Shallows of Night - 02 (39 page)

Once or twice Ronin fired a handful of a reed which they had found would burn brightly despite the excessive humidity and went out perhaps a hundred meters from their camp. For a time he saw nothing, then, as he turned back to Moichi, his peripheral vision caught a quick spark of reflected light from his torch and, swinging back around, he thought he saw the pulse of red eyes, burning like heated embers in the night. But these glimpses were so brief that he could not be certain whether these lights were organic or inorganic in origin.

On a day when it rained steadily, turning the world about them a dismal pale gray-green, the pair climbed a heavily overgrown escarpment, an ‘s’ shaped double-crescent and, just beyond it, found four stone stelae perhaps three times the size of the obelisk. These also were carved along all four of their faces from top to bottom. The pictoglyphs were similar to the obelisk’s.

The grouping, had it a horizontal section across the top, would have constituted a gate.

They passed between the stelae while the jungle wept sorrowfully.

They could hear nothing now save the hiss and drip of the rain, which swept through the jungle in waves, for once unintimidated by the terraces of leaves and vines, raking the spongy floor. Visibility was extremely poor and they were forced to move forward cautiously.

Half a kilometer past the stelae the jungle ceased, its death so abrupt that they found themselves on the brink of cleared land before they had realized what had happened.

They stood very still and stared at the incredible expanse which swept majestically away before them.

The rain had all but stopped and, from above them, the sun shone, against the background of dark gray thunderheads, into the illimitable valley, casting into brilliant white complex stone buildings of immense size, a towering, pyramidal city linked by uncurving stone causeways edged by low stone monuments.

The buildings were ornate, terrifyingly alien and hypnotically familiar at the same time, and none more so than that structure which dominated the entire valley city.

It was an enormous stepped pyramid in the stone city’s center. It towered over all the other buildings, bizarre and compelling. It was four-sided, perhaps typical of this culture, with central stairs running up each face, set within the Cyclopean steps. At its flat summit was a stone slab, an oval striated green and black. It looked like an altar.

‘Ama-no-mori?’ whispered Moichi.

An oval, thought Ronin, suddenly dizzy, on the verge now, parting from the leafy shadows of the jade sea, an enfolding talisman against the terrible stone city crouched watchfully.

Waiting.

‘It appears deserted.’

‘Yet, a feeling –’

‘I know.’

‘Where are the inhabitants?’

Everywhere he looked the great stone stelae and buildings were richly carved with strange scenes filled with myriad figures. Were these men or gods? Or perhaps both, mingled on the grounds of this site, for surely they saw depicted the abandoned, the defeated, the humbled, the sacrificed overshadowed by the fierce, the victorious, the revenged, ensplendored and revered in stone three times the size of man.

At the commencement of the central stone causeway, wide and perfectly flat, they passed between twin stone cats, giant jaws agape, stretched forepaws many meters in length, rippling shoulder muscles deeply etched, the mighty relief of the massive chests sweeping in sinuous curves up and away to the lifted rumps and quiescent tails.

Just beyond these mammoth stone guardians, two more stelae rose on either side of the causeway, immense, covered in such high relief and complex glyphs that it was impossible to count the number of their sides.

Passing between these they saw a great stepped plaza rising on their left. Pools on the stone steps, remnants of the day’s heavy rain, glistened in the lowering sun. Here and there, as they moved, their angle of vision changing, these shallow pools broke into arching pastel rainbows.

On either side of the plaza, to north and south, were high structures with windowless stone walls, vertical and sheer on their inner sides, sloping outward on their opposite walls. A lone doorway set in each vertical wall led onto the plaza.

‘Strange,’ said Moichi as he halted before the first steps of the plaza. He gazed all about him. ‘The arch seems unknown to these people. You see, Ronin’ —he pointed to the structures at either end of the plaza—‘they use, instead, the corbel vault to support their taller buildings.’

Ronin’s gaze at length swung away from the plaza complex, west, along the flat causeway, and he called softly to his companion. Before the great stepped pyramid which rose above them a quarter of a kilometer away, he could make out three silhouetted figures, tall and black, featureless against the diffuse mauve and copper glare of the dying sun, slipping steadily into the highest reaches of the towering jungle beyond the stone valley.

‘This way. Come on.’

They were masked.

Two men and one woman with great feline mantles covering their entire heads. These were cunningly crafted, furred and spotted, with triangular ears, black muzzles with long, stiff whiskers, and cold, glittering eyes, the color of gold or light green jade, translucent, glassy, and somehow disturbing.

All three were extremely tall, fully two and a half meters, the men with deep chests and long, muscular legs. Their skin was the color of stained teak.

The two men were garbed in gold and black spotted fur cloths wound about their loins. They wore sandals of black leather. Along their arms were bands of gold of varying widths, beaten and carved with fantastic designs. Ronin could pick out a bizarre scene between several headdressed warriors and a multiheaded creature which he took to be a god.

The woman was fully as tall as the men, her great untangled mane of blue-black hair outlasting the length of her grotesque mask; it rode to the small of her back. She wore a short tunic of golden fur that reached from her heavy breasts to just past the juncture of her thighs. Her legs were long and beautifully formed. She wore no gold on her arms but rather a band of pink and white jade, not more than a centimeter across, carved into an intricate latticework design through which the rich copper of her skin could be seen.

The man on the left stepped forward one pace.

‘Welcome,’ he said, his voice distant and strange through the grillwork of ivory fangs, ‘to Xich Chih, the great city of the Chacmool.’

‘Time,’ said Cabal Xiu.

He was the shorter of the two men.

‘It has ever been our greatest concern.’

A light breeze ruffled the fur of his mask.

‘Thus our history is written in stone to survive the cataclysms of the ages.’

To the north and the south, low pillared edifices; to the east, the jungle shivered, a high, almost impenetrable barrier. On a stepped acropolis, facing west. Across the wide, stone causeway, another structure loomed, a stepped pyramid perhaps one third the size of the giant structure near the center of the stone city, made up of nine successively smaller terraces. At the top was an oblong building set on six thick columns, heavily carved and worked. A set of wide steps along the center of the near side of the edifice gave access to the top.

‘We have waited—’ Cabal Xiu paused as if debating his choice of words. ‘We are waiting—’

The absurdity of the situation, Ronin reflected uneasily as his gaze swung back to the three bizarrely disfigured creatures sitting before him, failed to impress itself upon him. There was a disturbing aspect to this trio that disallowed any but the most immediately self-involving thoughts.

‘Waiting for what?’ said Moichi. ‘The end?’

The feline mask which covered Cabal Xiu’s head swiveled in his direction. The oblate sun’s dying rays fired his eyes.

‘Oh no.’ A line of crimson light fired his whiskers and was gone. ‘That has already come.’

In a hush, the sun left the land and the city of Xich Chih was engulfed in amethyst and lapis light. In reflection, the valley glowed, as if from a frozen spectral fire kilometers distant.

‘See to the rushes, Kin Coba,’ said Cabal Xiu.

The woman rose from her alabaster stone seat, crossed the stone acropolis to the north building. Ronin watched the movement of her buttocks, the strength of her firm thighs.

She returned moments later with two reed torches, smokily lit, which she set into stone pillars on either side of the group.

‘This is the Chacmool,’ said Uxmal Chac, the taller of the two men, speaking for the first time. He pointed to the low table between them. Its top was the back of a cat, stylized and perfectly flat. The stone from which it was carved was either stained red or was naturally ruddy. Into its sides and back had been sunk circles of green jade, representing spots. The table’s top was strewn with fired clay bowls of dried white corn and a heavy milky drink, spiced and certainly alcoholic. ‘It is the Red Jaguar, which still roams this land. It is unique in all the worlds for the Chacmool never knows defeat until all life has fled from its body.’ His mask shook as he spoke; several strands of mixed teeth and claws and carved flint clicked against each other as they lay around his neck. ‘It is the fiercest and therefore the most feared of carnivores.’ His eyes were in deep shadow. ‘Among our people it was told sometimes that the Chacmool was a supernatural being; that it could, for short periods, assume the form of man.’

‘The Red Jaguar was the basis for many tales,’ said Kin Coba, her voice evenly modulated. ‘Quite natural since the creature was always extremely rare.’

‘In the end,’ said Cabal Xiu, ‘it was revered as a god.’

Now the stars, glittery in close array, manifested themselves through the deep azure and magenta of evening’s haze, the brilliantine light of frosted ice crystals scattered across the sky by cosmic breath.

The great stone city lay just beneath this eternal blanket, an unmoving, articulated expanse of planes and angles, mathematically precise, perfectly situated, abruptly in harmony, now that darkness had fallen, with the slow intense wheel of the heavens, stupefying in its chill, cruel calculation.

Uxmal Chac inclined his head. ‘Tell us—’

‘I think,’ said Cabal Xiu, deliberately interrupting, ‘that our guests must be fatigued after their long journey through the jungle.’ He extended a long arm. ‘Kin Coba, please see that these men are comfortable. Uxmal Chac and I have much to discuss.’

At their backs a green and gold bird fluttered across the cool geometric expanse of the acropolis before disappearing into the tangled maze of the black jungle.

Night.

They were narrow cubicles within the building at the north end of the acropolis. What little light fell across their lintels was the result of reed tapers set along the blank stone walls of the brown airless corridors. In his and in Moichi’s a thin straw bed without legs lay on the stucco floor. Next to each was a shallow earthen bowl filled with water and, in the opposite corner, a chamber pot.

The walls of the cubicles were frescoed. Strange beasts and fantastic warriors bedecked in plumed headdresses and animal skins, men with large hooked noses and flat craniums, long eyes and wide full lips; scenes painted in hues of soft maize and brick red, deep green and lustrous midnight blue (purple seemed an unknown color here, except in the sky).

‘Is there anything that you require?’ said Kin Coba. She addressed both of them as they stood in the corridor.

‘Not for the moment,’ said Moichi.

‘Well, then,’ she said in farewell.

They listened to the slap of her sandals against the hard floor diminishing as she went away from them.

Ronin signed to the big man and silently they followed her out of the building.

They watched her within the shadows of the doorway as she headed across the adamantine acropolis.

‘Just as well we left the rooms,’ whispered Moichi. ‘I could hardly breathe in there.’

‘Too much dust in there to believe that anyone has slept there for a long time,’ said Ronin.

Kin Coba went swiftly down the steps and across the wide white causeway toward the pillared building atop the pyramid to the west.

‘Who are these people?’ Moichi asked himself as much as Ronin.

‘Whoever they are, they seem singularly uncurious about who
we
are or how we came here.’

Moichi nodded.

‘As if it makes no difference.’

‘What was it Cabal Xiu said—?’

Kin Coba had reached the foot of the pyramid. She began to climb the stone stairway along its near face.

‘“We have been waiting”?’

‘For what? Us?’

‘Let us find out,’ said Ronin.

And they stepped from the dark shadows, following in Kin Coba’s footsteps, across the acropolis, toward the bulk of the waiting pyramid.

‘There can be only one answer,’ Uxmal Chac said in his deep voice. ‘Surely you need no reminder, o my “brother”.’ He could not keep the scorn from his voice.

‘I do not believe that it is so clear-cut,’ said Cabal Xiu. ‘There must be no error. We—’

‘Can you have already forgotten that though I am commander of the Majapan, I was once, many
katun
ago, a priest like you?’

‘How can one forget what has been seared into one’s brain, Uxmal Chac? Even though the military is something with which I can have no sympathy, still I understand your position.’

‘I abhor your condescension,’ growled Uxmal Chac, turning his back on the other. Kin Coba stood between them, arms folded across her breasts, watching them both as a lizard would a pair of fighting cocks, with a mesmeric but rather detached fascination.

‘Ah, at last it comes out.’ Cabal Xiu took a step forward, away from the brazier of fire, the sloping wall of hieroglyphs in high relief. Beyond, to either side, shadowed archways rose to low vaulted ceilings, blackened with the caked charcoal residue of many burning torches.

Uxmal Chac whirled around and his hands lifted menacingly. The short stone weapon which was neither a sword nor an ax, slapped heavily against his thigh.

‘You will not lecture to
me.
I have studied the Book of Balam; I know it as well as do you.’ He pointed to the glyph wall behind the burning brazier. ‘The wording is quite precise; it cannot be twisted—by you or anyone else—’