Thunder God (28 page)

‘I am not going anywhere with these bird-men,’ said Olaf, ‘especially not on my own.’

‘Then you had better tell them the truth,’ I said, ‘before we find ourselves in trouble.’

When Olaf tried to explain that Kukulkan was not his name, they indicated to him with solemn expressions and hands
swept in front of their faces, that he was mistaken. It was as if, in our long voyage over the ocean, Olaf had somehow forgotten his true identity, just as I, as his servant, had forgotten mine. What the men seemed to be saying was that there had been many Kukulkans in the history of their world. He was a kind of spirit, wandering in and out of human hearts. The manner of our arrival, and of our appearance, told them all that they wanted to know. In their eyes, Olaf was some kind of messenger, although what message he brought was as much a mystery to us as it was to these strange men.

‘They do not think you are a man,’ I said to Olaf. ‘They think you are some kind of god.’

None of Olaf’s protests could convince them otherwise, and when I stepped forward to add my voice to his, one of them silenced me with an angry click of the tongue.

The Mayans gave up trying to persuade Olaf to accompany them, but they were not happy about it, and indicated that they would return before long.

Afterwards, Choll explained with drawings in the sand that these men were powerful priests called Nacom and that the sticks they carried were called Calvac, with which they had the power to send people to Chibolba. We could not understand from Choll whether this Chibolba was a real place or an imaginary one, but clearly it was not a place in which he wanted to end up.

Olaf tried again to explain to Choll that he was not Kukulkan, and that I was not his servant.

I could not tell if he believed Olaf, but it seemed that from then on he looked at us with pity in his eyes, and particularly at me, as if whatever role I played in this was worse than I had yet imagined. Perhaps he grasped now that we were just two men who had lost our way out on the ocean. Even if Choll did not know where we had come from, or who we were, he could
tell from the condition of our ship that we had travelled a long way and that we would be lucky if we reached our home again.

Later that same day, Choll guided us to the village of Yochac. He explained that we had nothing to fear. There were no Nacom in the village, as they lived further inland. But then he rested his hand against Olaf’s chest and repeated the name of Kukulkan. Then he pointed down the coast towards Yochac, and gestured at the boat. From this, we understood that if we wanted help from the people in Yochac, it would be better if they believed that Olaf was indeed Kukulkan, and I his servant.

While Olaf handled the sail, I worked the steerboard. Choll sat beside me on the deck, laughing nervously at the speed of our boat over the waves. The walrus skull made him anxious. We had trouble persuading him that it was dead.

Yochac lay a short distance down the coast, set back in a shallow bay. All the buildings in the village were made of stick structures like Choll’s house, except for one large stone pyramid, painted rosy pink and turquoise blue. It stood at the far end of the little bay, which was filled with silty green-white water. The bay was protected from the ocean side by several small islands made up entirely of tangled trees and roots. Large black birds, the same kind as the one who had appeared over the boat when we were out to sea, nested in the branches. They clacked their beaks when we sailed past and showed their baggy red throats.

By the time Olaf had hauled down the sail and dropped anchor, the whole village had turned out on the beach to watch. There were about a dozen families, with more than twenty children among them.

The harbour at Yochac became our home for now. In the days that followed we grew used to the daily life of the Maya.

They slept whenever they wanted and often stayed awake all night talking. They drank a potion made from water with
mashed, soaked beans, and for food they ate small pieces of flat bread cooked over driftwood fires and a kind of fish called Uzcay, which they speared in the lagoon. The jungle was filled with lizards the length of my arm, fearsome to look at but easy to catch. Children knocked them on their heads with springy sticks, then cut their throats with the sharp edges of broken sea shells.

Olaf was given his own home, which was set up on a foundation of stone, unlike any of the others. I was provided with a lean-to shack, connected to the house by a door made of deer hide stretched across a wooden frame. Food was delivered to me, which I was expected to prepare for Olaf whenever he asked for it.

No sooner had we arrived than a wooden chair draped with the skins of some large spotted cat was placed in the shade of Olaf’s new house. Olaf was made to sit there while children were brought before him, to be touched on their bowed heads. Then the old and sick were ushered in, and offerings of food for Olaf piled up around my shed.

While Olaf was busy holding court, I ran the boat aground and, with the help of several of the men, used logs as rollers to get it up above the tide line. Then I set to work scraping barnacles and weeds off the hull. Choll showed me how to prepare a thick, tar-like substance from the bark of a tree, which he and I and several of his friends painted on the boards with
palm-frond
brushes to re-seal them. Some of the planks had wormholes in them and these we replaced, carefully saving the nails since the Maya had no iron. For blades, they used pieces of flint, which they carefully flaked until it was sharper, although more brittle, than any kind of steel.

That night, when I brought Olaf his food, I found him staring at the ceiling deep in thought, lying on a bed with his hands tucked behind his head.

In a hushed voice, I told him about my success at resealing the hull boards.

He listened for a while and then told me I had better go.

‘Go where?’ I asked.

He jerked his chin back at towards my lean-to. ‘We do not want to make them suspicious.’

I stared at him for a moment, fighting back my irritation, then went down to the water and walked along the beach until I found a secluded spot. Lying on the sand, I prayed, with that same hollow feeling inside me that the words I was speaking were just words in this place. My thoughts raced from one end of my brain to another, like a school of fish caught in a net.

After a night of being mauled by insects in my lean-to, I returned to the boat, where Choll had arranged for some of the Mayan women to help me reinforce the sail. In places where the cloth had worn thin, they stitched patches of animal skin and rawhide lacing.

Again that night, when I brought him his food, Olaf listened impatiently for a while and then told me to go. ‘Do not forget what these people think you are,’ he said.

Early next morning, Choll and I walked back into the jungle, gathering vines to replace the leather cables which had stretched thin. Although we kept an eye out for a tree that would serve as a mast, we found none that was suitable. Most of the tall trees had either been weakened by beetles gnawing deep inside them, or had a milky white sap, which Choll said burned the skin.

That night, carrying a clay bowl of cooked beans flavoured with hot peppers, I tried to open the door which connected my lean-to and Olaf’s house, but found it was blocked by the furdraped chair on which he spent his days, receiving the people of the village. ‘Olaf,’ I whispered. ‘Olaf!’

I pressed my ear to the door and heard him laughing softly,
followed by the sound of a woman tittering. I stood back, and let the bowl fall with a dull crash onto the floor. Another burst of laughter came from Olaf’s darkened house. I returned to my shack, and listened to dogs fighting at the edges of the jungle.

In the days that followed, Choll and I travelled further afield, using his dug-out canoe to cross the wide and pea-green lagoon which opened out behind the village. The water was shallow, and we could have walked across it, but we kept to the canoe because of crocodiles. We had to be off the lake before sunset, as that was when the crocodiles came out to hunt. I had seen crocodiles before, basking in mud along the river Nile, and did not argue with Choll about taking our chances among them after dark.

The Maya called to each other across these marshes by blowing into large spiral shells, whose sound carried far across the water. Often, the quiet of the afternoon would be broken by the sad wail of a shell horn, followed by the distant, moaning reply.

By now Choll and I had learned to communicate well, in a mixture of Mayan, Norse and hand gestures. He told me that the people who lived here now were the remnants of a much larger population. Choll said that years of drought and storms had ruined the crops. Many people moved inland, where there was more fertile land to farm. The edges of the jungle were lined with abandoned stone buildings and some large roads, which the Maya called Sacbe. These had been reclaimed by the relentless creeping vines, leaving only narrow footpaths to snake among the dusty trees. The arrival of Kukulkan had been foretold by the Nacom as the beginning of a new age for the Maya, a time of plentiful crops and prosperity. Only when Choll had explained that to me did I understand the full measure of the danger we were in.

Choll was worried, too, as much for himself as for us. He
feared that the Nacom would punish him for helping to repair the ship, since it was clear that the Nacom did not want us to leave.

I offered to take him with us, but he shook his head. Alive or dead, his place was in this world and not in mine.

That night, finding Olaf’s door blocked again, I went in through the front of his house.

He was in bed with a woman, who jabbered at Olaf when I appeared, pointing at me and then at the doorway.

‘You cannot come in that way,’ said Olaf.

‘The other way is blocked.’

‘I am not hungry,’ he yawned. ‘I have been eating all day.’

‘Tell her to leave,’ I said.

‘I cannot do that. She is the daughter of the village elder. He gave her to me, you know.’

I pointed at the woman, who was running her hands through Olaf’s hair. Her own black hair shined blue in the light of a palm bark fire, which burned in the middle of the stone floor. ‘You,’ I said.

She looked at me.

‘Get out,’ I told her quietly.

She turned to Olaf.

Olaf glared at me, then sighed and waved her away.

She gathered up her clothes and walked past me, bare feet padding on the stone.

‘What do you think you are doing?’ asked Olaf. ‘We agreed to play along with this. I am only doing what is expected of me.’

‘The deeper you tangle us into this dream of being Kukulkan, the harder it will be to get out. I cannot find us a new mast. Until I do that, we are not leaving. In the meantime, what are you going to tell the Nacom when they return?’

‘Perhaps they won’t come back,’ he said.

Then I told him what Choll had explained to me about the new age the Nacom believed was coming, and how it began with the appearance of Kukulkan. ‘They will come back,’ I said. ‘You can be sure of it. And if they find out that we are not who they think we are, it will be easier for them to kill us than to come up with another explanation for our being here. Do you not see?’

‘Keep your voice down.’

I walked closer to him. ‘The Nacom will have to answer to these people for their mistake. I have no doubt that some of them will answer with their lives, but not before they have taken ours as well.’

He rose up until he was on his knees on the bed. ‘What if they are right?’ he asked.

‘Right about what?’

He shrugged. ‘About who I am.’

‘You are Olaf,’ I snapped. ‘That much I know for certain.’

He shook his head, as if I had misunderstood. ‘It does not matter what you know.’ Then he raised his hands and let them fall again. ‘It does not even matter what I know!’ he laughed. ‘You understood what they said. Kukulkan is a messenger.’

‘But you do not have a message, you fool!’ I shoved him backwards.

He sat up and for a moment it looked as if he was going to lash out. But when he spoke, it was with a calm voice. ‘The message that he brings is kept a secret even from himself. Perhaps my presence here is all the message they are looking for.’

‘Are you honestly prepared to take that risk?’

He breathed out sharply through his nose. ‘How much less of a risk is it to sail that boat across the ocean, hoping we can find our way home again?’ He climbed off the bed and took hold of my arm, drawing me towards the doorway. ‘I do not even think we are in the same world anymore. Whatever special
treatment you received from the gods is over now. I see you shuffling off down the beach to pray, and look how much good it has done you.’ We stood now at the entrance to his home.

In the doorways of the little houses, people had gathered to see what the noise was about. Their faces were lit by the soft light of their cooking fires, which filled the air with fragrant smoke.

‘Know your place among these people,’ Olaf murmured in my ear. Then, with a jerk of his arm, he shoved me off the stone foundation and sent me sprawling in the dirt.

By the time I got to my feet, he had disappeared inside his house.

There was another group besides the Nacom, who seemed equally certain that Olaf was Kukulkan. These were the slaves, of which there were four in the village. They had been given to certain people in the village by the Nacom, but why they had been given or where these slaves had come from, I did not know. These slaves lived in sheds beside the cooking houses of their owners, much as I did. There were three men and one woman, and they spent most of their time washing clothes.

The next evening, from behind the door of my lean-to, I watched as one of the slaves came crawling across Olaf’s floor on his hands and knees until he reached where Olaf sat eating his meal of roasted fish. The slave was thin and sickly, with scabs on his legs and dirty hair that stuck up in tufts. He told Olaf his name was Achel. He clasped his hands in front of his face and begged to be set free.