The Mayan Codex as-2

by Mario Reading

  Sabir shook his head violently. ‘I’m sorry. Desperately sorry. But it’s not what you’re thinking. Ever since early this summer – ever since I was involved with your brother…’

  ‘Ever since you killed my brother, you mean?’

  Sabir glanced away. To a third party it might have looked as though he were searching for an elusive waiter. But Sabir was merely trying to regain his sang-froid. To stop the sudden rush of panic that threatened to overwhelm him. To regain some measure of control over the still visceral memories of what Bale had done to him.

  He turned back and met Lamia’s gaze full on. ‘Ever since I killed your brother, yes. That’s technically true. I did kill him. If I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed me. Where I come from that’s called justifiable homicide, Mademoiselle de Bale.’

  ‘My name is Lamia, not Mademoiselle de Bale. And believe me, Mr Sabir, I don’t blame you in any way at all for killing my stepbrother. He was a rabid dog. And I hated him for it.’

  Sabir felt as if he were floundering in an unfamiliar ocean, far out of his depth, in a rapidly encroaching riptide. ‘I’m sorry. Really sorry that it had to end that way.’

  ‘I am not.’

  Sabir stared desperately at Calque. He no longer had the remotest idea what was expected of him. Or why Calque had brought him into this mess.

  ‘Your dream. You were telling us of your dream, Sabir.’

  Sabir tried to gather himself together. ‘Yes. Yes I was.’ The words came out explosively, like a sneeze. ‘Ever since I was in the cellar. Or in the cesspit rather. Ever since I thought that I would suffocate to death, in other words, I have been having these dreams. Well, they’re nightmares, really. In which I’m quite literally torn apart.’ Sabir’s voice trailed off. He was making no sense and he knew it. ‘And then my head is eaten by a snake. Then I become the snake.’ He had begun to sweat. ‘It’s crazy. I really can’t describe it. But I have them pretty much every night. They’re so bad I can’t sleep. That’s how come your twin brothers didn’t get me when they broke into my house last night. I get claustrophobic – so most every night I check out of the main house and go over to sleep in the summer house. It’s open out there. I can see the sky. I can breathe.’

  ‘You mean they entered the house when you were already outside? In the garden hut?’

  ‘Yes. Crazy, isn’t it? I even left the back door unlocked. Later, when they switched on a light, thinking I wasn’t anywhere about, I managed to get the drop on them with my father’s empty shotgun.’

  ‘You managed to get the drop on them? With an empty shotgun?’ Calque seemed to be having difficulty conjuring up a sufficiently lurid image of the event. ‘You held up the de Bale twins with an empty shotgun?’

  ‘You see, no one can tell whether a shotgun is empty or not. It’s not like a revolver, where you can see the shells. Or lack of them.’

  ‘I understand the constitution of a shotgun, Sabir.’

  ‘Well, anyway, as part of this dream I see a woman. She has her back to me. You’ve got to imagine that I’m the snake by now, and I’m approaching her. My mouth is hanging open. I’m going to take this woman’s head in my mouth, just like the snake did with me. Then at the very last moment the woman turns around. And she has your face, Mademoiselle de Bale.’

  ‘You mean exactly? With my birthmark? With my blemish?’

  ‘Yes. She has a blemish, if that’s what you want to call it, just like yours. At first I thought it was blood. All along, really, I’ve thought it was blood.’

  ‘And now you realize it isn’t?’

  ‘Yes. Now I realize it isn’t.’ Sabir looked down. He understood only too well how badly he had hurt the woman. That he had damaged her in some invisible way. In his head, though, he was still torn between his horror that she was Achor Bale’s sister, and his fascination that she seemed to have rejected the de Bale camp and joined the side of the angels – e.g. him and Calque.

  ‘And what happens to this woman who looks so much like me? In your dream, I mean.’

  Sabir closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and stared directly at Lamia. ‘She opens her mouth – wider even than the snake was able to open its mouth – and she swallows me whole.’

  10

  ‘Saudi Arabia? You can’t be serious?’

  Sabir threw himself back in his chair. ‘You bet I’m serious. I’ve looked into this every which way there is to look, and the quatrain seems to point directly there.’

  ‘Would you be prepared to share your logic with us?’ Twice, now, Calque had reached for his cigarettes, and then replaced them in his pocket after reproving glances from the inn staff.

  Sabir glanced at Lamia.

  She caught the glance, and made as if to stand up. ‘Would you rather I left the room? I can fully understand if you still don’t feel, despite Captain Calque’s assurances, that I am an entirely trustworthy companion.’

  Sabir waved her back down again. ‘Stay right where you are.’ He caught Calque’s eye and shrugged. ‘There’s no way you could possibly know this, but before I got the drop on your brothers, I listened in on their private conversation. A full couple of minutes of it. And together with what they told me later, it soon became clear to me that they think you betrayed them, Mademoiselle de Bale. In fact they think that – via our friend Calque here – you warned me directly about their coming. And that, to put it mildly, they don’t like you for it.’

  ‘But she did.’ Calque squirmed forward in his seat. ‘That’s exactly what she did do. She told me of her brothers’ mission. In good time for me to warn you. If ever you’d bothered to pick up your phone, that is, or taken an interest in your messages.’

  ‘ Touche, Captain.’

  ‘And I’ve not told you how I found her yet. What her family were about to do to her.’

  ‘You don’t need to. Her brothers’ words were good enough for me. You can’t fake attitudes like that. Mademoiselle de Bale is welcome to sit in on our conversation if she wants to.’ Sabir was aware that part of him was endeavouring, via a studied politeness, to compensate the woman for his blundering faux pas about her face and the disturbing content of his dream. Another part of him recognized that Calque had obviously committed himself to her in some way – heck, didn’t he have an errant daughter hidden away somewhere? Maybe she reminded him of her? – and that he still owed Calque.

  ‘Why did you let the twins get away? They were in your house illegally. Why didn’t you simply call the police?’

  Sabir shook his head. ‘They were playing with me. They knew I wouldn’t shoot. They brazened it out, making it clear there’d been no breaking and entering of any sort. That I didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of the cops. Then, when they’d worked out to their satisfaction how I’d managed to avoid their little trap, they left.’

  ‘You let them leave? Just like that?’

  ‘What was I going to do, Calque? Toss the shotgun at them? If you ask me, they’re holding fire until they can corner me somewhere private and wring out everything I know. When I haven’t got a shotgun in my hand, maybe.’ Sabir shrugged. ‘Things might pan out a little differently that time.’

  11

  ‘Sabir was warned, Madame. I’m certain of it. The American knew we were coming. He was hiding outside the house with a shotgun. When we switched on the lights, thinking he was no longer there, he knew exactly where to find us.’

  ‘You think Lamia warned him? Through Calque?’

  ‘I’m convinced of it.’

  ‘Why didn’t he involve the police, then?’

  ‘He was scared to, Madame. We had entered his house through an open door – he slipped up on that one. Given that fact, and the existing relationship between our two families, he would have been hard put to accuse us of robbery. I think we can call this first round something of a stalemate.’

  ‘What are you going to do now, Abiger?’

  ‘We’ve flushed him out, Madame. He will go on the run now. We must follow him.�
��

  ‘Have you tagged his car?’

  ‘Impossible, Madame. He has it sealed up tight. And the garage is alarmed. When he leaves, he will leave fast.’

  ‘And Lamia?’

  ‘She is here with the policeman. They are all three sitting in the public rooms of the White Horse Inn. We can’t even get close.’

  ‘Will you be able to follow him?’

  ‘Of course, Madame.’

  ‘Abiger, you are talking arrant nonsense. Two men cannot follow a man twenty-four hours by twenty-four. It’s an impossibility. And once you’ve lost him, he is lost for good. I am sending your brothers and sisters over to help you.’

  ‘But, Madame ‘Be quiet, Abiger. I want to know exactly what he does, and why he is doing it. It’s not enough simply to deal with him any more in the way we discussed previously. There’s more involved. We’ve got Calque to deal with too. So all eleven of you will conduct a full surveillance on the three of them – if they split up, all well and good. If they stay together, even better. I want to know everything they do – everywhere they go. And I shall decide when it is the right moment for you to strike, Abiger, not you. Have I made myself clear?’

  There was a brief hesitation.

  ‘Have I made myself clear, Abiger?’

  ‘Yes, Madame. But I’m still running this operation, aren’t I? I’m still in charge?’

  ‘Until I decide otherwise. Yes, Abiger. You are.’

  12

  At first, you were lucky. The travelling went well. A man taking chayotes down to Veracruz gave you a lift in his truck. Through Orizaba and Cordoba, as far as La Tinaja. He dropped you off there, and you stood on the Tierra Blanca road for three hours, hoping for another lift. But no one stopped. Everyone was going the other way. Towards the volcano. In order to see the free show, you supposed.

  It was then you began walking. You had money for food, but not for buses. But there was no hurry. The volcano had done its worst. No one had been killed. A number of villages close to the summit had been damaged, some by lava, some by dust, but the people had had ample time to evacuate, even when on foot. Now the State had promised to rebuild their homes. All this you had heard on the radio of the truck.

  The State was indeed a powerful thing, you said to yourself. When things went badly, it was the State which put things right. You did not fully understand this, nor how the State functioned, but you suspected that its benevolence was, as it were, inbuilt. That things had always been like that.

  You clutched the thin cotton bag that held the codex to your chest. You were hungry. In the excitement of the eruption, and of knowing that you had a job to do, you had forgotten to eat. Now you stopped at a roadside shack and bought some tacos. You ate half the tacos immediately, and secured the remaining ones in a piece of rough paper for later. You suspected that you might have to sleep out in the open, and for this you would need energy.

  You drank some Coca Cola for your stomach, and because, amongst your people, it was sometimes offered as a gift in the church. Somewhere, far back in your mind, you wondered how you would manage to live when you reached your destination, and the little money you had was exhausted. You had never been outside your own province before. What if there was no one there to welcome you? What if you were not expected? Perhaps, then, you should ask the State for help? But you did not know how to contact the State, or how to communicate with it. Perhaps, being all-powerful, it would try to take the codex away from you? Which would leave you with no function. With no reason to live.

  No. You must keep away from the State. Something would arise. Someone would recognize you. The protection of the codex had gone on for far too long, and for far too many generations, to mean nothing at all.

  13

  ‘Why are you doing this, Sabir? Why are you still sticking your neck out in this way? What’s in it for you?’

  Calque had an unlit cigarette dangling out of his mouth. He had come to a grudging understanding with the staff of the inn that he wouldn’t, under any circumstances, actually light it, but simply suck on it for the taste of the tobacco. Lamia had had to do the translating for him, because Calque’s mastery of the English language was marginally inferior to that of the average first-grader.

  ‘But I thought you knew? I’m in it for the money.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Look, Calque. You’d better get one thing straight. The only reason I responded to Samana’s ad last May was because I thought there was a book’s worth of material in it. I write books. And I live off the money I make from writing them. I’ve put nearly six months of work into this project already. It’s cost me the ability to sleep for more than two hours at a stretch. It’s cost me part of my ear. And it’s turned me into a killer. Beyond that, I’ve been chased and intimidated and shot at, and an attempt has even been made to bury me alive. People have threatened to castrate me. I’ve had knives thrown at me. An effort has been made to burn down my house. The French police, in the guise of your good self, have even had me on their Most Wanted list. I think I’m entitled to some comeback after all that – some sort of a quid pro quo. And I am finally beginning to figure out a way to get it.’

  ‘Saudi Arabia, you mean?’

  ‘Listen. The prophecy talks of the eruption of a “Great Volcano”. A man, “Ahau Inchal Kabah”, lives in the country of this volcano. This man is capable of looking into the future. Through him, the world will know whether 21 December 2012 will bring the feared Armageddon, or the beginning of a major new spiritual era.’

  ‘Why Saudi Arabia?’

  ‘It sounds simple. But it’s taken me weeks to work out. The key word is “Kabah”. This obviously relates to the Kaaba, or the House of Allah – the most sacred site in Islam. I mean the spelling is pretty much exact, isn’t it, give or take an extra a at the beginning and an h tacked on at the end? The Kaaba building is more than two thousand years old – meaning Nostradamus would certainly have known of it. And every Muslim, wherever they are in the world, turns towards the Kaaba when they pray. Next we have “Inchal”. The Muslims traditionally call the Will of Allah, Insha’Allah – pretty close, wouldn’t you say? With all that in hand, I went to check on what Nostradamus calls the “land of the Great Volcano”. I immediately found another link to Saudi Arabia. I now believe the Great Volcano to be the 5,722-foot-high Harrat Rahat, which last erupted in 1256, its lava flow travelling to within three miles of the holy city of Medina. Many think that this volcano is the actual location of Mount Sinai. Exodus 19:18 describes it as “And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly”.’

  Calque glanced across at Lamia. Then he turned to Sabir. ‘Has this volcano erupted recently?’

  Sabir made a face. ‘Not in the last 950 years, no, it hasn’t. I acknowledge that. But then some scholars think Mount Sinai is actually Mount Bedr – or Hala-’l Badr.’

  ‘I suppose that one has erupted?’

  Sabir was beginning to lose his temper. ‘No. No, it hasn’t. Not yet.’

  ‘But you’re living in expectation?’

  ‘Well, Nostradamus can’t be expected to get everything right, can he?’

  ‘And the word “Ahau”? What about that?’

  ‘I can’t get a handle on that one. It doesn’t seem to be an Arabic word at all.’

  Calque glanced back at Lamia. ‘Shall we tell him? Shall we enlighten our intrepid researcher? Who obviously doesn’t bother to listen to the news, just as he doesn’t bother to answer his telephone?’

  Lamia returned Calque’s look. ‘Why tell him? We don’t need him any more. Probably better that we let him swan off to Saudi Arabia, as he intends – that way he can draw my brothers after him, leaving us free to head down to Mexico unmolested.’

  Sabir was looking from one to the other of them as if he suspected that he was the victim of some elaborate practical joke. ‘Mexico? What are you people
talking about?’

  ‘Seriously, Sabir. Are you a complete technophobe? Have you really not listened to the news for the past few days?’ Calque had chewed his existing cigarette into a pulpy mash. He snatched the opportunity to replace it with a fresh coffin nail.

  The clerk behind the front desk did a quick double take, and then studiously avoided looking in Calque’s direction, through fear, Sabir supposed, of triggering an embarrassing confrontation with his only non-English-speaking guest.

  Sabir sensed that he was being set up for a fall – he remembered Calque’s intellectual vanity from their last meeting, and did not relish a return performance. ‘Who the heck are you calling a technophobe, Captain? I seem to recall your refusing to use a cell phone on more than one occasion, much to the frustration of your second-in-command.’

  ‘My question remains the same.’

  Sabir drew himself up. ‘Okay. You’re right. I haven’t been following the news these past few days. I’ve been in a bad place in my head. And I’ve been working way too hard on my Saudi Arabia theory. I really don’t see why you guys are so fired up about Mexico, though, just because “Ahau” is a Maya sun god. Anyway, that’s Ahau-kin. Or Kinich Ahau, depending on context. You see. I’ve done my homework there too.’

  Calque settled back in his chair, unlit cigarette dangling, a Cheshire Cat grin on his face. ‘If you’d bothered to turn on your television set for just two minutes in the past twenty-four hours, you couldn’t have avoided seeing that the Pico de Orizaba, otherwise known as the Volcan Citlaltepetl, has just erupted. We saw the news report on the plane coming over. I would say that that is your Great Volcano, not the Harrat Rahat or the Hala-’l Badr. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl are the two great volcanoes of Mexico. Everybody knows that. Why should this Orizaba hill transmogrify into the Great Volcano just because it’s picked this particular moment in history to erupt?’