Having robbed the priests of their power through his compassionate decrees, the god-king suffered their revenge. Rebelling, they whipped up the multitudes, sowing discord and violence. Even worse, Chaac withheld his rain of tears, and drought ravaged the One-World.
The land’s bounty ceased.
To stop the insurrection, which was tearing Tula apart, Quetzalcoatl went into self-exile on a raft of reeds bound together with snakes, setting out into the eastern seas but promising one day to return and redeem the people who had betrayed him.
No king who ever existed in the four corners of the One-World has been more admired than Quetzalcoatl. A visionary master, he commissioned great works of art and architecture. He was a scholar who created the greatest library in the One-World and a mighty warrior who led armies of conquest.
Just as the gods break civilizations on a whim, so do they tire of kings and heroes. They broke Quetzalcoatl at the height of his power, forcing him to leave Tula to the petty nobles who would squabble endlessly until the gods crushed them, too.
The great god-king did not rise up to take his place as a star in the heavens. Instead, he came to the Land of the Maya with an army and quickly conquered the region that Mayapán now controlled.
He rebuilt Chichén Itzá, giving it a Toltec luster. And then he disappeared, leaving behind the mystery of the Dark Rift Codex.
From Ajul, I knew some of the legend.
Five hundred years ago, Quetzalcoatl commissioned scholars to amass all the knowledge of the One-World, the history and the legends, into codices that he stored in his vast library.
A Mayan astronomer-oracle, who was a favorite of his, and his assistant, a youth named Coyotl, who would one day rise to be a legendary astronomer-oracle himself, were given a special task: to compile all the information known about the rise and fall of the civilizations in the One-World.
Quetzalcoatl and his chosen astronomers knew not only that the gods destroyed civilizations upon whim, but that they also used the same method over and over—a heavenly blow that caused cities to be abandoned, their knowledge lost, societies producing barely enough food to subsist.
The knowledge of why this destruction occurred was compiled into a book called the Dark Rift.
Where the book was and what it said were now my problem.
22
I was at the gate of Lord Janaab’s palace when a guard on duty told me the great lord commanded my presence. Tensing, I followed, wondering if I was about to be tested by the snake again.
I was left alone, facing Lord Janaab in his audience chamber. That was a good omen—at least he meant to permit me to speak before he had me tortured.
“Why did you go to the Royal Library?”
“To inquire about the Dark Rift Codex.”
The truth spun off my tongue. It had to be the truth—I didn’t know how much Koj the Assistant had heard.
“And why did you ask about the codex?”
“You gave me the task of checking all the sacred writings in the city. I know nothing about the Dark Rift. If I don’t know what it says, or even what it might say, then I won’t be able to correct any inscriptions about it.”
“Have you found inscriptions you believe are from the codex?”
I shook my head. “No, my lord, though there are a few that I am having a difficult time placing and will have to speak again to the Master Librarian to see if they are correct. But I know that Jeweled Skull once performed the task I am doing, that of checking the inscriptions. He also advised the king and High Lords about which sacred writings we would inscribe on public buildings. He may have placed some part of—”
“Or some clue as to the codex’s location or contents.” Lord Janaab nodded and stroked his chin. “Very good, good. The Jeweled Skull would do something like that. He believed he communicated with the gods. I sometimes think he did and that he toyed with us mere mortals.”
He thought for a moment and then asked, “What did the Master Librarian tell you about Jeweled Skull?”
“That he had been the artist for Jeweled Skull, the one who inscribed the codices that recorded the tales Jeweled Skull provided.”
“Where does he think the codex is?”
“He told me he didn’t know.”
“He’s a liar. He knows more than he says. He was not just an artist favored by the Jeweled Skull; he was the storyteller’s best friend.”
I had already surmised that the Master had a close relationship to Ajul.
“Tell me exactly what he told you about the Dark Rift.”
“He said that Jeweled Skull was the only one who knew the book’s true prophecy. Others thought they knew and wanted to destroy the book because they believed it was an evil omen. No one really knows.”
Again, that was the absolute truth. I knew better than to lie to him. I had discovered early on that the great lord was not a fool nor could he be easily fooled. Before I mentioned the Dark Rift at the library, I should have confirmed that no one spied on me.
I held my breath while Lord Janaab stared at me with narrowed eyes, questioning my veracity.
“He told you nothing about how to find the codex?”
“He said to ask the High Priestess at the Temple of Love.”
Lord Janaab slapped his hand on the top of his knee. “Ha! Good advice. The High Priestess had been the lover of Jeweled Skull. And if anyone knows all the secrets of Mayapán, it is she.”
He got up and went to the window and stared out.
“I want you to find out everything you can about Jeweled Skull and where the codex is. You are to report only to me.” He turned and met my eye. “Speak to anyone else about the matter, and you will wish I had only painted you red.”
“Yes, my lord. I will scour the city for—”
“You will go to the High Priestess.”
I caught my breath. “I would not be allowed—”
He waved away my objection. “I will arrange it. The High Priestess would not dare offend me by spurning my emissary.” He raked me up and down with a stern stare. “Besides, she is a woman with a great hunger for love. And I’m told that besides the fat old nobles who pay well for her favors, she has strong young men dragged off the street for her pleasure.”
“Yes, my lord.”
He gave a laugh of dark humor. “Before you celebrate your luck, you should know something about her: When she tires of the young men, she sends them to the priests at the temple of the Feathered Serpent to be sacrificed.”
His howling laughter followed me as I left his chamber.
23
After our evening meal, I lay in my hammock and through the small window slit watched the Moon God drift across the night sky.
I have seen love priestesses from a distance occasionally as they came out of the temple atop the pyramid—mysterious figures cloaked from head to toe in shapeless robes that revealed nothing of their shapely, supple bodies.
Eyo! Somehow, their covering made them even more desirable than the beautiful women I passed on the streets.
I had been lonely since my wife left to make her journey to a better place, and I had often thanked the gods that she would not suffer the terrors of Xibalba, the Place of Fear. Because she died carrying my child in her womb, neither she nor the unborn child would endure the Place of Fear.
My marriage was arranged when I was born. There were a few opportunities at the village for me to wed again, but something in me said to wait. Ajul had reinforced that instinct, Ajul being the name by which I still thought of him. I had to keep reminding myself that his true name was Jeweled Skull and that the name I knew him by was false.
He told me his feet had suffered from wanderlust, taking him along roads in all four cardinal directions: from the shores of the Great Western Waters to the sands of its eastern brother; from the dense jungles of the Maya peoples far to the south of Mayapán to the northern desert beyond Tenochtitlán, the city of the mighty Montezuma, emperor of all the Aztecs.
He had traveled many places,
saw wonders of the One-World that the rest of us have only heard about—and that I have dreamt about.
Oracle that he was, Ajul had intimated that someday I would leave the village. Until Lord Janaab told me I was to become a member of his household in Mayapán, I had not given much thought to Ajul’s remarks. I had always taken his vague references that I would someday leave the village and travel the One-World as simply another tale told by a master storyteller.
Was Ajul dead? I had never doubted it until Lord Janaab came into my life and told me that a simple village storyteller was a renowned master who told tales to the gods themselves.
Now I had to wonder. That Ajul could have wandered away from the village for any number of reasons and been killed raised no suspicions. People routinely perished from snakes, spiders, and bloodthirsty beasts. If one wandered a few feet into the jungle to get firewood, went out at night to relieve oneself, or slipped off one’s hammock in the morning onto the dirt floor and stepped on something that had crawled into the hut during the night, something that carried the deadly poisons with which Xibalba’s demons killed—any of these could spell death.
Ajul’s body was never found—only his bloodied clothes. Again, a large animal could have dragged him off. Large male jaguars weighed over three hundred pounds and were longer than a man is tall. They were easily capable of dragging off a grown man.
Now that Ajul’s life and a forbidden codex had brought danger into my life, it was time to rethink all he had said.
Did he realize that someday the king’s men would come looking for him—and find instead a young storyteller with whom he might have shared his dangerous secret?
PART IV
24
Hargrave and Jamesy stared down at the bandits picking their way up the steep slope through the rocks and brush. Hunkered behind a cluster of big boulders, the two men had mounted a .30-caliber Browning machine gun between two contiguous rocks, and now they studied the approaching men over its sights.
“We can hold them here for a while,” Hargrave said.
“Save four of the belts for the summit,” Jamesy recommended.
“Save them all. Up there, the slope isn’t nearly so steep, and it’s over open ground. There’s no cover and they’ll come in a single push. We’ll need every machine gun round.”
Jamesy nodded and called Reets on their other TSX300 two-way: “Reets, come on down here and take back the machine gun. It’ll be more useful up at the summit.”
“We got two good 5.56 H and K assault rifles,” Hargrave said. “Too bad we don’t have scopes.”
“Who needs them?” Jamesy said, staring over the machine gun’s sights.
“Shoot straight as plumb lines,” Hargrave agreed.
“Go for head shots. Four or five go down, and they’ll think they’re fish in a barrel.”
“Indians in a shooting gallery.”
“When they get within seventy-five yards, I’ll start laying down frags.”
The Apachureros, however, were on the move, and Hargrave wasn’t listening anymore. He squeezed the trigger, and a bandit in a fake federal uniform fell backwards head over heels at full spread-eagle, a gaping, smoking hole between his eyes.
Jamesy, who was already mounting frag-grenades in his shotgun’s muzzle, hadn’t bothered to watch.
25
When Reets reached Jamesy and Hargrave, the Pach were hammering the boulders lining the top of the slope with rifle and machine gun rounds. Moving from boulder to boulder, her two friends were firing back, using every bit of available defilade. Sniping an Apachurero here, firing a gun-mounted frag-grenade there, they were too busy for conversation.
Head down, she picked up the tripod machine gun and ammo belts, then dogtrotted back up the summit’s slope.
26
At the summit, Coop dug their fire trenches, all the while wondering what the federales would think when they choppered in and saw that bandit horde scrambling up the slope and over the rise, charging their trench at the summit.
Charging us like hydrophobic ants, Coop thought. One round of Apachureros rifle-grenades, two machine gun fusillades, and that gaggle of morons’ll chopper their mordida-thieving asses back to base just as fast as they know how.
Their only hope was that federal greed would trump self-preservation.
Christ, Coop’s back ached. Although she worked out religiously, nothing—not weight lifting, not long-distance running—had prepared her back muscles for shoveling a zigzagging trench through hard ground with a three-foot-long fold-out shovel.
Thanks to Reets’ sciatica, it was up to Coop to do the heavy lifting. For the final assault on the fire trench, Reets mounted the big tripod Browning machine gun (BMG) in a hand-dug firing pit, behind a makeshift fortification of knapsacks—which she’d also taken off the dead bandits—now packed with dirt. Around the embrasure she’d also piled large rocks.
She’d now just finished loading the magazines and the M60 BMG’s ammunition belts. After jogging up to the boulders fifty yards to their left, she cached the ammunition and assault rifles, which they’d taken off the Apachureros.
If Jamesy and Hargrave made it back in one piece, they’d fall back behind the first boulders and work their way to the trench, hammering the attacking Apachureros with rifle-launched fragmentation grenades and automatic weapons fire.
Anything to slow the Pach down, in case those federales bastardos were slow choppering in.
27
Hargrave angrily hurled his H&K G36 assault rifle on the ground. It could not have jammed at a worse time. The Apachureros had just ripped a twenty-foot section of jutting escarpments out of a long jagged ridge, opening up a breach, through which they now poured. For almost twenty minutes, the razor-edged barrier had stalled their assault—so much so that the two shooters picked them off at will whenever the bandits clumsily raised their heads above the impassable rocks.
But no more.
Now the Pach charged them uphill, unimpeded, and Hargrave had no assault weapon. Jamesy, for his part, was low on ammunition.
“Time to blow this pop stand,” Gravesy said.
“Just as fast as we know how.”
Gravesy nodded, and they broke for the slope’s top. They had needed that second weapon and another half dozen clips to cover their retreat—especially with those Apachureros pounding up the slope as if all the legions in hell were at their backs.
Which seemed to be the case.
Gravesy had seen a dozen officers behind that mob of over a hundred fake federales. They were armed with automatic weapons, while the regular troops had semiautomatics—perhaps because they lacked extra ammunition for more automatic weapons.
Or perhaps the officers feared the men would turn the machine guns on them.
Whatever the case, the officers continued to fire them from their hips, the bullets kicking dirt on the calves and thighs of the men before them.
They’re flogging those men like slave drivers, Gravesy thought, but with bullets instead of whips.
At the top of the slope, the two men took off for the boulders—now a good two hundred yards distant. They had to reach them before the bandits behind them crested that rise. Otherwise they’d be open targets in plain sight.
We may not make it, Hargrave thought.
Glancing up at the boulders, however, he saw Coop now breaking out of their firing pit, where he’d ordered her to stay, and charging the rocky boulder-strewn defilade, forming their defensive perimeter. She held the M60 Browning machine gun low on her hip with the ammunition belt draped over her shoulders. Nor did she stop behind the massive boulders. Coop kept coming, diving behind a low incline in front of the boulders, digging an embrasure for the heavy gun, hunkering down.
Coop was covering their retreat.
He decided he would not lecture her on insubordination when they reached the fire trench.
Coming over the slope, the bandits charged them full-tilt, their shots ripping up the surrounding earth. He and Ja
mesy ran a randomly swerving S-pattern, but the shots were now increasingly close.
Coop, however, was also firing, the young woman raised by the outlaw moonshining father—who had trained her to hunt bear and wild boar—not even skulking behind her hand-dug embrasure but standing straight up, the machine gun on her hip, blazing at the bandits two hundred yards away.
Glancing over his shoulder, Hargrave was in awe.
Goddamn, he was thinking, her moonshine-cookin’ daddy raised his daughter right.
The Browning M60’s effective range was well over one thousand meters, and Coop was tearing them apart, reducing the Apachureros’ barrage to near silence. Glancing over his shoulder, Hargrave saw the bandits drop down onto their stomachs. They were firing infrequent shots from the prone position, but the low angle was throwing off their aim. Coop was saving their lives.
Still, part of Hargrave was sorry she was there. They would miss all the rounds she was pouring onto the bandit horde when they made their last stand in the firing pit on the summit. Those assholes would swarm them en masse. At close range, the Browning would be their only salvation, and they would need every round they could get their hands on.
They reached the boulders, heaving with exhaustion. Coop was in front of them now, behind the ridge of dirt. Picking up two of the three 5.56 H&K assault rifles, which Coop had propped against the boulder for them, they covered her retreat back to the big rocks.
“Hardest two hundred meters I ever ran in my life,” Jamesy said, still winded when she returned.
“More like four hundred, the way you guys swerved and zigzagged,” Coop said.
But now the Apachureros were less than one hundred yards away, charging the boulders, the officers in the rear, their machine guns braced on their hips, the automatic fire flogging the backs of the men’s legs with bullet-driven dirt.
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