Mayan December

by Brenda Cooper

  Torches passed, hand over hand, until each returning warrior held one. Beneath the flickering flames, seven stoic and sweaty captives were ringed by about twenty ecstatic and sweaty fighters of K’uk’ulkan.

  A mother and her young daughter brought water to be passed through the returning warriors, and then another one gave water to the captives, honoring them, too, as was the Way of Chichén.

  They would be honored until they died.

  People pushed and crowded in to get a better look, and Ah Bahlam let some step between him and his parents.

  He faded back, and then further back. In just a few moments, he had reached the crowd’s edge. All attention would be here for some time while the warriors’ stories traveled mouth to mouth through the crowd.

  He had planned to wait until everyone slept to find Hun Kan, but this was even better, for the high priest himself would come here.

  As soon as he stepped away from the plaza and neared the gate that would lead him to the quarters of the high priest, he slid into a slow, quiet jog, careful to avoid being seen by the few people that he passed, all still going the other way, toward the news.

  The high priest lived inside a stone building. Along the outside, temporary wooden structures with thatched roofs stood a line. She would be kept here. The small huts served acolytes and students, but were never fully occupied.

  He passed a painted white bone snake on the outside of the first building and peered inside the small window to find it empty of everything but a wooden table, a closed chest, and a sleeping mat. The peccary, the tapir, the ocelot, the puma, the jaguar, the macaw, the monkey, the quetzal—all empty except for various bits of simple furniture. The lower-level acolytes of the high priest did not share his opulent lifestyle.

  He found Hun Kan inside a small room with Cauac’s totem, a turtle, painted on the outside. He should have known to start there.

  Her back was to both the door and the window. She lay on her side, her dark hair spilling across her face. Her feet were bound even though her arms were free. How dare he bind her feet! It made her test herself every moment since with her hands free, she could free herself. She had more honor than the high priest! But maybe that was what he tested—the extent to which her will bowed to his.

  Ah Bahlam pushed hard on the door. It slammed open so easily he nearly stumbled. He rushed to her side. She flinched, not seeing him. “Go away!” Then she lifted her head and breathed out, “Ah Bahlam!” She sat up. “You should not be here. You have broken sacred law. You’ll die if you get caught.”

  “I had to know you’re all right. And you’re not.” Great streaks of blood stained her arm. Ni-ixie’s bright blue gift remained on her wrist, but it had been scratched. The scratches that were shallow on the gift continued deep down her arm, still bleeding slowly. They were at least a few hours old.

  She swallowed and looked up at him. Her eyes were rimmed in red from crying, but at the moment they were dry and clear. “There is nothing to be done. My family has asked after me, and been refused admittance. Only the high priest himself has talked to me.”

  He stroked her cheek. “I’m here.”

  “Please go,” she said. “This is between me and the high priest, me and my fate. I won’t be able to bear it if you’re killed.”

  “But you may be,” he hissed.

  “You’re not thinking,” she insisted. “You’re feeling. This is not the time to challenge the high priest.”

  An echo of exactly what he had told his jaguar in the Dance of the Way. He didn’t tell her that.

  Hun Kan continued. “Don’t be weak. You must accept whatever happens to me.” She looked away from him, but her voice didn’t falter. “After all, I am here. I know the turtle is painted on the outside of my place of keeping. Gods and goddesses rise from the turtle’s shell, but they must die first.”

  If she were a stranger, he would admire her words.

  She had gone beyond him into some place of acceptance he refused to follow.

  They couldn’t just run away. If his father weren’t so powerful, just the act of him being here could kill his family. “My father said the high priest is looking for sacrifices. He believes you could be chosen.” He touched her face. “But there is good news, there are captives.”

  She lifted her bloody arm and put a finger across his lips. “Nothing certain has been said to me. I will live until tomorrow, at least. He says I will watch the game.”

  Ah Bahlam wanted Hun Kan free now! And yet there was no honorable path to that freedom. He would have to think, and plan, and pray, and hope.

  Her great dark eyes, dry for herself, began to fill with bright water. “After the Dance of the Way, he came back and spoke to me. He wanted to know if you had ever spoken ill of him or of our traditions. I said of course not. But why did he ask?”

  Ah Bahlam shook his head. “The jaguar is strong, and while it rode me in the dance it . . . hesitated when he challenged it.”

  Her eyes widened. “What does that mean? Hesitated?”

  He recounted as much of the experience as he could, watching her lips grow tighter and her eyes rounder as he spoke.

  She clutched his arm. “The Dance of the Way is beyond the men who dance it. I have heard him say so. What will he do?”

  “I don’t know.” He hadn’t told her about the red warrior who stopped him and suggested the priest’s own elite might support a challenge. He needed to think about that, about what it meant for Chichén to be assaulted from inside and outside. He wanted her opinion, but fear for her held his tongue.

  “Surely we have a few moments.” He looked down at her wrist. Perhaps, if he could figure out how to remove the gift, the high priest would lose interest in Hun Kan. Her arm was so sliced and raw along one side that he paused before he touched it gently. “May I?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t take it even if you can. If I die, I wish to wear Ni-ixie’s gift, to recall her smile. I want a friend among the gods.”

  “Pah,” he spat, disappointed and a little angry. “If you don’t act to save yourself, your friend among the gods will be Ixtab, goddess of suicide.”

  She flinched at his words, but reached her hand up and curled it around the back of his neck. “Perhaps Ni-ixie is one of her faces. We do not know.” She pulled him down so that his face came close to hers, and then she lifted her head and kissed him.

  She had not kissed him in all the days they raced home through the jungle. Touching her lips with his sent fire through him, a heat that melted his bones. The jaguar inside his belly uncurled. He cupped her head with his free hand and let himself fall into her scent, even the scent of her blood; it brought back a brief vision of their blood mingling with Cauac’s in the altar bowl at Zama.

  It would all be right. Whatever happened would be right. This moment, this kiss, was right. It was all so right that he wanted to scream, to hear his throaty growl bounce off of the boles of large trees in the depths of the sacred jungle.

  She broke away first, whispering in his ear. “Footsteps. People come. You must go.”

  He fled.

  His path didn’t cross whoever made the footsteps, and he didn’t think they saw him. He crouched low, running on all fours until he was back where he was free to walk. He headed for the gates, passing people drifting home. There must have been some cloud on his features, for very few people greeted him.

  The jaguar was supposed to retreat from him after the Dance of the Way, to wait until it was called. It hadn’t—it had stayed in his belly, a small thing, barely noticed, but watchful. He felt it inside him now, but at least it didn’t ride him.

  He passed through the stone markers of the same gate the captives had come in, empty now, and then moved along the outside of the wall, staying unseen. He followed human and animal paths, guided by moonlight, twisting his steps upon each other until he was nearly lost. Finally, he knew to stop at the edge of a short cliff. A great dark hole opened below him: the sacred cenote.

  He sat wit
h his legs folded under him and placed his knife in front of his knees on the earth.

  Trees and bushes enveloped him, hard to name in the near-dark. Frog-song rose from below, and he heard the soft splashes of fish in the sacred water.

  He let the jungle take away his thoughts. Eventually his heart slowed, he breathed with the leaves and the night birds and the sleeping daytime animals. He slithered against rough bark with the snakes and felt the trees in the way of bats.

  But who, in this moment, should he pray to? K’inich Ahaw slept at night. Chaac turned his face. The jaguar god sat with him.

  K’ul’ulkan. Did he dare?

  He opened the question out to the jungle, the cenote, the power of this place.

  The jaguar inside him stirred and he spoke to it. “It will be all right. This is a choice with honor.”

  The jaguar snarled at him, a low grumbling that resonated deep in his bones.

  He chose the same arm he had cut in Zama. His knife drew a lightning stroke of pain across his skin and blood flowed wet down his arm.

  K’uk’ulkan, accept my blood, my life, my center. Let Hun Kan live, a fit vessel for you. Let honor be found for all of us. Let the captives provide strong sacrifice for you, and let the ball stay in the air tomorrow as a sign of your pleasure. Let it pass through the hoop of the world.

  He sat still as his blood flowed dark onto the dark earth. He breathed the jungle in and out, the palms and kapoks and ceibas and orchids and peccaries and wolves and birds, the stones and dirt and the scent of the sacred water below him. He became a jungle animal more than a man, the jaguar inside him and more than that, as if he were all the wild and sacred beings surrounding Chichén.

  When he stood on weak legs and began to walk back, taking a more direct route, his head felt clear, although his heart still hurt. Maybe walking the right path always hurt the heart.

  CHAPTER 37

  Nixie sat up in bed, leaning against a yellow pillow propped up against the wall, her book open on her lap. The flying horses were interesting, and she would love to live in the world they lived in, where girls rode the great-hearted beasts to save their kingdom. If she had been reading this at home, she would have devoured it in a day. But here the black ink fuzzed into clouds on the page. She wasn’t tired; she and Oriana had napped half the afternoon and then she’d swam in the pool while Oriana fussed with her costume for tomorrow—she was going to be a dancer at Chichén in the afternoon.

  All in all, it had been an ordinary day. But now, with Oriana gone and her mom fast asleep (she had looked exhausted when she came home, and hugged Nixie and listened to her day and told her about seeing the president, but she had fallen asleep before Nixie, something she never did), Nixie was awake and nervous. Where was Ian? How was Hun Kan? She had learned nothing today.

  She put the book down and picked up her feather, running it back and forth in her hand. Maybe she’d dream something tonight, but she needed to get to sleep first. She did like their new rooms. She and her mom both had big separate bedrooms so her mom didn’t take up the living room every night.

  She got up and walked out, staring at the television. She didn’t really want to watch anything. She still held the feather in one hand. She set it down and went to the sliding glass door by the balcony, opening it a few inches. Ocean smells soaked into the room while soft waves whispered against the shore. There was no wind, and here, on the far end of the resort, she heard no voices beneath the balcony. Just the waves.

  Nixie picked up the feather, and in her free hand she picked up Snake, wrapping the long green beast around her robe like a belt and clutching his head to her. She settled on the gold couch.

  She closed her eyes and counted the breaks of the waves, an uneven metronome.

  The waves flickered in and out, a soft, soothing sound in her ears that slowly saddened into sobs. The air cooled.

  She opened her eyes.

  Dream eyes.

  She stood on a packed-dirt surface that felt cool under her feet. Stars filled the sky, and she recognized the ancient fullness that had arched over them all two nights ago by the sacbe.

  Soft sobbing drew her attention. Like at Tulum. Hun Kan. It had to be Hun Kan. The sobs came from behind a wooden wall with a turtle painted on it. The image was almost as tall as Nixie, and crude.

  There were other huts, a line close together. The bulky dark form of a stone temple blotted the stars just behind the huts.

  There was a door in the wall with the turtle, at the far left. As she walked toward it, her feet made no sound. When she reached out for the door, it felt like putting her hand into a drift of sea-fog even though it looked like solid rough-hewn wood. It was closed. When she pushed on it, it didn’t move.

  She stared at it.

  She pushed again. Nothing.

  She ran at it, throwing her shoulder into it, and actually felt a stab of pain. The door barely registered her assault.

  There had to be a way. This was a dream. She’d known she would dream tonight. But it wasn’t like the dream from before, the time they could feel the thick roughness of the stones by the sacbe as solid things and when the jaguar’s throaty roar had made her bones shake. Now, she felt like a ghost.

  Her mom’s hand had passed through the leather necklace the bead had been strung on.

  She stepped through the door as if it weren’t even there.

  The room was empty except for Hun Kan lying alone on a dirt floor. She wore a red dress lined with yellow, bunched around her knees. A thick rope bound her feet. The skin under the rope was red and angry.

  Nixie’s eyes traveled up Hun Kan’s body, stopping at her side. She not only breathed, she cried. Softly, like the waves through the resort window. Nixie bent down, whispering, “Hun Kan.”

  There was no answer, no change.

  Hun Kan didn’t open her eyes, but simply lay still, sobbing quietly. Every once in a while, a fresh teardrop ran down a track on her cheek and fell onto a quarter-sized patch of mud on the dirt floor. She must have been crying a long time.

  What had happened?

  Dream Nixie ran her hands over her friend, feeling her body, both of their bodies, but barely. Hun Kan stirred, and rolled over onto her back. One of her hands held the other wrist, the knuckles bloody. The wrist that held Nixie’s watch.

  Someone had tried to cut it from her! They’d cut Hun Kan cruelly, but only scratched the watch face. The band was made of woven Kevlar. Didn’t they know nothing short of high-carbon stainless steel would cut it?

  Well, of course not.

  The face of the watch was visible. Nixie crouched beside her friend, staring at the watch for so long that her cheeks were soaked with tears.

  Hun Kan didn’t move.

  When Nixie opened her eyes and found Snake’s head soaked in her tears, it was midnight.

  She had given Hun Kan the watch.

  What had she done?

  DECEMBER 21, 2012

  CHAPTER 38

  The big white bus they rode in smelled like plastic and old coffee. Nixie groaned as a security guard gave them lists of rules. You’d think that after her mom got to tour all those important people, they’d have been picked up by a black limo, or at least been able to drive their own car. By the time they got to Chichén Itzá, they were already two hours late.

  At least they were here.

  She had to find Hun Kan and show her how to take off the watch. She should have listened to Ian about not giving the old Mayans anything. She had to make this right.

  The parking lot was closed to all traffic except buses and more buses. Nixie stood by her mom in a long, colorful line of people snaking toward the main gates of Chichén Itzá. She stared at the parts of the ruins she could see over people’s heads. The bright primary colors she knew belonged to the real Chichén, the old one, streamed from this one on banners. It looked like a party.

  Nixie fidgeted with the bead they had dug up from the past, which she’d stuck in her front pants pocket. The necklace
draped over her white shirt, looped twice so it wouldn’t catch on anything. Most important, the quetzal feather, wrapped carefully in cardboard, stuck in the back band of her pants. The top of it tickled her ear. Her mom had argued so much about the necklace Nixie hadn’t said anything about the feather. Now, she stood a little sideways, hoping her mom wouldn’t notice.

  Her mom clutched Nixie’s hand, but otherwise she seemed far away. She had woken tense and growly this morning, and every few minutes she glanced down at her phone, looking for messages.

  For Ian. He hadn’t come back, and her mom was worried. Not that she said so, but they were all doing it, Nixie and Oriana and Alice, talking about him from time to time and checking their phones obsessively.

  Oriana had said he was supposed to be here, that he had a pass in as a security guy. Maybe Oriana had already found him.

  Nixie rubbed the bead in her pocket for luck.

  They shuffled forward a few more steps and then stopped again. A man in white shorts walked by with popsicles. Nixie’s mom bought two juice sticks and handed one to Nixie, already dripping sugary-orange drops onto the dirty parking lot. Nixie’s hand was sticky from clutching the empty stick by the time they got to the gates, and showed their tickets and ID. The gate guard seemed impressed by the paper her mom showed and talked to her in Spanish, pointing away from where he was sending most other people.

  Inside, it was emptier than Nixie had expected after the long line. There were a lot of people, but there was still room to walk and space to sit.

  Her mom led her to a small staff bathroom in the back of a building to wash the sticky juice from their fingers. She pulled a comb through Nixie’s hair, fussing with it far more than usual. She cocked her head and used the comb to flip up the front side. “You might as well take that out, now.”