by Scott O'Dell
Before the summer rains began, I journeyed to Tikal, three days’ hard travel to the south. Tikal—from what I had seen and heard from travelers—had been the largest of the Maya cities, reaching out for a dozen leagues in all directions.
It was now mostly a jumble of mounds and ruins, like the City of the Seven Serpents. But in a vast central plaza, situated between two towering heaps of stone that had once been tem ples, people from the surrounding jungle met to sell things and to worship before an effigy of coiled snakes.
The bustling settlement had a horde of black-robed priests, as blood caked as those in the City of the Seven Serpents, many lords, and a powerful cacique, Ah Machika. On the morning I arrived in Tikal I saw him striding through the plaza in a feathered robe and plumed jaguar mask, a stiff, impressive figure attended by a retinue of slaves and guards. I met him soon afterward as he sat on a stone slab in one of the ruined buildings, holding court among a crowd of petitioners and wrongdoers.
My turn to be heard came last, just after Ah Machika had banished a young man from the settlement for stealing a bowl of corn cakes and sentenced a woman to have her hair shorn off for meeting the eye of a traveler, a stranger she had not seen before.
Others had approached him on their knees, and I did the same. But before I had crawled halfway toward him, he mo tioned me to stand. He removed his mask, revealing a typical Maya head—a long, heavy beak of a nose thrusting out from a slanted brow, the result of having it squeezed between boards as an infant. But his eyes, instead of being crossed in the fashionable mode, stared straight at me, little pieces of ob sidian black as night and cold.
“I have heard words about you,” he said in a rumbling voice that befit his size. “You are here to sell me something I do not want.”
“No, I have come because I have heard of you, as you have heard of me, honorable cacique. To see for myself the man who is known everywhere, as far away as the Isle of Petén, for his kindness and generosity and a mind sharp like a serpent’s tooth.”
I had heard these same compliments when I was Kukulcán. I had spoken them in Tenochtitlán to the Emperor Moctezuma. They had impressed me and also Moctezuma, but they did not impress Ah Machika. He stared at me with his black eyes.
“I had news from people that you were tall,” he said, “and I saw a tall man in my thoughts. But you are taller than a man. You are tall like a tree.”
I had a suspicion that the cacique considered me a freak, as others had before him, and that as such I was about to be offered inducements to remain in the village of Tikal. My sus picion was partly correct. Before I left the next day, with an order for two hummingbird cloaks trimmed in the silky fur of araguatos, red-bearded howling monkeys, the cacique in an elaborate ceremony made me a lord of the realm and prom ised me fabulous gifts should I return.
“This city is where the gods have stored their gold. Only here in Tikal,” he said. “You are a white man, and you will know what to say to the white men when they come here and ask for gold. As they have done elsewhere.”
“You know about the white men?”
“I have heard.”
“About Quintana?”
“Yes.”
“About Cortés, who came to Petén and burned the tem ples?” “Yes, about Cortés,” the cacique said. “About him I have heard much.”
CHAPTER 19
NEAR THE END OF SUMMER, WHEN OUR STORE OF FEATHERS BEGAN to run low, Zambac departed for Quintana. After he had been gone for several weeks, a runner brought word from him that he had found the warehouses bare—the few feathers to be had were of an inferior quality, mostly from small, dull-colored parrots.
During the summer, in the jungles north and south of Panama, there had been a series of fierce hurricanes, each more devastating than the one before. Fruit trees had been leveled. Insects swept away. Flowering bushes ripped from the earth. Struck down by the horrendous winds or starved by lack of food, birds perished by the millions. A meadow had been seen where a flock of hummingbirds lay in a gray carpet, rot ting in the sun.
One bright morning, a few days after the runner appeared, Zambac returned empty-handed except for one small, pathetic bundle of parrot feathers. But to my amazement, after he had washed off the grime of a week’s journey and slept soundly through the afternoon, he came to the supper table that night showing no signs of disappointment. He sat down and took up his knife, cut a slab of iguana, which he doused on all sides in a pyramid of salt, maneuvered the meat into his mouth, and thoughtfully began to chew, meanwhile smiling at me across the table.
Zambac was a happy man—he even woke up in the morning with a smile. As the day progressed, the smile broadened, but on this night it seemed broader than usual.
“We cannot make feathered cloaks without feathers,” I said. “And it will be a long time before we can buy more.”
Zambac counted out the twenty days of the Maya month from Imix to Ahau. Then he added up the months until he came to a tun, 360 days. Then he doubled the tun and held up two fingers, which brought the total to 720 days in Spanish numbers.
“A long time,” I said.
“Long,” he said, and called to a servant to bring him more salt. “Long.”
“Long enough to starve,” I said.
He nodded, cut himself a second slab of meat, and went through his ritual of dousing it with the salt the servant brought. Torchlight shone on his forehead, which now began to show a fine coating of sweat.
“What plans for not starving did you bring back from Quintana?” I asked him.
“I have many plans from Quintana,” he said between chews. “But only one shines out like a bright star in the sky.”
He finished his mouthful and took a draught of mild balche wine. Then he sat back and fixed his one good eye on my amethyst ring, glowing like a crystal flower in the light from the torches.
“It is very difficult, this plan. It has more points than ten porcupines,” he said. “You can get yourself stung with this plan. Both of us, but you mostly.”
He rinsed his mouth with balche and spat it out. He glanced at the iguana briefly, then his eye again fixed itself on the amethyst. During the time I had lived in Petén not a day had passed without some mention of the ring—its beauty, how it came into my possession, its worth, on and on. He was ob sessed with the amethyst ring.
“Down below in Quintana,” he said, “the first day I was walking in the market looking for feathers—the two women do well in your stalls making hats, by the way—on that first day in the morning this white man who came here to Petén and left his animal that they made a statue of…”
“Cortés.”
“Cortés, yes. This man was walking in the market also, and he came up to me and said that he remembered when he was up in Petén that he got a cloak from me. I think it was the eye he remembered…He said he bought a cloak from me—he bought a cloak, that is true, but did not pay…Anyhow, he wished to know if I had ever seen a tall man, a very tall white man, or heard of such a tall white man…”
Zambac squirmed out of his jacket and tossed it away. The night was very hot. Bats were swooping about, chasing insects in the jacaranda bushes. Insects were flying into the torches, making little frying sounds as the flames consumed them. Zambac pushed the iguana aside and put his bare elbows on the table and called for a fan.
I waited for him to continue. Usually he spoke rapidly, biting off the ends of his words. Tonight they were oozing out of his mouth. He had something to tell me, but didn’t know how to go about it.
“And of course,” I said, “being my friend, you waited until you knew exactly why Cortés was asking about me. You didn’t say right off that you had seen a tall white man roaming around in the streets of Petén. That…”
“Oh, no, sir,” Zambac said. “Oh, no, sir.”
“What did you say?”
“I said…” Zambac paused. “I did not answer Cortés at once. I wrinkled my forehead and thought. Then something came to me right out of the sky . .
.”
He glanced up at the dark sky hovering above the light from the torches, as if he expected something more to come tumbling down to him.
“ ‘I have not seen this tall white man,’ I said to Cortés. ‘But I have heard that others have seen him. Not in Petén. In places farther to the south.’ Cortés said, ‘In Tikal?’ And I said, ‘Yes, in Tikal.’ Then this Cortés went away, but the next morning he came up and asked if I could find you. If I could find you and bring back…not you exactly, but something. Your hand that has the ring on it.”
“My hand would show that you had found me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was his offer for this small service?”
“Big,” Zambac said, making a sweeping gesture that took in the world. “I will be the cacique of all Quintana. Of Petén likewise.”
“You will be or you would be?” I asked.
The distinction between the two was lost on Zambac, and I had to repeat the question in different words.
He laughed, took a hearty drink of balche, and said, “I asked him, this Cortés, if he would be pleased with the ring only. He shook his head. I said I would bring a finger. But he shook his head again. He wished everything—the ring and the hand both.”
“Where is Cortés now?”
“Going to Tenochtitlán.’’
“If he is going to Tenochtitlán, how can you give him my hand?”
“He has fast runners down there in Quintana waiting now.”
“And when they get the hand they will run fast to Tenochtitlán and give it to Cortés,” I said, half-amused at the whole idea.
Zambac had quit smiling and was slowly getting himself drunk.
“How do you become the cacique of Quintana and also Petén if Cortés is up in Tenochtitlán? Did he tell you that?”
“Yes, he told me. In Quintana there is a white captain now and his men. Twenty men. Cortés left them when he went away, and they rule Quintana. Cortés took me by the arm to this captain and gave him a command to make me the cacique of Quintana and likewise Petén when I was finished with things.”
The servant was standing behind him, waving a big pal metto fan. Zambac wore his hair in a bang and the breeze from the fan kept moving it up and down.
“Alala,” Zambac burst out. “This is what came out of the sky.”
He glanced up at the sky once more and then down at the ring. I moved my hand out of sight.
“It came to me,” he said, for some reason lowering his voice, “that you will give me the ring. Take it off and give it to Zambac. Then Zambac will search around and find a hand somewhere and put the ring on it…You see what came out of the sky?”
“The hand you search for, Zambac, and find hereabouts will be the hand of an Indian. Not the hand of a white man.”
“I have thought about this, sir. This will not be hard for Zambac. He will change the hand from brown to white by the milk of a ficus tree. Then he will dry the hand in the sun. Per haps he will put a white man’s tattoo on it. How would a cross be, like the crosses this Cortés left around everywhere in Petén?”
“The cross is an inspired thought,” I said. “Did it also come from the sky?”
“From the sky,” Zambac said, pointed overhead and or dered a second gourd of balche and another fan. “Down from the sky, sir.”
A breeze drifted through the courtyard, but it was still hot. The fans kept moving up and down after Zambac went to sleep. I had the servants put him to bed in the hammock that swung between two jacaranda trees. I waited until they left, then I tied up his hands and feet with cords I cut from the hammock.
I had nothing much to take. The streets were deserted, except for a homeless dog that followed me to the plaza. There he sniffed, about and finally lifted his leg on the statue of Cortés’s horse and left. A small moon was riding along in a cloudless sky. By its light I found a canoe and paddled across the lake. I walked until dawn on the trail that led to Tikal, then slept for a while, then went on at a rapid gait.
CHAPTER 20
I STAYED IN THE RUINED CITY OF TIKAL THROUGH THE NEXT SUMMER and another winter. I lived in a wing of a palace that was quite similar to my palace in the City of the Seven Serpents, even to its broken statues, stained walls, and vermin.
Ah Machika had his quarters in another wing of the six wings that formed the huge, star-shaped structure. After a week or so, when he made no mention of the gold he had told me about in such glowing terms, I brought up the subject one night at supper. I had come to Tikal to evade Zambac, true enough, but I had not forgotten the promise my host had made.
Ah Machika was apologetic. “I forget,” he said. “I am old and forgetful. Tomorrow, soon, we go and you will see that what I told you is correct.”
We didn’t go on the next day or soon, though I mentioned the gold every few nights at dinner. I came to the belief that he was deliberately delaying the matter, fearful that if once I got my hands on the treasure I would take what I could carry and then disappear. It was also possible that the treasure did not exist. He valued the impression that I made on his subjects and the travelers who came by—there were many, since the town was not only on a main trade route but also at the gateway of the trail that led to Mount Chicanel, the Concealer, home of Tzelta, the sibyl.
In the distant past Tikal had been a flourishing trade center, larger than Quintana, situated as it was on the east–west trails between the Southern Ocean and the Sea of Caribs and other trails connecting it to Tenochtitlán in the far north. It had also been a great religious center, drawing hordes of Maya wor shippers. Now the trails were heavily used by commercial traders and known to the Spaniards.
Spaniards came in bands, mostly on horses, and well armed with muskets or harquebuses, even with small cannon pulled by mules. At first they were apt to be respectful of Ah Machika’s army, for the soldiers with their crossed eyes and naked bodies coated with soot were fearsome to behold. But they never left without causing trouble. One band, told that there was no gold to be had, set up cannon and fired at the palace.
Ah Machika, who had never heard a cannon or seen an iron ball as big as his head flying through the air, fell on his knees and begged forgiveness for his poverty. I prevailed upon him to hold fast and not to tell them about the gold, that they would soon run out of powder, which they did. Whereupon he seized the Spaniards, arranged a feast day, and sacrificed them one by one to the hungry sun god.
There were mounds in Tikal ten times the number found on my island. They extended in a line more than a league wide and for twenty leagues, in what appeared to be a series of plazas faced by temples, government structures, and the abodes of the city’s nobles—all devoured by vines and creepers, sunk beneath a quiet verdant sea, marked only by trees that grew from the rooftops.
I did no exploring. I was not tempted to restore any of the buildings near the palace in which I lived. And if I had undertaken such a rash task, it would have failed.
The people of Tikal—some two thousand were left of what must have been, judging from the vast numbers of mounds, a city of a hundred thousand—were content to farm their small milpas, eat corn cakes and red beans at every meal, drink copi ous amounts of balche, congregate on feast days, and have many children, of whom more than half died before they were a year old. Like the people of my lost island.
However, while I waited upon Ah Machika and his gold, growing more suspicious that he was gulling me, more restless day by day, from time to time weighing the advantages of throwing in my lot with one of the Spanish bands, of forcing Ah Machika to act, of even wringing the truth from him, if necessary, I had hours to spare. I spent them in an attempt to decipher the Maya past.
There were no books in the palace, such as those I had studied in the City of the Seven Serpents. I had to be content with the stelae scattered about in the plaza. Most were in good condition, but most of their glyphs dealt with dates—who ruled the city in a certain year, the length of his rule, and nothing else. There was no clue,
no more than in the books I had studied before, to the great mystery.
The Persian empire had disappeared, as had the Assyrian empire, and those of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Ro mans, but not overnight. Why, in the matter of a few brief years, had the Maya suddenly stopped building their magnificent temples? Why had they quit constructing splendid cause ways, buttressed with cut stone, that led to the temples? Why had they deserted their palaces and elaborate edifices to disap pear into the jungle—as if the voices of the gods and of the stars they worshipped, speaking as one single voice, had com manded them to cease doing what they had done for a thou sand years. Or was it that they heard no voice, no command, that they had suddenly lost faith in the gods and the stars?
There was no sign here in Tikal, as there had been none on the Island of the Seven Serpents, in Chichén-Palapa, Quintana, or Petén, that earthquakes or famine or disease had weakened the Maya will to carry on the traditions that they had inherited. But there were signs, the same ones I had seen before, that the reasons for the cataclysm might lie with the priesthood. As elsewhere, the Tikal priests went about in dirty gowns, their long hair caked with filth—thin, dark figures who camped in the ruins and made predictions that didn’t come true as often as they did.
We had a steady stream of these dolorous apparitions com ing from all directions, pausing for a night or two and moving on. During my first month in Tikal, two of them arrived by the north trail who looked to be twin brothers. They were a pair whom I felt I had seen before, possibly in Quintana. I had seen them, true enough, but not in Quintana. They came from the Isle of Petén, sent hither by Zambac.
I was awakened toward morning of a stormy night by a scuttling sound. I slept on a pallet near a window—one without glass, like all Maya windows—and thought it was a coatimundi, a snake, an iguana, or some other of the small animals that paid me nocturnal visits. I thought this until I felt a sharp pain at my wrist, something tugging at my finger, and caught the fetid breath of an assailant groping for my throat.
