The Alien Element

by M. G. Herron

  19

  Time Itself

  Here he was again, as he’d been so many times before.

  Rakulo stared up as the smooth, sheer, slightly concave face of the Wall. A short run up a slight hill of soft piled earth and he could touch the sleek surface that was always slightly colder than the air, and often wet. It gathered moisture to its smooth, hard surface like leaves on humid days, big beaded water droplets that dripped down the face and gathered in the damp earth at the Wall’s base.

  Rakulo had run up the small hill to touch the Wall many times. Only once had he ever seen a way through the Wall, however—a small hole about twice his height where Xucha had come through to retrieve one of his damaged demons. The opening had simply appeared in the Wall while Rakulo was watching from the cover of a nearby ash tree’s canopy.

  No trees grew close enough to the Wall to climb and peer over. They were kept pruned back. The nearest tree remained at a distance of several dozen long strides, so he’d never been able to see over.

  Rakulo knew this jungle. It was his home. Had these trees not been pruned back, they would have climbed up the Wall on their own by now. It was not until months had passed in their patrols along the Wall that Rakulo began to mark skinny young stumps where saplings had been cut down when they grew too tall. First he found one, then another, then dozens when he got better at spotting them. They were severed at the base somehow, the cut perfectly smooth and the trunk’s exposed edge charred black. As if by fire. What kind of fire cut trees and carted off the trunks? Rakulo had cut down plenty of trees in their efforts to make canoes. They used flint axes and hand-tools and chipped away at the base. No axe of his could have made a cut as smooth as the trunks of these saplings that had the misfortune to grow too close to the Wall.

  Gods’ fire. The work of Xucha himself.

  Faint footsteps approach from behind, the noise louder in his right ear than his bad left. It was Citlali. Though it had been two days since his warriors rescued him from the cell, and the blood in his ear had dried, his hearing remained faint on the left side. He’d nearly driven his knife into Thevanah’s exposed ribcage when she had startled him in the cave the night before. Rakulo had been checking the knots of the vines they had gathered and tied tightly for today’s mission.

  Citlali stopped at his shoulder.

  “Are they ready, then?” Rakulo asked.

  “They are,” she said. “Are you?”

  Rakulo rubbed his ear. “As I’ll ever be.”

  Citlali shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. Send me instead, Raku.”

  “No,” Rakulo said immediately, in a tone that came out harsher than he intended.

  Her shoulders slumped, and Rakulo walked away, towards the large tree they had chosen. What Citlali said made sense. She was just as strong as he was, and lighter. She would be the next obvious choice to climb up the tree with the limber Thevanah if Rakulo was not fit for the journey. But this had been the plan all along. He had trained for it. Besides…

  “You don’t know what to look for,” Rakulo said. “I’m the only one that’s seen it.”

  “That strange tree you told me about?”

  “It was a different shape than a tree. Tall, and dark, like a knife stabbed into the Earth.” He frowned. Rakulo had only glimpsed what was on the other side of the Wall once before. Twelve moon cycles had come and gone since then, but the image was burned in his mind. It was like a tree. A massive, charred tree.

  A sharp pain stabbed at his left ear. His hand rose to his head and he rubbed at his ear with his palm until the pain faded away. He squinted with his left eye.

  “Look at the kind of pain you’re in,” Citlali said. “I know what to look for. I can do this.”

  Rakulo stopped at the base of the large mossy oak with the thickest, oldest-looking trunk in the area, among the rest of his warriors.

  Citlali had not kept her voice down. Thevanah hefted the thick vine in her hand and regarded them with a concerned expression. Quen took a deep breath and crossed his meaty biceps across his broad chest. Yeli smiled wanly. The others watched with similar, impatient poses.

  “You agree with her?” he asked them, incredulous.

  He met Thevanah’s eyes. She shrugged as if to say, sorry, it’s my life, too. Quen pursed his lips and nodded once. The others all agreed, one by one, with small gestures or a brief meeting of his eyes and a mumbled apology.

  “All right,” Rakulo said. “If that’s how you all feel, then Citlali can climb in my place.”

  Rakulo took Citlali and Thevanah aside and described to them the structure in more detail. “It sounds so odd, but I remember the earth looking dry and cracked around the base of the thing. It was thin and tall like a tree, not broad and square like the buildings and temples in Uchben Na. And it was dark color, almost like obsidian. That’s all I know.”

  “What do you want to know about it?” Citlali asked.

  “And what do you want us to do when we get up there?” Thevanah said.

  “First, see if there’s a way we can get over the Wall. Maybe we can anchor a rope on the far side? I don’t know. If this tree isn’t tall enough to see, look for another. And look for the black tree. I tried to look for it when we went around the Wall in the canoes. Now, though, I think we were probably too far away to see it from the water.”

  “And you think I’ll be able to see it up there?”

  “If you get high enough, you should be able to.”

  Thevanah took a deep, calming breath, and shook out her wrists and ankles. Citlali swallowed and tilted her head back to gaze at the massive, ancient tree. It dwarfed the other trees nearby, jutting straight up into the thick canopy. Judging by its girth and his previous exploratory climbs up the trunk, its top rose high above the other trees in the nearby canopy.

  This tree is older than time itself, Rakulo thought. And then an odd idea appeared in his brain, fully formed. He licked his lips nervously.

  “Do you think this ancient tree was here first…or was the Wall?”

  “I don’t know, Rakulo,” Citlali said, rolling her eyes. “What does it matter?”

  “You sound like Gehro,” Thevanah said. “Maybe that blow to your head knocked something loose.”

  Rakulo chuckled softly. “I’ve been spending too much time with the old kook. He’s probably just rubbing off on me.”

  “I think so.”

  He watched as the girls stood on one side of the ancient tree and pulled the thick, woven cords of rope around their waist. The rope was made of dead plants, agave, vines, and the young saplings they’d found near the cut trunks. Collecting the material needed for such thick ropes, and making them, had been another part of Rakulo’s training program.

  The girls stretched their limbs. Thevanah’s rope harness had come a little loose, so Quen tightened one of the knots under her left thigh. Rakulo double-checked the knot on Citlali’s rope as well. The girls tested the tension of the vines again.

  “One, two…” Citlali began.

  “Three!” they both said.

  Jumping up, Citlali caught a low branch, and hauled herself up. Gripping the massive trunk of the tree, she worked her way higher. Thevanah followed.

  Although he’d done this twice with Thevanah, Rakulo’s pulse pounded in his injured ear as he watched the two women climb. He was way more nervous than he would have been if he were up there himself, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. Now he just worried that one of them would slip on a loose piece of bark.

  After about five minutes, they climbed past the highest point Rakulo had reached. They were tiny now, miniscule. Quen let out a low, strangled noise in his throat as he gazed up at the women.

  Rakulo’s neck began to ache, and he looked down and rubbed his ear, which was the only reason he spotted a low-crouching man covered in a brown tunic tiptoeing through the trees a spear’s-throw away.

  “Quen!” Rakulo whispered. “We’ve got company.”

  As Rakulo turned,
he instinctively looked at the Wall and a cold sweat washed over his body. A large doorway had silently appeared at the base of the Wall. On the other side, the black tree-like thing was there, its base partially visible through the doorway. It was a lot like a tree—big black roots with a thick bark like nothing he’d ever seen before parted and plunged into the red earth. Rakulo spotted something else, a glint of greenish glow, just a shimmer in the crack before it was gone again.

  Then a shining little orb darted through the doorway and shot straight for him. Rakulo lifted his two fingers to his mouth and managed a shrill whistle before the demon barreled into his chest and knocked him off his feet.

  20

  Like Warning Signs

  The team responded enthusiastically to Eliana’s suggestion to move on. She was secretly relieved, as she harbored the suspicion that at any moment they would question her theories, just as she had done many times during moments of severe self-doubt that crept up on her after midnight as she lay awake in her tent.

  Still, Talia, Turner, Ross, and Lakshmi packed to leave without any objections. Eliana took a final set of photos documenting the site while Tanner and Ross hiked back to the first camp site and took the Land Rover to town to grab extra supplies. Lakshmi, with Talia’s help, packed the rest of their gear and loaded it into backpacks. The stones were left on the ground where they had lain for almost 1500 years, and the markers removed. The only evidence they would take with them were the photographs.

  When the men returned with provisions—food, water, and a few other essentials—they added that to the packs and belted their loads onto their backs.

  Eliana adjusted the straps of her pack so it sat off her shoulders by half an inch, distributing the load to her waist, and looked one last time at the carving, trying to burn it into her mind. The two overlapping circles and the simplistic arrow carved below it, nothing more than two angled lines. The rest of the monolith was smooth, if slightly worn and pockmarked stone. She couldn’t help feeling like she was missing a piece of the puzzle.

  “Which way, boss?” Lakshmi asked.

  Eliana shifted her gaze out across the deep bowl of the dense jungle that sloped away below them, falling hundreds of feet and spreading like a lush green blanket to the north. At the far end of the low section, barely visible through haze, another incline rose on the opposite side.

  “Did you make it to those hills on the other end of this valley?”

  Talia shook her head. “That mountain you see there is about ten miles off. We went maybe halfway.”

  “The other end of this valley seems like as good a destination as any. How about it?”

  The others nodded, and they set off down the slope. The way immediately became difficult, and Eliana soon realized why Talia and Ross hadn’t been able to make it to the opposite side in a day. The bugs and trees were so thick they were practically a thicket in the shade-darkened jungle at the bottom of the bowl-shaped valley. Eliana led the way for a time, until she sank up to her knees in a puddle of water and Tanner had to pull her out. They were forced to backtrack to find a way around the bog.

  The sun began to fall around the three mile mark. They found a slight rise with a low wall of white stone on which to pitch a couple of tents. Ross gathered firewood but it turned out to be far too wet to burn. Talia distributed a dinner of beef jerky, dehydrated mangos, and fresh coconut milk. They all tried to sleep as soon as it was dark, exhausted from the slow journey and wanting to make better use of the daylight the next day. But sleep wouldn’t come for Eliana, even after she had changed into dry clothes. The noises of a restless group of howler monkeys not a hundred yards away kept them all up, tossing fitfully. She knew it wasn’t possible, but the cackles and cries of the monkeys gave Eliana the distinct impression that they were laughing at her.

  They were awake and moving away from the troop of monkeys at dawn the next morning, as the gray light filtered through the thick canopy. They ate breakfast as they walked. Eliana was gnawing on a piece of jerky with no joy when they came to another low bog-like area, so filled in with rainwater that it was more a lake than a bog.

  “Which way now?” Eliana said.

  Not once did they pass near any cut stones. A few limestone boulders, half-buried, but no monoliths or decorated structures or facades of any kind that she had seen.

  Were more ruins here, buried beneath the lake, or sunk beneath centuries of growth? She might never find them even if she spent years searching. How were they ever going to corroborate enough evidence to prove anything about the carving? If only Amon would let her go back to Kakul…

  She shook her head and trudged on, pushing vines and fan-shaped tree boughs aside with tired arms. They camped without a fire again that night.

  On the third day, their exhausted party reached the base of the hills rising on the opposite end of the bowl. The walls here were striated, showing centuries of layer after layer of sediment and rock building up on it. After scouting a mile in either direction, Talia and Ross reported back.

  “There’s a game trail a mile west,” Ross said.

  “And another one half a mile northeast along this ridge,” Talia reported. “Game trail is generous, actually, but there’s something resembling a path and it seems to be moving upwards.”

  Eliana considered their options. “Let’s split into two groups and follow each one to see what we find. Ross, show me the trail you found. Lakshmi and Tanner, you go with Talia. Let’s meet back here two hours before nightfall so we have time to set up camp.”

  Eliana followed Ross as he hacked his way back to the west with the machete. Eventually they located a thin trail that led north, up the slope of the mountain. The foliage on the slope was a bit thinner, and the trail zigzagged, showing how animals had picked their way uphill, finding the easiest way to the sun through the local flora. Eliana watched the striation of the earth as they climbed, noting different layers. What did it mean? Had a glacier come through here, slicing into the land and forming this valley some millions of years ago? She wondered if there had always been a lake at the bottom. Or perhaps this whole valley had been filled with water, and the “lake” at the bottom was only a small remnant of an ancient inland sea.

  Eliana swung her pack off and set it against a nearby tree. “We’ll make better time without the extra weight,” she explained when Ross looked at her sideways. They had several hours to explore before they had to meet the others back at the base of the mountain, and Eliana wanted to make the most of it.

  Ross grunted a wordless agreement. Eliana took her camera and a water bottle from her pack, and waited while Ross belted his machete at his waist, then put a rope through the straps of both their packs, and hoisted them across a thick branch so that the packs hung suspended in the air, keeping the food away from any creatures who happened to wander by and smell it, like the wild boars and wolves known to inhabit this region. Once the rope was tied around the tree trunk, they began to climb again.

  Eliana felt light without the burden of her pack, and they made good time. After two hours, the trees thinned out and the wind picked up, drying the damp skin of her neck and cooling her. Though the wind was still too hot, it felt glorious just to be in the moving air after the humid, stagnant heat of the jungle below. Even Ross, who never complained, sighed with audible relief when he felt the wind on his face.

  The game trail wound back and forth, and then suddenly lead her and Ross through a ring of pine trees. Eliana gasped as she stepped inside the ring—for there stood another stone structure in the same rectangular arrangement as the one they had found on the other side of the valley.

  One of the stone monoliths lay on its side and was slowly being swallowed by the earth beneath it. But on the other end two low stone walls connected the other three cornerstones, which remained standing. These stones had a ring of reliefs carved around their top—a ring, Eliana realized, of skulls.

  A chill raced down her spine. Skulls were a big part of Mayan mythology—skull ca
rvings decorated graveyards and tombs, and many Mesoamerican cultures displayed the skulls of defeated or captured warriors in a tzompantli, or skull rack. A particularly famous tzompantli relief could be found near the ball court at Chichen Itza—the depictions nearby suggesting quite clearly that the losers of the royal games were beheaded.

  But this was no ball court on the top of this mountain. It was more like…a warning sign. Much like the tzompantli were a warning to the attendant teams of warrior players that death lay within the walls of the ball court, she couldn’t help but feel that the skulls carved on this monolith were a warning that death lay beyond.

  “Looks like you may have been right, boss.”

  She nodded. “The other ruin was never finished. This one was.”

  Eliana took out her camera and began thumbing back through the photos of the first site, comparing the two. The cornerstones were located in the same position, and they seemed to be the same size. The carved skulls were missing from the first site, but she could see where they would have gone had it been finished.

  Her heartbeat quickened when the picture of the carving came up on the screen.

  Eliana walked into the shadow of the monolith that would have matched cornerstone A, and turned around so that she was facing out over the front side—this time looking south, again in the direction of the bowl of forest that swept back toward the first site.

  “It’s almost like…”

  She gazed up and spotted the two moon carving, just where she expected it.

  This time, she saw the whole sign clearly.

  The overlapping circles that represented the two moons of Kakul on top. Beneath them, the arrow pointing up—but in full detail this time. It was not just an arrow, but a clear depiction of a pyramid. Stairs were even drawn down the middle of this one.

  Below that was the head of a feathered serpent known to the Maya as Kukulkan. His tongue hung from his open mouth between two big fangs, and a ring of feathers fanned around his serpent head like the petals of a flower.

  And finally, below that was a skull.