Dustin Thomason - 12.21

Still, nothing can ever come of the prince and Flamed Plume; her father has been sacrificed to the gods, and she is stuck between worlds, unfit for the company of a king, no better than a bastard. Watching them, and knowing this, took me closer to tears than I have been in many suns.

The prince reached into his satchel. I thought he was pulling from it one of the great books I had instructed him to bring from the royal library, and I swelled with pride, believing he might show his reading skill, which I had taught for so long.

Yet instead he held an ornate ceramic bowl, more than two hands in its depth, as if built for water. The bowl was decorated with colors of death and rebirth, and he held it out toward Flamed Plume at arm’s length. Then the prince spoke to her:

—Behold Akabalam, who graces my father with his power and in whose honor we build the new temple. Have you seen Akabalam with your own eyes, girl?—

Flamed Plume went silent, bowed by the invocation of the god who had claimed her father’s life. But I was anxious with desire to know: Could the king have shown his son what the mysterious god presided over, that I might understand?

Then the prince spoke to the girl again:

—Do not be afraid. I have power over these creatures, this embodiment of Akabalam. Do not be afraid. I will protect you.—

Smoke Song opened the bowl, and I could see inside there stood a count of six insects, long as a finger, color of the leaves of the most vibrant trees that once ruled our forest. The insects climbed atop one another, attempting to scale the walls of the ceramic bowl but without success. Their long, bent legs were entwined beneath their bodies. Their eyes, color of night, protruded from their heads.

The prince spoke:

—I have seen him worshipping these creatures, and I took them from his throne room, where they have their royal feasts, and now I, too, feel their power.—

I studied the insects, those that blend with the forest itself. For what purpose we would worship this creature, I could not imagine! They made no honey. They could not be roasted for food. Why would the king dedicate a temple and sacrifice his overseer of the stores in the name of a useless insect? Why would a king denigrate us, the gods’ holy maize creation, in its name?

I spoke:

—This is what your father calls Akabalam? Only this?—

—Yes.—

—And has he told you the meaning of why we must exalt them?—

—Of course he has. But you, scribe, could never feel what a king would feel in the presence of such power.—

But as I studied the insects more closely and watched them slowly rubbing their tiny front legs together in the air, I believed I understood. Their legs gave them the appearance of a man communing with the gods. No other creature I have seen in the kingdom appears more pious. No other creature is such a model for the way all men must pray to the gods.

Is this why the king so reveres them? Because he believes we have lost our piety in the drought and that they stand as a symbol of commitment to the gods?

The prince turned to the girl and spoke again:

—Only a man ordained by the ancestors can understand Akabalam—

Beyond his father’s influences, Smoke Song is a good child, pure of heart. His is a soul the ancestors of the forest would have loved and respected, as it is written in the great books. While his father might simply have ordered me beheaded if he thought I had defiled a girl he wanted, Smoke Song only intended to impress the girl and win her heart. He stole the insects from the palace, and with them he was showing Flamed Plume how much more powerful he was than I. So I would allow him this pleasure.

The girl watched as I bowed to the boy and kissed his feet.

“ TWO THOUSAND SUNS,” ROLANDO SAID. “ALMOST SIX YEARS. It’s a mega-drought.”

He, Chel, and Victor stood over five newly reconstructed and deciphered pages of the codex. Chel gazed down again at Paktul’s statement on the twenty-eighth page: Some ears of maize grow tall even during the droughts as long and terrible as ours, gone on for nearly two thousand suns.

“Don’t you agree?” Rolando asked Victor, who sat across the Getty lab, studying his copy of the translation and sipping on his tea.

Last night, when Chel returned from seeing her mother at the church, it was Victor she’d wanted to share her frustrations with, certain that he was the only person who’d truly understand. But Victor hadn’t come back from his fruitless trip into his obscure stash of academic journals until well after midnight. By then Chel had stolen a quick shower in the Getty Conservation Institute building, washed off the residue of her conversation with Ha’ana completely, and thrown herself back into the work. She hadn’t spoken of it since.

“The king wasn’t helping matters,” Victor said. “But, yes, it does seem like there was a major drought and that it must have been the underlying cause.”

In a normal world, it might have been the most important discovery of all of their careers. In landlocked classic cities, the Maya could store water for no longer than eighteen months. Evidence of a six-year drought would convince even Chel’s most resistant colleagues that the cause of the collapse was what she had been arguing for years.

But of course the world was no longer normal. What mattered now was the connection between the codex and the lost city, which strengthened with each section they translated. Now that it was clear Paktul had protected the two little girls by taking them in, it seemed nearly inevitable that he would take them as wives. Rolando’s theory that they were the Original Trio was more and more plausible.

Groundbreaking as these discoveries were, they still hadn’t been able to figure out where exactly the lost city might be located or where Volcy could have gotten sick. Fortunately, they now knew more about the mysterious Akabalam glyph that had impeded their decipherment progress. Based on the scribe’s descriptions of insects that looked like they were communing with the gods, Chel, Rolando, and Victor all agreed he must have been describing praying mantises. Mantises were common all over the Maya area. And despite the scribe’s questions about why they would need to worship them, Chel knew the Maya had occasionally worshipped insects and created gods in their honor.

Yet there was still a missing piece. Thirty-two bark pages were nearly complete, but even with this potential break, the glyph appeared ten or eleven times on a single page in surprising and unusual ways. When Chel inserted praying mantis or praying mantis god into all the places they saw Akabalam, much of the end still didn’t make any sense. In the earlier sections, the glyph referred to the name of the new god. But in the final pages, it seemed as if Paktul was using the word to refer to an action .

“It has to be something intrinsic to them, right?” Rolando asked.

“The way bees symbolize sweetness.”

“Or how Hunab Ku can be used to indicate transformation,” Victor suggested, referring to the butterfly god.

A boom outside startled all of them, and Chel hurried to the window. Over the last two days, a few cars had made the trek up to the Getty, interlopers in search of easy looting. Each time, they’d seen the security team still patrolling the grounds and turned around.

“Everything all right?” Rolando asked.

It was difficult to see very far into the night. “I think so,” Chel said.

“So… what?” he asked as she turned back. “Is the king ordaining this new god because the praying mantises appear pious?”

“The droughts probably inspired a lot of doubts among the people,” Chel said. “Maybe he believed it was inspiration.”