Catch the Lightning

by Catherine Asaro

  “Let’s see how you like ours.” He pulled the blanket up over us, then spoke to the warrior outside. An Abaj entered and knelt, setting a pot and two cups on the floor. Red glaze covered the pot, accented by aqua hieroglyphs. Although I didn’t recognize most of the symbols, that didn’t mean much; I didn’t know many Mayan glyphs either. There was one that was familiar, though, on the pot’s lock-top cap: a comb, pronounced ca; a fish, also ca; and underneath that a symbol for wa. Ca-ca-wa. Cacao.

  The warrior asked Althor a question. After Althor answered, the Abaj stood and bowed, then left, the curtain rustling with his passage.

  “What did he ask you?” I said.

  “If we wished witnesses.”

  “To what?”

  He motioned at the two of us in bed. “This. That we consummated the marriage.”

  “What?” I flushed. “We most certainly do not want witnesses.”

  “I think it is a good idea.”

  “You can’t be serious. They want to watch?”

  He grinned. “Many millennia ago, when deemed necessary for political reasons, the Abaj did indeed witness in that manner.”

  “Althor!”

  He laughed. “Today they just witness us together like this. They will take our word that everything else went as it should.”

  “But whatever for?”

  “Proof the treaty is valid.” He picked up the cacao pot. “I asked the Abaj to check the web last night. Stonehedge apparently delivered our contract to the Assembly himself. Our marriage has been public knowledge for days.” Dryly he added, “So are the circumstances of our kidnapping. I want to avoid embarrassing questions.”

  “It actually makes a difference whether or not we consummated the marriage?”

  “Legally, no.” He poured a steaming dark liquid into one of the cups and set it in front of me. “But as a symbol, yes.”

  I took a sip of the cacao. It was wonderful, like raspberry-flavored coffee with cinnamon. “Don’t they get lonely?”

  “The Abaj?”

  “Yes. Don’t they want wives?”

  “Some do.” He poured himself a drink. “Those leave Raylicon. But most stay. They are all clones. The original templates were chosen from men believed suited to this life. I guess they learned to live without women.” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine it.”

  “Couldn’t they clone their women too?”

  “The women were already gone. That’s why they learned to clone in the first place. They did save some genetic material, which is how Rhon created my grandmother.” He took another swallow of his drink. “Healthy clones are difficult to make, though.”

  “The Jag told me about it.”

  He regarded me. “Will you let the Abaj geneticists analyze your DNA? One of their best genetics labs is here, underground.”

  I took another sip of my drink. “All right.” It was hard to imagine a high-tech lab under the ruins of this ancient city.

  Althor spoke in Iotic, in a louder voice. A guard outside answered, and I heard the booted tread of someone walking away from the spire.

  As we were finishing our cacao, footsteps approached the spire. I rolled over under the blanket and Althor pushed up on his elbow, his front against my back.

  The Uzan entered with five warriors, their robes billowing. They knelt before us and the Uzan spoke. In response, Althor kissed my cheek, a gesture more ritualistic than affectionate. I tried to imagine the Abaj as towering female warriors, me as an Amazonlike queen, Althor as my concubine. It was an odd image, hard to get my mind around.

  The Uzan and four of the warriors left in a swirl of robes. As the curtain opened, revealing a dawn-washed sky, the sun raised its huge rim above the horizon. Then the curtain fell back into place and we were alone with the fifth warrior.

  “This is the geneticist,” Althor said. “He wants a skin sample.”

  I looked at the Abaj and he averted his eyes. He unhooked a tube from his belt and took out two spatulas, each smaller than my litde finger. He scraped one along my arm, then dropped it into a vial, where it hung suspended.

  “Your mouth too,” Althor said.

  I opened my mouth and the Abaj scraped the second spatula across the inside of my cheek. He dropped that into another vial, then closed up everything in a black pouch, hung it on his belt, and rose to his full height. He departed with a bow, sand drifting in his wake.

  “How do they do that?” I asked. “They move so fast. And always together, as if they all know what the others are doing.”

  “They’re empaths. Being clones makes their link stronger.” Althor lay down and slid his hand under the blanket, over my breasts. He smiled. “Perhaps we should make doubly sure this treaty we’ve established is valid.”

  I laughed and pulled him into my arms. “Perhaps we should.”

  Izu Yaxlan. City of magic.

  As we stepped out into the reddish rays of the morning sun, I had my first good look at the ruins. We climbed a pyramid near the spire, up stairs so steep we could put our hands on the steps in front of us without bending over. All that remained of the top was a platform two stories above ground. I turned around and around on it, my dress whipping in the wind as I absorbed the sights.

  Half a mile away, a cliff rose up from the desert, and behind it mountains stepped into the sky. At the base of the cliff, the ruins of a palace basked in the sun. The building was long, three stories high and three times as long. Nine doorways were spaced along the front, none with doors. Had I drawn a line through the center, the two halves would have been mirror images. The remains of the roof angled in steep vaults made by overlapping flat stones. Faded murals covered important areas: stairways, walls, parts of the roof, the tower at each end.

  Izu Yaxlan spread out in the desert beneath the cliff. Wide streets linked houses, plazas, and what resembled Maya sweat houses. The buildings with gaping beast mouths for doorways had to be temples. I even saw ball courts like those in ancient Maya cities. Pyramids rose here and there, with steep stairs. Other structures were less familiar: narrow spires reaching up many stories and bridges arching between upper levels of buildings, their spans built by overlapping stones. Cobblestone paths bordered by octagonal pillars wound through the city, and more buildings showed beyond the city center, smaller and more widely scattered, like suburbs.

  “This is incredible.” I stopped turning. “How can they let such a beautiful place fall apart?”

  “Almost no one lives here now,” Althor said. “Just the Abaj, and they don’t spend the entire year.”

  “But they could do something. Send in robots, or nanomachines, or bring people from offworld.”

  “That is not what they want.” Althor regarded me. “After the last Abaj dies, Izu Yaxlan will belong to my family. We will follow their wishes that it be left alone.”

  “To crumble back into the desert?” The thought was heartbreaking. “Why, Althor?”

  He motioned at the city. “This is Raylicon. Like Raylicon, it is dying. The Abaj have accepted their death.”

  “If they wanted to die, they wouldn’t have tried so hard to survive.”

  “They don’t want to die. My family, all of Skolia, even the Traders—we exist out of their struggle to live.” He spread his hands. “Some unknown race brought them here. They never had a choice. Now, in the sunset of their lives, they want no interlopers to take control again, either human or machine. They will die as they have lived for six thousand years. On their terms.”

  “I understand, I think.” I motioned at the city. “It looks Maya. Has anyone from Earth seen these ruins?”

  “Not many,” he said. “Raylicon is closed to all but a few select visitors. And Izu Yaxlan is a sacred place.”

  “Has anyone ever sent pictures of it to Earth?”

  “No. It would be sacrilege.”

  “There must be records about the Maya,” I said. “Anthropologists love to study us, or at least they did in my universe. All that work couldn’t have just disap
peared.”

  “I thought the Maya didn’t exist six millennia ago.”

  “Perhaps your ancestors were brought from another universe, one with history shifted by thousands of years.” I considered the thought. “Most Maya kingdoms collapsed around 900 a.d. Perhaps it was because our ancestors were taken away.” I shivered. “Maybe it happens over and over again in different universes, some race taking them from one and stranding them in another.”

  He stared at me. “For what gods-forsaken reason? To see if we can survive? To concentrate Kyle traits in a race already strong with them?”

  “Maybe.” I couldn’t think of a better reason.

  “Then they failed.”

  “Your family exists.”

  “Just barely.” His expression softened. “Though perhaps now…” He held out his hand and I went to him. We hugged each other, the wind twining my hair around our bodies.

  Eventually we returned to the stairs, where two Abaj waited on the steps, out of sight but close enough to hear if we called. They descended before us, like a human safety net. Althor took me through the city to the cliff, a pitted wall thousands of feet high, with a staircase switchbacking up its face. If a railing had ever protected the stairs, it was gone now. Cave entrances showed far up on the cliff, great beast heads carved into the mountain. The stairs reminded me of a toy I once saw, a frame with chutes that went back and forth. You put a marble in the top and it ran down one chute, dropped to the next, rolled down in the other direction, and so on, to the bottom.

  “You go first,” Althor said. “I’ll come behind you, in case you slip.”

  His emotions made a gentle amber glow around us, colors of hope and love. I cupped my hand in the air, filling it with that luminous mist. Then I started up the steps, resting one hand against the cliff face at my side.

  Gusts tugged at us, growing stronger as we climbed higher. The. two Abaj followed, their long legs taking the steps with ease. I looked back once, but it made me dizzy. After that I kept my gaze on the stairs, trying to forget the drop-off next to us.

  At the first switchback, though, I couldn’t resist looking down at the city. It spread out for miles, radiant in the bronzed sunlight, timeless and mysterious. I could easily believe ancient warriors had become legends in this place.

  When we started up the second switchback, I said, “How high are we going?”

  Althor answered from behind me. “To the House of Izam'Na Quetza.”

  “Izam Na Quetza? That sounds like Itzamna and quetzal.”

  “Who?” '

  “Itzamna was the Maya god of wisdom and knowledge.” I kept talking, trying to take my mind off the long fall to the ground. “A quetzal is a bird. It’s gorgeous—green, red, white, and yellow, with long tail feathers. Royalty and warriors wore them. The feathers, I mean. In some places the penalty for killing a quetzal was death. It angered the god Kukulcan. Also the Toltec god Queztalcoatl. They’re the same god, really, a feathered serpent who rules on Earth. Sometimes Kukulcan disguised himself as a wind god, though.”

  “Izam Na Quetza is the Raylican god of flight,” Althor said.

  The wind grew stronger, enough to make balance difficult. When we reached the second landing, we looked out at the city. Izu Yaxlan lay far below now. A black bird lit on the tip of a red-gold spire and cawed, its lonely call flying out into the desert.

  We started up the third switchback. I faced the cliff, using both hands to search for handholds, not so much because the stairs were any steeper but because we were so high I felt the need to hang on. Wind sang across the cliff, its voice chill as it threw tendrils of hair into my eyes. The Abaj came behind us, walking steadily. I could imagine how we looked, four tiny figures far up on a vertical cliff.

  My hand slid out into empty air and I fell—.

  And hit ground, landing on one knee. Althor tripped over my leg and caught himself on his hands and knees. We were inside the mouth of a cave. Literally. The entrance had been carved into a beast head with its mouth open in a roar. Huge stone fangs framed the opening.

  Both Althor and I turned and sat on the edge of the opening, our legs dangling over the lower teeth. Far out in the desert, dunes rolled for mile after mile to the horizon. Scraps of clouds drifted through a porcelain sky. Out in the distance a sand devil whirled across the red sands.

  The Abaj appeared, bending their heads to fit under the fangs as they stepped inside the beast’s mouth. Wind tugged their cloaks, revealing bright clothes with gold embroidery, then hiding them again. They bowed to us without missing a step. It was impressive. I hoped they hadn’t seen our far less graceful entrance.

  As Althor and I stood, one of the warriors went to the wall. From a hook there, he took a bundle of what looked like dried branches tied together with cord. Then he pulled a tube off his jeweled belt. A spark of light—and the end of his torch flared with flame. The yellow glow mixed with the bronze sunlight, giving the cave an aged look, like an old photograph.

  A rectangular tunnel stretched into the cliff for several yards, then bent sharply to the left. Hieroglyphics covered the back wall, drawn with black, red, and brown paints. The paint looked fresh; I later learned that the temple was one of a few sites in Izu Yaxlan the Abaj scrupulously preserved.

  They led us down the tunnel. At the turn, they gave Althor the torch, then bowed in unison and withdrew back to the entrance. There they stood looking out at the desert, two gaunt figures in black framed by giant teeth, silhouetted against the sky. Wind keened past the entrance, high and lonely.

  Althor took my hand and we continued down the new branch of the tunnel. Behind us, sunshine lit the space where the tunnel turned, but the farther we walked the more darkness folded around us. After a few hundred yards the tunnel turned again, plunging deeper into the cliff. After that, only the torch lit our way. It was cool, too, the heat from the desert only a memory. Hieroglyphics covered the walls. Torchlight made shadows dance across them, so that the glyphs seemed to move.

  “Here.” Althor raised the torch. A staircase descended from our feet; at the bottom, a chamber curved out, disappearing into the darkness beyond the pool of torchlight. The air felt heavy. Ancient.

  We descended the stairs together. At the bottom, he slid the torch into a claw that gripped the wall, its talons carved in stone. He took a second torch from a claw next to it, lit it with the first, and set it in a claw on the opposite wall. Four more times he repeated the procedure; when he finished, six torches lit the chamber with dim light.

  My memory of that moment I first saw the House of Izam Na Quetza remains vivid even now. A sense of magic lives in that place, a memory of ancient kingdoms, of legends distilled until their essence became a part of the temple. Blocky friezes covered the walls, painted with dyes as blue as the sky and as red as the desert, their colors vivid even in dim light. The shadows were motionless that day, flickering only if the torches sputtered or we stirred the air. Gemstones embedded in the walls glittered in the radiance from the torches.

  A bench stood in the center, carved with winged creatures. One was a square-faced beast with horns that spiraled around his ears. He had six legs, three on each side, and a tail that also curled in a spiral. Wings lifted from his back in a magnificent sweep of outstretched feathers. Another showed a woman with tufted ears, or at least she was a woman from the waist up; her body was that of a hunting cat with a feathered tail. She held a spear over her head, her breasts lifted high, her wings spread in flight. Even carved in stone, her hair seemed in motion, tossed by the wind. Statues stood against the walls, beasts with wings opened wide, their heads thrown back as they shouted to the sky. Flight, frozen into rock.

  No statues stood on our right. Instead, the wall was sculpted into a man’s face, his visage nine feet tall. The simple concentric circles of his eyes gave an impression of gentleness. His nose jutted out from the wall in a hook and his mouth was a long rectangle with square teeth. His chin came out parallel to the floor in a ledge six feet long a
nd one wide, supported by stone columns. Incisors bent out from his mouth like armrests. A set of stairs led up to the wall, ending at the face, the top step even with the chin.

  Althor was watching me. “What do you think?”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Harsh too.”

  “Like the desert.”

  “Yes. Like the desert.”

  He took me to the bench in the center of the temple and I sat with him, the carvings on it sliding smoothly against my legs. “How long has this been here?” I asked.

  “Over five thousand years.” Althor motioned at the winged statues. “Izam Na is our god of flight and transcendence. He rises above the ills that plague humans. He nurtures. The Abaj came here after battle to seek healing, not necessarily of physical wounds but those that killing inflicts on the spirit.”

  I brushed my hand across a carving. “What are these?”

  “Each is a spirit companion to a goddess or god.” He indicated the winged woman. “’Chak’.”

  His pronunciation surprised me. He started the name with a perfect glottal stop and ended with a globalized k. Although most Skolian languages use glottals sparingly, both Iotic and Eubian are full of them, more even than my native tongue, Tzotzil Mayan. That’s Why the Trader language sounds so harsh. However, the musical quality of Raylican voices renders the glottals pleasant. It’s one reason Iotic is such a difficult language; to speak it properly, you need vocal chords that can produce musical notes

  “Who is ’Chak’?” I asked.

  “Spirit companion of the fertility goddess Ixa Quelia,” Althor said. “She wields the ax of lightning and brings rain to the desert. She’s also the goddess of war.”

  “There is a Maya diety we call Chac, a spirit of rain and war.” I touched the carving of the beast with spiraled horns. “And this?”

  “Azu Bullom. Spirit companion of Izam. You have this one also?”

  “I don’t think so. But balam means jaguar in Mayan.” I looked up at him. “We have spirit companions too. Animals. The jaguar is the most powerful.”

  “Bullom is also a spirit of great power.”