Mayab, p.1
Mayab, page 1
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Mayab
A Pete Brady Mystery
Malcolm Shuman writing as
M. S. Karl
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
To D,
a very special friend,
with memories of the Mayab.
PROLOGUE
Ah Mochan Xiu, the halach uinic of Mani, stood under the anona tree before the large thatched house which served as his home and palace. Around him life passed in the dirt street; white-smocked women came and went on their way to the underground well which, legend said, had once been formed by a falling star. It was the same city that he, Mochan Xiu, had known all his life, and that his father had known, and his father’s father, ever since the fall of the great fortress, Ich-paa-Mayapan, in the days of the Itza men. His own ancestors, the Xiu, had taken part in that revolt and in so doing had come to rule a part of the spoils. Today, only the tumbled walls of the great fortress could be seen, near the town of Telchac, and what had once been the dominant city of the whole peninsula now lay within the Xiu province of Mani. The old men told tales and sang songs of Chichen Itza, almost a day’s journey to the east. They were only tales and songs and images in the sacred hieroglyphic manuscripts kept by the high priest, the ahkin. But the ahkin could not explain the strange seethings which were trembling throughout the land these days. There had been omens, birds falling from the sky, and tales of unrest in the distant kingdom of Mexico. There was talk of strange illnesses striking down people in the east, near the port of Ppole, and last year’s harvest had been poor. There were murmurs of a pilgrimage to Chichen Itza to make sacrifices in the sacred well. Several times now Ah Mochan Xiu had summoned the ahkin to him, to explain these things, and each time the ahkin had cast the bones, looked puzzled, and said that the coming year would be a lucky one. At last, in exasperation, Ah Mochan Xiu had flung the bones away and dismissed the ahkin, with all his paraphernalia of bones and stones. There was only one solution. He would consult the chilan, the prophet.
The old prophet had listened, sitting quietly on his mat until the halach uinic had done talking, and then he had nodded shortly. Certain preparations would have to be made. Some fowl must be brought, and some ears of fresh corn. The halach uinic agreed, looking away from the wrinkled face of the chilan, for the prophet made him nervous. The ahkin was different, half politician and half trickster, and the halach uinic knew how to deal with his kind. But the prophet … He never sought anyone out; they came to him. And now the halach uinic himself stood before the prophet, in supplication.
The instructions had been given and the halach uinic had left, glad to return to his own house. He would arrange it as the prophet asked, but there was no reason for him to be there. That had been one day, no, two days, ago. What the prophet did in his house none knew, but this morning he had collapsed in his trance, and so the prophecy would be coming soon now. But suppose the prophecy were bad? Suddenly the halach uinic was overcome with dread. What did it profit a man to know the worst, when there was no way to avoid it? Surely he had been a fool; he should have left things as they were. Perhaps it was not too late to call it off. He started into the street in a panic, his cape flapping in the breeze. People bent their heads in respect as he passed, but he ignored them. He must reach the house of the chilan before it was too late, before the chilan had waked from his stupor.
There was a small group waiting outside the thatched hut of the prophet and they parted with a murmur as the ruler approached. He stooped at the doorway and entered, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness. Before him, on the dirt floor, lay the body of the chilan, and even as he watched the body stirred and the chilan began to utter the prophecy of Katun 13 Ahau, the prophecy of the coming of the gods. Mochan Xiu turned away and fell against the door frame, his stomach a nest of snakes. So. It was true. They were coming. And soon it would all be over.
Five hundred years later Gonzalo Omar leaned back in his chair and gazed over his desk at the man who sat half covered by the shadows. The air conditioner shut out the sounds of the street, and here, it was cool and dark, and the smoke from Omar’s cigarette made lazy marble layers. Omar picked up the little vase and turned it over reflectively in his hands.
“What you propose is very dangerous,” he said at last. “It requires precision. There is considerable risk.”
“Of what? Are you telling me you no longer have protection?”
“When dealing with these,” Omar said gesturing disdainfully at the vase. “Even Jainas. But this, what you propose.…”
“… would be your greatest coup,” the other man finished for him, “… the greatest in Mayan archaeology. Still, if you’re afraid.” He started up, but Omar’s hand stayed him.
“It will not take them long to find out.”
“Then I’ll have to be quick.”
Omar puffed thoughtfully on his cigarette and regarded his visitor.
“Tell me, my friend, are you really doing this only for money?”
“That’s my business, Omar. Just see that you have the cash.”
Omar nodded. “Very well. But that is a lot of money. I would not like to be taken for a fool.”
“Then we understand each other, don’t we?” the man said.
Omar watched the smoke form, dissolve, and reform. “The archaeological fraternity will not be very happy about this,” he said finally with a smile. “They will not be very happy about this at all.”
ONE
The man in the hammock heard the plane as it passed overhead, the thunder of its descent breaking the stillness of the afternoon. A moment later its shadow crossed the window, and when he craned his head to look out he saw it, hot silver against the blue sky, wheels already down, as it sank toward the earth like a bird that had burned itself against the sun. Then it was gone and after a few seconds its sound was gone, too, and the only noise was the barking of a dog, somewhere on the other side of the plaza.
New Orleans. He turned his head back to face the bare plaster walls and suddenly he felt something tighten in the pit of his stomach. He shoved the wall with his foot, setting the hammock into motion, stirring the thick air. He only had the feelings when something, like the plane, caught him by surprise. He wiped an arm across his face, blotting the sweat. Of all the times, April was the worst. A slow oven. Well, he had made it through three Aprils here. After all, it was just a question of endurance. You just hunkered down like the campesinos and endured. In another month, with luck, would come the rains.
Now even the dog had stopped barking, like everything else beaten down by the heat, and the only sound in the man’s universe was the regularly spaced squeaking of the hammock hooks in the wall rings. How many squeaks to a man’s life, he wondered and could not fight back the crooked smile. Some anthropologist ought to do a study. It would correlate with something.
Jose Dzib, standing in the rear of the bus, bent his head to look out. The road widened all at once into a boulevard. It was bare on both sides, like all the road from Oman and Muna, with thorny brush and henequen beyond, floating in an ocean of heat, and little humps in the fields which were the mounds built by the old ones who had been killed in the flood. But in the center of the boulevard was a man frozen in brass, an upraised finger denouncing the sky, which once, in real life, had fallen on him, and Jose Dzib knew that it was the statue of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, and that they were in Merida.
Then he heard the plane. It came thundering over the highway, hung for an instant in the frame of the window, and then slipped over the cyclone fence which marked the airfield. A moment longer he could smell its fumes, and then he let his attention wander back to the boulevard. There were cars and motor bikes and businesses over on the left side now, while the aluminum fence stretched interminably ahead on the right. He took a deep breath of the air sucked in by the window. The air was hot and smelled of concrete. But it was the air of a city. He had arrived.
The man in the airplane looked down through the Plexiglas window at the green water two miles below. He tried to remember the last time, but it had been a decade ago. His dark good looks were accentuated by the frown that knotted his brows, and gave him an almost Mephistophelean appearance. A decade ago when he had been a graduate student, just into his twenties, it had all been new. Now … The intercom announced the beginning of the descent into Merida, and he saw the Customs pier jabbing its long finger into the Gulf from the white beaches of Progreso.
Right about down there, he thought as he watched the dotting of houses which were oceanside vacation homes. A little past Yucalpeten. A white beach house with … He shut off his thoughts and just as quickly saw the seaport die into a flat brown wasteland, sprinkled with scrub. The plane seemed to be following a thin ribbon of highway off to the left, and he could see tiny vehicles crawling along it. Rambling taxis crammed with seven, eight, nine Maya villagers on their way back from the market in Progreso with the scattering of pesos representing the day’s earnings; roaring buses with bodies packed inside like so many store manikins, stopping at each little rancho or hacienda to let down an old man with chickens in a wooden crate or a stout woman wit h basket and sisal bag; Volkswagens and Renaults taking the Banco Agrario officials on their rounds … He remembered it all, and so he tried to blot it all out of his mind and see the surreal, other-side-of-the-moon landscape as it had been twelve, thirteen hundred years ago, with the pyramids, temples, dwellings flung out for miles in all directions. But his imagination guttered like a candle flame, and flickered out in the blast of desolation, and all he saw was a village disappearing under the left wing, a diorama of houses centering on a toy plaza with a red water tank, like a tiny island in what had turned into a seaweed ocean. Henequen, he thought, and wondered which village it was: Chablekal, Komchen, Lubanche … Ten years ago he would have known. Then as if to mock him he saw an archaeological mound, the ruins of some ancient pyramid, rise up out of the even rows of henequen plants, gaping with the hole someone had made to extract its treasure. The poor huts on the outskirts of the city were passing now, only a stone’s toss below, and there was an avenue with a red bus creeping along it. He felt a bump as they touched ground and bent forward as the engines braked with a roar. He began to tighten his tie and fasten his collar. The plane came to a rest beside the new terminal, and he gathered up his attaché case and duty-free liquor and unbent his long legs to follow the other passengers down the aisle. He stepped from the cabin door into a blast of desert air and pounding sun. The breeze came like a current out of some inferno, and, by the time he had made it across the cement, past the fat, tired Customs guard in khaki, and into the long hall of the building, the sweat had plastered his clothes to his body. Here, out of the sun, the heat had coagulated, a heavy mass that seemed to permeate every molecule of air, and he tried not to breathe in. The footsteps of the others sounded lonely, as if each person had drawn up into himself to avoid the terrible heat. He came to three desks and presented his tourist card to the woman at one, who checked it and then passed him to another desk in the center of the hallway, behind. The officer there looked at the name on the card and then at a list before him. He gave back the card and sent him to a final desk, where a man in blue took the card, turned it over in his hands, and then looked up at the American.
“Clayton Holliman,” he said, and the American nodded. The agent looked down at the card again and then back at Holliman. “This is a six months’ permit. How long do you intend to be in the country?”
“Five months,” Holliman said.
“What is your oocupation?”
“Archaeologist,” Holliman said. He could feel a sweat drop making its way slowly down the center of his back.
The officer looked up from the card into Holliman’s eyes. “To do archaeology you need a special permit. You cannot enter as a tourist.”
“I’m not here to excavate,” Holliman told him.
“But that is what archaeologists do,” the man replied, as though instructing a slightly backward child.
“Only sometimes,” Holliman said. “I’m here to evaluate the results of someone else’s excavation. You’ve heard of John Catlett Davies, the American archaeologist who died while he was working at Bacab Tun? The son-in-law of doctor Alejandro Leon. You know el doctor Leon?”
It was impossible to tell whether the official did or did not. His eyebrows lifted a fraction and then he handed back the card.
“If you are going to dig you need a permit,” he said.
“Yes,” Holliman said. “I know.”
The man looked away from him to the next person in line and fifteen minutes later Holliman was handing the last of his bags to the porter outside of Customs. Suddenly it seemed like forever and a world away since New Orleans and the spring cloudiness hanging over the delta. Less than two hours, he reminded himself. It was the heat which stretched the time, the heat making each minute an hour, and wringing the resistance, the will power, out of you, so that all you wanted to do was sink down to the tile floor and absorb the last coolness from the stones. Then his mind took over, pushed up a scene ten years old, a cool study with bougainvillea outside and the leather smell of books within, gin and tonic on a wicker table before him while a prim little man in white shorts leaned back easily in his basket chair, lecturing. It was all so simple, he was saying. A question of reconstructing cultural history.… And they all listened, Holliman and the others. And even the dark-eyed girl across the room. Oh, yes. It was 1964 and they listened.
A small man tugged at Holliman’s sleeve.
“Permiso. El professor Oliman?”
“Si?” Holliman replied.
“I am to take you to the Quinta Leon,” the little man said in Spanish.
Holliman froze. Quinta Leon. Then he nodded. “Como no?”
The little man gave him a smile full of gold teeth and showed him out the glass doors and back into the oven. High above, Holliman saw a buzzard circling.
Seconds later they were away from the airport, on Avenida Itzaes, a long, desolate boulevard with dusty oleanders in the center. Like everything else, the oleanders looked dead.
“Un poco de calor,” the driver said, looking back at Holliman with a smile, and Holliman nodded. Yes, it was very hot.
He looked over at the margins of the boulevard, where the flamboyans and lluvias de oro burned red and gold above their white-washed trunks. At least there was something alive.
They turned north and moments later were passing under the blessed shade of the trees.
“El Centenario,” the driver said and gestured to the right. Holliman nodded. He remembered the zoo.
And on the other side there was still the Neuropsychiatric Institute with its barred windows. “Por alla las locos…” said the driver.
The car overtook a truck piled high with bales of a yellow fiber that looked like doll’s hair, spun from the sun.
“Sosquil,” the driver said. “Fibra del henequen.”
“Oro Verde,” Holliman said. Because that’s what they called henequen in Yucatan: green gold. Except now everybody knew that was a lie, the alchemy of a bygone age. One man had said it, fifty years ago. A man who had been governor. Henequen is slavery, he had said. And they had taken him away to that yellow fortress they were passing on the left, the state penitentiary, and then, early one morning, to the cemetery on the other end of town.… Today you could visit his cell, and they had statues to him. There was a town named Felipe Carrillo Puerto. But there were many who still liked to think henequen was green gold.
“Usted conoce Yucatan,” the driver approved.
Yes, Holliman thought as they passed the hospital and headed down Colon, into the section of sumptuous, palatial estates which henequen had built in the last century; henequen and the sweat of the Maya peones: yes, I know Yucatan. Or I knew it once. But there are things that have changed. Like the driver. He was new.
Jose Dzib sat on an iron bench in the main plaza with his sack of possessions by him and looked around. Some of the taxi drivers were nodding on the benches beside the curb and one, with a bench to himself, was spread out with a newspaper over his face. The calezasstood motionless, the horses hitched to them patiently waiting, while their owners slept inside the cabs.
The plaza was an island of somnolence in a sea of sun. Across the street the cathedral shone like a molten cliff, and by its side the buses choked and coughed on the afternoon air, as they took on the few people who were caught out at this time. At the army headquarters, a few buildings down, the military policemen slumped against the doors they guarded, and even the vendors crouched beside the walls of the buildings, seeking sustenance from the shadows.
A sudden whiff of smoke sent a pang through Jose Dzib, and brought back the world he had left. By now everyone in Noholchen would be in their hammocks, except for a few who would be straggling in from the fields. It was time to burn. Soon every milpa would be ablaze and men would be performing the ritual offering, the yukulil-col, in compensation to the balamob—the lords of the forest and field. Soon now in the evenings the men would be visiting the house of his uncle Pedro, the men, the shaman of his village, confirming Pedro’s reading of the xockin, the count of the days, discussing again the predictions for the coming of the rains.
