Coop motioned for more Dos Equis, and Jack poured the rest of the bottle down her dehydrated throat in four long swallows.
“Where . . . is . . . the . . . codex?” Coop asked weakly, haltingly.
“That’s my girl,” Jack said, smiling. “I knew the first complete sentence out of your mouth would be about the codex.”
He rose, walked outside, and returned within thirty seconds.
He placed her knapsack beside her. “The codex urn is inside, unopened, bone dry, not a drop of H2O leaked inside. Those Mayan bastards knew how to make and vacuum-seal watertight vessels—you have to give them that. I decided not to open it until you were well enough to begin decoding it.”
He took the oblong crimson urn out of the pack, the Feathered Serpent’s image blazoned in black along its flat side.
“Relax, Coop. You done good. Your codex is safe.”
For a long moment, Coop studied the image of the legendary Mayan god, Quetzalcoatl—the Feathered Serpent.
It was uncracked, unharmed.
The codex was safe.
Slowly, quietly, Cooper Jones began to cry.
PART XVI
88
We walked up the main concourse to the dark gray Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The temple was in ruins, but the menacing images of the god-beast were still there, snarling.
Many of our main gods had physical human attributes, but Quetzalcoatl was a beast with the snout and fangs of a snake, the feathers of a giant bird.
We lived in a dangerous world, subject to the vicious whims of capricious gods. The one with the most frightening appearance, however, was this great serpent beast. Terrifying to behold, his powers awesome even to imagine, he was a benevolent/malevolent god—both the creator and the demonic destroyer of worlds.
Sparrow knew from the Temple of Love women in Tenochtitlán that the Hermit lived in a cave under the ruins of the Feathered Serpent’s temple. It was located near the Pyramid of the Sun, on the main concourse.
We found no evidence that anyone resided in or around the ruins except for an old woman with shaggy hair, wrinkled skin, and strange, unfocused eyes. She was tending to a cook-fire, yet one look at us and she slipped away, silent as a wraith, ignoring Sparrow’s gentle greeting.
And was gone.
Images of snarling beasts flanked the temple’s main staircase. To the staircase’s right, we found the cave’s darkly ominous opening from which neither sound nor light emerged.
“I hope he has not passed into Xibalba,” I whispered to Sparrow.
“He wouldn’t do that, and let the secret die with him.”
“Maybe he already has.”
Standing at the entrance, she called his name and repeated it when no one responded.
With one hand on my sword hilt, I pushed by her. Cool and surprisingly dry, the air was redolent with the smell of burnt-sap torches. Where the cave turned a dozen feet in, I detected a faint glow.
Stepping slowly, I called his name. Again, there was no response, but I approached the glow and rounded the turn, and then I saw Huemac the Hermit in the dim light of a single torch.
As old as the earth was my first impression, and immediately I understood why even the Aztec emperor spoke of him as a man who had walked with distant ancestors.
He lay in a single blanket on a bed of straw, wearing only a loincloth despite the cave’s coolness.
His long white hair—pale as any albino’s—hung below his shoulders. His dry, leathery skin—so tight against his frame that I could count every bone—had the color of the temple’s own gray stone. In fact, he looked like the stone effigy of a dying god.
His eyes were so milky, I could not make out his pupils in the dim torchlight.
Sparrow approached and knelt before him. His eyes did not seem to take her in. “I am Sparrow, the daughter of Jeweled Skull, a keeper of the secret.”
He made no response.
“This is Pakal, the Jaguar Oracle, whom Jeweled Skull treated and taught is if he were a son.”
His eyes finally fell on me as well, but they were empty of expression, unreadable as the grave. He gestured toward me with a frail hand. “Come closer.” His voice was as old and arid as his leathery skin.
I moved closer.
Reaching out, he felt my face. He ran his fingers over the claw marks, and they trembled against my skin. “The sacred talon,” he said.
I pulled the claw out from under my shirt and guided his hand to it. When his eyes failed to move toward it, I knew he was blind.
Taking the claw necklace in his wizened fist, he pulled my head closer. My body was rigid, but my soul trembled. This ancient, enigmatic man—in whom the gods vouchsafed their eternal wisdom—was about to whisper in my ear.
“Why am I not the chosen?” Sparrow interrupted angrily. “I am the daughter of a keeper. I have the right to bear the secret . . . by blood.”
The old man lay back on his bed of straw and answered Sparrow’s plea in a hoarse whisper that tore at my heart. “Because—calling your name—the gods will soon demand that blood.”
Xibalba awaited those whose name was called by the gods.
Whispering the secret of the codex in my ear, he then lay back on his straw bed. With a small sigh, his body settled.
Having designated a new Protector of the Dark Rift Codex, the old man abandoned the sorrows of this earthly existence and succumbed.
The mortal vessel of the all-knowing gods was gone.
And I was chosen to take his place.
89
We left the cave of Huemac the Hermit with dark clouds in the sky and darker storms in our hearts. We were both in shock at the old man’s words. Heading for a nearby hill, we had to learn if Axe was approaching or if Aztecs were in sight. We made the walk in silence. I did not know what to say to Sparrow about the old man’s prediction.
Ironically, Huemac’s rejection of her as the Codex Protector seemed to hurt her more than his belief that her days were numbered. However, his last words—that she would die—devastated me completely . . . so much so, I was mad at the old man.
I loved Sparrow, the gods be damned.
“It’s not true,” I told her. “He cannot divine the future any more than you or I can.”
“But he did know,” she said stoically. “So did Jeweled Skull. That’s why Jeweled Skull prepared you to become the Bearer of the Secret and why he commanded me to help you.”
“You’re not going to die,” I told her savagely. “Not until you have lived a full life with me.”
“Whatever the case,” she said, more irate than fearful, “we still have a mission to complete. What did Huemac tell you? Where is the codex?”
“In Tula.”
“Tula? The legend is that it was taken from the city for safekeeping during the Aztec invasion.”
“I don’t know. Huemac didn’t explain. He said to go there and move the codex to another place. In the One-World, we have too many kings seeking the book, and ultimately they will unearth it because it is identified with Tula.”
She thought for a moment. “Jeweled Skull told me that the person who helped create the codex and safeguarded it was a young stargazer named Coyotl. To keep secret the hiding place he chose after he left Tula, he spread word that the codex was in many places, adopting a trick used by Huehuecoyotl, the trickster who appears as a coyote. Perhaps the biggest trick of all was that he actually left the codex where everyone thought it would be.”
We spotted Axe approaching on the road. Leaving the hillock, we went down to meet him and head for Tula.
“We will need Axe when we get to Tula,” I told her, “and help from others—villagers, if we can find them. We have to move something heavy to get the codex.”
My question about whether Axe ever spoke was answered when he and Sparrow conferred. He used his hands to speak to her, not his tongue.
I had seen people who couldn’t speak make gestures that most others understood, but Sparrow and Axe had their own
language. Axe spoke with his hands but he could hear what she said.
He had bad news for us.
“We have to hurry,” Sparrow said. “A hundred warriors from Tenochtitlán are not far behind us, and Axe has spotted another group, too. He’s not sure who they are, but ten or twelve men who don’t march in the open like the royal guardsmen.”
“Flint Shield,” I said.
Axe grunted and nodded.
I didn’t need Sparrow to translate his conclusions, too.
“We have more to fear from Flint Shield’s band than from the hundred Aztecs,” I said. “Montezuma’s warriors will find the old man has begun his journey to Mictlan, their Place of Fear. They may spread out in different directions to hunt for us or return to Tenochtitlán for instructions. Either way, they won’t know we are headed for Tula. But Flint Shield may have learned a great deal about the codex from the High Priestess.”
“He did,” Sparrow said. “He will guess we’re heading for Tula once he knows the Hermit is dead, if for no other reason than it’s the place most connected with the codex.”
Tula was a full day’s walk. If we set a good pace and walked part of the night, we would be there in the morning. We were well appointed with weapons, but would have to purchase shields along the way.
We set a quick pace, once again leaving Axe behind to follow.
“Why is Axe unable to speak?” I asked as we walked.
“His tongue was cut out when he was young for disobeying his master. He wasn’t sacrificed, because he was exceptionally strong and the master used him for a bodyguard.”
“May the master falter during his journey through Xibalba and may ravening beasts rend him to his soul,” I offered.
“The master fell in battle and will spend an eternity in a heavenly paradise with beautiful women, good food and drink, and with comrades-in-arms.” She met my eye. “There is no justice in the One-World. The gods decide our fates, and sometimes they play with us as if they enjoyed our suffering. Why else would evil people prosper?”
I couldn’t explain the gods but knew that when it came to Sparrow, I would not assist in her annihilation.
Huemac had told her she did not have long to live.
He whispered to me that I was to kill her and anyone else who helped me retrieve the codex.
PART XVII
COYOTL THE STARGAZER
As we crested a high hill, the sea of maize and other foods was laid out before us. But it was not the richness of the supply of food or the two rivers that met and flowed among it that caught my eye, but the sight of Tula.
In the distance, it glittered and sparkled like the reflection of the midday sun off a pool of pure water. Its sloping pyramidal temples with their heaven-piercing summits soared high above the city’s white walls.
I shivered with excitement, with anticipation and fright . . . it would swat away an Aztec raiding party like smashing a mosquito. I could not even imagine the city falling to an army of all the Clans of Azteca.
—Gary Jennings’ Apocalypse 2012
90
Like the cannibals of culture the Aztecs were, they had chewed Tula to pieces, broken its bones for marrow, then hauled off the gnawed, gnarled skeleton, using its shattered fragments as building blocks for their own cities.
The brilliant city and civilization that the Toltecs had built was gone. Before us were the bare bones of a city from which all the flesh and marrow had been taken.
Tula, the golden city, had been the custodian of the One-World’s most glorious art and of Tula’s own irreplaceable historical codices. An unrivaled repository of knowledge, Tula’s legendary library contained uncountable codices, which innumerable scholars had collected over the millennia. Now, thanks to the Aztec barbarians, nothing remained in that inexhaustible fund of wisdom to pass on to future generations.
“My father told me that the nomadic Aztecs shivered half-naked around their campfires in the windy, parched deserts to the north,” Sparrow said, “and stared at warm, green Tula with lust for the city’s golden life. The savages dreamed of maize ears that grew as tall as men and fountains that effervesced clear, bubbling water that was pure as the gods’ own ambrosia.”
She told me that the Toltecs stunned the Aztecs by transporting water to their cities in clay pipes and aqueducts and by bathing in it. Later, they would model their own city’s water supply—along with their temples and palaces—after what they saw in Tula.
Hundreds of years after they destroyed the city, status-seeking Aztecs still “traced” their bloodlines to the Toltecs.
“If there was such a bloodline,” Sparrow said, “it came from rape, not marriage.”
The Tollans god-king, Quetzalcoatl, had collected books, artworks, and historical writings throughout the One-World, sending his legions to gather them as tribute and blooding any city that refused his demands.
Among the “treasures” he brought to Tula were the codices used to create the one that we had come seeking—the secret of the ages that Mayan astronomers in Palenque, Tikal, and other great Maya centers had preserved, along with the knowledge of the Olmec, Mixtec, and other nations in the One-World. Quetzalcoatl had ordered all the End Time codices brought to Tula and their contents combined into several codices. Into these august tomes he had interfused his own apocalyptic revelations. The primitive Aztec barbarians—ignorant and incapable of appreciating the codices’ importance—would have used those invaluable books as cook-fire fodder.
What direction Tula and its empire would have taken—had Quetzalcoatl not left his city in the throes of civil war and gone to the land of the Maya to rebuild its cities in the Toltec image—is left for kings and philosophers to argue.
“The Aztecs sought to destroy all historical records, because those writings would have demonstrated that while the Toltec feasted on venison, the Aztec dogs had subsisted on grubs and worms,” Sparrow said. “What wasn’t stolen or razed during the Aztec conquests, they later seized when they enslaved the survivors. One of the few things that they had not destroyed was the Temple of Warriors, because they feared angering the War God.”
The stone warriors were more than twice as tall as I was. They stood atop the temple—silent sentinels standing guard over dead memories of ancient glory.
Perhaps as punishment for the Toltecs’ sins—in permitting their wondrous city to fall under the brutal bludgeons of a barbaric horde—the gods had scorched the once lush valley, blistering the land, trees, and grass until it was baked yellow brown.
To save time, I sent Sparrow and Axe to the village below to hire workers for the labor necessary to unseal the cache that had entombed the final codex for hundreds upon hundreds of generations. I went up to the ruins by myself, to the few stone mounds where a city of sixty thousand people had once stood.
The Thundering Paw, Huemac the Hermit had whispered to me. Look under it.
Thundering Paws were sacred stone statues of a man reclining on his back, with his elbows on the ground, head and shoulders raised up, and his feet pulled back. The posture provided a surface on top, in which a bowl or other vessel could be placed. The hearts ripped out of sacrificial victims by temple priests went into those vessels.
The statues’ sacrificial function was no doubt the reason the Aztecs and other plunderers had left them alone. Thundering Paws played an integral role in the sacred blood covenant. Removing them from the city would have offended the gods.
The statues were easy to spot, because they were located near the main temple, where most of the sacrifices probably took place.
Unfortunately, when the Hermit said to look under a Thundering Paw statue, he did not inform me I had to select a statue that would be surrounded by nineteen other Thundering Paw monuments. My chances of picking and turning over the right effigy were slim.
Moreover, the stone statues were not just heavy, over time the bottom edges of the statues became affixed to the stone beneath. Moving them would be a backbreaking, time-consuming job. If we had
to move twenty statues before we found the right one, we would still be tipping up statues when Montezuma himself arrived at the head of an army.
I examined each one, looking for some clue that a passageway might lie beneath it.
I found nothing.
As I looked them over, I detected another dilemma.
I didn’t know the size and nature of the final codices’ hiding place. A small area just big enough to put the final codex? Or a large one, perhaps even containing other books?
I had assumed that moving the statute would immediately reveal a hiding place for the final codex. But stones—even cemented brick—might block the entrance to the cache.
Jeweled Skull had told Sparrow that the attack on the city had come as a surprise to the occupants and that the walls had been breached quickly.
The circumstances would have left Coyotl little time to hide the final codex.
I sat in the shade and thought about what the stargazer named Coyotl, who hid the final codex, was thinking as he searched for a cache with barbarians flooding the city.
The ruins were in the city’s ceremonial center, near the royal palace, pyramids, and temples. Located behind a second set of walls, it would have been the last place in the city to fall to the invaders, along with the royal palace itself.
The god-king would have kept the final codex in the royal library or the house of the stargazer. And it was unlikely that a Thundering Paw would be found in those areas. Tula’s Thundering Paws were located where the statues were commonly found in other cities—near the temple where sacrifices were conducted. The bloody deeds were done atop pyramids—to let the gods see the blood flow—and the hearts were later brought to Thundering Paws’ sacrificial vessels.