Dustin Thomason - 12.21

Chel studied him. How odd it was that three days after he had held her future in his hands, his career had suffered a similar fate, and now he’d come to her for help. What did she really know about this guy, anyway? Gabe Stanton was clearly whip smart, extremely hardworking, a little too fierce sometimes. Chel didn’t know much else. They hadn’t exactly had the chance to unwind over a glass of wine. Maybe if she looked closer, she wouldn’t like what she saw.

Then again, he’d been the one to let in the crack of daylight keeping her life’s work alive—at a moment when she’d given him every reason not to. So if Stanton wanted to help, Chel wasn’t going to stop him now. She’d just have to make sure that the CDC didn’t find out when they eventually reached out to her again.

“Okay, fresh eyes, then.” She leaned in closer to him. “The scribe’s referring to a collapse of his city. Or at least to his fear of its collapse. There are harbingers in the central plaza, in the palace, everywhere. But there’s nothing worse to him than the worship of this new god, Akabalam. It’s a god we’ve never seen before, a god of praying mantises. As if this god has just been created at this particular historical moment.”

“Was it unusual for the Maya to create… new gods?” Stanton asked.

“There are dozens in the pantheon. And new gods were invented all the time. When Paktul first hears of this one, he wants to learn about him and to worship him. But in this final part of the manuscript, it’s as if he has found a reason to be mortally afraid of him.”

“What do you mean, mortally afraid?”

“He uses all the superlatives of the Mayan language to describe his fear—including words that suggest he’s more afraid of this new god than of dying. One thing we’ve been able to translate says: This was something much more terrifying, which no one ever had to teach me to fear .”

Stanton walked to the railing overlooking the Getty’s sycamore-lined stream, processing. “So maybe we should be looking for a deeply ingrained fear.” He turned back from the railing. “Think about mice.”

“Mice?”

“One of a mouse’s most powerful fears is its fear of snakes. But no one had to teach mice to fear snakes. It’s coded into their DNA. We can actually make that fear disappear by altering their genetic structure.”

Chel pictured Stanton’s years spent in a lab, years spent not so differently from hers. He thought in ways foreign to her, using a vocabulary that was mostly unfamiliar. Yet his constant return to the underlying scientific processes at work was similar to the way she saw language and history.

Stanton continued, “So the question we have to ask is: What could your scribe’s most powerful fear be?”

“Fear of his city collapsing forever?”

“It doesn’t sound like that’s news to him.”

“Well, I don’t think he’s talking about snakes.”

“No, I mean, what fears are so powerful for him that they could create this kind of response? It’s got to be something more… primal. Something innate.”

“You mean like fear of incest,” Chel said.

“Exactly. Could that be it?”

“Incest was prohibited,” she told him. “And it wouldn’t make any sense anyway. What would incest have to do with praying mantises?”

Yet as soon as she said the words, another possibility hit her—an indictment of her people that she’d dismissed her entire career.

From the beginning, Chel had wanted the codex to prove that her people hadn’t brought the collapse on themselves.

But what if they had?

My fast has lasted forty turns of the sun, sustained only by cornmeal drink and water. No rain has fallen on our milpas or in our forests, and the water stores have receded. Each corner of the city has begun to hoard water and maize and manioc, and it is rumored that men drink their own urine to quench their thirst.

There are whispers that some have already begun to plan their journey north in search of tillable fields, though Jaguar Imix has decreed that to abandon Kanuataba will be punishable by death or worse. There have been eighteen deaths in the poorest corners of Kanuataba in the last twenty suns, many of them children, starved because they are given lowest priority in the distribution of rations.

Our city was once a center for the best goods within ten days’ walk. But jade adornments are useless, and artisans no longer flourish. Mother-of-pearl ear flares and varicolored feather mantles have been replaced by tortillas and lime as the greatest desires of the noble women. A mother who cannot feed her children thinks little of gold medallions, no matter how holy.

At yesterday’s zenith I was called to the palace.

I left Auxila’s daughters in the cave at the noon sun, knowing my spirit animal would watch over them in my absence. Jaguar Imix, his holiness, newly returned from his distant star war, had called me to the palace to reveal to me the meaning of the god Akabalam, so that I might continue to educate the true prince.

When I came within a few hundred paces of the city center, less than a thousand paces from the king’s newly ordained burial temple, I could not believe what I saw. Thick black smoke rose above the tops of the towers of the minor temple, our sacred catacomb. And as I turned the corner, I saw the largest gathering of the men and women of Kanuataba I had seen in six hundred suns.

I knew a large gathering was called for this day, but I could not have imagined its size and splendor. There are no words to describe the feeling I had upon seeing Kanuataba alive again then, as it was in the days of my youth, when my father would walk me through the merchant causeways atop his mighty shoulders. There were whispers among them the people gathered Jaguar Imix had brought a miracle, that he would feed the masses with this mighty feast, that there would be enough to sustain us until the harvest.

I watched men carry large offerings of spice and wood and jade toward the south stairs to the palace. Others carried salt and allspice and cilantro, combined with burn-dried chilis to make the seasoning for turkey and deer meat. Even my stomach growled with hunger. There are no deer or turkey or agouti within two days’ walk, of that I was certain. Had Jaguar Imix and his mighty army plundered stores of meat during their star war?

The royal dwarf approached me. I will recount his words to reveal what machinations he was capable of. He spoke:

—If people knew you as I do, scribe, knew that you would never touch those girls, you would lose those concubines you’ve taken. Your life could be cut short by ten thousand suns and with it the lives of those girls. So I suggest you never displease me again.—

Never have I felt a greater urge to drain the blood from a man’s body and rip his heart out. I longed for some commotion in the causeways, loud enough that I might muffl e Jacomo’s screams. I would tear him into pieces and bury them in unmarked graves.

Before I could raise my hand, a boisterous sound filled the plaza. A line of blue-painted captives, fifteen in number, were dragged into the causeways. Each captive was tied together to a long pole, lashed by both hands and neck to the man in front of him. Several men were stumbling. Many appeared half dead already.

Tattoos on his torso proved one of the prisoners was of high standing, and I have never seen a noble so afraid of sacrifice. He screamed and writhed as the captors of Kanuataba ushered him along, dragging his feet across the dirt, exciting dust everywhere. From the look on the captors’ faces, I knew that even they had never seen anything like it. Such indignity! Only a sickness of the mind could have damaged this nobleman’s soul so that he would not accept his fate!