Age of Aztec a-4

by James Lovegrove

  “Seems to be in order.” The Jaguar handed the passport back. “I wish you luck, Mr Jolicoeur.” He turned and motioned to the other three with a circular sweep of his arm. “Let’s move out, men. We’ve wasted enough time here. We’ve another half-dozen of these hick-towns to cover today.”

  They tramped out of the village along the path that led to a nearby dirt track. Shortly, there was the sound of two-stroke engines spluttering into life. Motorbikes. The waspish drone faded into the forest.

  “Whew,” said Stuart to Zotz. “Nicely done. I thought they were here looking for me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Englishman. Like I said, routine. Jaguar patrols come through every so often. They shake down the villages. Kick in a few doors, prise up a few floorboards. Not sure what they hope to find. Some sort of contraband. There isn’t any. What do these people have? Nothing. Mainly it’s a show of power, to remind everybody, even in the boondocks, who’s carrying the biggest stick. A bit of swaggering. The locals know to keep their heads down and wait until they pass.”

  Sure enough, with the Jaguar Warriors gone, the villagers emerged from indoors. In just a few minutes the air was filled with shouting and hurly-burly again. Normal village life had been resumed.

  “Still,” said Zotz, as he and Stuart began the arduous four-hour hike uphill to the village where Xibalba were billeted, “we’d better tell Chel. There’s a chance one of them might not be as lazy and complacent as the Jaguars round these parts usually are. He might check with his counterparts in France to see if there really is a botanist called Rene Jolicoeur.”

  “And is there?”

  “Yes, there is. That’s his stolen passport you’re carrying. Trouble is, he doesn’t look a bit like you.”

  Ah Balam Chel agreed that they had a problem. The encounter with the patrol was unfortunate. He’d known having Stuart among them would be a risk. A tall white man in the company of a group of short, brown-skinned Anahuac nationals was always going to attract attention.

  “You are, at least as far as physical appearance goes, a liability, Reston. And it means, I’m afraid, that we must abandon this cosy little perch sooner than planned.”

  “And go where?”

  “Where we have to go,” Chel replied cryptically. “To the place the military would call our forward operating base. The bad news is, we won’t be travelling by truck. We can’t. We’ll be too visible on the roads — you will be. We’ll have to go cross-country instead, on foot. But we have enough time, that’s the main thing. Still enough time. We’re ahead of schedule.”

  “Schedule? What schedule? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “The countdown, Reston. The cosmic clock is ticking.”

  “You what?”

  “Come now, don’t look like that.”

  “No, you’re really going to have that explain that remark.”

  “I will, I swear. But tomorrow, after we head out. Go get some sleep. You look done in. In the morning, we march.”

  THIRTEEN

  4 Deer — 6 Water 1 Lizard 1 House

  (Saturday 8th — Monday 10th December 2012)

  The rain was like no rain Stuart had ever known. Britain had its downpours — torrential cloudbursts that could soak you to the skin in seconds. They seldom lasted long, though. They came, they went.

  This rain was relentless, merciless, endless.

  The deluge started shortly after dawn, and Stuart expected that Chel would postpone departure. But instead, Chel claimed the rain was a great opportunity. “It’ll keep the Jaguar Warriors off our backs. If we wait for it to stop, we could be hanging around for days.”

  So, heads bent, packs on backs, they set out. Within minutes they were drenched. The trees were no protection. The forest canopy didn’t act as an umbrella; instead, the foliage served to channel and focus the rain, turning it into thick rods and shimmering, sluicing sheets. It was like taking a tepid shower, fully clothed. You couldn’t see much further than a dozen yards ahead. Everything beyond dissolved into a haze of falling water.

  The Mayans didn’t appear to mind. They marched along in a line, singing a song in a language unfamiliar to Stuart but not dissimilar to Nahuatl. The melody was dirge-like, but peculiarly haunting, as it vied with the rapid staccato drumming of the rain.

  “Old Mayan lullaby,” Chel explained, “learned at one’s mother’s knee. A tradition the Aztecs haven’t managed to eradicate, not for want of trying. Most of these men don’t understand the actual words. Mayan is a dead language, its use forbidden. But they know what the song is about.”

  “Which is?”

  “The twin brothers Hunahpu and Xbalanque and how they played the ball game against the Lords of Death in the underworld. The Lords of Death cheated, trying to injure the twins both on and off the court. They still couldn’t beat them, so they killed them.”

  “Cheery.”

  “It has a happy ending. Happy-ish. The brothers were resurrected and turned the tables. They tricked the Lords of Death into letting themselves be slain with a knife, making them believe that they would be resurrected too. From that day on Death no longer had quite such a hold over humankind. Its power was not completely broken, but it had to play fair forever after. No more luring the innocent and unwary into its domain, as it had done.”

  “So then, inspirational.”

  “Very much so. Afterwards, Hunahpu and Xbalanque rose into the sky to become the sun and moon, eternally alternating but interconnected.” Chel chuckled, casting an upward glance. “Not that we’re seeing much of Hunahpu today.”

  “You said something last night about a schedule. A cosmic clock.”

  “I did. You’d like me to explain?”

  “Anything to take my mind off this pissing rain.”

  “Well now, first off, I don’t want you getting the impression that I’m some kind of fruitcake who puts his faith in prophecies and the like.”

  Stuart shot him a wry sidelong look. “From the sound of it, that’s exactly what I’m going to end up thinking.”

  “The truth is, I do sincerely believe that the Empire’s dominance is coming to an end. Things can’t go on like this. The Empire has become decadent and corrupt at every level. It’s had its time; its comeuppance is due. You feel that too, don’t you? That the Age of Aztec has run its course?”

  “All empires collapse eventually,” Stuart said. “Although this one does seem to have lasted longer than most. Alexander the Great didn’t manage to conquer the entire world. Neither did the Romans. But has the decline begun? I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “It just so happens that we’re in a time of endings. Have you heard of the long count calendar?”

  “Vaguely. It’s the Mayan equivalent of the tonalpohualli.”

  “Equivalent!” Chel snorted. “It was the forerunner. The Aztecs copied their calendar from us. Mayan astronomers devised it, the Aztecs took it and modified it and claimed it as their own, much as they do everything. The tonalpohualli is based on our dual calendar, which consists of the haab and the tzolk’in. The haab is the solar calendar, and the tzolk’in the base-twenty calendar, with a two-hundred-and-sixty-day cycle. The two calendars turn and turn, one inside the other, a wheel within a wheel, meeting again at zero every fifty-two years. However, there is a further, larger unit of time called a b’ak’tun, roughly four centuries. Thirteen b’ak’tun s constitute a ‘world age,’ the time it’s reckoned it takes for Creation to commence, evolve, and be complete. That’s approximately five thousand, one hundred and twenty-five solar years. With me so far?”

  “My head’s starting to swim,” said Stuart, “but that could just be rainwater.”

  “According to a Mayan sacred text, the Popul Vuh, the current world age — the fourth — began in 3114 BC Gregorian.”

  Stuart did a swift bit of mental arithmetic. “Five thousand years ago, give or take.”

  “It’s nearing its climax,” said Chel. “Another Creation is due to begin.”

&n
bsp; “When, precisely? Soon?”

  “Four Flower One Movement One House.”

  “Very soon. That’s just over a trecena from now.”

  “Fourteen days on the nose. Of course, none of this is widely known. When they invaded, the Aztecs suppressed all Mayan culture, including the Popul Vuh and the concept of world ages. They stole what they liked the look of and stamped out the rest. But we know. A few of us, true Maya, have kept our folklore and beliefs alive. We’ve passed our culture on down through the generations orally: the legends, the myths — like the story of Hunahpu and Xbalanque — the learning, the lore, all of it. We remember what we used to know, even if no one else does.”

  Stuart thought of the books in his library. He’d done much the same thing as the Maya, in his own small way. He’d sought out and bought novels and works of nonfiction that pre-dated Britain’s fall. Extraordinarily expensive, some of them, and only available from a handful of very greedy and jealous collectors. Not illegal to own, but no self-respecting subject of the Empire would dream of having them in the home, let alone displaying them openly on shelves. Precious artefacts from the time when Britain was Great and a slave to none.

  “So if the fourth world age is nearly over,” he said, “will there be a fifth? Or is now the time to find a remote cave and start stocking up on provisions?”

  “Some believe the end of the fourth age heralds apocalypse,” said Chel. “Not me. I think there’ll be a fifth, and a sixth, and many more. Why not? The long count calendar is a cycle, not a straight line. Everything comes round again. What’s inarguable is that the completion of thirteen b’ak’tun s is a significant date. It’s a period of transition as oneworld age pivots around and becomes the next. Creation begins anew. Life is transformed.”

  “The Empire falls.”

  “If it’s to happen, when better? We can look on this as an auspicious time to be undertaking our mission. The stars are aligned in our favour. The universe is smiling on us. A state of flux approaches, and in flux anything is possible.”

  It would have been easy to dismiss outright Chel’s talk of world ages and periods of transition — to treat it as meaningless mumbo-jumbo number wrangling.

  Stuart, however, was in a state of flux himself. So was the forest he was trudging through, literal flux, as the clouds continued to dump water onto it in epic quantities, turning the ground to an ankle-deep mush of dirt and leaf mould. Nothing seemed stable, as the rain beat down on Stuart’s skull and made the world around him a smeary green blur. Time itself became elastic. So did distance. He lost all sense of the hours passing and couldn’t even guess how far he and the guerrillas had been walking. They climbed and descended ridges, pushing through thick stands of fern and bromeliad, ducking beneath vines, straddling over rotten deadfall trunks, wading through the slurry the soil had become. Only when the greyness of the daylight darkened did Stuart realise that nightfall was on its way.

  They bivouacked beneath an enormous cedar that provided some shelter from the continuing rain. No one could get a cooking fire started, so they ate their tinned rations cold.

  When they woke the next morning, it was still raining. They squelched on through the rain on a westward course. The Mayans were no longer singing to counteract the rain. Zotz cursed the rain. All Stuart could think about was the rain. The rain had soaked into his brain. He felt like a sponge filled with rain. His clothes hung heavy with rain. There was only rain. There had only ever been rain. There would only ever be rain. Rain reigned.

  They spent another night shivering beneath the tarpaulins they were using as tents. Sometime during the small hours the rain stopped. Everyone snapped out of sleep, startled by the sudden hush. Nobody could quite believe the watery onslaught was over. Even the forest fauna took a while getting used to the idea, but once one animal let out a first tentative hoot, the others pitched in. The nocturnal chorus was back with a vengeance, louder than ever as if to make up for its silence the previous night. The frogs in particular were overjoyed, creaking and booming.

  When dawn arrived, the air turned to steam. The guerrillas resumed their journey in better spirits than before, strolling along, chatty and cheery. Stuart himself felt his mood lighten with every step, and his clothes lighten too as they gradually dried out. When Chel paused to take a compass bearing, Stuart asked how much further they had to go and was pleased to learn that it was only another day’s walk. Tomorrow morning at the latest they would reach their destination. If it had still been raining, he wouldn’t have dared ask. Any answer would have been too depressing.

  By the middle of the day, the heat had become ferocious, accompanied by a humidity that sapped the life out of you. Even the Mayans, who had struck Stuart as indefatigable, began to drag their feet. The air was a thick, unbreathable broth. Zotz collected some berries from a guarana vine and passed them round for all to munch on. The caffeine in the bitter-tasting fruit helped, giving an energy surge, but tiredness soon set in again. After a while every step was an effort. Clothing became wringing wet again, now with sweat.

  Chel sensibly decided they should make camp early. A fire was lit — a minor miracle — and hot stew was consumed. For Stuart it was a pleasure beyond all reckoning just to sit on the forest floor, not moving, with his bare blistered feet stretched towards the flames, soles gently warming. None of the forced marches he’d undergone during his Eagle Warrior training could compare to the yomp he was on right now. He couldn’t find a part of his body that didn’t ache. It took all his remaining strength just to crawl under canvas and lay himself out on a blanket; he was asleep before he knew it.

  And awake again, in the darkest part of the night. Someone was yelling frantically. Stuart scrambled out into the open. All the guerrillas were up, milling about. It took a while for the cause of the commotion to become clear.

  One man, Tohil, had got up and gone to the edge of the campsite to relieve himself. Mid-flow, he’d spotted something between the trees. A shape. A person. Watching him.

  Tohil had let out a cry of surprise and the watcher had fled.

  No, not fled.

  Kind of vanished.

  Definitely vanished.

  Melted into the darkness as though being swallowed up by ink.

  And Tohil was sure — not absolutely sure, but pretty sure — that it had been a woman. The watcher had had a female silhouette. Not too tall. He’d glimpsed the contours of hips and breasts.

  The other guerrillas scoffed. “A woman? You don’t think you just imagined it? You were maybe asleep and dreamed her?” Snide allusions were made to Tohil’s manliness and how long it had been since he’d last had a girlfriend.

  Tohil became indignant, insisting he had seen something. But the more he protested, the louder the mockery grew. Eventually he stomped off to his tent, muttering under his breath.

  Only Stuart considered his claims with any seriousness.

  Was it possible? Could DCI Vaughn have followed him to Anahuac? Be on his trail now?

  No. Absurd. How could he even think it? Vaughn was still in London. Had to be. There was, in fact, every chance that she was dead. If she hadn’t been killed when the Xibalba van hit the paddy wagon, the Jaguar Warrior code of honour would have swiftly remedied that situation. A high-profile murder suspect had been snatched from right under her nose. You couldn’t cock up an arrest that badly and expect to be allowed to live.

  If Tohil was right and a woman had been spying on the guerrillas’ camp, it wasn’t Chief Inspector Malinalli Vaughn.

  Which, Stuart was bemused to find himself thinking, was a pity.

  FOURTEEN

  7 Dog 1 Lizard 1 House

  (Tuesday 11th December 2012)

  The fourth and final day of the journey began innocuously enough. After a breakfast of maize cake and dried broad beans, Stuart and the guerrillas tramped off, reassured by Chel that there were ten miles remaining, perhaps less. Stuart’s inner compass told him they weren’t far from Lake Texcoco. They had more or less retrac
ed his and Zotz’s river recce trip, overland.

  The mood was genial.

  That changed when one of the guerrillas spotted something overhead. Among the leaves. Too large to be a monkey.

  It was there one moment, gone the next. Nobody else saw it.

  “A jaguar?” Chel suggested.

  It could have been. The big cats did sometimes lurk in trees, balancing on a thick branch, poised to pounce on prey below.

  But whatever the guerrilla had seen was larger, he said, than a jaguar. And he could have sworn it had flown upwards as it disappeared from view. On wings that shimmered like a hummingbird’s. A hummingbird the size of a human.

  Tohil was gleeful. “Hey, so I wasn’t imagining things last night, was I? There was someone watching us.”

  “Something’s going on, that’s for certain,” growled Chel.

  “We’re close to enemy territory,” said Stuart. “Your men are getting jumpy.”

  “My men don’t get jumpy,” Chel snapped. “I’ve been feeling it since we struck camp. Haven’t you?”

  “Feeling what?”

  “That we’re being followed. Stalked.”

  “By something up in the trees?”

  “Not just there. Behind us as well.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He’s not,” said Zotz. “I’ve noticed it too. I didn’t want to say anything, so as not to spark alarm, but I’m convinced we’re not alone.”

  “But who? A forest tribe?”

  “Not round here.”

  “Jaguar Warriors?”

  “I don’t think so. They’re not nearly this subtle.”

  “Serpents, then.”

  “Again, I don’t think so. They’re good, but this isn’t their style. Why follow us when they could just as easily ambush us?”

  “Maybe there’s only one or two of them. They’re waiting for reinforcements.”

  “No,” said Zotz. “It’s something else. Something I can’t figure out. Whoever they are, it isn’t natural, what they can do. They’re as stealthy as spiders.”