Deity (30 page)

“You’re
talking about the reign of Seven Macaw,” Matt guessed.

“Exactly.
For two thousand years the Big Dipper,
representing Seven Macaw, reigned at the center of creation.”

“You
mean it stopped?” KC asked.

The
fact that KC was following the conversation at all surprised Peet. Of course,
the conversation may have simply provided a distraction from her discomfort,
but she’d lost that sarcastic tone that had dominated her comments back at the
throne and pillar. Dare he suppose that she’d picked up an interest in
Mesoamerican astronomy?

John
sounded eager to educate his audience. “Beginning around 1000 BC, the Big
Dipper started slipping away from the North Star due to precession.”

“Precession?”

“It’s
the way the earth’s wobble causes the stars to shift out of alignment,” Peet
explained, pausing at the top of an incline to allow the group to catch their
breath. John wasn’t the only educator encouraged by an interested student.

“Increasingly
since, the Big Dipper has been falling further and further away from the North
Star,” John said.

KC
slipped the pack from her shoulders and took a relieved sigh. She arched her
weary back which effectively protruded her breasts against the damp front of
her sleeveless shirt. Peet took notice, but he observed that Matt had too.

“So
Seven Macaw is falling out of the center of creation,” KC clarified.

Peet
appreciated her genuine interest, but found himself admiring too long for she
caught him staring. He quickly turned away, but not before catching the grin
she shot back at him.

It
wasn’t until then that Peet checked himself. This wasn’t Lori he was esteeming,
but a spark of that same level of regard had suddenly struck him like a bolt
out of nowhere. Why now? Where did it come from?

For
a brief moment he lamented that it might be a residue response left in Lori
absence. He missed the connection he’d once had with Lori, but Lori had been a
student. KC wasn’t. There was no need to hide a moment of admiration from her. And
that’s when he realized that KC offered an opportunity that Lori couldn’t—a
deeper connection that he’d denied
himself
for so
long.

All
of a sudden, surrounded by the enclosing jungle, he found himself standing in
new territory. He faced a whole new world of thought in a wilderness he’d never
before considered.

John
didn’t seem to notice.

“The
North Star turned out to be a deceptive center of creation,” he was saying,
“with a deity that proved just as false.”

“So
the Olmecs needed a new center of creation,” KC said.

John
smiled. “They needed a whole new way of thinking. You can imagine how alarming
this would have been to them.”

Sierra Madre De Chiapas

Forget
finding the forest through the trees, John thought as he stepped over a log
swarming with ants and wood rot. It was the mountain he’d lost sight of. The
truth was
,
he was too small to see it through the
jungle mist. Thank God for his compass. He never did have a good sense of
direction on his own and Matt’s reliance on modern navigational equipment was
no help at all when the signal was lost in the trees. But the compass couldn’t
fail.

Even
still he felt less and less certain they were headed in the right direction.

The
chit chat had ceased as their trek became more laborious, yielding his thoughts
to inner regrets. He regretted receiving Matt’s call. He wished he hadn’t
agreed to meet him in Izapa, but who would have known he’d find himself climbing
a volcano? From his organized existence within museum life, John thought
accepting Matt’s request would be a refreshing pick up from the holiday lull. The
offer had been made even more enticing with the possibility of a new monument revealing
more of the Izapan cosmology. The very idea brought back a sense of expectation
that always came when approaching new frontiers—the desire that had driven him
to first explore Mesoamerica in his youth. Izapa had been his first love and he
still treasured it for its mysterious nature.

However,
with the weight of his pack now bearing down upon his shoulders and digging
into his back, that sense of nostalgia was as distant as those adventurous days
of his youth. The insects were more severe than he remembered, the air more
sticky, and his legs weren’t as willing to maneuver through heavy vegetation
and dead fall. And as the canopy arranged consuming patches of shadow upon
dense stands of trees, and every sliver of things between them, he was reminded
yet again that his eyesight was nothing like it used to be either.

To
make matters worse, he was following a colleague suddenly very unfamiliar to
him.

Matt
Webb—the man who’d shared a deep interest in Mesoamerican cultures, the man
who’d swapped tidbits of knowledge across their respective campuses—that Matt
Webb could not be the same man who’d possess enough stealth to cheat a museum’s
highly sophisticated security system. This couldn’t be the same man that stole
a pillar ball, much less the Effigy of Quetzalcoatl. What had changed? What
kind of desperation would drive an archaeologist to such drastic measures?

John
thought he knew. Perhaps Matt’s crime spree was an act of rebellion against his
former employer. It was very possible he was willing to do anything to make BYU
regret letting him
go
. Finding the very first Long Count
Calendar would certainly accomplish that goal. John hoped revenge was all his
strange behavior was about, but even more so, he hoped the incriminating
details of this whole venture would work themselves out in the end and everyone
would realize this was all just a mistake—one twisted mistake after another.

John
was pondering his involvement in this unfortunate predicament when he walked
face first into Anthony Peet’s back. Anthony barely moved a muscle.

“What
are we stopping for?” John asked, adjusting his bifocals over the bridge of his
nose.

Anthony
lifted a finger to his lips. Everyone held very still.

“We’re
being followed.”

No
sooner had the words escaped Anthony’s lips when John heard another footfall in
the woods behind them. He scanned the sinking shadows, suddenly wishing they
were nowhere near Tacana. He didn’t like being exposed in a wilderness he
didn’t know, especially when their only means of defense was the rifle
passively slung over Matt’s shoulder.

“Let’s
keep moving,” Matt said. “It’ll be dark soon and I want to have camp set up
somewhere before that happens.”

“Guys?”
KC interrupted in a slow, haunted tone.
“Where’d my pack go?”

“What
do you mean, where’d it go?” Matt asked.

KC huffed irritably as she searched the ground
immediately around her. “I mean I set it down right here and now it’s gone.”

“Now
how can that be?” John asked as he and Father Ruiz joined in the search. “You
must have stepped away from it after you set it down.”

KC braced her fists upon her hips. Her face was red from
their hike’s exertion, glowing with sweat and now tense with anger. “I’m not
stupid,” she spat. “I set the damn thing right—”

The
brush suddenly shuddered behind her, startling both KC and Father Ruiz. John
was also taken by surprised, shocked to see the vegetation move away from them
in a wave, like water shook from a dog’s coat, from head to tail.

“Something’s
got my pack!” KC shouted, springing after the receding brush.

“Careful, KC!”
Anthony called, as he
chased after her. “You don’t want to corner the local wildlife.”

John
feared what might spring out of the vegetation. His mind went through the list
of animals that could be large enough to drag off a pack full of camping gear. A
monkey
perhaps,
or a wild boar.
Worse
yet, a jaguar.

“Don’t
get too close!” he warned, but it was too late.

With
an impressive leap, KC managed to jump ahead of the creature’s path, cutting
off its hasty retreat through the brush. The animal backtracked, its movement
still detected solely by the swaying of vegetation. Perhaps blinded by its own
cover, the creature changed course once again after nearly bumping into
Anthony, fleeing straight toward Matt who’d joined in the chase.

Matt
lifted his rifle. “I’ll put a stop to this,” he said.

But
his prey abandoned its course again. For a moment it seemed they had it trapped
within a dense patch of vegetation. John would catch a patch of fur here, the
flip of a tail there. Then, it suddenly made a desperate break, springing
straight out of the brush in a reddish-brown streak that collided with John’s
face!

Horrified,
John reached for the furry body clinging to his head. John’s foot slipped over
a moss-choked log and caught in the crook of an exposed root, painfully
twisting his ankle as his weight collapsed over the snare. John groaned as he
felt something pop in his ankle but there was no catching his fall. As a final
insult, he felt two hot, padded feet pushed off of his chest and before he even
hit the ground, the animal was scaling the trunk of a tree.

“Stop
that damned monkey!” KC ordered as John crashed into the jungle growth.

Holding
his leg and groaning in pain, John tried to assess the situation from the
ground. The only man capable of performing such a feat was Matt who, with rifle
still pressed into his shoulder, had swung around to follow the monkey’s path. He
stepped around another tree for a clear shot. In that brief moment, as if fully
aware of what it held in its possession, the monkey reached into KC’s bag and
withdrew a can of beans.

“Get
him!” KC demanded. “He’ll eat up all my food!”

Matt fired but the monkey shifted just as he pulled the
trigger. The beans exploded in the primate’s hand. With a wild shriek it sprang
from its limb and began swinging from tree to tree, escaping into the canopy
and dropping a trail of food stuffs and camping supplies at Matt’s feet as he
picked up the chase.

The
jungle erupted into panic. As Father Ruiz helped free John’s leg, the air
erupted with the screaming monkey and screeching birds. The canopy swayed in
the monkey’s wake while below, Matt led the charge with Anthony and KC crashing
through the vegetation below.

“We
best go after them,” Father Ruiz said, helping John to his feet. “Can you
walk?”

John
tested his weight and pain shot up his leg. “It’s not looking good,” he said, gritting
his teeth. He cursed silently to himself. This was just what his old body
didn’t need, not in the middle of a God-forsaken jungle!

With
Father Ruiz supporting his weight, they waded and stumbled after the chaos
ahead. The staccato blasts of Matt’s rifle punctured the noise like opening
beats to a symphonic allegro. A colorful wave of exotic birds burst from the
canopy as a lone body fell to the ground.

“Is
it dead?” John asked as they drew closer.

The
three hunters stood before them, none of them bothering to approach the spot
where the monkey fell. None of them dared to rest another pack on the ground
either.

“You’re
not gonna believe this,” KC said.

John
had drawn near enough to hear them panting from their chase, but he still
couldn’t see anything on the ground. It wasn’t until he stood beside Anthony
that he saw the monkey.

It
wasn’t dead.

In
fact, it was very much alive and clinging like a toddler to a near-naked child.
Beside him stood a little girl, holding KC’s empty pack and looking bashful and
frightened all at the same time.

For
an extended moment they all simply stared at each other, five adults as
uncertain about the situation as the two children and their pet monkey. When
someone did finally move it was the monkey who squatted to scratch at its bare
rump where one of Matt’s bullets had just grazed it.

Father
Ruiz turned to KC. “And you’d rather claim that to be your evolutionary relative?”

Quiché

Darkness
dropped into the jungle like lead in a pool of water. It had settled itself
heavily upon the village by the time Father Ruiz and his companions followed
the children in. The going had been painfully slow helping John through the jungle,
even with KC co-supporting his weight.

At
first nobody noticed them arrive. The entire village was engrossed with a giant
tree standing at the center of their pitiful collection of crateboard and
corrugated metal huts. A bonfire was ablaze near the base of the tree where the
villagers appeared to have lost themselves in some primitive ceremony of supplication,
prostrating themselves before the tree and tossing offerings into the fire.