Yolanda, Manuel, and Erik stopped walking.
“Oh—my—” Yolanda said. “This is it.”
“Just hold on,” Erik said, excited. “Just wait.”
“No, you can see,” Manuel said. “A tumulus; it could be something. A mound of earth—that’s how Maudslay knew he’d stumbled on Quiriguá.”
I knew that he was referring to the nineteenth-century scholar of Maya ruins in the Motagua Valley, but otherwise I didn’t know what they were talking about. I couldn’t read this place at all. Von Humboldt, writing in the 1800s, had described finding the Elder Brother’s blue city after following the direction of the Dwarf: “A tall, crumbled, fantastic city rose before our eyes, all spires and turrets, with great devastated keeps and eroded ramparts, even as it now sank into the muds and soughs.” If this was it, then it had sunk almost completely into the swamps, as here only mounds of mud dipped into lower shallows, and in dug-out sections rocks were strewn about with bits and crags of timber from the broken trees. We walked toward the clearing, picking through muck and deepening shadows. Above us, the chattering of the animals sounded loud and insistent. The air pressed against us, hot, full, and very wet.
Yolanda crouched down by one of the rocks, and I recognized the old adventurer’s expression passing over her face; she was nearly happy. She turned her Maglite onto the site. “This is it! It’s a line of carved stone!”
We all bent down, grabbing at the broken rocks that appeared in the mud; some were very large, too big to dig out, and as we heaved off as much mud as possible, we saw underneath what appeared to be a large flat rectangle of basalt that stretched through the area. We started to dip our hands into water that stood in pockets in the ground and splash it over the stone.
“Look, look, look, look!” Erik belted. “It is—it’s been hewed. It’s man-made.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell yet.”
“This is it. This is what he was looking for.”When Yolanda said “he,” I knew she meant her father.
“It’s a foundation,” Erik said. “It looks like a foundation for a temple. Like the ones they found at Quiriguá and Tikal.”
“Could it be part of a city?”
“I’d say it could.”
“I can’t believe it!” Yolanda said.
“I think it looks like Classic Maya,” he said.
“Then where is she?” I yelled at them.
Erik looked up at me. Manuel already stood on the outer edge of the clearing, staring through the violet light. Yolanda stayed crouched on the ground, pouring handfuls of water over the stones and picking through the dirt with her fingers until she had cleaned off yet more sections of the rock foundation. It emerged from the mud in precise, artistic geometric shapes, forming hard-edged rectangles and squares through the sodden jungle floor. As she danced over the sumps and leaves, heaving the vegetation off this buried structure, more networks of stone appeared. She uncovered vertical lines of thick rock so exact that they could never be the creation of nature; here were angular depressions descending into a carved stairway; beyond that sat a fallen column of stone incised on every millimeter with delicate images of flowers, priests, women, words, stars, and suns.
She sat back, exclaiming. “I think it runs as far as we can see. The foundation. It could go miles through the forest—there could be an entire palace here, under the swamp. And Erik might be right—I think it could be Classic Maya. We need to be able to read these markings, though. It’s too soon to tell. And—” she was looking around. “It’s all basalt. But it looks like there’s pieces of jade facing. We’ll have to test it to make sure.”
“But we might have found the ruins of a city, is what you’re telling me,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“Then where is she?” I asked again. “She should be here—do you see any tracks?”
We all looked down, but if someone had walked through in the past few days, their footprints wouldn’t have held in that soft mud.
“Okay,” Erik said. “We have to find that tree, right?”
“Right,” I said. “The dragon tree. My mother would have been looking for it. And then she would have tried to solve that—that riddle.”
“The second maze in the story.”
“Yes.”
“So—what does a dragon tree look like?” Erik said.
“I told you,” Yolanda said. “It has red sap. That’s why it has that name. People used to think that the sap was blood, and the dragons were men who’d been cursed by witches and turned into trees.”
“All I see around me are trees,” I said. “Help me look for it!”
“All right.” She stood up. “What have we got here …”
But Manuel had thought ahead of us. He was on the far eastern edge of the clearing, standing next to one of the trees that had been half torn down by the storm.
“This is it,” he said, in a quiet voice. “I already found it.”
“Are there any tracks?” I said, walking over to him. “Is there any sign of anything?”
“Not that I can see.”
“It does have red sap,” Erik said, looking down at the broken tree and touching the bark with his fingers, which came back stained a dark burgundy color.
Next to me, Yolanda pressed her hands to her heart. “That means—it means we could find—”
“The Stone?”Manuel said.
“Juana,” Yolanda said, uncertainly.
Manuel nodded. “Perhaps she has found it first.”
Again, silence greeted that prediction. We stood there, not looking at each other; I refused to see the expression on their faces.
But then Erik said, “That wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
He leaned back his head and called out my mother’s name, several times, in his loudest voice. I did too. We walked back and forth, through the clearing, shouting out for her. Then Manuel did as well. And Yolanda.
There was no response except for the shrieking of the birds and the spiders above.
I sat down on one of the trunks of the trees, and took off my pack; I held on to my hip, which was burning.
“Lola?” Yolanda said. “Can you make it?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Lola?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s take the next step. We have to figure out which direction to go.”
“It’s time to solve the Maze of Virtue,” Erik said.
“Yes,”I said.”It is.”
CHAPTER 58
I reached into my pack and took out the papers and the journal that I’d wrapped and wrapped again in that plastic to keep it safe from the rain. But the Xeroxes were more damaged from water than ever, and they stuck together in clumps; some of the ink had not run down the page, but just washed off. I picked through the papers until I reached the section of de la Cueva that I was looking for. The muddled type would soon be nothing but a smear, but with the aid of the words that I’d memorized, I could read the bleary lines to my friends:
… he fled his Mad city. He passed the Dragon Tree … toward the East. Here, he hid within a second Maze of his own making. This, he called the Labyrinth of Virtue.
And of what was this crazed Puzzle composed?
Of nothing more than a riddle:
The Roughest Path to Take
The Harshest Road to Tread
Is the one We must Make
Tho’ our Hearts fill with Dread
The Hardest Pass to Walk
In these Days foul and Fast
When crooked sin us Mocks
Is ours to Brave and Last
He who steers due from Hell
For he who bears the Waves
The Jade waits in her Dell
And the Good Man is Repaid
A round of mute stupefaction greeted my reading of that riddle.
“Well, does anyone know what that means?” I asked.
“Let me think,” Yolanda said. “I’m drawing a blank. Manuel?”<
br />
“I have no idea,” he said. “Let’s see—‘the roughest path to tread.’ Sounds like what we’ve been on for the past three days.”
” ‘The hardest pass to walk …,’ “ Erik recited. “Maybe it means we have to go back the way we came—that’d be the hardest pass for me. Or it could mean a circle, or it could mean going downward, into Hades. It’s the labyrinth that Odysseus traveled through. Or it could mean a straight line. The Greeks had a theory about a labyrinth made up of one continuous plumb path.”
“Odysseus, the Greeks,” Yolanda said, her voice cracking. “Keep on track, here. The Greeks had nothing to do with the Maya.”
“It’s just an idea, I’m just thinking out loud.”
“Let’s not get negative,” Manuel said, “the boy’s trying.”
“I just want us to keep focused,” Yolanda said.
“Remember,” I said, “not only do we have to think of what the riddle might mean, we have to figure out what my mother thought it meant.”
“You’re right,” Yolanda said. “Did she ever talk to you about it?”
“Never.”
“You, Manuel? Any theories?”
“No, dear, not at the moment. But I do wish you’d hurry and figure this one out, as it will be perfectly dark here soon.”
But we couldn’t hurry up and figure it out. We had no idea what to do.
For a long while we sat there in the forest, surrounded by the ancient rocks and the ghosts of old priests and gods, and the felled bleeding tree, and tried to think.
Did Juana write anything about it in that journal of hers?” Yolanda asked, when no one had any ideas.
The trees darkened in the forest. The air, though still humid, was less searing hot. Evening closed in.
“No,” I said. “It was mostly about the Stelae. She only wrote one comment about it, I remember, but it wasn’t exactly … well …”
“What?”Erik said.
“Let’s hear it,” Manuel said.
I looked down at my pack and rummaged through until I found the soiled, half-soaked, salmon-colored journal. I opened it up and saw that the pages were tattered and clumped together; on some leaves the ink had transformed from words into blue blossoms.
“Can you read that?”
“I think so,” I said. “She did write one thing …”
I unfolded the diary. The leaves rode up, crinkled, and had to be pulled out straight and reshaped again very gently. I sculpted the soft book until I reached the page I wanted. I read to them the passage my mother wrote out after she had transcribed her translation of the Stelae, and was making plans to head up here, north.
October 25. …
My first task will be to use the Maze of Deceit as a map in the forest. 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.
” ‘As for the Maze of Virtue, I think that’s fairly straightforward,’ “ Yolanda repeated, slowly.
“It seems she figured it out quickly enough,” Erik said. His face turned purple with confusion. “It’s not straightforward at all.”
I began laughing, and so did Yolanda and Manuel.
“I am quite surprised that you are not demanding credit,” Manuel crowed. “From what I understand it’s quite unlike you, my boy, to miss out an opportunity for praise and glory.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
Yolanda’s scuffed face had transformed all at once; her mouth moved up, she began to smile. Then she started to pound Erik on the shoulder.
“Good God, what?” he said.
“Maybe you’re not a clown after all,” she said. “And you should know that is a very high compliment from me.”
“It is,” I agreed.
“And what did I do to deserve such praise?”
“Well, you solved it.”
“You’re losing me.”
“You did!” I yelled. “The Greeks? The labyrinth made up of one continuous line?”
And then he got it, too. “Of course, I did! Yes! I’m a genius!”
“Let’s not go that far,” Yolanda said. “But good job, anyway—it’s obvious now. The harshest road to take, and the hardest line to walk, is the straight line. Like you said.”
“The straight and narrow,” I chimed in.
“The Labyrinth of Virtue,” Manuel said. “The virtuous man avoids ‘crooked sin’ and walks on the unswerving path. As will we. ‘Toward the East.’ “
Erik was so happy about his riddle-cracking that we congratulated him just a little bit more, and he received this abbreviated adulation with very good grace. Then we all stood up to get our gear and began to chase down this last, true course.
I had a harder time than the others, though.
By now my hip had stopped hurting so much, but this was not a good sign, as my leg proved only partially useful. I had to move my left thigh by aiding it with my hands as we pursued our direction through the forest, to where the Jade was said to be hidden.
Nevertheless, I kept up with my friends, and the four of us walked together for another mile until we came across the cave.
CHAPTER 59
North of the river Sacluc, and east of the forest’s infamous dragon tree, a few miles within the Maya Biosphere’s core area, there is a small cave in the lee of a hill.
It is not easy to spot at first, particularly in the near pitch-dark, unless you are traveling with experts in the field of Maya architecture and topography. That is, unless you know what an ancient cave looks like.
Under the lee of this hill sat a tumulus, a primordial mound once hollowed out by hand. To the ancient Maya, caves, wells, and water-holes were sacred spaces; in-between zones where the living and the underworld communed.
Grass covered the sides of the hummock, as well as stonecrops and saxifrages with tiny white and yellow petals that were lit by pale fire when struck by our flashlights. Birds perched and pecked at the blossoms that strung across at the cave’s gloomy mouth.
“We’re here,” Yolanda breathed. “We found it.” I didn’t call out my mother’s name; I was too afraid. I didn’t say one word, and only gripped my Maglite.
I was the first one in.
The light flashed very harsh and pearly into a space that I couldn’t gauge; the cave extended much deeper than it had appeared from the front, though the sides were close and narrow. The bottom of the cavern was filled with water up to my ankles, and as my torch moved over the area, I saw that it descended into some deep black place we’d have to plumb.
We moved down, and all three flashlights spangled across the stalactites and the dripping limestone halls like beacons. Red hieroglyphs blazed from the walls in the images of dragons and hunchbacks, which I didn’t bother to read yet. Fool’s gold glimmered from the crevices of the cave, as well as the flashing red eyes of lizards and bats. I heard a flapping; a flourish; water pouring. I ducked into a system of thin hot tunnels, which I had to maneuver through by touch, as there was insufficient room to cast my flashlight around. My hip was going numb, and I fell into the water before Erik grabbed me from behind.
But I walked on my own two feet most of the way. I breathed very heavily in the close air and heard my friends breathing too, and the sloshing of their feet through the water, and Manuel slipping, and Yolanda falling. We reached another very low, very black pass, which I squeezed through.
I found I could stand up. I was in some kind of room.
I moved my light back up through the air and saw I was in a large, carved-out space with half-faded markings on the wall. A long blue object sat on the raised and dry center of the floor. It was a massive piece of worked blue jade, rectangular in shape, and so pure that when I cast my torch on it, the stone burst into a dazzle of fiery cobalt light. The jade object’s carvings threw sapphire and azure shapes onto the wall, stars and whorls and half-moons that flickered and revolved
over the limestone like the lustral rays of a magic lantern. The surface of the stone, incised with the intricacy of the Flores Stelae in those hieroglyphs of gods and warriors, as delicate as Moorish calligraphy, reflected shades of turquoise and opal, peacock and dark veins of absolute indigo. Beneath the changeable surface of the stone’s skin burned a constant, deep, dreamlike color: rich, on the edge of black, touched with gloss. A perfect blue.
But there was something else. This long angled jade didn’t resemble the stone in de la Cueva’s story. It was not a solid megalith at all but was instead—hollow. It was a box. An oblong box. There was something in it.
As I stepped forward again, unsure what I was looking at, I saw lying next to this box the prostrate figure of a woman. She was struggling to sit up and blinking in the light.
The woman pushed herself onto her elbows, and wet silver hair fell over her left cheek. My mother’s black eyes shone out like an owl’s in the flashlight’s glare. The thinner curve of her cheekbones stood out against the blackness around her. I saw the fragile lines around her eyes and her mouth, which deepened into creases that fanned about her knifelike nose as she turned her head up to me. A large spreading bruise flushed around her left temple and eye, and a tracery of mud appeared on her neck. Her mouth moved, but she did not make a sound yet. Her white shirt and jeans were soaked and ripped into cotton shards; she had taken her shoes off, and her right leg was turned awkwardly around, as if it might be sprained or broken.
I ran. My heart rang and rang inside me like a church bell.
The Queen Jade Page 29
