by Jon Voelkel
“Tooki? What was that short for?” asked Lola.
“Ix Took’ Hool.”
Lola burst out laughing. “Lady Flint Skull?”
“Exactly. Chan Kan wanted to give me a name worthy of a Maya queen. He hoped his baby daughter would grow up to lead Utsal to a bright new future. I’m afraid I failed him.”
Uncle Ted squeezed her shoulder. “No, Tooki, he failed you.”
“Please, please,” begged Max, “can I call you Aunt Flint Skull?”
“No.” Zia threw a breadstick at him.
“What’s my name?” asked Lola suddenly.
“Lily Theodora Murphy.” Uncle Ted’s voice cracked. “It’s the most beautiful name in the world.”
“I didn’t give you a Maya name because I was so angry at Chan Kan,” added Zia. “But I think Ix Sak Lol is beautiful, too.”
“Lily Theodora Murphy.” Lola repeated it to herself a few times. “I like it. But I guess I’ll stick with Lola for a while, till we all get used to things.” Her eyes were shining with happiness. “So how old am I, exactly?”
“You’re sixteen. You’ll be seventeen on 8-Crocodile,” replied Zia instantly.
“You keep the days?”
Zia nodded. “Old habits die hard.”
“When you were a little girl, did you used to sit on the riverbank and play with Chan Kan’s crystals?”
Zia nodded. “How did you know? Did you do that, too?”
Lola jumped up. “I have to get something! I’ll be right back!”
While Lola was out of the room, Max took the opportunity to ask Zia some more questions. His head was still spinning. “I was thinking,” he said, “that in Spain, you told me that Lord Kuy promised you a reward if you helped get the Yellow Jaguar to Xibalba. Is this what you asked for?”
Zia smiled. “You have a good memory! Yes, he told me that I would see my daughter again. I didn’t really believe him, but the thought made me so happy. And there she was in Spain, sitting next to me, all along. I always felt that your friend Lola and I had a connection. But I never dreamed she was my daughter.”
She beamed proudly at Lola, who’d just come back into the room.
“Look!” said Lola, handing Zia a little deerskin pouch. “Chan Kan wanted you to have these. He said they would connect me with the rest of my life.”
Zia recognized the bag instantly. “His crystals! His plan was for me to succeed him as shaman. I would have been good at it, too. If only he hadn’t been so angry with me for marrying outside the village.”
Uncle Ted thumped his chair arm. “How dare he! All these years, making us think our daughter was dead. He destroyed three lives, for the sake of his own stubborn pride.”
“He was truly sorry at the end,” Lola assured him. “He knew what he had done.”
“Maybe he will tell me that himself,” said Zia. She tipped the bag of crystals onto the floor and studied the pattern.
“What does it say?” asked Lola eagerly.
Zia shook her head sadly. “If this is a message from my father, then he hasn’t changed a bit. These crystals spell out a warning.”
Lola looked crestfallen, and Zia hurriedly gathered the crystals back into the bag.
“We are together now, and that is all that matters,” she told her long-lost daughter. “Tomorrow I will give thanks to Mother Moon, Ixchel.” She glanced out of the window. “How perfect. It is the first night of the new moon.”
So One Death had been right, thought Max. The White Jaguar had found its way back to Xibalba before the next new moon.
As Lady Coco and Raul brought in hot chocolate and fresh-baked cookies for a midnight feast, Max looked around the room at all the tired and happy faces and tried to take a picture in his mind. He wanted to capture this feeling, so that when the dark days came, as they surely would, when Ah Pukuh took over the throne of Middleworld and used the power of the Jaguar Stones for ultimate evil, he could uncork this moment and remember how it felt.
There was a rapping at the door, and Raul went out to investigate.
“I can’t believe you ordered pizza, Hoop!” said Lola, giggling.
“Some things never change,” agreed Zia.
But she was wrong.
Because quite a lot had changed.
“I didn’t order pizza,” said Max.
“Then who would knock at this time of night?” mused Uncle Ted.
When Raul walked back in, he didn’t look like Raul anymore.
His face was white as chalk dust. His hair had gone completely gray.
“It was the man who looks like an owl,” he said. “He brought us mail.”
With shaking hands, he passed around the envelopes.
There was one for everyone, except for Max.
And the reason for that became obvious when they opened them:
GLOSSARY
AH PUKUH (awe-poo-coo): God of violent and unnatural death, depicted in Maya art as a bloated, decomposing corpse or a cigar-smoking skeleton. Ah Pukuh rules over Mitnal, the ninth and most terrible layer of XIBALBA, the Maya underworld.
CENOTE (say-no-tay): A deep, water-filled sinkhole. Cenotes are unique to the Yucatan peninsula, where there are around three thousand of them. (The name is a Spanish corruption of the Mayan word tz’onot.) Some cenotes are underground lakes in cave systems, while others are pools in open shafts. The ancient Maya thought they were gateways to the watery underworld.
COSMIC CROCODILE: The two-headed Cosmic Crocodile, also known as the Celestial Monster, is a Maya representation of the Milky Way. Its two heads represent the duality of life and death, as the sun moves through the northern sky in the life-giving rainy season and through the southern sky in the dry season.
GLYPHS: The name given to more than eight hundred different signs in the ancient Maya writing system.
HERO TWINS: Twin brothers Xbalanke (sh-ball-on-kay) and Hunahpu (who-gnaw-poo) are the main characters in the Maya creation story, as told in the POPOL VUH. Challenged to a ballgame by the LORDS OF DEATH, the twins outwit their underworld opponents and take their places in the heavens as the sun and the moon.
IXCHEL (eesh-shell): Controversy reigns over the goddess named “Lady Rainbow.” Traditionally, she has been viewed as one deity with multiple personalities. As the malevolent Goddess of the Old Moon, she is shown with a snake headband and a skirt embroidered with crossbones; as Goddess of the New Moon, she is a beautiful young woman who reclines inside the crescent moon, holding her pet rabbit. Recently, scholars have made a case for two separate deities: Chak Chel “Great Rainbow” and Ix Uh “Lady Moon.”
JAGUAR STONES (in Mayan, bahlamtuuno’ob): A literary invention of the Jaguar Stones trilogy. Along with the five (fictional) sacred pyramids, these five stone carvings embody the five pillars of ancient Maya society: agriculture, astronomy, creativity, military prowess, and kingship. As far as we know, no such stones ever existed—nor did the Maya ever relax their warlike ways enough to forge an equal alliance of five great cities.
LANDA, DIEGO DE (1524–1579): The overzealous Franciscan friar who piled Maya books and religious artworks into one big bonfire and burned them all on July 12, 1549.
LORDS OF DEATH: In Maya mythology, the underworld (XIBALBA) is ruled by twelve Lords of Death: One Death, Seven Death, Scab Stripper, Blood Gatherer, Wing, Demon of Pus, Demon of Jaundice, Bone Scepter, Skull Scepter, Demon of Filth, Demon of Woe, and Packstrap. It is their job to inflict sickness, pain, starvation, fear, and death on the citizens of MIDDLEWORLD. Fortunately, they’re usually far too busy gambling and playing jokes on one another to get much work done.
MAYA: Maya civilization began on the Yucatán peninsula sometime before 1500 BCE and entered its Classic Period around 250 CE, when the Maya established a series of city-states across what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. Building on the accomplishments of earlier civilizations such as the Olmec, the Maya developed astronomy, calendrical systems, and hieroglyphic writing. Although most famou
s for their soaring pyramids and palaces (built without metal tools, wheels, or beasts of burden), they were also skilled farmers, weavers, and potters, and they established extensive trade networks. Wracked by overpopulation, drought, and soil erosion, Maya power began to decline around 800 CE, when the southern cities were abandoned. By the time of the Spanish Conquest, only a few kingdoms still thrived, and most Maya had gone back to farming their individual family plots. There are still six million Maya living in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.
MAYAN: The family of thirty-one different and mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Maya groups in Central America.
MIDDLEWORLD: Like the Vikings, the Egyptians, and other ancient cultures, the Maya believed that humankind inhabited a middle world between heaven and hell. The Maya Middleworld (yok’ol kab) was sandwiched between the nine dark and watery layers of XIBALBA and the thirteen leafy layers of the heavens (ka’anal naah).
MORLEY, SYLVANUS GRISWOLD (1883–1948): Thought by some to have inspired the character of Indiana Jones, Morley was a Harvard-trained archaeologist most famous for his excavations at Chichen Itza and his work as an American spy during World War One.
PITZ: The Mesoamerican ballgame was the first team sport in recorded history and most Maya sites have ball courts. Although no one knows for sure, it seems that the game was played along the lines of tennis or volleyball, but without a net. Using only hips, knees, or elbows, the heavily padded players tried to keep the large rubber ball in play, scoring points if the opposing team made an error or failed to return it. It is now thought that the stone hoops often seen on ball courts served as markers. The game had great religious significance, and it is believed that the losing team, or a team of captive “stunt doubles,” was often sacrificed. A version of the game called ulama is still played in modern Mexico.
SAN XAVIER: The setting of the Jaguar Stones books, this is a fictional country in Central America based on modern-day Belize.
VISION SERPENT: When a Maya king wished to communicate with an ancestor, he would hold a bloodletting ceremony to summon the Vision Serpent: a hybrid monster depicted as part snake and part giant centipede. In Maya art, this creature is often seen rising out of the smoke, with the ancestor emerging from its mouth.
XIBALBA (she-ball-buh): The K’iche’ Maya name for the underworld, meaning “Well of Fear.” Only kings and those who died a violent death (battle, sacrifice, suicide) or women who died in childbirth could look forward to the leafy shade of heaven. All other souls, good or bad, were headed across rivers of scorpions, blood, and pus to Xibalba. Unlike the Christian hell with its fire and brimstone, the Maya underworld was cold and damp—its inhabitants condemned to an eternity of bone-chilling misery and hunger.
A SIDE TRIP TO VENICE
In this book, we take the Maya Death Lords to Venice, Italy. It seems like the ideal vacation spot for them because it has a lot in common with Xibalba, the Maya underworld.
Of course, Venice is a beautiful city. But there’s no denying that it’s watery and misty, sometimes smelly, and sometimes bitterly cold. Most importantly, as Lord Kuy explains to Max, it’s a liminal place, and the ancient Maya were fascinated by liminality. It’s a concept that comes from the Latin word limen, meaning “threshold,” and it describes something that’s between two states of being. For example, the ancient Maya revered jaguars because they hunt on land and in water, by night and by day; similarly, mountains were sacred because they are half on earth and half in the sky. So we think Venice would have delighted the Death Lords because it’s not quite land and not quite water.
Tradition has it that Venice was founded in the fifth century CE (at about the same time the Maya were building Chichen Itza) by refugees fleeing from barbarian invasions of northern Italy. At first, it was just a collection of swampy islands in a tidal lagoon, but the settlers gradually reinforced the mud with millions of wooden pilings.
Today, as the weight of buildings pushes the pilings ever deeper and sea levels rise with climate change, Venice is slowly sinking. At particularly high tides, water floods the city and gushes up through marble floors.
In the beginning, the Venetians relished their isolation in the lagoon. Like a Maya city-state, they formed an independent republic (ruled over by a doge), and established an extensive trading network. But just as smallpox brought over from Europe devastated the Maya, successive waves of plague carried in from other ports ravaged the Venetians. In the 1629–31 epidemic, a third of the Venetian population died. On that occasion, the small island of Poveglia (the inspiration for our Plague Island) was used as a quarantine and plague pit.
Another consequence of the plague was the appearance of the medico della peste, or plague doctor. Members of this perilous profession wore beaked masks and head-to-toe robes to protect themselves from disease. Today, the plague doctor costume is a popular choice for revelers at the Venetian carnevale.
And that’s another reason why the ancient Maya Death Lords would feel at home in Venice: because for all its grim history and ghosts and four rats to every human, it’s a fun-loving city that thrives on masked balls and glittering social events. And as you know if you’ve read the Jaguar Stones books, the Death Lords are just twelve fun-loving guys … on a mission to destroy the world.
THE MAYA CALENDAR
Ancient Maya astronomers devised many different calendars to mark the passage of time. Most of them—including the Long Count calendar, a misinterpretation of which gave rise to all the hokum about 2012—are not in use anymore. But Maya daykeepers still follow a 260-day ritual calendar, the Tzolk’in, to track ceremonial days and indicate the best timing for life events such as weddings and journeys. Like Lord 6-Dog, Maya children were sometimes given their birthday as a nickname. (By this reckoning, the Jaguar Stones books are written by Lord 9-Thunder and Lady 7-Monkey.) To find out your Maya birth sign, just e-mail the day/month/year you were born (spell out month) to [email protected].
Here are the twenty day names—which one will be yours?
PIZZA GELATO
(Requires ice-cream maker)
INGREDIENTS:
• 8 oz. finely grated Parmesan cheese
• 5 cups heavy cream
• 1 tablespoon fresh basil & oregano, finely chopped
• 1 small Pizza Margherita, cooked and sliced into half-inch squares
• ¼ cup chilled tomato puree
• Pepper
PREPARATION:
1) Pour cream into a saucepan and heat to a simmer. Add all the Parmesan and a dash of pepper, stirring until smooth.
2) Push mixture through strainer to extract as much liquid as possible, cool to room temperature, then pour into ice-cream maker.
3) When nearly ready, add chopped herbs.
4) Mix ice cream with slices of pizza and top with tomato puree.
5) THROW OUT IMMEDIATELY AS IT IS DISGUSTING.
The following variations were also tried and are strongly not recommended:
• Cheese ice cream, topped with bacon and carbonara sauce.
• Tomato ice cream swirled in cheese ice cream, sprinkled with herbs.
We attempted many ways to re-create Carla Murphy’s concept for a savory dessert and, every time, the results were inedible. If you have your own recipe for Pizza Gelato to share on the Jaguar Stones website, please email it (with photos if possible) to [email protected] Buon appetito!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Originally planned as the third and final volume in the Jaguar Stones series, the first draft of this book was as thick as a pyramid step and as heavy as a Maya king’s headdress. So, for giving us the freedom to start over and go beyond a trilogy, huge thanks to the most perceptive, most inspiring, most supportive, most fun-to-work-with editor in the world, Elizabeth Law at Egmont USA.
Thank you to everyone else at Egmont for your passion for children’s books and your commitment to saving the rainforests by using only paper from sustainable sources; especially t
o the wonderful Mary Albi, and to Katie Halata, Bonnie Cutler, and Rob Guzman—we love you guys. That goes for you too, Daniel Lazar of Writers House.
Thank you to Arlene Goldberg (who doesn’t usually have to work around cockroaches on the page) for making it all fit with such care and precision, Becky Terhune for book design, Cliff Nielsen for the cover illustration. And thank you once again to Katherine Hinds for an amazing job of proofreading a text that includes English, Italian, Spanish, Yucatec Maya, and ancient Maya hieroglyphs.
Massive thanks to our redoubtable advisor-in-chief, Marc Zender, and to all the other real-life Indiana Joneses who have shared their knowledge and experiences with us: Gerardo Aldana, Armando Anaya H., Anthony F. Aveni, Jaime Awe (Director, Belize Institute of Archaeology), Ramzy Barrois, Mary Clarke, Allan Cobb, Stanley Guenter, Norman Hammond, Amanda Harvey, Julie Hoggarth, Patsy Holden, Gyles Iannone, Harri Kettunen, S. Ashley Kistler, Maxime Lamoureux-St Hilaire, David Lee, Bruce Love, Heather McKillop, Meaghan Peuramäki-Brown, Christy Pritchard, Jim Pritchard, Mat Saunders, Priscilla Saunders, James Stemp, Mark Van Stone, George Stuart, Gabrielle Vail, and Belizean chef/storyteller Patricio Balona.
Thank you to the following people for helping with our research: In Mexico, Denis Larsen, proprietor of Casa Hamaca in Valladolid—the best guesthouse in Yucatán; Serviliano Petil Urtcil (Don Carlos), Sofia Pat Balam, Lorenzo Antonio Petul Balam, Lorena Letiticia Petul Balam, and Genny Magaly Petul Balam in Yalcobá; the students of Escuela Primaria Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—and in respectful memory of their gracious principal, Mauricio Eustaquio Acosta Balam; Allan Brookstone and neighbors in Santa Eléuteria; Alex Aranda in San Cristobal de Las Casas. In Italy, Signor Dino Padovan on Guidecca island, Signorina Giovanna at Grandi Vedute, and Marco Penazzi for recreating Venice in Vermont and correcting our Italian. At the NASA Calendar in the Sky workshop, Brian Mendez of the Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley and Marco Antonio Pacheco, President of Casa de la Cultura Maya in Los Angeles.