12.21

get him back on his feet.

For nearly a year, Victor spent his days assisting with whatever decipherment projects arose and his nights watching the History Channel. Someone even saw him using a computer at the Getty. He cobbled together enough money to rent an apartment. After Victor had visited with his grandchildren at the beginning of 2012, his son emailed Chel to say he was greatly relieved to have his father back.

Then, this past July, Victor was supposed to be working finishing an exhibit on post-classic ruins. Instead, he stole Chel’s UCLA ID and used it to get himself into the faculty library. He was caught trying to walk out with several rare books, all of which were related to the Long Count. Chel’s trust was fractured, and she’d told Victor he needed to find another job, which was what ultimately led him to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Since then they’d spoken only a few times, and the conversations had been strained. In the back of her mind, Chel had reassured herself that, sometime after December 22, they would put it behind them for good and try to begin again.

Only now, she couldn’t wait for that.

“I need your help,” she said, turning back from the exhibit. She knew how pleased he was to hear these words.

“I seriously doubt that,” Victor said. “But anything for you.”

“I have a syntax question,” Chel said, reaching into her bag. “And I need an answer immediately.”

“What’s the source?” Victor asked.

She took a breath as she pulled out her laptop. “A new codex has just been discovered,” she said, filled with a mix of pride and hesitation.

“From the classic.”

Her old mentor laughed. “You must think I’ve gone senile.”

Chel pulled up images of the first pages of the codex on the computer screen. In an instant, Victor’s face changed. He was one of the few people in the world who would immediately understand the significance of the images in front of him. Staring in awe, he never took his eyes off the computer as Chel explained everything that had happened.

“The Guatemalans don’t know about it,” she told him, “and we can’t have anyone else trying to get their hands on it either. I need to be able to trust you.”

Victor looked up at her. “Then you can, Chel.”

* * *

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, they stood together in Chel’s lab at the Getty on the same side of the examining table. Victor marveled at the renderings of the gods, the new glyphs he’d never seen before, the old ones in novel combinations and unusual quantities. A part of Chel had been longing to show him the book since she laid eyes on it, and it was a thrill to encounter it again for the first time through his eyes.

Victor had instantly gravitated right toward what she’d brought him back to the Getty to see: the father–son glyph pair she and Rolando had had so much difficulty deciphering.

“I’ve never seen it as a couplet either,” Victor said. “And the number of times it appears as both subject and object is unprecedented.”

Together, they examined the paragraph where the pair first appeared:

The father and his son is not noble by birth, and so there is much the father and his son will never fathom about the ways of the gods that watch over us, there is much the father and his son does not hear that the gods would whisper in the ears of a king.

“It appears more often as a subject,” Victor said. “So I think we have to focus on nouns that could have been used over and over again.”

“Right,” Chel said. “Which is why I went back to the other codices and searched for the most frequently used subjects. There are six: maize, water, underworld, gods, time, and king.”

Victor nodded. “Of those, the only ones that make sense are either gods or king.”

“There are a dozen references to a drought in the early pages and to the nobles waiting for the deities to bring water,” Chel said.

“But gods wouldn’t make sense. Not in the context of the father and son waiting for the gods to bring rain. The gods don’t wait for the gods to bring rain. The people do.”

“And I tried king, but it didn’t make sense either. Father and male child. Chit unen. Could it be some kind of indication of a ruling family? Maybe father is being used metaphorically to mean king, and he has a son who will succeed him.”

“There are pairings with husbands and wives to indicate a ruling king and his queen,” Victor said.

“But if we assume the father and son pairing indicates a ruling family, then this sequence would read: The king and his son are not noble by birth. That makes no sense either.”

Victor’s eyes lit up. “Mayan syntax is all about context, right?”

“Sure…”

“Every subject exists in relation to an object,” Victor said. “Every date in relation to a god, every king to his polity. We always talk of King K’awiil of Tikal, not simply of King K’awiil. We talk of a ballplayer and his ball as one. Of a man and his spirit animal. Neither word exists without the other. They mean one thing.”

“One idea,” Chel said, “not two.”

Victor started to pace around the lab. “Right. So what if these glyphs work the same way? What if the scribe doesn’t refer to a father and his son but to a single man with the properties of both?”

It dawned on Chel what he was saying. “You think the scribe’s referring to himself as having the spirit of his father inside him?”

“We use it in English to talk about how similar we are to our parents. You are your mother’s child. Or, in your case, your father’s child, I suppose. He’s referring to himself.”

“It means I,” she said, astonished.

“I’ve never seen it used this exact way,” Victor continued, “but I have seen grammatical constructions like this used to highlight a noble’s connection to a god.”

Chel felt like she was floating. All the other codices were written in the third person—the narrator a distant, detached player in the story he was describing.

This was completely different.

“I am not noble by birth,” Victor read, “and so there is much I do not fathom about the ways of the gods that watch over us, there is much I do not hear that the gods would whisper in the ears of a king.”

A first-person narrative would be unique in the history of the discipline. There was no telling what could be learned from such an account. It could bridge a thousand-year gap and truly connect Chel’s people to the inner lives of their ancestors.

“Well,” Victor said, drawing a pen from his pocket as if it were a weapon. “I think it’s time to find out if this thing is worth all the trouble it’s caused.”

FOURTEEN

No rain has come to give us nourishment in a half cycle of the great star. The fields of Kanuataba have been harvested and humiliated, and the deer and birds and jaguar guardians of the land have been pushed out. Hillsides