“Okay,” he said. “You’re making me crazy right now.”
“Apparently it is all very clear to the two of you,” my father said, “but I would like more of an explanation.”
“The Maze of Deceit and the Flores Stelae are one and the same,” I said, describing how the stories of Tapia, de la Cueva, and Von Humboldt fit together. I took out my mother’s journal and opened it to the pages where she described her discovery. I also showed them Mom’s calculations, and her description of the route she’d planned to take through the forest. The copies of the documents we’d been traveling with were scattered all over the floor, and I snatched these up, riffled them together, and thrust them under my friends’ noses as further proof.
From Von Humboldt’s Narrative, where the German describes his first encounter with the Maze of Deceit, I showed them this line:
We might enter one of the sapphire passages, grow confused by its signs, and become so baffled by its convoluted express that we could not take a single step forward.
And from the Legende itself, I read out the following quote:
So the Mad Blue City was built in the shadow cast by the great Tree that bleeds ruby sap. And it was hidden within that colossus of a Labyrinth formed of diabolical jade passages and malefic stanzes and Confusion out of which there would be no Express.
“It all makes sense now, if you look at what’s right in front of you,” I said. “The words passages and express were meant literally by Von Humboldt as written passages and expressions. And we’d been confused by de la Cueva’s use of the word stanze before, because it means ‘room’ in Italian. But stanze, etymologically, forms the root word for a poetical stanza.”
They stared blankly at me.
“It has something to do with a stanze—the room—being called a ‘standing’ or ‘stopping’ place. And a stanza—the division of a song or a poem—is described by its stop at the end.”
“How do you know all this?” my father asked, after a few seconds.
I extended my arms, a little wildly. “A lot of reading.”
Eventually, they believed me.
“My goodness,” Manuel said, putting his hands in his pockets. “Juana kept all of this so close.”
Erik said, “She did it. The old girl did it!”
I pointed to the correspondence. “Mom says in her diary that the key to the Stelae is in one of de la Cueva’s letters. Written December 15, 1540. It’s where she writes about this dance lesson—Erik, do you remember it? We were looking at it in Guatemala City? We need to start going through it.”
“I know the letter you’re talking about,” Erik said. “It’s the one where Balaj K’waill spouts gibberish. And where he admits that he lied to de la Cueva about the Jade.”
“Right. So we’ll study it, and find out how to decode the Stelae. And when we do, we’ll know where to go in the forest.”
“Those are a lot of ifs, Lola,” Manuel said.
I turned toward the bed. “But I really do think we have a map now, Yolanda. Or at least the beginnings of one—we just have to solve the cipher. If we crack it, everything that I said will have been true.”
I approached her, holding the Translation and the Letters. But she remained on the bed and put her head down, looking up at me in a very baleful and frightening way.
She shifted, grimacing, and made a menacing gesture. It seemed she had not heard what I’d said.
She did not care at all about maps, letters, the routes, or the Stelae. She stood up and walked toward us. She remained staring at me, her eyes like hot glass and her lips completely white.
She walked until she stood behind me, and then with a quick flickering movement brought her arms around me so that they circled my chest.
My grip on her arms grew tighter, as well, and my heart started jamming at my ribs.
“Don’t do this, Yolanda,” I said. “You wouldn’t have helped me go get Mom.”
She continued to hold on to me, her arms embracing me like a vise across my chest.
“You could have hired anyone else for that,” she said, in this awful, tender voice. “You didn’t even try to find another tracker, and they were all over the city. If you’d just looked. What you wanted was forgiveness from me. And I would have given all of that to you. If you’d shown me. That you were sorry. For cutting me loose. But all you did was try to fool me.” She began to loosen her grip. “Over the years, you’ve been teaching me a hard lesson, Lola. But I’ve got to learn it. I’ve got to learn it. You’re teaching me that I’m all by myself. Everyone that ever belonged to me is dead.”
“Oh, no,” I said. I went limp and felt her words just hollow me out.
If I were to claim her, I’d have to disclaim my father. And maybe she wouldn’t want me for a sister anyway.
She dropped her arms, turned around, and walked out of the room.
CHAPTER 43
Amazing,” Manuel Alvarez said, as we talked later in my room. He still sat on the bed, and looked at Mom’s key to the Stelae. “The stones come down to a five-number cipher. Not meaningless at all, were they?”
We were alone; I sat next to him, my hand on his shoulder, and read along. “Doesn’t look like it, Dad. Though we still have to decode the panels.”
He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me, Lola.”
“I know—she didn’t tell me either.”
He turned the pages. “It looks like it might be fairly simple to solve—that is, unless you haven’t the brains to see the obvious in the first place. Leave that to your mother.”
“She was surprised at it herself, I think.”
“The Stelae and the Jade—the two things were connected the entire time, and none of us knew. Though it isn’t clear how far that gets you.”
“Why not?”
“What if we decipher it and it still doesn’t make sense? Or the landscape has changed? Or your mother reads it differently than we do?”
“Well … let’s just take this slowly and worry about those things if they come up. We won’t be able to solve everything today—that’s all we know for sure.”
Manuel read for a little while longer and then closed the book. He reached up to touch my hair.
“Dad.”
“I had to come here, you know. Couldn’t let the old fear stop me. After all, I thought your mother might be amused if I were the hero for once.”
“Dad, it’s all right.”
“I waited by that phone, darling. I was sitting there, trying to act like a normal person—all you could see on the news were pieces on the jade they keep finding up in the Sierras—more and more of the blue every day. But what did that matter to me? If they find a mine or not? She’s really taking so much longer to get back to me than she ever has before—the longest we’ve ever gone without speaking is three days. And then it occurred to me that perhaps she was trapped somewhere or … something. I saw that it simply didn’t matter if I got swallowed up by a swamp or shot or nibbled on by crocodiles if she—if she needed a little bit of help in coming back, you see. So here I am. And in that helicopter, no less. Hideous things, helicopters. Smashing about in the air like I don’t know what. Thought I was going to be hugging a mountain at any minute.”
I rubbed my hand on the bedspread in a nervous gesture. The red cloth, similar to the runner on the stairs, was embroidered with blue stars, green doglike animals, blue men, and tiny yellow flowers.
“Yolanda really is quite upset, you know,” he said.
“Yes, she is.”
“She won’t come out of her room, and she won’t even say if she’s coming along with us. Though she must. You’ll have to patch it up with her sooner rather than later.”
“When she’ll talk to me. It’s all a mess.”
“She’ll calm down, in time. The two of you have always had that, what should I call it—connection. You were—friends.” He looked down at the journal and touched the salmon binding, fingering a rip in the fabric. “So you read your mother’s jour
nal—”
“I did, Dad.”
He stared blankly ahead for a moment or two, and then tried to smile at me. “I hope that wasn’t a mistake. Do you think it was?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if she finds out, she might be—a little angry. She likes to keep things to herself. And I’ve always respected her in that. Did you—did she write anything too personal there?”
He wasn’t smiling now, and his mouth bent down into a long, hard dent. He didn’t look like he usually did; his face was emaciated and wary, as if I were about to hurt him.
I shrugged.
“There really wasn’t anything but notes on the Stelae,” I said. “Scholarly writing, things like that.”
“Scholarly writings.”
“Oh, yes. It was actually fairly boring stuff until I got to the part about the panels—then, obviously, it became very interesting. But the rest of it was a yawn.”
“Really.”
“The most boring. She knows how to yammer on.”
He stared at me a few seconds longer to make sure. When his face relaxed, it sagged a little. “I don’t think we have to tell her that when we see her.” He took my hand. “Like I said—she’s a temperamental one. And she’d get awfully upset if she heard that criticism about her writing style, wouldn’t she?”
“She’d probably start stomping about and roaring about my lack of taste, yes.”
“Absolutely. You never want to get my angel in a bad mood. That’s one lesson I’ve learned. Always best to remain on her good side—though on the other hand, maybe you should tell her when we see her. What do you think? Maybe she deserves it for all the trouble she’s putting us through.”
I laughed. “All right, then.”
He lifted up my hand, and in a gentlemanly, fatherly, and very tender way he kissed the back of it with his small dry mouth.
“I adore and love you so much, Creature,” he said. “I need you and your mother so, so much, my dear.”
I put my arms around him and rested my head on his shoulder. “We need you too, Dad. And I love you!”
CHAPTER 44
The four of us spent the rest of that day and the night in the Hotel Peten Itzae, with Erik studying Beatriz de la Cueva’s correspondence, and my father and I waiting for Yolanda to emerge from her room and say whether she would come to the forest with us. Day turned into afternoon, and the sky darkened into tin and lead colors that were reflected by the waters of Lago Izabal. The poke boats with their roughly painted green and yellow trim skidded across the swollen water; boys and fishermen worked the lake, dressed in baseball caps and white shirts or T-shirts displaying everything from Charlie’s Angels logos to portraits of Rigoberta Menchú. Women bent down on the banks and washed shirts and khakis against the stones, so that foam formed traceries of delicate white on the surface of the lake.
The afternoon deepened further; evening came on. Manuel drank a few rums with our fellow lodgers and then retired for the night. Yolanda had still not shown her face or given us one sign. Erik and I parted in the kitchen, remembering our kiss again and so awkwardly saying good night before the smiling landlord’s wife and their watchful daughters. Then I retired to my room and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep at all, though, with the moonless night rushing through my window like a mass of black birds, and the sounds of the men’s talk floating up through the floorboards.
An hour later, at eleven o’clock, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I sat up and kicked back the covers on my bed.
In my nightgown, I opened the door of my room and waited to see if anyone was around. Not a sound; not a footfall; everyone had retired for the evening. I slipped into the hall. I padded through the blackness of the corridor until I reached the place where he’d sleep that night.
“Erik?”
I turned the door handle. Inside, I found him working at a desk under a dim lamp. My parents’ Translation was opened to an analysis of the Stelae’s first panel, and next to the book he had placed a dictionary that he’d borrowed from the owners of the hotel. Spread all about were sheets of paper, upon which he’d written an ever-growing list of words and mathematical solutions.
He looked up and smiled. Half of his face was visible in the light, and the other remained in shadow.
“It looks like you’re getting lucky,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder.
He raised his eyebrows at me.
“Your work, your work?” I asked, pointing down to the books.
“Ah, well, yes. I am getting somewhere with this.” He looked back down at his writings, and his bangs fell over his eyes.
“Show me.”
He began to shuffle around the papers and then found the section in de la Cueva’s letters that my mother had focused on.
“I found the passage she was talking about,” he said. “The December fifteenth letter, describing the dance lesson.”
I took his hand and led him down through the forest, toward a river that runs through the wood, and by that water we took our leisure. I rubbed him with balms and I sang in his ear; and then, in order to lift his heart, I thought I would entertain him by teaching him our country’s dance, the Sarabande.
“One, two, three, four” I whispered in his ear. “Those are the maneuvers of this game we are playing, my dear. One must go forward, forward. And move smoothly, like a European.”
“La, la, la” he said, laughing and singing songs I could not understand. He grew berserk, spouting nonsense words, numbers, and rhymes.
“To dance in Goathemala, my sweet,” he said, “one must move roughly, skipping every other trac.”
“Every other what?”
“That’s the French for ‘track,’ my beloved thickwit. And as you have noted that we are quite backwards, you must follow our reversed native steps, which are four, three, two, one, zero.”
Erik stopped reading.
“That’s it!” I said. “That’s got to be the numerical cipher.”
“Yes. But the instructions, as far as I can tell, have something to do with two different directions. I don’t think the numbers alone are going to decode the Stelae. First, Balaj K’waill instructs us to ‘skip every other trac,’ and for a while I wasn’t quite sure what he meant until I began to puzzle over that word—”
“Track,”I said.
“Right. Track, as we usually use it, refers to marks made by feet on a path, or wheels in a rut. So he’s saying that they should skip their dancing steps, it seems. But the word’s related to writing as well, in a remote way.”
“Track,”I said.”Trace?”
“Yes, there’s some connection between the two, in Old French. Trac and Trace. Both meaning a beaten path. And tracking the path becomes a means by which to trace it. Trace is another old term for dancing, as it turns out, and it’s also a word that we use when referring to clues, in detective fiction—”
“Vanished without a trace, and so on—”
”—but it also comes from the Latin word for drawing”—he flipped a page of the diary—“trahere, as in drawing something behind you, like a cart. Which leaves a mark. A very specific sort of mark. The kind that you make when you draw with a pen.”
“A straight line.”
“Exactly.”
“But if I’m getting you right, all this is assuming that Balaj K’waill was playing intentional word games. That he was a punster who knew the French terms for track and trace—”
“Or, in the sixteenth century, maybe this was all common knowledge. He was a linguist. And I think that I am on to something. Just listen. The way I’m reading this first part of the cipher is that when he says we should skip every other track—”
“It means that you should skip every other line of text.”
“Which is what I’ve been doing here.” He shuffled through the papers before him and showed me a leaf. “This is a few lines of your parents’ translation, from the first stone of the Stelae.”
The of story the
Jade once was I king Jade
You without lost I’m too lost I’m too lost
Fierce king true a jade under born noble and jade
I’m you lost I you lost I warm stay will
The of sign the jade possessed I serpent feathered Jade
You where you kiss can I where arms my in
Earth over power all Jade man and sea and Jade
Safe stay me forgive you do charm my treasure my
My of account on Jade it gift great one Jade
Darling my you lost I you lost I empty so
To destiny my was Jade for land this rule Jade
And cold so world this in live to me left
In years thousand one Jade Soft every Peace perfect
You have why done I have what beauty my
“Right,” I said. “Incomprehensible.”
“But this is what you get if you separate out every other line. I blacked out the rest of it. Remember that paragraph I showed you before? The text that I now think we’re supposed to be reading looks like this.”
The of story the Jade once was I king Jade
Fierce king true a jade under born noble and jade
The of sign the jade possessed I serpent feathered Jade
Earth over power all Jade man and sea and Jade
My of account on Jade it gift great one Jade
To destiny my was Jade for land this rule Jade
In years thousand one Jade Soft every Peace perfect
“Do you think that it makes more sense?” he asked me.
I squinted down at it. “I think it might.”
“Me too. And assuming this has worked, then I just have to apply the numbered cipher. Four, three, two, one, zero.”
We continued to stare down at the pages and the black writing on them that glowed nearly bronze in the lamplight. Silver specks of dust circled in the air; I turned and saw that Erik still had a bruise beneath his eye, and he hadn’t shaved in days.
But he looked wonderful to me.
I put my hand over his and rubbed his palm with my thumb. I could feel the pulse in his wrist and hear his breathing. All discussion of cryptograms and signs faded away.
The Queen Jade Page 22