Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Avram pondered. Perhaps not puppet and puppeteer, but falcon and falconer instead? Avram was not certain how reassuring he found that idea, but he now had no doubt that the falconer was still watching the falcon, and the falcon could still hear the falconer.

  The rest of the morning went along normally enough, until Avram got a bit disoriented and lost after the microbial contamination talk. As a result, he arrived late to Miskulin’s lecture.

  By the time Avram snuck in at the back of the hotel ballroom where Miskulin was making his presentation, Doctor Meteor was already well along in talking about the elaborate mythology Inuit shamans had built up around the “One Who Falls from the Sky”—the literal meaning of qilangmiutaq, the word for “lemming” in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit people.

  Miskulin dismissed as “facile and fundamentally racist” the anthropologists’ anecdotal explanation for such lemming-names found throughout the circumpolar north—that “primitive” peoples, seeing the sudden explosion in local lemming numbers, simply assumed the creature had fallen from the sky. Miskulin’s countertheory was the product of his experiences during a summer appointment at the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS)—or so he claimed.

  Long publicized as “Mars on Earth,” FMARS was a Mars-analog habitat and scientific facility situated within the frigid and arid environs of the twenty-three-million-year-old, twenty-four-kilometer-wide Haughton Impact Structure, the most northerly meteor crater on any of earth’s continents.

  There, besides helping to test environment suits and habitat structures for an eventual Mars colony, Miskulin said he came to a better understanding of the boom/bust cycles of lemming populations. He connected their extreme aggressiveness during periods of exploding population to a similar dynamic of overpopulation, environmental destruction, and aggressive territorial expansion in humans.

  At FMARS he also first encountered the story of Uvavnuk, the nineteenth-century Inuit woman who became a shaman and poet after reportedly being struck by a ball of fire that fell out of the sky. Some of the tribal witnesses claimed it was a meteor, others thought it was ball lightning, still others that it was a “spear of God,” but all agreed Uvavnuk was immediately possessed by a tupilak spirit—something of a “cross between a shooting star and Tinkerbell,” in Miskulin’s words—who gave Uvavnuk her life-song.

  Avram jotted down Uvavnuk’s song as Miskulin recited it in translation: The Great Sea has set me in motion, Set me adrift

  And I move as a weed in the river.

  The height of sky And strength of storms Encompasses me,

  And I am left Trembling with joy.

  According to Miskulin’s Inuit sources, forever after her encounter with the fireball, Uvavnuk had strange powers over—and affinities with—lemmings, to the degree that she was also known as Lemming Woman.

  Even the story of shamanic healer Uvavnuk and her meteor-assisted metamorphosis, though, was only a launch-point for Miskulin’s larger argument that a great amount of reliable astronomical observation had been encoded in such legends—a basic approach with which Avram very much agreed.

  Avram didn’t give it the same biomedical spin Miskulin did, however. Doctor Meteor boldly argued that the traditional association of comets and meteors with shamans, priests, and healers, on the one hand, and with pestilence, disease, and contagion, on the other, was not superstition but was based in experience.

  He cited a long tradition of “bad stars.” Comets or meteor showers had reportedly been seen in the skies about the time of the final collapse of Rome and the plunging of sixth-century Europe into the Dark Ages.

  They had also been observed contemporaneously with the appearance of the Black Plague during the first half of the fourteenth century, and the spread of the Spanish Flu during the early twentieth.

  Miskulin read them all as proofs that organic compounds and organic life of nonterrestrial origin had in the past traveled to the Earth in meteoritic material. Coupled with arguably extraterrestrial fossil bacteria from meteorites, and with evidence that various types of hardened spores could travel through deep-space-like conditions and yet remain viable, such oral traditions convinced Miskulin that, throughout its geologic history, the Earth had been periodically exposed to prebiotic and protogenetic material from off-planet, both from within the solar system and from the depths of interstellar space.

  For him, the heretical idea of “germs from space” seemed entirely plausible. He ended his presentation with the proposal that historical records ought to be reexamined in light of this, and that shamans and traditional healers from throughout the world ought to be interviewed and questioned about their myths and legends concerning transient celestial events and meteoritic impacts before such information was lost forever, trampled out of existence by the global march of Western biomedical orthodoxy.

  No sooner had Miskulin finished than the room erupted into questions. As the questioning ran long, Avram quietly made his way out the nearest door of the ballroom, in order to keep his appointment with Vida and possibly with her cousin the falconer. Yet as he walked, he wondered. True, he had already been planning to attend Miskulin’s presentation, but why had Luis wanted him to attend that one in particular?

  He shrugged. Perhaps it was not always easy for the falcon to divine the falconer’s intentions.

  INTERLUDE: FOX GOES TO GROUND

  Amid explosion, fire, and gunshots, through bodies of the faithful blown to pieces, they had entered the building. The bespectacled, railthin man who traveled with them stayed focused on his mission, intensity of purpose seeming to cloak him in an impenetrable aura. Fire and noise of clashing forces notwithstanding, he made his way swiftly to the raw rock protruding from the floor of the shrine.

  Despite the frenetic chaos around him, he patiently lifted the earth-penetrating sonar-scanner from his shoulder and set it gingerly down on the floor, before carefully wiping the dust from his eyeglasses.

  Looking at the rock, he nodded to himself, satisfied. Powering up the scanner, he lifted it to his shoulder and began methodically playing it—back-forth, up-down—over the rock before him.

  A lull in the chaotic noise opened up around him, but Avigdor Fox barely noticed it, so intent was he on his scanning of the rock. Nor did he notice when the noise of gunfire intensified again, for by then he had located what he was looking for.

  Removing hammer and chisel from his belt, he crouched on the raw stone and began chipping methodically away at a small area of the stone, working a depression into a hole.

  The gunfire grew loud enough that even he noticed it now. Just a few more minutes, Fox thought. A few more good whacks—I’m almost there!

  Abruptly, the only sound in the building was his hammer hitting chisel, chisel chipping away at stone. Then hurried footsteps from behind him.

  “You will come with us, please,” said a voice coming from the same direction as the footsteps.

  “Just a minute—a minute!” Fox said, far too preoccupied to turn and see the speaker. “I’m almost there!”

  A single pair of footsteps came toward him.

  “You will come with us. Now.”

  A gun barrel—hard and quite warm—prodded him at his left temple. As he dropped the hammer and chisel and slowly stood, he seemed to fall back into his body. He tasted dust and smoke in his mouth. He smelled chipped stone, burnt gunpowder, and cordite. He heard sirens, booted footsteps, and masonry falling. He saw the bodies of those who’d been killed defending the shrine. He saw the fire at the entrance through which they’d blasted their way in, the ancient doorway still burning. Those who had cracked the place open for him also all seemed to have died.

  As he was marched out of the shrine by antiterror SWAT units of both the Jerusalem Police and Wakf Islamic security, the many misgivings Avigdor Fox had had about this enterprise, everything he’d managed to push out of his mind these last few hours, all came crashing in on him.

  LABYRINTH IN AIR

  As Avram wa
lked onto the terrace, Vida and a short wiry man with wavy black hair stood to greet him.

  “This is my cousin Umar,” Vida said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Avram said, shaking the man’s hand.

  “The pleasure’s mine. You want to see falcon hunting, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  With a sly smile, Umar gestured for them to follow him. When they came to Umar’s Jeep parked in the Burj Al Arab’s lot, Avram saw that there was a hooded bird of prey on its perch, facing them out the back window.

  “Saker falcon,” Umar said proudly. “She’s a strong, smart bird. Aggressive. Good endurance.”

  They got into the vehicle and drove mainly west for nearly an hour, then turned north. Avram filled Vida in on the Miskulin presentation, and Vida did the same for him regarding the Nuhus. Glancing at her notes from the lecture as they bounced along increasingly rough roads, she told him about Miller’s interpretations of the red-and-white Nuhu symbols from a number of bark books or codices. He mentioned the Colombino-Becker, the Zouche-Nuttall, and the Ríos, but focused especially on the Codex Boturini with its history of the Aztec migration into Tenochtitlan, the Tira de la Peregrinación.

  “The Tira tells how the ‘god’ Huitzilopochtli—who also seemed to be a Nuhu, from the red-and-white symbols associated with him—was discovered in a cave,” Vida explained, as Umar went off the road completely and jolted them along through the desert. “Inside a place depicted as Curl Mountain in some codices and Flower/Fruit Mountain in others.

  “Huitzilopochtli was reportedly carried on the back of a priest with the glyph-name of Serpent,” she continued. “The priest with Huitzilopochtli on his back led the pilgrims who founded Tenochtitlan. When the travelers became discouraged on their long road and would go no farther, the priest insisted that Huitzilopochtli spoke to him and said he wished them to continue their journey.”

  “That’s all well and good, I’m sure,” Avram said, over their bouncing ride. “Sounds somehow like the Exodus from Egypt—but what does it have to do with stars and meteorites?”

  “Huitzilopochtli had to be carried by a yahui, or priest, because, although he could speak, he was a bundle without feet. Miller said these speaking bundles without feet, like Huitzilopochtli, were never human beings in any form. They were instead objects treated not so much as ‘gods’ as simply ‘sacred’ or ‘belonging to the gods.’”

  Umar plunged into a wadi flat as a highway, and their ride was a bit smoother for a time.

  “In the Codex Telleriano Remensis, what are called Nuhu by the Mixtec are generally associated with a yahui-priest, who is in turn connected to celestial bodies referred to as fire serpents. Those are usually glossed as cometas—as comets, or meteors, or both.

  “Thus the priest with ‘serpent’ as part of his name,” Avram said, “in the story of Huitz-his-name?”

  Vida smiled.

  “Right. Miller suggested the Nuhus were part of a meteorite storm that struck the Americas, leaving ‘magical’ magnetic stones and pebbles in the mountains and on the plains. That storm’s context supposedly also explains the continuing myths about strange lights seen near sacred caves in the mountains.”

  “How so?”

  “Streaks of light coming from the Orionids, Perseids, or Leonids are said to be the yahui, who leave their caves only at night. The yahui, like the Aztec god Tlaloc, were believed to reside in mountain caves that were miraculous treasure houses filled with all that was needed for wealth and prosperity.

  “The descriptions of the caves in the Mixtec Nuhu tales and the Aztec tales of Tlaloc are identical in their emphasis on an abundance of food and wealth. Many codices show the same mountain for the place where Huitzilopochtli was discovered: a mountain with a whirlpool inside, and things like white flowers and fruit trees blooming on top. Miller said that’s due to impact geology.”

  “Caves? Impacts? Whirlpools? What’s the link?” Avram asked. Umar turned out of the wadi and zigzagged up a hillside so erratically that Avram wondered whether their driver might be lost, too.

  “If a meteorite hit a mountainside, it could create a cave, large or small depending on the structure of the mountain and the size of the impactor,” Vida said. “Miller believes that a magnetic stone, later named Huitzilopochtli, was found in what the codices show as Curl Mountain Cave. Able to indicate north, or ‘speak,’ the stone was carried on the back of a priest and helped guide the people during their migration to Texcoco and Tenochtitlan, to found their new nation.”

  “I’m a big believer in the idea that meteorite histories are often shrouded in myths,” Avram said as they rolled past mounds of dry desert brush and stone outcroppings, “but a rock that talks? That sounds like a stretch.”

  “In our terms, yes, because we understand ‘speak’ as indicating sounds emitted from the mouth of a person or an animal. In the ancient Mesoamerican world described in the codices, though, the scrolls coming out of a mouth as ‘speaking’—”

  “—in fact only imply a transmission of information,” Avram said, suddenly getting what she was getting at, “like captions under pictures in a newspaper or in a comic strip, which can be ‘thought bubbles’ as well as spoken words.”

  “Right. A magnetic iron meteorite—shown in the codices as a sacred mummy bundle, but without the feet seen on depictions of human mummy bundles—such a stone would have the ability to ‘speak north,’”

  Vida said. “Its opposite end would then ‘speak south.’”

  “Still seems like a bit of a stretch to me.”

  “Maybe. Some people in the audience thought it didn’t stretch far enough. Darla Pittman, for one.”

  “Oh?”

  “She wanted to know whether the stone’s speaking to the priest might indicate something other than magnetism. If ‘speaking’ simply meant information transfer, then she thought maybe the priest himself might be hearing voices, due to some psychoactive effect arising from his proximity to the meteorite.”

  “That sounds like Pittman, all right,” Avram said, nodding, his head moving more vigorously than he’d intended as, just then, they moved over bumpier ground once more.

  “Psychoactive skystones are her hobbyhorse, yes,” Vida agreed, her voice vibrating oddly with the bounce of Umar’s driving.

  “And she rides it whenever she can. Anybody else in the audience get up on their horses and ride?”

  “I don’t know if it is her hobbyhorse, as you say, but Susan Yamada was quite enthused about meteorites inside mountain caves, especially with all that stuff about a whirlpool inside a Mountain of Fruiting Flowers, or whatever. She thought that might be a reference to some psychoactive agent, perhaps in fungi associated with those particular caves.”

  “That makes sense, too,” Avram said, trying to ponder the possibilities despite the jouncing ride. “I mean, given that she’s an ethnobotanist. What about the connection with Quetzalcoatl?”

  “Miller thinks a number of the codices are really describing Huitzilopochtli as a star that fell from the skies under the auspices of Tlaloc,” Vida said, her ride-jounced voice breaking up her pronunciation of the Aztec words. “Under other aspects, Tlaloc is also known as Quetzalcoatl. Miller said the name Quetzalcoatl, ‘feathered serpent,’ also has associations with comets and meteors.”

  “Like the priest with ‘serpent’ in his name glyph, again?”

  Vida nodded.

  “In Aztec or Mexica art, fire was often depicted via images of feathers, so feathered serpents, like fire serpents, were also sometimes images of comets and meteors. Quetzalcoatl shared similarities with earlier Maya meteor gods, particularly the brother-gods triad at Palenque….”

  They had to stop speaking then as, bouncing through a heavily folded countryside of brush and rock and dry wadis, conversation became too difficult to continue. It seemed to Avram that he’d been spending an awful lot of time in such bad-shocks and rough-road conversations since he came to the Arabian Peninsula. Thinking about what V
ida said, though, he was struck by the image of a great meteor as a stone fletched with flames, trailing a feather boa of fire.

  Before too much longer, Umar pulled up alongside three other off-road vehicles. Relieved that their bladder-jolting, kidney-punching ride was over at last, Avram took the time to notice that each of the other off-road vehicles also had a falcon perched in its back window.

  “Like guns on gun racks,” Vida remarked, “in pickup trucks of the American South.”

  “Maybe it’s not so glamorous as a Bedu on horseback with falcon perched on his gloved hand,” Umar said with a shrug, “but we have fun in ways the old Bedu could hardly imagine.”

  Umar didn’t elaborate further as he went to greet his friends and fellow falconers, to whom he also introduced his cousin Vida and her guest, “Ibrahim.”

  Umar and his friends spread out. They tossed lures—bustard wings sewn together, with a small piece of meat attached to each—into the warm air of late afternoon. Their birds dove on the lures, hitting them with an audible crack.

  As he warmed up his female falcon, or hurr, with the lure, Umar explained that though it was late in the hunting season, some of the saker’s favored prey, the houbara bustard, were still in the area. He also went into extensive detail on how he had trained his bird, always trying to walk the fine line between making her tame enough to control, but not so tame that she would lose her killer instinct. Vida cracked wise about falconers’ treatment of their female birds resembling their attitudes toward woman generally, but Umar chose to ignore that.

  When Umar felt the bird was ready, he donned a pair of what looked like goggles and sent the bird out on a long arc. After a few moments, some distance toward the horizon, Avram saw Umar’s hurr fold her wings and drop like a stone. Below her, a rather stout, gray-brown bird broke from cover, twisting and turning in low, wing-pumping, darting flight.

  Almost before Avram had time to gather that the plump but extremely agile ground-hugger was a bustard, Avram’s bird made some adjustments in its trajectory and nailed the bustard a few feet off the ground, even as the prey was trying to execute a further evasive maneuver. Umar, Avram, and Vida walked to where the saker stood over its downed victim, the hurr’s wings hunched over the bustard as if to protect her prize from rivals.