In the Courts of the Sun (31 page)

“Huh.”
“He goes back a long way, though. Supposedly.”
We walked west out of town with the brown moon bouncing ahead of us—
wenn sie auf der Erde so wenig, wie auf dem Monde,
I thought, pretentiously—and down into the valley, onto one strand of the network of footpaths under the Cordillera de los Cuchumatanes. A mile out of town the path branched south down alongside the river. I could hear its white noise just out of sight, and I could smell cut reeds and mud, and then mold and something like fresh ginger, and then something else under all those, as faint as the hint of ambergris that might still be evanescing from the dry residue at the bottom of an empty Guerlain Samsara flask that you might pick out of a dusty box at a flea market on a hot afternoon: the pheromone for home.

[23]

S
ylvana’s eyelash fluttered against my shoulder, the way it used to when she was dreaming, but it wasn’t her, it was something else, scratch it. Thing! Live thing. Okay, got it, oops, now on the back of my hand, running up the arm, shake it off shakeoffoff. I spasmed with prelinguistic revulsion. The little brown lizard dropped casually off my wrist and padded away over the metalized-nylon groundcloth.
Qué jodedera.
Getting citified in my old age. Not used to critters and shit anymore. I looked at the time readout on my phone: 3:04 p.M.
La gran puta.
Late.
Okay. Where the hell was I? The light was an odd purple-blue shade. I blinked up at the ceiling. It was high and corbel-arched.
Oh, right. Ix Ruinas. Michael’d said this was one of the palaces.
I flayed the damp sleeping bag off my person and sat up. It looked like everybody else was outside. The room was a big old Maya
audiencia
, a receiving room, about fifty feet long by nine deep and twenty feet high at the apex, with a single high doorway in the center of the western long side. The door was covered with a purple-blue nylon tarpaulin. In the Classic period there’d been a big mural on the back wall, and there was still about 20 percent of it left. You could just make out a little figure on the left, walking up some stairs, and then, faintly, a temple on the right with Earthtoadess volutes streaming out, but lately, that is, in the last few decades, water had been seeping in and it had washed away most of the stucco there. Still, the room was pretty dry at this season. Ana’s advance team had shoveled out the bat guano, but you could still smell it. They’d also prestashed most of the equipment in here, and the whole north third of the room was stacked with sections of oil-drilling rods, flexible conveyor tubes, boxes of drill bits, four Honda 90 hp motors, six Volvo jacks, and a pair of big yellow cases that held two tunneling-and-sampling robots, courtesy of Schlumberger Oilfield Services, one of which had been rigged with lights and video. The place looked like a pre-Columbian chop shop. Closer to the sleeping zone there were two silent gas generators and a bevy of power conditioners, a skein of fat cables snaking out the door and north toward Mound A, two medium-size lab freezers, a vacuum box, a vacuum packaging machine, rolls of aluminum foil for carbon 14 samples, a thirty-inch glove box, an as-yet-unpacked air-line system, two water pumps, a pressurizer (all available from Lab Safety Supply), boxes that held two stone saws and their circular blades (also Schlumberger), and the usual archaeological stuff—shovels, spades, label printers, light boxes, rolls of bubble wrap, packing boxes, work lights, LED probe lights, brushes, brooms, and sifting trays—basically enough gear to keep a whole graduate-study and summer-internship program busy out here for a decade, not that any real scholarly research was actually going to happen. We’ll never use half this stuff, I thought. Well, next time, don’t do—
Wait.
TONTODID.
Hmm.
DON TOD IT
. . .
DON’T DO IT.
I’d tried to warn myself.
Hell.
Don’t go back to the old days. Don’t trust these people. Don’t go through with this madness. Don’t do it.
Hmm.
I lay there wondering, squinting at a tall trapezoid of blue light, a nylon tarpaulin stretched across the single door of the ancient room. My teeth chattered a little. Don’t do it why? Couldn’t I have been just a little more specific? Because it’s an abomination before God? Because it’s unpleasant? Because I’d be missing the season finale of
Gossip Girl
?
Good going, I thought. It takes my subconscious four days to solve one Junior Jumble. Could’ve done it on my phone in between four and six seconds.
And now tonight I’ve got my appointment with a dead guy.
Yahora que,
what can you do about it now? Bail out? Run off into the bush with No Way and sneak south into Honduras? Fake a nervous breakdown? Just say no?
No wonder Tony Sic hadn’t seemed so upset when he found out I was going instead of him. I’d felt really sheepish about it, and then he’d seemed all philosophical and unfazed. Maybe he’d been having second thoughts. Jed, you’re an idiot, idiot—
Squelch that. Unproductive.
Whew. Okay. Let’s pick up the pieces. Time to Awaken the Giant Within.
I scratched my ankle, found a blue Patagonia Capilene sock that during the night had crawled from the foot of my bag past my head and out onto my inflatable mattressy thing. Inside the sock were five little rubber-banded bundles of foil packets. I found the General Foods Espresso Viennese, tore the thing open with my canine tooth, and poured a shower of powder onto my tongue. Yuck. Okay. I washed it down with two marshmallows. I opened two big PDI Super Sani-Cloth Germicidal Wipes, Proven Effective Against Tuberculosis, Salmonella, SARS, and HIV, and ran them over as much of my face and body as I could reach without spraining something. Next I found a packet that said No Need to Brush in big ice-blue letters. I ToothToweled my thirty-one teeth and ran the other side of the paste-impregnated paper over my wooly old tongue. The fourth packet held a four-by-six-inch square of gauze soaked with Skin So Soft, which neutralized the drying effects of the germicides. I tore a new Hartz Advanced Care 3 in 1 Control Flea Collar out of its wrapper and buckled it around my right knee. Arthropod bites and hæmophilia don’t go together too well. I bunched all the junk into a ball, put the ball in a pocket, screwed my earbud into my left canal, and crawled through the tarpaulin’s lower right flap.
“Care for a cuppa?” Michael asked, mercifully not on the earbud. He, Lisuarte, and Boy Commando were sitting on a ground cloth, like it was a picnic. I didn’t see No Way, but he’d said he’d snoop around. I said thanks but I’d had some. It sounded like an invitation, though, so I squatted next to them. We were in the shade of a long building that had been the west side of an eighty-yard quadrangle that Michael said was probably part of the Ixian Ocelot Clan’s men’s palace. The other buildings were covered with shrubs and just looked like small ridges, and the building we’d set up in wouldn’t have been noticeable, either, if the ES people hadn’t cleared out the doorway. The area that had been the courtyard looked like it had been planted with corn a few years ago. But now it was overgrown with nettles and ferns. The whole compound was about halfway up a once-terraced mountainside, a quarter mile uphill from the river and about a hundred yards south of the site’s biggest pyramid—which the great Sylvanus Morley had called Mound A and which we now, with better epigraphy, knew had been the Ocelots’ mul. But with all the leafage you couldn’t see either the river or the mul or, except in patches, the sky.
There was a big open OtterBox next to Michael, filled with packets of jellies and honey and juice boxes and corn chips and protein bars and stuff, and I picked out a Land O’ Lakes TravelPak and a half-liter foil-covered paper brick of Undine, which I guess was the latest thing in positron-enriched all-sports superwater. My last Ziploc, the one with my many-hued meds ’n’ vitamins, was still in my left hand, but I managed to peel the little Mylar tab off the box top. There was a puff-adder hiss as the little canister of CO
₂
inside shot its wad and instantly cooled the liquid down to thirty-two filling-cracking degrees. I poured my pills into my mouth, started to drink, found that my left hand was stuck to the frozen condensate on the outside of the box, peeled it off, picked the box up again, got the now-congealing cluster of capsules down with two-thirds of the heavy water or light water or whatever it was. Michael’s hand handed me something. It was a granola bar. I pushed it out of the wrapper and crunched into it.
Bring it!
the wrapper said,
And that’s what we did. We brought 50% more protein to the table than our traditional granola bars. This way, you won’t have to worry about where you get your strength from, just where it will take you. At Bear Naked™ Granola, we believe true strength is seeing every finish line as the next starting point. So go ahead, set your sights a little higher. It’s not important how far away your goal is—just that you’re moving toward it. This is the granola that gets you there.
Excellent, I thought. I drank the remaining third of the box of water, crushed the box around the wrappers and the baggie, and dropped the wad in the Leave No Traces bag.
“Ow,” Marena’s voice said somewhere. “You
cunt
.” I looked a little more carefully out into the milpa. Ana and Marena were fighting out in the middle of the field. No, they were practicing hup kwon do or something. Ana was teaching Marena some new and devastating low-body shin kick.
America’s Bloodiest Psycho Dyke Catfight Videos,
I thought.
El video mas sangriento de lucha-libre de marimachas. Spick Chix Kick Dix. Mistress Ana, She-Jackal of Abu Ghraib—
“Cornstarch?” Michael asked.
Excuse me? I thought. “Excuse me?” I asked.
He pointed to an open box of Argo. I looked at it. Boy, the Corn Maiden had really slimmed down at some point over the last couple of decades.
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh, sometimes I give it to people who aren’t used to hiking,” he said. “They tend to get chafed about the tender bits.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Uh, no, thanks.”
“Did you just eat that thing of butter?” Boy Commando asked me.
“Huh?” I asked. I looked down at the empty foil wrapper. “Oh . . . well . . .”
“Like, straight?” Boy asked. “You just eat plain butter?”
“Uh . . . I guess you can’t take the Third World out of the Indian.”
“Hey,” he said, “I bet you can’t tell me how many cigs I’ve got left in this pocket.” He tapped his left breast.
“No, I can’t,” I said. “I’m not a remote viewer.”
“We have two mung-sprout pita pockets left,” Michael said.
I said no thanks again and asked where the designated
latrina
was. He pointed to the southern side of the field. I creaked upright and headed over.
“Cover your traces,” Ana’s voice said out of my ear. Thanks, I nodded.
Tortillera.
I don’t care how many contras you blew away for Bill Casey. I scrubbled forward, slipping a bit. My guess about Ana was that she was one of probably a lot of women who’d been in the marines and wanted to run combat-level missions, and then when the U.S. wouldn’t let them they’d quit in a huff and hired themselves out either to more swinging countries or to the private sector. Anyway, she sure had a big chip on each shoulder. Damn. I was having some trouble getting a second Wet One out of its packet. Shoulda just stood in sleeping bag. Person packet. Pick a peck of pita people packets—
My ear buzzed. “System on,” I said. The system came on.
“It’s Kozo,” Michael said. “Good news, check this out.”
I shuffled back and crouched into the
audiencia
. Hitch and Boy Commando were just inside the doorway, tinkering with audio stuff. Michael and Lisuarte were in the back, hunched over a monitor.
“We got a heads-up from the home office,” Michael said. I sat down. “You know about the markings in the ahau’s niche?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. I’d memorized them, as I was sure he knew.
“Right. Well, the recoronation, the k’atun-seating ritual, that was at dawn on the twentieth, right? In 664.”
“Exactolutely,” I said. At the downloading we’d be shooting for twenty minutes before sunrise, when 9 Fanged Hummingbird would be inside the niche, waiting to emerge and show himself to the assembly in the plaza.
“Remember the San Martín thing?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Max says hi,” Marena said. I hadn’t seen her come in. We said hi back. She relayed the messages, signed off, and slid her phone—a new, clunkier, encrypted one, with a black case—into a little Velcro pocket on her sleeve.
“Sorry,” Marena said. “What’s San Martín again?”
“It’s a volcano on the coast of Veracruz,” Michael said. “There was an eruption there right around the target date.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Right.”
“Well—I was telling Jed—the dendrochronology couldn’t really pin the date down,” he said. “But the Connecticut Yankee Department just came through with something aces,” he said. “Have a squiz at this.” He spun the monitor around to face me. It showed the first line of a scan out of some English liturgical document: