by Meg Cowley
Soon, I was on the first outbound flight with screaming babies all the way. Even better, I was in a central aisle seat flanked by two passengers so burly I couldn’t even call my entire seat my own. Still, it wasn’t my worst flight. I gritted my teeth, put my earplugs in and blindfold on, and tried to sleep, aided by a sound shield from my ever handy bracelet to save me from the worst of the noise. As I zoned out, hunched awkwardly in my seat, my muscles complained at even more abuse. So much for that massage.
~
By the time I hobbled off the second plane, my body had given up trying to figure out what time zone it was in, and whether it ought to be night or day. Here, at least, it was three in the afternoon, which meant it would be a good while until I slept again.
I could feel the buzz of magic, however. Cancun, another urban centre, meant another ley line convergence and a glut of magic. I basked in the feeling of it flowing through me as I soaked it up in a brief ‘toilet’ break, locked in a cubicle as I replenished my energy levels. Not as good as sleep, but as close as I would get.
I was looking forward to seeing Mexico, one of the few countries I hadn’t been to, but it seemed I had a little more waiting to do: the immigration lounge. People, packed as tight as sardines, stood between me and the doorway out. I sighed and joined one of the snaked lines, wishing a diplomatic passport would get me through it quicker, but I wasn’t important enough for that level of clearance. I could sense other magic users around me, but they were all shielded; it would be silly not to in a public place.
For the next hour, I shuffled forward, one excruciating half step after another, cursing under my breath and trying not to breathe in the unconditioned air filled with the sweat of a thousand bodies. I didn’t know which I wanted more: sleep, fresh air, or to find out about this mysterious, dangerous relic I’d travelled halfway across the world to find.
When I cleared immigration at last, I stepped out into the baking, muggy heat of a Mexican afternoon. I paused for a moment to appreciate it, and the breeze, for it was a welcome change to London in autumn.
“Zoe Stark?” an accented voice called. I opened my eyes at my name. A man a couple years older than myself jogged over. He was tall and lithe, with tanned Spanish skin, twinkling eyes, and a wide, easy smile. “Hola, Señorita. I’m Juan Santiago, your guide.” He shook my hand and offered me a dazzling grin.
“Hey, Juan, nice to meet you.”
“Mucho gusto,” he replied with the Spanish equivalent, I presumed, and his touch lingered on my hand. His easy confidence spoke volumes; he thought much of himself, I presumed, and he had the body and the face to back it up, but I wasn’t interested. He would be an unneeded distraction; I was there for business and business only. I pulled my hand away.
“So, what can you tell me?”
“This way, chica. It’s a long journey.” He loped away before I could tell him to call me Zoe. I had to jog to keep up. “I’ll tell you in private,” he called and flashed me a wink. I glared at him, but my gaze lingered for a moment as I examined him. No magical aura I could sense, but he could have been shielded, too.
I followed him into a battered pickup truck and he pulled out of the airport swiftly, heading onto the interstate road away from the airport and Cancun, west into the Yucatan peninsula. Soon, nothing but jungle surrounded the straight road that bored into the distance.
The air conditioning was pathetic at best, and I shucked my jacket within minutes, pointedly ignoring Juan as he eyed my toned, bare arms. “So?” I prompted.
Juan cleared his throat. “I’m a member of the Secretaria de Cultura — my country’s organisation for archaeology — on secondment from Chichén Itzá to our new site. I’ve been cataloguing artefacts as they are recovered, and packaging them for removal from the site to our Cancun facilities, where they will be cleaned, restored, and analysed. Everything we have found has passed through my hands.”
He paused and shook his head, and I saw his hand tighten around the steering wheel until his knuckles strained. “The site was classified, under armed guard, and all staff worked under sworn secrecy. The huecheros — ah, the looters — found it anyway.” Juan scowled. “They killed our guards, took every last thing, and damaged much at the site. Now, the police are swarming over the place, making it even harder to find out if there is anything that was not taken or destroyed.” He fell silent as trucks overtook us; police trucks, with armoured men sat on the back in rows. All held rifles.
“We won’t have time to visit today. I’m taking you to a small place near Chichén Itzá to stay for the night, with a friend. I’ll take you to the site tomorrow. It’s close by. It’s an amazing discovery.” His grin had returned, and his eyes were alive as he glanced across at me. “The entire thing, it’s staggering. We’re going to learn even more about the ancient Mayan culture that we only could have dreamed of, and it is a miracle we found it. Do you know much about archaeology?”
I shook my head. I just recovered stuff. Other people messed around digging them up, and that was archaeology, as far as I was concerned. Juan took it as an invitation to tell me more. I didn’t mind; the radio was terrible.
“So, this site is close to Chichén Itzá, which is one of the most important Mayan cities. Wait until you see it! El Castillo, the Temple of Kukulkan, the feathered serpent god, rises into the sky, as strong and tall as it was the day it was built. Ah, the cleverness of our Mayan ancestors cannot be overestimated in building such a great structure. The newly discovered city is modelled in the older ways, and has not stood the test of time so well. It will take many years to discover it all, truly, for the jungle has claimed it as her own, and she nearly kept it from us entirely.
“Men have trekked these areas before and not discovered anything of this place. It was only when we secured funding for a Lidar examination — to have the ground scanned from the air using new technology — that it stood out to us as clear as day and night. Well, of course, we were ordered to explore the site at once, but in the strictest secrecy. Much of Mexico’s heritage has been lost: stolen and destroyed. It’s hard to evade the gangs. Yucatan is one of the safest places in Mexico, but even so, we have our problems. They must have noticed our activity and followed us. Who knows. It’s all gone. I’m glad you came. I hope, with your help, we can reclaim it for Mexico.”
I suppressed a spike of anger. I hadn’t been to Mexico, to Yucatan, before, but it was the same tale the world over. People took things that were not theirs to take. Society lost out. The cycle seemed endless: as long as there were treasures, there would be thieves.
“Anyway, chica,” said Juan, his tone artificially light. I could tell he was trying to distract himself from the way his fingers drummed on the wheel. “You may want to update your time. We are about to time travel!” He winked at me and laughed at my confusion. “Alright, I’ll tell you the secret. Right now, we’re in Quintana Roo state, but soon, we cross the state line to Yucatan. They’re an hour behind. Hey, presto, magic! We have an extra hour of the day, just you and me, chica.”
His effort was amusing, if nothing else, so I gave him a small smile for it. He sat back in his chair with a lazy grin as I fiddled with my trusty watch; still on seven am Tokyo time. Yikes.
It took us two and a half hours to reach Chichén Itzá — though I couldn’t see it from the road — and we drove ten more minutes past it to a small village called Xcalacoop. I couldn’t believe the contrast of the airport, a hub of modern civilisation, to here.
Xcalacoop was a traditional rural Mexican settlement with plenty of Mayan influence. Ramshackle, single storey, whitewashed buildings lined the road: dwellings and businesses with their wares on the street and the inhabitants sat under shaded verandas, watching us drive by. The stone buildings mingled with round-walled, thatched, wooden huts; traditional Mayan construction, Juan explained, for here, the old ways were strong. Looming over everything was the church: a sign of the Catholic legacy of the Spanish invasion centuries before. The entire place was d
usty and tired.
Juan turned off the main road onto dirt tracks. At the edge of the village, he pulled over beside a small house built of concrete breeze blocks and roofed with corrugated metal. “Hola, amigo,” he called as he killed the engine and jumped from the cab with more energy than I could muster. “Come with me, chica, for some Mexican hospitality.”
I grabbed my bag and followed him into the cool shade of the house. Juan was already inside, chattering away in Spanish to a man much shorter than he, and older, too, with a rounded head and friendly face.
“Hey, chica, meet Alejandro, my Mayan amigo.” He slung an arm around Alejandro, who batted him away with a laugh. “Zoe is going to help us out, amigo.”
“Hola, Zoe. A pleasure to meet you. Come, you are welcome here today.” Alejandro’s accent was even thicker than Juan’s, and his wife and children spoke no English at all, only some Spanish. Out here, the Mayan tongue ruled. I had little chance of communicating, it seemed. I smiled at them as they were introduced, and they regarded me with the same curiosity and bemusement. It was at times like this I realised how strange my job really was.
“Ok, chica, we’re staying here tonight. We get the floor.”
That didn’t bother me. I’d slept rough plenty of times before. Whatever it took to get the job done. I could see into the two small bedrooms; one belonged to Alejandro, his wife, and the baby, and the other was shared by the two older children.
Suddenly, a little hand slipped into mine and tugged me. Alejandro’s girl. Her brother grabbed Juan, and he let himself be pulled along, laughing. “Zoe, come with us! Alejandro Junior and Gabriella have a surprise for you.”
I followed, intrigued, into the jungle, as the children chattered to Juan. The noise of life was overwhelming, but no people and cars; just insects, monkeys, and birds. The canopy opened before us and I stopped with a gasp. Before me was a huge pit in the ground. Perfectly circular, it stretched fifty metres across, and when I peered over the sheer edges, a pool of azure water sat far below us.
“Welcome to the cenote,” grinned Juan. Behind him, the children took off their scant clothes until they stood as naked as the day they were born. Gabriella scrambled over the edge on a knotted rope, followed by her brother. I watched them push off from the cliff walls and jump shrieking and whooping into the water.
“What is it?” I had never seen anything quite like it before.
“A sinkhole, a cenote. A portal into the Mayan underworld. That water is deep, you know. This one has not been measured. Some of them are hundreds of metres going down.”
In the bright sun, the azure water looked like any other pool, and silver fish glinted in the light, but as I studied it, I realised I couldn’t see the bottom at all. I didn’t know about any Mayan underworld, but I felt old magic here. It was foreign and faded, like it lingered from another time.
“Is it safe?”
“Sure. Come, have a swim. I promise you, you have not experienced this before.” Juan stripped down to his shorts and slid over the edge.
I shrugged and stripped off myself, down to my underwear, and followed him. I’d been enough places like this to know people didn’t have the same shame about their bodies as I had grown up with in England.
The cold of the water took my breath away. In contrast to the warm stickiness of the Mexican afternoon, the cenote was surprisingly cool and served as a welcome refreshment and I surfaced with a gasp of relief. As the children swam around us like fishes themselves, Juan floated with me.
“Drink it if you want. It’s clean. The Mayans used these for their own water, you know, and they still do.”
“I thought the Mayans were dead?” I’d been meaning to ask, for he talked about them as if they still lived.
Juan laughed. “No, they live now as they ever did. You have like, the Spanish-Mexicans and the indigenous Mayan-Mexicans. We’re all one, and yet different.”
I tried the water as he spoke, savouring its clean sweetness, and continued to drink in the rich scenery around me. I looked into the dark nothingness, wondering how deep it was, and to the sky, where all I could see of the surface was a wide circle of blue above me, with the fringes of the jungle peering over the edge. It felt like a strange barrier to another world, of sorts.
As the light began to rapidly fade, we made our way back to the rope and climbed out of the cenote, up past the hanging vines, roots, and pitted limestone, back to the land of the living and the noise of the jungle. My skin dried in minutes, and I slipped behind a tree to squeeze out my wet underwear and don my clothes again. I made to walk barefoot like the children, enjoying the feel of the warm, hard earth under my feet instead of my heavy, stifling boots, but Juan’s warm hand on my arm stopped me.
“Put them on,” he warned. “Lots of things that bite and sting. We’re far from a hospital out here.”
I did as I was told, for a change. I’d been stung by a scorpion before and I didn’t plan on repeating that incident with anything else that had venom.
The smell of food guided us back: fresh tortillas, guacamole, salsa, and seasoned meats made my mouth water. I realised I hadn’t eaten in over a day now, and I savoured every mouthful, not caring what the meat was. It tasted so good I could have eaten twice my portion, but there was no more to go around. Alejandro’s face clouded with anger as I took some dollars from my wallet. Juan motioned me to put the money away.
“Here in Mexico, we do not charge our friends to eat. It is a great insult. Put it back.”
I returned it to my wallet. I understood, but I’d never accepted just how poor some folks were. It didn’t seem fair. Here they were, raising three kids in a building as small as my poxy studio in London. I thought my living arrangements were rubbish at times, but at least I had electricity, running water, and could afford anything I needed.
“Gracias, Alejandro, Maria,” I said to them with a smile, and they nodded and smiled graciously back, all forgiven.
After the meal, Juan surrendered the battered straw mattress and worn blanket to me, and went to sleep under the stars in a hammock. I was watchful and alert for a while; Alejandro and his family were no threat, that was easy to see. Yet, the jungle was full of dangerous creatures and I wasn’t thinking about animals.
The same people who had terrorised the newly discovered city could well be out there, but here, at least, it was quiet and as safe as could be. Eventually, I surrendered to my complaining body and to sleep. Though, I always rested lightly, ready to awake if I needed, that night, I dreamed deeply.
I fell into other, strange, shadowy worlds through cenotes. Juan, skeleton-faced and bony, led me through the watery doors to an altar of bones, atop which sat a skull of no creature I knew.
“Kukulkan…” a deep voice echoed in the darkness.
Chapter Three
The jungle buzzed around us as Juan led me away from the car. It seemed as if we were in the middle of nowhere.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” It felt foolish to ask, but how could he tell one patch of jungle from another when it all looked the same?
“Look.” He pointed to the ground at his feet, and then drew his arm up, still pointing far into the distance.
I scrunched my face in the universal gesture of ‘huh?’
“On the floor; the light stones.”
I looked harder. Sure, there were light pebbles on the floor. Along with a million other stones, roots, and leaves. “So?”
“Look,” he repeated. His voice was quiet, not the exuberant Juan of the previous night. This Juan was different: calm, respectful, reverent. “See how high from the jungle floor we are?”
Sure enough, when I looked, it was as if we stood upon a raised causeway leading into the jungle. “What is it?”
“Welcome to Mayan Mexico, Zoe. This is a sacbe, a Mayan road. You know, they go for many miles, straight as an arrow, through the jungles? The Mayan people used to run along them from city to city. In the daytime, when the sun was hot overhead, the
white stones would be kind and not burn their bare feet. And at night, why, the paths would light up like the stars to guide the Mayans home.”
I could almost see it as he spoke, but the image jarred with the ruins that remained, along with a trickle of the same old magic I had felt at the cenote last night. It was a slow, steady pulse, beating through the land.
“Come with me.” He led me along the causeway, and we picked our way carefully through the overgrowth.
Before us, piles of rubble emerged between the trees: ruined structures that bore little resemblance to what they had once been. As we entered the site, Juan nodded at the armed guards who stood like statues and in full military uniforms watching the path. They must have been sweltering. I didn’t envy them. They watched me as we passed.
Juan led me away from the sacbe and into the jungle, where larger structures punctured the canopy: ragged, ruined, and stepped structures that towered far above us. Weathered carvings adorned them, all indistinguishable. I could still hear the jungle, but here seemed a bubble of peace, separate from the outside world, as if we had stepped into another place and time altogether.
As we approached the largest structure, the pyramid of the temple, I halted and my mouth fell open. Red paint, sprayed as violently as blood, doused the stones, scrawling obscenities I didn’t understand across the ancient structure. I bit back a swearword. Juan stood wordlessly before me. His eyes were as hard as flint, and anger set deep in the lines upon his previously carefree face.
“This is what they think of their own history,” he spat. “They disgust me.”
It was hard to match the venomous voice with the laughing cadence he usually spoke in, but I could see why he was so mad.
“It’s abhorrent.” I reached forward to touch the stone and now dried paint on a monolith next to the pyramid; the red-obscured carvings whose details were already almost lost to time. Where my hand touched it, my eyes wandered. For some reason, scrawled on this surface were two strange, almost cubist style faces. Each had one eye each that dribbled red paint like bloody tears upon the conquered stones.
