by Farris, John
She turned and limped toward the huts lining one side of the plaza.
"What were you cussing at 'Nica for?" Hazen asked me. He was wearing a revolver in a belt holster, two half-gallon bags of water in a shoulder yoke, and a backpack he had crammed with some things from the helicopter, including a first-aid kit.
"I think she's going bush on us," I said. "Maybe we should search the huts."
He aimed his light in Veronica's direction. I saw children, wearing shell necklaces and stripes of red and yellow paint on their bodies, withdraw into shadows. The invisible dogs were still barking. An old woman with an infant wrapped in a shawl looked out at us from a doorway.
"Not yet. Let's see what 'Nica's up to."
Veronica made some sounds like tongue-clicks, and waited at the edge of the plaza to be acknowledged. After a few seconds she was answered. She approached one of the huts; a fire was flickering on the floor inside. An old man appeared, stooped and with half his right arm missing. He was wearing a headdress like an upside-down pot, a beaded breastplate, and a belt of colorful feathers—decorated like an old vet left behind while younger men marched off to war.
She spoke to him for a couple of minutes, raising her hands to the sky to emphasize a point. It was hard to tell if he was hostile, but he obviously wasn't dangerous. He shook his head several times; each time his protest, or denial, seemed weaker. Finally he answered her. Veronica nodded, and came back to us, pausing to reach up painfully and take a lantern from one of the pedestals.
"He was a sorcerer," she explained, "but he lost part of his arm to the bite of a coral snake, and also his powers. Now his sons are the priests of the temple. The language here is Yucatec, not Itzá, and the idiom is old, I had difficulty to understand him. We're going this way, I think about a twenty-minute walk. Follow me."
Veronica had taken a dozen steps when a stone was thrown from shadows. She shied, and it missed her. But the abrupt sideways motion caused her to cry out. I heard, like an echo, a wailing sound, a lamentation, from the hut of the old sorcerer. More stones came at us, without much force behind them.
Veronica said tautly, "By the way, we will not be welcome there. You can stay behind with Benito, if you wish."
"Wouldn't want to miss anything," Hazen said, glancing wryly at me.
I fell in behind Veronica as we passed between two of the large buildings. Jaguar pelts had been attached to the walls. Just behind the buildings the forest loomed, but there was a paved path, only about a yard wide, winding off between trees deformed by the embrace of strangler vines thicker than my arm. She had been right about the depths of darkness inside the forest. One lantern, two flashlight beams attracting swarms of insects, the big hardshell kamikaze type, and still I felt as if I were walking blindly into the throat of something that would consume me. Beetles with sticky legs got hung up in the hair of my forearms, adding to the spooky discomfort.
On either side of the path vegetation and vines had been hacked neatly and vertically to a height of about twelve feet, where the overarching branches were woven together almost impenetrably. The path, of unmortared loaf-sized blocks, was slightly humped to allow for runoff. The stones had been recently scraped clean of lichen.
Veronica stopped suddenly, then reached down slowly and picked up a piece of black glass.
"Part of an obsidian blade," Hazen muttered. "Razor-sharp."
"There may be other shards," Veronica said. "Be careful where you step, they will slice through the sole of a boot." There were a few lizards on the winding forest path, but no litter. Each step might have taken us closer to the monotonous drums and low tones of primitive woodwinds, but as the minutes went by I couldn't be sure we were making progress. I wished I could see the moon overhead. The night was still cooling, and I had a bout of chills as the path crossed a wide swampy area on crude wooden footbridges. Then the path sloped upward, and we left the swamp behind.
I thought I smelled smoke. Veronica was moving more slowly, her limp more pronounced. She seemed to be dragging herself along. We stopped for water. When she raised one of the flexible water bottles to her lips, I saw a thread of fresh blood on her chin.
"You've done enough," I told her. "Go back now, while you still can."
"It makes no difference. I will not leave here alive tonight. But there is still a chance for you and Glen. And Sharissa." She wiped her mouth, looking at us with exhausted eyes. "Vámanos. I think we are almost to the top of this hill."
Before long firelight was visible through the spaces between thinned-out trees. As we approached, the flickering light became the flames of a fire made from the trunks and branches of whole trees; we could feel the heat a hundred yards away. The fire was blazing near the center of a plaza twice the size of the one in the village. The wind carried a torrent of sparks high above the big trees growing inside the plaza's perimeter. We saw dancers, moving elaborately, slowly exchanging one posture for another, silhouetted against the flames. But the most remarkable sights were the temples at either end of the plaza. They had stairstep terraces, with smaller structures mounted on each terrace, and one very long central staircase rising at a forty-five-degree angle to the topmost terrace, which was nearly at treetop level. Stone carvings capped the pyramids: a crouching jaguar, a serpent with a human, a kingly head like some versions I'd seen on tree-stones at Kan Petén. The figures were realistically painted. The eyes of the spotted cat, fixed on the celebrants in the plaza below, glinted like jade dinner plates in firelight reflected from the underside of the forest canopy.
We reached the edge of an I-shaped ballcourt with seating on both sides. Veronica set her lantern aside and warned us to turn the flashlights off. We didn't need them anyway; the fire, and torches shaped like ebony wine goblets with long stems, provided plenty of light.
"What do you make of this?" I said to Hazen, who had taken a Leica with a zoom lens from his backpack.
"The most amazing goddamned thing I've ever seen. Early Classic design; there are similar temples at Tikal and Rio Azul, but not so elaborate. And nothing this well preserved anywhere."
"Flash that camera," Veronica said, "and you will have your throat cut in no time."
"Not using a flash, but I have to get some pictures." The look on his face was ecstatic. His hands were trembling; he seemed afraid that it was a mirage, or a hallucination, and was about to disappear. "They must have spent weeks plastering and painting to get ready for tonight."
I looked around us. The trees at the edge of the plaza were thickly hung with lianas, a screen behind which we were as inconspicuous as shadows. And the Maya may have been under the influence of their strange, three- and four-note music for hours. I could understand why; the beat of drums, the doleful woodwinds, was painfully seductive. It appealed to a primitive part of me I had never been aware of. It influenced my emotions, and made it difficult to think coherently.
Veronica licked her bloody lips and jostled me. "Snap out of it, Buzzerball."
"Right. Okay." Hazen had edged off closer to the plaza for a better angle on the jaguar temple. "What do we do now?" I asked her.
She almost laughed, but it turned into a grimace.
"It might only take us another day or two to explore inside these temple."
"Are they hollow?"
"Many rooms inside. It is a very sacred place where they will offer their sacrifice. Which means that the sacrificial altar must be in a place known only to the Timekeeper, and the immortals."
Nobody is immortal, I wanted to say. I looked at my watch. It had stopped. I had forgotten to wind it after Veronica gave it back to me.
"How much time do we have?"
"Until the silence. When the music, the dancing stop. And everyone waits for the immortal one to reappear, to bless them."
"After Sharissa is dead."
"This is what I think. But I do not know for sure." She looked unsteady on her feet. I put an arm around her. "You need to sit down for a little while."
"Then I may not ge
t up again." Veronica looked shyly away from me, as if she'd shared a secret, and I had reacted badly to it. "Doan worry so much. I am not buying the farm yet." She asked me to help her off with the backpack and to take out the binoculars. She scanned the plaza, then concentrated her study on the jaguar temple which, I thought, faced west. But I had no orientation after our walk through pitch-black forest, and what sky I could see was filled with flying sparks, not stars.
"Glen," Veronica said softly, "come here."
He clicked off another couple of shots, then came back to us.
Veronica handed him the binoculars. Then she leaned against me, and clutched my hand. I felt flattered, and scared. The sudden violent motion of avoiding the stone had torn something inside; it was making her bleed. She had to have a doctor, and soon. Sharissa, now Veronica—I couldn't let either of them die, but I felt frustrated and helpless.
"The temple of the Vision-Serpent is a tomb, I think," she said to Hazen.
He looked it over. "Uh-huh. I don't know who he was. 'Most holy lord'—there's a cartouche for ch 'ul ahou, the animal form."
"They would not perform a ritual sacrifice to prolong life in an old tomb. So it is the other temple, the ch 'ul na of the Lord Balam, where we should find them."
"Is there a back door?" I said, trying to lighten the prevailing mood.
Glen Hazen had turned the binoculars on the jaguar temple.
"No back doors in Maya temples. The major house is the one at the top of the central staircase. In their religion, the pyramid represents a mountain; the way into the mountain is always through the mouth of a monster. All those carvings around the doorway of the ch 'ul na represent aspects of the monster of the sacred mountain that rises from the forest of tree stones on the plaza,"
My heart was beating very fast. "So that's where we have to go?"
He lowered the binoculars slowly, nodded. "We've come to the tough part. It's by invitation only."
Veronica said, "Inside the doorway is the Otherwurl—a place of the, the—"
"Supernatural," Hazen said.
"Yes. The temple complex may be only fifteen hundred years old. But the temple site, where the power from ritual sacrifice accumulates, that is maybe another thousand years, who knows how old? And the power of time and space, concentrated there in lines of magnetic force, all the cosmic energy of the gods who pass back and forth through that doorway from Xibalba, the Otherwurl, might be enough to destroy us as soon as we leave our wurl . . . to enter theirs."
"That's nuts!" I said. The pressure of ceremonial drums, at my temples, against my chest, had me dizzy and half-sick from anxiety. My eyes dripped tears. "If Sharissa's in that ch'ul place, that's where I'm going!"
"Well, I cannot go with you," Veronica said faintly. "Not because I am afraid, Buzzerball. But because, all of a sudden, it is too many steps for me."
She began to cough, spraying a fist with blood, and slumped against me; I lowered her to the ground.
"God, what's wrong?" Hazen said, his normally popped eyes wider, and frightened.
"She took a beating a couple of days ago. Something's—I'm not sure, a punctured lung, maybe that's all it is. Can you carry her back to the helicopter?"
"Yes. What about you?"
"The truck's there. I'll drive it out. You fly her to Dr. Gùzman's clinic in Las Figuras."
"Man, you can't hope to pull this off on your own!"
"I'm not superstitious," I said impatiently. "Look, I'm going to get as close to the temple as I can without attracting attention. Then I'll need a diversion."
"Flares," Veronica murmured. "We will shoot them . . . in the sky above the Wacah Chan . . . the Wurl Tree in the center of the plaza." She pointed to a sculpted column, larger than other treestones, around which the Maya had been performing their unhurried three-step dance, stylized as a minuet. She looked up at me, with a thin-lipped smile. Then she wiped a hand across her mouth, reached out and painted my forehead with her blood. I don't know if it was a gesture to give me courage, or an endearment, a moment of ritual we had no name for yet.
"Buzzerball?"
"Yes."
"Take off your clothes, all of them. And take my . . . Uzi rifle with you. Hold it like you would a sacred object. I guarantee . . . they will think you are a god." She looked ingenuously at me. "Or at least a monster, one they know nothing about. That will be your protection, until you reach the sacrificial altar. Of course . . . Don Francisco, Greg Walker, they will recognize you. Then you are truly on your own."
I stared at her. I had to laugh. She wanted to laugh too, but couldn't stand the stress on whatever was hurting her.
"Green-eyed monster from the Otherworld," I said. I could still feel the touch of her fingers on my forehead, the warmth of her blood. I began to strip, flinging off my shirt and unbuckling the belt of the too-big duck trousers that had belonged to her late husband.
"A god among gods," she said, admiringly, I thought. "I'll see you back at the copter. No more talk about dying, Veronica."
"Call me . . . 'Nica."
I pulled off the duck trousers, then my undershorts and shoes. I wasn't wearing anything but my Hamilton watch—I guess I was a little superstitious, after all—and 'Nica's Maya scarf. I was shaking, more from a kick of adrenaline than fear. "Leave me a flashlight," I said to Hazen. I reached down and took the Uzi from 'Nica's hands. I'd seen plenty of them; they were one of the weapons of choice on the streets of South Central Los Angeles.
"Okay," I said, dancing up and down to stay warm, hopefully to keep the adrenaline pumping.
Glen Hazen nodded. He had taken the flare pistol from his backpack, and loaded it.
"Run like hell," he advised me, grinning.
By then I was choking with laughter. Hazen busted out laughing, too. And 'Nica, 'Nica was doubled over, from pain or amusement or both.
"One thing is for sure . . ." I said, "nothing . . . this fucking weird will ever happen to me, the rest of my life."
I had the Firestar automatic in my left hand. Laughter had turned to hiccups, and I was burning up too much precious energy. I turned away from them, focusing through blurred lenses on the oblong windowless building at the top of the pyramid, crowned with a crouching jaguar. Lord Balam, they called him. I pumped myself up a little more by imagining he was waiting for me. It was all games and rituals, and I was half-drunk with a frenzy that had been trying to possess me from the morning I got off the plane from Guatemala City. And now there was no more time to lose.
I was at the base of the huge pyramid when the first flare whistled and burst over the center of the plaza, painting the neatly plastered stonework a hot pink shade.
I scrambled up twenty feet to the first terrace, then turned to look out over the plaza. The three-note music had stopped abruptly, leaving a void in which my heart thumped madly. There was a rippling of consternation among the Maya, some shrill outcries. They were all wearing their best costumes, and costume jewelry. Some of them had turned to Lord Balam for an explanation of the starburst above their heads.
What they saw was the hairy monster Butterbaugh, bowlegged and buck-naked with a blood stripe on his forehead, jumping up and down on the terrace brandishing a firestick and screaming the University of Georgia's Bulldog Fight Song.
It's fair to say they were stunned.
Either 'Nica or Hazen had the wit and timing to send another flare arcing over the jaguar temple. It exploded and came down slowly, drifting smokily in the wind, the hot light forming a double halo above my head. Many of the Maya fell to their knees. Others covered their eyes, and lamentations filled the night.
I went up two more flights of steps to a terrace strewn with flowers and the freshly cut branches of trees arranged in front of four small houses. I had to stop to catch my breath. None of the Maya from the plaza forty feet below were attempting to follow. They all seemed to be kneeling, wailing, praying.
I looked up to see how far I had to go.
A figure in a long robe had appea
red from the doorway of the structure on top of the pyramid. Smoke billowed around him. He wore funereal black and a white horned mask with a jutting, snout-like face. He was carrying a staff or a lance in his right hand, and a three-pronged object in the other. I had no idea who he might be.
I started up the central staircase. The limestone steps were only a few inches deep, and worn in the middle. It was a much tougher climb than I had anticipated, and the steps were slippery in places with half-congealed blood. Animal blood? I wondered how much slaughtering had gone on here already. The rifle lay across my hunched back, giving me one hand free, but I had nowhere else to put the pistol. The figure in black, standing at the top of the stairs watching me, had not moved. But the only thing I was afraid of at the moment was falling. If I'd been wearing shoes, I probably would've lost my footing. For the only time in my life I was glad I'd been born with big feet and monkey toes.
I tried to keep him in sight while I was climbing the stairs. He seemed to be chanting something, in low tones. Then I saw him raise the lance, slowly, as if he were taking aim. The lance was tipped with a gleaming, honeycombed piece of bone or quartzite. Whatever it was, it had an evil, useful look.
I flattened myself against the steps and tried to draw a bead with the automatic. His bestial headpiece glowed in the moonlight. I thought I saw a liquid movement of eyes in the deep spaces on either side of the exaggerated, curling snout.
Then, abruptly, he lowered the lance, turned and, with a dismissive shake of the three-pronged instrument in his left hand, vanished into the cloud of smoke rising above the terrace.
I began creeping up again.
The first stone I put my hand on was a loose one. It almost pulled free of the temple stairway, and that would have left me grasping at air with my other hand as I plunged head over heels all the way to the plaza below. It was my first unmistakable warning that the pyramid, fifteen centuries old, was not the solid structure it appeared to be from a distance, no matter what measures had been taken to preserve it.
Or—another thought, while I froze and recovered from that jolt of pure terror—maybe the damned thing was booby-trapped.
