Mayan December (24 page)

CHAPTER 40

Alice finally spotted Oriana swirling and dipping, third back in a line of four, her synchronization just a little off. The bright red skirts looked like carnations from a distance and roses when the women came closer. The men they danced with also wore red, with white shirts. The announcer was busy claiming that red stood for sacrifice, for blood, and that the dancers chose the color to symbolize death, and thus avoid it. The dance was the sacrifice.

Exactly the kind of nonsense Alice hated on tour buses. The sacrificial life and choices of ancient Mayans was neither simple nor completely understood, but they had clearly seen death as part of a life that continued after death. Kings had decapitated themselves at the height of their power. Mayans danced to please the gods and gain power, not to forestall death.

As Oriana came nearer, Alice leaned down close to her daughter. “She’s having fun, isn’t she?”

Nixie nodded, her eyes tracking Oriana, her hands stroking the feather, and her feet doing a staccato pound on the ground in front of them.

“Are you okay?” Alice asked. “You seem . . . so nervous.”
Even more than me, and I’m nervous.
“Are you scared?”

Nixie kept her eyes on Oriana. She whispered, “I’m excited.” She licked her lips. “And I want to see Ian.”

Well, so did she.

“And Hun Kan,” Nixie’s eyes shone with determination.

Such focus. So much of her daughter’s energy was centered on this other girl. “I can’t help you there.” Alice put a hand on Nixie’s shoulder. “Do you want to meet my friend Marie?”

“When?”

Alice eyed the delegation she’d spotted coming in the gate, checking to make sure Marie was among them. “In about three minutes?”

Nixie turned around and blinked at her, then grinned. “Really?”

“She’s asked us to sit with her.”

“I . . . what if we just sit here?”

Why would Nixie say such a thing? And would she answer Alice if she asked? “She’ll have better seats.”

Nixie swallowed. “But I like these. We can see people come in and out the gate.” She looked almost desperate. “Hun Kan,” she whispered, just under her breath.

The first line of bodyguards already snaked behind their seats, moving toward the VIP bleachers. “Come on.”

Alice breathed out a sigh of relief when Nixie actually stood. As they walked around to the back, Marie called a greeting to Alice and stopped to wait for them. The man in white was there again, and he stopped near Alice and Nixie, still unsmiling.

In just a moment, Marie reached them. She walked alone between two sets of bodyguards, and gestured Alice and Nix to her side. “Hello! You must be Nixie.”

Nixie gazed at her evenly, as if taking her measure. No awe, no fear. Just curiosity. “I’m happy to meet you.”

Marie smiled. “Will you tell me about the turtles?”

“Sure.” Now Nix blushed. She didn’t seem happy, though. They hadn’t finished the conversation that Marie’s arrival had interrupted.

The VIP bleachers filled in quickly. To Alice’s surprise, they were actually seated just below Marie, close enough for conversation.

The dance started to wind down, and Oriana’s group came close to the assembled VIP’s. The drums rose to a strong beat and then fell, the dancers slowing, and slowing, matching the falling and softening drum until they stood completely still.

Applause erupted and dancers bowed. Oriana looked toward where they had been.

Nixie squeezed Alice’s hand quickly. “She’ll look for us by our old seats. I’ll be right back.” She handed Alice the long quetzal father, and without waiting for an answer, she was gone.

Alice shivered in spite of the sticky heat. She didn’t want Nixie off alone, even though she should be able to see her from here.

Above her, Marie laughed softly. “Spunky.”

Nix was eleven. She could find her way back. Alice stretched, trying to get rid of the worry riding her spine. “Marie? Did you have a good night?”
How were your dreams?

“It was hard to get to sleep. I kept thinking about old times here and about how different everything is now.”

I keep thinking about yesterday when we were on the temple of K’uk’ulkan
. Or that’s what Alice thought she meant. “I slept so well I don’t even remember if I did dream. But maybe that’s because it was so late when I got home.”

“What did I miss here?” Marie asked.

“Nix’s babysitter danced in that last dance—the one with the red dresses.” She looked over and spotted Nix by the old seats, although Oriana wasn’t with her. A new set of dancers, men dressed in costumes that made them look like birds and animals, trotted slowly onto the field. Good. The dance of the Wayob. Maybe this would be the last dance. It wasn’t the right historical order, or even the right day for this particular dance. But it would be majestic. “There’s a theory that in the old days the dances were supposed to open portals to the stars. Particularly to the Milky Way—to the dark rift I was telling you about yesterday.”

“Maybe these dances will do the same,” Marie mused.

Alice kept her eyes on Nix. “I think the old dancers had help. Mayan shamans used hallucinogens. And everyone was of one religious mind.”

“Your friend who danced? What does she believe in?”

Alice frowned, surprised that the question was so hard to answer. “I don’t know. She’s been with us every day for a week, but I never asked her. She’s a reef diver and she believes in conservation. She wants peace. But I don’t know if she has a . . . a religion.”

“Was she with you when you went hiking?”

Alice nodded, squinting, looking for Nix. She couldn’t see her, but a small group of people milled about, letting someone down the bleachers. Surely Nix was just too small to see in a standing crowd.

“Can you find your babysitter, so I can talk to her?” Marie asked.

“Now?” Alice turned to look up at Marie, surprised. Clearly, Marie meant it. “Sure, I can try.”

Marie held out her hand. “Want me to watch the feather for you?”

She handed it to Marie. “I’ll be right back.”

She stepped down into the crowd, looking for Oriana’s slight, dark form, but even more, for Nixie’s golden hair, which had disappeared in the moment she’d turned to hand the feather to Marie.

CHAPTER 41

A small crowd shifting unhappily to let a fat man down the bleachers gave Nix the perfect cover. If only her mom had let her go, so she didn’t have to sneak away. But finding Hun Kan mattered more than anything.

She hurried past the guards, using a technique her mom had taught her a long time ago for foreign airports: Walk fast and look like you know exactly what you’re doing. That got her out of the Ball Court, but then she stopped, unsure. Large crowds and guided groups milled noisily through the open spaces. The shadowy building she’d seen in her dream hadn’t been very big, but it was stone. If it had survived, she’d recognize it. She needed a map. She started off for the entrance to find one.

Nixie was close enough to see the guards’ faces when she stopped dead in her tracks. Ian. Coming toward her. He wore black pants and a white shirt, and carried a lightweight navy jacket with the bright yellow emblem for security on it. His dreadlocks were pulled back from his face and fell down his back in a neat ponytail. Peter walked on Ian’s left. Ian leaned down, talking to an older man dressed in traditional Mayan clothes with a homemade pack slung around his middle and baby-blue tennis shoes on his feet. Don Thomas Arulo?

She raced toward them, cutting off three older women in her pell-mell rush, hardly noticing when one of them screeched at her in Spanish. Where had Ian been? What did he know?

She skidded to a stop when she got close, squinting. It wasn’t Don Thomas Arulo. This man was older and more wrinkled, and his eyes were darker. Gray hair hung straight to his shoulders and a big home-made leather pouch was wrapped around his middle. Calm seemed to drip off of him, unless she looked directly at his eyes, which glittered with curiosity and looked a little . . . scared. As if he had great amounts of fear and quiet strength all at once, feelings Nixie had never seen together so clearly.

Ian’s voice pulled her attention away. “Nixie! Am I ever glad to see you.”

The old man’s head whipped around faster than she would have thought possible. His dark eyes bored into hers, and then rolled up in his head as he bowed to her, so his eyes never left her even though he bent nearly in half. The fear still shone in his gaze, but also the same sort of wonder she’d seen in Hun Kan’s eyes on the beach. When he stood back up, he said, “Ni-ixie?” in a voice so full of hope it plucked at her insides. He held out a hand to her, palm down.

She patted his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Cauac,” he said, slowly, as if he wasn’t sure she would understand. He reached out and touched the necklace from Hun Kan.

She glanced up at Ian.

He grinned at her. “Cauac,” he repeated. “He’s from Hun Kan and the bird-man’s time. The bird man has a name—he’s Ah Bahlam, which means ‘jaguar.’”

Jaguar. She liked it. “How did you get here?” A car must have been hard on the old man. Besides, Ian’s jeep was parked back at the resort. “Did you have Don Thomas Arulo’s beetle?”

“Worse. We took a bus. Only way to get here. Line was two hours long.”

She rolled her eyes. No wonder fear clung to Cauac. The modern world might be scary, but tourist buses were even worse.

Ian turned to Peter. “Can you take him and show him something close by?”

Peter nodded and led Cauac away.

“Where’s your mom?” Ian asked.

She remembered the last time she saw him was when he and her mom kissed. Too bad she didn’t have a copy of the picture with her. She watched his face closely as she said, “She’s sitting with the President of the United States.” She was rewarded for watching by seeing his eyes round and widen. “Well, and her friend, Marie. The science advisor.”

He bit his lip for a second, looking over at Cauac and Peter, who had stopped by a tourist booth. “Are they watching the ball game?”

She nodded. “But it hasn’t started yet. Just the dancing. Oriana already finished. She did great.” She looked up into his eyes, trying to tell if he’d help her. “I have to find Hun Kan—I had a terrible dream. I dreamed she was locked up. They tied her up.” She winced, and plowed into the next part, talking fast. “It’s all my fault. I gave her my watch, remember? I dreamed her whole arm was bloody, but the watch was still on. Like they almost cut her arm off trying to get to it.”

His lips drew together. “Why can’t they just take it off? Did she see you put it on?”

She shook her head. “Well, maybe she did. But it’s the kind with the clasp hidden in the band. The first time I got one, I had to work at it for a whole hour to figure it out. Even if she did see me put it on, she might not know how to take it off. I have to find her.”

“Shhhh . . . I know.” He knelt down so his eyes were at her level. “I know this is scary. And I know it matters. And I don’t know why yet.” He inclined his head toward Cauac and Peter. “I bet I can’t get him into the Ball Court. Don’t know if I want to. We’d have been inside an hour ago, even with the bus ride, but when he saw Chichén he just stopped and stared and then he cried and then he stared some more.” Ian’s eyes were sad. “He lived here once, when it was a real city. Makes me feel guilty for bringing him. But he has to be here. I don’t know why, but I know he does.”

“You can talk to him?”

Ian nodded. “Don Thomas was there to help me. At first I needed him, but once you learn it, Cauac’s Mayan isn’t so different from today. I can puzzle it out. The hard part is he doesn’t have words for a lot of stuff we do, and he does have words for things I don’t.”

She nodded. “Is Don Thomas coming, too?”

“I think he’s here. Have you seen him?”

“No. But we’ve mostly been in the Ball Court.” She bit her lip. “I need to find Hun Kan. Are you coming?”

He stood back up. “Coming where?”

“I need a map.”

He pulled one out of his back pocket. “I got it to show Cauac how we do maps. The Mayans had them, so I thought he’d like to see.”

She took it from him and folded it out. “In my dream, there was a small pyramid. About four stories. Maybe a little bigger, but not like K’uk’ulkan. There were a lot of wooden huts around it and Hun Kan was in one of those. It had a turtle painted on it.”

Ian’s eyebrows rose. “Cauac’s totem animal is a turtle.”

She felt buoyant for a second, as if held up by hundreds of tiny turtles. Ian didn’t even know she was turtle girl! He’d been gone so long. “I swam with turtles. A bunch of them. Back at the resort. They came to see me. Do you think that’s why?”

Ian blinked at her, looking lost for words. “When?”

“The day before yesterday. The same day that we came back from getting the bead.”

“Do you remember what time?”

“Sure. Late morning.”

Ian gave her a big grin. “Maybe Cauac is a more powerful shaman than I thought.”

She unfolded the map. “Why?”

“We went to Tulum. Straight from where we left you. Don Thomas wouldn’t let us stop for food or coffee. He wouldn’t tell me why. As soon as we got in, Don Thomas almost ran down to the beach, so fast we could barely keep up with him.” Ian’s voice had gone all storyteller, quick-paced and dramatic. “We raced down to the water, panting, and here was this old man climbing out of the water, naked. He just stood there, dripping wet, his feet getting stuck in the sand as the ends of the waves ran over him. When we walked up to him, he squinted at me, and you know what he asked?”

She shook her head.

“He asked if I was Ni-ixie.” He drew out the pause in the middle of her name.

She giggled.

“He’d been out in the water calling for you. He told us he sent his turtle totem to fetch you. He’d heard about a fight and dead warriors, but he was sure Ah Bahlam and Hun Kan were okay. He seems to think they’re special.” He laughed. “They’re so special they see you. Makes me special, too?”

She grinned again, but bent her head to the map, letting the idea that Cauac had sent the turtles sink in. Maybe if the turtles only spoke Mayan that explained why she hadn’t quite gotten the message. She shook her head and stared at the map. “A small pyramid. It was stone, so it would still be there.” She read the names by the squares that showed buildings. The smaller ones didn’t have pictures. “Is it the High Priest’s Tomb?”

Ian shook his head. “Too big. Maybe one of the buildings by the Las Monjas group?

She glanced down. “Maybe. But it says here that those were built later.”

“Later than what?” Ian asked. “We never got an actual date. Although we can ask Cauac. He’d know it in the Mayan long count calendar. But I’d need a pencil or a computer to figure it out.”

“Ask Peter.”

Ian laughed.

There had to be a way to find the building. “Maybe there’s a tourist book with pictures of everything over by Peter and Cauac.”

“Good idea.”

There was, and two or three places could have been right. She frowned and flipped back and forth between pages. “Can you tell Cauac what I saw, and ask him?”

Ian closed his eyes.

“Hurry,” she whispered.

He nodded. “Wait here.”

“Okay. Just hurry. Mom’s going to be worried about me.”

She shouldn’t have said that. Ian’s chin tightened and his eyes narrowed, but instead of a lecture he said, “Okay, I’ll hurry.”

Ian and Cauac talked. They did as much in gestures as words; maybe Ian didn’t understand all that well after all. He called her over and had her talk about the dream, translating. Cauac’s hands clenched and released, but he didn’t show any other sign of worry. As he and Ian talked, and he gestured, ridged scars made red and white ropes of thin shadows down his forearms.

Ian asked her for a specific description of the hut, and how Hun Kan looked, and she described it and pantomimed Hun Kan’s bound ankles. As soon as Ian finished translating, Cauac started walking.

Ian shrugged. “I guess we follow.” He gestured to Peter, who fell in behind them. He still hadn’t said anything more to her than a mumbled hello. She wasn’t even sure he’d noticed her.

Part-way there, Ian leaned down and whispered, “It is in the Las Monjas.”

He stopped in front of what could be the right building. It was the right height, but most of the edges had tumbled and worn to rounded ruin. “Is that it?”

She bit her lip. “It looked a lot sharper in my dreams.”

He laughed. “Tulum was pretty sharp, too.”

“The huts aren’t there. But they weren’t stone, so they wouldn’t be. But how do we get back?”

Ian shook his head.

Nixie started walking around, imaging what it looked like in her dream. The paths, the huts, the glory of the brightly-colored building with its elaborate feathered serpent heads for decoration at every corner. It had been dirt then, where there was a neat green lawn now.

She tried to get all the dream-details, the whitish-brown dirt and the packed paths, the sharpness of the stone edges clear in her mind.

It didn’t make any difference.

Nothing changed.

Cauac watched her silently. Peter sat down a distance away. Ian stood by Cauac and smiled at her from time to time, looking up up at the stars when he wasn’t watching her.

Nixie bit her lip. Last night, dream-Nix had just walked through a wall. Could real-Nix just walk through time?

She paced. She closed her eyes. She tried calling, “Hun Kan,” softly. The name fell in the modern world. She was here, felt here. There was no lightness in her.

She sat down on the grass and put her head in her hands.