Nixie slid the cardboard and the feather out from her back, relieved and a little apprehensive. “I might need it. Why else did he give it to me, if not for today?”
Her mom gave her a dark look. “You’re to stay close to me. I don’t want you going back.”
Nixie stroked the feather softly, careful to brush it only down from the slightly crushed shaft to the delicate tip. “I might not be able to help it mom. I never choose to go back.”
“What about Tulum?”
“I chose to hear who was crying.”
“You chose on the sacbe.”
There wasn’t anything she could say to that so she turned and splashed water on her face.
Her mom gave an exaggerated I’m-not-happy-but-I-won’t-get-you-in-trouble-now sigh. “I wish you hadn’t brought it. You have to take care of it now.”
“I will.” She didn’t want to talk about it—she just wanted to go back and find Hun Kan as fast as possible. “Let’s go.”
They neared the entrance to the Ball Court just as announcers began loudly exhorting, “Clear the center,” in a rotation of Spanish, Mayan, and English.
They stood in another line of sweaty people and produced two more tickets to show they should be there. Her mom handed her one, smiling. “Don’t lose this.”
“I won’t.” At least her mom trusted her that far. They always did this at movies and plays, too.
Two sets of temporary bleachers had been erected along the sides of the Ball Court, away from the great stone wheels the players would eventually try to hip and elbow and head-bump the heavy balls through. It was crowded, all except for the tallest set of bleachers, closest to the middle, cordoned off with yellow and black VIP tape.
Security guards herded people to their seats until the main floor of the Ball Court was empty.
Drums sounded.
A man in a red costume stood at the top of the steps leading up to the Temple of the Jaguar. His headdress was as tall as he was, with bright macaw feathers that stuck out almost in a sunshine pattern. His face was masked like a bird and he wore a skirt with feathers and beads in it. His bare legs were long and brown. Below his knees, he wore leather circles that even more feathers dangled from. “He doesn’t look real, mom.”
“None of this looks real, anymore.”
“No kidding.”
The announcer was on an English round, and Nixie caught the words, “Last time a ball game was played here could have been five hundred years ago, or even seven hundred. And perhaps this is the last ball game that will be played here. You are . . . ”
Nixie let the voice fuzz out, already knowing from Oriana that there would be dancers first. Oriana would be one of them, even though she was Italian and not Mayan. But she spoke a little Mayan and lived here, and had dark hair and eyes. That had been enough for a bit part.
Drums wafted in through the entrance. The drummers came in first, wearing white leather pants and vests and black boots. Women in simple white shirts and flaring white skirts followed them. Nixie looked for the red skirt Oriana had been working on, but everyone, even the men, wore white. The performers faced away from the drums, which picked up speed until the dancers flung themselves out, the women circling and the men doing acrobatics. It was too modern. She glanced up at her mom. “This isn’t right. It’s not even close.”
Her mom whispered, “They’re going backwards. Remember how in the Xcaret show they started with the old times and moved forward? This is starting with now and moving backward, and supposed to take us slowly to the ball game.”
But Hun Kan needed her now. “Mom? In the old time, are they having ceremonies, too?”
“I suppose so. They had them every year here on the solstice. It’s always the same date.”
So if time was a stack of cards, there were hundreds of dances going on all at once, all on this day. Nothing was going to happen just sitting here. Clearly there’d been a ticket sold for every inch of hot silver seat on the bleachers. “Can I go walk around? I’m waiting for Oriana’s dance and it’s going to be hours.”
“No.”
She hated being eleven. Why couldn’t she be sixteen or even twenty?
CHAPTER 39
The morning sun stung Ah Bahlam’s eyes. Then his father’s face blotted it out, his eyes angry and his jaw tight as a drumhead. “The High Priest of K’uk’ulkan sent a runner to me this morning. You will not play in the game. You will have no role in the game.” He stared down, pain and anger both shaping his features. “You will watch it only.”
Ah Bahlam blinked, silent for a long time as disappointment twisted to anger, souring his blood. “Will I dance the doors of the world open?”
“All the lords do,” his father said. “Even the ones out of favor.”
That stung.
Then he leaned down and grabbed Ah Bahlam’s blood-streaked arm. He stared at the deep sacrificial cuts, still angry-red with dried blood. “Maybe the high priest is right.” He jerked Ah Bahlam up, wrenching his sore arm and sending shooting pains all the way to his head. “You think you learned enough in less than a year with the shamans to mix your own sacrifices into the power of this ceremony? What will the high priest think when he sees this, especially after you challenged him in the dance?”
Ah Bahlam was getting tired of restraint. He pushed himself up, trembling with fatigue, anger, and fear. Tasting the fear allowed some of the anger to leak away, but he refused to back down into being a child at the mercy of his father’s words. He made his own words come out slowly, demonstrating his control. “Father, I did what I needed to. Warriors are allowed to make personal sacrifices. It is done, and even if I wanted to, I can’t undo it.”
“I raised you to take my place.”
Ah Bahlam sat quietly, waiting.
“Mayan lords must be brave. Courage without thought kills a lot of us. Perhaps you will dead before the year is over.” Ah Bahlam’s father turned his face away. “All I can hope now is that you have an honorable death.”
He watched the back of his father’s head, willing him to turn around and smile, to look proud of him even if he was worried. It had all started with Ni-ixie. He had not called her, had not chosen her. She had chosen him. He had to trust. “Father?”
“Yes?” His father did turn, and he looked as sad as Ah Bahlam felt.
No words would heal this rift. He drew a breath, surrendered. “It’s time to go. We must eat and prepare to dance the world open before the game.”
“Wash the blood from your arm before your mother sees it.”
Ah Bahlam cut off a bitter laugh. He stood and headed toward a basin of water the kitchen slaves had just filled for the day.
At least the jaguar did not seem to live inside his skin this morning. He sensed that he could call it, but he wanted to be clearly and only himself for a while. He took a cup of water and walked away from the family compound to scrub his wounds. His arm stung, and he wished for Hun Kan’s soft hands to clean his cut as she had the now-healing gash across his thigh. Even more, he longed for the simplicity of Zama, the ease of being a student. Chichén was so much more confusing and terrible than it had seemed when he was still a young man.
He had dreamed so hard of being a grown-up Lord of Itzá.
And all summer he had dreamed of playing in the game. This game.
He had to return to the basin twice to get enough water to wash all the blood off.
CHAPTER 40
Alice finally spotted Oriana swirling and dipping, third back in a line of four, her synchronization just a little off. The bright red skirts looked like carnations from a distance and roses when the women came closer. The men they danced with also wore red, with white shirts. The announcer was busy claiming that red stood for sacrifice, for blood, and that the dancers chose the color to symbolize death, and thus avoid it. The dance was the sacrifice.
Exactly the kind of nonsense Alice hated on tour buses. The sacrificial life and choices of ancient Mayans was neither simple nor complet
ely understood, but they had clearly seen death as part of a life that continued after death. Kings had decapitated themselves at the height of their power. Mayans danced to please the gods and gain power, not to forestall death.
As Oriana came nearer, Alice leaned down close to her daughter. “She’s having fun, isn’t she?”
Nixie nodded, her eyes tracking Oriana, her hands stroking the feather, and her feet doing a staccato pound on the ground in front of them.
“Are you okay?” Alice asked. “You seem . . . so nervous.” Even more than me, and I’m nervous. “Are you scared?”
Nixie kept her eyes on Oriana. She whispered, “I’m excited.” She licked her lips. “And I want to see Ian.”
Well, so did she.
“And Hun Kan,” Nixie’s eyes shone with determination.
Such focus. So much of her daughter’s energy was centered on this other girl. “I can’t help you there.” Alice put a hand on Nixie’s shoulder. “Do you want to meet my friend Marie?”
“When?”
Alice eyed the delegation she’d spotted coming in the gate, checking to make sure Marie was among them. “In about three minutes?”
Nixie turned around and blinked at her, then grinned. “Really?”
“She’s asked us to sit with her.”
“I . . . what if we just sit here?”
Why would Nixie say such a thing? And would she answer Alice if she asked? “She’ll have better seats.”
Nixie swallowed. “But I like these. We can see people come in and out the gate.” She looked almost desperate. “Hun Kan,” she whispered, just under her breath.
The first line of bodyguards already snaked behind their seats, moving toward the VIP bleachers. “Come on.”
Alice breathed out a sigh of relief when Nixie actually stood. As they walked around to the back, Marie called a greeting to Alice and stopped to wait for them. The man in white was there again, and he stopped near Alice and Nixie, still unsmiling.
In just a moment, Marie reached them. She walked alone between two sets of bodyguards, and gestured Alice and Nix to her side. “Hello! You must be Nixie.”
Nixie gazed at her evenly, as if taking her measure. No awe, no fear. Just curiosity. “I’m happy to meet you.”
Marie smiled. “Will you tell me about the turtles?”
“Sure.” Now Nix blushed. She didn’t seem happy, though. They hadn’t finished the conversation that Marie’s arrival had interrupted.
The VIP bleachers filled in quickly. To Alice’s surprise, they were actually seated just below Marie, close enough for conversation.
The dance started to wind down, and Oriana’s group came close to the assembled VIP’s. The drums rose to a strong beat and then fell, the dancers slowing, and slowing, matching the falling and softening drum until they stood completely still.
Applause erupted and dancers bowed. Oriana looked toward where they had been.
Nixie squeezed Alice’s hand quickly. “She’ll look for us by our old seats. I’ll be right back.” She handed Alice the long quetzal father, and without waiting for an answer, she was gone.
Alice shivered in spite of the sticky heat. She didn’t want Nixie off alone, even though she should be able to see her from here.
Above her, Marie laughed softly. “Spunky.”
Nix was eleven. She could find her way back. Alice stretched, trying to get rid of the worry riding her spine. “Marie? Did you have a good night?” How were your dreams?
“It was hard to get to sleep. I kept thinking about old times here and about how different everything is now.”
I keep thinking about yesterday when we were on the temple of K’uk’ulkan. Or that’s what Alice thought she meant. “I slept so well I don’t even remember if I did dream. But maybe that’s because it was so late when I got home.”
“What did I miss here?” Marie asked.
“Nix’s babysitter danced in that last dance—the one with the red dresses.” She looked over and spotted Nix by the old seats, although Oriana wasn’t with her. A new set of dancers, men dressed in costumes that made them look like birds and animals, trotted slowly onto the field. Good. The dance of the Wayob. Maybe this would be the last dance. It wasn’t the right historical order, or even the right day for this particular dance. But it would be majestic. “There’s a theory that in the old days the dances were supposed to open portals to the stars. Particularly to the Milky Way—to the dark rift I was telling you about yesterday.”
“Maybe these dances will do the same,” Marie mused.
Alice kept her eyes on Nix. “I think the old dancers had help. Mayan shamans used hallucinogens. And everyone was of one religious mind.”
“Your friend who danced? What does she believe in?”
Alice frowned, surprised that the question was so hard to answer. “I don’t know. She’s been with us every day for a week, but I never asked her. She’s a reef diver and she believes in conservation. She wants peace. But I don’t know if she has a . . . a religion.”
“Was she with you when you went hiking?”
Alice nodded, squinting, looking for Nix. She couldn’t see her, but a small group of people milled about, letting someone down the bleachers. Surely Nix was just too small to see in a standing crowd.
“Can you find your babysitter, so I can talk to her?” Marie asked.
“Now?” Alice turned to look up at Marie, surprised. Clearly, Marie meant it. “Sure, I can try.”
Marie held out her hand. “Want me to watch the feather for you?”
She handed it to Marie. “I’ll be right back.”
She stepped down into the crowd, looking for Oriana’s slight, dark form, but even more, for Nixie’s golden hair, which had disappeared in the moment she’d turned to hand the feather to Marie.
CHAPTER 41
A small crowd shifting unhappily to let a fat man down the bleachers gave Nix the perfect cover. If only her mom had let her go, so she didn’t have to sneak away. But finding Hun Kan mattered more than anything.
She hurried past the guards, using a technique her mom had taught her a long time ago for foreign airports: Walk fast and look like you know exactly what you’re doing. That got her out of the Ball Court, but then she stopped, unsure. Large crowds and guided groups milled noisily through the open spaces. The shadowy building she’d seen in her dream hadn’t been very big, but it was stone. If it had survived, she’d recognize it. She needed a map. She started off for the entrance to find one.
Nixie was close enough to see the guards’ faces when she stopped dead in her tracks. Ian. Coming toward her. He wore black pants and a white shirt, and carried a lightweight navy jacket with the bright yellow emblem for security on it. His dreadlocks were pulled back from his face and fell down his back in a neat ponytail. Peter walked on Ian’s left. Ian leaned down, talking to an older man dressed in traditional Mayan clothes with a homemade pack slung around his middle and baby-blue tennis shoes on his feet. Don Thomas Arulo?
She raced toward them, cutting off three older women in her pell-mell rush, hardly noticing when one of them screeched at her in Spanish. Where had Ian been? What did he know?
She skidded to a stop when she got close, squinting. It wasn’t Don Thomas Arulo. This man was older and more wrinkled, and his eyes were darker. Gray hair hung straight to his shoulders and a big home-made leather pouch was wrapped around his middle. Calm seemed to drip off of him, unless she looked directly at his eyes, which glittered with curiosity and looked a little . . . scared. As if he had great amounts of fear and quiet strength all at once, feelings Nixie had never seen together so clearly.
Ian’s voice pulled her attention away. “Nixie! Am I ever glad to see you.”
The old man’s head whipped around faster than she would have thought possible. His dark eyes bored into hers, and then rolled up in his head as he bowed to her, so his eyes never left her even though he bent nearly in half. The fear still shone in his gaze, but also the same sort of wonder
she’d seen in Hun Kan’s eyes on the beach. When he stood back up, he said, “Ni-ixie?” in a voice so full of hope it plucked at her insides. He held out a hand to her, palm down.
She patted his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Cauac,” he said, slowly, as if he wasn’t sure she would understand. He reached out and touched the necklace from Hun Kan.
She glanced up at Ian.
He grinned at her. “Cauac,” he repeated. “He’s from Hun Kan and the bird-man’s time. The bird man has a name—he’s Ah Bahlam, which means ‘jaguar.’”
Jaguar. She liked it. “How did you get here?” A car must have been hard on the old man. Besides, Ian’s jeep was parked back at the resort. “Did you have Don Thomas Arulo’s beetle?”
“Worse. We took a bus. Only way to get here. Line was two hours long.”
She rolled her eyes. No wonder fear clung to Cauac. The modern world might be scary, but tourist buses were even worse.
Ian turned to Peter. “Can you take him and show him something close by?”
Peter nodded and led Cauac away.
“Where’s your mom?” Ian asked.
She remembered the last time she saw him was when he and her mom kissed. Too bad she didn’t have a copy of the picture with her. She watched his face closely as she said, “She’s sitting with the President of the United States.” She was rewarded for watching by seeing his eyes round and widen. “Well, and her friend, Marie. The science advisor.”
He bit his lip for a second, looking over at Cauac and Peter, who had stopped by a tourist booth. “Are they watching the ball game?”
She nodded. “But it hasn’t started yet. Just the dancing. Oriana already finished. She did great.” She looked up into his eyes, trying to tell if he’d help her. “I have to find Hun Kan—I had a terrible dream. I dreamed she was locked up. They tied her up.” She winced, and plowed into the next part, talking fast. “It’s all my fault. I gave her my watch, remember? I dreamed her whole arm was bloody, but the watch was still on. Like they almost cut her arm off trying to get to it.”
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