12.21 (7 page)

“You think the looter could have discovered a lost city?” Rolando asked.

Chel shrugged. “If they did, every
indígena
in Guatemala will claim it as their own.”

So many Maya villages had oral histories that told of an incredible lost city where their ancestors had once lived. During the revolution, a cousin of Chel’s father even claimed to have found Kiaqix’s lost city, from which the Original Trio had supposedly fled. The reality was less sexy: Many Maya had always lived in small villages in the forest, and, for Chel’s people, claiming a connection to a lost city was like white Americans saying they had an ancestor on the
Mayflower
—easy (and desirable) to say, harder to prove.

“So I’m not asking again where the hell you got this …” Rolando said as he matched another fragment, “but, based on the iconography, this does look like it’s from the end of the classic. Maybe 800 to 925? It’s unbelievable.”

Chel said, “Hope the carbon dating agrees.”

Rolando put down his tweezers. “And I know we can’t tell anyone, but … there’s a lot of complicated syntax here. We could really use Victor on this. No one knows classic syntax better than he does.”

From the moment she saw the codex, Chel had wanted to call Victor Granning, but she was too afraid of how he might react. They hadn’t
spoken in months; she had good reasons for avoiding him. “We’ll be just fine on our own,” she told Rolando.

“Okay,” he said. He knew better than to press. Granning was a sore spot. Chel loved her old mentor, but he was too much of a diehard. And a little nuts.

Trying to put Granning out of her mind, Chel studied the puzzle of “stacked” glyphs Rolando had started to assemble from the first page:

Mayan glyphs came in two basic varieties. They could be combinations of syllables strung together to approximate the sound of words (just like English or other alphabetical systems). But often they were more like Chinese, with each glyph or glyph combination symbolizing an object or idea. Once Chel had broken the blocks down and deciphered each component, using the established catalogs of one hundred fifty decoded syllables and the catalog of the eight hundred-plus known “picture” glyphs, she strung them into sentences.

Words like
jäb
were entirely familiar; it was the same word the modern Qu’iche used for
rain
. Some, like
wulij
, could only be loosely translated, because there was no corresponding word in English: to
take down
was the closest she could get, carrying none of the religious implications the word had in Mayan. Researchers had identified about a hundred fifty glyphs that still hadn’t been deciphered, and not only did a few of these appear on the very first page of the codex, there were others Chel had never seen before. When the entire text was reconstructed, she suspected there would be dozens of new glyphs to analyze.

Three hours later, Chel’s legs had cramped, and her eyes were so dry and irritated that she had to replace her contacts with the glasses she hated. But finally they had a rough translation of the first glyph block:

Yet for Chel, these literal words weren’t enough—a completed translation had to capture the essence of what the scribe was trying to convey. Codices were written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, and they were often very formal in tone. So she did her best to insert missing words from context and typical word pairings seen in the other books until they had a better rendering of the first paragraph:

“It’s talking about a drought,” Rolando said. “Who would’ve been allowed to write something like this?”

Chel had never seen anything like it. Written Maya records were generally ancient press releases for kings. The royal “scribes” who wrote them—half press secretaries, half religious leaders—didn’t dare mention anything that undermined their rulers.

Never before had Chel seen a scribe writing about the difficulties of
daily life. Predictions of rain were inscribed on stone columns at the ruins and in the Madrid and Dresden Codices, but for a scribe to report an ongoing drought was unheard of. It was a king’s job to bring the rains, and such a discussion would embarrass any king who couldn’t deliver.

“Only a scribe could have this kind of skill,” Rolando said, gesturing at a perfectly executed picture of the maize god.

Chel studied the words again. The penalty for writing this could well have been death.
No rain has come to give nourishment in a half cycle of the great star
. The great star was Venus, and a half cycle was almost fifteen months. What the scribe was describing would be by far the longest drought in the known Mayan record.

“What is it?” asked Rolando.

“It’s not just the drought. He’s talking about the depletion of the maize stores,” Chel said. “He’s talking about endangered animals and diminishing amounts of arable land. No one would have been permitted to write something like this. It’s basically a description of the end of the civilization.”

Rolando flashed another grin. “You think …”

“He’s writing about the collapse.”

OVER THE COURSE
of Chel’s career, the question that had bedeviled her more than any other was the “collapse” of her ancestors’ civilization at the end of the first millennium. For seven centuries, the Maya had built cities and innovated in art, architecture, agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, and commerce. But then, six hundred years before the Spanish conquistadores arrived, city-states stopped expanding, construction halted, and scribes in the lowlands of Guatemala and Honduras stopped writing. Within a span of only half a century, urban centers were abandoned, the institution of kingship disappeared, and the classic era of Maya civilization came to an end.

Colleagues of Chel’s had a variety of theories about what caused the collapse. Some suggested eco-recklessness: aggressive farming practices
and disregard for deforestation. Others claimed that, through continuous warfare, hyper-religiosity, and sacrificial bloodlust, the ancients brought on their own demise.

Chel had a skeptical view of all these ideas. She believed they were rooted in a European inclination to belittle
indígenas
. Exaggerations of human sacrifice had plagued the Maya since the Spanish landed, and the collapse had been used for centuries as proof that the conquistadores were more evolved than the savages they’d conquered. Proof the Maya couldn’t be trusted to rule themselves.

Chel believed that the collapse was caused by natural mega-droughts that spanned decades and made large-scale agriculture impossible for her ancestors. Studies done on riverbeds in the area suggested that the end of the classic era was the driest in seven millennia. When these extended dry periods made cities uninhabitable, the Maya simply adapted. They reverted to subsistence farming and migrated to small villages like Kiaqix.

“If we could prove this is an actual description of the collapse,” Rolando said giddily, “it would be a landmark.”

Chel imagined what else they might find on these pages. Imagined how far the codex would go toward answering what had, to date, been unanswerable. Imagined how she could one day show it to the world.

“And if we could prove the collapse was the result of mega-droughts,” Rolando continued, “it would cut the balls right off those generals too.”

This possibility gave Chel yet another surge of adrenaline. In the last three years, tensions had flared again between
ladinos
and the
indígenas
. Civil-rights activists had been killed, crimes perpetrated by the same ex-generals who’d murdered Chel’s father. Politicians had actually invoked the collapse on the floor of Parliament: The Maya were savages who’d destroyed their environment once, they’d claimed, and would do it again if they were allowed to keep their valuable land.

Could the book prove otherwise once and for all?

The phone rang in Chel’s office at the back of the lab. She checked the clock. It was just after eight
A.M
. They needed to pack up the codex and
put it in the vault. People would start filtering into the museum soon, and they couldn’t risk questions.

“I’ll get it,” Rolando said.

“I’m not here,” she called after him. “You have no idea when I will be back.”

A minute later, Rolando returned with a curious look on his face. “It’s a translator service from a hospital,” he said.

“What do they want?”

“They have a sick man who was brought in three days ago, and no one’s been able to talk to him. Now somehow they’ve concluded he’s speaking Qu’iche.”

“Tell them to call the church in the morning,” she told him. “Someone over there can translate for them.”

“They told me the patient keeps saying one word over and over again, repeating it like some kind of mantra.”

“What word?”

“Wuj.”

T
HEY REPEATED THE GENETIC TESTING AT THE PRION CENTER
. John Doe’s chart, lab tests, and MRI scans were scrutinized at CDC headquarters in Atlanta. By the following morning, after all-night meetings and emergency conference calls, the doctors all agreed with Stanton: The patient had a new strain of prion disease, and it came from tainted meat.

After dawn, Stanton reviewed the case with his deputy, Alan Davies, a brilliant English doctor who’d spent years studying mad cow across the Atlantic.

“Just got off with USDA,” said Davies. They were in Stanton’s office at the Prion Center. “No positive tests for prion at any of the major meat packagers. Nothing suspicious in the herd records or feed logs.”

Davies wore the vest and pants from a pin-striped three-piece suit, and his long brown hair was so perfectly set on his head, it looked like a toupee. He was the only lab rat Stanton had known who wore a suit, his way of showing Americans how much more civilized their British cousins were.

“I want to see the tests myself,” Stanton said, rubbing his eyes. He was having trouble fighting his exhaustion.

“That’s just the big farms,” Davies replied, smirking. “USDA couldn’t cover all the small farms if they had a year. Never mind the sheep and
pigs. Somewhere out there, some careless bugger is probably still grinding up contaminated brains or whatever the hell else and shipping them to God-knows-where.”