The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

  ‘Great. Excellent. We shall all become bulimics. This has been one of my ambitions for many years.’ Calque shook his head, as if he was standing amongst a group of madmen. He hitched his chin at Sabir. ‘Are you absolutely sure you want to go through with this?’

  ‘What do you think, Calque? Of course I’m not sure. But if I think about it any longer I’ll do another bunk. So here goes.’ Sabir glanced quickly at Lamia. Then he held his hand out to the Halach Uinic.

  The Halach Uinic placed fifteen seeds in the palm of Sabir’s hand.

  ‘This is it?’

  ‘More would be dangerous. And unnecessary. When gringo kids take more, they end up schizophrenic. Their pupils enlarge for days, and they suffer from photophobia. Some become amnesiac. They are fools. They are simply concerned with gratification and not with knowledge.’

  ‘And this won’t happen to us?’

  ‘No. Not if you chew the seeds well. Not if you ask the right questions.’

  Sabir poured the seeds into his mouth. The Halach Uinic did the same. So did Ixtab. Sabir saw that the guardian was drinking his mixture, as was the Chilan.

  Calque shrugged and popped the peyote into his mouth. He began to masticate the pulp, a disgusted expression on his face, as if he were being forced to swallow a tablespoonful of castor oil.

  Lamia was the last to make up her mind. She turned and looked into the darkness surrounding them for a very long time. Then, with a shudder, she placed the peyote on her tongue.

  90

  At first Sabir felt very little. It was almost as if the datura wasn’t working. Perhaps they’d given him a bunch of sunflower seeds to chew on by mistake? Every now and then he found himself stretching his hand out as if he were reaching for a cigarette. But he had never smoked. This fact struck him as strange.

  The Halach Uinic’s voice droned on. He and the Chilan had been praying for over an hour now, and the sound had become like a sort of sonic wallpaper behind which Sabir could dimly make out the presence of other people. But the room was entirely dark – not a sliver of light entered from anywhere. Even the stones heating the air were dark – Sabir had assumed, for some obscure reason, that they would glow like household coal.

  Thanks to the heat from the stones he was now sweating uncontrollably. He began to picture himself as a cold bottle of beer on a midsummer’s day. The thought of the beer made him want to salivate, but he found that he couldn’t produce any spit at all. He thought about asking for a glass of water and then decided against it. The idea of the seven of them sitting packed together around the stones and still not being able to see each other struck him as ludicrous in the extreme.

  Every now and then there was a mild clattering and banging – the susurration of things being shifted and of liquid being poured. Sabir reckoned that this represented the sound of the Halach Uinic, Ixtab, and the Chilan arranging their offerings in the dark. Each had brought with them various vessels filled with deer blood, sacpom resin, and certain other accoutrements, while Ixtab, as usual, had been carrying her shamanic bag of tricks.

  Sabir began to muse on what was secretly hidden inside Ixtab’s bag. A powder compact? A lipstick? A cell phone? He began to giggle at the thought of Ixtab as some sort of super-urban Maya princess. The idea was so absurd that he felt an overwhelming urge to communicate it to the assembly at large so that everyone else could appreciate it too. But for some reason he found himself unable to speak.

  Slowly, Sabir began to realize the full enormity of what was happening to him. He no longer felt remotely claustrophobic. In fact he had not felt claustrophobic since entering the sweat lodge. This fact struck him as so absurdly unlikely that he began to search around inside his head in a vain effort to reclaim the comfortably ingrained emotions of fear he had now so palpably lost track of. But try as he might, he couldn’t reconnect with them. Was it someone else who had been claustrophobic, then, and not him?

  He felt around with his fingers, anxious to know who was sitting beside him. The process was a difficult one, however, as he did not wish to invade anyone else’s privacy. By a process of elimination, he decided that the Halach Uinic was sitting directly opposite him, with the Chilan on the Halach Uinic’s left, and Ixtab on his right – the sounds of praying were coming from over there, and they were site specific. This left the guardian, Lamia, and Calque as his potential next-door neighbours.

  Sabir lowered his nose and began sniffing. For some reason he felt that he ought to be able to tell who was sitting next to him simply by their smell. This seemed entirely reasonable, to his way of thinking, and he was surprised that more people didn’t use the procedure in the ordinary run of their lives. He had a sudden clear vision of approaching people on the street and sniffing at them. Of discovering their secrets that way. Whether they were menopausal, on heat, full of testosterone, angry, in love, etc., etc. Someone or something had come up with this theory before, but he couldn’t remember who or when.

  ‘It was dogs!’ he screamed, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice.

  The Halach Uinic and the Chilan stopped their chanting.

  ‘I knew it. Dogs go around sniffing.’ Sabir raised one hand to his face in yet another cigarette-smoking movement. He swept the hand out in an arc, like an over exuberant actor, then stopped abruptly when he felt some resistance. But the resistance wasn’t physical. He was only inferring it. ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ He had forgotten to use the person’s name, but he suspected it was Calque.

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘I knew it. I nearly hit you.’

  ‘You were a long way off. You were nowhere near me.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Sabir allowed himself to flop backwards. He lay, looking up at where the roof was supposed to be – but it might as well have been the floor for all the evidence it gave of its existence. ‘Can anyone tell me why I’m here?’

  The Chilan and the Halach Uinic began their chanting again.

  Sabir decided that he would go to sleep.

  91

  Athame had been lying without moving for close on three hours. During the whole of that time, the Halach Uinic and the Chilan had only stopped their chanting once, when someone – she supposed Sabir – had shouted out something about dogs.

  She had taken to working on one part of her body at a time. Small movements. Flexions and tensions. Tiny spasms of the muscles designed to keep the blood flowing around her body and to protect her from cramp. She wondered how much longer she would have to suffer this torment for the sake of – well what? Nobody had said anything worth missing supper for so far.

  At one point her cell phone began to vibrate. Fortunately for her, the bass-baritone droning emanating from the Chilan and the Halach Uinic, with the occasional contralto interjection from the witchdoctor woman, more than compensated for its sound, and Athame was able to dampen it with her hand until it switched itself off. She had arranged with Abi that he only let any of his calls run for two rings – if she didn’t answer, it meant that she was otherwise engaged. This foresight had now saved her from the embarrassment of premature discovery – a discovery which would have forced her to act in a manner directly contrary to Madame, her mother’s, wishes. Athame was sufficiently level-headed to realize that in those circumstances Abi would gleefully have fed her to the dogs, transferring all responsibility for his own maverick actions onto her head.

  Once, when the chanting became especially raucous, Athame achieved a partial change of position, turning from facing the wall to facing outwards. What were these people thinking of? Why were they all sitting in a pitch-dark space chanting nonsense? She began to regret her super-smart, on-the-hoof idea of sneaking inside. Now, given the impossible situation she had contrived for herself, she knew that she would have to see the thing through until the bitter end.

  She silently prayed that Abi might somehow be able to deduce what had happened to her, and detail one of the others for skull and codex duty.

  92

  The temporary c
amp had gone quiet. People were either curled up on the ground or sleeping in hammocks they had strung up between the trees. Some had attempted to build bivouacs out of palm fronds and plastic sheeting, but most seemed content to lie out beneath the stars.

  Abi had the entire area covered. With Oni and Berith back at the warehouse, he still had Vau, Rudra, Aldinach, Alastor, Athame, Asson, Dakini and Nawal to police the temporary camp. Each was in contact with him via their cell phone, and each was covering one particular section of the camp.

  Thanks to Aldinach – who was in fully female distaff mode at the moment for reasons best known to himself – he knew to an inch where the skull and the codex were. Thanks also to Aldinach’s intuitive genius in policing areas he was not directly responsible for, he also knew that Athame was hidden somewhere inside the sweat lodge, cosying up to all the major players.

  He had cursed Athame’s impetuosity at first – what had she been thinking of, putting herself in imminent danger of detection? But once he’d calmed down and began to think rationally about the whole thing, he started to feel better. He’d tried her once on the phone, moments before Aldinach had told him where she was hiding, and if that degree of buzzing hadn’t give her away to the sky pilots, he reckoned nothing else would.

  Madame, his mother, had also telephoned earlier. Sensing that the whole affair was now entering its final phase, she had recently taken to calling him every hour on the hour. Abi felt a deep sense of satisfaction, therefore, that he had been in a position to tell her pretty much the entire truth about their situation. They were doing exactly what she had asked them, after all – monitoring events with no direct intervention. No one, bar Athame, had made anything like a proactive move. No one was going against her wishes. Yet.

  Abi knew that the Countess was disturbingly adept at discerning lies. He had stuck to the strict letter of the truth, therefore, in a desperate effort to stave off the evil day. He wanted to be able to report total success to her: the securing of the Maya codex and the thirteenth crystal skull; the identity and geographical location of the Second Coming and of the Third Antichrist; and the gruesomely drawn-out murder of Adam Sabir, for which he had already earmarked Aldinach and her deliriously transformational scalpel – then, and only then, might he expect to be forgiven. The deaths of Joris Calque and Lamia would simply add an extra layer of icing to the celebratory cake.

  He looked at the time on his cell phone – 2.30 in the morning. He’d better get on with it. People woke up early here, and he reckoned some might be moving by as soon as four o’clock, if they needed to get to distant places of work.

  He began the necessary round of telephone calls.

  93

  The snake was approaching him again. The same snake he had seen whilst imprisoned in the cesspit below the Maset de la Marais safe house waiting for Achor Bale’s return.

  This time the snake slithered past him. He could feel the roughness of its skin kissing his.

  Sabir tried to turn his head to follow the snake’s progress, but he was unable to move. It was then that he realized that his skull was being held in a vice.

  He corrected his eye-line and stared to his front. He instantly knew what he was looking at. It was the exact same scene described by Akbal Coatl, the chief guardian of the sacred books, in Maní, in the run-up to the burning of the Maya relics.

  Sabir tried to shout. To break through the reality he now found himself in, and back to the reality he felt he should be inhabiting. But his words were eaten – no sound came out of his mouth.

  He remembered then that time was a spiral. Wasn’t that what both the Maya and Nostradamus believed? That at any given moment, granted the right conditions, you could encounter time past, or even time future, in time present? The poet, T.S. Eliot, had taken the idea and run with it in the ‘Burnt Norton’ section of his Four Quartets:

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  If all time is eternally present

  All time is unredeemable.

  The words repeated and repeated themselves in your brain.

  You were clearly going crazy. A Spanish soldier was approaching you. He held a garrotte in his hands.

  The soldier turned towards a friar dressed in the dark-brown habit of a Franciscan Minorite. Friar de Landa. It couldn’t be anybody else. The man’s face was smooth and blameless – the face of someone who knows that whatever they do, whatever outrage they choose to commit, is, by godly implication, the right thing. Beside him a man you also recognized was busy scribbling onto a vellum sheet, supported on a lectern. You knew this man well – he was a member of your family. For a moment you resented him. What was he doing, hobnobbing with the Spaniards? He should be out here, with you, suffering for his beliefs.

  Then you remembered. He had taken an oath. You had administered it yourself. In this oath he had undertaken to protect two sacred items – the last remaining copy of the sacred codex, designed by the priests as the final back-up to the library revealed to Friar de Landa by the terminal folly of Nachi Cocom – and the thirteenth crystal skull, the so-called ‘singing skull’, without which the twelve remaining skulls of wisdom might not speak. To fulfil his task, Akbal Coatl had agreed to placate – even to become one with – the Spaniards. This he was clearly doing to the best of his ability.

  The Spanish soldier wired the garrotte in place over your forehead. The snake was close behind you too. He was whispering in your ear.

  You knew now that the snake was the Vision Serpent. The Serpent who only appeared to those whose eyes were no longer sufficiently acute to view the reality about to encompass them.

  The first turn of the garrotte was made. You shrieked in pain. You could feel the blood starting from your forehead.

  The Vision Serpent whispered the first of the seven secrets to you.

  Then came the second turn. Your eyes clouded. Your ears began to hum with the pressure of the cordeles. Four turns. That was the maximum you had ever heard inflicted. You would be able to withstand that much. You were a strong man. You would be scarred, yes. Badly scarred. But you would live.

  The Vision Serpent whispered the second of the seven secrets to you.

  When they turned the garrotte for the fifth time, you no longer knew or cared what they were asking you to say. You could feel the cordeles knotting against the bones of your skull. Blood clouded your vision. Pain was your only reality. You could feel the teeth breaking off in your mouth as you ground your jaws together in a vain attempt to loosen the pressure.

  The Vision Serpent whispered the fifth of the seven secrets to you.

  With the seventh turn, your eyes burst out of their sockets and fell onto your cheeks. This you could see. For you were seeing through the eyes of the Vision Serpent. You were dead and you were alive at the same time. Your skull was cracking under the pressure of the garrotte. Your brain was compressed inside the cordeles, which were binding it as in a vice.

  You were dead. No man could survive seven turns of the garrotte.

  The Vision Serpent whispered the seventh of the seven secrets to you.

  ‘He is still alive, sir. Shall we tighten the garrotte another turn so that his skull breaks in two?’

  ‘No. Let him live. As a lesson to the other chiefs.’

  At first, when they untied the garrotte, it was found impossible to free it from your skull. The cordeles had ground so far inwards that they and your skull had become one.

  You were dead. You felt nothing.

  You could see the soldiers still, but only via the eyes of the Vision Serpent. One soldier cut the membranes that supported what remained of your out-spurted eyes. Another cut the cordeles and ripped them from your forehead, just as you would rip a congealed bandage from an infected wound.

  You were lifted. You saw this clearly. Lifted by four men and a woman. Your head lolled backwards. You could see the blood rushing from your wounds.

>   You were dead. No man could survive what you had endured.

  Then the pain came. And with it the final whispers of the Vision Serpent. The final sighting of yourself through the Vision Serpent’s eyes.

  94

  Sabir opened his eyes. He was blind. He closed them again.

  It had all been true then. They had taken his eyes. He felt consumed by the darkness. He screamed.

  Hands took hold of his body. He was carried out of the touj and into the open air.

  Sabir threw his forearms across his face. It was dark. All was darkness. He could not bear to acknowledge his blindness.

  Ixtab leaned forwards and rested her hands on his. ‘Try to open your eyes again,’ she said. ‘You will see. You are not blind. Trust me.’

  ‘No. No. I can’t.’

  ‘Open your eyes.’

  Sabir was placed gently on the ground. He could smell the odour of the dust. Smell the bodies of those around him. He could identify each by their smell.

  ‘Where is Lamia? I need her.’

  ‘Open your eyes, Adam.’

  Sabir opened his eyes. It was still dark, but he was just able to make out the faces of those immediately surrounding him in the first suggestion of pre-dawn.

  It was then that he knew that he was not blind. That he had merely been having a mimetic vision. Hacking sobs racked his body. In a sudden cognitive rush he remembered taking the datura. He remembered the ceremony. He remembered going to sleep. When he had recovered sufficiently to speak, he made a grab for Ixtab’s arm. ‘What did I do? What did I say?’

  ‘You told us many things.’

  ‘Did I tell you the seven secrets?’

  ‘The seven secrets?’

  ‘Yes. The seven secrets the Vision Serpent told me.’

  There was a heavy silence. Sabir could almost smell the excitement emanating from his companions.