I reached down and turned off the light.
“I guess I’m done with my labors for the night,” he said.
“Not exactly.”
I couldn’t see him or myself in the dark, and after I had hauled us over to the bed I had a bad moment when the things I had learned in the last day began to crowd my mind. I hovered over him, not speaking, touching the hair falling away from his forehead. But my worries continued to struggle inside me, and I wondered if I really could do this at all. So I hesitated; the shadows continued to fold around us, and I could hear us breathing, swallowing. He did not press. He kissed my fingers; he kissed my palm and wrist bone.
“It’s all right,” he said. “This is enough for right now.”
But I didn’t want it to be enough. I bent down toward him.
“Oh, no,” I said, “you won’t get off so easily.”
“Ah, the dominant modern woman,” he said in a teasing tone. “You know, in the eighth-century Maya tradition, it was very common for the man to take the courtship lead, as Central American maidens were supposed to be very docile and innocent, and liked to run shrieking from their suitors, though obviously today that would be somewhat tedious or even frightening—”
“Stop talking,” I said.
Then I took his hand. And I was so gentle. At first.
A chatty, sexy, maddening, Latin, and very large man must be made to know who’s boss right away, in the first seduction. First teasing, tickling, and very slightly scratching, I took a furious joy in stripping him of all available language until he could only answer me with his hands and his treelike thighs. There were certain moments, I’ll admit, when he was the one getting the better of me, though I was not one to complain too much when I discovered myself aloft in the air a foot above that narrow bed, wildly moving my elbows as if they were wings that might keep me afloat. I heard his devilish chuckling somewhere in the nether regions around my hips. And then all was soft—all tender soft, I found he could be—though his raspy pelt rubbed against my ribs, my chest, giving rise to the most heavenly of inflammations. I wrapped myself around his massive waist; he curled himself about me, head to tail, and nudged his muzzle onto my cheek.
There was a moment, right before, when he reached up his hand and cupped my face.
“My beauty,” he said. “My beautiful girl.”
Then I held him tighter and tighter, and I was smiling and moving like a porpoise. I think I surprised him by how strong I was, and how I wrangled him about and made him yelp with happiness. The floorboards shook beneath us, and the bed half-hopped about the room like a colt, and I took that man and pressed him to my breast, and I kissed the breath out of him so that he lay back, stunned. From my pillow, I felt this tornado of laughter come out of me. Everything lifted, I was happy; though I tried to keep quiet enough so that no one else in the bed-and-breakfast could hear.
And then it happened again. And again.
CHAPTER 45
Two A.M.
As I walked softly back through the halls, which were inky black and full of obstacles, I could hear a faint rain tapping on the roof.
I walked down the stairs; I felt the runner’s rough cloth under my feet.
Then I found my way to the door of Yolanda’s room. I knocked.
“Yolanda?”
She must not have been sleeping. I started and jumped back when she opened the door. The light had been turned on in her room, and she was a dark daguerreotype in front of the lamp.
I waited, and she didn’t say anything.
“Are you coming with us tomorrow?” I asked.
“You mean today.”
“Are you coming with us today?”
She kept on staring at me with such an angry look.
“I—I know how you feel about your father. Or at least I’m starting to. I’m this close to being in the same position as you. So don’t turn away from me.”
“I told you once before not to talk about my father.”
I paused. “Fine.” I stared at her. “Are you coming with us?”
“What do you think?”
“Yolanda, I’m so sorry about everything.”
“Go back to your boyfriend,” she said.
She shut the door.
But in the morning, she was packed and ready before all of us. She put her hat back on; she slung a heavy pack over her shoulders, along with some other items we’d need for the trip. She’d spent the day before not just in moody hiding, as we thought, but in shopping via the credit card she found in my mother’s duffel bag. New rubber tarps and metal spades, flashlights and two machetes, snacks, painkillers, the antibug spray called DEET, and synthetic fiber hammocks stacked up against the foyer wall. In the kitchen, she stamped about in her big suede hiking boots, disturbing Erik as he sat at the breakfast table scribbling rapidly over a rustling sheaf of paper. She intimidated the landlord’s daughters while she slammed down some coffee and ate an apple with noisy bites. (The daughters were also, I will say, shooting curious and somewhat scandalized glances at me on account of the involuntary joyous sounds that had escaped from me in the night; I tried very hard to ignore the shocked and newly intelligent expressions on their smooth faces.)
“If there is anything to find out there with this new map of yours,” Yolanda said to Erik, “I’m going to find it.”
“I have to figure it out first,” Erik replied, not even looking up. “Though I think I might be close—even if what I’m deciphering doesn’t … doesn’t quite …”
“Doesn’t quite what?” I asked.
“I can’t say yet—just give me a little while longer,” he said.
“If you’re really interested in finding Juana, you’d better hurry up,” Yolanda grunted.
“He’s working hard, dear,” Manuel said. “We can all see that.”
She frowned, though at least she was talking to them; Yolanda wouldn’t even look at me. When I tried to touch her arm, she stepped back. Then she walked away.
Within the next hour, we were on our way to the Peten forest.
CHAPTER 46
At noon on November 6, we found ourselves on the road that stretches northwest from Flores, through the small riparian town of Sacpuy, and up through the part of the Peten forest called the Maya Biosphere Reserve. This passage forms the initial part of the Scarlet Macaw Trail, a byway that cuts through from Sacpuy, past the large and splendid Laguna Perdida, or Lost Lake, and into the first reaches of the jungle’s buffer zone, a ten-to-fifteen-kilometer-wide swath of land where the government continues to permit slash-and-burn farming. We planned to stop at the Lost Lake, leave our car by the side of the highway, then cut on foot northeastward through the buffer zone until we hit the mouth of the river Sacluc—the same tributary over which de la Cueva and Von Humboldt had crossed, where Oscar Angel Tapia discovered, or stole, the Flores Stelae, and where my mother intended to travel in the days before Mitch hit. By that time, we all hoped Erik would have unraveled the Maze of Deceit from the clues left by my mother, and we would be able to discern the correct jungle path upon which to proceed. If we then found anything that looked like a ruin of a city, we would see if we might find the “dragon tree,” or Dracaena draco, which both de la Cueva and Von Humboldt wrote of as a key signpost in their letters and journal. And after that we’d have to puzzle out the second maze, the Labyrinth of Virtue, being the riddle that begins with the gnomic lines “The Roughest Path to Take/The Harshest Road to Tread/Is the one We must Make/Tho’ our Hearts fill with Dread” … hoping all the time that my mother was following the same clues.
But all of that was far ahead of us, as we had miles to go before then.
The road that runs northeast through the jungle of the Peten showed signs of recent flooding, though much of the high water had already drained into the rivers below. Shaggy olive bushes and chartreuse palms lined the road, along with remnants of banana farms and wet acres where farmers once cultivated corn, beans, and chili. Manuel drove us down the pocked and mar
shy highway, occasionally with such trepidation that he pressed his chin nearly up to the driving wheel of the Ford Bronco that Yolanda had somehow rented the day before. She sat beside him in the front, jostled by the thwacking of the wheels; Erik and I remained in the back. He was still working on his decipherment, scoring the paper with his pen and spanning the pages with arrows and cross-outs, as well as numbers and words.
“You’re getting it, aren’t you?” I asked.
He nodded. “I think I am. I was just confused at first.”
“What does it say?” Yolanda asked.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “The text, I mean. The way it reads. I’m still checking my work—I have to make sure that I’m doing this correctly.”
Yolanda slapped at the rearview mirror so that she could take a good look at him. “Let’s hear it.”
“I said I was still checking my work—”
“Is there a problem?” Manuel asked.
“It’s—well—look,” Erik said, shaking a handful of papers at me. “The maze—the Stelae—it’s made up of … tales, or something.”
“Tales,” Manuel repeated.
“What’s he talking about?” Yolanda asked.
“I certainly couldn’t tell you,” Manuel said.
“Stories—I’m deciphering a handful of stories,” Erik replied. “And they’re all related to the legend—they have the same characters. You’re supposed to use the tales as guides when you get to the mouth of the Sacluc, where Tapia found the maze—or, the Stelae. Lola, last night I showed you a part of the text before I started working on the numbered cipher.”
“Where you skipped every line.”
“Yes, and after I did that and used the cipher, I translated it into this. I think it’s written in the voice of the Eldest Brother:
THE STORY OF THE KING
I was once a true King, fierce and Noble. Born under the Sign of the Feathered Serpent, I possessed all power over Earth and Sea and Man. On account of my one great Gift, it was my Destiny to Rule this land for one thousand years in perfect peace. Every soft girl I desired would call herself my wife, and embrace no other. Every strong man would bow before me as a slave and despair. …
He read this out loud, and everyone went very quiet for a long, tense minute.
This was our map. But there was no “X marks the spot.” There was no description of a specific cave like in The Count of Monte Cristo, no pointing skeleton like in Treasure Island.
I think that I can speak for all of us when I say that the morose complaint of an extinct king was not quite what we’d been hoping for from the decoded Maze of Deceit.
CHAPTER 47
The Story of the King’?” Yolanda blurted out, in the car.
“Could you repeat that?” Manuel asked.
” ‘Born under the sign of the Feathered Serpent’?” Yolanda exclaimed again.
Manuel frowned over his shoulder. “Erik, you’re not making any sense.”
“Oh, I’ll explain it to you,” Yolanda said. “Though you won’t like it. That’s not a map.”
I raised my hand like a crossing guard. “There’s no option. We have to make sense of it.”
“I’ll show you how it’s a map,” Erik said, “if you’ll just give me more time to make sure I’m not missing anything—”
“I can’t use that to get us through the jungle,” Yolanda answered. “That’s a practical joke, not an atlas. No … forget it. I’ve decided. We’re going to have to go east once we hit the Sacluc. It’s the only rational choice.”
“Why east?” Manuel asked.
“I was telling them before,” she said, batting her hand in our direction, “my father always thought he might find something in the west, but my idea was that closer by Tikal, and those ruins—eastward—we’d be more likely to find some sort of structure.”
“Perhaps,” Manuel said. “But on my last trip to the forest I—I lost my compass. So I’m really not sure how to find the landmarks.”
“I’m very confident that the way is east,” Yolanda emphasized.
“Just hold on,” I said. “Erik, how did you figure this out? Could you be missing something?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. As far as I can tell, it’s parsing perfectly—the numerical cipher’s a transposition code.”
Erik explained to Manuel and Yolanda about how he’d skipped every other line of hieroglyphs, and then said: “The text is divided up into units of five symbol-words. In de la Cueva’s letter, where she describes that dancing lesson with Balaj K’waill—the one that Juana writes about in her journal—K’waill mentions the numbers four, three, two, one, zero.”
“That was when he was jeering at de la Cueva,” Manuel said. “When he said that Guatemalans were backward, he was teasing her with the clue.”
“That’s right. The only thing I couldn’t figure out at first was what the zero stood for, until I realized that each zero corresponds to the symbol for jade in the text.”
“What does that mean?” Yolanda asked.
“That the symbol for jade is a dummy. It’s means nothing—and everything, at the same time. You can only understand the text if you cross out each instance of the word. So the first sentence of the un-cracked text, once you parse it into the units of five, becomes—
The of story the jade
once was I king jade
fierce king true a jade
and then, striking out all the instances of the word jade and reversing the passages, like Balaj K’waill instructs you to—”
“Four, three, two, one,” I said. “It’s backward, so you reverse it to one, two, three, four.”
“Yes—”
The of story the
once was I king
fierce king true a
becomes—
The Story of the King
I was once a true king, fierce … and noble, etc.
“It was so easy to crack,” Manuel said, though without bitterness.
“Yes, it’s not very hard, now,” Erik said.
“Well, as to the bit about the zero blotting out the symbols for jade, that’s an ancient trick,” Yolanda said. She turned in her seat, directly toward Erik. “It’s old hacker’s wisdom. You know: ‘In a riddle whose answer is ‘chess,’ the only word that must not be used is chess.”
“It’s amazing!” I said.
“It is clever,” Manuel agreed. “Excellent, Erik. You’ve done it. And so …maybe my daughter was right to bring you along, after all. I might have to revise my opinion of you.”
“You will, I guarantee it,” Erik said, his head still bent over the pages. Mine was too. “In a couple of days, you’ll be crazy about me, Señor Alvarez.”
“Oh, dear,” Manuel said. And I could tell from his tone that he wasn’t responding to Erik; nor did he sound as if he were even talking about the maze.
“I’m not going to revise my opinion of—” Yolanda was saying.
“Look,” Manuel interrupted.
Erik, Yolanda, and I gazed up and through the windshield, and stopped discussing codes and keys.
The landscape had deteriorated mile by mile, and this far north it had turned into a flooded disaster area. We passed by patches of forest that were nothing more than scorched, dripping lands, fringed by shattered homes and trees with lime-colored bark and yellow leaves. We maneuvered past caved-in sections of the road; here chocolate-colored earth, streaked with lime and pebbled with stones, extruded into the paved areas, thick, deep, and making exhaling sounds when the car’s wheels crushed on by. We saw people picking blown litter off their milpas, or farms; two women and a man stood in front of shattered huts and simply cried.
“Terrible, terrible,” Manuel said.
“It used to be beautiful here,” Erik said. “My father used to take me out around this area, during the summer. … I don’t recognize it now.”
I pressed my hands on the window glass. “It’s ruined.”
“Stop,” Yolanda said.
“This has something to do with me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just stop right here. I’m getting out.”
“Just for a minute, Dad,” I said.
“All right.”
“Give them some of our supplies,” I said.
But Yolanda had already thought of that.
She dug through one of the knapsacks, pulled out several containers of dried fish, and ran out into the mud to give these packages to a woman standing before one of the huts. The woman had very long dark eyebrows, and dead, set eyes that stared out at the settlement with a jolting expression of total, wise, but unaccepting comprehension. While Yolanda handed her the packages, she asked her a few questions; the woman shook her head.
Then Yolanda ran back to the car and slammed the door. “Twenty people died in that woman’s village.”
“Did you ask her if she’d seen my mother?”
She had been ignoring me for a full day, but talked to me now.
“Yes, she hadn’t. And she told me she hadn’t seen her family in days, either. She’s … in shock, I think.”
In the rearview mirror, her eyes met mine for a second.
Her face twisted before she looked away from me again. “She says that even more people died farther north.”
We stopped talking; Erik kept scratching at his paper. I had a momentary vision of my mother’s eyes as Manuel pressed the car down the shifting road. I could sense the weather getting warmer, and even more moist than before. The burned and green and wet fields passed us by. Birds clawed through the thick air. The remaining bronze leaves on the mahoganies shuddered in the wind, like hands on long thin arms that made unintelligible signs.
Our car passed two, three, four more destroyed towns. We drove on.
CHAPTER 48
At three in the very hot, very humid afternoon, the four of us reached the outskirts of the Lost Lake, the point from which we’d agreed to begin making our way into the bush. I’d been hoping to see a car parked along the road, as a sign that my mother might have been here in the days before. But there was no such indication. The rain forest thrust abruptly from the ground, incongruously, green, woolly, and empty of any visible human habitation. The air felt thick and swarmed with bugs and hot mists; our clothes hung heavy on our bodies, and our shoes stuck in the mud when we stepped out of the car. The light had begun to dim. The sky turned slate-colored and appeared full of rain; the deeper reaches of the forest seemed very dark indeed.
The Queen Jade Page 23
