12.21

by Dustin Thomason

  “Why would she lie?” Chel asked.

  “Ha’ana understood her people,” Initia said. “She could rally the women, but no man would listen to a woman about the ways of war. To rouse the men to action, Ha’ana needed the voice of a man. When your father was imprisoned, it was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to her but also a chance to be heard.”

  “But when he died, she left here. She left all of you behind and never came back. How could the person who wrote those letters leave?”

  “It was not easy, child. She worried someone would discover what she’d done and come after her—and you. The only way to protect you was to leave everything here.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  Initia put a hand on Chel’s back. “They killed your father because of the letters, even though he didn’t write them. After he was murdered, your mother felt so much guilt. Despite the good her letters had done, she blamed herself for his death.”

  Chel was in shock. She had punished her mother for her apathy, for abandoning the place she came from, and Ha’ana had never corrected her. She stayed silent, knowing how hard she had fought and how much she had lost for her people.

  “Your mother is the gray fox,” Initia said. “Ati’t par Nim is always cunning.”

  Chel had always thought Ati’t par Nim seemed wrong for Ha’ana. Now she knew better. The ancients believed that the power of the wayob was ubiquitous; they believed in its interchangeability with the human form, its dominion over life, its promise of a person’s potential. The fox made people believe what it needed them to.

  Suddenly Chel thought of something. She darted over to one of the supply bags, digging through until she found her codex translation.

  “Is everything all right, child?” Initia asked.

  Chel had assumed Paktul led the children from Kanuataba into the jungle, to a place in the forest where his ancestors had once lived. Yet throughout the codex, the scribe conflated his human form with his animal form—his spirit animal. And Chel and her team had been unable to reconcile why the oral history spoke of an Original Trio who’d escaped the Lost City rather than a foursome composed of Paktul, Smoke Song, and the two girls.

  But what if Paktul the man hadn’t made it out with them?

  WHEN STANTON returned to the main house, Chel had energy in her voice that he hadn’t heard since they’d sat in the Getty plaza together. “I think we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Lake Izabal doesn’t have anything to do with where the trio went.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Paktul isn’t writing about his human ancestors. It’s right here in the translation. He uses the word I interchangeably with his spirit animal. He goes back and forth using I to refer to his human form and his wayob. But we know he was keeping an actual macaw with him in the cave, because he refers to other people who can see it. He shows it to the prince and Auxila’s daughters, and he writes about the bird rejoining its flock.”

  I told the prince my spirit animal had stopped in Kanuataba on the great path of migration every macaw makes with its flock, Paktul wrote. I told him that in weeks we would continue our journey in search of the land that our ancestor birds have returned to every harvest season for thousands of years.

  “When he says he’ll lead them in the direction of his ancestors,” Chel said, “I thought that meant his human family. But what if he never went anywhere? What if he was killed by the guards, as he predicted, or he stayed behind to make sure the children could escape?”

  “Who led the children to Kiaqix?” Stanton asked. “You think they followed a bird?”

  “The prince would’ve been trained to track game a hundred miles. And the macaw would instinctively have returned to its flock. Kiaqix means the Valley of the Scarlet Macaw. It’s right along the migration path. The oral history says that the Original Trio considered it a good omen when they saw so many macaws in the trees here. What if they were following one of them because they believed it was the spirit of Paktul?”

  Chel pulled out the latitude map. On it she’d drawn a line representing the macaws’ known migratory path. “During migration seasons, the macaws fly from the southwest to here,” she continued, “and the patterns are highly consistent. We can find the exact trajectory and follow it.”

  For most of Stanton’s adult life, the possibility that three children followed a bird a hundred miles would have sounded insane. Now he didn’t know what to believe, but however improbable it was, all he could do was trust Chel’s instincts. If they had to track a migration pattern into the jungle, then that’s what they’d do.

  “Are you sure this is the exact path?” Stanton asked.

  Chel reached down into the supply bag and pulled out the satellite phone. “I found three different sites online, all giving the same coordinates. You can see for yourself.”

  She handed Stanton the phone, but when he tried to power it up again, the screen remained blank. It had been dying for hours, and the last bit of juice was gone. Cutting them off from the world entirely.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Chel told him, pointing back at the map. She seemed almost manic. “We have what we need.”

  Then Stanton saw something in her eyes that stopped him cold.

  “Look at me for a second,” he said.

  Chel was confused. “I am looking at you.”

  He pulled out his penlight and shone it in her eyes, studying the blacks of them as he swept the light away. They should have constricted in the light and dilated in darkness.

  When Stanton took the light away, nothing changed.

  “Am I sick?” Chel asked. Voice trembling.

  Stanton turned, quickly kneeling down to the supply bag to get a thermometer to measure her temperature. Then he stayed there for a moment, collecting himself. He didn’t want her seeing the fear in his eyes. She needed strength. She needed to believe they would find the lost city, her only hope now. He couldn’t let her see his doubts.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THEY LEFT KIAQIX AT FIRST LIGHT. SOON THE SUN WAS COOKING the Petén, and the light breeze coming through the open windows of the jeep gave Chel little relief. She could almost feel the VFI inside her. She glanced over at Stanton in the driver’s seat. He’d barely looked at her as they’d packed the medical supplies back into the jeep, along with the food Initia had given them. He just said over and over again that, with the disease as concentrated as it was here, the assay was as likely to render a false positive—from contamination—as to be accurate. He was unwilling to accept the results of a test he’d designed himself.

  Chel couldn’t read his body language very well, but she understood him enough by now to know he would blame himself for the fact that she was sick, for being a second too late. She wanted to make him understand it wasn’t his fault—that she would have died there on the floor of the chapel if it weren’t for him. But she couldn’t find the right words.

  She turned her attention ahead again. The macaw’s path ran 232.5 degrees southwest. Stanton had set them on a course through the jungle, across alternating patches of overused farmland and uncleared forest. Chel knew that they were looking for flat, elevated places, where the ancient cities like Kanuataba would have been built. Two hours in, the terrain was becoming more rugged. For the most part, there were no roads here at all, and they knew they’d eventually have to go on foot.

  The jeep rocked back and forth, kicking up mud. It was almost impossible to see through the windows. Chel’s world was getting louder and brighter and stranger: The noises of the car grated, and the howls and screeches of the jungle frightened her in a way they never had before.

  She had no idea how long they’d been driving when Stanton stopped the jeep again. “If the bearing’s right,” he said, “we have to keep going this way.” Ahead was a thicker jungle than any they’d seen, and dozens of felled trees blocked their path. It was the end of the line for the jeep.

  “Let’s go,” Chel said, trying to show strength. “I can walk.�
�� He bent down over the odometer. “We’re sixty-two miles from Kiaqix. If they traveled three days to get there, it can’t be much farther, right?” Chel nodded silently.

  “How’re you feeling?” he asked. “If you can’t make it, I’ll go in alone and come back as soon as I find it.”

  “People have hunted around here for centuries,” Chel managed. “Only two people have found the ruins. You’ll never find them alone.”

  STANTON CARRIED ALL the gear on his back—tools for scraping residues from the bowls they hoped to find in Jaguar Imix’s tomb, a microscope, slides, and other essentials for spot testing. He walked ahead, clearing shrubs and branches with a machete he’d taken from Initia’s house. They navigated choppy mudbanks and held on to the rough bark of towering trees to help them remain upright. Chel’s feet began to blister and her head pounded. She felt like there were a million tiny things crawling all over her body.

  After nearly an hour, Stanton stopped. They had just climbed their way to the very top of a rocky embankment, giving them a view of several miles. He held the compass in the air. “The migration path leads into that valley. It must be there.”

  Two small mountains lay ahead, each several miles wide. Between them was a large valley of unbroken tropical rain forest.

  “It can’t be there,” Chel said. Exhaustion bore down on her fast. “The ancients wouldn’t have built between mountains. It … made them vulnerable on both sides.”

  The look on Stanton’s face told her that, in her condition, he didn’t know what to believe. “Where do you want to go, then?” he asked.

  “Higher,” she told him. She pointed at the larger of the two mountains. “To look for temples above the trees.”

  THE TREE TRUNKS AT THE foot of the mountain were thin and blackened, charred toothpicks stuck into the ground. There’d been a fire, most likely started by lightning. In storm season, small lightning fires were common; the ancients believed they were a sign from the overworld that a patch of land needed time to rejuvenate.

  At the edge of the lightning forest, they reached a more verdant part of the slope. Then, from the corner of her eye, Chel saw a cluster of vanilla vines in the distance, about halfway up the mountain. She turned toward the strange but oddly familiar pattern. Vanilla was common throughout Guatemala; it wrapped itself tightly around tree trunks and climbed up to reach the top of the canopy for rain and light. The vines could grow hundreds of feet high.

  But these vines stretched only about fifteen feet into the air, as if the tree had been cut off and stripped of its branches. Chel called out for Stanton to wait, but he didn’t hear her. She let him keep going and turned off course. The fifty-plus yards up the slope were interminable, each of her steps more difficult than the last, but she was drawn to the thin, elongated leaves. The dense tangle of vines was looser than what it should have been on a tree—a clue that whatever lay beneath was covered with something other than wood bark.

  To the untrained eye it would’ve been impossible to discern, but hundreds of Maya stones had been discovered in the jungle beneath vines like these. Chel’s hands shook—with anticipation or sickness—and she barely had the strength to rip the strands away. But finally she could see down to the core. It was a massive boulder, at least eight feet tall, cut into the shape of an elongated headstone.

  “Where’d you go?” Stanton had found his way back to her. He bent down to peer over her shoulder. “What is that?”

  “A stela,” Chel said. “The ancients called them tree stones. They used them to record important dates, names of kings and events.”

  These stelae sometimes appeared near cities, she explained, but were also built by smaller villages as homages to the gods. The only thing she knew for certain about this one was that no one had seen its surface for a very long time. Age and weather had cracked off one of the corners.

  Chel tried to breathe steadily while Stanton cleared away the rest of the vines, revealing a surface covered in eroded etchings and inscriptions. There was a rendering of the maize god in the middle of the stone, while renderings of Itzamnaaj, the supreme Maya deity, adorned the edges.

  Then Chel saw three familiar glyphs. “What does it say?” Stanton asked.

  She motioned to the first carving. “Naqaj xol is Ch’olan for very near. And this one—u’qajibal q’ij—means we are directly west of it.”

  He pointed to the last glyph. “What about this?”

  “Akabalam.”

  FELLED TREES AND UNDERBRUSH covered every inch of the slope, and each step was an exhausting challenge for Chel. Up and down they traversed the steep incline, searching for a passable path. They stopped every fifty yards so she could rest. The air was unbearably hot and wet, and with each breath she felt like she couldn’t make it any farther. But with Stanton’s help she pressed forward, pushing on through another stretch of forest.

  Strangely, the pitch of the mountainside flattened out as they headed farther west, giving Chel’s legs a short break and allowing her to continue on. After two miles, it no longer felt like a mountain at all. They were still high above sea level, about halfway up to the peak, but the western face had eased into a massive plateau, flat as any plain. Kanuataba meant the terraced city, but nowhere in Paktul’s story had he written about agricultural terracing. Maybe instead, Chel thought, the city got its name from this ledge that a river cut into the mountain millions of years ago—a natural terrace that eluded discovery after her ancestors abandoned it.

  Minutes later, they found more reason to hope.

  Hundreds of ceiba trees, sacred to the Maya, stood in the distance. The trunks had thorns, and the branches were covered with grasses and moss, phosphorescent green.

  Kanuataba was once home to the most majestic collection of ceiba trees, the great path to the underworld, in all of the highlands. The ceiba once grew denser than anywhere in the world, blessed by the gods, their trunks nearly touching. Now there are fewer than a dozen still standing in all of Kanuataba!

  They continued through the dense area of holy trees that had now returned to the jungle. The ceibas stretched to the heavens, reaching toward the overworld, and Chel could see outlines of gods’ faces in the leaves: Ahau Chamahez, god of medicine; Ah Peku, god of thunder; Kinich Ahau, god of the sun, all beckoning her forward.

  “Are you okay?”

  Stanton was paces ahead, calling back at her. Could he see what she now saw in the leaf patterns above them? Could he hear the call of the gods as she did?

  Chel blinked, attempting to see ahead with clear eyes. Trying to form the words to answer him. She stepped toward him, and a break in the ceibas caught her eye. Between the trunks was a sliver of stone.

  “There,” she whispered.

  They walked a quarter mile to the base of an ancient pyramid and stood together in stunned silence. Mist bathed the structure’s top reaches. Trees and shrubs and flowers sprouted in all directions, obscuring every corner. More trees had grown up the stairs, to the top; one façade was so dense with flora, it could have been mistaken for a natural slope. Only at the summit could they see limestone, where three adjacent openings were formed by columns in the shape of elongated birds.

  “Incredible,” Stanton said. “This is it?”

  Chel nodded. Broken shards of stones transformed in her mind into angular steps. Slaves and corvée laborers appeared, carrying boulders on their backs. At the base, she saw tattoo artists and piercers, spice-makers trading for chert. The dull and decrepit limestone was, for Chel, now painted with a rainbow of color: yellows and pinks and purples and greens.

  The birthplace of her people, in all its glory.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THEY CONTINUED ACROSS THE MOUNTAINTOP, MOVING SLOWLY, searching for other signs of the lost city through the overgrowth. The stela and small pyramid were signposts that they had reached the outer limits of the metropolis, but they still had to find the city’s center.

  Stanton carefully led them over shrubs and massive tree roots extending i
n all directions, hacking away with his machete in one hand, and gripping Chel’s with the other. He tried to keep track of what plants he was cutting through—pink orchids and liana and strangler vines and others—in case they turned out to be relevant.

  He also listened closely as they walked. Wolves, foxes, even jaguars could be in the area. Stanton had been on safari once after medical school, and that was about as close to dangerous animals as he ever wanted to get. He was very glad that he could hear only birds and bats in the distance.

  They passed stelae and small one-level limestone buildings wrapped from base to top in foliage and small trees. Chel pointed out areas where servants to the nobles likely lived on the edge of the city, and what was once a small ball court where the ancients practiced their strange hybrid of volleyball and basketball. Stanton could easily have missed these overgrown landmarks.

  He was trying to keep his eyes on her as much as possible. She seemed stable, but it was hard to know to what extent her symptoms could be exacerbated or accelerated by an arduous hike through the jungle in hundred-ten-degree heat. She would have been better off back in Kiaqix under Initia’s care. But he knew she was right that he never would have found the city without her.

  Now they had to zero in on the king’s entombment temple, the last structure built in Kanuataba before its collapse. Paktul had described the construction as a haphazard project, rushed to completion and built with inadequate resources. Excavating a temple would ordinarily require serious equipment, but Volcy and his partner had been able to do it with pickaxes. So it was likely shoddily built or left unfinished.

  The foundation will be laid in twenty days, less than a thousand paces from the palace. The viewing tower shall be built to face the highest point of the procession of the sun and will create a great holy triangle with the palace and the twin pyramid of red.