by Pat Murphy
The huts I passed grew more affluent as I approached the city center. First, the huts of well-to-do peasants; then, those of rich merchants. An effigy of Ek Chuah, the black-eyed guardian deity of the merchants, pouted at me from one yard. He was an ugly god, and the cedar carving portrayed him accurately, showing his misshapen lower lip, the black markings on his face, the burdens on his back. Finally, the huts of the nobility and priests. The solars around these huts were well tended and filled with flowers. But something was wrong. An evil smell hung in the air. The horizon was clouded with smoke.
I left the huts behind and entered the first ceremonial plaza. As I approached the far end of the court, three ravens flew up, shrieking and cursing. The black birds had been perching on a heap of sun-bleached coconuts, and that seemed odd, since coconuts did not grow in this part of the Yucatán.
The coconuts grinned at me and watched with hollow eyes.
The round objects were not coconuts, but the skulls of men. I suddenly realized what was happening: Dzibilchaltún was at war. These were the skulls of enemy warriors killed in battle. Scraps of dried flesh clung to the topmost skulls, the most recent additions. The other skulls had been there longer; they had been picked clean by birds, insects, and night-wandering rats. The faint aroma of dead meat hung in the warm air.
I was surrounded by the heavy scent of death. The sky was cloaked in clouds and the air was thick. From somewhere far away, I heard the slow beat of drums, growing louder with each beat.
When I woke, I was drenched in sweat. The hut was filled with darkness. I lit a candle, but that only pushed the shadows back; it did not chase them away. It was strange to walk through the dark camp and fear the shadows. They pressed too close, these shades of darkness. Something was wrong here. The smell of death clung to me.
I stood by the open door to Diane’s hut. I remembered a long distant evening, buried deeper than any jade mask, when I watched my four-year-old daughter sleep. She was covered by a quilt, surrounded by stuffed toys. Her red-gold hair fanned out over the pillow; her thumb had found her mouth under cover of darkness. The next day, I packed my bags and left for New Mexico the first time.
Now I listened to soft breathing in four voices: Diane’s breath was a husky whisper in the chorus. She was quiet in her hammock, at peace. I turned away from my sleeping daughter.
Zuhuy-kak stood in the shadows by the water barrel. She walked beside me as I strolled toward my hut. ‘You and I have much in common,’ she said to me. ‘I had a daughter once.’ She walked in the shadows and I could not read the expression on her face.
‘What became of your daughter?’
‘The ah-nunob came and she died. Many died.’ Her voice was very soft.
The uneasy residue of my dream lingered. ‘I dreamed of the time before the ah-nunob came,’ I said.
‘You dreamed of bad luck,’ she said flatly. ‘Bad luck is coming. You did not make a willing sacrifice to the goddess.’
I walked in silence for a moment, imagining what Tony would say if I suggested we take a holiday in the middle of the week because I feared bad luck. When I entered my hut, I was alone. I returned to my hammock, but it was a long time before I fell asleep.
The week began badly and got worse. On Monday, John spotted a rattlesnake on the trail to the tomb; Robin was afflicted with heat rash; Pich was bitten by a centipede, a nasty sting that quickly began to swell.
The students were growing restless. At breakfast and dinner, I heard talk of what they would do after the dig was over. They were as nervous as birds just before a storm, fluttering here and there with little purpose other than the movement itself. I think they felt the tension in the air, but they blamed it on isolation, on hot days and lonely nights.
On Tuesday, two workmen did not come to work and two others arrived late. I was in a bad temper when I drove the jeep to Mérida and tried to track down the chain hoist and winch that we needed to raise the stela. After much searching, I located a man who would rent us the equipment on Thursday of that week, later than I had hoped but better than nothing. On the way back, I had a flat tire, discovered the jack was broken, and finally put out my thumb and hitched a ride with a farmer. I arrived at camp crouched in the bed of a pickup truck with a mournful pig. I spent the evening with Tony, drinking aguardiente and calling curses down on the workmen who had not come.
And on Wednesday, the day Ix, our luck turned bad, very bad. Philippe, Maria’s younger brother, was working in the passageway when a large rock rolled down onto his right foot.
Philippe was young: a basketball player, a boxer, a university athlete who was earning a little cash doing work that he considered beneath him. Salvador had hired him, I believe, partly because Maria had asked him to do so. Certainly, the young man was strong, but he lacked the traits that make a good worker for a dig.
Older men make the best workers: they appreciate the virtue of a slow steady pace; they take advantage of delays to stand in the shade and smoke; they are wiry and enduring but not overly muscular. They know how to conserve their energy.
Hot-blooded and restless, eager to see signs of progress, Philippe had grown impatient with the work, annoyed at the frequent delays while John photographed the site. In the moist warm passageway, he had shoved too hard on a crowbar, using muscles built through long hours in the gym. A boulder, suddenly loosened, tumbled down so quickly that Philippe had no time to dodge. The rock pinned the young man’s foot beneath it.
Working in the narrow passageway, squeezed between unyielding masonry walls, was difficult. It took half an hour for the other workmen to lever the rock off the wounded foot. When Salvador and Pich carried the young man from the passageway, his bravado and impatience were gone. He was pale; his jaw was set; and his face was covered with sweat. Salvador and Tony took him to the hospital emergency room in the pickup truck.
Dinner that evening was not good. I believe that Maria was punishing us for indirectly causing, by our existence, her younger brother’s injury. The chicken was smothered in a sauce that left the tongue scalded and numb. Beneath the sauce the chicken was scorched. The salad was limp and the tortillas were cold.
I was lingering in the plaza over a cup of bitter coffee when I heard the coughing roar of Salvador’s pickup truck. After a time, Tony came to find me and report. Philippe’s ankle was broken and the foot was badly bruised. With his ankle in a cast, he had returned. Now that the ordeal was over, his bravado was restored.
At Maria’s insistence, Philippe would be staying with Salvador’s family until he was better. Maria was determined to nurse him back to health.
‘Tomorrow,’ Tony said, ‘she wants Tony to bring the curandera from Chicxulub to come and see him. Apparently she thinks this is more than a medical problem.’
I offered Tony a cigarette and lit one myself. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘She wants a specialist in matters of bad luck, evil winds, and sorcery.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s much we can do to talk her out of it,’ he said.
‘I don’t suppose so.’ I leaned back in my chair and watched the red-hot coal on the end of my cigarette. ‘That leaves us short another man and marked as unlucky in the bargain.’ I shrugged. ‘Nothing we can do about it. Nothing at all.’
‘Do you suppose there’s a chance that she’ll give us a clean bill of health? No bad spirits here.’
I shook my head. ‘I doubt that. At best, she’ll blame the Aluxob.’ The Aluxob were mischievous gremlins that haunted the old ruins and occasionally harassed people who disturbed the ancient places. ‘At worst, we’ll need an exorcism. For that, we’d lose a few days’ work.’
‘That’s not so bad. We could weather that,’ Tony said.
I watched the shadows grow longer and I hoped he was right.
On Thursday, the day Men, we dragged the winch and other equipment out along the sacbe to raise the stela. Salvador and five of the men from his crew constructed a wooden tripod and rigged an arrangement of pulleys that culminated in the small gas-powered wi
nch. Salvador politely ignored most of my advice on how to rig the pulleys, quietly setting them up his way, and in the end I sat with Tony by the mound and picked thorns and burrs from my clothing while listening to the workmen. In digging to slide a rope beneath the stela, they had disturbed a nest of stinging ants and they were cursing steadily, colorfully, with many anatomically impossible suggestions.
Not far away in space but very much removed in time, two young men, h’menob or apprentices studying to be h’menob, were playing what looked like a gambling game with the red fortune-telling beans. I tried to listen to their conversation, but Tony kept interrupting with comments about the weather, the dig, the stela.
Throughout the morning, the sky rumbled with thunder and the sun hid behind a solid gray expanse of clouds. Salvador sniffed the air and said that it would not rain before afternoon, but I had my doubts.
Just before noon, as Salvador’s crew was digging a depression in which the stela could rest once it was upright, the survey crew came tromping through the monte. The end point of their latest transect was about a mile away, so they had decided to join us for the raising of the stela. Diane looked cheerful enough, smiling even though her legs were covered with insect bites and scratches.
When Salvador started the winch, it made a horrible sputtering noise, then died immediately. He swore, made various adjustments, and tried again. It caught this time and began to turn. One man on each corner of the stela held a guy wire, steadying the great stone slab as it shuddered, then began to tilt, lifting slowly from its bed in the dirt and leaves. At first, it moved smoothly.
The wind blew, fluttering the leaves of the trees around us. Birds flew here and there, calling their displeasure. The sky cleared its throat. The rain began when the upper end of the slab was a foot off the ground and rising steadily. In minutes we were drenched. The stela’s steady ascent faltered as the workmen holding the guy ropes slid in the mud. I ran to help the workman who was guiding the northwest corner of the stela, clinging to the guy rope and planting my heels in the mud in a vain effort to stop sliding. Tony was on another rope, shouting encouragement. Diane and Barbara were dragging on another rope, helping a thin old man who was calling loudly to the saints for assistance.
The rain whipped us, stinging on my bare skin, soaking through my thin shirt. The flashes of lightning shattered the world into fragmentary blue-white images: Tony’s face, his mouth open to shout; Diane’s hands, knuckles white as she tried to grip the rope harder; black exhaust rising from the coughing winch; wet metal glistening in the rain. Thunder crashed as if the sky were tumbling down around us, overwhelming Tony’s shouts, Salvador’s instructions, and the old man’s prayers.
The slab was nearly erect, sliding slowly into the hole that had been dug for it, when the thunder crashed with a cataclysmic rumble and the lightning struck the end of the stone, filling the air with the crackling smell of ozone. I could hear a man’s voice, shouting in Spanish to the Virgin Mary for mercy and another calling to Saint Michael and the Chaacob. The winch coughed once, a petty imitation of the thunder, then roared with a sudden surge of power, jerking on the stela. We gripped the guy ropes, our hands wet and slippery, our feet sliding in the mud, and the great stone slab kept moving, tumbling with majestic grace, its momentum overcoming our puny efforts to stop it, continuing on its slow inevitable path. It fell.
The thunder mocked us with deep demonic laughter, and I scrambled through the mud to see the stela, ducking involuntarily whenever the lightning flashed. The limestone had broken when it fell. An irregular diagonal crack – bright white but darkening already in the falling rain – cut through the relief carving, separating the slab into two parts.
The leaves and dirt that clung to the surface made the relief carving stand out. On the top section, a Toltec warrior stared down, resplendent in an eagle headdress, a jaguar-skin cloak, and full military garb. His eye was a dark clot of mud, and angry ants ran over his robes, his spear, his round shield.
The crack separated him from the Mayan woman who crouched at his feet. Her head was lowered and her hands held out an offering – a bowl of something. I recognized her face as that of Ix Chebel Yax, the fickle Mayan moon goddess who sometimes brought healing and sometimes death.
The lightning flashed again and the thunder rolled more softly, as if it were moving away, having finished its work. I looked up and saw Zuhuy-kak watching me from the far side of the stela, smiling in the rain. Angrily, I called to her in Maya, asking why this had happened. She did not reply.
The thunder rumbled again, distant now, and I became aware once again of the people around me. The Mayan workmen stood in the shelter of the trees, far away from the stela. The rain was still falling, though it was gradually letting up. Diane stood beside me, drenched as a drowned cat. Barbara, Tony, and Salvador stood at the winch, all shouting at once in voices intended to carry over the thunder, which no longer rolled overhead.
Diane was looking out where Zuhuy-kak had been standing, as if trying to figure out who I had been shouting at. I put my hand on her shoulder to distract her. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. She nodded. ‘Welcome to the romance of archaeology,’ I said.
14
Diane
‘There is nothing wrong with being afraid. When you fear, you see things in a different way.’
– Carlos Castaneda,
The Teachings of Don Juan
My mother was chain-smoking again. She had been in a bad mood since the beginning of the week, but it had grown worse since the stela fell. Tony was drinking. Maggie and Carlos were trying to persuade John and Robin to join them in a game of cards. The air was hot and heavy and slow-moving.
‘Want to go for a swim?’ Barbara asked. I shrugged and followed her to the hut to get our swimsuits, then down the path to the cenote.
As soon as we were out of sight of the plaza, she grinned at me. ‘I have a treat,’ she said. ‘A present from Emilio.’ She pulled a joint from her pocket, waved it delicately under my nose, and tucked it back in her pocket. ‘I think we need a little relaxation.’
‘I think you’re right.’
On the edge of the pool, she stopped. ‘Swim first or smoke?’
‘Smoke.’
We left the path and scrambled around the pool to the high rock from which Carlos liked to dive. If anyone from camp wandered down to the cenote, we could sneak away, following the path to the tomb site. Barbara lit up and took the first hit, closing her eyes and drawing the smoke in deep. I took the joint and drew on it, fighting the urge to cough out the smoke, drawing it in deep and holding it in my lungs.
‘Emilio said to think of him when we smoked it,’ Barbara said, holding the joint. ‘I’m thinking of him quite fondly.’
I nodded. With the second hit, the world around me began losing its hard edges. The air was cooler here, and bats skimmed low over the water. ‘He’s a fine man, Emilio. He has risen immensely in my estimation.’ I accepted the joint and glanced at Barbara. ‘Are you going to sleep with him?’
She shrugged, leaning back on her hands and staring out over the water. ‘Don’t know. Wouldn’t mind it, but I get the feeling that he’s playing some variation on the game I’m used to. I think he would like me better if I didn’t sleep with him.’ She shrugged again. ‘I’ll play it by ear. What about you? You like that young basketball player?’
‘Sometimes. But I know what you mean about the game. The rules are different.’
For a moment, we sat in companionable silence, trading hits. Long shadows stretched across the cenote. The surface was still, disturbed only by spreading ripples when an insect landed on the water or when a fish rose. Barbara took a paper clip from her pocket and bent the wire to make a primitive roach clip. We finished the joint.
‘Let’s go for a swim,’ Barbara suggested.
The water was cool and I swam several slow laps, watching the last of the sunlight play on the rippled water. I floated on my back, looking up at the deepening blue of the sky. I r
elaxed and my thoughts drifted. There was a rock ledge a few feet beneath the water’s surface at one edge of the pool. I rested there for a moment, sitting on the submerged ledge with my head above water, my knees pulled close to my body. The last sunlight shone on the mound beyond the path. I could see the traces of relief carving on the stones, here and there. I wondered idly what the temple had looked like before the stones had tumbled and the trees had overgrown it. I studied the hill and drew a picture in my mind: three doorways, side by side in a rectangular building.
Barbara glided to a stop beside me. ‘What are you looking at?’
I jerked my head toward the hill. ‘That pile of rocks. Liz told me, one time last week, that you can choose to see the past. I’m trying it out.’
‘Liz can be a very strange lady,’ Barbara said. She sat on the ledge, let her toes rise to the surface of the water, and regarded them solemnly.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m going to head back to camp before my toes turn to prunes. I’ve still got to write up today’s field report,’ she said.
‘In your condition?’
‘It’ll probably be better than all the ones I’ve written straight. I feel inspired.’
‘I’ll stay here a while,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you back there.’
She swam languidly to the rocks on the far side and dressed. ‘If you don’t come back soon, I’ll send out a search party,’ she called.
I waved and she headed back to camp. I returned to my consideration of the rock-strewn hillside, and the picture in my mind came into sharper focus. Above the doors, the wall was an intricate lattice of stone, which rose high above the pool. The stones around the doors were carved with hieroglyphics, a jumble of shapes and faces and strange symbols, painted in bright red and blue. A curving stone jutted out just above the central door; a little higher on the wall, two dark recesses in the carvings flanked the stone, making the doorway appear to be a cavernous mouth in an enormous long-nosed face. A steep stairway led from the mouth to the edge of the pool, and the stones of the stairway were carved and painted, a riot of unreadable symbols.
