12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  I give them crumbs to feed my bird self, who has taken to perching inside the cave. It gives the smaller girl solace. She is too young to understand that the macaw is my spirit self, but she can muster a smile when he squawks, and it stops her tears, if only for a moment. Despite my efforts, I am a poor substitute for a mother.

  Two suns ago, my concubines and I were paid a royal visit by the holy prince, Smoke Song. It is most unusual for the prince’s lessons to take place outside the palace, unless we are studying some natural phenomenon. But before the king’s recent departure, he agreed to my request to send the prince here. The king is away with his warriors, waging war for three suns against Sakamil. Mercifully, despite his promises, he decided not to take his young son with him.

  Upon the prince’s arrival, it became clear that Flamed Plume would be a distraction. The prince’s eyes lit at the sight of her, and he could focus on nothing else. He had believed he would never see the girl again, this girl of whom he had been most fond for years.

  According to custom, when the prince addressed the girl, she went to kiss the ground beneath his feet. Then I listened to them speaking admiringly of the bird, who silently climbed atop Flamed Plume’s shoulder, preening. The bird was recovering most rapidly and would be ready to journey in search of his flock in a matter of weeks. Looking at the macaw, the prince postured by pushing his immature braid to the front, still adorned with the white bead indicating servitude to his father.

  Then he spoke:

  —But this bird is nothing compared to my spirit animal, the mighty jaguar. Have you ever seen one with your own eyes? He is swifter than any animal in the jungle and more capable of attacking his prey than the most skilled archer could ever be. He moves faster than the arrow, and quieter too. I can show you where lie the graves of jaguar bones, which will give you a chill you will not soon forget. Indeed, you might faint upon seeing this, but I will be there to catch you, for my heart and mind are stronger than yours, little girl.—

  What happened next between these children surprised me and reminded me in what strange and beautiful ways the gods have fashioned us, the fourth race.

  The girl Flamed Plume did not look away from the prince then when he looked into her eyes, as custom dictated. In the royal palace she could be sacrificed for such an indiscretion. But there was no fear on her face, or in her heart. She smiled enough to reveal that she had two front teeth emblazoned with jade but then hid those jade pieces so he could not see more. Since the day I came to her in her parents’ home to explain that her mother was dead, there had been no smiles.

  Then she spoke as I have never heard a girl speak to a prince:

  —But, holy prince, Smoke Song, most revered one, how can the mighty jaguar be faster than a quiver of arrows when I have seen jaguars killed by those very same arrows by our marksmen? Can you explain this contradiction to an intelligence as meek as mine?—

  It was not until that moment that I came to understand how strong-willed and noble Flamed Plume is. But how the boy would react to this affront I could not predict. His face indicated puzzlement at her refusal to defer. Yet then Smoke Song smiled and showed Flamed Plume his jade, and I was reminded how little he resembled his father. One day he will make a great leader of Kanuataba, if we can emerge from the calamities that threaten to consume our mighty lands. I was filled with pride for him.

  Still, nothing can ever come of the prince and Flamed Plume; her father has been sacrificed to the gods, and she is stuck between worlds, unfit for the company of a king, no better than a bastard. Watching them, and knowing this, took me closer to tears than I have been in many suns.

  The prince reached into his satchel. I thought he was pulling from it one of the great books I had instructed him to bring from the royal library, and I swelled with pride, believing he might show his reading skill, which I had taught for so long.

  Yet instead he held an ornate ceramic bowl, more than two hands in its depth, as if built for water. The bowl was decorated with colors of death and rebirth, and he held it out toward Flamed Plume at arm’s length. Then the prince spoke to her:

  —Behold Akabalam, who graces my father with his power and in whose honor we build the new temple. Have you seen Akabalam with your own eyes, girl?—

  Flamed Plume went silent, bowed by the invocation of the god who had claimed her father’s life. But I was anxious with desire to know: Could the king have shown his son what the mysterious god presided over, that I might understand?

  Then the prince spoke to the girl again:

  —Do not be afraid. I have power over these creatures, this embodiment of Akabalam. Do not be afraid. I will protect you.—

  Smoke Song opened the bowl, and I could see inside there stood a count of six insects, long as a finger, color of the leaves of the most vibrant trees that once ruled our forest. The insects climbed atop one another, attempting to scale the walls of the ceramic bowl but without success. Their long, bent legs were entwined beneath their bodies. Their eyes, color of night, protruded from their heads.

  The prince spoke:

  —I have seen him worshipping these creatures, and I took them from his throne room, where they have their royal feasts, and now I, too, feel their power.—

  I studied the insects, those that blend with the forest itself. For what purpose we would worship this creature, I could not imagine! They made no honey. They could not be roasted for food. Why would the king dedicate a temple and sacrifice his overseer of the stores in the name of a useless insect? Why would a king denigrate us, the gods’ holy maize creation, in its name?

  I spoke:

  —This is what your father calls Akabalam? Only this?—

  —Yes.—

  —And has he told you the meaning of why we must exalt them?—

  —Of course he has. But you, scribe, could never feel what a king would feel in the presence of such power.—

  But as I studied the insects more closely and watched them slowly rubbing their tiny front legs together in the air, I believed I understood. Their legs gave them the appearance of a man communing with the gods. No other creature I have seen in the kingdom appears more pious. No other creature is such a model for the way all men must pray to the gods.

  Is this why the king so reveres them? Because he believes we have lost our piety in the drought that has lasted nearly two thousand suns, and that they stand as a symbol of commitment to the gods?

  The prince turned to the girl and spoke again:

  —Only a man ordained by the ancestors can understand Akabalam—

  Beyond his father’s influences, Smoke Song is a good child, pure of heart. His is a soul the ancestors of the forest would have loved and respected, as it is written in the great books. While his father might simply have ordered me beheaded if he thought I had defiled a girl he wanted, Smoke Song only intended to impress the girl and win her heart. He stole the insects from the palace, and with them he was showing Flamed Plume how much more powerful he was than I. So I would allow him this pleasure.

  The girl watched as I bowed to the boy and kissed his feet.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “TWO THOUSAND SUNS,” ROLANDO SAID. “ALMOST SIX YEARS. It’s a mega-drought.”

  He, Chel, and Victor stood over five newly reconstructed and deciphered pages of the codex. Chel gazed down again at Paktul’s question on the twenty-eighth page: Because he believes we have lost our piety in the drought that has lasted nearly two thousand suns, and that they stand as a symbol of commitment to the gods?

  “Don’t you agree?” Rolando asked Victor, who sat across the Getty lab, studying his copy of the translation and sipping on his tea.

  Last night, when Chel returned from seeing her mother at the church, it was Victor she’d wanted to share her frustrations with, certain that he was the only person who’d truly understand. But Victor hadn’t come back from his fruitless trip into his obscure stash of academic journals until well after midnight. By then Chel had stolen a quick shower in the Getty
Conservation Institute building, washed off the residue of her conversation with Ha’ana completely, and thrown herself back into the work. She hadn’t spoken of it since.

  “The king wasn’t helping matters,” Victor said. “But, yes, it does seem like there was a major drought and that it must have been the underlying cause.”

  In a normal world, it might have been the most important discovery of all of their careers. In landlocked classic cities, the Maya could store water for no longer than eighteen months. Evidence of a six-year drought would convince even Chel’s most resistant colleagues that the cause of the collapse was what she had been arguing for years.

  But of course the world was no longer normal. What mattered now was the connection between the codex and the lost city, which strengthened with each section they translated. Now that it was clear Paktul had protected the two little girls by taking them in, it seemed nearly inevitable that he would take them as wives. Rolando’s theory that they were the Original Trio was more and more plausible.

  Groundbreaking as these discoveries were, they still hadn’t been able to figure out where exactly the lost city might be located or where Volcy could have gotten sick. Fortunately, they now knew more about the mysterious Akabalam glyph that had impeded their decipherment progress. Based on the scribe’s descriptions of insects that looked like they were communing with the gods, Chel, Rolando, and Victor all agreed he must have been describing praying mantises. Mantises were common all over the Maya area. And despite the scribe’s questions about why they would need to worship them, Chel knew the Maya had occasionally worshipped insects and created gods in their honor.

  Yet there was still a missing piece. Thirty-two bark pages were nearly complete, but even with this potential break, the glyph appeared ten or eleven times on a single page in surprising and unusual ways. When Chel inserted praying mantis or praying mantis god into all the places they saw Akabalam, much of the end still didn’t make any sense. In the earlier sections, the glyph referred to the name of the new god. But in the final pages, it seemed as if Paktul was using the word to refer to an action.

  “It has to be something intrinsic to them, right?” Rolando asked. “The way bees symbolize sweetness.”

  “Or how Hunab Ku can be used to indicate transformation,” Victor suggested, referring to the butterfly god.

  A boom outside startled all of them, and Chel hurried to the window. Over the last two days, a few cars had made the trek up to the Getty, interlopers in search of easy looting. Each time, they’d seen the security team still patrolling the grounds and turned around.

  “Everything all right?” Rolando asked.

  It was difficult to see very far into the night. “I think so,” Chel said.

  “So … what?” he asked as she turned back. “Is the king ordaining this new god because the praying mantises appear pious?”

  “The droughts probably inspired a lot of doubts among the people,” Chel said. “Maybe he believed it was inspiration.”

  She moved to the glass case containing a fragment they’d partially pieced together from one of the final pages and started substituting in her mind:

  Perhaps the king allows [piety] because his call for rain has been thwarted, and he knows no rains will come! But will such wanton [piety] not result in chaos among the people, even among those who fear the gods? There is reason the people of Kanuataba so fear [piety] as I do, the most terrifying transgression of all, even if [piety] is commanded by the king!

  “It wouldn’t make sense,” she said to the men. “Why would the scribe be so frightened of piety? And why would it be a transgression?”

  Chel studied the pages again, contemplating possibilities.

  “Where are we with the satellites?” Rolando asked. As of yesterday, thanks to Stanton, the CDC had arranged for a dozen NASA satellites to be turned toward the area surrounding Kiaqix, to search for any sign of ruins in the jungle rim.

  Stanton had been Chel’s first call after leaving her mother. It pleased her to be able to tell him that her father’s cousin Chiam’s account of the lost city matched Paktul’s descriptions in the codex. The doctor had listened eagerly, and this time there wasn’t any skepticism in his voice. All he’d said was “Let’s do it.”

  She hadn’t heard from Stanton since, but Chel checked her phone constantly. Someone from his team would get in touch as soon as there were any images that required her team’s expertise, and she hoped it was him.

  “The satellites can each take up to a thousand photographs a day,” she said, “and they’ve got a team of people searching the images.”

  Victor piped up. “Now we just have to pray that Kanuataba is another Oxpemul.”

  In the 1980s, satellites had snapped pictures of the tops of two temples poking out from beneath the leaf canopy very close to a major archaeological site in Mexico, leading to the discovery of an even larger ancient city.

  “It’s the rainy season, and there’s constant cloud cover around Kiaqix right now,” Chel reminded the men. “The trees could be shielding everything. We’re talking about buildings that are more than a thousand years old and are probably crumbling. Not to mention the fact that they’ve eluded discovery for centuries.”

  “Which is why we must focus on the manuscript,” Victor said.

  HE TOOK NO PLEASURE in how the victims of VFI were suffering or in the fact that so many more were sure to become infected. It horrified him to hear about children falling prey to the disease and about the ways that men had turned on one another in the streets of L.A. Yet as Victor had watched the stock market crash and the grocery stores empty, he couldn’t help but feel validated. His colleagues had ridiculed him. His family had abandoned him. Until the epidemic began, even he’d begun to wonder if he and the rest of the Believers wouldn’t be proven wrong as so many others had, from the Millerites to the Y2K believers to … well, every other group who had believed the world was due for a great change.

  Just after noon, the team broke up to continue exploring the Akabalam question on their own. Chel had gone into her office that adjoined the lab to think, and Rolando had gone to another building for reconstruction equipment, so Victor was left alone in the room. He stood over the plates, examining the one that contained Paktul’s reference to the thirteenth cycle. He lifted the glass off its perch, testing its weight. The case was heavy—fifteen pounds or so—but one man could carry two or three at a time.

  Holding part of the codex in his hands, Victor felt its incredible power. In synagogue as a boy, he had learned the story of how rabbis threw themselves over the Torah scrolls when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem. The rabbis believed the Jewish people couldn’t carry on without the written Word and gave their lives to protect it. Victor felt he finally understood what inspired that willingness to sacrifice so much for a book.

  “What are you doing?”

  He froze at the sound of Rolando’s voice. What was he doing back here already? Gently, Victor replaced the page and made a show of adjusting where the case sat on the light table. “Some of the glass was starting to shift,” he said, “and I was afraid it might disturb the fragments.”

  Rolando joined him in front of the light table. “Appreciate your help, but it’s better if you let me handle the plates, okay?”

  Victor moved down the table, pretending to study fragments from the final section. He didn’t want to appear too quick to retreat. Rolando, satisfied with whatever he’d come to check on in the first place, headed toward the back of the lab. Then Victor heard a knock on Chel’s office and the sound of the door closing.

  Did Rolando suspect something? Victor sat down at one of the lab benches as casually as he could. He calculated what he would say if Rolando confronted him.

  Minutes later, Victor heard Chel’s door creak open again and her soft footsteps coming into the lab. She stood behind him. He didn’t move.

  “Can I talk to you?” she asked.

  “Of course. What is it?”

>   She sat down on one of the lab benches. “I just got off the phone with Patrick. I asked him to come here and help with some of the remaining astronomy glyphs, but he said he wouldn’t leave his new girlfriend again. Martha. Who the hell is named Martha in the twenty-first century? I don’t know if we can do this without him.”

  “First of all,” Victor said, “he did his part and we don’t need him. Second of all … you know I never liked him anyway.”

  “Liar.”

  She smiled, but Victor flinched a little at the word. “But Patrick was right about one thing,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Volcy. The codex. Kiaqix and the Original Trio. He was the first one to point out that it’s all one hell of a coincidence.”

  The last thing Victor believed was that any of this was coincidence. “Anything is possible,” he said carefully.

  Chel waited for him to continue, and her expectant look gave Victor a feeling he hadn’t had in so long: being needed by someone he truly loved.

  “What do you believe?” he asked her.

  After a long silence, Chel said, “The obsession with the Long Count drove up the prices on antiquities, which is probably what sent Volcy into the jungle in the first place. Whatever else is happening right now, this started because of 2012 one way or another.”

  Silently, Victor prayed once more that he might be able to convince Chel to come with him and his people. He’d always thought he might be able to get her to the mountains when the end came. Now he hoped that she was beginning to see that the predictions were coming true. Soon, perhaps, she would understand that escape was the only way forward.

  “I think if we keep our minds open,” he said gently, “there’s no telling what we may come to understand about the world.”