I ran to the U’s library and paged through de la Cueva’s correspondence to her sister Agata. In them, I returned again to the stories of Balaj K’waill, the Labyrinth of Deceit, the deadly trek through the jungle, and the murder of the beloved slave.
I did not at first understand what relationship, if any, this history might have to the Stelae. And for several weeks, I shelved my ideas and suspicions at the back of my brain; whatever trail I had been on seemed to have gone perfectly cold. But the entire time, something was forming in my mind: An idea. An insight.
And then, like a light, on it came.
I woke up one night, just before dawn, and the notion struck me full force:
In the 1920s, Oscar Angel Tapia found the Stelae at the mouth of the Sacluc, which is exactly where de la Cueva writes that she saw the maze of “clear blue stone.” We’d all thought of the first labyrinth being some gigantic Coliseum-like edifice winding its way through the trees, instead of a stone book placed, so precisely, at its threshold. In the Narrative, Von Humboldt writes about this too, describing blue carved stones and the first maze. And he recounts also “sapphire passages” where one grows “confused by the signs.” All of this is his description of the Maze of Deceit, which is what the Stelae are.
That is, at the border of the Sacluc sat the maze, which was made up of both the Stelae and the jungle itself, and through which no one could find their way without its deciphered guidance.
And what is of even greater import—as I continued to study Beatriz’s correspondence, I found within it the key to the ancient cipher. The Secret to the Code! The key was in one particular letter, dated December 15, 1540, describing a bizarre dance lesson between the governor and her comely slave. In this epistle, Balaj K’waill appears to succumb to a fit of madness, but I found the method in it. Scholars have read of their famous duet with blind eyes for centuries. No one before me has known that the answer to the mystery was there the entire time.
What key? I wondered, slapping through the pages of the journal. It looked as if she hadn’t transcribed the code itself—but I had no trouble recognizing her description of that letter. I’d read it out loud to Erik a week ago. This was the epistle where Beatriz de la Cueva recounts for Agata how she had tried to teach Balaj K’waill how to do the Spanish dance called the sarabande, but that he’d had an insane fit where he begins shouting nonsense words, numbers, and rhymes.
Apparently the solution to the Stelae-Maze was to be found there.
For the next four days, I applied this key to the Stelae, and found it easily cracked. I had written the first, roughest draft of the Flores Stelae. And thus I was also the first modern person to understand the precise nature of the Maze of Deceit:
Though this Maze has been called a Coliseum, or a Colossus, its gigantism exists in the mind, not in space: The winding and baffling passages that de la Cueva and Von Humboldt describe are passages not that one walks through but that one reads.
Months passed after this revelation had come to me. Keeping my own counsel, I gloated over my accomplishment. On account of my concerns that I had not yet deciphered the Maze-Stelae with complete accuracy (for I will never reveal my work until it is Perfect) I had not yet revealed to a single soul, not even my daughter, what I had found.
I was just about to do so when I heard the news of Tomas’s death; after that, everything changed. I kept the Secret to myself, resolving to go in the forest alone to look for the Stone, and finish my old lover’s work.
So here I am, back in Guatemala, and that journey begins today.
My first task will be to use the Maze of Deceit as a map in the forest, employing also some clues I’ve found in Alexander Von Humboldt’s Narrative. If I do come across the city, my second step will be to look around for a dragon tree, according to the records.
As for the next riddle, the Maze of Virtue, I think that’s fairly straightforward.
And if I am correct about both, perhaps I will discover the Jade.
Later today I’m heading for the Maya Biosphere Reserve, coming as close as I can to the mouth of the Rio Sacluc, where Tapia found the Stelae. From there, I’ll have to follow the route (insofar as it qualifies as one) that is described in the decoded Maze of Deceit. In so doing, I know I’ll be following the paths already hewed by Beatriz and Von Humboldt.
Perhaps I’ll get lucky.
I won’t even stop in Flores, as the weather continues to get worse and worse.
And the last thing I’ll do before I leave is write out a clean copy of the Maze-Stelae.
THE MAZE OF DECEIT, DECODED
I turned the page. I turned the next. But all I found were the stubby remnants of several leaves that had been ripped out of the journal.
And then:
There now. That’s all done. I’ve shipped the thing off to Lola in Long Beach, for safekeeping. She’ll get a kick out of my theories when I finally explain them to her. I think they would particularly appeal to such a bookish girl. What’s that queer line from de la Cueva’s Legende?
… the Witch saw she could never read all the labyrinth’s dangers and escape.
Indeed.
Now off I go to the jungle.
Hunching over the diary, and sweating in the cave, I shook my head and groaned.
The cracked Maze of Deceit was in Long Beach!
And the only clue my mother had left us for its decipherment was a reference to a dance lesson that took place nearly five hundred years ago.
CHAPTER 41
I had reached the maddening end of the journal. Sitting on my stone and encircled by the brandy-colored light, the glistening water, the warm air filled with gold motes, and the dragon-eyed creatures, I felt these secrets work their way inside me and alter my fathoming of my whole life. I looked around me. Unseen fish and lizards continued to dive and leap into the pools, and drops of water falling from the dome of the caves and its stalactites chimed as they slipped into the ponds, creating an exact music within the cave, to which I listened for a while.
Then I slid off my rock and made to leave.
Moving back through the tunnels and rooms of Actun Kan, I ran my fingers again over the graffiti hieroglyphs carved in 1974, 1983, 1992, 1995. As I worked through the passages toward the cave’s mouth, the stone corridors began to take on a natural light, so that it appeared as if a thin copper leaf had been applied to the stone by an adept mason. The light grew brighter, falling across the cave’s hall in a soft line. After this I heard the sounds of footsteps, and Erik appeared, dark against the glare.
“Here you are,” he said.
“Oh, Erik … you’d better be good.”
He stopped walking. “At what?”
I looked at him until I could see his eyes and his mouth in the shadow. I reached up and touched his jaw, and I kissed him.
He brought his arms around me and bent down to hug me as he kissed me back.
“At breaking codes,” I said.
“What?”
“Breaking codes—hey, you’re shaking.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
He looked down very seriously at me. “Because I’m crazy about you. I mean it.”
Little fires were thrilling through me, too; my face and fingers felt electric when I pressed them to his body. My breath flew out of me, and I laughed at the sensation.
“They were right about you,” I said. “You’re dangerous.”
We held on to each other hard, as if we were half afraid our dizzy heads would make us tumble.
“What does that mean, I’m dangerous?” he asked, smiling into my hair.
“It means that you’re for me, aren’t you?” I asked. “I can feel it.”
“I think I am.”
“Here, touch me, touch me.”
We ran our hands over each other, shivering. We kissed again; for a moment my fear whited out, like the color of the sun shining through my closed eyelids. He slid his hands under my shirt and gripped my waist.
“Like this,” I said. I was showing him how to hold me.”Hug me, Erik!”
“I’m here, it’s all right.”
The fear came back again, and I thought about my father, Manuel. “It was so bad in that morgue.”
“I know. You’re here now.”
I put my face against his chest and waited until the harsh feeling passed. “You’re a good person.”
“I hope so,” he said. He almost sounded frightened. “Maybe I wasn’t before I met you.”
For a while after he said that, we didn’t speak at all. We caressed and kissed each other and pressed close in the chiaroscuro of the cave.
I stepped back only when the fever dimmed a little. The light shining into the cave grew more golden. My mother was still waiting for us to find her, and we could both tell it was time to stop.
“We have to go,” I said. “I found things out in her diary. I think I can find her.”
“What things?”
“She wrote here that she didn’t stop in Flores at all.”
“She went up to the forest, then.”
“That’s right. And she writes about the path she was taking, so I have a pretty clear idea where we should be heading.”
“We’ll start up there today. What do you say? Tomorrow at the latest.”
I nodded. “I found other things out, too.”
“Yes …?”
“I think that maybe they should wait.”
He leaned his head closer to mine. “What is it?”
I hesitated. “I’ll tell you when we go get Yolanda.”
“All—right. What exactly are you talking about?”
“It has something to do with the Jade. My mother figured the puzzle out. But I’ll explain it when we get back to the hotel.”
“The maze? Then we’d better get back.” Mirth rippled over his face. “You’re too much! This whole thing is cocked.”
“I think you like some of it, actually.”
“I’m ready to do what it takes, let’s put it that way.”
On the way back in the cab he grasped my hand, and I saw the trees flashing past. I leaned my head back and pictured him, my mother, Manuel, and Yolanda someday in the future, all of us having dinner together, and a quick bolt of happiness shot through me.
And then I had a broodier, time-twisting thought that mixed in with my hope: my future depended on what I found in the jungle, and I was excited and terrified to go there with Erik.
Perhaps this mixture of emotion was just how Beatriz de la Cueva had felt when she embarked on the journey for the Jade with Balaj K’waill so many centuries ago.
CHAPTER 42
We arrived back to the Hotel Peten Itzae by two o’clock. That morning Yolanda had taken a room on the building’s first floor, while Erik and I had been led up to two apartments on the second by the landlord’s very tired wife.
I walked up to the door of Yolanda’s room and knocked. No answer. I knocked again.
“Anyone in there?” Erik called out.
“Hello?”I said.
But when we opened up the door to look inside, she wasn’t to be found.
“She must be—I don’t know, taking a shower?” I said. Yet I didn’t hear any running water. A light effervescence of angst shot across my collarbones; I felt like something wasn’t quite right, despite our reconciliation. I remembered our childhood together, and how she would first disappear from view before springing upon me in one of her wrestling holds. And a tweaking nerve ending that had frayed in my youth was warning me that perhaps I might expect some similar ambush now.
We walked up the stairs, which were made of a soft and polished wood adorned with a runner made out of a red textile. I reached the other apartments, and the one bathroom. They stood empty. I turned from that door, walked farther down the hall, and opened up the blue-painted door to my room.
Yolanda was sitting on my bed. She wasn’t wearing her hat, and her black hair fell in a tumble over her shoulders and down her back as she bent over my mother’s duffel bag, which she had rifled through. She’d scattered about the room all the atlases I’d brought and all my books and papers.
“I’ve been looking for that map you promised me,” she said.
I stayed in the doorway. The light feeling I’d had in the cab went away completely.
“It isn’t here, is it?” she asked.
“Yolanda.”
“Do you have it?”
I closed my eyes. “No. Not exactly.”
“God, Lola.” She shook her head.
Erik walked into the room.
Yolanda’s cheeks and nose were turning red; the corners of her eyes sparkled. “He told me not to get angry at you, but now that I know it’s true, I am. I really am very, very angry.”
“Who told you not to get mad at me?”
“I’m in a frenzy,” she said, in a cold and very calm voice.
“I’m not exactly sure if I should say anything right now,” Erik interjected. “But Yolanda, you’re obviously upset. A person might think that you’re going to hurt yourself, or … someone else.”He paused. “In particular, I’m not wild about the word frenzy.”
“Tell him to shut up.”
“It’s all right, Erik.”
“There’s nothing here,” she said. Her voice burned across the room. “You lied to me.”
“Of course I did,” I said.
“What?”
“Of course I lied to you. I don’t know where my mother is, Yolanda. She could be dead. Do you know what I’d do to find her? A lot more than tell a lie to my good friend.”
“Agh—you—”
“You wouldn’t have come along if I hadn’t told you what you wanted to hear. And later, you would have left us if I’d told you the whole truth.”
“I should leave you right now then, shouldn’t I?”
From below, I could hear some men talking, and then footsteps walking toward the landing before the stairs. Was that the landlord?
“I’ve found out something, though,” I said. “For real. And if you’d just give me one minute—”
I heard the downstairs footsteps rise up to us, and a familiar voice. Manuel suddenly appeared, poking his withered-looking head into the room. He stepped inside. He was wearing one of his tweed suits, and had his hair half-combed across his pate. His shoes were shined, his eyes were large and bright. But his collar was kinked, and he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.
“Are you two having that conversation, dear?” he said to Yolanda. Then, to me: “Hello, darling.”
I stared at my father who was not my father and wiped away the tears that began to run immediately down my cheeks.
“Honey?”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Hello, Erik,” Manuel said.
“Hello, Señor Alvarez. How did you know we were here?”
“I’m the one who told my daughter about this hotel.”
My father looked between Yolanda and me, and a brief pained expression flickered across his face. And this made me remember again the reason why I had cut off contact with Yolanda in the first place—because my friendship with a de la Rosa had hurt him. Or at least my mother had said so. And I’d decided to pick family first.
My stomach and throat clenched at that thought.
“It appears that you and Yolanda have had a—misunderstanding,” Manuel was saying.
“It’s a little more than a misunderstanding,” I admitted.
Yolanda sat on the bed and stared at me with her rough eyes without saying anything.
“How’d you get here?” I asked Manuel. “The roads are blocked.”
“A helicopter, of course, my love,” he said. “I’ve learned a trick or two from your mother. I certainly wouldn’t bother myself with that God-awful highway.”
“Oh.”
“So, we have more things than a squabble to deal with today,” Manuel said. “Are you ladies going to be able to make up?”
“No, Manuel,” Yolanda said.
/> “I can make it up to you,” I said.
She didn’t respond.
“And how so?” Manuel asked me.
Erik looked at Yolanda. “I think she’s got some good news for us.”
“I’ve found some things out,” I said. I wiped my wet cheek again. “I got hold of one of Mom’s diaries, and she writes in it that she went to the forest over a week ago, so we have to head up there as soon as possible.”
“Oh, Lord,”Manuel said.
“And she also writes about the Jade. I think she figured out part of the path that leads to it. She found out what the Maze of Deceit was—and we can use it as a kind of guide to find her. The maze isn’t completely … decoded … but Mom writes about the key to it in her journal. I think I know where to look for it. And if we find it, we can decipher it, and find out the way she went.”
Manuel frowned. “That’s all a bit much for me. Are you saying she found the maze? That doesn’t seem like her—she didn’t say anything about this to me.”
“I know.”
“You must be mistaken.”
“I’m not. I can show you.”
“So you’re talking about deciphering the first maze. …” Erik folded his forehead into an accordion as he pondered this. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“The Maze of Deceit wasn’t a structure—a building—like we’d imagined. It was the Stelae. The panels.”
“The Stelae?”Manuel asked.
“Oh—no—hold on,” Erik said.
Yolanda still sat on the bed glaring at me, not uttering a word.
I looked from her to Erik. “It’s true—she decoded it. Though we don’t have the deciphered version here—she sent it back to Long Beach for safekeeping.”
“No—wait,” Erik said. “I was thinking that—before—in the car. That the Stelae might have something to do with all this …”
“Yes, all right,” I said.
“No, I’m just telling you that I seriously was. Before Yolanda smashed her car up and distracted me—”
“Yes, yes—I believe you.”
The Queen Jade Page 21
