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 Balancanché 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.
‘What do you see?’ The Halach Uinic was standing beside him.
‘See? I see forest. And then more forest.’
‘No. Nearer home. Across the way there.’ The Halach Uinic was pointing towards a second pyramid, four hundred metres across the tree-dotted plain in front of them. He moved his hand in an elegant arc to encompass the even smaller pyramids surrounding it.
Sabir shook his head, as if some extraneous thought were intruding on his attention. When he spoke, his tone was matter-of-fact. ‘I see a family.’
The Halach Uinic took a pace backwards. ‘You see what?’
‘I see a family. We’re standing on the father pyramid. He probably represents the sun. And across there is the mother pyramid. She’s probably the moon.’
‘Why do you call her the mother?’
‘Look. You can see she’s a woman by the way your ancestors built her. There are two buildings high up either side of her flank. Those are her breasts. Then further down, between where her legs would be, you can see a slit. That is her vagina. And on her left. The two matching pyramids. Those are her twins. The smaller pyramids are her other children. They all stand in the shadow of their father, who overlooks them. Christ, they’ve even got eyes.’ He turned to the Halach Uinic. ‘It’s all there. One has only to look.’
The Halach Uinic had gone pale. ‘Where did you hear this?’
‘Hear it? Where should I have heard it? I never even knew this place existed beyond seeing it depicted on a map. It’s obvious, though. Anybody can see it.’
‘Obvious to you, maybe. But in my entire life, no one has mentioned this to me before. Ever. It appears in no book. It is written up in no scholarly papers. The site is not spoken of in this way even by the priests.’
‘Well I’m probably wrong then. But you asked me what I saw. And I see that clearly. The buildings seem alive to me. As if they’re breathing, almost.’
Ixtab, who had been standing behind the two men and listening to their conversation, moved forwards. She gestured to the Halach Uinic, and then placed one hand on her heart. ‘You must tell him.’
The Halach Uinic turned towards her.
‘He is the one. You must tell him.’
‘You are sure?’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then speak.’
76
‘I have a story to tell.’
The Halach Uinic was standing just in front of you, at the very pinnacle of the great pyramid. As he spoke, his voice was snatched up by the pyramid’s acoustics and transported over the waiting crowd.
Earlier, while the Halach Uinic had been occupied with one of the gringos, Tepeu had touched your arm to gain your attention. When you had approached him with your ear he had whispered many things to you about the pyramid and about the Halach Uinic. He had told you, for instance, that the pyramid had been built as a mouthpiece for the priests, and that the priests had been selected, from birth, to be mouthpieces to the gods. That the Halach Uinic was both their temporal leader – the so-called ‘true man’ – and also their spiritual leader – the Ah Kin Mai, or ‘highest one of the sun’. For one person to hold both of these titles was unprecedented, said Tepeu. It was a measure of the severity of the coming times. Everything must be concentrated into one vessel.
You had no idea what Tepeu was talking about, but you did not tell him this. You did not wish to abuse his faith in you. So you nodded at everything he said, and encouraged his speaking.
Then, unexpectedly, the Halach Uinic motioned to you to approach him. You moved towards him without hesitation. But as you walked, you were already asking yourself questions.
What were you really doing here, standing high above the crowd as if you were someone of importance? You were only a campesino, with no land, no money, no education, and no knowledge of anything beyond the tending of a vegetable plot and the harvesting of a field of chayotes. What worm had entered into you to cause you to question the Halach Uinic while you were travelling together in the car? If you had not insisted that if you were to be offered back the book, the gringos should also be offered back the crystal skull, then none of this would have happened. There would have been no gathering. There would have been no ceremony. You would have been free to return to Veracruz and to your mother – if you had been able to make it back, of course, without food, or money, or transport, and with no real understanding of the geography of your own country.
Now the Halach Uinic was speaking out in Spanish, and not in Maya. This was a good thing. You had tried to understand Maya when Tepeu had demonstrated it for you, but you had failed entirely. Not a single word had made itself clear to your understanding. You looked back over your shoulder and you saw the woman with the damaged face translating for the two other gringos, and this was good also, because the gringos, too, needed to understand what it was the Halach Uinic was offering them. They needed to be free, as you were, to either agree to, or to refuse, the Halach Uinic’s offer. This much was plain to you.
Next, the Halach Uinic was holding up your book. He began to tell the story of your family’s guardianship of the book over many generations. He told how one of his priests, who had been trained to read the language of the ancient Maya, ha
d read the book, and that it contained a story that everyone needed to hear. But that the priest could only recount this story with your permission. For the book was yours, he said, not theirs. You had been chosen to guard it, and not a Maya. Just as the gods had chosen a gringo to discover the thirteenth crystal skull.
These choices made by the gods constituted a message, the Halach Uinic continued – a message with two tongues to it. The first tongue told that the Maya were in no way special. They had not been selected over others. They took no precedence in any hierarchy. They were not ‘chosen people’. Like a priest, their function was simply to be the mouthpiece for whatever the gods, and through them, the one god, Hunab Ku, had to tell the world.
The second tongue referred to the end of what the Halach Uinic called the ‘Long Count’, which he described as the end of the last great 52-year cycle of the serpent wisdom – the final ‘sheaf of years’. This, he said, was the only time when the first day of the 365-year calendar and the first day of the 260-year calendar intersected during the 52 years of the Calendar Round. It marked the end of the Fifth Great Cycle. The end of the Fifth Sun.
Your head was beginning to spin at this stage. Why was the Halach Uinic concentrating on these things? What did they mean?
Next he told how the beginning of the first of the Five Great Cycles had begun with the birth of Venus, on 4 Ahua 8 Cumku. At this point he turned towards the gringos and explained that in their calendar – which he called the Gregorian – Venus’s birth date fell on 11 August 3114 BC. The Fifth Great Cycle was due to end on 21 December 2012, not with the death of Venus, but with the possible destruction of the earth. This was not the first time the earth had faced such a crisis, he added. For during the preceding 5126-year period, the world had been created five times, and had been destroyed on four separate occasions.
The Halach Uinic now told a story to further illustrate his meaning – just as the priest at your church in Coscohuatepec did when he spoke of the parables of Jesus Christ. The story went as follows:
The Mayan Codex Page 32
