Deity

by Theresa Danley

  “This is Lori’s, isn’t it.”

  It wasn’t a question so Peet didn’t feel compelled to answer.

  “You loved her, didn’t you.”

  Peet shifted uneasily to KC’s silky voice. A part of him wished she’d return to the calloused, rough-and-tumble pilot he’d hired two days ago. He didn’t need a confidant to wring out the overflow of his personal life.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s still there,” she pressed, her slender fingers still toying with the pendant. “Look at all that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours. You’ve nearly drowned in a collapsing cenote, you almost cooked in a plane crash, and you were that close to taking a Zapatista’s bullet for that Bible thumper, and yet none of that has shaken the hurt from your eyes.”

  Peet finally snatched the necklace back from KC and stuffed it into his pocket. “Maybe I don’t handle death very well,” he reasoned.

  “And yet, in your line of work you dig it up all the time. But this is very different.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re not the same man that boarded my plane in Salt Lake City, Dr. Peet. I saw the way you lit up when Lori found us. Suddenly, looking for John and Matt wasn’t so much a chore as an adventure. But ever since you returned from that cenote you’ve been living out a personal hell. I see it in your eyes.”

  Peet groaned inwardly. He hated being evaluated, much less finding himself under the lens of someone he’d met only days ago. Then again, maybe it wasn’t the evaluation but KC’s intuition that left him wishing for a hole to crawl into. Women were like that. They had a way of reading him like a book. His late wife had been a proficient mind reader. Lori had been pretty good herself. Now it was KC, and her intuition seemed to be hitting its mark, whether Peet cared to admit to it or not.

  “You don’t know anything about my situation,” he tried to counter.

  “No, but Lori did.”

  There was no arguing that point. He hadn’t really considered before just how close he’d grown to Lori. He never allowed himself. But now, the thought was consuming. Over the years his student had come to know him just as well as, if not better than, some of his closest colleagues. As much as Peet tried to close himself up, Lori had a way of cracking the cover.

  But with Lori, it had become a two way street. Truth be known, he dared to admit that he’d come to know her as well as anyone he knew. Hours in the lab, days in the field, years in the classroom. None of it was unique beyond the time he spent with any other student, but somehow Lori affected him differently. With Lori, he took note of details, like the Kokopelli pendant. He knew she always wore it. He knew she liked to start her day with a shot of hazelnut in her coffee. He knew how well she filled Cathy’s summer blouse.

  He knew of the scar in her side, just below the rib line.

  It was their involvement with the Effigy that had catapulted their relationship to a whole new level. More time in the field. More time in the lab. More time in Mexico. It was the realization of this closeness that had finally scared him away from his student. That explanation sounded weak and inexcusable. Perhaps that was why he just couldn’t give it to Lori. It seemed cowardly now. But now, it really didn’t matter.

  KC’s buttocks slid off Matt’s pack as she slipped in close to him, pulling herself between his knees. Her fingers slipped through his hair, tingling his scalp with her touch.

  “It’s okay to mourn, Anthony,” she said, soothingly.

  Peet closed his eyes, defeated. He was defenseless against women who could feed his heart right back to him. He had nothing to combat their discerning stratagems. There, hunched in the darkness of his soul, he felt like a little boy again, waiting for his mother to make things right. She was there, stroking his hair and cooing relief into his tattered nerves.

  And then her lips gingerly brushed his.

  Peet snapped back to KC. She was leaning into him, her lips searching his, her watery breath filling his nostrils.

  He pulled away with a discouraging sigh but KC wasn’t so easily thwarted. The flesh of her palm slipped from his hairline down to the coarse stubble on his face, allowing her fingers access to his ears. She pulled his face toward her.

  “Stop fighting,” she whispered enticingly into his ear. “Don’t fight what you feel inside.”

  Peet buried his nose into her shoulder and gazed out at the human shadows gathered around the bonfire. KC’s cool, bare arms wrapped around his neck, holding him into her.

  He closed his eyes again and allowed his arms to rest around her waist. The sinewy muscles of her body softened and he pulled her tight against his chest. A heaviness fell over him as he sat there, feeling the pain anchor deep into the darkness of his chest, deep where Lori squeezed at his heart.

  Part IV

  Friday, December 21, 2012

  Katun

  “And here is the shooting of Seven Macaw by the two boys. We shall explain the defeat of each one of those who engaged in self-magnification.”

  -Popol Vuh

  One Hunahpu

  John slept fitfully. Actually, he hadn’t slept at all. The pain and swelling in his ankle worried him that something was fractured and if that wasn’t uncomfortable enough, his mat continuously lost air beneath his sleeping bag and his old bones weren’t accustomed to lying on the hard floor of a tent anymore. To make matters worse, a humid drizzle coated the early morning hours until just before dawn when John pulled his stiff and aching body out of his dripping tent and settled himself against a tree to watch the morning scurry of the villagers.

  As restless as John had been, the village had been just as agitated. He wondered if anybody got any rest. People were moving around all night and scurrying along well before dawn. The closer to sunrise the more hastily they moved, as if preparing for something. And then John suddenly remembered.

  This is the day!

  Movement from Peet’s tent distracted him from the dark shadows floating back and forth throughout the village. After a moment a shadow crawled out—a small shadow. Too small to be Peet.

  “KC?”

  “Morning,” she said and yawned. Apparently she hadn’t caught a wink of sleep either. “What the hell’s going on?” she asked wearily.

  “It’s December twenty-first,” John announced, satisfied with the distraction from the affairs of his son-in-law’s tent.

  KC appeared disinterested as she turned back toward the tent. “Wake me when it’s Christmas,” she said.

  “To the ancient Maya, this is Christmas—a long awaited Christmas. This village must be maintaining the ancient tradition.”

  John became excited. This was the dawn history had been waiting for. These villagers weren’t going to miss it. Neither was he. With the help of an aluminum cane given to him by a woman who’d lost her father several months ago, John pulled himself up and reached for KC’s support.

  “Come, young lady,” he beckoned, pulling her away from the tent. Don’t go back to that tent. Don’t go back to him.

  With a heavy sigh, KC ducked beneath John’s arm, holding his weight off his bad foot. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To the crowning of a king!” John said excitedly as they followed the stream of people out of the village.

  “Is that all,” KC groaned.

  “You don’t understand,” John insisted. “When the arrogant Olmec god, Seven Macaw, fell from his perch on the North Star and was proven to be a false deity, the people of Izapa discovered a new center of creation.”

  “Yeah, and where’s that?” KC asked, struggling to wade through the dark vegetation tugging at their feet.

  Luckily, they didn’t have to go far. Just beyond the trees skirting the meager village, they came upon a reverent crowd of cotton and blue jean men gathered at an abrupt ledge overlooking a deep ravine. The gap opened the jungle just enough to allow view of the southeastern sky where the long span of the Milky
Way brightened the horizon. The men were silently watching, waiting, and after pausing a moment, John saw it too—the pregnant bulge within the belt of stars, a cross section of the galaxy.

  “The dark rift of the Milky Way,” he said. “The great womb of creation.”

  As they watched the glowing prelude to sunrise began to outline the horizon, slowly diminishing the Milky Way’s luster.

  “Keep your eye on the rift,” John instructed. “Don’t lose sight of it.”

  “Easier said than done,” KC grumbled.

  John admitted keeping an eye on that one point in the sky was getting difficult as the sun’s glow began to drown the stars. Then, just when he thought the last trace of the dark rift had been blotted out, the sun began to crown over the jungle right where the womb of creation had set.

  “One Hunahpu is reborn!” He gasped.

  “And the Long Count Calendar is dead,” came a man’s voice. It was Matt. John turned to find both he and Peet, already geared up to travel but content to stand at the fringe of the gathered villagers to watch the mesmerizing display of precession.

  So Peet wasn’t in his tent after all?

  At the moment it didn’t matter. He’d just witnessed the event all of Mesoamerica had been anticipating for thousands of years. Civilizations had been centered around this singular sunrise. Izapa had been the fulcrum between cosmologies, where old Olmec beliefs collapsed and gave rise to new Mayan mythology. The Long Count wasn’t dead. Not by a long shot.

  “Don’t you see?” John asked as he hobbled over to Matt. “Calendars are meant to be cyclical. This isn’t the end of anything. This is the beginning of a new great cycle, a renewal of the Long Count!”

  “Like New Year’s Day,” Peet said contemplatively, “on a new five thousand year calendar.”

  John couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. “That’s right!”

  “Pardon me,” KC interrupted grimly. “But why are you the only one celebrating?”

  John hesitated only to realize the woman was right. There wasn’t the rejoicing John had come to expect. In fact, as the sun drew higher upon the horizon the mood of the village men had grown more somber. There was hardly a muttering amongst them to acknowledge the return of their long lost god.

  “I don’t understand,” John said. “The Twin Boys’ decapitated father is alive once again and has reclaimed his throne. This should be a day to celebrate.”

  “That doesn’t look like much of a celebration to me,” Peet said, pointing back toward the village.

  John turned around. The village was eerily quiet and empty. Even the howler monkeys seemed to revere the mystical morning by refraining from their usual morning racket. Trapped beneath the canopy floated a haze of bonfire smoke around the central prayer pole. There, the village women were huddled in their best red and white huipils. Loops of tiny red and white beads dangled from their bowed necks. The vibrant ribbons that had been braided through their hair now hid beneath supplicant shawls as they crouched prayerfully, repentantly on their knees at the base of the great tree.

  “I’ve never seen such a submissive display,” John admitted. “It’s almost as though…”

  He didn’t have the words to finish.

  Matt did.

  “It’s as if they fear what the day will bring.”

  Vol De Feu

  A stiff nudge jolted Lori awake. Her eyes sprung open to a resurgence of hatred welling up inside her. It didn’t help that her head was once again pounding and Rafi stood over her, smiling.

  “Time to go,” he said, pulling her to her feet with one hand, gripping an assault rifle with the other. Without further warning, he dragged her across Laffy’s trailer, ramming her hip into a countertop. Books and equipment fell to the floor in her wake as she was flung out the door into the dim glow of dawn.

  She landed hard and rolled across the ground. When she finally skidded to a stop she became keenly aware of how quiet the morning was. And how empty. The cluster of vehicles that had surrounded the trailer the night before were all gone. Abe and his men were nowhere in sight.

  “Back on your feet, you clumsy bitch,” Rafi demanded as he dragged her, flailing and stumbling to keep up, around to the back of the trailer where Laffy’s Vol De Feu waited, idling with a choppy rotor. There awaited Tarah, now armed with a rifle of her own and sporting two pistols, one strapped to each muscular thigh.

  “Welcome aboard, Lori,” she sneered.

  Lori couldn’t believe Tarah’s transition into yet another personality. She changed character the way one would don a new outfit each day. Like a chameleon, her colors had shifted from servitude to audacious poise to military arrogance in the short time Lori had known her. Interestingly, this appeared to be the skin Tarah was most comfortable in—a no holds barred rigidly commanding bitch.

  Lori spat at her feet. Tarah merely laughed as she tied a gag in place, tight enough to nearly choke off Lori’s air. “You should be more appreciative,” she said. “If it weren’t for me, Abe would have shot you last night.”

  She laughed again and, together with Rafi, threw Lori into the helicopter.

  Lori landed hard and in a heap into the cramped space behind the pilot and the back seat. Laffy was already at the controls. He spun around to the sound of the commotion behind him. Lori met his gaze and offered an apologetic grimace. Whether Laffy understood the gesture or not, Lori couldn’t say, but he did seem to offer his own silent response that reminded her that he was in no better straights than she.

  Rafi and Tarah both leaped into the chopper and with a single command, Laffy lifted them into the air. Within minutes they were thrumming over the jungle toward Tacana, towering boldly against the skyline. While Rafi waited uncomfortably close to Lori, Tarah and Laffy began searching the early morning shadows as they drained off the volcano’s southern slope.

  “There,” Laffy suddenly barked into his headset. He pointed to a towering curtain of lava rock that peeled the jungle back from the rim of a shallow crevice below. There, in the shadowy bottom stood a lone pillar.

  “Set down there,” Tarah commanded.

  Laffy shot her an incredulous look. “Are you joking? That’s at least a ten percent grade there. Even if the ground was level I couldn’t set this bird down in the middle of that jungle.”

  Tarah sighed irritably. “Then find a place where you can land and set the damn thing down.”

  Laffy circled, scanned, and circled again. Finally, he found suitable ground several miles east and, much to Tarah’s visible dismay, set the helicopter down there. “Shut it down,” she ordered.

  “You’re not suggesting we leave the helicopter here…”

  With a move as fluidly effective as Abe’s pistol threat, Tarah produced a pistol of her own and trained it onto Laffy’s head. Laffy cut the power and the helicopter wound down.

  Tacana

  Nothing about Lori’s journey to Mexico was turning out to be what it first appeared. The Calendar Deity wasn’t exactly the Jesus Dr. Webb had been looking for, and although it didn’t appear to record Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl’s arrival in Yucatan, it wasn’t just any old fresco either. Chichen Itza wasn’t just another ancient Mayan city, and both Dr. Webb and Dr. Friedman may or may not be threatened by the Zapatistas.

  But the most baffling of all were Abe and Tarah. They were nothing like they originally seemed. Just when Lori thought she had a handle on them, they turned into completely different people. Obviously, they weren’t Red Cross humanitarian aides. That had been a cover, and now the two people who’d saved her life had turned on her, a deception she was still trying to grasp as she trudged through the jungle.

  If there was one thing that was clear, Abe and Tarah were following their own agenda and now they weren’t bothering to disguise it as a mission to help Lori. In fact, Lori doubted she’d had anything to do with informing them of Dr. Webb’s disappearance. They must have known he was working in the collapsed cavern—a cavern so conveniently close to Tunkuruchu. Therefore, it
must have been him they were looking for when they found her. But why? What would they want with a Mormon professor unless…

  If he’s come this far then he must already have the cross.

  Was that why Dr. Webb was being pursued by the Zapatistas? But how did Dr. Friedman fit in? Were they even aware they stood between two paramilitary forces in a desperate race for the Talking Cross?

  Imagine the power one would achieve with such direct access to God!

  Lori groaned at the realization that she’d led one of those armies this far. Abe wasn’t helping her find Dr. Webb, he was using her. He must have lost Dr. Webb’s trail when the cavern collapsed but managed to pick it up again with the information she’d given him. That explained his eager insistence to help find him and, like a fool, Lori had gone along with his plan.

  Until now.

  The only problem was, with her arms bound behind her back, she had no choice but to march in single file through the jungle. Lori glared holes through the back of Tarah’s head. She heard Laffy breathing heavily around his gag behind her. Rafi marched at his heels with his rifle at the ready.

  The morning had warmed quickly and the still air trapped within the humid jungle felt heavy. It wasn’t long before Lori broke into a sweat and the soggy gag in her mouth proved to be a terrible inconvenience, leaving her to pant through her nose. To make things worse, her eyes stung from the sweat streaming from her brow.

  She spied the pistols strapped to Tarah’s thighs. If only she could break free. If only she could reach a pistol and—

  Tarah stopped abruptly at a seemingly impenetrable wall of vegetation. She surveyed the area with a quick sweep of her eyes.

  “We’ve gone off course,” she said, her words fairly grinding between her teeth.

  Rafi sighed impatiently. “Damn women can’t keep their directions straight,” he growled as he joined Tarah at the front.