The Mayan Codex as-2

by Mario Reading

  When Oni broke his neck it was almost a relief.

  72

  Abi stared down at the cenote. You got to it through a thick stand of pampas grass. The sinkhole was maybe sixty feet wide, and situated fifty feet straight down, with sheer walls on all sides. It was shaped like a cylinder. Trees grew up from the vase of the cenote, and trailed their fronds in it, but none of them reached anywhere near the lip. Around midday the pool would probably be bathed in sunlight, but now, nearer to eight o’clock in the evening, it looked like the entrance to hell.

  A pipe had been let down one side, feeding a series of pumps that took water to the warehouse. Aside from the pipe, there was no way up or down to the cenote. What went in stayed in.

  ‘Strip the four stiffs and burn their clothes. Then put the stiffs in the Suzuki. Crack the windows about fifteen centimetres – enough to let the water in, but not enough to let anything leak out. Then drive it here and dump it in the cenote. Try not to disturb the grass too much.’

  ‘But the stiffs will spoil the water, Abi.’

  ‘We’ll drink bottled water while we’re here, Vau. We won’t be staying long enough to require baths.’

  ‘Okay. You’re the boss.’ Vau hesitated. ‘Are you going to bring Sabir, Lamia, and Calque out here to the warehouse?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll sweat everything out of them soon enough. Sabir will crack the moment we start in on Lamia. That’s what true love does to you, Vau. Makes you vulnerable. Some people admire that about it. I think it stinks.’

  Abi watched Vau negotiating his way through the pampas grass and back to the warehouse via the track alongside the agave field. He shook his head. Things couldn’t have fallen any better really. They’d lucked into the perfect base. They had more weapons than the CRS and the Foreign Legion combined. And they had the aquatic equivalent of a batch incinerator to get rid of any inconvenient cadavers that turned up as a result of collateral damage.

  ‘Collateral damage’. How it rolled off the tongue. Abi loved American euphemisms. When he was really bored, he would make up new ones, like ‘inadvertent blood donors’ and ‘residual throw-downs’. But ‘collateral damage’ was still the best. He’d never come near matching that one.

  Now all Abi needed to make his happiness complete was Madame, his mother’s, okay to go in and snatch Lamia, Calque, and Sabir and whatever else he could get his hands on, including the mestizo’s book and the crystal skull. Which, given the Countess’s recent form, would be easier said than done.

  Abi called up Athame’s cell phone. He knew that her position might be compromised if she answered the phone at the wrong moment, so he let the phone ring twice only, and then hung up. She would feel the vibration through her clothes and know that he wanted to speak to her.

  He sat on the lip of the cenote and stared down into the pool, waiting.

  When his cell phone finally rang, it took him a moment to respond. Dusk had fallen. The forest all around him was alive with the furtive movement of animals.

  ‘Can you talk?’

  ‘It’s fine. There’s so much noise coming from over by the temple that I could bellow like a bull and they wouldn’t hear me.’

  Abi smiled. The thought of the dwarf-like Athame bellowing like a bull tickled his sense of the absurd. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘They’re holding some kind of ceremony.’

  ‘Can you make out what it’s about?’

  ‘I can’t get close enough. You could try Aldinach for that. She’s up in a tree, over on the other side of the site. She might have a better view. I don’t know where Dakini and Nawal are hiding. It was a brilliant idea of yours to use us girls. If we get caught, they’ll just think we’re a bunch of New Age gringas trying to cop a view of the ceremony.’

  ‘What do you figure is happening?’

  ‘You want my guess?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think they’re discussing what to do with the skull and the book. They’ve got my sister and her two boyfriends up there with them on top of the pyramid. Maybe when they’ve made up their minds they’ll cut their hearts out and offer them up to the jaguar god? Then someone could dress up in their skins and go cavorting about the sanctuary like in the good old days. That would save us all a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Who’s running the show?’

  ‘The High Priest. If we can keep tabs on him, we’ll know where to find the book and the skull.’

  ‘Stay where you are. I’m coming over to join you with Vau, Asson, Alastor, and Rudra. I’m leaving Oni and Berith here to watch the warehouse.’

  ‘What warehouse?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. But we’ve got all the weapons we need. You can take your pick. Glock. Beretta. Heckler and Koch. Star. Walther. Smith amp; Wesson.’

  ‘I’ll take the Walther.’

  ‘Nice choice. It’s a P4. I’ll bring it to you personally.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I’m about to find out. I’m about to call our mother.’

  73

  Sabir followed the Halach Uinic up the pyramid steps. He knew that every eye in the house was fixed upon him and his party. The crowd, for the most part, had fallen silent, but an underlying murmur remained, like that made by a distant swarm of bees.

  Dusk was only gradually falling, but the brightness thrown out by the candles, the bonfires, and the burning bowls of incense exaggerated its effect. The higher Sabir rose on the pyramid, the easier it became to discern the endless blanket of forest stretching in every direction around him. It was like a great murky ocean, with the pyramid as a fragile island of light at its epicentre.

  The wind picked at his clothes as he made his way up the endless stone steps. He turned his head briefly towards the west, relishing the cooler air. Was this why the ancient Maya had built themselves pyramids and not long houses? An understandable desire to compensate for the fearful heat of the Yucatan summers? The whole thing was probably as simple and as straightforward as that. All the rituals and the contrivances must have come later. Like the chaser to a glass of beer.

  Sabir smiled to himself, pleased at his capacity for lateral thought. After all, there was not a single mountain in the whole of the peninsula, nor a single volcano, nor a single hill worthy of the name. Surely the Maya would have had a race memory of travelling through the alpine lands of the northern Americas before they settled? Maybe they wanted to recreate the details of their journey in stone? Or perhaps they simply wanted to match the gods? Or was it subtler than that? Was it flattery they were after?

  Sabir had reached the halfway stage in his ascent of the steps. Some instinct made him glance to his left. He realized that he was exactly parallel with the woman whom he sensed had been telepathically communicating with the Halach Uinic. He took a step towards her.

  Acan put out a hand to stay him. ‘Adam,’ he whispered. ‘That is Ixtab. My mother. I told you of her. But we will see her later. You must come with me now. You cannot wait here. The Chilans are coming up behind us. They will be very angry if you disrupt the ceremony.’

  Sabir shrugged off Acan’s hand. He broke clear of the ascending line of priests and made his way to where Ixtab was standing. He was frowning, as if someone had set him an unexpected puzzle. He was half aware that the Halach Uinic and his party had stopped their progress and were watching him, but he didn’t care. All of a sudden he knew exactly what he had to do.

  He held out both his hands to Ixtab.

  Ixtab smiled and took them. She nodded her head a number of times, as if something she had hitherto only suspected had now been proved true. ‘Welcome, Shaman. I have been expecting you.’

  A fearsome energy seemed to be transferring itself from her hands into his.

  ‘Shaman?’ The energy flowing between Sabir and Ixtab’s hands now seemed to be stemming directly from him.

  ‘Why are you surprised? You have been fighting it for many years. Were you not told?’

  Sabir closed his eyes. ‘A Gypsy curandero in the south
of France. He told me. Earlier this year. In a way he even saved my life.’

  ‘There. I knew it. He was your messenger. He sent you here to us. If you had been born here, amongst us, it would have been I who would have told you.’ She stared at him for a long moment. ‘Your mother, too. She was a shaman.’

  Sabir looked up sharply. ‘What are you talking about? My mother killed herself. She was disturbed in her mind.’

  Ixtab shook her head. ‘No. She went unrecognized. She lived amongst people who did not understand her true function. She consumed herself. This can happen. You must not do the same.’

  Acan had fallen in behind them. He was frowning. Things weren’t going quite as planned.

  Sabir shook his head, as if by so doing he could physically discourage unwanted thoughts. ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘But you know it to be true.’

  Sabir allowed his eyes to play over Ixtab’s face. There was no room for doubt. What this woman said, she believed. And he believed it too. ‘I had no idea. She was too damaged by the time I was old enough to understand.’

  ‘She did not know it herself. You are not to blame. Your father loved her too much. She was swayed by that. She should never have married. Shamans should remain single. They are wedded to the truth.’

  ‘But you? You are married. You have a son.’

  ‘Two sons. And three daughters. But I am not a shaman. I am an iyoma. My duty is simply to recognize those whom the gods have marked out, and to guide those who are lost.’

  ‘Would you have guided my mother?’

  ‘If she had come to me. Only then. But I cannot search people out. This is beyond my power. Beyond anybody’s power but Hunab Ku’s.’ Ixtab glanced up at the Halach Uinic. She nodded. He nodded back.

  Sabir turned to face the Halach Uinic. The Halach Uinic held out a hand and beckoned Sabir and Ixtab to follow him. Sabir turned to Lamia. She was staring at him with a quizzical expression on her face. He gestured to her, but she shook her head, and fell back in line behind Calque and the mestizo from Veracruz.

  Sabir felt a sudden coldness overwhelm him. The feeling was so powerful that it was as if he had been touched by the shadow of his own death.

  He turned to Ixtab. She was mentally urging him to climb the rest of the steps. This fact was so clear in Sabir’s head that it didn’t even occur to him to question it. He began dutifully to ascend. He had no idea what was happening to him, nor why he was behaving in the odd way that he was. Who was this woman? And why did he feel so connected to her? Why, moreover, had Lamia refused to accompany them? And what was the significance of the invisible triangle that now seemed to exist between him, Ixtab, and the Halach Uinic?

  Instantly, in his head, three images appeared, just as they would have done in a dream. Together, they made perfect sense of everything he had been asking.

  In them the Halach Uinic was the sky, Ixtab was the earth, and he, Sabir, represented the underworld.

  74

  ‘We’re to do nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly what I said. Madame, our mother, says we are to do nothing. We are to watch and wait.’

  Vau, Asson, Alastor, and Rudra were sitting in the car with Abi. They had each stripped, oiled, and tested their chosen weapons. Rudra had found some old wine corks at the warehouse, and had seared the ends to produce a quantity of charcoal substitute. Each of the brothers had camouflaged his face, hands, and forearms, so that no pale skin showed outside the borders of their clothes.

  Alastor was still fired up from his activities at the Balancanche caves. He sensed that his brothers were experiencing the same physical lift. This is what they were trained for. This is what they lived for. There was little sense in doing anything else. ‘But we’ve been watching and waiting for more than a week.’

  ‘Exactly. Now we must do more of the same.’

  The brothers looked at each other.

  Abi was driving, so he couldn’t immediately identify the focus of their attention. But he knew just what they were all thinking. And he knew that this was the moment, if any, to engineer an invisible coup against Madame, his mother’s, leadership. ‘You all happy with that? At least you’ll get to go to the party. Asson, have you got the girls’ guns?’

  ‘A Walther P4 for Athame, Berettas for Dakini and Nawal, and the Heckler and Koch for Aldinach. I’ve got that right, haven’t I? I’m not missing anything? Like why do we need weapons at all if all the fuck we are doing is fucking watching a fucking ceremony?’

  ‘You’re right, Asson. And you argue your point so eloquently. We’d better leave them in the car then.’ Abi was enjoying winding them up.

  ‘The hell with that.’ It was Alastor. The starved planes of his face were drastically exaggerated by the black stripes of his camouflage. ‘I’m not letting this work of art out of my hands. I felt naked all through the US and most of Mexico without a pistol. Now I’ve got this Glock I’m going to keep it. Seventeen rounds of 9mm Parabellum – muzzle velocity 375mps – effective range 100 feet. And it’s all mine to do with as I please. God Himself couldn’t separate me from this piece.’

  ‘And this from the man who got a straight left and right of Mexicans with two hidden fighting sticks?’ Asson was grinning. ‘Alastor might not look like much, but he packs a mean backhand.’ Asson’s grin faded away. ‘Abi, are you serious? She really wants us to hold off? But what have we been doing all this past week? Pissing in the wind?’

  ‘Is your face wet?’

  ‘Fucking streaming.’

  ‘Then you just answered your own question.’

  They fell silent for a while on the approach to Ek Balam. They could see the pyramid glowing in the distance. It looked like a Christmas cake with a thousand candles planted on it.

  ‘I’m going to leave the car down this track. We’ll walk in from here.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘The point is that we’re going to wait until the crowd disperses and everyone goes off to beddy-byes. Then we’ll strike. Athame says that the Maya aren’t carrying their rifles any more. My guess is that Sabir and company have inveigled their way into the High Priest’s good graces, and that they’re no longer considered prisoners. So we snatch the three of them, together with the book and the skull for good measure, and get out of here. No killing. No noise. We don’t want the Mexican police on our tail. Those boys don’t joke around when it comes to firearms. They’ll kill you as soon as look at you.’

  Vau turned to his brother. ‘But Madame, our mother, told you to hold off.’

  ‘What Madame, our mother, doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Are we all agreed on that?’

  There was silence in the car.

  ‘Listen. We get this done and then we present her with a fait accompli. She’s not here on the ground. She hasn’t got the necessary facts to make an informed decision. Plus she doesn’t know about the warehouse.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m not going to talk about it on an open phone line, am I? Do I look like a moron? The fewer people who know about it the better. By the time we’re finished up here there’ll be seven bodies down in that cenote. And I want them to stay there. Forever. When the guys who think they own the place come back from picking up their consignment in six days’ time, I don’t want them sniffing around the cenote. It’s got to look normal. Untouched. Because we’re going to be dumping most of the remaining ordnance down there too.’

  ‘Why, Abi?’

  ‘Because we want the big boss to think that dear old Pepito and his three cronies took off with all his junk. Instead, he’ll be brushing his teeth and showering in a mixture of corpse water and rust for the next ten years.’

  ‘Won’t he phone up from wherever he’s going? When he doesn’t get an answer, he’ll send someone down to check the place out.’

  ‘He’s up at the US border, for Christ’s sake. And he’s not going to phone in the middle of the night to check if his watchmen are still
on duty – that’s what they’re paid for. Do you think he expects his warehouse to be invaded by a bunch of Frenchmen? By the time he gets someone on a plane, maybe tomorrow afternoon, maybe later, we’ll be long gone. Anyway, I’ve told Oni and Berith to set up the Stoner and that piece of shit AAT we found in crossfire positions to cover the approach road. Anything comes up from there unannounced, we can blow it into a hundred thousand pieces. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Is “sort of” enough to grow your balls back?’

  ‘You mean are we going to follow your orders and not Madame, our mother’s?’

  ‘Bingo.’

  Alastor glanced around at his brothers. ‘I don’t know about you, but it felt good killing those guys this evening. It felt like we were finally getting somewhere. I don’t want to lose that rush. Right now, I’ve got it. But if we sit around for the next seven days just watching people and getting eaten alive by fucking mosquitoes, I’m going into town to rob me a bank just for the kicks.’

  Rudra glanced at Abi. ‘And you say we’ve only got a small window of opportunity to use the warehouse?’

  ‘According to what the watchman said, six days. But we can cut that down to twenty-four hours after the big boss phones up tomorrow and deduces that his own people have probably run off with his investment.’

  ‘Then I say we go with Abi. If we all stick together, we can square it with Madame, our mother, later.’

  Abi reached back and punched him on the shoulder. ‘That’s my boy. To infinity and fucking beyond.’

  75

  Sabir stood at the very top of the pyramid and looked out over the Yucatan. It was nearly dark now, but just enough residual light was left in the evening sky to suggest the immensity of the landscape stretching away below him.