James Steimle - The Kukulkan Manuscript

Porter’s hair hung wet to his eyebrows. If he’d had Fabio-length locks, the sweat probably would have repulsed Alred out of the room. Nevertheless, Porter nodded and reached for another magazine. “I missed this. Too busy with my dissertation, I suppose.”

Alred examined the periodical as he flashed the front of it. Bold letters in a black cover read: Archaeological Journal.

Flipping to another spot devastated by his rainbow markings, Porter tossed the open journal onto Alred’s lap.

She looked down.

THE NEW MESOAMERICAN MYSTERY

Guatemala’s Hidden Treasure by

Dr. Alexander Peterson, Ohio State University

“Ohio State University,” she read out loud.

“An obvious connection to Dr. Albright.”

“But this was Ulman’s discovery,” said Alred. “Why haven’t there been any essays by him?”

“Maybe there have been,” Porter said, leaning back in his chair, which squeaked with the sound of a thousand tortured mice. He put his hands behind his head and closed his exhausted eyes. He didn’t want to think about Ulman. Frankly, he wished Alred would go away. Porter preferred working with solitude, his quiet lover these past years.

Alred saw the codex on the desk. Porter weighed the volume through her eyes. She recognized it instantly, once she saw past the piles of other academic junk Porter had put there as if to hide it. The artifact held the same tan color of the other ancient Central American books she had seen.

The manuscript was thick, but the pages were surprisingly thin. Each page of the bark paper had years ago been attached to the page beside it until it looked like an unrolled scroll of great length. But instead of being rolled together, the pages had been bent toward each other to make it look like an accordion or an oriental paper fan that could close into one solid form. The codex was opened now, not unlike the way books open today.

Numerous colored glyphs washed across the pages. Different inks and paints had been used, and pictures were interspersed among the lettering.

Alred squinted as if to decide what language the codex had been written in.

Porter eyed her closely.

She had read and reread Albright’s paper by now, but still couldn’t come to grips with the possibility that Near Eastern devices were found in KM-1. But then, she didn’t know exactly what she was seeing right at this moment.

Porter held his eyelids parted only slightly. He smiled. That the terrible thing was on his desk would be enough to throw her logical mind into emotional chaos, he figured. He’d wait a bit.

Alred saw him appraising her, however, and recreated her unfeeling face with contemplative green eyes. “You don’t think these professors killed Dr. Ulman to get to his find.”

“Well,” Porter said, dropping his hands into his lap, “I didn’t say it. You seem to be more concerned about Ulman than the manuscript on my desk.”

“What is it?” she said nonchalantly, as if it didn’t matter as much as it did. All this time she’d done her work in her apartment, checking out books from the library and ordering others through the inter-library loan system. She’d kept her work quiet. Her prerogative. But in the end, she would need to face the archaeological evidence. Well, here it was.

“In tradition of the great scholars who wrote articles before we knew it was a race, I call this KM-2,” said Porter with a hand presenting the object like a new guest in the small room.

“Ulman’s codex.”

“The one he sent Dr. Kinnard, yes.” Leaning back to his card table, resting his elbows thereon, Porter looked at the bark book and at the notes he’d hoped to finish before she arrived. “I’ve been translating-”

“You don’t know Spanish,” Alred said, “how can you translate a Mesoamerican document?”

Porter looked up at her. “Why are you making this so difficult, Alred? We’ve talked about this. Can you be so obstinate concerning science vs. religion as to not see the facts before you?”

“Religion isn’t an issue,” Alred said, sitting back in her chair.

With unbelieving eyes, Porter said, “I’m glad to hear that. Be a scientific judge then.” He lifted a hand again to the codex.

“KM-2,” she said, carefully picking up the ancient book.

“Hope your hands are clean,” Porter said as he dived back into his notebook. He flipped through the pages to review his work. It really was a mess and needed to be rewritten. But he was really wondering with all his mental faculties what his companion was thinking. “Ever see a volume like that? Looks a lot like a scroll someone decided to press flat and open differently, doesn’t it?”

“I saw one in a museum in Mexico City. They are rare, but not unheard of. This codex was very well-preserved.” She looked at the writing on the top half of the pages. The characters were very square-like, while the figures on the bottom of the pages resembled organized chicken scratches written in black and red.

“You translated some of this?” she said, shooting her eyes up.

“A little over halfway through as you can see,” Porter said, motionless.

“Halfway. When did you start?”

“As soon as I got the codex.” Porter jumped to his feet. He took two books from his desk and added them to an apparently orderless pile against the wall on Alred’s right. Immediately he started fishing for another volume. “I couldn’t make a bit of it out right away, but Kinnard thought he could read some of it.” He found his book and sat back down with an explosion of metallic cricket sounds.

“Kinnard’s an Orientalist.”

“So am I, Alred.” Porter couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t accept the Mesoamerican connection with the ancient Old World as Albright had described in his paper. “You know that.”

“And you can read ancient Mayan?” she said, lifting a brown eyebrow.

Porter looked at the codex. “Is that what it is?” He opened the book he’d found and started rummaging through the pages with two wild hands. “I suspected a correlation with the Maya, but when I looked up their script, I thought it didn’t match well enough.”

“You’re not a Central American archaeologist,” said Alred, turning the delicate pages of KM-2.

“Please don’t lose my spot,” Porter said, one of his hands leaping from his book.

Alred found an envelope on the edge of his desk, which she gently used as a bookmark. Before turning the page again, she glanced at five hand-written letters above the address on the envelope: FARMS. She held up the white paper for a moment. “What’s this. You’re a farmer on the side?”

“Forever harvesting new levels of knowledge,” Porter grinned as she put it back and turned the page. The word was an obvious acronym, but he didn’t want to explain it at present.

Alred tightened her eyes. “I thought you said you’d translated-”

“The bottom half of the codex,” said Porter, standing up again, one finger jammed in the volume he held. “What language might that be?”

Alred squinted at the letters, as if it helped her to think, and tilted her head to the left. “Mmmm…proto-Mayan, maybe? The language of a sister group small and fortunate enough to have evaded archaeologists until now?”

“Possibly,” Porter said. He came to her side-pushing her away with his smell-and opened his book before her eyes.

“That looks different,” she said.

“Only as different as the Mayan on the top half of the codex pages and the Mayan I found in the Stratford Library.”

Alred examined the letters in the hard-bound volume, comparing them to the characters on the lower half of the ancient page in her hands.

“This is a facsimile of a document written in a language scholars now call Meroitic. It dates to approximately 600 BC, and is closely related to Egyptian Demotic from the same time period,” Porter said.