12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  The foundation will be laid in twenty days, less than a thousand paces from the palace. The viewing tower shall be built to face the highest point of the procession of the sun and will create a great holy triangle with the palace and the twin pyramid of red.

  “To the ancients, a holy triangle was a right triangle,” Chel explained. “They were considered mystical.” There were many examples of the Maya using 3-4-5 right triangles in the layouts of their cities, construction of individual buildings, and even religious practices. The most notable use of them in urban planning was at Tikal, where a series of integral right triangles was centered on the southern acropolis. “Jaguar Imix wanted his tomb in a triangle with one of the temples and the palace. The twin temples should be easiest to find first.”

  “So we’re looking for the red temple?” Stanton asked.

  “It won’t actually be red. Red is the symbol of east.”

  “So we’re looking for the one that is farther east?”

  “The one that faces east into the plaza.”

  The closer one got to a central acropolis, Chel told him, the larger the structures became, so she knew they were getting warmer. Stanton’s arms were exhausted from cutting through brush. The machete felt like its weight had multiplied, and its blade had dulled. Even small branches took too much effort to clear. Sweat poured into his eyes.

  Then, twenty minutes later, they came upon a colonnade of pillars. They had been nearly covered with moss, and birds’ nests sat atop at least half, but they were still standing, taller than the stela, twelve of them in a square. Whatever original patio joined them had been buried beneath the underbrush long ago, but immediately Chel knew: They were exactly as Chiam had described them.

  Her uncle made it here after all.

  “Then we have to be close, don’t we?” Stanton asked.

  “This was a meeting place for upper classes,” Chel explained. “It wouldn’t have been far from the palace.”

  “Do we keep going in the same direction?”

  But she wasn’t listening. Stanton followed her gaze. Ahead of them, the sun’s last rays poked through the leaf canopy and struck white stone. Chel let go of his gloved hand and set off almost blithely, paying little attention to the countless obstacles in her path.

  “Wait!” Stanton called out. But she didn’t respond.

  He hurried after her. Before he could catch up, something flew into his mask, nearly knocking him over. Stanton swatted at it uselessly with his flashlight, until it flapped off behind him. He watched it go—a bat, beginning its nightly hunt. When he turned back toward Chel, the last light of day was gone. The stone that had caught her eye only a moment before had disappeared into the darkness.

  It wasn’t until he’d closed the gap between them that he finally saw what she’d found. She was standing at the base of what had once been stairs, long crumbled away after a thousand years. Stanton’s eyes traced the sloping overgrowth that climbed upward from the ground. It was a temple that dwarfed everything else.

  “Don’t take off like that again,” he said. “I’m not gonna lose you out here.”

  Chel didn’t look at him. “This is one of them,” she said. “It has to be.”

  “The twin temples?”

  She nodded, but seconds later she was on the move again.

  CHEL STEPPED UP to a sprawling limestone substructure. It was built lower than any temple would be, and the walls were half standing, but she recognized it as soon as she saw it and started climbing. Her cotton pants and long-sleeved shirt were wet and heavy. Her hair scratched the back of her neck. But she continued up the overgrown stairs, hopping from one small ledge to the next until she reached the first of six enormous platforms.

  “What are you doing?” she heard from below.

  She waved Stanton off, concentrating. Chel pictured thirteen men seated in a circle in front of her, their heads covered with animal headdresses, all clapping in agreement with the man who was speaking. All except one—Paktul.

  Stanton took her hand as he reached the top.

  “This is the royal palace,” she whispered.

  Stanton gazed out over the series of raised platforms. “So this is where …”

  “They cooked,” Chel said without emotion. He’d expected her to be shaken by standing in the place where her ancestors had prepared human flesh. But Chel’s expression was fixed and focused as she looked out into the darkness once again.

  “According to Paktul, the palace is the second point on the triangle,” she said. “So if it’s a three-four-five right triangle, then the distance between—”

  Suddenly Chel felt dizzy. Her legs were weak.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she lied. “Then the distance from the palace to the twin temple is the first side of the triangle.” She pointed west. “They never would’ve built a burial temple in the central plaza, so it has to be that way.”

  “Do you need to rest more before we go?”

  “Once we find the tomb.”

  Stanton helped her down from the palace. They trudged on through the underbrush by flashlight, pushing in the direction the right triangle led them. Stanton continued to whack through brush with the machete, but still refused to let go of Chel with his other hand, even when fighting through the most difficult bits. She was so overheated she felt she might vomit, but she forced it down and kept going.

  It was Stanton who spotted it first. From afar it looked like a small mountain, overgrown with small shrubs. It had a square base, maybe fifty feet on each side, and it rose into a four-sided pyramid three stories high. They were fifty yards off from the entrance, but even with all the overgrowth Chel could see that this building was unfinished. The slabs of limestone hiding under the dirt and trees weren’t properly cut, and they weren’t properly fitted.

  “Is it the king’s tomb?” Stanton asked.

  Chel circled the massive pyramid in search of an inscription. She found none, but when she reached the northwest corner of the temple, something gleamed in the beam of Stanton’s flashlight.

  Something metal, left on the ground.

  Volcy’s pickax.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “THE AIR DOWN THERE ALONE COULD INFECT A HUNDRED PEOPLE. You need to put it on.”

  Stanton held out the biohazard suit.

  So much sweat already poured off Chel, she couldn’t imagine ever feeling cool again. “I’m already infected. You said heat would only make it worse.”

  “The higher concentration you’re exposed to, the quicker it can act. The sooner …”

  She didn’t make him finish the sentence.

  He helped her into the suit. Chel had no idea how she’d get herself into the tomb with it on; it was as bulky as it was hot. She’d been in plenty of tombs before, and she’d never been claustrophobic. But the idea of descending into the catacomb with this thing on—she imagined it would feel like being buried alive.

  With her helmet on, the noise of the world was muted. Looking out through the glass, her entire surroundings—the jungle canopy, Paktul’s city, Stanton and his gear—seemed so far away.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Stanton helped her press awkwardly through the opening in the stone they’d found next to the abandoned pickax. Then he squeezed inside after her and reached over her shoulder to light the path in front of them with the flashlight.

  Chel watched her breath cloud the helmet glass as she shimmied forward on her knees. Tracks of what must have been mold had formed along the stones here countless years ago. Even through her suit, the mossy surface felt alien. She knew the scent of bat guano hung in the air, but all she could smell inside her mask was the slightly antiseptic odor of the suit’s purification mechanism.

  Finally the narrow passage opened up into a larger space. The ceiling was about five feet high. Chel had to lean down a little; Stanton had to crouch. She shone her light at the far wall, marveling at the etchings of sacrificial victims in ornate animal hea
ddresses and of snake-headed creatures with the bodies of men. Chel reached out and touched them, wiping away a thick film of dust with her glove. She had no doubt the drawings were made by Paktul’s contemporaries. Each line took hours to carve, and the price of a single mistake would have been death.

  On the far end of the platform, stairs led farther down. The temple had clearly been designed as a series of stacked rooms, with four or five staircases on one side, which ultimately led to the lowest level, below ground. There, Chel suspected, they would find several smaller ritual rooms and a larger one where the king was buried—as at the temples of El Mirador.

  They kept descending. Each staircase was narrower than the last, and in the biohazard suits they had to turn sideways to squeeze between the walls. The air would get colder as they went down, Chel knew, and she would have given anything for a breath of it, but the suit made everything feel stale and recycled.

  Finally they could go no farther. Chel pointed her flashlight ahead into a hallway with cut-out doors on both sides. They were now fifteen or twenty feet underground, and even at midday there would have been no natural light this far below. But the ceilings were higher here; even Stanton could almost stand upright.

  “This way,” Chel said, leading him down the hallway. She shone her light into two empty rooms before she found what she was looking for.

  In the middle of the most distant chamber stood a limestone sarcophagus.

  The final resting place of King Jaguar Imix.

  “Is this it?” Though he was right behind her, Stanton’s voice came to Chel through a tiny muffled speaker in her ear.

  Chel’s body was exhausted, but her mind was still hungry to take it all in. One look at the floor told her the tomb had been looted. Still, there was much that Volcy had left behind: carved flints and rusted necklaces, shell pendants, serpentine statues.

  And skeletons.

  On the floor surrounding the sarcophagus were fourteen or fifteen ancient skeletons, splayed in ritual fashion, all dusted with maroon-colored cinnabar. They had probably died of the same disease that was killing her now, feeling the same way she did: hot, tired, and terrified by the knowledge that they would never dream again.

  “Who are the others?” Stanton asked.

  “The ancients believed that the death of a king stole just one of his thirty-nine souls,” Chel said, “and that the other thirty-eight lived on or went to the overworld. The ajaw needed other souls to sacrifice to the gods during his journey to ensure safe passage.” She pointed at the six smallest skeletons. “Including children.”

  Stanton bent down. “See the full formation of the ends of the hips of this one? That’s a very small adult.”

  The dwarf, Jacomo, buried with his king.

  A sudden whine in the darkness startled Chel. She turned in time to see an explosion of bats surging toward them.

  “Get down!” Stanton called. “They’ll tear the suits!”

  The flurry of flying creatures made Chel momentarily lose her bearings. She reached out for the wall, but her hands found nothing and she tumbled to the floor. Above her, Stanton flailed his arms, shooing the bats into the hallway.

  Their high-pitched screams faded.

  Chel wondered if she had the strength to get back up. The suit mummified her arms and legs. Her muscles ached. She lay there, face-to-face with the skeletons, and felt overwhelmed. Then, just as she was about to close her eyes, she caught sight of something metal hidden in the dust near her. It was a large jade ring with a glyph carved into it.

  The monkey-man scribe.

  The prince had escaped, and Auxila’s daughters too, all of them following Paktul’s spirit animal—the scarlet macaw—in the direction of Kiaqix. But Paktul, the man, had not escaped. He must have been killed by Jaguar Imix’s guards, who had then buried him, his ring, and his book with his king.

  She looked at the skulls, wondering which was Paktul’s. Somewhere, among these remains, lay the father of her people. They’d never know exactly where, but Chel was content to be in the scribe’s presence. To know they’d found him.

  Stanton got her to her feet, but Chel couldn’t walk on her own. He helped her shuffle over to the king’s sarcophagus. Even in her state, Chel saw that the limestone slab was etched with ornate designs from end to end, masterful workmanship lavished on a single stone. She knew that Volcy hadn’t gotten inside it either: The heavy lid was still in place, and he never would have taken the time to replace it. He’d probably found the book quickly and known it was all he needed.

  “Can you lift it?” she asked Stanton.

  Stanton took hold of the stone slab, jockeying it back and forth, one corner at a time. Finally it crashed to the ground, the noise reverberating through the chamber.

  Then Chel leaned against the wall again and watched him lift out the bones and artifacts. A jade head mask with pearl eyes and quartz fangs. A long spear with a sharp jade point. Carved jade plaques.

  But there were no bowls. No water carriers. No containers for chocolate or maize. No vessels of any kind. Just jewelry, head masks, and weapons.

  All priceless. But useless.

  Chel had been confident that they’d find ceramics, that the king would be buried with them, and that they’d find within them the residue of whatever the ancients had been eating. “I don’t know what to say, Gabe. I thought—”

  She stopped when she realized Stanton wasn’t even looking at her. He simply walked to where the smaller skeletons lay and wrenched the dwarf’s skull from his body, which gave easily. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Stanton pointed. “The teeth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We might be able to extract what they were eating. From the teeth. Food grains can survive forever. Even if they exhausted their supplies, grains they ate a long time before they died could still be here.”

  Stanton rapidly gathered other skulls and began to prepare them. For a moment Chel watched him from the wall she leaned on, then she closed her eyes. Everything was somehow still bright. Even in the darkness. And the air inside her helmet was cooking her brain.

  “If you need to leave me …” she started to say, but she was already thinking only of Paktul, whose ring she’d put on her gloved finger, and then of her mother and how wrong she’d been about her. So she didn’t hear Stanton’s next words as he went about his work.

  “I’m never leaving you.”

  FIRST STANTON REMOVED all the visible calculi and took scrapings from each portion of the teeth using an X-Acto knife. He did each section three times before putting the scrapings onto microscope slides. This was difficult work under the best conditions; using only a single flashlight in darkness, it was nearly impossible. But, with painstaking care, he slowly did it.

  Using a reference text, he compared what he saw on these slides to known plant species. He matched a variety by the unique shapes of their starches: maize; beans; avocado; breadnut; papaya; peppers; cacao. Hundreds of deposits sat on the teeth, but it seemed unlikely that any of these common foods had protected the nobles against VFI.

  Then, under the dim luminescence of the battery-powered microscope, Stanton saw something unexpected. A starch he needed no textbook to recognize.

  Stanton couldn’t believe he was seeing the remnants of beech trees here. Beech generally grew in true mountainous climates, like central Mexico. He would never have expected to find it in the jungles of Guatemala, and neither would any botanist he knew. Which meant that this could be an unknown species, native to this small corner of the world.

  Beech was the active ingredient in pentosan, which had once seemed like the most promising drug for slowing the spread of prions. But there had never been a safe way to get pentosan into the brain, and no species of beech could cross that crucial blood–brain barrier. So they hadn’t tried it on VFI.

  But something didn’t make sense to Stanton now. Beech fruit was edible, although its taste was famously bitter. Yet to win immunity from prion dis
ease, the whole city would have to have eaten it, week after week, in quantity.

  He crossed over to Chel and gently tapped her on the shoulder. “I have to ask you a question,” he whispered. “Did the Maya chew tree bark?”

  He knew she was awake, but Chel’s eyes were closed. He’d pushed her to continue through the heat of the jungle, to march farther than she thought she could. He had given her hope. And, with hope, she had led him here. But now she was dying.

  “In Lak’ech” was all she said.

  Stanton hurried back to the slides. He’d remembered something from the codex that talked about the dwarf chewing and spitting something, and he would bet everything on this one instinct: It had been beech bark, and it had been their cure. A new species of the familiar tree had evolved in this jungle, capable of sneaking past the blood–brain barrier. And eating it protected the ancient Maya, up until the day they’d consumed it all.

  Stanton had to believe that somewhere outside this temple, the native population of beech trees could have regrown after the collapse, just as the ceiba trees had. Unless the Maya had razed an entire jungle—something even modern man could rarely do—it was impossible to have killed them all. Nature outlasted everything. The only problem was that he couldn’t find those trees unless he had some way of recognizing them.

  In the jungle night, leaves would be impossible to see. The only way to tell trees apart would be by their bark. Instinct told Stanton that these Guatemalan trees would share the trait that set all beeches apart: their perfectly smooth, silver-gray bark.

  WHEN HE EMERGED from the tunnel, Stanton’s flashlight was faltering. He’d been using it for hours. To conserve it, he decided to gather branches from a nearby tree and light them into a torch.

  By the entrance to the tomb he saw pines and oaks, but nothing with that smooth gray bark of a beech. Back around the twin temples, smaller plants grew in every crevice, and Stanton gathered a thicker bundle of limbs to use as a second torch when the first one sputtered out. The jungle had gone quieter. Only a symphony of crickets played in the night, so it took Stanton by surprise when two deer sprinted across his path as he bent for kindling.