Still breathing deeply she got up and looked westward, the sun no longer in her eyes, the gentle mountains tumbling down into brown foothills, and finally surrendering themselves to the arid plain stretching into the distance. The land there was definitely harder, crueler, less forgiving to those who tried to eke out a meager existence working its parched soil. That was the direction Soba had originally come through, and about one hundred miles southwest was Mexico City, with all its congestion, traffic, and pollution. And Nick.
The closest town to where she was staying in this sparsely populated region was Tulancingo, visible on the plain below. There were no real indigenous reservations per se in Mexico as there were in America, things had evolved differently here. Ironically, when Mexico finally achieved its independence from Spain in the nineteenth century, much of the land that had been set aside for the indigenous tribes was instead absorbed by large haciendas. It wasn’t until after the Mexican Revolution of the twentieth century that most of the large commercial estates were forcibly broken up into ejidos, tracts of land worked by peasants who didn’t own the land but had certain use rights to it. There was still a lingering conflict in the Chiapas region over that very issue, but the noise from the drug wars tended to drown it out on the world stage.
Soba gazed at the scattered ejidos on the plain in the distance, and ruefully reflected that neither system, the reservations of North America nor the ejidos of Mexico, ever really benefited those they were designed to protect. What was the proverb Nick had said to me about it? she thought. The path to hell is paved with good intentions, he had said, only half-joking.
Suddenly her quiet reverie was broken by a loud beating in the bushes off to her side, and two wildly flapping turkeys frantically emerged and ran past her, Nanook playfully nipping at their heels. She whistled once, a short, shrill note, and the lathered wolf came to a halt just past her, crouched and looking back over his shoulder for permission to continue the chase.
“You’ve scared them enough for now boy, let them go and raise their young and make the earth rich. You have already brought plenty of game home the last few days.”
Nanook turned and faced her and huffed once, then twice, to make sure she wouldn’t change her mind. When she didn’t, he dejectedly came back and sat next to her, panting heavily. Nanook had not been quite himself since they left Nick behind, but he diligently kept his vigil of protecting her, while patiently awaiting his return.
“Hang in there Tlācanēxquimilli, I miss him too,” she absentmindedly cooed to Nanook, calling him ghost in the native Nahuatl tongue of her Aztec ancestors. Nanook cocked his head at her when he heard that, it was a moniker she used rarely for him, only when her mind was somewhere else or troubled. Instinctively and protectively he leaned closer in.
Soba had found it was easy to blend in and disappear among this tribal community. The rhythms of their life were familiar and comforting to her, not all that different from her Navajo upbringing. Most were bilingual between Spanish and Nahuatl, but she noticed that while the elders only spoke Nahuatl among themselves, the young favored Spanish. It was the same everywhere. She sighed. The assimilation had been easier mentally than physically for her, as she stood a head taller than even the men, and Nanook, with his large size and bright white coat, didn’t exactly blend in. But Nanook had found a companion, a beautiful female Husky raised in the little village, a favorite pet of all the children. And Soba had been openly welcomed in this land of perpetual drug wars and class discrimination, no questions ever asked.
Upon arrival she had decided to forego speaking any Spanish whatsoever, both to ingratiate herself among the tribal elders, and to refine and practice the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs her father had taught her. It wasn’t hard at all, as immersion was always the best teacher, and she found herself easily slipping into it, like putting on an old favorite coat. The elders loved visiting with her, as an outsider’s perspective and news was a welcomed diversion from their routine existence, although she was careful what she divulged about herself. And certainly not just for her own sake.
Some of the terms the elders used and their pronunciations, the subtle voice inflections, took her back to the days of her youth, with her father patiently teaching her the language that no one else used on her Navajo Reservation. She had never understood then why she had to master three languages, Nahuatl, Navajo, and English, not when all the other kids spoke mostly English and were actively rejecting Navajo. Now she found she wasn’t just mastering contemporary Nahuatl but was getting a refresher course in the ancient Aztec dialect of Nahuatl of her ancestors.
The eldest of the elders was fondly nicknamed Huehue, for ancient one. Nobody really knew her age, but she would always grasp Soba with her bony, weathered hands to have an intimate talk in the whisperings of the old ones. Soba was now so fully immersed in the language she even found herself dreaming in it. It all had come full circle, and she silently offered a prayer to the memory of her father, and felt closer to him, among these simple, gracious people.
Soba ate an apple and venison jerky, peeled off a piece for Nanook, and took one last look at the vista spread all around her. There’s a cruel beauty to it, she reflected, as she thought of all the history and turmoil that had taken place over these lands in the last five centuries. Snapping back to the present, she jogged back down the trail, Nanook trotting out in front of her. It was time to get back to the tribe, as the elders had something they had insisted they wanted to show her today.
Arriving back at the settlement tucked inconspicuously in the forest and foothills to the east, Soba had a sense of calm and peace. She felt safe here, she was accepted. Immediately a pack of children descended on Nanook, petting, rubbing, and laughing. When he crouched down and wagged his tail, they ran in all directions squealing and giggling as he pounced and nuzzled from one to the next, knocking them over like ten pins. Soba pulled a bucket up from an antiquated well and splashed herself to cool down. A smiling elder heard the commotion and saw her, motioned to follow, then disappeared.
Ducking, Soba entered a small dusty hut and paused a moment to let her eyes adjust to the light. Four of the elders were sitting on the floor in a circle, looking at rolled scrolls made of deer hide. Two were talking to one another, and one was chanting. The other was Huehue, hunched over and silently painting brightly colored figures onto a hide with a steady hand that belied her age. When she saw Soba, she smiled and patted the empty space next to her. Soba sat carefully, tuning into the conversation and the chanting, and finally felt Huehue’s hand on her knee.
“These are the lost art of the old ones. Their writing, their stories, their wisdom,” Huehue softly intoned. “Time has been unkind to us, but we have our oral traditions and our memories. The art of producing these was handed down over the generations to a select few. Sadly, now hardly anyone wants to learn the craft. I am afraid that like so many of our customs, this may fade away with us.”
“These are beautiful Huehue, simply beautiful! The art of producing them is timeless, priceless really. I am familiar with them, the outside world calls them codices. The only ones I have ever seen were produced after the conquest, when some learned Spanish men realized they must preserve the writing before the knowledge was lost forever,” Soba replied. “But unfortunately the originals, those made before the Spanish arrived, like much of the feather and metal work, were simply destroyed.” She purposely neglected to say she had learned much of this from her father and Nick.
“It seems we know similar things, just from different times and places,” Huehue said, looking up at Soba through kind eyes. “You have an old soul dear, you could have been me many years ago.” She concentrated back on her painting and started humming.
A thought suddenly occurred to Soba, and she hesitantly reached for her phone. She turned it on and flipped through some photos until she found what she was looking for. They were images of Aztec petroglyphs etched into the back of the collapsed room Lonan had shown them in Zuni on their
trip south. “Huehue, you don’t per chance think you could read these, do you?”
Huehue smiled and nodded yes, then joined in the chant, and time seemed to drift away on the dust of the light that filtered through the dull windows. Soba closed her eyes and had a strange sense of déjà vu, that she had heard this chant before, that she had been among these people before. That while she had a Navajo mother, these could have been part of her Aztec family. The rational, college educated linguist in her knew it wasn’t possible, but the shaman in her wasn’t quite so sure.
A little later, she went over to the worn-down community building, which had an old computer for everyone’s use. It was slow and dated and smelled like ozone when you turned it on, but at least it had a spotty internet connection. Soba had turned off her phone and kept it off, despite the temptation to use it. She and Nick had agreed no using their phones, not under any circumstances, and kept it in airplane mode. No tracks. After all, that was why she was out here in the first place.
It turned out Nick liked to fancy himself as an amateur cryptologist. After all, wasn’t an archeologist simply someone who liked solving complex puzzles of the past? Originally, he had come up with an elaborate coded system to communicate with Soba but abandoned it when he realized it was too complex for her. “Don’t dumb it down for me,” she had defiantly objected, but that was exactly what he had done. Instead, he had set up a series of unique, unrelated email addresses, each to be used for one simple message on one day only. And after Soba read the message, she was to delete it, and further to empty the email trash bin and never reuse that email address. Leave no footprints. Low budget and low tech, but hard to trace.
Any communication was to be in a simple series of code letters, signals from Nick to Soba. “A” meant all good, things are progressing. Any number after the “A” indicated how many more days Nick thought he needed, a question mark meant he didn’t know yet. “B” meant someone was on to him and he had to lay low, again the number after indicated the number of days until he thought he was safe. “C” meant he was ready to come get her and for her to respond with coded GPS coordinates, because, for safety, he didn’t even know where she was now. “D” was a signal that they were both in imminent danger, and that they would each make their own way to sanctuary at a predetermined rally point north of the border.
There were similar codes in case Soba needed to communicate with Nick in an emergency, otherwise the communication was to be one way only. Nick wouldn’t even let her write the codes down and made her memorize them. She concentrated and mentally went through the sequence one more time to further burn it into her brain. “A” was all good, “B” was being careful, “C” was coming for you, and “D” was danger, run.
Soba nervously booted up the computer and logged into today’s email address, which had one new message waiting for her. Anxiously she clicked on it and waited for the computer to slowly form the pixilated message on the screen. It simply read “A?”, all good, the number of days yet to be determined. Well, no news was good news. She let out her breath in relief, then grinned when she saw Nick had included an emoticon below it, :-). Low tech indeed.
Still, she couldn’t shake the increasing feeling of foreboding she was starting to experience. Ill portents were making her uneasy. Not with her being sequestered with the tribe, or with Nick doing research in Mexico City. It was something else, something bigger, something darker that seemed to be hovering off in the distance, menacingly gaining strength. Their last conversation kept replaying in her mind. She didn’t like to rely on her intuition, but with her shamanistic upbringing she had tended to be unerringly prescient.
“Come back to me Nick LaBounty. You don’t want to make me chase you in the next life,” she had said, and now wished she hadn’t.
An ocean away, unbeknownst to Soba, Nick was still diligently researching through the archives in Seville with Dr. Storm. They had approached the task in a scientific manner, much in the same vein as when Nick had conducted his research in Mexico City. The volume of available material was staggering, and the initial assault began with a series of computer algorithms to query the vast database of documents. Brainstorming together, they had come up with a list of key words and phrases that slightly expanded on the queries Nick had already used in Mexico. For their purposes, it was a richer trove of documents given the Spanish disposition of meticulously documenting everything. But that also meant going down the proverbial rabbit hole, again and again.
“This one is a dead end too,” Nick groaned. “Just another tease.”
Dr. Storm, lost in his own research, turned and looked over the top of his glasses at Nick. “Remember what Thomas Edison said my young friend. ‘I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that won’t work,’” he replied, smiling.
Nick chuckled. The good doctor always knew how to put an optimistic spin on any situation. After all, patience and persistence in research, the vital precursor to actual field work, were the hallmarks of any truly successful archeologist.
“Well, that leaves only 9,900 to go Doc!”
As one day faded into the next, they both settled into a routine. First thing each morning when they arrived, coffee in hand, they reviewed if anything promising had turned up and was worth investigating further. If not, they divided up the leads the search algorithms had produced and separately burrowed into them. Where possible, they reviewed images of the documents online since it made the process quicker, but if they hadn’t been scanned, they had the original source materials delivered to them for a white glove review. The private room that had been set aside for them was typical of any such institution, no windows, harsh fluorescent lights, and stale recycled air. Throw in a cryptic ancient puzzle to solve and the company of his mentor, and Nick was in his element. He loved it.
Friday afternoon Juan Ramirez, the Minister of Culture, stopped by and inquired how they were progressing. “Only 9,500 stones left to turn over,” Nick replied without looking up, banging away at a computer. When Juan raised an eyebrow, Dr. Storm explained to him the inside joke. Juan let out a hearty laugh, he had been skeptical of their finding any new useful information, but he was also rooting for their success.
“Don’t mind him, he’s just living the dream,” Dr. Storm added, nodding over at Nick. “You remember how it used to be Juan, to be young and idealistic and full of piss and vinegar. When one could bend the world to their view of it and prove the unprovable because they were just too ignorant to know it couldn’t be done.”
“Ah yes, let the dreamers dream. We will all be the better for it. Keep me posted Philip, and let me know if there is anything this institution or I can supply to aide your efforts,” Juan replied, and shook Dr. Storm’s hand and patted Nick on the shoulder. Nick smiled and gave him a look of thanks and watched him leave the office.
“Good man, good friend,” Dr. Storm commented. “How are things going over there, Nick? Anything interesting turning up yet?”
“Maybe, kind of. I found a reference of information about ‘items’ being secretly taken out of Tenochtitlán, but it dead ends. It doesn’t say who provided the information, it’s just a passing reference from a low-level priest to his superior, a kind of ‘thought you would like to know.’ The crux of the letter has to do with conversions of the heathens, the struggle to get them to reject their gods and accept the Christian faith. There isn’t even a date that I can make out.”
Dr. Storm thoughtfully rubbed the beard on his chin. “Hmm. Can you make out the name of his superior?”
“Not in this scan Doc. I already requested the original, should be here in a bit.”
Later that afternoon an attendant dutifully wheeled in a cart, full of carefully arranged bound volumes, dusty manuscripts, and individual letters. Each had a small slip of printed paper sticking out of it, the computerized request form from either Nick or Dr. Storm. Nick thanked the attendant, put on his archival white gloves, and parceled them out.
“I have to admit, they are really on
the ball. Even the paper they are printing our requests on are on acid-free paper, so they won’t damage the originals.” Nick and Dr. Storm then got lost in their own little worlds of going through their requested items, this time of the day being the most exciting part of the routine they had fallen into. Their chance to actually touch the history they were seeking to unravel.
Nick carefully pulled the letter the priest had written out of its clear plastic envelope. He then unfolded it with metal forceps, swung a brightly illuminated magnifying glass over it, and carefully examined it. He couldn’t make out the date it was written or the name on the salutation, they had faded to nothing, and not even a trace of the indentation from the quill pen that wrote it survived. That isn’t unusual, he reflected, as a quill pen wasn’t typically pressed down very hard, since it would result in a thick flow of ink. One wouldn’t do that unless it was on purpose, in which case you could probably just read the denser ink and not need the indentation in the first place.
The letter was one sided, and Nick flipped it over to examine the back. Nothing there either, just faded coloration marks and faint imperfections. He folded the letter and was about to put it back, when something caught his eye. It was the fold itself, it was odd. Upon closer examination the fold he had opened it from was relatively recent, from when someone had probably scanned the letter and then put it into the plastic sleeve. It wouldn’t fit the sleeve they had, so they refolded it differently, smaller. But Nick now saw the older original fold and restored it to that format. And there on the back of the letter, which was folded into itself, in the very middle, was barely perceptible, faint lettering. The name of who this was addressed to, perhaps the name of the priest’s superior.
Professor Storm jumped and bumped his forehead on his own lit magnifier when Nick broke the deafening silence with a ‘woo-hoo’ of excitement.
Aztec Odyssey Page 28
