by J; P Voelkel
There was a smattering of applause as Landa and Lola took their seats.
Servants lit incense bowls all around, and soon thick clouds of perfumed incense billowed onto the stage like dry ice.
Ah Pukuh came forward, applauding loudly. “And for our next surprise—”
“Espere! Wait!” shouted Landa. “I have not finished explaining the history—”
“Antonio, my friend,” said Ah Pukuh, “your guests have come for a party, not for a history lesson. Besides, this surprise is for you.…”
Landa looked confused. “Por favor, Lord Ah Pukuh, let us stick to the script we agreed—”
“No,” said Ah Pukuh, “that doesn’t seem to be the way this night is going.” There was a sinister edge to his voice. “Let us do this thing properly.”
He snapped his fingers for another drumroll.
Landa was shaking his head.
Lola was on her feet now and looking worried.
Max suddenly knew what was coming.
He started to rise in protest, but the roadies pushed him down, their sharp fingernails squeezing his shoulders like claws.
Ah Pukuh turned to look at him, his face a mask of hate. “Drumroll!”
“You heard him,” said one of the roadies. “Play it!”
Max tried to stop his arms from shaking enough to brush the snare drum.
This was bad.
This was so bad
And it was all his fault.
His worst fears were confirmed when a gasp went around the audience.
“Feast your eyes,” Ah Pukuh was saying, but Max couldn’t bear to look.
He took a peek.
As he suspected, Ah Pukuh was holding something up to show the crowd. “This is the authentic Yellow Jaguar of K’awiil, the mighty Stone of Truth,” he proclaimed, to much oohing and aahing. “Antonio de Landa, because you love history so much, I give it to you freely, as it was given to me.”
“But … But this is not what we rehearsed …,” stammered Landa.
“So live a little.” Ah Pukuh turned to the crowd. “Dear Antonio is overcome with gratitude,” he explained. He turned back to Landa. “There is no need to thank me,” he said. “To see your happiness as you open the portal for the ancient ritual will be thanks enough.”
“But … But … I can’t …”
“Put on the necklet,” boomed Ah Pukuh.
Landa shook his head.
“Do it!”
Ah Pukuh clapped his hands and led the crowd in a chant.
“DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!”
Landa was getting extremely agitated. He looked like he wanted to cry.
“Here, let me help you,” said Ah Pukuh.
When Landa saw that he had no choice, he reluctantly allowed Ah Pukuh to tie the string of heavy beads around his neck. Max heard Ah Pukuh hiss into his ear: “This is a loaner. Don’t get any ideas. Swear to give it back or I will destroy you.”
Landa, too petrified to move, made a faint squeak.
Apparently satisfied with this response, Ah Pukuh signaled to the stagehands. “Dim the lights and start the show!”
There was a fanfare of wooden trumpets.
As the stage grew dark, a yellow light emanated from the Jaguar Throne.
Landa clutched at his neck in pain as the yellow stones in the necklet began to glow. His face was as white as the starched folds of his ruff.
The audience drew in their collective breath as a cold wind blew through the room, extinguishing candles, pulling wigs off heads, lifting tablecloths, and making the stilt walkers lose their balance.
“Be still,” warned Ah Pukuh. “Nobody move.” He backed away to the side of the stage. “The portal is open. Lord K’awiil is in the house.”
The crowd sat in fidgety silence, sipping their drinks and exchanging apprehensive looks, their eyes darting every which way, everyone trying to be first to spot K’awiil, like children waiting for Santa Claus.
At first the noise seemed far away—a rumbling boom like a battering ram hitting a heavy oak door on some distant castle.
An expectant murmur went around the audience.
After a few seconds, there was another, closer boom.
Then one after another, the booms continued, growing louder and deeper, each one sending tremors through the floor and reverberating around the room.
The audience wasn’t smiling now.
There was a crash like a giant’s jackhammer striking the palace foundations. Every electrical fixture in the room—stage lights, electric guitars, amplifiers, microphones, cell phones, wall sockets—began to smoke and fizzle, exploding one by one in showers of red-hot sparks.
When the last spark died out, the terrified audience was left in darkness.
Some people stood up with the intention of finding their way to the exit, but another massive boom shook the building so violently that they were knocked off their feet.
The crowd was in chaos now, panicking and screaming, masquerade costumes ripped and torn in the rush to climb over one another and escape.
But it was too late.
They were caught at the epicenter of a furious electrical storm.
All they could do was cover their ears as the thunder crashed and jagged fingers of lightning arched in every direction, illuminating the room with retina-burning flashes of white light.
One fork lit up the base of the throne like a spotlight. All eyes that were not shut tight in terror watched as a piece of stone—thin and round like a rolling pin, maybe four foot long—tumbled free.
“Pick it up, Antonio, pick it up,” Ah Pukuh ordered over the microphone.
Hesitantly, Landa obeyed.
“Behold,” announced Ah Pukuh, “Count Antonio de Landa now carries the sacred scepter of K’awiil, the kingmaker. Hold it up high, dear Antonio, so everyone can see it.”
Looking scared out of his wits in the yellow glow of the collar, Landa obeyed him. As Max studied the scepter, he saw that it was carved into the shape of a figure with a long head and a snake in place of one of his legs.
The scepter seemed to be glowing yellow, too.
Was Landa shrinking, or was the scepter growing?
Soon there was no doubt about it: the scepter was growing and growing, dwarfing everything around it.…
With an explosion of sparks, it burst out of Landa’s clutch and sprang to the back of the stage, its snake leg whirling like a tornado. The head by now was twenty feet tall; the impossibly long forehead was black and polished to a dull sheen; its eyes rolled angrily from side to side; its anteater’s snout emitted curls of dense gray smoke like a fire-breathing dragon. Electricity danced and popped off the surface of the creature’s scaly silver-gray skin and lit up the stage around him.
Now the snake leg wound itself around, so that the body of K’awiil rested on its coils, with the great mirrored forehead shining down from the stage like a gigantic plasma-screen TV.
The audience, eyes wide in terror, sat back in their seats as if pinned there by centrifugal force.
Ah Pukuh bounded to center stage like a gameshow host.
“Let’s have a big hand for my friend and yours, Lord K’awiil, god of lineage and kingship,” he shouted. “Welcome back to Middleworld, your lordship.”
Ah Pukuh clapped loudly, encouraging the audience to do the same, but no one could move a muscle; they were all paralyzed by fear.
K’awiil exhaled through his snout and sent a ball of flame shooting out over the audience. A chorus of screams suggested that the troop of mime artists at the back had suddenly found their voices as the fireball melted their polyester costumes.
“Silence!” bellowed Ah Pukuh. He turned to Landa. “Are you ready?”
Landa shook his head. “Not this,” he whimpered. “Por favor, not this.”
Ah Pukuh cackled maniacally. “It is too late to back out now, Antonio. You wanted to be a king, didn’t you? You can thank me later.”
Lola seemed resigned to whatever was about to
happen. Max willed her to look up, to see him, but her shoulders were slumped forward and her head hung low. She looked so tiny and fragile, like a little girl playing dress-up in a big yellow ball gown.
Ah Pukuh was addressing the great head.
“Lord K’awiil,” he was saying, “I present to you Count Antonio de Landa, a noble son of Spain, who seeks to mix his bloodline with our royal lineage. I beg you to pronounce him worthy and reveal his illustrious pedigree.”
K’awiil’s massive forehead swiveled around until it reflected Landa in the center of its screen. For a few moments, the quivering aristocrat was bathed in a pool of sodium-yellow light. Then a single lightning bolt shot out of the mirror and blasted him to pieces, the flesh on his bones disintegrating into thousands of tiny particles until he was nothing but a glowing skeleton.
While the mirror played scenes from his life, the particles of Landa hung in the air like glitter in a snow globe.
Max, like the rest of the audience, was transfixed in shock and awe.
He didn’t know whether to watch the giant screen (which was showing scenes from Landa’s life to illustrate how he’d graduated from drowning kittens as a boy to punching servants as a teenager and on to murdering his own brother when he came of age) or watch the tiny particles as they slowly floated down. When each speck landed, like a tiny seed of Landa’s being, it grew into a person. Soon there were tens, then hundreds, of people crowding onto the stage. All of them—men, women, and children alike—bore an uncanny resemblance to Landa.
The first to march into the audience were several families of dirty, ragged peasants, who made straight for the buffet table and leapt on it with cries of joy. A band of swineherds traded insults with a band of goatherds, while their animals attacked each other. The audience recoiled in horror as a line of lepers wandered through, ringing their bells and looking for a place to hide themselves away. Wizened old men and hunchbacked old women accosted the elegantly dressed party guests, begging for money and trying to steal their jewelry.
The scene was bedlam. Food flew onto the stage. Tables were knocked over. People pushed and shoved in the crowd. Pigs and piglets squealed underfoot, while goats chewed on the party decorations. An aroma of manure undercut the waves of incense and caused some of the more delicate guests to faint.
A company of laughing conquistadors surveyed the chaos, ready to join the fray. As they sized up the plunder they were planning to steal and the women they intended to abduct, a hooded figure pushed through their ranks and took center stage.
An eerie silence descended.
The massed ranks of Landas froze.
The peasants dropped their chicken legs.
Even the pigs stopped squealing.
The figure lowered his hood to reveal a balding dome, a sharply pointed nose, and cold eyes like a fish.
Max recognized him straightaway from the story of Princess Inez.
It was Antonio de Landa’s most notorious ancestor, Friar Diego de Landa, the rogue priest who’d burned every Maya book he could get his hands on. Three thousand years of learning destroyed by one power-crazed sadist. How many times had Max heard Lola lament Friar Diego’s actions?
And now, assuming that her fiancé’s flesh and bones were ever reunited—she was marrying into his family.
Max understood that you couldn’t blame the entire Landa clan for the actions of one bad apple. But Antonio and Diego had the same cold-fish look about them and, from what Max had seen of Antonio, they seemed to share the same vicious and volatile nature.
Friar Diego’s newly appeared relatives apparently felt the same way, cowering away from him and scrambling to get down the stairs. Even the conquistadors gave him a wide berth and leapt from the stage into the audience.
All this time, the friar’s descendant, Count Antonio, was perched motionless and fleshless on the Jaguar Throne like a neon-yellow skeleton in a steel helmet. Through the jostling generations of Landas, Max could just make out Lola, sitting beside the remains of her husband-to-be, staring at the friar in shock.
Then, as he watched, she reached down, picked up a stray chicken leg that had landed on the stage, and hurled it at Diego de Landa’s back. Even before the chicken bone made contact, she followed it with a fat chorizo sausage and a large orange, which exploded pleasingly on his bald head.
The food fight was on. As the friar wiped orange pulp from his eyes, an artillery of fruit, vegetables, and meat products splattered onto his head. It seemed that everyone had a grudge against him.
The Maya roadies stage-dived into the crowd to join in. Max could pick out their red shirts at the buffet table as they lobbed custard tarts at the malevolent monk.
Diego de Landa raised a bony finger and pointed into the audience.
“Repent!” he screeched.
An apple sailed toward him and lodged in his mouth, making his eyes bulge in surprise and giving him the look of a roasted pig at a medieval banquet.
More and more Landa ancestors were accumulating at the back of the stage. The ones who’d been born after the conquest were better dressed than their peasant forebears, but none of them had good manners nor an ounce of noble bearing. While the men brawled among themselves and pulled one another’s beards, the women kicked one another’s shins and grabbed at one another’s hair.
What a rabble they were.
Ducking the missiles that were raining down, Ah Pukuh made his way over to the microphone. “Let’s give it up for our surprise guest, Friar Diego de Landa!” Ah Pukuh didn’t seem a bit bothered about the chaos that had broken out and he put his arm around the priest’s shoulders in a chummy, old-boy-network sort of way and tried to lead him off the stage.
But the monk—who by now had so much food splattered on him that he looked like one of those make-your-own-volcano kits encrusted in luridly colored lava—was angry. He cursed and gesticulated at the crowd, his face a mask of pure hatred.
Ah Pukuh roared with laughter and clapped his hands.
At this signal, the monk’s unholy language was drowned out by the wailing of conch shells and the stage lights came back on.
The great K’awiil shrank back into a stone scepter, which rolled across the stage to the base of the throne, where it slotted itself back into place.
The yellow collar stopped glowing, the yellow haze faded, and Antonio de Landa’s skeleton was absorbed into the rest of his body. He gazed out uncomprehendingly at the devastation that was his engagement party.
Most of his relatives had evaporated, but a few lolled drunkenly in the shadows. A small pig snuffled around his feet.
“Welcome back, dear Antonio!” gushed Ah Pukuh into his newly restored microphone. “And thank you for introducing us to your delightful family. What a spirited bunch! It’s so refreshing to meet aristocrats who have not lost their common touch!” Here he made a face at the audience to show what he really thought of Landa’s lineage. “We’ll round up any stray ancestors later, but you might want to count your silver …!”
Landa groaned and sank his head into his hands, massaging his temples as if he had a headache.
“Just joking, Antonio!” More mugging at the audience by Ah Pukuh. “Well, it’s been quite a show, hasn’t it, folks?” he prattled on, as servants cleared the stage of piglets and debris. “But it’s not over yet!”
He gestured to a stagehand, who began to haul on a rope. The glitzy backing curtain rose jerkily out of sight to reveal a painted backdrop depicting the top platform of a Maya pyramid, blue sky above and rainforest canopy below.
“And now,” boomed Ah Pukuh, “to ensure the fertility of this union, I am delighted to present the happy couple with my final gift … a human sacrifice!”
The stunned audience began to applaud politely and then stopped as his words sank in. A human sacrifice? What kind of wedding gift was that? Since when did toasters go out of style?
Ah Pukuh clapped his hands.
There was a creaking noise as the servants brought out a sacrific
ial altar. It looked authentic, like the stone altars Max had seen on Maya pyramids in San Xavier, but it had been mounted on wheels for ease of mobility, so that it now rolled onto the stage like a squeaky room-service cart in a fancy hotel.
But the special tonight was not lobster or steak.
Tied down and writhing on the altar stone lay a young man. He wore only a loincloth, and the rest of his body glistened with bright blue paint. Max recognized the color as surely as if it were a paint chip at Home Depot.
Sacrificial cobalt.
He’d seen it before when Lola was daubed in it, ready to be sacrificed by Tzelek on the Black Pyramid.
Was this a skit? This was going a little far even for Ah Pukuh. That blue guy had to be an actor. Max mentally awarded him full marks for historical accuracy. He was also impressed by the Oscar-worthy howls of terror that were emanating from the “victim.”
Man, this was a weird party.
He looked around for the Plague Rats in the audience and gave them a halfhearted thumbs-up sign, more of a signal between survivors than anything. They responded enthusiastically, and he guessed from their rapt expressions that they were already planning to incorporate a little mock human sacrifice into their next performance.
Ah Pukuh lumbered to a position behind the altar.
He fumbled around inside his capacious robes and pulled out a razor-edged obsidian dagger.
The audience gasped.
“For tonight’s grand finale,” announced Ah Pukuh, “I will pluck out the beating heart from this human body and have it served to the newlyweds for their wedding breakfast—”
A bloodcurdling scream from Lola interrupted him.
She was on her feet and yelling hysterically at her future husband. “No! You can’t do this! You promised me! YOU PROMISED—!”
Without even looking at her, Antonio de Landa darted out one black-gloved hand, fast as a lizard’s tongue catching a fly, and grabbed her wrist to restrain her.
With the other hand, he snapped his fingers.
A posse of guards appeared, and Landa made a gesture to indicate that Lola should be conveyed from his presence with all speed.