by Scott O'Dell
I asked Ceela for the word that meant horse. It was a joke, of course, but she thought seriously and finally gave me a long string of words that I didn’t understand. In return I told her that Bravo was a caballo. She tried to say the word, failed, made a face as if she had eaten something bitter, and with a shrug dismissed the whole idea. She made it clear that Maya was the only lan guage worth speaking. I never again used a Spanish word with her.
When she was able to ride by herself, I walked along beside her instead of leading the stallion. After a week of this I decided to enlist her help in making a saddle that we both could use. She brought a deerskin, which we laid out on the floor of the hut and cut to fit Bravo’s back. It had no pommel or cantle, but sewed together with an underlayer of cotton and feathers, a sort of fat pillow, it proved to be comfortable.
Ceela had not been inside my hut before, and what she saw while we worked on the saddle she didn’t like. With the first heavy wind, she told me with words and mimicry, the entire roof would come loose and fly away. Also, in a rainstorm it would leak. Both things would happen unless I tied the palm leaves together in a certain way, which she showed me how to do.
The hut’s greatest fault, however, was its lack of paint, inside and out. We talked about this problem for weeks, whenever she came to ride the stallion, which was almost every day.
She wished that I would paint the threshold, the beams that supported the lintel, and the lintel itself a bright sea blue. I had no objection until she explained that blue was the favorite color of the goddess Ix Chel.
“The one in the clearing?” I asked, trying hard to dis guise my feelings. “Ix...Ix...whatever her name?”
“Ix Chel,” Ceela said eagerly. “Blue is her magical color. It brings life and much happiness.”
Remembering the hideous stone image in the jungle, the eyes that held me with their evil glance, the snakes that coiled about the loathsome body, I felt like tearing at my hair.
“Ix Chel brings many children to people,” she said.
“I am the one who is living in this hut,” I answered. “It is my house.”
Ceela fell silent. She started to say something and stopped. There were tears in her eyes when she turned away from me.
Could she think, I asked myself, that one day she would live in the hut as my wife? Was this why she had given me so many presents, done so much for me?
Not knowing what to say, I took her hand in mine. It was very small and cold. But she pulled away, and the next moment she ran off through the meadow, crossed the stream, and was gone.
CHAPTER 31
AFTER THREE DAYS, DURING WHICH CEELA DIDN’T COME INTO MY HUT, the language lessons continued, and I soon built up a good vo cabulary. It became possible for me to put sentences together, copying the nouns and verbs that I heard her use. Just as important, I began to think in Maya, not in Spanish, and in this time, thinking thus, learned something about the island and much about Ceela Yaxche.
She lived more than a league away, with her grand father, who was sick, her grandmother, and two unwed aunts, who were old, very old. When she was ten, in the middle of the night the top of the volcano had blown away, scattering fire in all directions. The fire and the dust and flowing rock had engulfed their milpa and left her mother and father and two brothers dead.
The fire and dust killed many others. The ones who weren’t killed fled to the nearby village of Ixpan and be yond, all except what remained of her family. The grandfather, a stubborn and fearless man, built a tem porary shelter as near as he could to the old one and re mained there with Ceela’s grandmother and two aunts, though the volcano smoked day and night, planning that someday he would return to his ruined home.
I learned that we lived on the Island of the Seven Serpents, which accounted for the seven serpents that writhed about the stone goddess Ix Chel. It was about twenty leagues from south to north, eight leagues from west to east, and at the far northern end stood a habita tion of many temples and many people called the City of the Seven Serpents, the place I had seen on my re turn from the volcano.
I also learned something that disturbed me greatly. The natives of this vast temple city were unfriendly, especially toward those who lived on the mainland to the west. Not only unfriendly; they went on regular raids to the mainland and returned with hordes of slaves, whom they sacrificed on their many altars, cutting out their hearts with stone knives.
When I discovered this, the task I had set for myself seemed far beyond my powers or that of a saint or of a dozen saints.
I learned that Ceela and her two aunts supported the family. The aunts wove dresses that Ceela took to the market in Ixpan along with wild honey she gathered in the jungle and put in gourds she had painted herself. The hours left over from these duties she spent with Bravo and me.
Ceela was not an untutored girl, as atfirstI had thought. Her grandfather had been a priest, before he became old and sick, with the responsibility for the vil lage festivals connected with planting and harvesting, for all the gods who watched over the fields, such as Chac, the god of rain; Hobnil, the patron god of beekeepers; Yum Kaax, god of corn; Xipe Totec, the terrible god of spring, whose effigy had to be clothed in the skins of sacrificial victims. Also the Thirteen Gods of the Upper World, the Nine Gods of the Lower World, and numerous others.
The grandfather had passed on some of his knowl edge to Ceela, so she knew the gods by name and spoke of them often. Of them all, however, she worshiped Ix Chel, the goddess of childbearing and the moon, whose magical color was blue. She wanted to paint the doorway Ix Chel’s favorite color and I invited her to do so—to paint the whole hut blue, if she wished, though it was not to my liking.
One morning while I was grooming Valiente’s silky coat, she appeared with three brushes, one of them made of bristles taken from a peccary, two brushes of palm thatch, and gourds filled with rock ground up into a powder. She mixed blue powder with water and daubed the outside walls and the doorway, threshold, and lintel; daubed them twice over.
Then she did something that astounded me. She painted the inside walls a shining white, and astounded me more by painting upon them pictures of Bravo graz ing in the meadow, Bravo running with his tail and mane flying in the wind. And, biggest of all, Ceela her self on the stallion’s back, riding under a blue sky among blue trees.
She painted with many colors. There were splashes of green and yellow and red, red even in the stallion’s mane, and red glints in his eyes. On the deerskin saddle she painted the black spots of a jaguar. Her dress was green dotted with yellow, and in her hair were yellow flowers. The hut reeled and danced with color. It was all fanciful, but still Bravo looked like a stallion and Ceela looked like a girl.
I asked her who had taught her to paint.
“My aunt taught me when I was six. She gave me a brush and paint on the feast day of the god of art. I looked at her. She said, ‘Don’t stare at me. Take the brush and dip it in the color and paint.’
“‘Where?’ I asked.
“‘Anywhere,’ she replied.
“So I did. I painted on the wall right beside her.”
“What?”
“A dog. It was lying in the doorway asleep. It was an old dog and ugly and had only one ear, since once it was in a fight with a jungle cat. But I painted so it had two ears and was not so ugly and was young again.”
“Why,” I asked, “when the dog was really old and ugly and had only one ear, why did you paint it to look different?”
“Because when it died then I would remember it as a pretty dog and it would go into the sky young and with two ears.”
“To the Thirteen Gods in the sky?”
Ceela nodded. “But my grandfather made me paint it over,” she said. “He didn’t mind if I painted the gourds to sell the honey in, but he thought for a girl to paint figures on a wall was wrong.”
“Your pictures make these walls look fine,” I said. “Perhaps you’ll paint a picture of our friend Valiente, with his long tail a
nd very long snout, which he can move around like a finger.”
“When?”
“Now. Any time,” I said, and recalling my remark about the hut being mine, “When you come to see me I hope you’ll think of this place as yours, too.”
She tossed her hair back from her face. “I do not come here to see you as much as to see the horse.”
Deep in her honest eyes was a flash of fire.
“When you come to see the horse,” I said, “the hut is yours.”
CHAPTER 32
THE TIME HAD COME, I DECIDED, FOR ME TO USE THE LANGUAGE I HAD taken the trouble to learn for the purpose I had learned it, which was to explain to Ceela the mean ing of Christ’s life and teachings.
Accordingly, the next afternoon, before she had a chance to ride Bravo, I took her to the headland. On the way I caught several flies, of which there were many, and clapped them into a gourd half-filled with water. Together we climbed to the rock where the cross stood. It had rained that morning, and the air was fresh with the smell of the sea. Gulls circled overhead and sandpipers ran along the beach, but there were no sounds even from the waves.
I waited until Ceela grew tired of the game she had started to play with a handful of blue pebbles. I then ex plained to her how Christ had died on the cross, like the one that stood before us.
The medal that showed the figure of Our Lord on the cross, the only thing I had saved the morning of the wreck, I took off and put in her hand and told her as I had done before that the medal she held was an image of Christ on the cross.
Then I said that when Christ died, at that moment, at midday with the sun shining, the sky grew dark and the earth shook and the hill where the cross stood was rent asunder.
Ceela clasped her hands together.
“They buried Christ,” I said, “in a tomb hewn out of the rock, and in front of it they rolled a large stone. Then, on the third day, while the sun rose, watchers saw that the stone had been rolled back and the tomb was empty, that Christ had risen from the dead.”
Her eyes grew wide as I said the last words, but she was puzzled, as I knew she would be. I let all the flies out of the gourd save one. The one that was left I held under the water until its wings went limp. Then I put the fly in the palm of my hand. I had seen Las Casas perform this little act before a class of children in the city of Seville.
“It looks dead,” I told Ceela. “But it is not dead.”
My hand and the last of the sun’s rays warmed the fly. It moved its wings and legs, rubbed its eyes, then suddenly rose and flew away. Ceela laughed, happy that it had gone. But as far as I could tell, she made no connection between what had happened and the resurrection of Christ.
“We have a god who went off, too,” she said. “Only he didn’t fly. He built a large raft of snakeskin and sailed away.” She pointed toward the east. “He sailed in that direction on his snakeskin raft. But some day he will come back, everyone says. I hope that this is true. His name is Kukulcán. He is the Feathered Serpent.”
Kukulcán! Another name to add to the list of Maya gods, to the dozens, to the hundreds of gods, one for each minute of the day, who controlled everything the Maya did from the time they awakened in the morning until they went to sleep at night and then while they slept. How possibly could one God take the place of a multitude of gods?
“The man,” she said, “who flew away like a fly. What did he do before that time? Was he...”
I interrupted her. “He didn’t fly away like a fly.”
“Was he a high priest, an ahkin?”
“No, He was a humble man who worked with His hands and went around talking to people all over the countryside.”
She looked at the medal I had given her. “Our high priests are lords and they do not walk around talking to people in the countryside or anywhere else. They live in big temples and stay there and talk to the gods. Only to the gods.”
“Christ talked to anyone who would listen to Him,” I said. “Do you wish to know what He talked about?”
She nodded.
“Christ went out in the hills,” I said, “and prayed all night. Then He came back and talked to people.”
Ceela picked up the blue stones she had set aside and began to play with them.
“Christ told those who listened, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, give to everyone who begs from you. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your coat as well. And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.’ ”
Ceela smiled, showing her white teeth, and looked up at me. I saw that she had understood little of what I had said. And why should she understand? The words were there, proper enough, but their meaning was lost. I would need to recast each sentence and explain it as I went along.
“We Maya have many gods,” she said, tossing the blue stones into the sea. “And you have only one.”
She sounded as if she felt sorry for me.
CHAPTER 33
I HAD LOST MY ROSARY IN THE WRECK OF THE SANTA MARGARITA, SO now that I was in possession of a small stone hammer and a supply of stingray spines, I set about the making of one, using stones from the beach for the beads. For the paternoster, the largest bead on the string, I used a piece of driftwood that may have come from the caravel.
It was while I was finishing the rosary that Ceela ap peared. I hadn’t seen her for two days, since the afternoon on the headland, and I had begun to think that she might be angry because of something I had said. Such was not the case.
She came into the meadow, swinging her arms and singing some odd, strange song. On her head, balanced as neatly as if it were tied there, was a large bundle. I got up and went to meet her and offered to carry the burden, which seemed to be heavy. She refused my help, saying that Mayan men did not carry bundles.
These words should have warned me of what was to come.
In the bundle were a breechclout, a sheaf of gaudy feathers, two painted blue ear plugs, and two anklets made of blue stone. The mastil, a band five fingers wide and long enough to be wound about the waist three times and passed between the legs, was also blue—the favorite color, I remembered, of the goddess Ix Chel.
Ceela, greatly pleased with her handiwork, waited for me to be pleased, so I spent some time thinking up com pliments. Then I put on the anklets, stepped inside the hut, and got myself into the breechclout, which wasn’t as easy as it may sound, and came back to be admired.
When this was attended to, Ceela said, “Now we must make holes in your ears for the plugs, which come from the bones of the jaguar.” She drew forth a stone knife, tipped with obsidian.
I was silent.
“The holes do not hurt much,” Ceela promised, feel ing that I was in need of assurance. “And it takes little time. In five days the holes will be ready. Then I will put the plugs into your ears.”
“We will make the holes for my birthday,” I said.
“When will that be?”
“Next year,” I said.
“I will remember,” Ceela informed me. “Now, to morrow I will make a cloak, and when you wear it with your anklets and ear plugs and the mastil, you will look like a Maya. It can be white or black, this cloak. Black is for a warrior. But you are not a warrior. Blue is the best color for you. A blue cloak!”
“White,” I said, again remembering Ix Chel. “And please make it a big cloak.”
“Yes,” she said, “for you are very big, twice as big as the Maya.” She was silent for a moment, and then, fearing that I would think poorly of them, quickly added, “But they are strong, the Maya. They can run all day and all the night, and for a week they go without water, even a mouthful.”
I had the impression, as she stood solidly upon the earth before me, broad of shoulder and the strong color of bronze in the sunlight, that she herself could accom plish all these things.
She had brought powdered yellow rock and a gourd filledwith sooty scrapings, which she mixed together into a thin brown paste.
While she went on about the Mayan men, she began a picture of Valiente. He was asleep in one corner of the hut, with his long tail looped over his head, but she painted him from memory as she had seen him once at dusk fishing in the stream, crouch ing on the bank, ready to pounce upon his prey.
He was a muddy brown with a black tail, when she had finished, and looked more like a jaguar than a member of the raccoon family, yet he brightened up the wall with his shining eyes and ferocious teeth and black-banded tail, which looked twice as long as the one he owned.
In return for all the things she had given me, I took off the rosary I had just finished and hung it around her neck. I said nothing to her about its meaning and the way it was to be used, deciding that this could wait for a better time. She was pleased with it.
The next morning, while opening a mess of oysters I had gathered in the mangroves, I happened upon a pearl, the shape of a filbert nut and amber in color. I drilled a hole, and when Ceela came the next day I took the wooden paternoster bead from her rosary and in its place fastened the large amber pearl.
She took the rosary and, smiling, ran the beads through her fingers, happy with what she thought was only a pretty necklace, prettier now by far with its shin ing pearl. I placed it around her neck and then kissed her upon the forehead, at which she stepped back and gave me a strange look.
I still said nothing about the beads and how she was to use them, planning to do so after I had talked to her again. Perhaps on the headland, when we knelt before the cross.
Soon after she had gone I experienced a sudden and severe shock. I had lifted up my sleeping mat and was about to take it outdoors to air in the sun when I noticed that the earth beneath it had been disturbed. Upon looking closer, I found half-buried there, where I lay my head at night, a small wooden image of Ix Chel, much like the image in the jungle.
