The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  20

  Southern Mayalands, New Spain, October 1556

  CEDRIC OWEN WOKE to rain that was not rain, but Diego standing over him flicking water hard and fast at his face. His heart-stone, safe in its satchel, dug into the small of his back where he had fallen on it. He rolled over to find that the jaguar was squatting at his side, gazing at him curiously.

  From this new angle, he could see that the gape of its jaw was the pelt of a beast, with the still-boned head set atop wiry native hair; that the lines flaring back from the bared teeth were not whiskers, but scars gouged deep into the cheeks of a dark native face; that the great white jaguar teeth below were not set in the jaws of a beast, but only threaded on to a necklace, hung there for decoration like the two paws of the jaguar skin cape that dangled below, and beneath them, pushing them out in two gently swollen curves, were …

  Very much too late, Cedric Owen came to understand that the beast that now stood up beside his prone form was a woman, and that beneath the spotted beast-skin, with its head set on her head and its claws draped loose about her neck, she was naked.

  He had been a long time at sea, in the company only of men. His eyes had travelled the length of her from head to toe and back to the swell of her chest again before he had a grip on himself and remembered that he was a physician, and the human body held no mysteries for him, nor allure.

  From the place he no longer cared to look, a rusted voice of vast amusement and great depth said, ‘Cedric Owen, keeper of the blue heart-stone, are you afraid to set your eyes on me?’

  He was afraid, but not as he had been when he believed he faced a living jaguar. Now, he was afraid for his pride and his deportment rather than for his body and soul. He was not so much a child as to give in to that.

  He stood, and made himself look. The jaguar-woman was a head shorter than Diego, who was not tall to begin with, but she bore herself with an assurance that Owen had never seen in any woman, not even the Medici Queen of France.

  Viewed in greater detail, she was as well muscled as any fighting man, only fuller of the hips and with the soft swell to her belly that men never carried, and her breasts … In his professional opinion, she had borne at least three children.

  He tried to drag more light from the falling sun that he might better estimate her age. In the shock of first seeing, he had thought her of his own age, not far into her third decade. She stepped closer to him now, to let him look better, and he saw beyond the startling disfigurement of the jaguar-scars on her face to the fine-branched lines in the brown skin at her eyes and the thicker skin at her throat and the silvering hair at her temples under the jaguar’s head cap. At the end, he believed her closer to forty than twenty. The thought made her no less terrifying, or beautiful.

  He was staring at her, dumbly, which was not decent. He closed his mouth and averted his gaze. She took hold of his jaw and turned him forcibly back to face her. ‘Do you not know me?’

  ‘I regret not, madam.’ Discomfort made him formal. He bowed stiffly against the pressure of her hand and flushed when she laughed aloud. ‘I came in search of help for my friend who is dying.’

  ‘Only that?’

  … therein to meet those who know the heart and soul of your blue stone. They will tell you how best you may unlock its secrets and preserve them for all eternity.

  ‘No, madam. I came also to find how I may recover what was lost: the knowledge of how best to use my blue heart-stone. I am led to believe I may find these two together; the healing of my friend and the secrets of my stone that once were known and have long since been lost to my family.’

  Raising a brow, the jaguar-woman took a step back the better to view him as he had her. The starkness of her scrutiny was as discomfiting as anything else she had done. Owen’s heart twisted in his chest. Very badly, he did not want this woman to be disappointed in him.

  He said, ‘I have not yet the honour of your acquaintance, while you know me in all ways. May we redress the balance?’

  ‘Cedric Owen, ninth of that name.’ She ran her tongue across her teeth in a gesture that spiked terror and desire in him equally. He felt an unfortunate movement in his groin and prayed she might not notice.

  She did him the service of not looking down. ‘I have known you since before you were born,’ she said. ‘I have known you since before you last died, when you were not Cedric Owen, and before that, and before that. I know who you will be when next you walk upon the earth.’

  There was nothing he could say. Something in his silence drew her to a decision. She bowed her head as he had done, but with more grace.

  ‘I am Najakmul. You may call me Dolores, if you find it easier – that name was given me by the Spanish priest when he still believed that by dipping me in cold water he could bring me closer to his man-god.’

  She was no more Dolores than the man who had summoned her was Diego. Owen said, ‘I would prefer to call you Najakmul.’

  She nodded. Her scrutiny seemed less scathing. ‘We have little time. Are you prepared?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘My sons have not told you what is required?’

  ‘Your sons?’ Owen spun with all the force of an aggrieved and injured pride. ‘Diego!’

  The scarred native shrugged sheepishly. ‘What could I say that you would have believed? Among your people, the women have no power. They cannot talk to the god of the black-robed priests, they cannot talk to the kings and generals of the armies. Even among my people who live in Zama and Mérida, the women were already accounted less than the men long before Spain came. Only those of us who still live in the jungle, by the ways of the jungle, know that the she-jaguar is the more powerful, the she-eagle the bigger, the she-snake the more deadly.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Is all of these.’ White teeth flashed him a many-layered smile. The complexities of love and respect and a deeper awe weathered into Diego’s face spoke more depth than his voice ever could. ‘When she talks, we listen. What she needs of us, we give her.’

  ‘Of course.’ He turned to Najakmul, swept off an imaginary hat and bowed. Fernandez de Aguilar could have done it with no greater panache. The Spaniard breathed painfully at their feet. Owen knelt, and lifted the sleeping man’s hand, that they might all remember why he had come.

  ‘Perhaps then, you can tell me what is required to achieve the healing of my friend?’

  Catlike, the jaguar-woman stalked thrice around him and came to kneel on de Aguilar’s other side, bringing her face close to his. Her eyes shone with the light of the moon, dazzling him. ‘Can you light a fire, Cedric Owen, keeper of the blue heart-stone?’

  This at least he could answer. ‘I have been lighting fires since I was six years old.’

  ‘Then do so now.’

  ‘Diego has already—’

  She shook her head, grinning savagely. He turned round in time to see Diego kick the remains of his fire to smouldering cinders.

  ‘You are the keeper of the heart-stone. It must be your fire.’ Najakmul saw him reach for his flint and tinder and shook her head again, handing him instead the loose-strung bow and charred rod that the natives used with such ease and Cedric Owen had never used at all.

  ‘Not here, there,’ said Najakmul, pointing. ‘On the fire circle of the mosaic. There must you raise your heart-fire.’

  Under the critical gaze of Najakmul and her three sons, he crouched in the sweating heat and bent his back to slide the blackened tip of the stick into its socket and did his best to draw the bow back and forth as deftly as Diego had done.

  None of them laughed, for which he was grateful. He sweated and swore and snagged his fingers in the bow-string and cursed and slowly, as the late sun honed its light across the sharp edge of the pyramid, he brought forth a spidery thread of smoke and saw a reddening glow come alive in the tinder and fed it the hairs from his head and small fragments of dried moss and grasses and knew a satisfaction that surprised him; he had long since forgotten the
child’s unfettered joy in a new task mastered.

  The smoke was rich with the scents of the jungle. Owen’s eyes began to water. Diego and his brothers gathered at his back, whence the light breeze was coming. In the forgiving shelter of their bodies, his flame became two flames, and then many. The buttery yellow mosaic tiles took the flames to their hearts and glowed as if from within, so that his fire burned down into the earth as much as it did up to the evening sky.

  At a certain point, when the flames were bright to match the fading sun, Diego leaned over his shoulder and pressed a fresh knot of grasses and leaves into his hand. ‘Burn this. Drink the smoke.’

  The bundle burned with a high, blue flame, the colour of his skull-stone. The smoke was fine and peppery and slid down his throat to fill his heart and spread through his chest, warming him, lightening him, lifting him to heaven. He drank, and grieved when it was done.

  ‘Stand. Look. Listen.’

  He stood. He looked. He listened to a world in which every breath of every beast of the jungle was made suddenly clear to him, as if his ears had been stopped all his life with cotton and were only now laid open.

  All around, the cries of the small jewelled birds spilled out as individual notes, clear as chimed crystal; to his left, high overhead, the wings of a passing butterfly rasped through the air thick as crows’ feathers; he heard the scales on a snake slide past the loose bark on a tree.

  His eyes were similarly deafened. Before, he had thought the jungle blindingly iridescent. Now, he saw the colours within the colours and was dazzled. He could have lost himself in the single mote of light of a quetzal bird’s eye, or the veins on a hanging leaf, or the scattering of tiles on the mosaic, which were not separate any more, but flowed together to make a living image of the held breath before the world’s end.

  Light-headed, he began to kneel, the better to see the shape of a single blue flower picked out in turquoise pebbles in the meadow of Innocence.

  His balance was bad. Careful hands caught him, and wrapped his head, tilting it backwards. Diego’s voice, light and brisk, said, ‘Do not look down yet, Cedric Owen, lest we lose you for ever in the other times.’

  Afraid, he let his gaze be directed west, to the setting sun and the open blue sky whereon were painted the colours of the coming night.

  He might have launched himself into the sweep of saffron yellow and deep plum reds flaring out from the sun’s globe, letting go the fragile boundaries of his body, but that Fernandez de Aguilar coughed – a chaotic sound, cracked across by shearing scarlets, whites and blacks.

  Owen followed the bubbling in-breath that came after and knew the depth of it, and the pockets of water in the lungs where it sought to rest, and the pressure of blood in the great pulmonary vessels that even now was beginning to fade.

  He reached forward for his friend’s wrist, and found it, and read the truth in the three pulses. ‘He is dying. We must act now!’

  His voice swayed out to the trees and rebounded. From the far side of the fire, Najakmul answered, ‘Then look at me, Cedric Owen, keeper of the blue heart-stone. The time is right.’

  She sat in shadow. Two beams of light came from between her hands, as if she had reached to the sky and pulled the sun twice from its mooring and brought it here to shine on him.

  Against the brightness, Owen squinted at the space between her bony fingers. Slowly, a shape grew: the silvering outline of a jaguar skull crafted from perfectly clear, colourless stone that drew in the wavering firelight and the haze of distant, jungle-screened moonlight and wove from them two beams of silver light that sang with a tone so pure it came near to breaking his mind apart.

  So it was, in the throbbing night, with all his senses sharpened beyond bearing, that Owen saw for the first time in his life another skull wrought of stone and shaped by hands that knew the secrets of the stars. Almost, it came near to the perfection of his own stone. Almost.

  Softly, Najakmul said, ‘It is strange, is it not, to see another?’

  ‘It breaks my heart.’

  Owen felt his soul rise to his eyes; a kind of nakedness he had never known before. ‘What have you done to me?’

  ‘Opened the eyes and ears of your heart. You can see now as we see, hear as we hear, feel as we feel. Thus equipped, you are fit to walk the rift between the worlds, to bind the four beast-stones, and join together the nine stones of the races of men.’

  A half-remembered shadow rose to him from the mosaic, and a chance remark by the priest.

  At the End of Days … these four will come together to form one beast. Can you imagine, sir, what might arise out of the union of these four?

  The hairs rose on his scalp, prickling and cold in the warm night. Afraid, he said, ‘You want me to raise the dragon Kukulkan, the rainbow serpent? The end times are not yet upon us, surely?’

  Najakmul shook her head. ‘Not yet. But in a time yet to come, the whole must be made from the sum of its parts. The nine stones of men must be joined in the hoop that will girdle the earth. If we were asked to do this now, we would fail; a piece is missing from our knowledge. Only you can find it. When it is found, then may the four beasts come together as one.’

  Najakmul leaned forward over the fire. Thick smoke furled about her head. She did not cough. ‘Will you believe me, Cedric Owen, if I tell you that time is a path along which you may walk if we open the gates and send you?’

  Something in her dark eyes warned him, and a simple question from Nostradamus. ‘Does death attend the trying?’ he asked.

  ‘Death attends all things.’

  ‘And yet, if I succeed, will the death that presently attends Fernandez de Aguilar depart so that he might live?’

  She nodded, and it was almost a bow. ‘If you can do this, it is possible your friend may be healed. If you fail, more than you and he will die, for the last rift will be joined and Desolation will spread over all the earth without hope of redemption. Are you prepared for this? Are you willing to risk all for the life of the one you care for?’

  ‘I am.’

  He spoke with a certainty that surprised them both. Through the swirling smoke, he heard Najakmul’s soft laugh. ‘Then look down now, Cedric Owen, and see at last the world at your feet.’

  21

  Southern Mayalands, New Spain, October 1556

  SOME TIME BEFORE night fell, De Aguilar had been brought to lie on the very centre of the mosaic that mapped the end time. At his right hand was devastation, grief, destruction and death, made so real Owen could taste the fear, could see the colours of the tears, could hear the soul-death of those who struggled simply to survive.

  At his left, place of the rising moon, a girl-child played knucklebones in a summer’s meadow with wild flowers scattered around.

  Caught in the rift between these two was the string of many-coloured pearls; a thin thread of hope for Fernandez de Aguilar and for the world.

  From the far side of the fire, Najakmul said, ‘They must be joined by the song-line of your stone.’

  His blue stone languished in the satchel bumping at his hip. With the care of a father to his firstborn, Owen delivered it into the firelight.

  He felt shy of it, in the presence of another, and then proud, for Najakmul showed her soul in her eyes as she gazed on it.

  Tilting his hands, he played with the light until the stone gathered enough of fire and moon to weave them together and send them out to meet and match the clear, uncoloured crystal of her snarling jaguar.

  In their meeting was an alchemy of tone and light he had not witnessed before. Seeing how each wove into the other, to make a third thing that was greater than either apart, Cedric Owen understood how the thread of the song-line might perhaps be made to join the nine skulls together and then to unite the four beasts as one. The question was whether he could do it.

  ‘So.’ He lifted the skull and moved it, that the shine from its eyes and the thread of its song might be directed downwards, on to the tiled rift in the mosaic.


  He began in the south, with the red stone, colour of the fire’s heart. The rift widened as he sent the blue song of the heart-stone on to it, so that what had been a red-stained pearl became a skull-stone of deepest carnelian, and what had seemed a single line of plain black obsidian pebbles set into the earth became instead a widening place of night-time shadows and soft breath, waiting.

  Drawn by his own stone, sent by Najakmul’s beast-stone, he moved on and in.

  The rift was a valley, now, that led on to a broad, sandy desert. Owen walked on warm, coarse sand, which sifted up between his toes. He smelled a bittersweet smoke, quite different from that which he had left. He looked up to a crisp night sky with stars he had never imagined, and could not name.

  The red fire-stone was held by a woman his own age, with skin black as pitch. She sat naked before him. Firelight cascaded gold and red down the satin valley of her breasts. She nodded to a log on which a visitor might sit. As Owen bent to take his seat, he heard a slither on the sand behind.

  The blue skull-stone sang a bright note of warning and command. Time warped and slowed in the place where he stood. In leisurely fashion, he spun on one foot and hooked the toe of the other under the red-bellied black snake that struck for him, sending it sailing far into the night.

  He felt no fear, only a strange, dry exhilaration. In a separate place of his mind, he apologized to Fernandez de Aguilar, his friend, that he had not moved with such swiftness when the last snake came upon him.

  Turning back, he found the black-skinned woman standing. Her skull-stone was the colour of blood, of birth, of raging, red-fanged death, the colour of the snake’s belly. It took in the light of the fire and spilled it out again in a scarlet song-line that stained the earth to make a path that did not depart when she turned away. Owen turned his blue stone the same way, and the paths wove together, to make something greater than either apart.