“There’s no path to take the car on,” Yolanda said as she opened the back of the Bronco and began to drag the packs and gear forward. “We’re going to have to leave it here.”
“Are we just going to walk in now?” I asked her.
“It’s getting dark,” Erik said, squinting up at the trees.
Yolanda and I stood side by side at the back of the car, grabbing the bags and the bottles of water. I wore a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, high boots, socks, but I already felt the bites of the mosquitoes, so I took a bottle of the DEET and spread the cream on my neck. Next to me, Manuel worked to put his own pack on, though his hands had begun shaking.
“Yes, we’re going in,” she said. She glanced at me. “If you really think Juana is close by, we’re on the clock. It wouldn’t have been easy for her in there.”
I squinted up at the sky. “You’re right.”
She crammed her pack down and stuffed her hammock and mosquito netting more securely in their places. Next she took out a giant black Maglite from the pack’s side pocket, and pointed also to one of the two machetes she’d bought in town. These were fearful-looking knives, sheathed in leather, with brass studs on the scabbards. “We’ll make our way through the forest with these.”
My father dropped his pack and cursed; he sweated and continued shivering.
“Let me help you with that thing,” Yolanda said. “It’s … heavy.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I can do it.” He forced the rucksack on.
No one mentioned my father’s hands at all.
“I guess that’s it, then,” Erik said, taking up one of the other packs and slinging it over one arm. “No use in stalling or fainting or fleeing, is there?”
“Exactly,” she said. “Oh, and by the way—have you been to this part of the forest before?”
“This part?” he asked, then shook his head. “No, not here. Farther south, just around Flores.”
“Well, then—there’s a nasty regional mite that you should watch out for. It crawls under the clothes, and bites. The privates, mostly.”
“Are you playing games with me?” Erik asked
“I don’t play games in the jungle,” she said. “And I don’t hold grudges in it, either, even if I want to. It’s too dangerous.” She looked over at me with steady dark eyes, and her cheeks were red. “We’re here for two reasons only. Your mother—”
“Yes,”I said.
”—and my father. My father’s work.” She shifted her gaze over to Erik. “But it’s going to be hard, and you’ll all have to look out for yourselves. So you should listen to me about the bugs. And there are a few other things, too. We might run into some of the big cats, in which case you should probably just run and scream your head off. You might also trip up on—sorry—sink holes.”
“Yes, fantastic,” Manuel said.
“And then there are these nasty feral pigs. Watch out for the machete blade as well, as it’s very sharp. I’ll probably be asking you to take over the bushwhacking when I get tired. Remember water, of course, or else you’ll get dehydrated quick and be no use. And just … follow me. Don’t get separated from me. It won’t be very safe if you do.”
I tried not to think about what these cautions might mean for my mother. And it seemed the same thought occurred to Manuel. He hesitated for a second, but then tugged down his shirt and nodded while clearing his throat.
“That sounds like very good advice,” he said.
He went over to the car, and he and Yolanda locked it before walking across the road and entering the forest.
Erik and I watched them as they parted the trees with their hands.
Yolanda took out the blade and stood before the bush, and though Manuel had turned waxen and more fragile since entering this atmosphere, I realized that it had the opposite effect on her. In the tawny light, in the presence of the jungle, her face flushed and a watchful private expression settled on her features. She raised the machete and swung it in a fierce and graceful arc. Thin precise muscles appeared in her neck. It occurred to me that she was as fluent in that gesture as I tried to be with words, because her father had made her an expert in how to survive in this wild place.
Manuel followed her, brushing away some of the leaves with tentative fingers. Then they disappeared.
“All right—you ready?” I asked Erik, hiking up my backpack.
I was covered in sweat, but undeterred by the mosquitoes frolicking around my extremities. A frightened excitement moved through me. I felt as if I could have pummeled down Yolanda’s path all night long until I found my mother.
He looked at me and nodded.
“I’m ready to go with you, Lola,” he said.
I smiled and touched his chest, once, with my hand. And then we turned from the road, toward the blue-dark trees, and went in.
CHAPTER 49
We entered the forest, batting away the mosquitoes and large buzzing flies, and stumbling over the low-lying brush and the great roots of mahoganies, which extended up thirty meters into the air and sent their large shoots into the ground. These roots ramified and formed a network of hard gnarled tendrils among the ferns and sedge and waterlogged mud that laved the jungle’s floor in waves. The air was very moist and hard to breathe, as it felt so thick in the lungs and the mouth. Also, the heat, which I had noticed before in Flores, had reached upward into the high nineties and moved over us with a rank force.
It took time to adjust. Every time we took a step, we landed in a plush and sucking mud that threatened to pull off our boots and crawled onto our legs, doused our pants, and otherwise maneuvered itself almost immediately up onto our chests and faces and hands. The mosquitoes evidenced a particular attraction for any protuberance on the body of special sensitivity, so our attention was very much involved for the first hour in the Sisyphean task of removing the living black layers of insects by swiping at them with our useless hands. Though no one said anything much during this initial period, that does not mean it was silent in the forest; the air was busy with the movements of the jungle’s inhabitants, mostly spider and howler monkeys. These creatures, dancing in the tree canopies and springing with big-toed feet from vine to vine in a kind of crazy play, shrieked at us in almost human voices. Then they’d shake the trunks and branches, breaking off branches to actually hurl them down at our heads, apparently in some kind of editorial concerning our unwelcome status there. What was all the more unnerving and wonderful about the spiders and howlers was the freakish way their faces looked, human and mobile, with the jaws moving and the lips grimacing, so that they seemed just on the verge of shouting at us certain extremely articulate profanities. When I saw them do this, I suddenly understood with a discomposing lucidity how related we all were to the beasts.
Until I heard something leaking and felt a wetness on my shoulder.
“Is it raining?” Erik asked behind me.
“What is that?” I said.
Yolanda began guffawing.
“Pretend it isn’t happening,” I heard Manuel say.
When I had the brilliant idea to look up, I realized that the monkeys were peeing on and very anthropomorphically laughing at me.
Beyond the racket of hominid urination and giggles, however, there were other, less compromised fascinations and pleasures in the jungle.
The orchids were as lithe and fresh-colored as girls; the trees were magical, leafy, woven with fuchsia blooms and white petals. At times the electric music of the insects would be broken by the thundering noise of the birds. These were red and green creatures with large hooked bright yellow beaks and thrashing wings. And there was also the rushing timbre from unseen rivers, the ingurgitational sound of our boots in the mud, and the efficient ripping of the machete as Yolanda hacked an emerald path for us through the bushes and the flowered vines.
She looked taller and stronger here than she did in the city. She swung that weapon so swiftly, it seemed more mercury than steel as it sizzled through the greenery. I could
hear her steady breathing, like a pulse; her lithe arms moved with rapid and savage strokes. The severed heads of scarlet blooms marked her wake, and the reflections of the bush walls that she carved tinted her black hair with the shades of sap and sea glass, apple and holly.
This rough glowing corridor that she fashioned with her blade would eventually cut toward the famous river Sacluc.
After an hour hiking through the rain forest, I had no idea where we’d just been or where we were.
“Is it close?” I asked. “I can’t tell. Are we far away from the road? Are we almost there?”
“We aren’t almost there,” I heard Yolanda say. “It’s at least ten more kilometers to the Sacluc.”
“Do you want me to take over?” Manuel asked.
“I’ll do it,” Erik said.
“There will be plenty of time for that, but I’m not tired yet,” Yolanda said.
“Ten more kilometers,” I said. “How long will that take, do you think?”
“Maybe another whole day. And drink some water, all of you. I won’t be able to carry you around this place.”
Pieces of sky were visible between the trees’ leaves, so we could see canary and gray clouds hanging overhead. The light in the lower wood grew more obscure, turning green as it reflected the color of the brush and the moss that crowded onto the bark of the mahoganies. The rainwater caused everything in the forest to glisten, and its flora proliferated around us, heavy, glazed, and so luxuriant that it seemed it might swallow us up in one great moist gulp. The trees’ branches and trunks were huge, sometimes as big as six times my body around, and they extended up into the air in curving lines; ferns and mosses curled in their furrows, orchids and lianas ran down from them like streamers. And some kind of chemical process was performed in the hot mud, which created mists and other vapors that rose from the ground in thin white billows.
We passed through a cloud. I listened to Erik’s tramping and breathing, and watched Manuel in front of me stagger occasionally, then right himself by pressing against the trees. Yolanda would wait for him sometimes, but she remained so busy cutting us the path that she didn’t even seem to notice us that much. She kept her eyes on the brush ahead and gave no sign of any hesitation about her direction, other than one or two consultations with the compass she’d kept in her pocket. But I don’t know how she managed it. I couldn’t have even led us back out if I’d tried.
The afternoon wore on. None of us talked. It didn’t take long for our muscles to begin aching, or our backs, or for our feet to hurt. But instead of this distracting me from a gory bout of self-reflection, I found that my thoughts sprang around in wild and unamiable directions.
Before night fell, it occurred to me with a nice neurotic twinge, which hit me like an attack of sciatica, that I understood almost nothing that had happened in the last few days. I didn’t really understand Guatemala City, with its guards and soldiers wandering around with rifles stuck in their pants. I didn’t understand why anybody thought it might be a good idea to worship a horse in Flores, or what sort of peyote the authors of the Rough Guide or Lonely Planet were taking. And, more nerve-rackingly, I didn’t understand what had become of my taste for firefighters, or why I was more Mexican or Latin back home than here, or how I had been ripped from my soft cozy armchair to dally among incontinent monkeys, or what had happened to my connection with Manuel Alvarez. I didn’t understand (or didn’t want to) the meaning of one bloody word in my mother’s journal. And I sure as hell didn’t understand why she would come out here all this way and not tell me exactly what she’d discovered, or why.
And then, on top of all of these invigorating metaphysics, I realized that I could also barely fathom that woman’s face in the Flores morgue, which had looked carved out of ivory, and was so still because she wasn’t alive anymore, as she had been killed by a tree. It was when this image came to me that I found myself stumbling suddenly over not only roots and orchids and slippery frightening snakelike creatures gliding through the mud in front of my feet, but also an extremely confounding fact that disturbed me more than anything else. I thought: Even if my mother didn’t die in Flores, and even if I find her out here, somewhere, alive—someday she will die. Someday I’ll never see her again.
This idea had never come to me before with such clarity.
So here I was in the jungle, thinking of all things horrible, incomprehensible, void, and nonsensical as I climbed past ferns twisting in a breeze like acrobats, and maneuvered past majestic trees wreathed in mist. I looked behind me, but Erik was communicating violently with some spotted centipede that had become suddenly interested in crawling up his leg. Ahead I saw Manuel, smaller than me and lighter, and the tall, elegantly boned frame of Yolanda. Out of all of this, every person I was with, every fact and datum that I’d run across, I wondered if the only thing that I thought I could possibly ever puzzle out with the aid of my million misfiring synapses and whirligigging gray cells was the story translated by Beatriz de la Cueva five hundred years ago about a King, a Witch, and a Jade.
We were following Beatriz de la Cueva, Balaj K’waill, Alexander Von Humboldt, the unlucky Oscar Angel Tapia, Tomas de la Rosa, and Juana Sanchez by heading north through ten to fifteen miles of buffer zone in the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Directly past the river Sacluc we would wind our way through the Maze of Deceit (which apparently was composed of stories) toward a moldering kingdom and a magical tree, and then crack the Maze of Virtue (nothing more than a riddle). Only then would we find a stone that some called a magnet, others a talisman, and still others a queen. And maybe, as well, we’d find my mother.
Ahead of me, Yolanda stopped in the forest’s dusk and lifted her face toward the canopy. She turned around and looked at me for a second, but didn’t smile. I stopped walking too. Then she reached behind and pulled her flashlight out of her bag. She switched it on.
The cold, white, brilliant light lit up the jungle like a flare. The beam blew through the shadows hanging from the boughs and covering the monkeys and the birds. And all about us there were fogs and wings of dark air, and the sounds of coming night, and the trees like giants closing in.
“This is where we’ll camp,” she said.
CHAPTER 50
The jungle’s dusk moved down over us quickly, and we turned on each of the three flashlights Yolanda had brought along, so their beams moved in crisscrossing patterns over the rough clearing where we’d decided to rest for the night. To my left, Manuel and Erik labored to set up hammocks and pulled out filmy white sheets of mosquito netting. I trained one of the torches onto the ground where Yolanda worked, with sure and fast digs of a spade to remove the mud and tussocks, and tried to dig a hole and level the surrounding earth. She still wore her hat at an angle over her eyes, and in the ebbing light I saw the scratches on her chin and her jaw, and the grime swiping at her cheek and across her nose. She pushed the spade into the ground, but the wet earth continued to cave in and she couldn’t get any leverage, so eventually she smoothed the whole area as level as she could make it. Then she began to cover the area with a nest of soaking leaves and ferns that I had gathered, as well as half of a crimson bromeliad plant.
Next she brought out of her backpack a stick of magnesium with a flint attached to one end, and took a small silver knife from her back pocket. With the knife, she whittled off a few scraps of the mineral stick and sprinkled them on the wet leaves and wood.
She struck the flint on her knife until a spark came, and the scraps of magnesium caught flame and the whole pile of wet steaming stuff began to move and crackle and radiate heat and gold light.
The four of us crouched about the fire for a while, our figures rose-colored against the forest, which grew gray, then black.
When night had fallen completely, I looked at my friends, and they seemed so lovely and wonderful that my heart expanded. I watched the red light play against their faces, and the shadows cast by their bodies. Manuel looked old, tired, and beautiful; Yolanda sharpened her machetes wi
th a stone. Erik sat on the far side of the blaze and tinkered with his decipherment with a pencil, frowning in concentration while a blue light glimmered like a jewel within the deepest part of the fire.
Then he put his pencil down.
“Lola?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got it,” he said. “I’ve deciphered it.”
Yolanda threw her machete to the side. Manuel sat up straighter and pressed his hand to his chest.
“Tell me that you decoded a map,” I said.
He didn’t answer at first.
“Is it a map?” I asked again.
“In a way,” he said. I could see from his face that he was excited. “It does give directions that we’re supposed to take once we hit the Rio Sacluc, where Tapia found the Stelae. And like I was telling you before, the stories are related to the legend. You’ve got the same characters … but … it’s a little complicated. Just don’t—get upset.”
“What do you mean?”
He spread out the pages before us.
“It’s another puzzle.”
THE LABYRINTH OF DECEIT, DECODED
The Story of the King
I was once a true King, fierce and Noble. Born under the Sign of the Feathered Serpent, I possessed all power over Earth and Sea and Man. On account of my one great Gift, it was my Destiny to Rule this land for one thousand years in perfect peace. Every soft girl I desired would call herself my wife, and embrace no other. Every strong man would bow before me as a slave and despair. Cold dark deep and absolutely pure, that holy rain would make rich my Gardens, and I would walk in my fields like a Fearsome Lord. When it was time for me to depart from this world, I would rise with the Sun like a God, and take my place beyond the Smoking Mirror of the sky.
The Queen Jade Page 24