The Seven Serpents Trilogy

by Scott O'Dell

  Among the gathering were two stonemasons, a quarryman, and a farmer who owned a piece of crystal half the size of his hand that he used to focus the sun upon dried moss or shavings, thus saving the arduous labor of turning a drill stick until it struck fire.

  The masons were put to work in the palace repairing walls and broken columns. The quarryman was given five apprentices who I hoped would learn to cut the beautiful soft yellow stone that hardened on exposure, and with which our jungle abounded.

  Unfortunately, the three hundred and ten slaves only increased the clamor for more sacrificial victims. And in the end, after two weeks of haggling with Chalco, I added five more to his list of those who would climb the steps to the god house.

  Flocks of green parrots flew out of the west at dawn on the morning that the high priests had set as the beginning of spring. A bad omen, they decided, so the festival was delayed for two days, though the heralds of spring were everywhere—in the meadows and the jun gle and on the wind, which was sweet with the scent of night-blooming flowers.

  The day of Xipe Totec, whose name means “the Dear One Slayed,” began with the booming of the temple drum and the shriek of trumpets. Before dawn crowds filled the square. They sang and danced and chanted over and over:

  Xipe Totec, god of spring,

  Make ready for thy golden garb.

  His statue stood in the middle of the square, at the top of a small stone temple. It was painted in the bright colors of spring, but the face was scarified by deep gashes from jaws to forehead and, as if winded after a long struggle with a powerful foe, the mouth gaped open.

  At noon, while the big drum boomed out the hour, Chalco came forth from the temple and down the three steps, followed by a host of attendants, all of them in gowns of the same golden color as ripening maize.

  In their midst was one of our most stalwart warriors, whom I recognized as a man I had once used to carry messages, a handsome and fleet-footed youth, by name Alua.

  The young man was naked except that he had a gar land of flowers in his hair and a green cypress branch in his hand. Four of the attendants took hold of him and stretched him out on the lower step of the temple. With a sharp knife, high priest Chalco removed his heart and dropped it into a votive cup.

  The youth was then dragged up the steps and taken within the temple. As the crowd cheered, clowns and dwarfs and boys on stilts cavorted around the square.

  Fifteen men were sacrificed that hour on the temple steps, all of them prisoners I had taken at Tikan and Zaya.

  When this was over, the door of the temple opened, a figure appeared, turned to face the four directions, came quickly down the steps—I recognized the snake tattoos on both shoulders as belonging to the warrior Alua—and began to dance, moving his knees stiffly up and down to the tune of flutes.

  I was puzzled that this graceful youth should move so awkwardly. Then I saw it was not Alua I was watching, but a smaller man. While Chalco was removing the hearts of the fifteen prisoners, his attendants had deli cately flayed the young warrior Alua and draped his skin upon one of the priests.

  The priest danced until sunset, moving in wild circles, arms and legs flapping, to the sound of flutes and drum beats, until he could dance no longer and with a groan collapsed on the stones in a dripping heap.

  The following day farmers slashed their fields with stone knives and burned the slashings. Smoke billowed up and hung in a pearly mist above the city. When the fires died out, they punched holes in the earth, dropped in the maize seeds, and tamped them down with their heels.

  The god of spring having been honored, their days of labor at an end, they then sat contented in their huts and waited for rain.

  It was the first month of the rainy season, but the rains did not come. Clouds, pinnacles and battlements of clouds, rose over the island, hung there every afternoon for days, and mysteriously disappeared.

  In this way more than two weeks passed. Then Chalco, the Azteca, came to me dressed in the gown that he had not changed since the day of the sacrifices.

  “Xipe Totec takes revenge upon us,” he said. “He lets us know what he thinks of our miserly tribute.”

  “Fifteen slaves is not a miserly tribute.”

  Chalco made a hissing sound between his teeth. “Last spring we sacrificed twice that number, and the year be fore we sacrificed forty-one. The cornstalks were so heavy with ears they bent to the ground.”

  We haggled for days as the clouds rose up and strangely disappeared.

  On all the hundreds of farms that enclosed the city, not a single sprout broke through the hard, dry earth. The farmers watched the skies and waited. Then Cantú brought news that they had begun to sacrifice rabbits and monkeys, even the dogs they kept for food, hoping to placate the angry god of spring.

  “Give Xipe Totec a few more hearts,” he pleaded. “Perhaps ten or twelve. Then if it doesn’t rain they won’t blame you.”

  “They blame me?”

  “They have no one else to blame. They can’t blame Chalco. They know that he pled with you for more slaves. And they can’t very well blame Xipe Totec.”

  In the end I consented, and ten more prisoners were sacrificed, again in the horrible rite of flaying a dead warrior. The farmers were satisfied, the elders and nobles and priests were satisfied. And yet the drought continued. Xipe Totec was deaf.

  Rain clouds drifted out of the east, passed over the is land, and disappeared into the west, never pausing. There was enough maize left over from the past to feed the people, but there would be no harvest in the fall and in the spring no seed to plant.

  I prayed at night when I went to bed and at dawn when I rose. To no avail. The drought went on and deepened.

  In desperation I sent out a call for everyone to come and pray to God, the Lord above all, above Itzamná and Ix Chel and Xipe Totec. Their souls, if they had souls, were steeped in darkness. Whether God would hear them I did not know. He had not heard me. He was as deaf as Xipe Totec. But in His infinite mercy He might hearken to their pleas, though they were not Christians.

  They came from all parts of the island and filled the square and the streets and the byways. We prayed, ten thousand people, together on our knees with hands upraised, asking God’s mercy.

  No one went to the sacrificial stone that day. There were no dancers in bleeding skins. Yet after our prayers, at dusk, lightning streaked across the sky, the heavens parted, and the island rumbled and shook to the sound of thunderous rain.

  CHAPTER 12

  IT WAS A TIME TO REJOICE!

  Seeds stirred in the earth and burst their heavy husks. They sent pale shoots into the sunlight.

  Likewise, Christ stirred in the dark, pagan souls. Crowds came to the plaza each evening to kneel beside the image of the Virgin. I taught them how to touch their foreheads and their hearts and then their shoulders in the sign of the cross. I sang the Salve Regina in my best voice.

  The crowds grew larger day by day. Men and women who had never seen the city before came out of the jun gle, carrying children on their backs. They camped in the plaza and their fires shone at night. They pricked their fingers with thorns and held them to the sun at dawn, but in the evening they came to watch and listen.

  The maize was waist-high, the ears just forming, when the rains stopped. Clouds piled up as before and van ished. The maize stalks began to wither. I prayed twice each day for rain, at dawn and dusk, the people gath ered around me, but no rain fell.

  Foreseeing a scanty harvest, the Council of Elders de cided to double the size of our fishing fleet and dry the catch for winter.

  When the drought continued, when the crowds that had come to the services thinned out, and the dwarf again brought me rumors of fear and growing discontent among the farmers, I gave up seven of my Tikan workers to the rain god, Chac.

  A statue of the god stood at the east end of the plaza, facing the direction of the wind that brought rain. He reclined on a bench, resting on his back with his knees drawn up. The seven h
earts were placed in his lap, but Chac’s anger was not appeased.

  The drought continued. The season of rain came to an end. It was then that Chalco appeared in the throne room, knelt before me, and set forth a strange idea.

  “There is a crop grown in Tenochtitlán,” he said. “They call it tecuítcal. It grows in one of the three lakes that surround the Azteca capital. The lake that’s salty. It looks like moss and grows very fast.”

  “It sounds like kelp,” I said, wondering what the high priest was up to.

  “It’s moss, not kelp, and green. It’s very nourishing and also tasty if you mix it with chili peppers. The Mexica eat much of it. In the large salt lagoon north of the harbor we could build dikes to regulate the tides and plant this moss. It grows while you watch. Since the harvest has failed, the city needs something to eat be sides smoked fish. I will undertake a journey to Tenochtitlán and bring back a load of this tecuítcal, if you wish.”

  Chalco spoke with such enthusiasm that it set me to thinking.

  It was most surely a wild scheme. Had he brought it up as an excuse to make a journey to Tenochtitlán? Had he some secret reason for going? Would he have an au dience with Emperor Moctezuma? Was there a scheme with the emperor to weaken my hold on the island? A scheme with Ah den Yaxche?

  I harbored these suspicions for days, but finally sent him off with forty stout porters to bring back forty jugs of tecuítcal. The Santa Margarita carried him and his porters northwestward for sixty leagues and set them ashore. I was glad to be rid of him and quietly hoped that he might be delayed on the journey. I had little faith in the project.

  In his absence I took the opportunity to have two stat ues torn down and dumped in the lake.

  One was a hideous likeness of the flayed Xipe Totec, the other a statue in front of the building that housed the archives, which I could see through the trees from the palace windows. It was carved of red sandstone and showed the god of war on his return from battle, dragging behind him by their hair, with the help of a pair of fanged serpents, a dozen captives who had lost their feet.

  While this took place, a pplom who had been trading along the mainland shore some forty leagues to the west brought news that in the village of Uxmal heavy rains had fallen during the summer and the maize crop was bountiful.

  A once flourishing town, it also had been abandoned and in time, like Zaya and the City of the Seven Serpents, was engulfed by jungle. A scattering of farmers and priests had returned over recent years to live among the ruins and now, according to the trader, numbered more than two hundred.

  I ordered the nacom to select the best, those with skills other than farming. He sailed off with his warriors, was gone three weeks, and came back from Uxmal with the entire population, some one hundred and fifty Indians, including three priests that we did not need.

  Thoughtfully, he brought along the maize that had been harvested, which would help us to feed them and would furnish seed for a spring planting.

  He also brought a piece of interesting news he had re ceived from a band of Azteca traders.

  They had met near Uxmal a white man named Gerónimo de Aguilar, who had been cast ashore some time before from the wreck of a caravel. Since he was not a member of the Santa Margarita’s crew, it meant that a second Spanish ship had foundered on the coast, not far away and recently.

  The news served as a spur to action. When the dwarf heard it, he turned pale.

  “I was the first Spaniard to be a castaway,” he said. “You were the second. Now we hear of a third. There may be others. In a year’s time, in months, hordes of Spaniards will be buzzing around the island like hornets around a honey pot.”

  Cantú was for acting at once.

  “Let us take the gold to Cuba,” he said. “Have it as sayed and registered, the king’s fifth duly weighed and stamped and delivered to the governor of Hispaniola. The rest sent to Spain for safekeeping.”

  “We risk the ship,” I objected, “if we send her off with our Indian crew. They are good seamen in coastal wa ters, but Cuba is far and hazardous, Spain out of the question.”

  Instead, I gave immediate attention to the wall that, except for a short distance at the mouth of the harbor, surrounded the city. It was overgrown by jungle but solid, twelve feet high and ten feet in width, with squat towers every quarter of a league arranged to enfilade with sweeping fire an attack from the front or either side.

  The people of Uxmal, including the priests, I had the bacab put to work hacking trees and creepers from the walls and replacing the stones that had fallen.

  I robbed the Santa Margarita of four cannon and two falconets and had them placed in a position facing the harbor, whence an attack might be expected, yet easily movable from one tower to another the entire length of the wall, which exceeded one league and a half.

  As soon as this task was completed the Uxmal workers joined those from Tikan and Zaya, who were un earthing the buried temple.

  At this time, while Chalco was still away, I issued an order through the Council of Elders decreeing that all priests henceforth must spend one day each week in the work force, as I had required of the farmers.

  This idea grew out of my readings of Marcus Aurelius, emperor of mighty Rome. “That which doth not hurt the city itself,” he wrote, “cannot hurt any of its cit izens.” And now, forced to make decisions and often doubting that they were wise, I remembered that his son Commodus inherited the crown of the vast Roman Em pire when he was only a youth of nineteen.

  For a time I went into the jungle and held services for the workers at the temple they were unearthing. But their work was hard and the men were too tired to listen, so I gave this up.

  I still appeared in the plaza to greet each dawn and pray to God on my knees. I had Ceela darken the skin of the Virgin, Whose picture hung there, in the thought that by giving Her the dusky look of a Maya, she would have a special attraction for the Indians.

  And She did attract them. They came, bringing small gifts, and decked Her brow with jungle blooms. But when the first light shone in the east, they pricked their fingers with thorns and offered their blood to the sun.

  Then one morning after I had prayed and sung the Salve Regina and watched my audience raise their bleeding hands to the east, I was struck by a singular thought. I was dismayed that it had not come to me be fore.

  Why, I asked myself, was I there before a pagan crowd, praying on my knees, raising my voice to heaven in their behalf ? I was still a student. Never having been ordained, I was not permitted to say mass and conduct rites. In all truth, I was pretending to be a priest, when in fact I was simply a callow seminarian.

  It was then that there came to me out of my readings, long ago, in my first year at the seminary, a thought put down by Augustine, bishop of Hippo.

  “God,” he said, “judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”

  Thus it must be true that evil exists because God has willed it. If this were not true, then there would only be good to choose from, which is no choice at all.

  God had created the Maya as He had created all beings. He must have allowed them, therefore, to dwell in darkness, worshipers of a hundred idols, ten times a hundred. In His wisdom, He had given them a choice between good and evil.

  Myself, I could point the way, as I had done, between the two kingdoms, one of eternal love, one of the sulfurous pits of pain and despair. But who was I to do more? After all, I was only a seminarian, a neophyte without the mission and the authority of a priest. It was better to stand humbly by and let God’s power quietly possess them.

  Or so I reasoned in an effort to forget that I had failed to end their bloody rites.

  After that, I turned my back on the barbarous rites of sun worship, no longer blaming myself for acts I could not prevent, and spent more time in the palace, studying the books brought to me from the archives.

  Most of them had been assembled in the years 1034 to 1146 AD. These were the years that intereste
d me, since during this period the Maya quit building their beautiful temples and began to abandon their cities one by one.

  What had happened to bring this exodus about?

  I satisfied myself that they had not met with disasters, such as earthquakes and floods and wars, or with crop failures that led to starvation. Something else had come upon them and not suddenly.

  It was my suspicion that slowly, over a period of a hundred years, the cities had decayed from within. Judging from the hundreds of priests that swarmed through the Temple of Kukulcán clad in filthy gowns that they never changed, the decay might have been caused by a loss of faith.

  Furthermore, could the ancient priests have used the stars to make a prediction or a series of predictions—as wrong as the one about the battle of Tikan—that caused the populace to turn against them? When they could no longer trust the priests, did they revolt, with hold their labor, and stop worshipping at the temples? Or, for some strange reason, had they turned against the gods themselves?

  It was a great and fascinating mystery. It had a great bearing on the very things I was trying to accomplish.

  I was interested in how the city had been governed during its years of splendor. And who governed it? What taxes were collected, and from whom? What work was required of the common man? Did it have alliances with other cities? What was the nature of the goods it bought and sold? What did the city look like before it was en gulfed by the jungle?

  To my disappointment, I found no answers to these questions.

  The scribes who painted the books were only in terested in the names of the rulers, the battles they fought, the number of captives they took, their victories—shown by a glyph of a temple with smoke rising—and the stars. The stars that ruled their lives from birth to death.

  I set about recording the history of the island from the hour I had appeared, since no records were being kept at the moment, except by the astrologers who nightly read the heavens.

  I had difficulties in finding recorders and was forced to settle upon a man who was nearly blind but was ac quainted with the Mayan glyphs, and on Ceela Yaxche, who did not understand the glyphs but could paint. As she became more skilled in the use of Spanish, I pro posed to have the books put down in both Castilian and Maya.