Invisible City

by M. G. Harris

  “Jeez. Sounds a bit over the top.”

  Benicio stares at me as though I’ve said something impossibly stupid.

  “You’re thirteen, right? Well, when you are sixteen, you have the right to take your place on the Executive as the Bakab Ix.”

  “When I’m sixteen?”

  “That’s right. Montoyo is your proxy until then. But when you are sixteen, Montoyo will have to stand down. I hope you like government, Josh.”

  “That’s just … ridiculous. Civics is, like, my worst school subject ever. And sixteen? Way too young!”

  “If you’re not born and educated for it like the other Bakabs, I think it may be. Although the truth is, I don’t think they’ve ever actually had a Bakab from sixteen. Mostly they wait until the father dies.”

  “It must have happened before.”

  “Maybe so, but I’ve never heard of it.”

  “If being the Bakab Ix means I have to join your Executive, then you can forget this whole thing.”

  Benicio frowns. “S’gonna be a pretty short term of office anyway. Unless you get the Ix Codex.”

  “Because of the end-of-the-world thing?”

  “Exactly.”

  Well, he may have a point. I’m finding it odd to be around people who assume the world is going to end in 2012. You’d think it would make it more scary. But no. Just the opposite—it makes it feel more like a crazy superstition.

  Benicio escorts me back to the apartment I’d assumed was Montoyo’s but now realize is Benicio’s own. In the bedroom a clothes hanger is draped with a pair of crisply ironed, white linen trousers, a matching tunic, and a poncho of pure white, finely knit wool, into which has been woven two black symbols, a glyph on the front and a jaguar’s head on the back.

  As I change, he watches with what looks like pride. “Now you are Zac Cimi, the black Bakab, the Bakab Ix.”

  I peer at myself in his tiny bathroom mirror. It’s only now, dressed as a Maya of Ek Naab, that I see the resemblance between myself and these people. I’m painfully aware that it’s just on the outside. Inside we’re so, so different.

  Benicio hands me a helmet shaped like a jaguar’s head. It’s heavy, metal coated with an enamel of matte black paint.

  “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “No, dude, you look cool!” Benicio says, giggling.

  I place the helmet carefully on my shoulders. It weighs heavily, even with the padded rims. I can’t see anywhere but directly ahead.

  “Wouldn’t be much good in a fight,” I mutter.

  Our evening walk through the paved alleyways is nerve-racking. Where before people had only glanced shyly or at least discreetly, now they stop in their tracks and gape. No one says a word—they don’t need to. Benicio answers their questioning looks with a bashful little shrug, as if to say, I’m just the delivery boy. Into my ear he rasps, “Don’t worry. This is normal. In the past forty years only one man has been seen dressed as Zac Cimi.”

  “Who?”

  “Your father, of course.”

  I try to stare directly ahead but it’s impossible not to catch the occasional eye. Is it hostility? Amazement? Relief? I imagine I’m seeing all reactions. They’re no more puzzling than my own. I’m wound tight as a cassette tape; snap me and I’ll spool into chaos.

  At the sacrificial cenote, we’re met by two guys carrying flaming torches. Benicio whispers that it’s all normal, part of the ceremony. “It’s rare for all the Bakabs to dine together,” he says. “They honor you.”

  And that’s where he leaves me. Looks like the torch guys and I are headed for the main pyramid. The pyramid has no platforms, just a single staircase leading to two towers. The masonry is stuccoed, painted a deep red, the staircase inscribed with turquoise- and gold-colored glyphs. As I climb the stairs, I feel myself examined, scrutinized by dozens of eyes. The solemnity of the moment hits me. These people—they expect something from me.

  But I’m just a kid. What the heck can I do?

  We enter the left tower, where the bronze door to an elevator slides open. The fire-torch guys step back. From here, I’m on my own. The elevator goes down just a few yards and opens onto a wide hall, which I’m guessing occupies the entire width of the pyramid. An attendant standing by the door takes my helmet and places it on a small table with three others—one white, one red, and one yellow.

  The stone walls are hung with tapestries of Mayan art—ancient kings in ceremonial dress receiving prisoners of war, and other images, less obvious to interpret. The ceiling is low, giving the hall an intimate, almost claustrophobic quality. The room is lit by multiple muted lights that mimic the flicker of candlelight.

  In the center is a long table made of varnished hardwood, laid with candles, wineglasses, platters of fruit and salad, ceramic bowls filled with rice, chafing dishes containing steaming heaps of spiced chicken, fried strips of plantain, and round wooden boxes for tortillas.

  Standing behind their chairs, watching my entrance, are three guys dressed pretty much like I am, except for the color of their Bakab symbols; one is white, one red, one yellow. Carlos Montoyo is there too, also dressed in some traditional clothes, without the poncho or the symbol, along with a middle-aged woman wearing a white embroidered dress and a man I’d guess to be in his sixties, his long white hair neatly braided, deep lines drawn in his face. He looks to be a pure-blood Maya, every bit as proud and kingly as the figures in the tapestries.

  The oldest member of the group, however, isn’t White Braid (who I’m guessing is the mayor) but the Bakab with the red symbol. He’s completely bald, with narrow, pale eyes that don’t follow me the way everyone else’s do. Instead, he simply stares, almost dreamily, into the candle to his right.

  They beckon me, so I approach. There’s one empty place, next to the bald Bakab with the red symbol. When I’m standing close to his left, he turns to me, but his eyes won’t meet mine. It’s a little unnerving, and I offer Carlos Montoyo a small shrug. He replies with just the vaguest widening of his eyes in the red Bakab’s direction. A quick glance around at the others, and I see they’ve all got the same expression.

  Into the silence, the red Bakab speaks.

  “They’re trying to indicate to you, young Joshua, that I’m blind.”

  His English pronunciation is flawless.

  “Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  The red Bakab chuckles, a deep baritone laugh.

  “So, young Josh. It’s good to finally meet you. I knew your father, and grandfather too. Very well.”

  The old man seems almost moved. I don’t really know what to say.

  How could he have known my father well?

  “In the Hall of Bakabs each of us speaks the truth of our inner self,” intones the mayor in a sudden, theatrical voice that breaks the hushed atmosphere. “A truth that can only be contested with blood.”

  There’s a long pause while the others mutter something under their breath. My guess is it’s something like “Amen.”

  “I am Chief Sky Mountain,” he continues. “Mayor of Ek Naab.”

  Montoyo declares, “I am Carlos Montoyo, proxy for the Bakab Ix.”

  “I am Rodolfo Jaguar, the Bakab Muluc!” says a guy in his forties with white symbols.

  “I am Lizard Paw, the Bakab Cauac!” says another, with yellow symbols.

  The red Bakab says in a faint voice, “I am Blanco Vigores, the Bakab Kan.”

  “And I am Lorena Martinez, the atanzahab.”

  They all turn to me expectantly.

  “I’m … er, Joshua Garcia,” I say. Their expressions show that they’re waiting for more. “The Bakab Ix.”

  A feeling of relief fills the room.

  “Congratulations, Josh. You just became our newest Bakab Ix,” says Blanco Vigores with a weak smile.

  Huh! That was easy!

  Chief Sky Mountain asks Blanco Vigores to say the blessing, which he does, speaking quietly in words I don’t understand. I’m guessing it’s a Mayan language, probabl
y Yucatec.

  Sitting down, Blanco Vigores makes slow, careful, and unsteady movements—more than I’d expect on account of his blindness. He moves like a very old man, but from his looks, I’d have put him at no older than seventy.

  How old is the guy, really?

  As I take my place among these people, I’m suddenly aware of how young I am. They’re all trying to act as though this is an everyday matter. Well, I’m not finding it easy to play along with the act. I’m just Josh Garcia, from Oxford, I feel like saying. And I think you might have the wrong guy. Books of doomsday prophecies—that’s not really up my alley.

  Yet everything that’s happened in the past weeks and hours seems to have turned that view on its head.

  Sitting in the Hall of Bakabs with the ruling Executive of Ek Naab, wearing the same ceremonial outfit that my father wore just months ago, and his father, and his father … it makes me feel more than a little special. Like everything fits into some cosmic plan.

  Including me.

  Chapter 27

  “It’s a magical age for us, Josh, our modern era. They have described this as the Golden Age of Ek Naab, the Era of Wonders.”

  Chief Sky Mountain pours me a glass of crimson-colored juice (pomegranate, so they tell me) and passes me a hollowed-out cactus head, chilled and filled with a cold soup of tomatoes, onions, and a cool green vegetable that I can’t quite place. I’m still guessing when Montoyo butts in. “Nopales,” he says. “Instead of cucumber, in the gazpacho. A traditional Spanish soup, yes? Adding nopales makes it Mexican,” he says. “The colonial with the indigenous.”

  “Do you consider yourself an Englishman?” asks Carlos Montoyo. “Or a Mexican?”

  There’s an expectant silence. “Not sure, really,” I reply. “My mother is half Irish. My father was Mexican. I don’t know about English, but British, yes. There’s this test we have: who do you support in cricket? I’d be English by that test, I suppose.”

  Blanco Vigores nods, smiling. “I remember cricket. Do you still play?”

  “You remember cricket?” I ask. “When did you see it?”

  “I wasn’t always blind, young Josh. This darkness, and the solitude it brings, descended slowly, generously, allowing me time to bid farewell to all the graces of a life blessed by sight.”

  There’s an uncomfortable pause. I don’t really understand what the old guy is talking about. I guess he misses his sight—who wouldn’t?

  Montoyo says, “Blanco Vigores traveled once in the outside world, much as I do now. Before we built our aircraft, the Muwan. He traveled by the old methods.”

  Vigores grins, showing his almost translucent teeth. “Propeller airplane, steamboat, even an airship. Those were the heroic days of travel. When one dressed in one’s best.”

  I want to know more about the Muwan. I promised Benicio I’d keep quiet about our joyride, but I can still ask questions about its history.

  “It means ‘sparrow hawk,’” the chief tells me.

  I nod uh-huh, pretending not to know.

  “We built the first one in the year you call 19”—and here he takes a moment to make the conversion from the Mayan calendar—”1952. Your grandfather and his nephew were both engineers on the project. Doubtless the source of young Benicio’s own talent.”

  Lizard Paw watches me for a second, then tells the others, “You’re making pleasantries. Isn’t it obvious that Joshua wants to know why he’s here?”

  Something’s going on between these guys, but I can’t tell what. Lorena leans forward and tells Lizard Paw, “You have no manners. Let the boy eat.”

  I stop chewing, anxious. “No,” I say. “Tell me now. Please.”

  Again there’s a long silence. No one seems to want to be the first to speak.

  Eventually, Rodolfo Jaguar does. Conversationally, he asks, “Did you ever read the letters of Hernán Cortés to his emperor, Charles V?”

  I shake my head.

  Jaguar seems disappointed, even scornful. “A pity. Not to know about the world that went before, the civilization destroyed by the conquista, seems a shame for a young Mexican.”

  “Wasn’t Moctezuma the Aztec Emperor,” I say, “the one who surrendered Mexico City to the conquistador Cortés?”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “I thought the Aztecs were enemies of all the other peoples of Mexico.”

  “Ah, yes. But with the fall of the Aztecs, our fate, too, was sealed.”

  “But I thought that the Mayan empire was already in decline. Hadn’t most of the Mayan cities already been deserted by 1000 AD? Hundreds of years before Cortés arrived. That’s what my dad told me.”

  Again, silence. Since they’re saying nothing, I throw in another question. “Why exactly did the Maya desert the cities?”

  But no one answers. It’s as though I haven’t spoken. Instead, Montoyo begins to talk.

  “Your cousin told you about the codices, yes? And that each codex has a guardian, the Bakab.”

  Nodding, I swallow my last piece of chicken taco.

  Montoyo continues. “It’s simple, Josh. You must complete the mission of your father and grandfather. You must find the codex and return it to us.”

  “Why?” I ask the question calmly, no fuss. There’s been a lot of talk about how I have to find this codex. Well, I know why I want the codex—to get the NRO and Mexican police to leave my friends alone. But if this end-of-the-world thing is real, I guess I have to face up to it, sooner or later.

  “The best way to answer that, Josh, is to show you.”

  Montoyo takes what looks like a remote control from a drawer in the table and activates the lights. Simultaneously the wall lights fade to black. And about one yard above the table, a small point of light appears and hovers. It expands to the point where we see that the light is itself composed of thousands of even tinier pinpricks of light. Like a miniature universe expanding, the lights rush apart, swirling away from each other until the entire spectacle has expanded to fill a space almost as long as the table.

  “It’s the Milky Way galaxy,” Montoyo says helpfully. Although that’s perfectly obvious, even to me.

  The image expands, zooming in on one of the spiral arms of our galaxy, presumably closing in on our own sun. One of the pinpricks of light begins to shine more intensely.

  “Our sun,” says Montoyo. “Situated on the inner rim of the Orion Arm. From now on we’ll look at the galaxy only from this vantage point: our own. From Earth.”

  Rodolfo Jaguar blows out the table candles. I catch sight of Blanco Vigores staring impassively at the table. He’s hardly spoken. Seems pretty rough to exclude him in this way, but I guess he’s heard it all before.

  “In the sky, there is a triangle of stars known as the ‘summer triangle.’” A triangle is drawn slowly in the hologram above. “Vega, Deneb, and Altair.”

  I stare at the projection, baffled. What’s this got to do with anything? I glance at Montoyo. I guess my confusion shows.

  “Astronomers use it as a pointer to this dark band you see beyond, known as the Great Rift. In fact, this dark band is a distant dust cloud.”

  Ah … now I’m getting it. “The Great Rift,” I say, remembering the Calakmul letter. “Xibalba be … the Black Road.”

  In the twinkling holographic light I notice that everyone at the table—except Blanco Vigores—has turned to me.

  “Exactly so,” Montoyo says. I detect a hint of pride, which I’m not sure I deserve.

  “I didn’t work it out,” I say. “Camila did. My half sister. She thought that the Great Rift crossing the sky to Polaris is some galactic event, something that the ancient Maya knew about. And some disaster will happen then.”

  “Well,” Montoyo says, “basically, she’s right.”

  I gasp. “How could she be?”

  Lizard Paw remarks, “Seems you doubt it. Why?”

  “There’s going to be this massive cosmic disaster,” I say, “and our scientists don’t know about it? But the ancient Maya
s did—how do you work that out?”

  “Fundamentally,” says Montoyo, “there are two ways to know that something is going to happen. One is to have scientific tools to measure things, make predictions. The other is to predict an event that happens regularly. Something that’s happened before. Like knowing the equinox is coming, or a solar eclipse. The ancient Maya were capable only of the latter kind.”

  “So whatever this thing is that’s coming … it’s happened before?”

  Montoyo nods. “That’s it exactly. And the ancient Maya knew about it, because they remembered. From long, long before the dawn of Mayan culture. Didn’t you ever wonder why an ancient civilization had the need for such big numbers? Only three things are counted in such high numbers—very small things like atoms, very big things like stars … and time. It’s why the Long Count calendar ends when it does—the date beyond which they could predict or foresee … nothing.”

  “So the cosmic cataclysm thingy … what is it?”

  “Did you know,” begins Lorena, “that cosmologists consider a massive gamma-ray burst from the explosion of a nearby star to be one of the greatest threats to life on Earth? The radiation, when it hit us, would be lethal.”

  I feel a ripple of energy pass through me. The hairs on my arms prickle my skin.

  For the first time I’m actually a little scared.

  “Wouldn’t it be headline news, though,” I say hopefully, “if a star nearby was going that way?”

  “Correct,” Lorena says. “Those are the stars we can see. But in the core of the galaxy, every so often there’s a mega-explosion. And the energy from that explosion can join up with interstellar magnetic fields, traveling through the galaxy at near light speed in a sort of wavelike volley.”

  I’m speechless. “That doesn’t sound good …,” I say.

  “Physicists call it a superwave,” Lorena continues slowly. “A burst of deadly radiation. The kind of thing that’s caused extinctions in the past.”

  I’m aware of sweat trickling down my back. It feels icy. I glance at Montoyo. He’s just nodding, very calmly.

  Montoyo says, “The Maya had records, or memory—of this kind of event. They refer to it as the Black Road meeting the Heart of Sky. This only happens once every 25,800 years—the time taken for the precession of the equinoxes. Can you guess when the next event is due to happen?”