Mayan December (18 page)

“I didn’t even see them. But will they follow me after today, or will everything be normal again?”

“After tomorrow, they’ll stop. Unless you see me again.”

Alice heard the yearning in her voice, and wondered that it seemed real. “I’d like to see you again,” she said, glancing at her watch, “but now I need to get searched, or I won’t be able to see you today.”

“And I have to go get formal. That’s why I came up here.” She looked around. “To see you before I put on my power.”

“You have it on now, whether you know it or not.”

“Not all the trappings. I also came to see Chichén Itzá like this, empty, with no one to watch me be amazed.”

“Except a few hundred soldiers and two or three Secret Service people.”

“That’s as good as it ever gets,” Marie said. “This is as good as it’s been for months, anyway.”

She couldn’t imagine what Marie’s life must be like. Yet she always looked confident and smiling in the news, or at least confident. “Will any good come of the conference?”

Marie wiped at a strand of her too-red hair. “It’s important for us all to be in the same place, look into each other’s eyes. China’s a problem. They think being extraordinarily good in some areas, like their new eco-cities and green buildings, makes up for being the worst coal polluters left in the world. India and the EU are both moving forward. Too slowly. I can only push so hard.” Marie sighed.

Alice wasn’t going to pretend she knew the right thing to do. She settled for draping her arm loosely around Marie, the way they had once expressed friendship at school. She whispered, “Good luck. I hope it goes well.”

Marie pulled Alice in close to her. “Me, too. This is supposed to be a time when the world changes.” As she looked out over the gray ruins under the gray clouds, she looked worried. “I want it to be for the good. I have the most power of any scientist in the world to make it be for good.
And I don’t know what to do
.”

“I’m sorry.” Alice sighed. “And I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m losing control. The turtles . . . ”

Marie made a soft sound of agreement. Pensive.

“And our dreams. Is the whole world dreaming strange dreams?”

“I don’t know. Maybe . . . ” Marie’s words trailed off.

Alice blinked in sudden sunshine. Unfamiliar noises—flutes and chatter in alien languages and the bleating of animals tickled her ears. She swayed, disoriented, her stomach sinking as she realized what had to be happening. Her hold on the real world felt like gossamer. She glanced down and pointed, watching Marie’s eyes for some sign Marie saw what she did.

Marie gasped, and a sound was starting to come out of her throat when Alice clamped a hand across it. “You don’t know who is nearby,” she whispered. “Maybe nobody. Maybe not your security guards.”

Marie turned wide, but not frightened, eyes on Alice. She nodded and Alice removed her hand.

Below them, the covers over the market stalls set between the columns of the Temple of the Warriors were no longer new canvas but old palm-thatch turned straw-colored by years of sun. A turtle had been painted across the top, clearly meant to be seen from where they stood. A long line of festival dancers snaked through the open space between the bottom of the pyramid stairs and the beginning of the market. People gave them room, small dark people dressed in cotton and bright woven clothes, busy, chattering with each other.

Alice licked her lips, looking down. Slanted heads. Masks. Feathers. Finery. Faces, some pealing into laughter but many walking in sullen silence. The grass was sere and brown, sere-brown instead of the green she had walked across an hour ago. The stones at ground level were bright red and smooth, like the sacbe except for the color.

It looked so intense . . . as if a bit of desperation touched the whole scene. A monkey rode on a woman’s shoulder. A little girl threaded through the crowd leading a goat. Here and there, people carried trays full of pottery or carved bones or jewelry, stopping to trade with small crowds that gathered for them.

Marie tugged at Alice’s hand, pulling her up. Where they stood, the steps were old and gray, and below them, near the bottom, everything was bright and sharp, the edges of the steps less worn by time.

Marie took a step down the face of K’uk’ulkan, toward the differences.

Alice pulled back, resisting. She couldn’t go back, not today, not with Marie. Not without Nixie.

Marie took one more step, her arm holding Alice’s hand fully extended now. Alice shook her head, frantic. She raised her eyes, looking behind her. A plane flew in the clear blue sky. Marie’s gaze followed hers.

When Alice looked back, the roof of the market was again new, and boringly uniform with no bright symbols painted on it. The market stood empty. Marie looked at her accusingly, almost angry. “You saw that? You’ve seen that before?”

Alice nodded, for a moment unable to speak. She licked her lips and said, “Only once. The day before yesterday. Not here. But we walked in the old world. We could tell because the road was perfect and new, a Mayan road.” She just couldn’t quite go into the relationship to the dream or the bead.

Marie took the steps back up, stopping one step below Alice, looking up. She’d lost the anger, replaced it with intensity. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Footsteps scraped the stone behind her, and Alice turned to find a man and a woman in black, standing close. She hadn’t even heard them approach. What had they seen? Their faces gave away nothing. She gave Marie a hand back up the last step. “I guess we better go.”

Marie nodded, her voice louder and more formal. “I need to get rigged up. I’ll see you when the tour starts.” She followed the two guards, clearly heading for the chain that made it safer to walk down the steps.

Should she have let Marie plunge them down into the past? In that moment of Marie tugging her downward, she had been sure it would kill them to go back.

But now, with the world solidly normal, she wondered if she should have gone, like some old fairy tale of King Arthur visiting Camelot. Except the Mayan world believed in blood and science while tales of King Arthur were chivalry and religion.

She should have had the presence of mind to take picture. She was a scientist, dammit. She could have at least used her phone.

She needed Nix.

Alice let them get halfway down before starting herself, watching Marie’s back as she walked easily down the narrow, uneven stairs, ignoring the safety chain and her watchers. And Alice.

Marie didn’t look back even once.

CHAPTER 30

The mid-afternoon heat sent runnels of sweat down Ah Bahlam’s back, and he was merely standing still. His mother leaned in from behind him, carefully knotting the black sinew ties that held the jaguar pelt to him. She stepped back, admiring her handiwork, and then moved close again, straightening the pads on the shoulder where Julu landed. “That bird,” she muttered. “Birds do not land on jaguars.”

He leaned in and gave her an awkward hug, hampered by the thick costume. “This one does. Besides, if you had not sewn these on, he would land on you.”

His mother screeched exaggeratedly, mocking him, laughing. “No, he would not. I am too bony.” She smiled and stepped back. “You look strong.” The pelt, which hung down his belly and back,
was
beautiful even thought it wasn’t black. Perhaps his jaguar would not care. The costume had belonged to his grandfather, the last person in his family to have been chosen by Jaguar. The base color of the pelt was a soft wet-shell white, its spots a light brown ringed with darker brown. Its teeth hung around his neck, and his mother’s hand held the mask he would don before the dance started. She had worked on the costume, fixing frayed edges and restringing the teeth while he was gone, preparing for her son’s return to take his place as a warrior-priest of the Itzá.

Perhaps her prayers had helped him come home.

His father waited, already dressed in puma skins and holding his own mask in his hand. Ah Bahlam leaned down and kissed his mother on the forehead. “We go.”

His father looked into his eyes, his gaze full of all the things he had shared with his son about the power of the dance of the Way.
Release. Let go. Believe. Let your Way become you and you become your Way
. But he added nothing now. He just nodded solemnly at Ah Bahlam, then winked. A final exhortation to remember that the dance could be done with humor regardless of how deep its meaning and how much the people needed their lords to succeed.

A path had been cleared for them. They walked, slowly and smoothly, as close to gliding as possible, until they had joined twenty other dancers milling at the bottom of the stairs up the Temple of K’uk’ulkan. Two others were cats: an ocelot and his father’s puma. His uncle wore the brown skins of a peccary and his heavy mask was made from an actual peccary head, split open and widened to fit over his uncle’s large skull, giving the pig’s face a puffed-up look. A wooden stake ran from the base of the mask to his waist to take some of the weight. He would have to dance with a straight back.

Ah Bahlam should have been surrounded by young men his age, but there was only Ah K’in’ca. He wore a wealth of macaw feathers in glittering green, and ruffed about the head and neck in scarlet. His mask left his eyes and mouth visible, although a great wooden beak hung out, the long pointed top jutting from his forehead and the small bottom beak cupping his chin. When he looked straight on at his friend, Ah Bahlam made out Ah K’in’ca’s smile and clasped his friend’s hand. “Good dance,” he said.

“And you,” Ah K’in’ca replied. “Dance your path.”

“Have you heard anything about Hun Kan?” Ah Bahlam asked.

Ah K’in’ca shook his feathered head. “Rumors only. Her sisters banged on the door of the high priest today but were sent away.”

“If you—”

“If I hear anything, I’ll tell you.” He paused, watching the men sort themselves into order for the dance. They would be last. “Now is not the time. Focus on your Way.”

Ah Bahlam swallowed. The jaguar had brought them both home. Had it brought Hun Kan back to serve the high priest’s desires? And if so, what were those? The world was duller for not knowing if she was safe. But he still had his duty. He nodded at his friend, repeating, “Good dance.”

Ah K’in’ca turned away and followed the men up, his wide red wings tucked in close behind him as he negotiated the stair carefully. Ah K’in’ca had never walked easily up or down the thin steep temple steps, even though, on the flat, he ran as if the wind pushed him.

Ah Bahlam took the last position, the dried seed-pods fastened around his ankles chuttering softly as he ascended. He fit the heavy jaguar mask over his head as he neared the half-way point. It smelled of oil and old fur, and he breathed hard into it, struggling to make its scent part of him, to give it his.

He nearly gagged before he could breathe clearly.

He stopped on the top step, sweating, so close to Ah K’in’ca that a feather tickled his face, even through the mask. In front of Ah K’in’ca, the next youngest, and then the men ranked by deed and position. The pride and hope of Chichén, regal, raw, and beautiful.

His father and uncle were lost to his sight, near the front. Ahead of them, standing at the edge of the steps down, would be those with most powerful Ways: the White-bone Snake, the Vision Frog, and the Maize God.

These were the Lords of Itzá and their adult male children.

The most elite warriors of Feathered Serpent were already there too, waiting on the sides of the great platform, ready to escort the dancers. Were there fewer, leaving some of the best to handle the unrest outside the city? The mask hid enough of his vision it was hard to tell. It only mattered a little. The linking of the gods to the Itzá here during ceremonies meant as much to Itzá’s safety as her warriors. For the first time, his responsibility to the people felt like it was here, now. The dances and games of these days would feed and water the people for the next year.

Or not.

The lilting drums and flutes that accompanied the maidens rose and fell, and wove through the last steps of a dance to the sun god, K’inich A’haw. The beat made his sandaled feet want to shuffle, and he remembered how lithe the young women looked twirling slowly side by side. But then the sun god had seemed well pleased for years. It was Chaac, the rain god, who hid from them.

The maidens’ music rose and then stopped, and the watching crowd called out to them, clapping and making the sounds of jungle animals, a great chorus that seemed to raise the very sky.

Even though he couldn’t see the front of the line, or down below to the people waiting for the dance, Ah Bahlam’s memories of these moments were so vivid he could see the next few moves in the familiar rite. The High Priest of K’uk’ulkan must already be standing at the top of the steps, sunlight glinting on the shells and beads woven into his net skirt. Red feathers adorned his powerful calves and arms. His mask hid most of his face and his ceremonial headdress, nearly as tall as he was, bobbed with every move. Ah Bahlam knew the moment the priest raised his arms by the silence that settled slowly over the crowd until even the children no longer called out to each other.

Drums boomed in the heartbeat of the waiting warriors, of the gods, and of the lords who would dance to become them.

He felt the high priest begin his stately walk down, flanked by seven warriors. He counted time in his head. When the high priest was halfway down, the Lords of Itzá would follow him.

And they did.

The crowd of costumed lords thinned out.

Before he was ready, the steps were in front of him. Below him, the crowd looked up almost as one being, flowing about the great flat space, a field of color. They thronged around the street vendors, to and from the Wall of Skulls, touching it for luck in battle, and came as close as the guarding warriors would let them get to the Venus platform and the path the dancers would follow to surround it. Ah Bahlam closed his eyes, calling to the jaguar, conjuring up once again the golden eyes and the black face, the lithe form.

The jaguar hovered in front of him, inside him, and then spilled away.

He was out of time, and took the first step down alone, clothed not in the jaguar but only in the costume. The last dancer, although one of the warriors walked beside him. Ah Bahlam focused on the immediate. Head up. In front of him, now, so high, only the blue, blue rainless sky. Another step. Another. Careful. The drums told the timing. Two full heartbeats for each step.

Should he call to his Way again, now, on the steps, or just get down?

The crowd below had become a heavy weight. He could not see them, but he knew they were there. They clapped softly, in rhythm with his steps, all the other steps.

The high priest would be near the bottom, preparing to mount the Venus platform in the middle of the square. There, he would start the dance alone on the raised surface, visible to all, the many Ways of the dancers below him.

Ah Bahlam took a deep, steadying breath and called the jaguar’s visage from the blue sky in front of him.

His right foot missed a step, slid, the seedpods scraping and crackling against the stone. His knee buckled. Before he could lose his balance entirely, he put his hands out, feeling for the steps.

Scattered gasps rose from the crowd below.

A strong hand caught his arm, pushed him back against the steps, giving him a moment to find stone under his foot. “Stand,” the warrior’s voice hissed, insistent.

He stood, shaking.

“Move,” the voice continued. “It happens.”

Ah Bahlam did not remember any Lord of Itzá falling down the stairs. But he had only missed one, and scraped himself a little. His knees shook. He managed the next step, and the next, and before they came close enough for the crowd to hear, he whispered back to the warrior. “Thank you.”

Silence.

How much damage had he done? And he had been worried about Ah K’in’ca. He let the heartbeat of the drum pick him back up, fold him in its rhythm, and by the time he came to the last step he moved easily again.

Now he could see the crowd clapping and singing and the sway of the dancers in front of him, feel the slow, even steps as they began to surround the stone platform. It had looked easy when he watched the dance, yearned to become part of it. Now, he fought just to stay with the others, to keep his steps in line.

Incense burners surrounded the Venus platform, sending the smoke of sacred plants and mixed venom from vision toads into the air the dancers breathed. It made his eyes water, but changed nothing about who he was.

He could not imagine the jaguar coming to him here in this crowd, in this moment when all of his attention was required to keep his balance, ignore the smell of his costume and know the position of all the others around him.