12.21

by Dustin Thomason

  It is rumored there is nothing in the world the royal cooks cannot prepare to the king’s taste. They will send assistants for a week’s walk to secure guava or mombin that grows only in the highest mountains or to trade with tree people for sweet potato that grows only in the shade of a single ceiba in winter.

  I followed his holiness, Jaguar Imix, and I saw the great serpentine flow of these men, devoted to their art, working to finish the preparations for the great ceremonial feast. Every man had an assignment. There were those devoted to the preparation of the sauces and garnishes, who added florets of manioc plant to the various mixtures of chili paste, cinnamon, cacao, allspice. The actual cooking was assigned to others, who presided over large open spits in every corner of the room, grilling meats before adding them to the rich stews stirred in enormous vats at the kitchen’s center.

  We passed through the tremendous heat of the cooking fires, almost as stifling as the sweat house itself. We were headed for the slaughterhouse, I knew. When we arrived at the door, the king flashed a beaming smile of jade at me.

  He spoke:

  —Low scribe, there can be no greater divination than the one I received twenty moons ago, the commandment from Akabalam, which will change Kanuataba forever and be our salvation. For nearly a year I have taken in this blood, and it is time for my people to share in my great source of strength. According to my royal spies, these rituals have become commonplace in other nations. Not just among the nobles but also among the lower tiers, and they have sustained themselves by them for many moons.—

  I followed him into the slaughterhouse.

  Blood coated the floor and soaked my sandals. More than two dozen carcasses hung, skinned and decapitated, disemboweled, blood-drained, and disjointed. The slaughter men were separating meat from the bone, each leg and arm providing a different cut that went into a pile of thick fillets. The slaughter cooks used blades of chert to prepare the meat for cooking, trying to conserve every precious sliver for the feast. It took me a moment to comprehend what these appendages were.

  Men’s bodies hung from meat hooks!

  The king spoke:

  —Akabalam has commanded that we should partake, that, through this meat, we will absorb the power from those souls that inhabited these corpses. I and my closest minions have gained such power from feasts on flesh, having consumed more than twenty men in the three hundred suns past. Now Akabalam has divined that he wishes to concentrate the strength of ten men in every man of our great nation. Mantises consume the heads of their mates to survive; blessed are they, and, like them, we will all consume the flesh of our own kind.—

  And as he finished speaking I knew: This was no god ordained for recommitment of piety. This was something much more terrifying, which no one ever had to teach me to fear.

  Much has passed in Kanuataba since the last inscription. Sixty suns have been born from the color of rebirth and died into blackness. Akabalam is spread to every corner of the city, on word that the king had sanctioned it at the feast in the great plaza, when Jaguar Imix fed the meat of our enemies’ noblemen to his own. With no rain come to feed the milpas, cooking pots are filled with the meat of the dead, not a single part wasted, every scrap pulled off the bones. The sole prohibition dictated by the king was that no man should eat his own son or father, daughter or mother, as the gods had forbidden it. But I have seen child slaves forced to prepare meals without the meat, only to be sacrificed as animals, salted in seasoning baths of their own making.

  I have not partaken in Akabalam, nor have I allowed Auxila’s daughters. We survive on leaves and roots and small berries alone. One Butterfly and Flamed Plume would have already become food for the masses were they not protected by my station. The orphans of the city were among the first sacrificed, but in my cave they have been saved. They are watched over by my spirit macaw. The girls do not leave, as I have commanded them, for the savages in the streets are many and ruthless, and they would take the life of any child as sustenance.

  The king has disappeared into the recesses of the palace for a royal divination, and none but Jacomo the dwarf, the queen, and the prince are permitted to visit him. The council was disbanded. Jaguar Imix proclaimed that no man can hear the call of the overworld but he and that the council was filled with false prophets! Jacomo the dwarf stands on the palace steps every sunrise. He reads the demands of the king and the sacrifices that must be made to please the gods.

  By every setting of the sun, the sacrifices have been made; men and women and children, some noble, brought to the top of the altar by the executioners, their hearts extracted and innards cut out before being fed to the masses.

  Yet with each sacrifice, there are more doubts in the streets of Kanuataba of Jaguar Imix’s power. I have heard dissent among the commoners. The people live in fear that they shall be sacrificed next. They whisper that Jaguar Imix has lost his channel to the gods, that a curse in his mind has confused his thoughts.

  And what power has Akabalam given us? No rain has come to the milpas, no reprieve sent from the overworld to nurture the crops that sustain us.

  So much is changed, so much horror! Death is all around us, the city in its cold black embrace. More than a thousand are dead by last report, and many more are cursed, awaiting death. I was right to fear as I did. The curse of Akabalam has fallen over many, sucking out their spirits into nothing, leaving them unable to pass into the dream world, where they may commune with their gods.

  The numbers of cursed are growing with each turn of the sun, cursed for their trespasses against their fellow man. The streets overflow with violence day and night, as peaceful men turn against one another, unable to invoke the spirits in their dreams, fighting over what few valuables are left in the markets.

  Jaguar Imix and his retinue consumed the flesh of men for many moons in good graces of the gods without being cursed. But whatever god protected them before does so no longer. The king is cursed, his nobles are cursed, and Akabalam has swept our land and destroyed everything.

  Akabalam has turned men into monsters, just as I have feared. The time of dreams is the time of peaceful reconciliation with the gods, the time of communing with spirit animals, the time of giving ourselves to the gods as we do in death. But those cursed cannot dream, cannot surrender themselves to the celestial gods or be in touch with their wayobs, who watch over them.

  Here is the account of my final sojourn to the great palace, where the men of the council once adjudicated. By night I came, carrying the bird on my shoulder, for it was too dangerous by the light of day for any pious man to show his face in the city plazas. I came, guided only by the light of the moon.

  I came for the prince, Smoke Song, my pupil, whom I planned to take from the palace. That the boy is not cursed reveals Jaguar Imix’s own confusion; when he did not give his own son human flesh, he revealed cracks in his belief.

  But Smoke Song is not the only child who will carry on the stories and legend of the terraced city. Flamed Plume and One Butterfly waited back in my cave, from which we planned to retreat to the forests of the lake that my father once sought. As I have still not allowed them to, Auxila’s girls have eaten no human meat in my care. We will live off the land, where we will be safe from the dreamless and those who follow them into ruin.

  I had not been to the palace or seen the king in twenty suns, and there was a strange falseness to all I bore witness to, a strange suspicion that this way of life in the palace and in Kanuataba was over, that appearances could no longer be maintained. The guards themselves were nowhere in sight, and I made my way to the royal quarters unimpeded.

  Because the prince was absent from his own room, I took myself to the king’s quarters. The prince must have gone to see his father, which terrified me, for I did not believe that the king would let him leave the palace.

  I went to the king’s chamber and entered it boldly.

  Stepping inside, I saw the prince kneeling at his father’s bedside. I knew then that Ah Puch had carried the ki
ng’s spirit into the afterlife, to spend the cycles of time with other kings, as it is ordained. There was no breath from his lips or beat of his heart. As I had taught him, Smoke Song was not touching the corpse, only waving incense sticks all around the body.

  Smoke Song looked up at me with tears in his eyes. Then the voice came from behind us:

  —This is the king’s chamber, and his alone, and you will not be forgiven your trespass here, lowly scribe.—

  I turned to face the dwarf, who stood ten paces behind. His beard had not been cut in many moons.

  I spoke:

  —You have spilled your lies onto the causeways and beckoned the people of Kanuataba with your tongue, and they shall hear these lies no more. They shall know that the king is dead!—

  —You shall tell no one of this, or I shall have it known that you have not taken Auxila’s daughters as true concubines, that you have made no copulation with them and can therefore lay no claim to them. I shall take them as my own, and they will blossom and bear my sons! The king’s guards will take them by force!—

  I struck the dwarf with my walking stick over the crown of his bulbous head, struck him with the end of it adorned with the pointed jade, and let forth the blood inside him. He fell to the floor, screaming out and calling for the prince’s help.

  Smoke Song did not move.

  The dwarf flew at me and clenched his jaw around my leg. The pain seared through me like fire. I gouged out his eyeball with the point of my jade knife, and he let go. I drove the jade point into his belly with all my strength, and his spirit was extinguished.

  Then I turned to the prince:

  —You must leave me here now. You must take Flamed Plume and One Butterfly and leave the city.—

  When the prince heard this, he spoke to me with new power:

  —As supreme ajaw of the city, I command you to come with us, Paktul. I will make you the daykeeper wherever we go. This I command you as king!—

  But I knew that what remained of the royal guards would come after me, bound by duty to avenge the dwarf. They would have a thirst for my blood, and I did not wish to endanger the children’s lives. I told the prince:

  —That you would honor me and make me your daykeeper, Smoke Song, is prize enough for me, prize enough for entry into the sacred world of scribes above. But you must abandon me here, that you may be protected by Itzamnaaj, holy god.—

  He spoke:

  —Holy teacher, the renouncers are come. I hear their screams! As your new king, I command you to follow me.—

  I told the prince:

  —Then let me lead you in the direction of my family whom I have lost, King, in the direction of all those that came before me.—

  Holy Itzamnaaj, may I lead them in the direction of salvation in the recesses of the great forests, where my ancestors once lived and shall live forevermore. Where we may worship the true gods and bring forth a new people to usher in the turn of the next great cycle. Flamed Plume will become wife to Smoke Song, and the union shall bless a new beginning, shall generate a new race of men, a new cycle of time. I can only dream of the generations Smoke Song will father with Flamed Plume and her sister, men who will lead their people with decency. And the people of Kanuataba will live on.

  12.19.19.17.16

  DECEMBER 17, 2012

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHEL STOOD ALONE IN THE LOBBY OF THE GETTY RESEARCH building, watching the afternoon sun shine into the glass oculus in the courtyard outside. On the summer solstice, at high noon, the sun would be directly aligned with the oculus, a design mirroring some of the astrology-based architecture of the ancients. This was the bastion of Maya scholarship she’d convinced the Getty board they had to have—that to ignore the most sophisticated civilization in the New World was an historical crime.

  It turned out the crime was perpetrated by the Maya themselves.

  For centuries, the conquistadores had accused the indigenous people of cannibalism, as evidence of their own moral superiority; missionaries explained burning ancient Maya texts by invoking it; Spanish kings used it to claim land. This blood libel hadn’t stopped during the conquest—even in La Revolución of Chel’s childhood, false claims surfaced again to justify subjugation of the modern Maya.

  She was about to hand the enemies of her people the proof they’d sought. The Aztecs had dominated Mexico for three centuries in the post-classic, made art and architecture and revolutionized trade patterns across Mesoamerica. But if you asked most people what they knew about the Aztecs, cannibalism and human sacrifice were the only answers you’d get. Now the same would be true for the Maya; all of Chel’s ancestors’ accomplishments would disappear into the shadow of this discovery. They’d be nothing more than the people who worshipped praying mantises for eating the heads of their mates. They’d be the people who sacrificed children and ate their remains.

  “It’s been going on for hundreds of thousands of years.”

  Stanton had followed her to the lobby. He’d stayed at the museum with them overnight while she, Victor, and Rolando reconstructed the final portion of the codex. Chel was grateful he had; even after everything they’d discovered, his presence here was somehow a comfort.

  “There’s evidence of cannibalism in every civilization,” he said. “On the island of Papua New Guinea, in North America, the Caribbean, Japan, central Africa, from the time all our ancestors lived there. Pockets of genetic markers in human DNA all over the world suggest that, early on, all our ancestors ate human corpses.”

  Chel looked back into the oculus. The stacks of the library were just visible below, thousands of rare volumes, sketches, and photographs from around the world. Each one with its own complicated history.

  “Have you heard of Atapuerca?” Stanton asked.

  “In Spain?”

  “A site there is where they discovered the oldest prehuman remains in Europe,” he told her. “Gran Dolina. They found skeletons of children who’d been eaten. The conquistadores’ ancestors were doing it long before yours were. To be desperate enough to do unthinkable things to feed your family is to be human. Since the beginning of history, people have done what they had to do to survive.”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, as dusk gathered, Stanton sat with Chel, Rolando, and Victor, perched on the stools scattered around the lab where they’d been working virtually nonstop. He tried to take in the words the king had spoken to the scribe:

  I and my closest minions have gained such power from feasts on flesh, having consumed more than twenty men in the three hundred suns past. Now Akabalam has divined that he wishes to concentrate the strength of ten men in every man of our great nation.

  Stanton pictured the ancient kitchen in which they stood. It was eerily reminiscent of the slaughterhouses and rendering facilities he had been investigating for a decade. The line between cannibalism and the disease was clear: Mad cow happened because farmers fed their cows the brains of other cows; VFI happened because a desperate king fed prion-infected human brains to his people.

  “It really could’ve survived that long in the tomb?” Rolando asked.

  “Prions could survive millennia,” Stanton explained. “And it could have been lying in wait inside that tomb. That place was a time bomb.” That Volcy had set off, no doubt. He’d gone into a tomb, stirred up the dust, and then touched his eyes.

  Victor said, “Paktul suggests that only those who ate human meat became sick. Presumably you don’t think Volcy was a cannibal, so how did VFI become airborne?”

  “A prion is prone to mutation,” Stanton told them. “It was born to change. A thousand years concentrated in that tomb, it became something else, something even more potent.”

  He scanned the page for another passage.

  Jaguar Imix and his retinue consumed the flesh of men for many moons in good graces of the gods without being cursed. But whatever god protected them before does so no longer.

  They now understood the genesis of the disease, but even Stanton didn’t know exactly how to
use the information. Were there answers in the tomb itself? Two days ago, armed with this, he would’ve tried to convince CDC to authorize a wide search for Kanuataba. He’d called Davies—now back working at the Prion Center—and told him what they’d found. But there were no experiments the team could run using this information. Stanton thought about emailing Cavanagh, but even if she could get past her anger with him, they still didn’t have an exact location to send the team. The Guatemalans would still deny that VFI had come from within their borders, so an official team probably wouldn’t be let in regardless.

  And according to the news reports, CDC had things closer to home to worry about: People were slipping out of L.A. by land, air, and sea, and the quarantine wouldn’t hold much longer. Finding the original source would hardly be Atlanta’s top priority. Words written a thousand years ago would not convince them.

  “If Paktul and the three children founded Kiaqix,” Rolando said, “I don’t understand why the myth said it was an Original Trio. There are four of them.”

  “The oral history isn’t sacrosanct,” Chel said. “There are so many different versions, and they get passed down across so many generations, it’s not hard to imagine them losing a person in the translation.”

  Stanton was only half listening now. Something about the sections he’d just been reading stuck in his mind, and he studied them again. In each passage, the king was proud of how long he and his men had been eating human flesh and the power it had given them. Three hundred suns. For almost a year before the king fed his commoners human meat, he and his men engaged in cannibalism, and they’d clearly eaten brains. So why hadn’t they gotten sick? Had the brains they’d eaten been completely free of prion?

  Stanton pointed this out to the team. “Within a month of when the human meat is introduced into the food supply for everyone else,” he said, “it makes everyone—including the king and his men—sick.”