Kisa pulled him into an empty hut that no longer had a roof. This hut was much smaller than the one Riq had visited during the great storm. “I don’t trust these men,” Kisa told him as soon as they were alone.
“The king’s people?” Riq asked. “Why not?”
“Itchik believes they want to study our codex so they can learn from it. But he’s too trusting. I believe they want to steal our work and claim it as their own. Everyone knows Pacal is the best scribe in any village.”
Riq looked out the open door. Several older Mayan women were in an organized line sweeping the road. Men were moving in and out of other huts with ancient-looking tools. “Shouldn’t we warn Itchik?” he said, turning back to Kisa.
“He won’t listen. All he cares about is proving our progress to others.” Kisa took Riq’s arm. “You need to be careful, too,” she said. “And the smaller boy who was hurt. They have been known to capture people who look different. I heard they take them back to Calakmul and shove them in cages. People pay to view them.”
“Trust me,” Riq said, remembering his experiences in 1850, “nobody’s putting me in a cage.”
Kisa nodded and picked up one of the ceiling boards lying by her feet. She stared at it for a few seconds and then turned to Riq with glassy eyes. “I guess I’m just worried for the people I care about. This storm has ruined so many of our homes. And our observatory. Everyone is working hard to recover. And here come these men from the richest village in the lowlands, demanding to see the fruit of our learning. It doesn’t seem right.”
“I wish I could be more help,” Riq said.
Kisa shook her head. “You have your own worries.”
Riq focused on the ground, thinking. No matter what happened to him, he needed to make sure Dak and Sera were okay. He needed to make sure the Hystorians’ mission didn’t end here. He pulled the SQuare out of his satchel and looked up at Kisa.
He waited for her to ask what it was, but she just stared at it, watching him push the power button. “I was wondering if you’d look at something for me,” he said.
“Of course,” she told him. “But I’ve never seen anything like that. I may not be any help.”
He typed in the password and pulled up the riddle, then held the screen up for Kisa to see. When she gave him a blank look, he blushed. Of course she couldn’t read it. It was written in English. He translated for her verbally.
“This is why you asked about snakes in my jewelry,” Kisa said.
Riq nodded. “Do any of the lines make sense to you?”
“I don’t know what the clown could be. Or the treasure. But I know Itzamna, of course. He is the god who gave us our calendar. And the numbers you read, those are calendar dates. One of them is today. The other is far into the future. Knowing one, it is a simple matter to deduce the second.”
The hair stood up on Riq’s arms. “One of them is today?”
Kisa nodded.
Riq powered down the SQuare and stuck it back in his satchel, looking all around the battered hut, trying to think. He saw old cooking tools and fallen boards and cloth. He saw a half-covered piece of wood that had been carved into a snake head. Riq knew he needed to tell Sera about the significance of today as soon as he possibly could. The Hystorians really had led them here intentionally. It was now just a matter of figuring out why. Dozens of images flashed through his mind: Itchik leading them into his hut; the scribes coming up out of the rubble; the storm as seen from the mouth of the cave; Jasaw burning incense over Dak’s lifeless body.
“Is everything okay?” Kisa asked.
“I’m not sure,” Riq said. “I just know I need to get to Sera. You’ve helped us tremendously, Kisa. And please —”
“Don’t worry,” Kisa said, cutting him off. “I will not mention the riddle to a soul.”
Riq nodded. “Thank you.”
“Be careful, Riq. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Riq squeezed her hand and turned to leave, but he only made it as far as the open door before spinning back around. “I need to tell you something, Kisa. Something I’ve been thinking about all day.”
“What?”
“The three of us. Me, Dak, and Sera. We’ve been traveling from place to place, trying to make the world better. It’s a quest I prepared for my whole life. But I’ve realized something since we arrived at your village.”
Kisa held the ceiling board, waiting for Riq to finish.
“Maybe helping the entire world is less important than helping a specific community. Because with a community you can see faces. You can know them, and they can know you back.” Riq returned to Kisa, took the board out of her hands, and studied it for a few seconds. “Who lived in this hut before the storm hit?” he asked.
Kisa lowered her eyes. “Me and my family.”
Riq nodded. “You know, all my life I’ve cared more about a quest than I have about people. I believed having a friend would take my focus away from what was important. But I was wrong about that, Kisa. Having a friend is the most important thing in the world.”
“It’s the most important thing for you, too?” Kisa asked.
“From this day forward.”
“And are we friends?”
Riq nodded. “I’d like to think we are. Even though we haven’t known each other very long.” He handed the board back to Kisa. “Do you think it’d be okay if I stayed here and helped your village rebuild? It would be a great honor if your people would allow me to help.”
“We’d like that very much,” Kisa said, dropping the board and taking his hands in hers. “I only wish I could do something for you in return. Something just as important.”
“You already have,” Riq told her.
His heart was racing. But at least the matter was settled. He would stay here and help Kisa and her family. Dak and Sera would be fine without him. They were the important time travelers. And when their mission was successful, Riq’s life back home wouldn’t be the same. If he even had a life there. Here, at least, he would serve a purpose. He would help rebuild a village. And he would be Kisa’s friend. And maybe he could even assist the scribes when they started their next project.
“I have to go,” Riq said. “Sera needs to know what you’ve told me.”
“And I have to help Mother with the children,” Kisa said.
Riq let go of Kisa’s hands and started through the door when Kisa called out, “And, Riq.”
He turned around.
“Please be careful of those men. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Nothing can happen to me now, Kisa.” Riq left the hut and started running through the village, toward the ball courts. His legs and chest felt incredibly strong, like he could run forever. Like nothing in the world could slow him down.
SERA SAT in awe as Pacal opened the codex like an accordion and pointed to the top right section. “Here we show the path of Venus,” he said. “We tracked its movement in the sky for many years.”
Sera looked at the foreign glyphs. Her translation device did little to help her with archaic written text. But it was an amazing thing to see in person. This was the first written language on the entire continent. And it had an almost otherwordly beauty to it. Each glyph was a miniature work of art.
After Sera had followed Itchik and the children to the ball courts, she had met the four visitors from Calakmul. They were squatty, powerful-looking men with dark brown eyes and bushy brown hair. She also met the three scribes, Cocom, Kan Boar, and Pacal. Itchik invited all the men to a special meal inside the temple, prepared by the best cooks in the village. Sera was all set to head back to the cave and check on Dak when Pacal announced that he would skip dinner and do a little more work. Sera was shocked when he then turned and asked if she wanted to accompany him.
She jumped on the offer, thinking she might get a chance to see the co
dex up close.
“Past generations have followed the movements of the sun and moon and stars.” Pacal went on, “And in our first very amateur codex, we did the same thing. But in this much wiser version I believe we are the first to have charted the course of Venus.”
“Wait,” Sera said, “there’s another codex?”
“A very poor one. A learning experience, you might say — though that alone took us years. We call it our trial codex. I wanted it destroyed, but King Itchik insisted he keep it for reasons of nostalgia.”
She looked at Pacal, a short old man with bad teeth. There was something very familiar about him. Every time their eyes met she had a strange déjà vu feeling, not a Remnant exactly, but close.
“How’d you see Venus without a telescope?” Sera said.
“Telescope?” Pacal asked. “What is that?”
“Uh, never mind.” Sera chided herself in her head. Of course he wouldn’t know what a telescope was. “Don’t mind me. I tend to make up words when I’m tired.”
Pacal stared deep into her eyes, and Sera felt herself tumbling toward that déjà vu feeling again. Only this time she saw the face of a man from her past. A man she hadn’t thought about in years. She had been three years old, playing in the yard at her uncle’s place, when a large van pulled up. Several men got out, and the leader walked onto the property and talked to Sera’s uncle. They had a long, spirited conversation and then the man walked over to Sera; he’d smiled big and knelt down so he could stare deep into her eyes. He was an older man with long gray hair tied back into a braid and a dark leathery face — the kind you might see at the top of a totem pole.
He’d rubbed his chin, still smiling, and said, “You’re going to be special, Sera. I can see it in your eyes. But you must understand, there is always a price to pay for being special. You must have strong shoulders. Do you have strong shoulders, Sera?”
She’d nodded but didn’t say a word.
He’d stood up and said, “Good.” Then he left in the van with the other men.
When Sera’s uncle came over to her, he’d said, “You see how rude he is? He didn’t even introduce himself.”
“Who was he?” Sera had asked, looking up at her uncle.
“Your grandfather,” he’d told her.
That was exactly who Pacal reminded her of. The man who said she would be special. Her grandfather.
Sera pulled herself out of her memory and asked Pacal, “So, why is Venus such a big deal anyway?”
Pacal picked up his fine-tipped brush and began painting a ceiba tree on the last panel. “We have learned much from Venus,” he said. “This planet tells us when it’s best to plant each crop and when we need to prepare for battle.”
Sera tried to decide what she thought of basing real-life decisions on the path of a planet. It reminded her of kids at school who always wanted to know what sign of the horoscope everyone was. Sera had never understood that superstitious approach to life. She’d always been about hard science. But Pacal still seemed smart.
“And this section here describes the work we’ve done with the calendar,” Pacal said, pointing to the fifth panel. “Using the Long Count system, we’ve calculated the dates far into the future.”
Sera wished she could explain all the amazing things that happened from Pacal’s time up to the modern day. He seemed like the kind of person who would want to hear about everything. But she couldn’t go down that road. She had to keep the conversation on the calendar. “So, at any point does your codex mention a curse?”
“A curse?”
“Yeah,” Sera said. “A curse that says we’re headed toward a Cataclysm and the only people who can save us are the SQ?”
“There is no curse in our codex,” Pacal said.
Sera tried another approach. “So, what happens when you get to the last date of your calendar? Will the world come to an end?”
“Oh, no,” Pacal said, laughing now. “That will only mark the end of a cycle. A new cycle will begin immediately after. We hope it is a time of even greater learning.”
They talked about other knowledge the scribes had shared in the codex, and something slowly happened in Sera’s brain. She stopped listening quite as intently and started thinking about the error messages on the Infinity Ring again. She still had no idea what the date was. But the Maya kept track of time by another system. And it was an extremely detailed system based on decades of scientific observation and record keeping. That meant raw data, which she could cross-reference with the data stored in the Ring.
Sera slipped the Ring out of her satchel and stared at it. Pacal continued to paint the ceiba tree. At one point he looked up at the Ring and furrowed his brow, but instead of asking any questions he went back to his codex.
After a few minutes, he cleared his throat and said, “Can I offer a word of advice, Sera?”
“I’m all ears,” she answered.
“I’ve come to believe that everything is of this earth. Including you and me. The most complex human invention already existed in the soil. We do not make up new things out of thin air; we simply find already existing elements, born of this earth, and place them in new combinations. Progress is merely organization and creativity.”
Sera nodded, trying to process what she’d just heard.
Pacal put down his paintbrush and reached into his bag. He turned his back on her. “And one other thing,” he said. “Never forget the importance of laughter.” He turned back around wearing a wooden clown mask, stuck his thumbs in his ears, and wiggled his fingers. “I usually only pull this out when I want to entertain small children.”
Sera definitely wasn’t expecting this. “So, wait . . . I’m like a small child to you?”
“The best part of all of us is a child,” he said.
Sera cracked up a little. It was funny to see the village wise man goofing around with a silly mask.
A few seconds later an alarm went off in her head.
The clown reference in the riddle. Maybe they’d already found the snake charmer and the clown. Before Sera could fire off all her questions for Pacal, though, Itchik pushed open the temple doors and led the four visitors from Calakmul into the room, saying, “And here, my friends, is the surprise I told you about.” He pointed at the codex. “Our greatest achievement of learning.”
The four men stood there nodding and staring at the codex as Pacal pulled off his clown mask and shoved it back in his bag.
Itchik guided the visitors deeper into the temple, saying, “Pacal will describe for you all that our codex explains.”
Sera saw that one of the men was looking at the Ring in front of her. She couldn’t worry about that now, though. She was too busy reviewing all their previous coordinates. There was astronomical data there, which she cross-referenced with the codex’s detailed information on Venus and the moon. She was able to deduce a likely date: July 25, 638. Her hypothesis was confirmed when she reprogrammed the Ring settings and the error messages disappeared.
She pumped her fist and shoved the Ring back into her satchel and stood up.
Pacal was now leading the four visitors through each panel. A second group of people shuffled into the temple as Pacal explained the calendar. A few locals. The other two scribes. “Sera,” someone said. She saw Riq step into view and wave her over to him.
As Pacal continued, Sera slipped around the visitors to get to Riq. “I’m so happy you showed up,” she said. “I have major news.”
“Me, too,” he said. “I just spoke to Kisa. She helped me understand the numerical part of the riddle. Apparently, there are two dates listed.”
“And?”
Riq seemed more excited than she’d ever seen him. “Sera, one of those dates is today.”
“Today?” Sera repeated.
“See? We were supposed to come here all along. Just like I thought. All we have
to do now is figure out what’s significant about today.”
Pacal was now speaking about the path of Venus.
“That’s huge,” Sera said. “Speaking of the riddle, you’ll never guess what that Pacal guy just pulled onto his face a few minutes before you got here.”
“What?”
“A clown mask,” Sera said. “He has to be the clown from the riddle.”
Riq’s eyes grew big. “We’re finally figuring this thing out,” he said.
Sera nodded and said, “Which makes me think Kisa really is the snake charmer. We just need to figure out what that means, exactly. But here’s the best news of all.” She patted the satchel holding the Infinity Ring and said, “You’re looking at the girl who just figured out how to eliminate all those error messages.”
“Are you serious?”
Sera explained how Pacal’s description of the Mayan calendar helped her figure it out. “The point is,” she said, shoving Riq in the shoulder, “we can now leave whenever we want.”
“That’s . . .” Riq suddenly looked concerned. “I mean, great work, Sera.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“What? Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
Riq nodded. “Of course I’m sure. But we should probably concentrate on the significance of today’s date for now, right?”
“Definitely,” Sera said. She turned when she noticed two of the visitors heading for the door. One of them glanced at her before stepping outside the temple.
Sera held a finger up to Riq and moved toward the group of Mayas listening to Pacal. “Where did they go?” she asked Cocom.
“To meet up with the rest of their men,” he answered. “They said the storm set them back and they need to make it to the next village by morning.”
“They’re not even staying the night?” Sera mumbled to herself as she moved back toward Riq. “That seems sort of weird.”
It was twenty more minutes before Pacal finished explaining the final panel of the codex. The two remaining visitors were beyond impressed. They raved to Itchik, who had a big smile on his face, and they patted Pacal on the shoulder and then the smaller of them began folding up the codex, saying, “Yuknoom the Great will be honored to display this in the very center of our empire.”
Curse of the Ancients Page 5