“There, piling up dirt and plants in the lake’s middle, they constructed an island on which they would then build their city. Serving as a moat, the lake offered protection from invaders. The Aztecs also built causeways, which they spanned with bridges, under which their canoes navigated. They always erected bridges, however, which they could take down in the event of an invasion.
“When they were strong enough, they allied themselves with other city-states and began to conquer the surrounding territories. They warred with unparalleled savagery and with no sense of honor. They would ally themselves with one city against another, and after they won that war, they turned on the ally and conquered them as well.
“They waged campaigns of unprecedented butchery and terror—campaigns so horrific, many cities capitulated and paid tribute rather than mount a defense.”
Sparrow shook her head. “How these people who once grubbed for worms could so subjugate so many kingdoms so quickly is puzzling.”
“They were lean, hungry, and fought against armies whose leaders had grown fat and lazy,” I said. “The same thing happens in the jungle. It’s the hungry beast that is always the most dangerous.”
“They are now fat, however, and no longer hunger after food—only treasure and power. That insatiable appetite, however, could prove to be their undoing. The fear they provoke unites their enemies against a common foe—themselves.”
“From the looks of the Aztec warriors and their obsidian weapons,” I said, “the enemies had better come prepared for a fight.”
“All they need is the right leader to rally them.”
“You said they have a monopoly on the best weapons.”
“True, the empire they built has an obsidian heart,” Sparrow said. “The blades given to us by the fire gods cut deep, but it is easily shattered when struck from the right direction. They have humiliated too many nations, raped and robbed and murdered too many times. Someday the ghosts of those whom they have devastated and defiled will come after them with a thirst for blood-vengeance.”
“When that happens, we will all be in jeopardy,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“The Aztecs control most of the northern half of the One-World, we Maya the southern territory. Our own society is weak from drought, decadence, and war. What will happen to the One-World when the only healthy part of it is ripped asunder by bloody conflict?”
I asked the question because the words of the man who said he was of the tribe called Spanish haunted me.
If we destroyed our own power to resist by warring against each other, who would fight the gods on giant deer when they came?
I saw a group of men speaking to travelers ahead and pulled Sparrow off to the side of the road, where women were selling water.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Trouble.”
71
“Keep moving,” I told her.
We had reversed direction and headed back the way we had come.
“What did you see?” she asked as we hurried.
“Some of Lord Janaab’s men up ahead watching as people go by. I recognized one of them, and I think he saw me.”
She shot a look back, and so did I.
The six men I had seen had come onto the road. They followed us in a hurried pace, but tried not to draw the attention of the people in the busy market area that paralleled the road.
“They’ll hesitate grabbing you because we’re in Aztec territory. The Aztecs do not take kindly to highwaymen, killers, and kidnappers.”
Still, they were closing in.
“The man I spotted had been sitting in the shade behind the others,” I told her. “Months ago, he attended a feast at Lord Janaab’s. The High Lord had had me display the claw marks on my face to them as if I were a prized animal from a hunt. He’s the son of our king’s ambassador to the emperor Montezuma.”
Someone behind us shouted in Mayan, “That’s him!”
The signal was made to three men coming out of a marketplace stall ahead of us carrying food.
The others were coming up fast behind us. It was time to make a break, but there was a solid wall of merchant stalls on both sides of the road and the men were closing in front and rear.
From our pursuers behind came a shout of “Thief!”
The bastards were covering their kidnapping of me with the accusation.
Horns blew and a commotion broke out on the crowded street as people shouted and moved to clear the road.
We flowed with the people massing to the side as the procession of the Aztec prince we passed earlier came down the street, warriors in front blowing horns.
The men trying to reach us got off the street, too, for the moment unable to reach us.
The street grew silent, no one even whispering as they awaited in awe and fear the passing of a member of the imperial family.
Sparrow suddenly poured water from our catfish bladder onto a cloth as the prince’s litter came into view. “Hold still,” she said. She began wiping the coloring I had over the scars on my face.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Shhh.”
As the prince’s litter approached, she took a step into the street and yelled, pointing at me, “The Jaguar Oracle! The Jaquar Oracle!”
I stood perfectly still for a moment, frozen in place. Then I looked to my left and saw the Aztec prince staring at me from his litter.
The prince said something. I didn’t hear his words, but the effect was stunning. The warriors stopped in place.
“The Jaguar Oracle!” Sparrow yelled again, pointing at me.
The guards suddenly rushed me. The last thing I saw before being grabbed was Sparrow slipping into the crowd.
72
Guards brought me before the prince with my hands tied behind me. The street had been cleared of people by a cohort of his guards.
He was a man about forty, soft from good living, but with hard eyes filled with Aztec arrogance.
He examined the claw marks on my face closely and then gave me a look filled with more dangerous contempt than Lord Janaab could have projected in my worst nightmare. “Your name?” he said.
“Pakal Jaguar.”
His head jogged up and down several times. “I have heard this name, Pakal Jaguar. News that he earned that name by killing a white jaguar with his bare hands. His ability to foretell the future has reached us in the north.” He gave me a hard stare. “But you are not this legendary storyteller and seer. He sits next to the King of Mayapán. Advising him on all matters, he also is older than my father.”
The description was a mixture of Ajul, me, and pure fantasy, but telling an Aztec prince he was wrong was not a viable option.
“Can you tell me what I plan for your future?” he asked, wiggling his little finger, a signal that brought burly warriors next to me, indicating that he had little faith I could do it.
I pulled the jaguar claw necklace from its hiding place under my shirt.
He stared at it for a moment, then reached down and jerked the necklace off my neck.
He examined it, rubbing the white furry part between his fingers, and then looked at me with wide eyes.
Had it been an ordinary claw, he would not have been impressed, but the white claw was so rare and sacred, he could not doubt my word.
73
Huitzilíhuitl, Prince Hummingbird Feather, was a learned man, a scholar who spoke many of the One-World’s languages. As a collector of tribute, he’d also traveled the length and breadth of the One-World. His intellect and learning intimidated me. Sitting on a throne of teak and mahogany ornately inlaid with silver, jewels, and gold, he gave off an aura of omnipotence and omniscience, which seemed to say, Nothing escapes me. Lie to me at your peril.
Still, my dissembling had begun when I first knelt before him and he began his cross-examination. I had no other options.
“What are you doing this far north?” he’d asked.
“The King of Mayapán,” I
answered, “has sent me to visit the sacred places of the northern peoples, where I am to ask their powerful gods for guidance concerning the terrible problems afflicting us.”
Sparrow had concocted that response when we first set out on the road.
“There have been strange occurrences that trouble the Lord and Forever Almighty as well,” the prince had told me in Mayan, lapsing occasionally into Nahuatl, which I could follow and was on the verge of mastering.
I recognized the title as that of the emperor.
“Can I be of service?” I asked.
He waved off my question. “That is not for me to speak of. Any words of that matter must come from the emperor himself, and by the way, he has heard of your visionary gifts, Pakal Jaguar, and has expressed interest.”
“Anything I can do, my lord,” I said, lowering my vision even farther.
He stared at my scars. “You really killed a jaguar with your bare hands? Amazing. The emperor has several of the sacred beasts in his palace zoo. They are so big and powerful, one cannot imagine a mere human being slaying one without a spear.”
“I didn’t slay it by myself. The Feathered Serpent gave me the strength.”
“Yes, only with the help of a god could it be done. But that shows you are a favorite of the gods. Anyway, the emperor has spoken of you. Had you not been a liege of your king, he would have invited you into his court.”
In other words, had they come up with a way to steal me from Mayapán, the Aztecs would have done it.
Not that I felt any safer here with the prince. Chaos did not disrupt his streets, but only because Montezuma crushed his opposition more ruthlessly than any monarch in the One-World’s history.
He would crush me with even greater ferocity if I didn’t meet his every expectation.
74
I had not seen Sparrow since she disappeared into the crowds when I was taken captive. Nor had the ambassador’s son or his henchmen shown their faces. I hoped that the ambassador’s son didn’t pursue her and that she would know to head for Tenochtitlán, which was our destination.
The prince had broken off from the long caravan and was proceeding ahead—with me in a litter behind him—at all speed to the Aztec capital.
Even in the prince’s company, I was sure my Mayapán enemies were preparing a trap for me. Lord Janaab and the king would learn via fleet-footed couriers that the princess’ procession was attacked and that we were not among the survivors.
Lord Janaab would not rest until he had me or my remains.
His agents knew that.
My Mayapán enemies would still be waiting for me. The king or my master would have sent a messenger north with instructions long before before I left Mayapán, telling the ambassador in Tenochtitlán to be on the lookout and seize me when I arrived.
That realization provided answers to other questions that had haunted me.
I had not been trusted from the beginning by Lord Janaab.
From the day he realized my connection to Ajul and the codex, he must have planned on sending me north. He had also set up a scheme to have someone accompany me and others front and back.
It smacked of the attention to detail and lack of trust that my master had about everything and everybody he dealt with.
The feast—in which my face was paraded in front of the ambassador’s son—had not been a moment of Lord Janaab showing off his trophy, but a means for the man to recognize me when the time came.
Eyo! He was like a spider, spinning webs, catching everyone in them who he could use to further his ambitions.
Now I was on my way to meet the ruler of the mightiest kingdom in the One-World.
Keeping my eye out as the litter carried me toward the great city, I hoped to catch sight of Sparrow signaling me that she was all right.
I desperately wanted her safe and at my side again. I wondered what mischief I might get myself into when I was asked to demonstrate my “gift” of divination to the emperor.
PART XII
75
Night was falling, and the stream—which Coop still waded and slogged through—flowed down from the high hills surrounding the big river. Crouching and panting behind one of the big rocks lining the uphill riverbank, Coop could hear the trackers with vivid clarity, the baying of the hounds louder and more hysterical.
From upstream and around the next high bend, Coop also heard a devastating din that unfortunately sounded like another . . . another . . . another . . .
Please, God, not another . . .
WATERFALL.
Then in the quickly gathering gloom, she looked down and saw blood billowing in the water and dappling the stepping stones behind her.
Her whole body ached so violently from four long falls and from banging off the white-water rocks that she did not even notice her open wound.
Everything hurt too much for one painful spot to draw her attention.
Day was dying, the dark around her deepening, but she finally found where she bled. Under her right arm, the shirt was soaked with blood. She’d busted the topmost rib under her armpit, and it was exposed, protruding through the skin.
God no, they would now be tracking her blood-spoor—which explained the hysterical howling of the hounds downstream—and worse, because of her exhaustion and physical injuries, they were gaining her.
When they caught up with her, the busted rib would only be an appetizer.
By my rough estimates, they’ll be up to me in less than fifteen minutes.
She needed a place to hide.
If she left the riverbank, they’d follow her bloody, water-dripping trail.
She needed to hide in the river.
But where?
Rounding the next uphill bend, she saw her last and only hope—a huge towering pine overhanging another—another—
Another—
Another goddamn, no-shit, 120-foot-high waterfall.
No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!
The thick wet mist rising up from the falls combined with the dark dense clouds, the blackening night, and the thick matrix of branches would offer her almost impenetrable cover.
Suddenly, the sky turned black and with a tremendous thunder crack—which was brilliantly illuminated by sheet lightning—seemed to split the heavens in two. A nanosec later, rain hammered her in layered slabs. She knew the tree was her only hope for survival, but still she doubted she could reach that overhanging bow, then make her way to the top.
She was hurting that bad.
But she had to.
If she didn’t, the Apachureros would catch her and earn their notorious name—the Breakers of Bones.
And even worse, they would plunder Jack Phoenix’s codex—the greatest archeological find of her or anybody’s career—arguably the greatest find in five hundred years.
Arguably in all of history.
The codex, which Monica Cardiff now believed might solve not only the riddle of Quetzalcoatl’s—the god-king’s—life but the secret of the coming 2012 apocalypse as well.
Dr. Cardiff would learn nothing if Quetzalcoatl’s 2012 Codex fell into the hands of the drug bandits dogging her trail.
She stared upstream at the overhanging bow.
Where did that strange beast-trio vanish to?
Who were they, anyway?
She’d taken some bad blows to the head.
Were they an hallucination?
She slowly, painfully, haltingly headed upstream toward the massive pine, precariously bent over the cataract, which roared like Götterdämmerung into the 120-foot waterfall.
God, she hated waterfalls.
76
Cooper Jones crouched near the dense top of the tall pine. Its thick branches and the blinding rainstorm provided her with dense cover but not much comfort. In her whole life, she’d never been so tired, rain-soaked, and sore. . . .
. . . The only reachable bough had been a good nine feet above her and jutted out over the cataract. The knapsack now strapped to her back, she positioned herse
lf as closely as possible to the limb, then leaped out over the abyss, grabbing the wet limb first with her left hand, then her right, gravity swinging her out over the white-water rapids sixty feet below. Hanging there between heaven and earth, watching the cataract below as it thundered over the 120-foot falls, she flashed to Odin’s description of his own ordeal at the World Tree, where the Norse god had hanged himself for six days and nights. Staring at the ancient runes—smoking on the cliff face across from him—Odin had hoped to divine their secret meaning. He later described his self-immolation:
Long I swung from the windswept tree
For six long days and nights.
Offering in the end only this:
Odin to Odin, myself to myself.
Coop also recalled the terrible truth that the fiery stones had told to the warrior-deity:
The gods, too, were mortal.
The gods would die.
Odin would die.
Coop sometimes wondered what Odin felt when the runes had spoken. Had he at last known despair? No, she decided, only rage—which she felt now—rage that God, Fate, Karma, Nature, call it what you will, would force people to such murderous extremes.
“Goddamn it to hell,” she muttered, staring at the overhead limb.
She then executed the hardest pull-up of her life and launched herself belly-up over it. Flinging a leg over the bough, she straddled it and grabbed the one above her. Pulling herself to her feet, she stood on the limb and worked her way one limb at a time into the big pine’s dense crown of branches, needles, and cones.
She knew her side was leaking blood and that the pounding rain made coagulation impossible. She could only hope the same rain would wash away any blood that had splattered onto the ground beneath her.
Oh well, if those bastardos Apachureros wanted to chase her up that tree, they’d have their work cut out for them. . . .