head, her heart, didn’t mind. What a gift to be here, in this time. “I want to see the stars. This may be my only chance to ever see them the way the old Mayans did.”
Nixie was climbing up near them. “Me, too.”
“Can we build a fire?” Peter asked.
“No,” Alice immediately answered. “To truly see the stars you need the blackest sky possible.”
“And we don’t want to attract attention,” Ian added.
Alice shivered.
They made a simple meal of the leftover snacks: potato chips, apples and Gatorade.
By the time they finished eating, there was barely enough light to see to put the bags and trash back in the backpack, and hang it from a tree in hopes it wouldn’t attract ants. They gathered close together, Alice and Nixie on one rock, Peter and Oriana each close by, and Ian above them. Ian looked up at the velvet-black sky shot through with stars. “So, you’re the archeoastronomer.”
He pronounced it right. She smiled. “I am.”
“What would the old Mayans have seen in this sky?”
“They knew most of our constellations, but had different words for them. What we call Monoceros and Canis Major, for example, are—roughly—the paddler gods, Stingray and Jaguar, in a celestial canoe. They tracked Venus very carefully, and knew its orbit more precisely than we did until the 1970s. Hold on . . . I think I can find it.” She should be able to do this easily, but the banquet of stars made it tougher. “There.” It hung low on the horizon, brighter than any stars around it. “Do you see it?”
She heard a soft laugh from Ian. “I think so,” and an “of course,” from Nixie, who had sat out with her at many observatories while she was working on the paper she’d just published.
“But what’s most important is they saw the stars as gods, as teachers, as guides. They understood complex astronomical terms that we didn’t document until much later.”
“So no one had to teach them the Earth isn’t the center of Universe?” Peter asked sleepily.
She laughed. “No, I don’t think so.” She licked her lips. It was a good question. “I don’t know. They did see the stars as influencing them and their world. Maybe I’d say they saw the Earth as a center, but not the center.”
Oriana asked, “What about in our time? I keep hearing about something special in the stars, some way they line up that’s very rare. Ian tried to explain it to me once, but I don’t think I fully understood it.”
In the moment Alice gave Ian to respond, Nixie said, “The equinox sun lines up with both the dark hole in the Milky Way and the center of the galaxy.”
Oriana giggled. “Okay. Pretty easy. Alice, how rare is that?”
“Oh,” she said, feeling a little giddy, “That happens about once every thirteen baktun’s. That means once every fifty-one centuries. It’s supposed to be a time when there are a lot of solar flares, too.”
“Ah,” Oriana said. “Rare.”
Peter spoke up. “There have been more flares lately.”
So she and Ian had become joint leaders of the expedition? She swallowed. Ian was the strongest, and Peter the weakest, perhaps even weaker than Nixie. “I’ll take Oriana,” she replied, and Ian looked over at her, the starlight illuminating a conspiratorial wink that tickled her below the belly, making her warm and uneasy.
She and Oriana drew the first part of the dark of night. Good. She’d have stayed up anyway.
Ian and Peter lay out their ponchos on large flat rocks and stretched out on them. Alice couldn’t imagine how they’d actually sleep, but at least Ian hadn’t pulled the man card on her.
As Alice and Oriana climbed up to find good watch-spots, Nixie called up, “Mom, I can’t sleep. Can I sit with you?”
Alice reached a hand out to help Nixie up. “Sure.”
Nixie tucked herself next to Alice, head on Alice’s shoulder, and mother and daughter looked up together at the bright blaze of stars.
The dark rift in the Milky Way hung black as an iris above her, surrounded by the light of billions of stars and galaxies. If she closed her eyes halfway, softening her focus, it was easy to imagine being an astronomer in this ancient world. Half her time would have been spent in the glory of nights like this one, which progress had stolen from the world.
The river of stars sent enough light for Alice to make out the dark lines of Nixie’s eyelashes. The brilliance of each individual star shone clearer than she had ever seen from ground-based expeditions or photos. And unlike satellite shots, written over with numbers and dates and captured on square screens or scraps of paper, this sky had fullness. Dimension.
“It’s magic,” Nixie whispered.
That would have to do. Even if she didn’t believe in magic. The thought was wry now, and she smiled as the magic of the stars above penetrated all the way to her bones.
Mayan December Page 14