Thunder God

by Paul Watkins

  After a night of being mauled by insects in my lean-to, I returned to the boat, where Choll had arranged for some of the Mayan women to help me reinforce the sail. In places where the cloth had worn thin, they stitched patches of animal skin and rawhide lacing.

  Again that night, when I brought him his food, Olaf listened impatiently for a while and then told me to go. ‘Do not forget what these people think you are,’ he said.

  Early next morning, Choll and I walked back into the jungle, gathering vines to replace the leather cables which had stretched thin. Although we kept an eye out for a tree that would serve as a mast, we found none that was suitable. Most of the tall trees had either been weakened by beetles gnawing deep inside them, or had a milky white sap, which Choll said burned the skin.

  That night, carrying a clay bowl of cooked beans flavoured with hot peppers, I tried to open the door which connected my lean-to and Olaf’s house, but found it was blocked by the furdraped chair on which he spent his days, receiving the people of the village. ‘Olaf,’ I whispered. ‘Olaf!’

  I pressed my ear to the door and heard him laughing softly, followed by the sound of a woman tittering. I stood back, and let the bowl fall with a dull crash onto the floor. Another burst of laughter came from Olaf’s darkened house. I returned to my shack, and listened to dogs fighting at the edges of the jungle.

  In the days that followed, Choll and I travelled further afield, using his dug-out canoe to cross the wide and pea-green lagoon which opened out behind the village. The water was shallow, and we could have walked across it, but we kept to the canoe because of crocodiles. We had to be off the lake before sunset, as that was when the crocodiles came out to hunt. I had seen crocodiles before, basking in mud along the river Nile, and did not argue with Choll about taking our chances among them after dark.

  The Maya called to each other across these marshes by blowing into large spiral shells, whose sound carried far across the water. Often, the quiet of the afternoon would be broken by the sad wail of a shell horn, followed by the distant, moaning reply.

  By now Choll and I had learned to communicate well, in a mixture of Mayan, Norse and hand gestures. He told me that the people who lived here now were the remnants of a much larger population. Choll said that years of drought and storms had ruined the crops. Many people moved inland, where there was more fertile land to farm. The edges of the jungle were lined with abandoned stone buildings and some large roads, which the Maya called Sacbe. These had been reclaimed by the relentless creeping vines, leaving only narrow footpaths to snake among the dusty trees. The arrival of Kukulkan had been foretold by the Nacom as the beginning of a new age for the Maya, a time of plentiful crops and prosperity. Only when Choll had explained that to me did I understand the full measure of the danger we were in.

  Choll was worried, too, as much for himself as for us. He feared that the Nacom would punish him for helping to repair the ship, since it was clear that the Nacom did not want us to leave.

  I offered to take him with us, but he shook his head. Alive or dead, his place was in this world and not in mine.

  That night, finding Olaf’s door blocked again, I went in through the front of his house.

  He was in bed with a woman, who jabbered at Olaf when I appeared, pointing at me and then at the doorway.

  ‘You cannot come in that way,’ said Olaf.

  ‘The other way is blocked.’

  ‘I am not hungry,’ he yawned. ‘I have been eating all day.’

  ‘Tell her to leave,’ I said.

  ‘I cannot do that. She is the daughter of the village elder. He gave her to me, you know.’

  I pointed at the woman, who was running her hands through Olaf’s hair. Her own black hair shined blue in the light of a palm bark fire, which burned in the middle of the stone floor. ‘You,’ I said.

  She looked at me.

  ‘Get out,’ I told her quietly.

  She turned to Olaf.

  Olaf glared at me, then sighed and waved her away.

  She gathered up her clothes and walked past me, bare feet padding on the stone.

  ‘What do you think you are doing?’ asked Olaf. ‘We agreed to play along with this. I am only doing what is expected of me.’

  ‘The deeper you tangle us into this dream of being Kukulkan, the harder it will be to get out. I cannot find us a new mast. Until I do that, we are not leaving. In the meantime, what are you going to tell the Nacom when they return?’

  ‘Perhaps they won’t come back,’ he said.

  Then I told him what Choll had explained to me about the new age the Nacom believed was coming, and how it began with the appearance of Kukulkan. ‘They will come back,’ I said. ‘You can be sure of it. And if they find out that we are not who they think we are, it will be easier for them to kill us than to come up with another explanation for our being here. Do you not see?’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  I walked closer to him. ‘The Nacom will have to answer to these people for their mistake. I have no doubt that some of them will answer with their lives, but not before they have taken ours as well.’

  He rose up until he was on his knees on the bed. ‘What if they are right?’ he asked.

  ‘Right about what?’

  He shrugged. ‘About who I am.’

  ‘You are Olaf,’ I snapped. ‘That much I know for certain.’

  He shook his head, as if I had misunderstood. ‘It does not matter what you know.’ Then he raised his hands and let them fall again. ‘It does not even matter what I know!’ he laughed. ‘You understood what they said. Kukulkan is a messenger.’

  ‘But you do not have a message, you fool!’ I shoved him backwards.

  He sat up and for a moment it looked as if he was going to lash out. But when he spoke, it was with a calm voice. ‘The message that he brings is kept a secret even from himself. Perhaps my presence here is all the message they are looking for.’

  ‘Are you honestly prepared to take that risk?’

  He breathed out sharply through his nose. ‘How much less of a risk is it to sail that boat across the ocean, hoping we can find our way home again?’ He climbed off the bed and took hold of my arm, drawing me towards the doorway. ‘I do not even think we are in the same world anymore. Whatever special treatment you received from the gods is over now. I see you shuffling off down the beach to pray, and look how much good it has done you.’ We stood now at the entrance to his home.

  In the doorways of the little houses, people had gathered to see what the noise was about. Their faces were lit by the soft light of their cooking fires, which filled the air with fragrant smoke.

  ‘Know your place among these people,’ Olaf murmured in my ear. Then, with a jerk of his arm, he shoved me off the stone foundation and sent me sprawling in the dirt.

  By the time I got to my feet, he had disappeared inside his house.

  *

  There was another group besides the Nacom, who seemed equally certain that Olaf was Kukulkan. These were the slaves, of which there were four in the village. They had been given to certain people in the village by the Nacom, but why they had been given or where these slaves had come from, I did not know. These slaves lived in sheds beside the cooking houses of their owners, much as I did. There were three men and one woman, and they spent most of their time washing clothes.

  The next evening, from behind the door of my lean-to, I watched as one of the slaves came crawling across Olaf’s floor on his hands and knees until he reached where Olaf sat eating his meal of roasted fish. The slave was thin and sickly, with scabs on his legs and dirty hair that stuck up in tufts. He told Olaf his name was Achel. He clasped his hands in front of his face and begged to be set free.

  Before Olaf had time to answer, a group of villagers arrived in the doorway and dragged the slave outside. They chased him to the edge of the jungle and beat him senseless with the same sticks used for catching lizards.

  I saw that the life of a slave here meant as li
ttle as it had in Miklagard. I could not bear the thought of being a servant again, even if the man I served was not my master.

  All night, the high-pitched sound of Achel’s wailing echoed through the jungle.

  *

  After another day of paddling through the labyrinth of shallow channels which connected the lakes behind Yochac, Choll made it clear to me that it was hopeless to continue our search for a mast. He explained that sometimes trees drifted up onto the beach which might have served the purpose, but he did not know where they came from. He said that the word had spread about the arrival of Kukulkan and that a great gathering was being planned by the Nacom at a sacred place inland. Mayans would be coming from all over the country. People had been awaiting this day for a long time.

  Choll and I sat there, in the middle of the lake, water lapping at the sides of his dug-out canoe. Late-afternoon sun beat down on our backs. With a casting motion of his arm, Choll showed that he knew how far I had to travel if I ever wanted to reach my home again. Then he looked at me and shook his head, as if to say that no one could go that far, not even the dead on their voyage to another world.

  That night, I waited until after dark, when most of the village was asleep. Then I went to the blocked door and whispered Olaf’s name. I called to him until my voice went hoarse, but finally he answered.

  ‘What do you want? You woke me up.’

  ‘There is no hope of finding a mast,’ I explained. ‘It is only a matter of time before the Nacom return.’ I told him about the gathering they had planned. ‘We have to leave now and take our chances out on the water. The next time they ask you to go with them, they will not take no for an answer. I will start provisioning the boat tomorrow. Choll will help me with fresh water and food. Then you and I can sail down the coast and dig up the silver before heading out to sea.’

  ‘You can do as you please,’ said Olaf. ‘I am staying here.’

  ‘Olaf!’ I shook the door, trying to wrench it open, but he had tied it shut with vines. ‘Think straight! We have to get away.’

  ‘I am not stopping you.’

  ‘And how far do you think I could sail that boat by myself?’

  He laughed softly.

  I heard him getting out of his bed and the sound of his bare feet walking across the stone floor.

  Now he stood on the other side of the door. He had thrown away his old clothes and now dressed like the other Mayan men, with only a cloth around his waist.

  I could not see his face, only his hands and his legs, on which the old salt-water boils had healed, leaving purple smudges on his skin.

  ‘You must learn to accept the way things are now,’ he said, ‘just as I learned to accept what I did not want to believe, back in the place where we came from.’

  ‘Olaf, do you not want to see your home again?’

  ‘What if we are already home?’ he asked. ‘What if we have at last found the gateway into the other world that we searched for back when we were children? Perhaps, somewhere out on the ocean, we passed through without even knowing it. And now we are on the other side. Maybe, even now, we might be in Altvik. Kari might be standing right beside you. But of course you cannot see her, and she might sense that you are there, just as we sensed the other world but could not see it. I believe I have found what I have been looking for all my life.’

  I slumped down onto my knees. ‘But Olaf, even if you were right, this is not your world. We are travellers and we are lost.’

  ‘If I am lost,’ he said, ‘it is because I choose to be lost, which means I am not lost at all.’

  ‘We do not belong here, Olaf. We belong in that other place.’

  ‘You belong there, my old friend. Go home, if you can. The temple is your responsibility now.’

  It was hopeless to try and persuade him. I could not convince Olaf, because I no longer even knew myself what the truth was, or if there was more than one truth. Perhaps there were a thousand truths, partitioned in their own realities but inhabiting the same space, in which those who held one truth above another lived and died without ever knowing the others existed.

  Olaf walked away without another word.

  I stayed on my knees, breathing in the still, hot air of Mayan night and longing for the glacier chill of a breeze off the Grimsvoss mountains.

  *

  That night, Choll woke me from a dead sleep. He was excited about something, talking so quickly that I could not pick up any of the words.

  My first thought was that the Nacom had returned, and I felt a jolt of panic arc across my chest. When I said the word, Choll laughed and swept his hand in front of his face to show I was mistaken.

  He brought me down to the water’s edge. A vast yellow moon balanced almost full on the rooftop of the jungle. It was so bright that I could even see the pale green colour of the waves as they rose and crumbled on the ghost-white sand.

  Choll led me to his group of friends, who were gathered around a stone-lined hole they had dug in the ground. The stones had been heated and the hole was filled with the tar-like substance we had used to re-caulk the hull. The men carried the tarring brushes we had made for the job and now that I had arrived, they began to paint the mast with tar, filling in the cracks which spiralled up the wood.

  Now I understood. They had figured it out. I grabbed a brush and began to paint alongside them. We were laughing as we worked in the moonlight, slapping each other on the back, because it was so simple, and so obvious, and we knew it would work.

  I tried not to think about the difficulties of sailing the boat alone. I even considered bringing Olaf away by force but realised that it would do no good. I could not make a prisoner of him and expect his help sailing the ship anywhere but back to this same place.

  By morning, the tar had hardened, sealing the cracks. It would hold now. It would be even stronger than before.

  I decided to speak once more to Olaf, and try to sway his mind. If he refused, I knew I had no choice but to leave as soon as I could, before the Nacom returned. It was morning before Choll and his friends and I managed to refloat the boat, hauling it over log rollers. As soon as the stern had passed beyond a log, one of us dragged the log down to the bow and kept things moving. The boat was sealed up tight and bobbed high in the water. I anchored it in the lagoon and used the rowboat to ferry out green palm nuts, bags of yellow grain, and dried fish, which I laced along the boom so that they hung like tassles, twisting in the breeze. I even tied a hanging bed between two of the old oar-ports, since I had grown used to sleeping that way since my arrival among the Maya.

  I discovered that, in my haste to seal the hull, I had forgotten to recaulk the waterbarrels. Now they were leaking badly. I had no choice but to heat up some more tar and paint it on. It would be late afternoon before the tar dried and I wanted to get out beyond the reef before sunset, as I could not cross it in the dark.

  I went to find Olaf, running over in my head the words that I would say to shake him from his trance.

  When I arrived at Olaf’s, my heart jumped when I saw a large group of Nacom gathered outside. Their feathered cloaks glinted with deep blues and reds and greens. Among them stood men without capes, who were armed with short bows, arrows held in lizard-skin quivers and heavy, stone-tipped spears.

  Olaf stood above them on the stone foundation of his house.

  The sight of the Nacom and their guards had sent women and children back into their houses and left the men sitting uneasily in the shadows of the trees, repairing their fishing nets and glancing up to see what might happen next.

  The Nacom were speaking to Olaf, gesturing towards the white-dusted Sacbe road along which they had come.

  Olaf nodded and stood.

  I pushed my way through the Nacom, despite their clicking tongues of disapproval. At the base of the stone foundation was a chair, built on two narrow poles, with two men standing at each end, ready to carry Olaf away. Over the top of the chair hung a canopy of interwoven leaves to block the sun.

&
nbsp; I stood before Olaf, squinting up at him, because the sun’s glare was in my eyes.

  ‘You should not have come here,’ he said.

  ‘The boat is ready,’ I explained. ‘These men –’

  ‘The men are taking me inland to the great celebration, which they have been planning for many days. Thousands of people will be there.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  He laughed. ‘And what would I tell them? That I cared nothing for the hardships they have endured? That I would deny them the new age of prosperity which my arrival has assured?’

  I shook my head. ‘In your heart, you know that is a lie.’

  Now he strode down the steps. ‘You cannot bear to see that my luck has changed. What you do not know is that your own luck would never have come to you if it had not been for me.’

  ‘Olaf, what are you saying?’

  ‘How do you think it felt,’ he shouted, ‘to watch Ingolf, and then you and Kari walk home and leave me up there alone in the fields? I thought if I could persuade you that we were close to discovering something, we might go back to the way things were before, with all of us together as friends. But it went wrong.’

  ‘What went wrong?’ I asked.

  He folded his arms, the way the Nacom did when they were speaking to someone of lower rank. ‘All this time, you thought it was Greycloak who called you out into the storm that night. But it was me.’ Then he spoke my name in that rasping, guttural whisper I had heard on the night I ran out into the storm.

  ‘That was you?’ I stammered.

  He shrugged, to show how easy it had been. ‘I put on Tostig’s cloak and waited until the middle of the night. I was going to lead you up towards the hills and then hide until you went home again. It would have worked. It would have been so simple.’