The Serpent's Coil

by Christy Raedeke

  Justine and Papers are still sleeping soundly, so I decide not to turn on the lights or TV. I grab my laptop and open my email. Though I’m not allowed to send outgoing mail, I always check for any incoming email from school. There’s a new message sent by a random account I’ve never seen. The subject line says, “UNCLE.”

  Uncle Li?

  This unnerves me since we’re not supposed to be communicating. Shaking, I open it up. The message says, I log in to a safety site at least once every twelve hours. If you are receiving this email, it is because I was not able to log in and it was automatically sent. Proceed with caution on your path. As always, follow your heart—the heart is known as The Emperor for good reason. Li

  “Oh no!” I say. “No!”

  “What the—” Justine yells, sitting up in bed.

  I show the email to her, my mind spinning too fast to hold a thought.

  “What do I do, Justine? Tell me what to do!” At this point I’m walking around and shaking my hands like they’re covered in flies.

  “First, you need to calm down,” she says. “Sit down. Let’s talk this through.”

  “I don’t know what to do—I have no way of getting in touch with Bolon or any of the other Council members! They appear when they need me, but not the other way around.”

  “Then all we can do is wait.”

  “I can’t wait. I can’t!”

  I rummage around my bag for my phone. Though I know I’m not supposed to, I call Uncle Li’s number.

  “Caity, think this through.”

  “It’s the only way,” I say, blocking my number and calling Uncle Li.

  Each of the three rings in my ear seems louder than the one before. And then a voice.

  “Hallöchen, frauline.”

  The sound of Barend Schlacter’s fake-cheery voice makes my whole body contract, like a dry heave.

  “I’ll go to the authorities,” I say, sounding more like a kid on safety patrol than I want to.

  “And how do you know we aren’t the authorities?” he replies.

  I have no answer for that.

  “Really, who can you trust?”

  “I’ll find someone,” I say. “I have proof that you exist! I can put the pieces together for—for someone.”

  “And this is worth to you the price of your dear Uncle Li’s life?” he says. “Because that is what it will cost you.”

  “How do I know he’s still alive?” I ask.

  “I will put him on the phone.”

  “He has to answer a question I ask so I know it’s not a recording.”

  “Fine, one question. Ask him what day it is and then you will know he is alive.”

  “Okay.”

  “You are now on speaker phone. Ask your question.”

  I put my phone on speaker too. Justine and Mr. Papers lean in to hear.

  “Uncle Li, it’s Caity,” I say. “Can you tell me what day it is on the Mayan calendar?”

  “Hello Caity,” he answers in a shaky voice. “I’m a bit confused about the Gregorian date but on the Sun Shield calendar—forgive me, I mean the Pieces of the Sun calendar—I believe it is Eight Ahau.”

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Rise iron mug!” Uncle Li shouts. I hear a thud and then Schlacter screaming, “Do you want me to kill you?” at him.

  Then the phone clicks off of speaker and Barend Schlacter comes back on. “Fool.”

  I look at Justine—it seems like she might start to cry.

  “What do you want? What can I do?” I beg. Hearing Uncle Li so confused has weakened me.

  “You know what we want,” he says. “The books. The Sanskrit books.”

  “But I don’t have them. I have no idea where they are.”

  “Well, you’d better find them then, yes?”

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  “No, you will,” he replies. There’s a moment of silence I don’t know how to fill before he says, “Guten tag,” and hangs up.

  I have to consciously focus on not throwing up.

  “What do I do?” I ask Justine.

  She just shakes her head and says, “We are so in over our heads.”

  “I don’t think he’s okay. He was totally confused—it’s nowhere near Eight Ahau.”

  “I know. It’s weird to hear him so disoriented. And what was the ‘Rise Iron Mug!’ thing about?”

  “I have no idea,” I say. “In all the time I’ve known him I’ve never heard him mention an iron mug.”

  Mr. Papers hops over and grabs some origami paper. I don’t know if he’s building a distraction or an answer, but we watch closely. It’s complex, with lots of folding and stacking.

  Out of the blue, Justine jumps up. “Wait, what if those were clues?” she says. “What if his mistakes were deliberate?”

  “You mean the date?” I open my laptop as Justine writes down exactly what he said. “And the name of the calendar. Instead of calling the Tzolk’in ‘Pieces of the Sun,’ he called it the ‘Sun Shield’ and he gave the date as Eight Ahau.”

  “You could be totally right!”

  Wondering how anyone figured anything out before the Internet, I put sun shield and 8 Ahau into the search engine.

  “Bingo!” I say as the results pops up. “Uncle Li was talking about Pacal the Great! The famous ruler of the Mayan city of Palenque was called ‘Sun Shield’ and ‘Eight Ahau’!”

  Mr. Papers comes over holding the creation he’s been so deliberately making—a 3D image of what I’m looking at on my computer screen: the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque where Pacal is buried.

  “Palenque?” I ask Mr. Papers. He nods vigorously, then goes over to my suitcase and starts rummaging around.

  “What’s he looking for?” Justine asks.

  I shrug. There’s no telling with Papers.

  He finally pulls out the old leather-bound Grimoire and brings it to me. This book of decoded symbols helped me decipher the poem back at Breidablik, so I carry it with me to keep it safe, but I’m not sure what it could do for me now. I look at each page, turning it every way possible to try and see what Mr. Papers wants me to see, but I find nothing new. I shrug at Mr. P. and he shakes his head in disappointment.

  “I honestly don’t get the Grimoire thing—I don’t know what Papers wants me to see,” I say. “But obviously we’re on the right track with Palenque. That’s got to be where he is.”

  “Then that’s got to be where we go,” Justine says.

  “What do we tell Clath?”

  “Let’s find a symbol to decode or a myth to study there,” she says, leaning over and pointing at my laptop. “What about Pacal’s tomb? That’s a pretty famous carving. There must be something in there that we could study, yeah?”

  “What about the iron mug thing? What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Rise iron mug!’ like a command.”

  I try searching it and only come up with cheesy mugs you can buy and engrave. “Nothing,” I tell Justine.

  “Maybe it will make sense as some point,” she says. “As much as any of this can really make sense,” she adds.

  “Yeah, maybe there’s some kind of iron mug at Palenque. But for now we need to get Clath and make tracks to Mexico, ASAP.”

  “But what about the books?” Justine asks. “How are we going to get Uncle Li back with nothing to trade?”

  “I really have no idea where the books are. Uncle Li never told me; he just said they weren’t at Dunhuang. We just have to trust that Palenque will either have the books or him—or maybe both! I mean, Uncle Li’s fake mistake on the date and the name of the calendar can only be interpreted one way.”

  Logging in to the new Gmail account, I write an email message to Alex, explaining what’s happened. I promise him I’ll check in to the account once a day with an update, and beg him to please get some information on where the Sanskrit books are. Then instead of hitting send I just save it to the drafts folder. That Alex is one clever boy.

  Unable to just sit
around, I start packing up again. “When do you think Clath gets up?” I ask Justine, who has crawled back under the covers.

  “I don’t know, but it’s ’o-dark-thirty and we haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a while. Can you at least try to rest?”

  Out of respect for her, I get back into bed. But I can’t possibly sleep knowing Uncle Li is out there somewhere with them. I try to tap into information, try to pick up something about where he is, but I’m too worked up to get anything.

  Instead I just lie there stiffly, like a fallen totem pole. After a while, my mind drifts and I see the letters R I S E I R O N M U G float through my mind. They swirl like tiny kites in the air. Then it hits me: It’s an anagram! It really spells something else.

  I lean over to the open laptop on the nightstand and search for an anagram engine. Clicking through the first one that pops up, I put all the letters in. About 80 possible word combinations are returned, but I know the answer when I see it: GRIMOIRE SUN.

  It’s physically painful to have to lie there and not wake Justine again. For the first time I understand what it must be like to be an obsessive compulsive hand washer or a Tourettic person who thinks their head might explode if they don’t shout some random word.

  So instead I reach for the Grimoire, once again scouring it for something related to the sun. I find nothing. Then I start really looking at the symbols in the Grimoire and thinking about the anagram. Each one of the seven decoded symbols has a letter under it, which gets me thinking about anagrams. What if there’s a message here, too?

  I put the seven decoded letters, V A Y D C I N, into an anagram engine. When I see the first word that pops up I laugh out loud. DAVINCY. What is this, a Tom Hanks movie?

  It’s phonetic but spelled wrong, but in this case there isn’t a way to indicate how to use two letter Is.

  Would da Vinci have anything to do with this? He was kind of into science so maybe it has something to do with the spinning vortex and gravity thing. I search da Vinci + torus expecting a long shot at most, and am astonished to see the first thing that comes up is an article on da Vinci and the Flower of Life. I click through to see two pages of drawings he did of the mathematical properties of the Flower of Life and, even more incredible, a drawing of it spinning! He totally knew that when you spin the 3D version of the Flower of Life you get a torus, the underlying structure of everything.

  I’m still amazed at the mystery of the Flower of Life. How can one design hold so much information? Unable to remember what the poem in the hidden chamber exactly said about it, I open up my sketchbook to refresh my memory.

  You know of the hares and their unity knot

  Now find what the Flower of Life sits atop

  It holds sacred knowledge from tribes of the earth

  Wisdom essential for new world rebirth

  It’s all starting to come together. The pieces, the clues. More than five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was playing with this knowledge—knowledge the Fraternitas worked hard to suppress.

  Can one girl, her best friend, and a monkey really change all that?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Justine finally wakes up, I practically explode with words, telling her about the two anagrams. She, too, has to look at the Grimoire, but she doesn’t see anything related to the sun either. The da Vinci thing kind of freaks her out.

  “So you think we should mention this to Clath?” she asks.

  “You mean in case it’s important for Professor Davis?”

  “Yeah, I mean, he was pretty interested in finding old references to the spinning Flower of Life that make a torus, and da Vinci is like the godhead of stuff like that.”

  “Can we somehow work that into why we need to go to Palenque?” I wonder out loud.

  “Maybe we should just wrap it up into the Three Hares stuff to make that paper more interesting.”

  “I still don’t know what angle we’re going to use for going to Palenque. I wonder if Didier is on alert for students traveling to any Mayan ruins after the whole email thing.”

  Justine laughs. “Man, if he even knew how many people he got to visit the website after his little tantrum in the auditorium!”

  “Seriously.”

  “Well, old myths are part of our secondary study—we could use that as a reason to go to Palenque.”

  “Actually, that’s perfect. We won’t even mention the calendar; we’ll just go to study their old, old myths.”

  Justine and I write a note to Clath saying we’d like to go to Palenque, adding some choice bits about how this was the place our parents were most interested in us studying. All I can think about while I’m writing the email is Uncle Li and his cryptic pleas for us to go to Palenque. This has to work. It has to.

  We slide a note under Clath’s door and then shower and start packing. After we’re dressed, I open up the curtain to a clear blue sky and the three of us wince from the brightness. Chattering, Mr. Papers runs to my bag and pulls out the Grimoire I’ve just packed.

  “What’s he doing?” Justine asks as we watch him walk to the windowsill.

  “I can never tell,” I say.

  Papers has the Grimoire in a shaft of sunlight, loosely opened so the pages fan themselves out. He’s staring at the book like a cat watching a mouse that it’s about to pounce on. Justine and I move closer but still can’t tell what’s going on.

  Suddenly he opens to a particular page and holds it to the sun. Sensing what’s about to happen, I run over to see it. Lines start to appear, first faintly, then darker.

  I remember back to Bolon telling me that if I ever had a problem to solve, look to the sun. I kind of thought he meant metaphorically. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this.

  He hands me the book to hold in the sun and then goes to grab the Palenque origami he made.

  “This is Palenque?” I ask, pointing to what looks like a map. He nods.

  Justine has not said a word. I think we just blew her mind.

  “Justine, hold this open while I get my sketchbook. Who knows if this is like a one-time thing or what!”

  Justine sits on the windowsill and holds the book while I sketch the map of a hidden tunnel and room under the ruins of Palenque.

  “You know we still have to go up to the church with Clath and pretend we’ve never seen that stained glass of the Three Hares,” she says.

  “Yeah. We can make it quick. On the way up there we should tell her we’ve already formed some opinions based on a photo we saw and that seeing it in place will just be a good double check.”

  I finish drawing out what we found in the Grimoire just as the shaft of sunlight moves. In moments, the lines fade back and hide in the paper fiber.

  Clath’s knock at the door startles us. I quickly put the sketchbook and Grimoire away as Justine answers the door.

  “Got your note about Palenque,” Clath says without so much as a good morning. “Fine plan. Love that you girls are always thinking about what’s next.”

  “We just need a minute to pack and we’ll be all set,” I tell her.

  She rolls her suitcase in and sits at the small desk. “Great. I’ll just wait here, then.”

  Justine and I carelessly stuff our things into our bags as Clath tells us that she’s called the pilot to meet us at the local airport so we don’t have to drive back to Cambridge, which feels like a huge relief. The sooner we get to Palenque, the sooner we can find Uncle Li.

  Out trip to the church goes as smoothly as Justine and I had planned. Clath seemed impressed with our interpretation of the odd addition of the sun into the Three Hares symbol, immediately texting Professor Davis with the information. “He was very impressed by you two,” she adds, as if it’s the most shocking fact ever.

  We settle into the plane for a very long flight. Since we’re using a small plane we can fly right into the small airport by Palenque, but we have to stop for fuel twice along the way. Clath tells us that once we’re in Palenque, we must plan an itinerary for the next f
ew weeks because the school is not going to look favorably on much more inefficient, spontaneous travel.

  ––––––

  After being in Scotland and England, so far from the equator, Palenque looks bright. Burn-your-eyes bright. We drop our stuff at the hotel, including Mr. Papers, whom I don’t dare take out of the carrier. I hear that howler monkeys are all over this place and I’m afraid he’ll get attacked. So I set him up in our room with a fresh papaya and a bottle of water before we meet Clath and our guide back in the lobby. Clath has planned for us to take a general tour this first day to get the lay of the ruins, then says she’ll do more one-on-one stuff the rest of the week.

  The ancient city of Palenque is enormous. It’s hard to believe the Maya could build such amazing things with just measuring cords and rough tools. And the tomb where the great ruler Pacal is buried is a feat of engineering. They built the massive tomb so that it could never be removed by setting it in a burial chamber and then building the temple over and around it. Only a skinny staircase led in and out of it so that Pacal and his tomb would never be able to be carried out. To this day, he rests there, unlike so many others who were uprooted and put in museums, most often in countries not their own.

  We pass Pacal’s tomb in the Temple of Inscriptions and cross a stream to a group of smaller temples. When we get to the Temple of the Sun, I watch the hair on my forearm stand on end even though it’s more than 100 degrees here. Something is beneath this place. Something we need to find.

  There are far too many people here to try the door that’s marked in the Grimoire. As much as it sends a chill through me to think about, we will have to ditch Clath somehow and come back here at night.

  At the end of the day, we part with our guide and walk out the back way down a path by the river. It’s beautiful and quiet and timeless. I stop to investigate the ruins of what were houses—stone walls still in place but missing roofs—cobbled together like hives. One of these stone structures has a staircase, which I want to climb so I can see what’s down the hill on the other side. As I approach it, I spy a mound of tiny fire ants. This sparks an idea.