by Alex Archer
Feeling a marked drop in internal temperature, Annja took his hand and shook it. His grip was cool, dry, and hinted at a strength that could crack walnuts without mechanical aid.
"I'm pleased to meet you, Father," she said.
He laughed, turned sideways in his chair as he reclaimed his hand. "I assure you, Annja, we Jesuits don't bite."
"I – I'm sorry. I know you don't. I didn't realize I was that transparent," she said, embarrassed by her childish reaction.
"I have perhaps an advantage in experience and training over most people. Your secret is safe with me, my dear. If my presence or profession make you uncomfortable, I shall be happy to wait for a seat at another table."
"No, no. I really am sorry. It's just that I was raised in an orphanage. In New Orleans. A Catholic orphanage. I – I'm afraid I still have a little bit of a problem with authority."
He laughed. Not loudly but richly. "I do, too. For much the same reason." He held up the heavy crystal water glass a server had deposited unobtrusively at the table. "I propose a truce. You will rein in your natural fear of priests – I will refrain from putting a poison tack on your chair."
It was her turn to laugh.
He leaned forward slightly. Behind his lenses she could now see the color of his eyes. They were extremely pale green. They danced.
"I take it you recognize the reference," he said.
"Sure. It's from a supposed argument in the late sixteenth century by a noted Jesuit scholar – I don't remember who – who claimed that while it wasn't permissible to poison someone's food, because a man must eat to live, it was permitted to place a poisoned tack on his chair, because man doesn't have to sit."
"Close enough. We've gotten more inhibited since then. Or at least more circumspect."
He ordered pork medallions marinated in red chili and they settled into a pleasant conversation. Annja told him about her work on the dig. He asked her about Southwest archaeology. She found herself falling readily into conversation with him. He asked questions like a well-informed amateur who was genuinely interested in knowing more.
He told her he was a Walloon – a French-speaking, Catholic Belgian, accounting for his curious part-Germanic accent. He regaled her with stories about growing up wild on the docks in Antwerp. Though the stories were pretty sordid and sad, if looked at carefully, he somehow made them seem lighthearted and nostalgic.
Annja realized how good it was to have somebody to talk to. She led a pretty solitary life. She was around other people a fair amount; any New Yorker was. But she so seldom got to talk to them.
She finished her meal and found she'd ordered coffee just to sit and talk a little longer. Even if he was twice her age and a Jesuit, her companion was entirely charming, as well as knowledgeable and witty. He had a gift of putting her at ease.
Or a skill, she cautioned herself as the coffee was delivered.
The crowd was beginning to thin out. A pair of expensively dressed and very fit women in middle age passed close by their table. They stood beside a pillar bedecked with artificial flowers, one aisle away from a window that looked out onto a courtyard alive with late-season blooms.
"You really should report it," the woman with hennaed hair cut in a bob said. "There are reports coming in from all over the area."
The other woman, taller, with frosted blond hair, shook her whole body in a shiver of negation. "It scares me even to think about it," she said. "Besides, who's really going to believe me?"
"Well, there have been a lot of sightings of strange animals. It's even in the paper."
"I just remember seeing that shape crouching on the slope right over my garden wall. All I could see was a shadow the size of a Shetland pony. It looked at me with those eyes – those red-glowing eyes! I'll be having nightmares forever. And that strange sound it made, like a baby crying. Or was it a woman screaming – ?"
They passed beyond earshot to the cash register up front. Annja felt a strange sort of shuddering emptiness within.
She was aware of Godin – Robert, he'd insisted she call him – watching her intently. Those pale jade eyes missed very, very little, she was sure. As she was sure there was a very great deal he wasn't telling her about his life.
"'And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth,'" the priest quoted softly.
Annja glanced sharply at him. "Revelation 6:8," she said. "The fourth seal, if I recall correctly."
"You do."
"Do you believe these are the end times?" Annja asked.
He gave slight smile. "I shall leave such speculations to your primitive Protestant millenarians," he said. "Nevertheless, it does seem we may be entering upon very perilous times."
"Why do you say that? The economy? The situation in the Middle East?"
He tipped his head to one side and hunched a shoulder upward. "Those, too. And these sightings of mysterious black creatures, prowling not just up in your legend-haunted mountains, but even appearing along the ridges of the affluent suburb of Lamy, seem to me ominous. And surely you have heard the prophetic pronouncements of this mysterious child who keeps appearing?"
"You take those seriously? I mean – I know you're a priest. I just think of Jesuits as having a more...scientific bent."
"Because you know much of our history. Many of my order have been scientists of note. The least of us is supposed to be, at minimum, a scholar. I have yet to evaluate these apparitions of an ostensibly Holy Child, much less validate his alleged prophecies."
He shrugged again, this time with both shoulders. "Still, my preliminary investigations suggest that those who report meeting this Santo Niño are sincere for the most part. It certainly raises questions."
"You think these appearances might be miraculous?"
"I sense skepticism in your voice, dear lady. In this you resemble our good archbishop here in New Mexico, who, it seems, prays most fervently that no authentic miracles should appear on his watch. They might disrupt his simple faith in dialectical materialism."
"I guess I am something of a skeptic by inclination," Annja admitted.
"As attitudes go, there are worse. So long as one does not permit doubt itself to become an article of faith."
"Do you believe in miracles?" she asked.
The smile he showed her seemed bittersweet. "I believe in strange things, surely," he said.
Such as swords that can appear and disappear at will? she thought incongruously.
"But I fear I have seen far more," he went on soberly, "and more concrete evidence for the existence of evil in this world than of good."
"A crisis of faith? In a Jesuit?"
He laughed. "We are human – all too human, to borrow from that most misunderstood of Western philosophers, Nietzsche. You must know, since you know so much of our history, that we Jesuits are notorious for such crises. As well as for our outbreaks of outright materialism. If not cynicism.
"Worldly education – the pursuit of knowledge – wars with faith. Even as the early church fathers perceived and feared."
"But you've pursued what you call worldly knowledge pretty vigorously, haven't you?"
He nodded. "I continue to, my dear. Pursuit of knowledge is pursuit of truth, is it not? And did not our Lord Himself name Himself the truth? But understand, please. A weakening of faith in faith – in things taken for granted, without questioning – does not necessarily imply weakening of belief in God."
She sat back, crossed one long leg over another and regarded him.
"You could always give up on the whole God issue."
His eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed briefly.
It was a low blow, she admitted to herself. Why do I suddenly feel an urge to bait this old man, who's shown me nothing but kindness and respect?
"Alas, my dear," he said softly, "that option is foreclosed to me. I know there's a God. I simply must suffer likewise knowing I shall never understand Him."
She found nothing to say to that, and sought refuge staring at the dregs in the bottom of her heavy blue pottery mug.
Father Godin leaned forward with his elbows on the table and his fingers laced above his coffee mug. "One wonders, in all this – might there be some connection between the apparitions of this Holy Child and these other – how shall we say – less holy sightings?"
Feeling unnerved, Annja glanced at her watch. "Oh. I'm sorry. I have to be going. I'm afraid I've got to rush away. But it's been lovely."
He stood up as she did. She offered her hand. He took it, bowed over it, kissed it briefly.
It's a corny, male-chauvinist gesture¸ she reproved herself sternly. Yet she found herself utterly charmed.
"I just have a plane to catch," she said. "Down in Albuquerque. And with the balloon fiesta, and all the security hassles..."
"I quite understand," he said, holding her hand for a lingering moment. His other hand came up and pressed something into hers.
"My card," he said as she looked at it. It identified him as Father Robert Godin, SI. The card also showed his cell phone number and e-mail address.
"SI?" she asked. "Oh. Societas Iesu."
"So you know Latin?" he asked.
She saw no reason to dissemble, although something had suddenly put her on her guard. "Yes."
"An affectation on my part. So, then, where must you be off to in such a rush?"
"Mexico City," she said.
Chapter 8
"We can be somewhat defensive here in Mexico," Dr. Lorenzo Márquez, of the Department of Mesoamerican Studies of the National Autonomous University, told Annja as they strode along a corridor with modern Mexican folk-style paintings spaced along the polished wood wall to their right. On their left was a series of tinted windows looking out on a spacious courtyard garden of ferns and broad-leaved tropical bushes, surrounding a huge round helmeted Olmec head carved of stone. "The whole concept of diffusionism strikes many of my colleagues as nothing more than Northern Hemisphere patronization."
Her escort through the capital's expansive Museo de Antropología was young and tall, his lean, long-legged body swinging along beneath a white lab coat hung from wide shoulders. His dark face was round, from bone structure rather than fat, of which he seemed to carry little. Beneath an unruly hank of thick hair, black as a raven's wing, he had a prominent jut of nose and piercing black eyes sunk in deep sockets. They seemed connected by a dark band, giving him a slight resemblance to a raccoon. Actually, Annja thought, he would have looked sinister had his manner not been so relentlessly cheerful.
"So you don't take seriously theories that space aliens taught early native peoples in the Americas to build step-pyramid temples?" Annja asked lightly.
His brow creased slightly.
Oh, dear¸ she thought. That sounded patronizing, didn't it?
"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I was only being facetious."
He smiled and bobbed his head. "Of course, of course. And of course I do not. Nor do I believe anyone – whether intrepid Polynesian navigators or ancient Egyptians – taught my ancestors to do so, either. A step pyramid, any pyramid, is the simplest structure possible. You place a smaller square of blocks on top of a slightly larger one. Even if one uses undressed stones, just piles natural rocks on one another, they will achieve an angle of repose to produce a rough pyramid of sorts."
"And the temples?"
"For all our cultural and physiological differences, we're the same organism – and forgive me, please, Señorita Creed, for telling you what you no doubt abundantly know. I suspect a fascination with the heavens is hardwired into our species. The sky, after all, is the one realm of natural Earth that is inaccessible to us. So a belief that gods must dwell there springs naturally to our minds. The urge to be closer to them, so they can better hear our pleas and complaints, drives us to high places. How many cultures boast stories of priests and shamans climbing high mountains in search of revelations? And getting them.
"So the urge to build high places – artificial mountains – for communing with the gods is universal, as well. When you combine that with the equally universal desire of rulers to express their power and intimidate rivals – and their own subjects, usually – by building vast monuments – " he shrugged "The worldwide prevalence of pyramid-shaped temples becomes not at all mysterious, and requires no diffusion whatever."
"So you reject the notion of pre-Columbian contact between American natives and Old World outsiders?" Annja asked.
His laugh surprised her. They had come into a large hall, in the midst of which rose a replica Mayan temple, with bas-reliefs seeming to writhe up its heavy square columns of poured concrete. He led her inside. Groups of visitors, mostly tourists by their dress and accents, clumped around pools of illumination under the watchful obsidian gaze of security guards. These squat, dark men, despite their European khaki uniforms, reminded Annja of Nahua statues themselves.
"Not in the slightest. Indeed, recent discoveries in North and South America make it abundantly clear that there was much traffic between the so-called Old World and the so-called New. Archaeologists in South America have possessed evidence for years of continuing contact with the Pacific peoples dating hundreds of years before the Europeans. Sadly, the tendency of North American archaeologists for years was to dismiss such evidence blithely. After all, who were we but mere natives?"
"It's true," Annja said. "Too true. I'm sorry."
"But you didn't do it, did you?"
"No. I was always something of a rebel against the established order in the orphanage school." She had made a point to establish her upbringing in a Catholic orphanage early in her correspondence with young Dr. Márquez. She had long ago learned that even fairly secular Latin Americans related more readily to Catholics. Not that she was communicant, or even considered herself Catholic, but she felt small inclination to raise that point.
And then I became a student of science, she thought. Did that transform me into a reflex defender of a different established order? A lot of her colleagues still ridiculed any notion of pre-Columbian contact across either ocean as chariots-of-the-gods rubbish.
He nodded. "Well, then. Not guilty. It pleases me to live in a time, Ms. Creed, in which such questions are beginning to be frankly examined by science, rather than reflexively ridiculed and explained away."
"Me, too," she said.
They came to a major clump of tourists sporting shorts revealing legs like uncooked sausages. From their mutterings Annja thought they were German, although she understood little of the language despite her gifts for learning tongues. She also knew that despite her own Anglo-American prejudices concerning body-mass index, these stout middle-aged and elderly men and women could more than likely hike her straight into the ground. Fit as she had always been, on her few side trips to Germany and Austria she had grown accustomed to finding herself halfway up a trail to some mountaintop castle or another, laboring along with her tongue all but hanging out, only to be passed at effortless speed by parties of jovial Germans of all shapes, sizes and ages.
Dr. Márquez steered Annja to the side so she could see what had the tourists so fascinated. "Now, here we have a fine specimen of the famous Mayan calendar," he said, beaming as if he'd invented it.
Propped atop a black stone pedestal in a blaze of yellowish light was a thick wheel of yellowish rock. Its center showed an angry-looking face missing a nose. Rings of intricately carved glyphs radiated outward from it.
"There are actually three distinct Mayan calendars," Márquez said. "There is a 365-day calendar, the Haab', which describes a standard solar year. There is the Long Count calendar, which is the one that involves all the controversy. This, though, is the calendar the Maya themselves most used – the Tzolk'in, the Sacred Round. It depicts a 260-day cycle."
"Which recurs throughout Mesoamerican cultures," Annja said.
Márquez nodded. "Just so. This is what people usually mean when they talk about the Mayan calendar."
<
br /> "But the Long Count – "
"Is the one that involves the so-called prophecy," Márquez stated.
He ushered her onward to a less crowded niche containing a tombstone-shaped slab. "This stela was unearthed in the Yucatán four years ago. It makes use of Long Count dating."
It showed two vertical rows of glyphs indecipherable to Annja. Fascinated as she was by the whole broad scope of archaeology and anthropology – all of humanity and its multiplex history – she specialized in Middle Age and Renaissance Europe. The Chimayó dig team had welcomed her involvement in large part because the early New Mexican colonists, cut off from almost all contact with Europe for most of their history, retained many aspects of culture long archaic in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. As a matter of fact the language still spoken in the high mountains of the north resembled sixteenth-century Spanish, just as the speech of certain mountain populations in the southeastern U.S. retained much of Elizabethan English.
"The Long Count was based upon cycles of just under four hundred years," Márquez said, "each called a b'ak'tun. The current b'ak'tun, the thirteenth, began on September 6, 3114 B.C., in our Julian calendar. It ends on December 21, 2012, although there's a certain amount of wiggle room, amounting to a week or two."
"Thus the end of the world," Annja said.
He grinned. "You might think so."
"What do you think?"
"What I think is that the makers of the calendars on which some people base end-of-the-world prophecies didn't see any particular reason to project more than half a millennium into their future. In fact I like to think their funding ran out."
Annja laughed.
"You must be familiar with the phenomenon."
"Oh, yes."
"Stargazing and astronomical calculations were a monopoly of the Mayan state. As in most of the world's more complex cultures, particularly the Chinese, calculating dates and astronomical events wasn't just an important activity, but a major source and mainstay of power. The public literally couldn't get rid of the state – though individual components, such as emperors, could be and were replaced – because then they'd have to do without vital knowledge. Both key ritual knowledge, such as the timing of eclipses, as well as when, in a given year, crops needed to be planted. So, long before the vaunted computer revolution of our own lifetimes, knowledge was, in fact, power."
