Thunder God (29 page)

Before Olaf had time to answer, a group of villagers arrived in the doorway and dragged the slave outside. They chased him to the edge of the jungle and beat him senseless with the same sticks used for catching lizards.

I saw that the life of a slave here meant as little as it had in
Miklagard. I could not bear the thought of being a servant again, even if the man I served was not my master.

All night, the high-pitched sound of Achel’s wailing echoed through the jungle.

After another day of paddling through the labyrinth of shallow channels which connected the lakes behind Yochac, Choll made it clear to me that it was hopeless to continue our search for a mast. He explained that sometimes trees drifted up onto the beach which might have served the purpose, but he did not know where they came from. He said that the word had spread about the arrival of Kukulkan and that a great gathering was being planned by the Nacom at a sacred place inland. Mayans would be coming from all over the country. People had been awaiting this day for a long time.

Choll and I sat there, in the middle of the lake, water lapping at the sides of his dug-out canoe. Late-afternoon sun beat down on our backs. With a casting motion of his arm, Choll showed that he knew how far I had to travel if I ever wanted to reach my home again. Then he looked at me and shook his head, as if to say that no one could go that far, not even the dead on their voyage to another world.

That night, I waited until after dark, when most of the village was asleep. Then I went to the blocked door and whispered Olaf’s name. I called to him until my voice went hoarse, but finally he answered.

‘What do you want? You woke me up.’

‘There is no hope of finding a mast,’ I explained. ‘It is only a matter of time before the Nacom return.’ I told him about the gathering they had planned. ‘We have to leave now and take our chances out on the water. The next time they ask you to go with them, they will not take no for an answer. I will start provisioning the boat tomorrow. Choll will help me with fresh
water and food. Then you and I can sail down the coast and dig up the silver before heading out to sea.’

‘You can do as you please,’ said Olaf. ‘I am staying here.’

‘Olaf!’ I shook the door, trying to wrench it open, but he had tied it shut with vines. ‘Think straight! We have to get away.’

‘I am not stopping you.’

‘And how far do you think I could sail that boat by myself?’

He laughed softly.

I heard him getting out of his bed and the sound of his bare feet walking across the stone floor.

Now he stood on the other side of the door. He had thrown away his old clothes and now dressed like the other Mayan men, with only a cloth around his waist.

I could not see his face, only his hands and his legs, on which the old salt-water boils had healed, leaving purple smudges on his skin.

‘You must learn to accept the way things are now,’ he said, ‘just as I learned to accept what I did not want to believe, back in the place where we came from.’

‘Olaf, do you not want to see your home again?’

‘What if we are already home?’ he asked. ‘What if we have at last found the gateway into the other world that we searched for back when we were children? Perhaps, somewhere out on the ocean, we passed through without even knowing it. And now we are on the other side. Maybe, even now, we might be in Altvik. Kari might be standing right beside you. But of course you cannot see her, and she might sense that you are there, just as we sensed the other world but could not see it. I believe I have found what I have been looking for all my life.’

I slumped down onto my knees. ‘But Olaf, even if you were right, this is not your world. We are travellers and we are lost.’

‘If I am lost,’ he said, ‘it is because I choose to be lost, which means I am not lost at all.’

‘We do not belong here, Olaf. We belong in that other place.’

‘You belong there, my old friend. Go home, if you can. The temple is your responsibility now.’

It was hopeless to try and persuade him. I could not convince Olaf, because I no longer even knew myself what the truth was, or if there was more than one truth. Perhaps there were a thousand truths, partitioned in their own realities but inhabiting the same space, in which those who held one truth above another lived and died without ever knowing the others existed.

Olaf walked away without another word.

I stayed on my knees, breathing in the still, hot air of Mayan night and longing for the glacier chill of a breeze off the Grimsvoss mountains.

That night, Choll woke me from a dead sleep. He was excited about something, talking so quickly that I could not pick up any of the words.

My first thought was that the Nacom had returned, and I felt a jolt of panic arc across my chest. When I said the word, Choll laughed and swept his hand in front of his face to show I was mistaken.

He brought me down to the water’s edge. A vast yellow moon balanced almost full on the rooftop of the jungle. It was so bright that I could even see the pale green colour of the waves as they rose and crumbled on the ghost-white sand.

Choll led me to his group of friends, who were gathered around a stone-lined hole they had dug in the ground. The stones had been heated and the hole was filled with the tar-like substance we had used to re-caulk the hull. The men carried the tarring brushes we had made for the job and now that I had arrived, they began to paint the mast with tar, filling in the cracks which spiralled up the wood.

Now I understood. They had figured it out. I grabbed a brush and began to paint alongside them. We were laughing as we worked in the moonlight, slapping each other on the back, because it was so simple, and so obvious, and we knew it would work.

I tried not to think about the difficulties of sailing the boat alone. I even considered bringing Olaf away by force but realised that it would do no good. I could not make a prisoner of him and expect his help sailing the ship anywhere but back to this same place.

By morning, the tar had hardened, sealing the cracks. It would hold now. It would be even stronger than before.

I decided to speak once more to Olaf, and try to sway his mind. If he refused, I knew I had no choice but to leave as soon as I could, before the Nacom returned. It was morning before Choll and his friends and I managed to refloat the boat, hauling it over log rollers. As soon as the stern had passed beyond a log, one of us dragged the log down to the bow and kept things moving. The boat was sealed up tight and bobbed high in the water. I anchored it in the lagoon and used the rowboat to ferry out green palm nuts, bags of yellow grain, and dried fish, which I laced along the boom so that they hung like tassles, twisting in the breeze. I even tied a hanging bed between two of the old oar-ports, since I had grown used to sleeping that way since my arrival among the Maya.

I discovered that, in my haste to seal the hull, I had forgotten to recaulk the waterbarrels. Now they were leaking badly. I had no choice but to heat up some more tar and paint it on. It would be late afternoon before the tar dried and I wanted to get out beyond the reef before sunset, as I could not cross it in the dark.

I went to find Olaf, running over in my head the words that I would say to shake him from his trance.

When I arrived at Olaf’s, my heart jumped when I saw a large group of Nacom gathered outside. Their feathered cloaks glinted with deep blues and reds and greens. Among them stood men without capes, who were armed with short bows, arrows held in lizard-skin quivers and heavy, stone-tipped spears.

Olaf stood above them on the stone foundation of his house.

The sight of the Nacom and their guards had sent women and children back into their houses and left the men sitting uneasily in the shadows of the trees, repairing their fishing nets and glancing up to see what might happen next.

The Nacom were speaking to Olaf, gesturing towards the white-dusted Sacbe road along which they had come.

Olaf nodded and stood.

I pushed my way through the Nacom, despite their clicking tongues of disapproval. At the base of the stone foundation was a chair, built on two narrow poles, with two men standing at each end, ready to carry Olaf away. Over the top of the chair hung a canopy of interwoven leaves to block the sun.

I stood before Olaf, squinting up at him, because the sun’s glare was in my eyes.

‘You should not have come here,’ he said.

‘The boat is ready,’ I explained. ‘These men –’

‘The men are taking me inland to the great celebration, which they have been planning for many days. Thousands of people will be there.’

‘Come with me.’

He laughed. ‘And what would I tell them? That I cared nothing for the hardships they have endured? That I would deny them the new age of prosperity which my arrival has assured?’

I shook my head. ‘In your heart, you know that is a lie.’

Now he strode down the steps. ‘You cannot bear to see that my luck has changed. What you do not know is that your
own luck would never have come to you if it had not been for me.’

‘Olaf, what are you saying?’

‘How do you think it felt,’ he shouted, ‘to watch Ingolf, and then you and Kari walk home and leave me up there alone in the fields? I thought if I could persuade you that we were close to discovering something, we might go back to the way things were before, with all of us together as friends. But it went wrong.’

‘What went wrong?’ I asked.

He folded his arms, the way the Nacom did when they were speaking to someone of lower rank. ‘All this time, you thought it was Greycloak who called you out into the storm that night. But it was me.’ Then he spoke my name in that rasping, guttural whisper I had heard on the night I ran out into the storm.

‘That was you?’ I stammered.

He shrugged, to show how easy it had been. ‘I put on Tostig’s cloak and waited until the middle of the night. I was going to lead you up towards the hills and then hide until you went home again. It would have worked. It would have been so simple.’

‘But why?’ I asked, my voice cracking with disbelief. ‘Why invent a lie when what held us together as friends was our searching for the truth?’

‘To make you believe,’ he shouted, ‘until we really found what we were looking for. So that you who were my friends would not lose faith in me.’ He paused. ‘And now it is the faith of these people that matters, not yours.’ Olaf pointed at the ship, riding at anchor in the jade green water. ‘Go, and if you find your home again, tell them that Olaf no longer exists. Now there is only Kukulkan.’

He tried to step past me, but I held out my hands to stop him. ‘Olaf, I am telling the truth.’

‘Whose truth?’ he demanded.

‘The only one that matters to me,’ I replied, still refusing to get out of his way, ‘is the one that will keep you alive.’

The next thing I remember, I was lying on the ground. The left side of my head was burning, and branches of pain spread like long fingers beneath my skin, reaching along the line of my jaw and down my neck. I tried to sit up but fell back again. When my head hit the dirt, chips of light flickered in front of my eyes. I could feel blood trickling down the back of my throat. Olaf’s face appeared over mine. He was talking to me, but his voice seemed to come from far away, and I could not hear the words.

Then I was hoisted to my feet by two of the guards, and my hands were tied behind my back with vines.

The Nacom and their guards set off down the white road. Olaf was carried in his chair, swaying gently with the motion of his bearers.

I stumbled along behind, pushed by the tip of a spear. The blood still dripped from my nose where Olaf had struck me. I felt the dryness in my lips and the greasiness in my joints which always came with fear. I thought about running, but knew it would be useless. Before the village was swallowed up by the jungle, I looked back and saw a small group of people watching. Choll was among them. From the expressions on his face, I realised he did not expect to see me again.

The route took us through the jungle along roads paved with the same crushed white stone. Vines and interlocking branches grew so densely on either side that I wondered how these paths could ever have been cleared, especially in this heat, which never seemed to fade from the moment the sun rose above the horizon until well after dark.

Now and then, the procession would pause to rest, and I would be given water to drink from one of the gourds, which
all the Maya carried with them. The guards neither looked me in the eye nor spoke to me throughout the day, only pushing me impatiently onwards when I lagged behind.

Once, I saw that Olaf had turned in his chair to look back at me. I tried to read the expression on his face, but there was sweat in my eyes, and all I could make out was a blur.

We camped that night beside a sink-hole where the rocky ground had fallen in upon itself to make an underground pond. The roots of trees had wormed their way through the rock and dangled into the bright blue water. The guards climbed down these roots and went fishing with their spears, while the Nacom set up a triangle of stones around where Olaf sat, still in his chair. They brought out dried leaves, placed them upon each of the stones and set them alight. Then they sat around the triangle and began to chant in a low guttural murmur. I heard the word ‘Ekchua’ repeated over and over. The leaves burned peppery and sweet. When the Nacom had finished praying, they kicked over the stones and scattered the ashes.

I was brought to the edge of the clearing, made to sit at the base of a tree and tied to its trunk. After giving me a drink of water, they left me alone.

The guards caught some fish in the pond, which they cooked whole and offered to Olaf on a broad green leaf. When Olaf had finished eating, the rest of the fish were divided among the Nacom and their guards. Olaf left his chair and walked over to me.

‘Do you see what trouble you have got yourself into?’ he asked.

‘We are both in trouble,’ I said, refusing to look at him.

‘These people do not seem to think so,’ he said, and gestured towards the Maya sitting around their smouldering fires.