Back in the 1920s, Los Angelenos had turned their hot, dry, earthquake-prone city into an ostensible oasis by siphoning water away from other regions and states. With this purloined water, they transformed their desert basin into a vast urban sprawl composed of millions of prefab, shake-and-bake houses and thin-walled buildings.
These flimsy wooden structures were now bursting into flames before Dr. Cardiff’s eyes like the kindling they were.
A city of firewood, Dr. Cardiff thought, with air so dirty, you could almost write your name on it.
The transformation of the region into a major metropolitan city in just a few decades may have been the largest building project in American history—and one of the most ill planned. No one took into consideration that the metro basin and its millions of flammable homes abutted dry hills choked with brush and stunted scrub oak. This parched chaparral grew so dense that people and large animals could not penetrate it, and those hills were plagued with wildfires driven furiously by scorching Santa Ana winds.
To the twenty million people crammed into the Los Angeles basin, the Santa Anas were synonymous with terrifying fires. Started by firebugs, careless people, lightning storms, or all of the above, the searing, gale-force gusts off the Mojave Desert fanned and spread the conflagrations. These tempestuous fires then generated their own burning winds, turning brush fires into firestorms, red-hot hurricanes with greater killing power than the nuclear superfires that destroyed Hiroshima.
The current fire had begun in the desiccated scrub brush north of the Glendale hills and quickly moved toward downtown L.A., destroying tens of thousands of homes and threatening the business and government high-rises in the heart of city.
“The worst urban fire in history,” the news media was calling it, but Dr. Cardiff saw it more as the Revenge of Planet Earth, whose climate Homo sapiens and her country in particular had sent careening downhill toward global meltdown. The evidence was all around them—shrinking ice caps, shriveling glaciers, towering tsumanis, and preternaturally powerful hurricanes—the whole apocalypse fueled by rising ocean temperatures.
My world is sinking into a sea of fire.
“The Age of the Mega-Fires” had started in 1988, with the Yellowstone forest fire. Burning through the park with unparalleled fury, it inaugurated a relentless cycle of catastrophic wildfires, each year’s conflagrations worse than the last, culminating in the twenty-first century’s Great Amazon Rain Forest firestorms, which threatened to alter forever the world’s oxygen–carbon dioxide balance and whose greenhouse gas emissions, Cardiff believed, were burning a hole in Antarctica’s ozone shield.
My God, Dr. Cardiff silently moaned, staring at her TV set, the whole world is burning. And Reets, Coop, the boys? Where are you? Where are you?
The whole world, Cardiff thought, is sinking into a sea of fire, as brilliantly lit as a Viking funeral.
PART IX
46
Flint Shield’s assassins had failed to kill me, and I doubted he had a backup plan. Still I kept an eye peeled—one behind me for those who would put a dagger in my back and one in front, hoping to glimpse the two archers with the poisoned arrows.
Rather than travel alone and leave myself vulnerable to attack—either by bandits or those temple bounty hunters who kidnapped the innocent for priests lusting after blood—I hired on to shoulder loads for a merchant, replacing a porter who had gone lame.
I did not want be spotted as a warrior, and the job gave me cover—a reason to be out on the road—so I concealed my sword and dagger. I would not stand out.
Those who traversed the One-World’s roads knew there were many reasons for a man to be on them. Rather than make an enemy by asking personal questions, people minded their own business and kept their own counsel.
Before I went far, I stopped and gave a personal sacrifice of blood from a nick on my leg to Xaman Ek, the God of Travelers, asking him to permit me a safe journey.
The merchant was from Tixchel, a port city on the Great Eastern Waters. Tulúm also sat on the coast of the Great Eastern Waters, but in a different region from Tixchel.
Travelers could ask about geography, the prevalence of bandits, and other nonpersonal subjects, and my thirst for knowledge drove me to ask the merchant many questions about the great waters.
He could have transported his goods to Tulúm by water. Merchant seamen plied the coast all along the great waters—both east and west—the man from Tixhchel explained. Our region protruded out far into the water, however, and sea transport required a far longer route. Most merchants employed caravans of porters, which they viewed as both shorter and safer.
“When the Gods of Wind and Sea battle each other, they whip up the waters, often capsizing boats, consigning both men and merchandise to the eternal sea.”
Fishermen also fell victim to the wrathful sea, as the gods clashed and frolicked with each other, stirring up vertiginous waves. Even though Chac Uayab Xoc, the Fish God, blessed their catches, he also ate them—when they fell into the sea and drowned.
Because of the dangers, the merchant said he used boats to transport his goods only for short distances.
“Coastal vessels range from small canoes to longboats, some as many as forty paces in length,” he told me. They required years of labor—from felling the giant trees to hollowing out the compartments for rowers and goods.
I had never seen anything but the small canoes, which we used on our few rivers and lakes. I could have told him all that was about to change. I was on my way to speak to a light-skinned madman, who boasted that his people’s seafaring vessels were the size of palaces.
The merchant was a learned man, who knew much not only about goods, but also about the people he encountered during his many travels.
Ajul had traveled widely and told me much about the One-World. Like Ajul, the merchant’s feet had also taken him to many places, and I plied him with questions about what he had seen.
When I speak of the One-World, I, of course, am referring to all the known world—from the Aztecs, Mixtec, Toltecs, and others to the north to the various Maya kingdoms in the south, running all the way down to Copán.
While we of the Mayapán League spoke the same language as those Maya in Palenque, Tikal, and Copán, we felt no special solidarity and were often at war with the other Mayan cities.
The Mayapán League itself, which included Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, was not unified as it had been during the time of our grandfathers. Instead, the cities were now allies in name only, with each waiting for the other to show a fatal weakness that would permit them to be attacked and conquered.
There was always talk that the Aztecs, who had subjugated most of the northern regions, would invade us. Although that had not happened, the emperor of Tenochtitlán had gained sway over the Mixtec, and now the influence of the Aztecs had grown stronger among the Maya.
Ajul said the Aztecs had not invaded, because the vast distance between the regions, and the jungle terrain, which they would have to traverse—except on the sacbe roads linking major cities (and they were easily sabotaged and of limited utility)—made mounting and maintaining an army so far from home unfeasible.
Also, the differences in language made it difficult to govern so large a mass of people, and the climate was inhospitable to the northerners—ours being much hotter, wetter, and swampier than in the north.
Ajul had told me other cities, such as Palenque and Uxmal, were better built and more beautiful than Mayapán, and I asked the merchant what he knew about the work of our ancestors.
“Cities like Mayapán do not compare to the great cities built by our people hundreds of years ago,” he said. “Not even the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlán compares to the greatness of Palenque and Copán.”
I wanted to ask the man if he had ever encountered stories of the Dark Rift Codex in his travels, but had the wisdom to remain silent.
47
Tulúm was small compared to Mayapán but had a picturesque location that must
have pleased the gods. Situated on a stony sea cliff elevated high above the countryside, its rocky ridge made Mayapán’s temples and palaces seem—to approaching sailors and other travelers—even taller and more magnificent than they actually were.
The land side of the city was protected by a thick wall—taller than two men standing one atop the other’s shoulders. The side facing the sea had the soaring cliffs as a natural barrier.
But grander than the city, more spectacular than any sight my eyes had set upon, were the Great Eastern Waters. Turquoise green, they were as endless as the Celestial Heavens and, I was told, as deep as the Dark Rift itself.
I had envisioned the sea to be like dark, cold cenote water or the muddy waters of a river, but the great waters were colorful and warm, as if the Sun God had specially blessed them . . . perhaps because his cave was located at their far end.
When I commented about how well protected the city seemed, the merchant told me that Tulúm was an important trading center.
“The jungles to the south of here are difficult to penetrate, so it is easier to transport goods by water. Trading canoes from up and down the coast bring goods here that are in turn transported to inland cities. A fire is kept burning atop the main temple. Its smoke directs canoes in the daytime, and at night its flames guide them through the sea rocks to a beach where they can safely spend the night on the sand.”
The city’s location was determined not only by the sea cliff, which offered protection on one side, but also by an unusually large cenote, which provided drinking water to the city. It had not occurred to me that the endless seawaters could not quench thirst.
“The gods made the great waters bitter so they would not have to share them with people,” the merchant told me.
He also told me why Tulúm was so well defended.
“Mayapán did not build those high, thick walls to protect the salt and cacao beans brought to it. Sea vessels bring obsidian from Ixtepeque, a fire mountain far south of here. Ocean vessels transport the knives of the gods far safer and quicker than caravans do.”
I parted company with the knowledgeable merchant and set out to find the master of the light-skinned slave.
I believed I was on a fool’s errand—coming all this way to speak to a madman. Getting out of Mayapán, however—and out on my own for the first time in my life—had a strange affect on me. My entire life had been spent in tight proximity with others. Life in the stoneworkers’ village had involved the same routine, day after day, for almost all my life: sleeping in a hut with others, eating, working under the supervision of the headman, and sleeping again, without any break in the monotonous activities except a few feast days in which we stood around and talked for a few hours instead of working.
Life at the palace had been different in the way I slept and ate, but I still did exactly what I was told. Traveling on the road to Tulúm, however, was different. I’d escaped a master’s commands. For the first time I was free to think about what I would do with my life.
The freedom gave me a chance to think about myself and the world around me. I realized the life I wanted to live was that of a traveler—the sort of life Ajul had once enjoyed, experiencing the peoples and the cultures of the One-World.
That impulse had propelled me on my quest to meet the madman.
Perhaps afterwards, I could become an itinerant storyteller, wandering from village to village and the marketplaces of cities, earning my tortillas spinning the tales of heroes, kings, and gods.
A peaceful life of travel and adventure.
Until Lord Janaab caught up with me and had the skin flayed from my stomach, back, and loins and then turned me over to the priests.
48
While most exchanges were barter transactions, jade and cacoa were used to buy merchandise or services outright. Lord Janaab had given me cacoa beans and small pieces of jade with which to purchase provisions and to bribe those he wished me to question. Both were small and universally prized, with jade being the most valuable and the easiest to conceal and carry.
Finding the slave and his master was not difficult—everyone in Tulúm appeared to know of the light-skinned man. Perhaps even more than my own reputation in Mayapán, his light skin made him easy to spot and raised many questions about who—or what—he was.
When it became known I was from Mayapán, people asked me about the Jaguar Oracle, wanting to know whether he could fly on the wings of eagles and divine all things past, present, and future.
I assured them that he was indeed a master of eagles and prophecies. Eyo! I wish I could have sold my services as a seer to these people.
The slave-master was a salt merchant with sheds near the beach, where bags of his wares were stacked and stored after coastal boats off-loaded them. A thin man with pinched, close-set eyes and a rawhide whip looped to his wrist, he fixed me with a narrow, menacing look.
“Why do you wish to speak to my slave?” he asked.
“I’m a traveling storyteller,” I said, “and have heard that the man claims to come from a strange land far from here. He will have sagas of his own people, which I would incorporate into my own repertoire of tales.”
Casting myself as a harmless storyteller dispelled the man’s suspicions. Also the lie had the semblance of truth to it, at least the part about my being a storyteller.
“He has learned to speak our language,” the slave owner said, “but he will say words in his own language that we cannot understand. Because he might use them to beseech his own gods for deliverance or wreak retribution on his captors, I have forbidden him to utter words from his language. His name is Jeronimo, but it’s not a name that can be written in our Mayan tongue.” The man gave a harsh laugh. “He told me that his gods are mighty and vindictive and will someday destroy us. I said that if I heard him say that again, I would donate his flayed, sobbing carcass to the temple priests for sacrifice. I’ve seen him cut, and his blood is the same color as our own. The priests are eager for it anyway. They are convinced his blood is white.”
An extra piece of jade convinced the slave owner that the man could utter a few words from his native tongue.
“There are others like him?”
“Only one other is alive, another man. But unlike this man, the other one has accepted our gods and married the daughter of a powerful headman. He’s said to be a good warrior, too.”
“What happened to the others?”
“There was a boatload of them, Jeronomo claims. They abandoned a larger boat—one that was sinking—for a smaller one, about a dozen or so, including a couple women. Many died at sea from hunger and thirst before the boat sank near land. He and some others washed up on shore. Most died from their sicknesses or were eaten by villagers who were curious as to the color and taste of their meat.”
I sat in the shade of palm trees and waited to meet the madman. The image of men surviving the savage sea, however—only to wash up on an alien shore where cannibals devoured them—haunted me.
49
The meeting took place in a grove of palms near the huts where the master’s trade goods were being loaded and unloaded. There, the slave kept a tally. His skin color was disconcertingly light. On rare occasions in the One-World, a baby was born with skin as white as teeth and whose eyes had a pinkish cast to them. As with dwarfs, the temple priests sacrificed the babies as special offerings to the gods.
The man named Jeronimo was not so pale as white babies, but his skin—now heavily tanned—was only a few shades lighter than mine. His owner told me that beneath the slave’s loincloth, he was much, much lighter.
He was taller than I was, and I was tall for a Maya. While some men grew to greater heights than either of us, I personally had never seen anyone so tall and thin and bony. He was so gaunt, his ribs could be counted, and he had the face of a skull.
The slave master said that the man’s ordeal at sea had starved and sweated the meat off the survivors who made it to shore with Jernonimo, and they had to be fattened up bef
ore they were eaten.
Seated in the palm shade, we each drank milk out of a holed coconut. I told him that if he did not answer my questions directly and honestly, I would tell his master he was the devil.
“He will have you flayed whole, then sell you to the temple priests,” I said. “Do you understand what I am saying?”
I saw contempt in his eyes. “My master tells me that all the time. Still you and your fellow cannibals have not eaten me nor have your heathen priests ripped out my heart and drained my blood. I find that miraculous. I think I’ll live awhile longer.”
I had never witnessed such ludicrous lunacy. “Tell me about your own gods.”
“There is only one god, the mighty Jehovah. We don’t worship a menagerie of idiotic idols who devour their subjects like jungle animals.”
“Watch your tongue, or you’ll anger our gods.”
“If they had the power, they would have killed me years ago.”
“They have the power, and you should fear their wrath.”
“I piss on your gods from a great height—like they were ants.”
I gaped, speechless, petrified with terror. I had never heard such blasphemy. No one ever dared say anything like that. To even think such a foul thought would ensure the divine vengeance of our notoriously vindictive deities. “You are mad!”
He laughed hoarsely. “I know. If my endless journey on the sea had not driven me insane—the sun broiling and parching even my insides, turning them dry as salt—watching your barbaric brothers and savage sisters eat my friends alive would have completed the job.”
“We are not savages,” I hissed.
He gestured at the activity on the dock. “Look at those workers. They seem civilized. Yet they worship demented demons to whom they slaughter the innocent and in whose name they cannibalize their fellow man.”