“The king suspected Flint Shield had betrayed him, and in fact, Flint Shield had allowed the king’s brother to enter the ceremonial center with the warriors. Under torture, one of Flint Shield’s warriors revealed the plot and implicated the War Lord’s son. The priests, however, argued that the gods had punished the War Lord for his schemes against the king by having him lose his life and his reputation.”
When I met with the High Lord, his sole interest was in the foreigner.
“What did the light-skinned man in Tulúm tell you?”
I chose my words carefully, uncertain what effect the man’s ravings would have on the great lord. I didn’t want him to punish me for the man’s insane harangues.
“He says that the One-World is only a small part of an infinitely larger world.”
He listened in grim silence as I laid out a reasonable rendition of what the man had said to me, easing in more of the “Spaniard’s” boasts about the might of their weapons as the great lord seemed to accept the tale.
When I finished, I could see he was reacting as I had. He was disturbed, not outraged.
“Tell me your opinion of the man. Is he as completely mad as he sounds?”
I hesitated again, giving thought to what words I would choose. I started by explaining that the man gave no outward sign of madness. “To the contrary, he runs the salt merchant’s business efficiently and has earned the man’s complete trust.”
“But how could such things be true?” Lord Janaab asked, not really expecting a response from me.
“Perhaps they are true only to him,” I said. “This other world he speaks of may be just in his own mind.”
He disappeared deep into thought for a while, looking past me, through me, then posed the question I feared he would ask: “Tell me, Jaguar Oracle, you who are said to have the gift of prophecy, what is your conclusion from talking to this foreigner?”
Eyo! He’d posed a dangerous question. Truth-telling is a precarious profession. A great lord could punish the prognosticator for being wrong or for speaking unpleasant truths.
“Tell me what you really believe,” Lord Janaab said.
In other words, he would punish me severely if he thought I lied. With no way to dodge the truth, I gave it to him. “At first I took him to be a storyteller like myself. The stories I tell about the machinations of the gods are themselves fantastic. So are the weapons the gods had used to destroy the One-World in the past. Strange things are happening, though. There is not enough food to feed all the mouths. Sickness plagues the land. Not only are ordinary people hungry and discontent, even the king’s nobles have been inflicted with a dark side.” I raised my eyebrows. “I heard shocking stories in the marketplace as I passed through. About—”
He waved away my attempt to share with him the allegation about the king having arranged the death of the War Lord. “What is your conclusion about what the foreigner said about his gods?”
“The man was adamant that his people have only one god—”
“What? One god only?”
“One god and not a god of war.”
“His god is impotent?”
I shook my head. “No, he says his god is all powerful. And that in the name of that god, an army of conquest, such as I described, will attack us.”
“And the demons that plague us?”
“He denied our ills are due to demons.”
“Do you believe this?”
“I believe our own demons vex us, causing the discontent, food shortages, and other problems we face.” I leaned forward to give him what I foresaw as the future. “We have weakened ourselves so catastrophically that if a foreign army came, as he claims one will, we will not be able to fend it off.”
He chewed on his lower lip for a moment and then said, “The Dark Rift Codex is at the heart of Mayapán’s darkness. It prophesies our demise, and that prophecy must be rewritten.” He gave me a long hard look. “I will speak to the king. I believe you are the chosen one to find it.”
53
I was back in Mayapán only a few hours when I stepped out on the street to watch and listen to people. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the city, because I felt different about it than when I had left for Tulúm.
When I first entered the city, I’d just left a village of rustic stonecutters and was in awe. But now I was more cynical. I saw instead a cauldron seething with plots and intrigues, murder and chaos, the people hungry, in panic, afraid.
I didn’t know whether I had changed or whether the city had. Perhaps the simmering turmoil had always been there, and the city’s sights and sounds, excess and extravagance had blinded me to the sordid reality underneath. Whatever the case, I felt as if I were seeing it with new eyes. I now realized how fragile peace and order were.
Deep in thought, I didn’t realize that my feet had taken me to the entrance to the Temple of Love. A cloaked feminine figure in the doorway gestured for me to follow, bringing me back to reality. I knew from her shape that my guide wasn’t Sparrow.
“Is Sparrow here?” I asked as I fell in behind the woman leading me up the narrow stairway.
She didn’t answer.
We passed through the doors and entered the throne room where I had met the High Priestess and continued into her inner chamber. My guide whispered something to the High Priestess and left.
The High Priestess waited for me, reclining on a couch. She was not dressed in her ceremonial clothes, but simply, her breasts bare, a sheer skirt offering little covering below the waist.
“Join me,” she said.
I sat on the couch.
“You asked about Sparrow. She’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
The High Priestess shrugged. “Ran away to become a nobleman’s concubine. It happens once in a while, when one of my girls falls in love with a man she has entertained.” She leaned closer and whispered: “Sometimes a man pays the temple, so we won’t complain to the king.”
I didn’t believe her—or perhaps I just didn’t want to believe her. What did I know about Sparrow? I lay with her once. She may have fallen in love with a wealthy merchant or nobleman, or the man may simply have purchased her. From what the High Priestess intimated, her flock of priestesses had a price.
Drawing me to her, she kissed me. “Don’t worry, I will take special care of you myself.”
I stared into her eyes and saw what I had pondered and puzzled over earlier but which was now clear to me. “You’re Sparrow’s mother,” I said.
She reacted as if I had slapped her, jerking back, her eyes going wide. Leaning back, locking eyes with me, she no longer had the features of the seductive and mysterious love goddess, but those of a jungle cat.
I forced myself not to look away.
Shutting her eyes, she took a deep breath. Taking my hand, she placed it on her breasts. When I cupped their warm flesh, they became instantly aroused. “You are as everyone says of you on the streets, Pakal Jaguar. You truly have the gift of second sight.”
I shook my head. “It’s your eyes. When I looked into your eyes, I saw Sparrow.”
She took my hand and pushed it up her skirt and into the warm flower between her legs. “You know, of course,” she whispered, “that priestesses of the temple are not permitted to bear children.”
I knew that, but after hearing how the women were sold to wealthy men, it was evident that everything about the temple had a price.
“A long time ago,” she said, almost dreamily, as she thought back over the years, “I was a young priestess and had taken a powerful nobleman as a lover. I could have left the temple and lived as his concubine, but I wanted to succeed the High Priestess. I had become her favorite, her lover, and she promised that I would claim her position.”
She stroked my cheek with her fingers. “That was why I was permitted to have the child. Because she loved me, she did not send me to the temple priests. And the child was permitted to live because the father was wealthy enough to buy its life.”
“When I told you she was gone, I spoke the truth. Unlike the other girls here, who spend most of their lives within the temple, she has been outside enough to know the ways of the world.”
“Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know. Don’t think about her. Sparrow is not for you. I have other girls who will please you more.”
Her hand went around my head, and she pulled me to her succulent lips. “I can please you more than any of them.”
My lips moved from hers, down her neck and to her breasts, tasting each one in turn.
She pulled my face back to hers and kissed me again, the sheer power of her sensuality firing my body. She placed a cup to my lips. “Drink,” she said, “and you will walk with the gods.”
I gulped down the liquid and tossed the cup aside as she pulled off her skirt.
I started to remove my shirt, but my fingers felt numb and uncoordinated, unable to fully grasp the material.
My vision blurred over, and my ears roared.
I said something, and even I realized that the words had come out in a jumble.
A dark figure approached.
Flint Shield grinned at me.
I knew he was there, knew he was my enemy, but my arms and legs were as impotent as my tongue. I couldn’t rise to strike him. I could only stare as he spoke words to the High Priestess I understood but could not react to.
“You better not have given him too much. He has to answer my questions.”
“I gave him enough to make him malleable—nothing more.”
She grabbed Flint Shield’s arm. “You said you will not kill him.”
“I say many things.” He laughed and pushed her aside. Then he stood in front of me. “Remember how I said I would hurt you one day simply because I could? Well, that day has come.”
He kicked me in the face.
PART X
54
In Cooper Jones’ dream, General Richard “Hurricane” Hagberg—whom she’d come to dismiss as a demented psychopath—was water-boarding her. As he stuffed the soaking-wet rag deeper down her throat and into her nose, then inundated them with H2O, his partner in crime, Bradford Chase—brutally bludgeoned her with a blackjack. The whole while, the two men grinned and guffawed, laughing as merrily as Hamlet’s gravediggers. . . .
. . . Those sick sadists didn’t fool around. Before dumping her into the tub and filling it with blood-chilling ice water, they had hammered a pair of iPod buds into her eardrums. Ripping through her skull case, the two maniacs had buried the twin listening devices smack in the center of her temporal lobes. Pumping up the volume on Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” to the blasting point, they thundered that End Time anthem into Coop’s neurons and synapses at warp-speed, exploding the gray matter out of her skull and up through the stratosphere. The remains of her cerebral cortex were even now, Coop believed, circling the globe in a high geosynchronous orbit. The cacophonous Wagner, combined with anoxia and water inhalation, made for a hell of a crescendo—a thermonuclear Götterdämmerung, fulminating fire, brimstone, apocalypse, Armageddon.
Her skull, chest, groin, legs, toes throbbed from the blackjack beating. Her brain and lungs blazed from water inhalation and oxygen deprivation. Her entire corpus was ballooning into one spectacularly livid bruise.
At last, that deranged degenerate of a general lifted her head out of the frigid, ice-packed liquid.
Opening her blinking eyes, she vomited out enough aqua to sink the USS Nimitz, looked around at the big steel tub and the chamber of horrors in which those cackling cretins tormented her, and—and—
Christ, I’m not in a tub at all!
She was soaring through snowmelt-swollen white-water rapids.
Her ears detonated now—not with Wagnerian thunder but with the deafening din of an approaching waterfall, the river propelling her so swiftly, she could not even hide beneath its surface and pass out. It rocketed her toward that abyss as if she were an inflatable flotation device, not a barely conscious, water-puking, pain-racked thing.
She was less than a hundred feet from its edge and catching random glimpses of her imminent doom. She was hurtling toward three consecutive falls, each at least ten stories high. Reaching the brink, she instinctively pulled her legs up into a fetal position and struggled to conjure visions of the mother she never knew.
All that came to her was an image of her redneck daddy with a sweeping gunfighter’s mustache, wearing a black slouch hat and a matching frock coat, raising a jug of moonshine to his lips, the butt-stock of his trusty 8-gauge pump braced on his hip.
And then she flashed to Reets.
Good-bye, Reets.
Legs up tight, hands locked under her knees, she dropped toward the bottom of the first waterfall, her butt pointed down.
At the last second, she realized her legs were also protecting the codex and its urn, still in her knapsack, which was somehow miraculously strapped to her chest.
She grabbed her legs even tighter.
Vanishing into the mist below, she hit that foam-filled cauldron like a hell-bent death star rocketing toward the earth from beyond time and space.
Again, the darkness closed.
55
Once more, the dream.
In this one, Cooper Jones soared. Arms tight at her sides, she slipped the surly bonds of earth. Skydiving through the clouds with godlike grandeur, she screamed at the top of her lungs: “Free at last, thank God, I’m free at last.”
Liberated from earth and from care, she frolicked with twin bald eagles, which continually circled her in ever-tightening spirals. The male wheeled near her now—almost close enough for her to touch—his white glistening nape, arched beak, blazing raptor’s eyes, and eight-foot wing span gorgeous as any angel’s. Coop focused fanatically on him and his mate, on the heavens and the clouds, on anything in the sky that kept her mind off the world below. She knew the eagles and the clouds to be her natural soul mates, her true home and habitat. She ignored at all costs contemplating the benighted land below.
There, dragons lurked.
Still, she could not avoid fleeting glimpses of Planet Earth rising up to meet her. The river, in fact, grew horrifically huge with each passing glance.
Still, her brother and sister eagles—not wishing her to return—shrieked in her ear: “Don’t pull the rip cord. Stay with us forever in the clouds and the sun.”
Somewhere, however, deep in her brain, she knew that was madness. She had to open the chute. Even as every nerve in her body howled, “No!” she reached for the cord, yanked it, and—and—
And—
Nothing happened.
Except that the river was now shockingly immense. In fact, it seemed to double its size almost by the second. Her landing zone, she could now see, was going to be a tremendous pine tree, its long, heavily needled boughs thick as a man’s arm.
Oh Christ, this is going to hurt.
Crashing through its massive limbs—breaking at least fifty of them on the way down—she felt as if her entire body had been run through a hammer mill.
She landed next to the stump on a soft bed of green deadfall like a bloody bag of rocks. Rolling over onto her back, she—she—
She—
She was on her back under a tree, but she saw no broken boughs, and instead of a soft bed of pine needles and dead limbs, she was sprawled supine on a rock-strewn, gravel-packed stream bank, vomiting river water out of her nose and mouth.
Ah hell, she hadn’t soared with eagles at all but had been swept over cataracts and falls like a busted-up spar.
Lifting her head, she attempted to survey her surroundings, glancing first at her feet.
She was sorry she had.
Instead of ten toes, she stared into the vertically spiked pupils of an amber-eyed jaguar—the biggest one she’d ever heard of, let alone seen. From hind flanks to tip of nose, the tom stood four feet tall and over six feet long, his switching snakelike tail addin
g three more feet to his imposing length. Jaguars are rare, but this one had few peers—it was a sacred white beast, so pale that even its claws were pearl white.
The jaguar’s favorite killing method was to shatter the skulls of its victims with a single bite, its jaws powerful enough to crack turtle shells—one of the cat’s favorite snacks.
Even so, Cooper Jones did not find his gaze intimidating. Instead his eyes seemed . . . curious.
In fact, Cooper Jones found his eyes strangely . . . relaxing.
The cat seemed to feel the same way. Sidling up alongside her, he dropped belly-down on Coop’s right—between her and the pine—purring, paws folded beneath his chest, his eyes still locked on hers.
Ah, what the hell? Coop thought grimly. In the destructive element immerse.
Rolling over onto her back, she stared up at the pine boughs above her and prepared to meditate on the meaning of life.
Instead she was now staring at something far more ominous than thick heavy branches. Ten feet above her, Eunectes murinus—the dreaded anaconda—was coiled around the trunk on twenty or so stout limbs. Olive green, its gargantuan twenty-five-foot body was overlaid with black blotches striped yellow-orange on each side. Compared to its body—which was at least ten inches in diameter—its surprisingly narrow head featured high-set eyes that bore into her own with an almost surreal fixity of purpose.
Still, the gaze was not disconcerting. Bright shimmering yellow, the anaconda’s upwardly pointed pupils studied her without malice or menace. If anything, the big snake seemed pleased at her presence. The eyes almost seemed to ask if she needed help.
Weirder still, a bald eagle perched next to him on a broad limb, the biggest, fiercest-looking bird she’d ever seen.
Yet even his eyes were nonthreatening, almost . . . kind.
Nonetheless, she wondered if she should break for the river. That was probably not a good idea, since jaguars and anacondas were both superb swimmers, the latter capable of shooting through streams like aquatic lightning bolts. If either animal got hungry, she’d be theirs for the asking in the drink.
The 2012 Codex Page 17