Caribbean (7 page)

But it was the third obscenity that was in some ways the worst, for it not only destroyed a thing of robust beauty but also foreshadowed what the new world would be like. When Karúku chose for himself the hut once occupied by Bakámu and Tiwánee, some of his men, acting on their own, began to knock down the croton plants, both those in front and those in back, and when Karúku himself protested, shouting: “Keep them!” one of his lieutenants explained: “Assailants might hide in those bushes in a plot to murder you,” and Karúku, acknowledging the advisability of clearing the area, nodded: “Clear the space!” and the crotons were slashed to the roots.

As they fell, Tiwánee realized that the tyrant Karúku had acted not through strength but through fear, and she felt contempt for him: Despite his great power, he has not found courage. He is driven by demons. He does not move like a hero, but like a coward. And scorning the frenzied acts of Karúku, Tiwánee whispered: “He has to be afraid of his own men! He’s frightened of shadows! But Bakámu, living freely, was afraid of nothing.”

She watched with sorrow as the hedge she had so lovingly tended disappeared, and as she watched she spoke to her plants in a kind of trance, for she knew they would revive:

As she bade her farewell to the croton, she realized that the three hideous events which had repelled her so violently had not involved the killing of human beings, but the assassination of benevolent ideas, and when she saw the destruction of these great good things, she felt herself so outraged that she was prepared to fight even the spirits of hell to resist the new order.

The formalities of the victory feast began. Four women specially designated to honor heroes slain in battle reverently lifted Bakámu’s corpse and bore it to the edge of the flames, where they recovered the branches which had been placed across his breast. These they delivered to Karúku, who accepted them, carried them solemnly back to the pyre, and tossed them as votive offerings into the flames. Then, whirling about with arms upraised, he shouted: “Victory! Victory! Our new home!”

The fire roared, the human flesh was roasted, and the feast began, but Karúku would not be allowed to enjoy it. For when Tiwánee saw the leaping flames, she uttered a sigh of tragic resignation, as if she could no longer absorb what she had been forced to witness this day. Quickly her ancient courage reasserted itself, and she cried out: “I can bear this outrage no longer!” And from the folds of her garment she took the fire-hardened dagger, intending to kill herself rather than submit to the brutality that now controlled her village. But then she saw Karúku reveling with the victors, and she was so mortally offended that with a strength she had never known before she broke from her captors, dashed up behind the Carib leader, and plunged her dagger through the middle of his back and deep into his heart.

O
N
J
ULY NINTH OF THE YEAR
1489
ACCORDING TO THE
C
HRISTIAN
calendar—a day noted as 11:13.8:15.6. in the much more accurate Maya rendering—on the remote island of Cozumel at the extreme western end of the Caribbean, the thirty-seven-year-old widow of the High Priest who served the local Temple of Fertility faced a grievous crisis.

She was Ix Zubin—the first name signifying
female
—and she was admirably qualified for what loomed ahead. She was robust in health, just under five feet tall, and built as if constructed of three sturdy globes: buttock, breast and dark round head. Her very black hair met her eyebrows in a straight bobbed line, creating the effect of a permanent scowl, except that her face could suddenly break into a generous, warm-hearted smile, as if some bit of fortunate news had made her feel good all over. But her sharp, penetrating eyes were dominant, darting here and there, demanding to know everything that happened about her, for she was a woman of unusual intellect.

The crisis stemmed from the unfortunate condition in which her island and her temple found themselves. Cozumel was a handsome island, but it was small and it did lie at the extreme edge of the once-great Maya empire that spread over the southern part of what would later be known as Mexico. The capital city of the fragment of empire
that still existed, Mayapán, lay far to the west and was so involved in its own crumbling affairs that it had neither time nor wealth to waste on Cozumel.

Left to govern their own affairs, the islanders became increasingly pessimistic: “With things falling apart on the mainland, pregnant women no longer flock here for our services. The temple is expensive to maintain. The world is different now, and old centers like this no longer serve any useful purpose.” A rumor circulated that no new High Priest would be appointed and the building would be abandoned to the salt winds blowing in from the sea. But some perceived another problem: “Boatmen have grown lazy and no longer care to ferry travelers to us from the mainland.” One cynic summarized the situation: “We’ve been forgotten. Not enough pilgrims coming to keep us alive. Desolation is upon us.”

If the rumor was true, Ix Zubin would face a double loss, for she not only loved the ritual which ensured the birth of strong children but she also had nurtured a plan whereby her son Bolón might one day ascend to the position of High Priest. Thus both her religion and her family were in jeopardy.

This little bundle of energy was no ordinary woman. Because of the extraordinary position she had held in Cozumel during the lifetimes of her grandfather and her husband, she had during the past three years convinced herself that Bolón was the ideal person to inherit the priesthood. Had the boy’s father lived another four years, till the boy was twenty, she was certain she could have maneuvered him into the office of High Priest, thus ensuring the continuation of the valuable temple and its records, but her husband’s premature death had put a tragic end to that plan.

The unique position she enjoyed in Cozumel society had begun when her grandfather, Cimi Xoc, a noble man of wisdom who knew the stars as brothers and was one of the greatest High Priests, famed even among the rulers at Mayapán for his mastery of the calendar and the orderly procession of the stars, realized that his only son, Ix Zubin’s father, was not capable of mastering the intricacies of Maya astronomy upon which the welfare of the world depended. Grieved by his son’s deficiency, he found solace in the fact that his granddaughter, the amazing child Ix Zubin, did have that peculiar gift, awarded to only a few in each generation, of being able to comprehend almost intuitively the mysteries of numbers and calendars, the moon’s motion and the wanderings of planets.

She was only five when her grandfather had cried with delight: “This child has much wisdom!” and he began to allow Ix Zubin to help him plot the movements of the brilliant morning-evening star long named Venus by scholars elsewhere in the world. Indeed, except for her lack of outstanding physical beauty, she understood the planet so well that she herself might have been called Venus: “Grandfather! When she hides between morning star and evening, she’s like the women who hide when they’re going to have babies,” and from that moment she appreciated the close identification the planet had with Cozumel’s Temple of Fertility, whose fortunes the male members of her family directed.

That insight led to her unprecedented education, for normally women in Maya culture were prevented from any contact with the sacred learning that enabled civilization to move forward. The mysteries of astronomy were kept hidden from them; they were never allowed to participate in the sacred propitiatory rites that ensured the benevolence of the gods; and there were a score of secret places in any temple into which women would never be admitted. A hundred rules were enforced to keep them obedient.

So when Cimi Xoc decided that his genius of a granddaughter should be instructed in the mathematical mysteries, it was a decision of tremendous significance, for it flouted the ancient belief that women should not be involved in such sacred matters. But like all keepers of treasured knowledge, he was determined that the lore he had accumulated during a long lifetime be preserved for later generations, realizing that it constituted an emotional bridge between past, present and future.

Ix Zubin had inherited this passionate respect for the history of her people and made repeated efforts to instill in her son a regard for his ancestry: “Our people are the wisest,” she told him. “Others are better at warfare, obviously, since strangers from the west did overrun us and install their gods in place of ours, but in all else we are supreme.” Her comments on history invariably referred to migration from the west, sometimes to relationships with the south, and occasionally to influences drifting down from the north, but the east where the great sea rolled was never mentioned.

Yet the Maya must have been known there. The green jade adornments so beloved by the Arawak and Carib women and the rubber balls so cherished by their men must have been transported from Maya lands, since there were no rubber trees or jade deposits on the
little islands far out in the Caribbean. And there was the custom of applying heavy boards to make the foreheads of children, especially those of female babies, slant backward from the bridge of the nose. But how these things had reached those distant specks of land, neither Ix Zubin nor her learned grandfather nor any other chronicler of Maya history could say.

In other respects, Maya knowledge was prodigious in both volume and precision. Two thousand years before the old man made his calculations, Maya astronomers, always seeking to refine their measurements, had determined that the year was not 365 days long but 365:24. Europeans, who failed to achieve this precise computation, stumbled along with their calendar falling each year into deeper error. Not until 1582, nearly two centuries after Cimi Xoc’s death, did European astronomers catch up with the Maya, who had also determined that the journey of Venus through the heavens required exactly 583:92 days.

Such basic facts had for centuries been recorded in tables inscribed on papyruslike sheets and jealously guarded by the priests who perfected them by making minute adjustments. But the intellectual accomplishment of Cimi Xoc and his peers that would amaze subsequent civilizations was their ability to forecast eclipses of the sun: When the old man first showed his granddaughter the tables, he chanced to point to a date five hundred years in the future which indicated that on Sunday 29 March 1987 a total eclipse of the sun would occur. To Ix Zubin’s astonishment, her grandfather’s table of predictions continued through two hundred years beyond that.

Long before the birth of Christ the Maya had devised a multipart numerizing system which enabled them to calculate with the most elegant exactitude dates going back ten thousand years or more, and, for an equal span, into the future. In their five-number system the first figure represented a very large number, the second a somewhat smaller, the third a portion comparable to one year, the fourth the number of units close to a month, and the fifth the number of days.

When European scholars in the early twentieth century unlocked the secret of the Maya calendar system, they found that the precise day of the week for any date reaching back three thousand years could be correlated, as could dates probing far into the future. Each group of five Maya numbers meant a specific day in a certain month of a given year. But more significantly, they formed a throbbing tie to the ancestors.

These records were preserved in a beguiling way. In front of temples and public buildings were erected groups of stelae, squared stone pillars four feet wide and sometimes as tall as three men, but more often shorter. On each of the long, slim faces thus provided, sculptors of rare skill had carved intricate hieroglyphics—faces of gods, officials in regal and ornate costumes, animals and arcane symbols to remind the worshipers that mysterious powers influence daily life. But for Cimi Xoc and his granddaughter the most valuable segment of each stela was the inscription of dates of the period. Ix Zubin would never forget the first day when her grandfather, in defiance of custom, had taken her to the nearby mainland city of Cobá, where he showed her, a mere girl, the magnificent scatter of stelae summarizing that site’s resplendent history.

“This one speaks of things that happened more than a thousand years ago,” he said reverently. “A priest of our line helped this ruler,” and here he indicated the specific king reigning in that distant period, “to consolidate his power. You can see the slaves kneeling before him.”

He then showed her symbols dating the stela’s events to Friday 9 May 755—9:16.4:1.17 7 Imix 14 Tzec—and it was with this clearly defined time that she began her involvement with the Maya numbering system. Soon she was able to read other stelae, one recording events from November 939, another more recent, in February 1188.