“However, while in control, Quetzalcoatl revived the world and thus began the second age, but then he was overthrown by Tezcatlipoca who ended the age with a tremendous wind. Their battle continued into the third age until Quetzalcoatl destroyed it with fire and then Tezcatlipoca countered by drowning the fourth age in a great flood.”
“Now it’s Quetzalcoatl’s turn to off the fifth age with earthquakes,” Derek observed solemnly.
“Then what?” Eva asked. “Will there be a sixth age?”
Dr. Friedman shrugged. “The stories only count five ages.”
“Maybe this constant battle will end the world once and for all,” Derek mused.
“Don’t get carried away,” Dr. Peet said. “This is only a story. We shouldn’t be any more concerned about it than the millennium bug.”
“Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca weren’t always enemies,” Dr. Friedman added. “In fact, there are other creation stories that describe them working together to create the earth, not to mention the fifth age.”
A crease developed between Dr. Peet’s eyes. “My Aztec lore is a little rusty, but wasn’t the fifth age created when all the deities threw themselves into a fire?”
Dr. Friedman nodded. “All of them gathered, but only two sacrificed themselves to the fire. According to mythology, this occurred in a Thirteen Reed year—marked by this solitary glyph situated at the very top of the sunstone. One of the sacrificed deities became the sun, the other the moon, and thus the fifth age began. The sunstone repeatedly commemorates their fiery self-sacrifice by the flames spiking the bodies of the twin snakes that form the outside border.”
“They look like butterflies to me,” Eva mumbled.
Lori leaned in for a closer look, careful not to touch the velvet rope strung before the exhibit. She spotted the two snakes. Their heads met at the bottommost part of the circle, mouths gaping toward their mirror images, their snouts curling like caterpillars toward the back of the head. The segmented bodies of the snakes, each segment marked by a flame or butterfly, created the outer circumference of the stone, the tails looping back to each other at the top where the Thirteen Reed glyph stood between their two triangular rattles.
“Is this Quetzalcoatl?” Eva asked.
Dr. Friedman shook his head. “No. This is Xiuhcoatl. There’s a lot of symbolism associated with this snake. For instance, each body segment represents the fifty-two year cycle of the Calendar Round, with the four year markers, Knife, Reed, Rabbit and House represented by the four bands near Xiuhcoatl’s rattle. And the seven stars of the Pleiades fringe his curling snout, making the sunstone more of a cosmological artifact.”
Lori frowned. “What are the Pleiades?”
John cleared his throat. “It’s a small cluster of stars located in the Taurus constellation.”
Lori drew a blank, which wasn’t missed by Derek.
“I’m sure you’ve seen them,” he said. “The Pleiades look like a tiny Big Dipper to me. The three stars of Orion’s Belt point directly at them.”
Lori shrugged. She’d have to take his word for it. Astronomy was a point of weakness when it came to the extent of her scientific knowledge. She knew a few of the obvious stars and constellations—Orion, the Big Dipper, and the North Polar Star—but that was about it. She wondered if most archaeologists didn’t suffer a similar impairment. After all, how much time does one look at the sky when they’re busy digging in the dirt?
“The Pleiades are also represented by the snakes’ rattles,” Dr. Friedman continued.
“So what’s so important about the Pleiades?” Lori asked.
“My father tied them to Quetzalcoatl,” Eva said.
That only confused the matter. “I thought Venus was related to Quetzalcoatl?”
“My father didn’t look at the stars the way the rest of the world does,” Eva explained. “He saw Venus as the spirit of Quetzalcoatl. But the Pleiades physically formed the snake’s rattle. The Milky Way was Quetzalcoatl’s body and his mouth was the dark gap in the Milky Way.”
Dr. Friedman was nodding as though picturing the whole thing in his mind. “What an ingenious view of the night sky,” he said.
“Hold on,” Lori said. “Catch me up here. There’s a gap in the Milky Way?”
“A cleft actually,” Dr. Friedman said. “Or a dark rift, if you will. Basically, when we look at the Milky Way, we’re looking out across the edge of our galaxy. From our viewpoint, what we see of the galaxy appears like a long band of stars. But this band varies in width as it stretches across the sky.”
“Let me get this straight,” Lori said. “In Shaman Gaspar’s view, the Milky Way is Quetzalcoatl. The bulge forms his head with a gaping mouth, and the Pleiades complete his tail, right?”
Eva nodded. “In a nutshell.”
“That must be why Quetzalcoatl’s mouth is always open in Mesoamerican art,” Derek suggested.
“But what about Xiuhcoatl’s mouth?” Eva asked. “My father told me to find the smoke in the serpent’s mouth.”
For the first time Dr. Friedman looked stumped. “I’m not certain. As you can see, there’s no smoke coming out of Xiuhcoatl’s mouth.”
Lori turned back to the twin snake heads at the bottom of the sunstone. In typical Mesoamerican fashion, the heads were embellished with mosaic artistry nearly blending them into the glyphs of the inner circles. But the longer she studied them, the more detail she began to pick out. The fiery shapes Eva called butterflies adorning each segment of the snakes’ bodies, their malicious half-moon-shaped eyes, the seven bulbs fringing their curlicue snouts.
As Dr. Friedman pointed out, there was no smoke coming out of their tri-fanged mouths. Protruding instead were what appeared to be…human faces?
“Wait a second,” Dr. Peet said into the hand which had reflectively buried his chin. His other arm lay across his chest, captured against his ribs by the contemplative elbow. “Gaspar didn’t say to look behind the sunstone. He told us to look in the place behind the sunstone.”
Dr. Friedman still looked confused. “What are you talking about?”
“The birthplace as explained by the message in the sunstone. It’s all in the symbolism. And what is the sunstone really about?”
“The fifth age,” John replied thoughtfully.
“Right. And where was the fifth age born?”
Dr. Friedman’s eyes snapped to life. “You’re talking about Teotihuacan.”
“Yes!”
“Of course! Teotihuacan is the place where the gods supposedly gathered to create the fifth age. And it honors the two deities that sacrificed themselves into the fire with the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon.”
Dr. Peet’s eyes were glowing as Dr. Friedman paced excitedly. It was the first time Lori had seen such correlation between the two professors. Their reservations toward each other had been momentarily pushed aside. They were two minds compliantly working together, causing Lori to wonder if she was witnessing a shadowy glimpse of buried history between them.
“The Aztecs highly revered Teotihuacan, even though it had been abandoned long before they arrived in central Mexico,” Dr. Friedman was saying.
“Shaman Gaspar did call it the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl,” Derek added.
“Mr. Gaspar didn’t bring the effigy to Mexico to donate it to the museum,” Dr. Peet said. “He must have had it with him when he went to Teotihuacan.”
Lori’s heart sank. “That means his killer took the effigy.”
“Not necessarily. Gaspar said we’d find the smoke in the serpent’s mouth. I believe ‘smoke’ is a codeword he chose to prevent anyone listening in on his phone call. Maybe ‘smoke’ refers to the effigy. And animal mouths such as jaguars, coyotes and snakes were often associated with caves—”
“Like Xiuhcoatl’s mouth, with the faces peering out,” Lori observed.
“So maybe Mr. Gaspar hid the effigy in a cave in Teotihuacan.”
“Right,” Dr. Friedman added, still pacing before the su
nstone. “Now, there is such a cave whose mouth aligned with the heliacal setting of the Pleiades. It became the cornerstone of Teotihuacan’s layout and the Pyramid of the Sun was built on top of that cave.”
Derek smiled with sudden revelation. “So first thing tomorrow morning we need to find this cave inside the Pyramid of the Sun.”
“That’s where we’ll find the effigy.”
Agave Azul
There were probably three reasons Shaman Gaspar had preferred the Agave Azul—its relatively quiet isolation along the moody, dead end street above the markets of San Felipe de Jesus, its close proximity to MEX 132, and the taqueria’s blue corn tortillas. There were also three reasons Derek Riesling had booked their hotel rooms there. First, it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Mexico City’s InternationalAirport. Secondly, it was cheap—thirty American dollars a night, to be exact. Finally, it was familiar. Shaman Gaspar had introduced him to the quiet little hotel that first year Derek agreed to attend the equinox meetings to write his articles in the Acatzalan newsletter.
It hadn’t taken him long to realize the benefits of his namesake. In a sense, the name Acatzalan was like Santa Claus—everybody knew it, but nobody knew him. Those who had seen Derek—and there were many—had yet to realize that he was the Acatzalan.
Needless to say, Acatzalan came with a celebrity status already intact. Most New Agers thought Acatzalan was Shaman Gaspar’s second in command, a silent and faceless partner in the group’s activities. Some suggested that he was Gaspar’s apprentice who would some day take over, perhaps once the Age of Quetzalcoatl was well established. There was even a rumor circulating that Acatzalan was Quetzalcoatl himself, like a coming messiah, or some crazy shit like that. Derek couldn’t help but wonder how the New Agers would react if they knew Acatzalan was nothing more than a college kid observing and reporting from the sidelines, who would have nothing to do with their religion were it not for the extra tuition the newsletter provided.
Now, with Shaman Gaspar dead, that avenue of income was certainly closed and Acatzalan would slip away from the New Agers just as mysteriously as he slipped in. Shaman Gaspar’s followers were bound to be distraught over the death of their leader, but for Derek, the loss was more of a relief. It was like losing a dependent grandparent. Sure, he was going to miss Gaspar and his many quirks, but in reality, he relished the freedom he’d now have. There’d be no more rambling meetings of what should and shouldn’t be included in the newsletter. There’d be no more late-night phone calls whenever Gaspar thought of a last-minute article to insert; no more scrambling to the office supply store to mass-produce copies that needed to be mailed yesterday, all the while trying to avoid the store clerks who found the newsletter’s title curiously intriguing.
In fact, with Shaman Gaspar gone, Derek was already looking forward to spending his free time writing about archaeological finds rather than the theological whimsies of a delusional, self-proclaimed shaman. And once he returned the effigy to the university, Derek had the perfect springboard from which to launch his writing career.
Thoughts of his comeback article regarding the return of the effigy, however, had dissolved into memories of his first trip to Mexico with Shaman Gaspar as he walked across the dark and dripping garden plaza between the small taqueria and the Agave Azul’s row of rooms. There were only nine rooms total, with the Agave Azul’s laundry occupying the far end of the row. Derek had managed to rent three —one for Eva, one for himself, and one he reserved shortly after calling professor Friedman from the Zócalo.
Getting two additional rooms for Lori and Peet had been out of the question considering Derek had to dish out a boatload of pesos to convince the manager to cancel a reservation and give John the extra room. Doubling Lori in Eva’s room had been no problem. It was pairing Quickie Peet with someone that proved difficult. Derek sensed Peet’s rigid animosity toward him and the thought of rooming with the professor felt awkward, like waking up in the middle of the night with a knife to your throat awkward. Problem was, John seemed just as hostile toward Peet as Peet was toward Derek, so rooming the two professors together was also out of the question. In the end, Derek gave up his room and bunked in with John to keep the peace.
He knocked on the seventh door and Eva immediately answered.
“Thought you might want to drown your sorrows,” he said, retrieving a six-pack of Coronas from the rain-speckled paper sack he’d been carrying under his arm.
“No thanks,” she said. “I think Jose Cuervo took care of that last night.” She glanced at the dripping eaves from which large terra cotta flower pots hung. “Did the rain stop?”
“More or less.”
Eva slipped out of the door. “Good. I need a smoke. Lori might help you with those drinks though.”
Derek stepped into the girls’ room where Lori was wrapped in a half-length hotel bathrobe, scrubbing the shower from her hair. She looked surprised to see him but in the swift moment that it took to wrap her head in the towel, her mood clearly soured.
“Thought you might like a nightcap,” Derek said, setting the Coronas down on the stained mesquite night stand.
“I don’t drink.”
Derek shrugged. “I know.”
His gaze followed the caressing exchange of her legs as her bare feet padded across the hand-woven rug centering the floor. Her slender neck was delicately feminine without her blonde hair draped over it, plunging ever so teasingly into the cushy fibers of the bathrobe. As though she’d never acknowledged his presence, she rummaged through her duffle—a bag, he presumed, that had seen more excavation tents than hotel rooms.
“Are you angry with me?” he asked as she retrieved her night cream and returned to the foggy bathroom mirror.
She removed the lid to her cream, but hesitated with the jar balanced precariously in her palm. “I just spent a ton of money on a last-minute flight to Mexico City,” she said. “Of course I’m upset with you.”
“I didn’t expect you to come. You weren’t supposed to be involved.”
Lori was leaning over the colorful mosaic-tiled sink, watching her reflection as she impatiently rubbed the cream on her face. “You got me involved when you stole the effigy.”
It crossed Derek’s mind to sit down on the edge of the bed but he thought better of it. He felt too defensive to relax.
“I only meant to borrow it.”
“Yeah, and you had intentions of bringing it right back, I know. You already told us.” She crossed her arms which only accented the sensuous curves within her robe. “And just how did you get into the anthropology building in the first place?”
Derek shrugged. “Sometimes it pays to know the janitors. I just explained to ol’ Harold that I needed to retrieve a book I’d left in the archaeology lab. He loaned me his keys, I found a shirt that could pass for a janitor’s uniform in case anyone saw me, and I carried the effigy out in a garbage sack to avoid suspicion. Nothing to it really.”
Lori didn’t look amused. “And while you were pulling this little stunt did it ever occur to you that you could get kicked out of school, or were you going to worry about that while you were sitting in jail?”
Lori returned her cream to her bag. Her face was glowing, her eyes charged.
Damn it if she wasn’t hot!
“I guess it all happened too easily to worry about complications. So I screwed up. But I’m going to fix this.”
“Tell that to Eva. Her father might still be alive if you hadn’t stolen that effigy for him.”
That one stung.
“I’m aware of the consequences,” he relented. “Look, I may not be able to bring Shaman Gaspar back, but there’s a chance I can bring the effigy back. But I need Friedman’s help.” He finally accepted the corner of the bed and reached for her hand. “I need your help.”
Lori’s stern expression softened ever so slightly. It was a cautious yield, but a yield nonetheless. “How do you expect to find the effigy?” she asked in a more consenting tone.
Lori stepped back toward her jeans draped over a chair, and plunged her hand into a back pocket. She withdrew the beige note from the Acatzalan newsletter which she’d rescued from the restaurant table.
“Maybe you can start by explaining these symbols,” she said.
Derek knew the symbols before she pointed them out. They were the two snakes that bordered the title of every Acatzalan newsletter. They were fitting, Derek thought, since Shaman Gaspar enamored his followers with the feathered serpent.
“What’s to explain?” he asked. “I believe that’s Quetzalcoatl.”
Lori retracted the note and lowered herself onto the bed, one foot folded beneath her, the other dangling off the side. By the pinched look on her freshly scrubbed face that wasn’t the answer she was looking for.
“It’s not Quetzalcoatl,” she said. “It’s the Toltec calendar date, Ten Coatl, which happens to land on May 20th.”
“That makes sense.”
Lori looked up in surprise. “It does?”
“Sure. That’s the day of the New Ager’s huge gathering.”
“What gathering?”
“To ring in the Age of Quetzalcoatl.”
Lori thought this over, mindlessly flipping the note between her fingers. Sitting there in her robe and towel she was as beautiful as a swan perched on a nest. And she was irresistibly close. Close enough that Derek could smell her fresh skin. He was tempted to touch her, to mold his hand around the knee exposed beneath the hem of her robe. He had the urge to kiss her, to gently part the cotton wrap at her waist and—
“The new age starts May 20th?”
Lori hadn’t noticed his wandering eyes. Her mind was calculating again. “Why not January 1st, or the Toltec new year equivalent?”
Derek shrugged and tried to shake his mind free of Lori’s bathrobe. “I’m sure it has something to do with the stars,” he said. “Shaman Gaspar was always watching the stars.”
“The stars, huh?”
The mattress released a muffled creak as Lori sprang to her feet and gathered her clothes off the back of the chair.
Effigy Page 17