Blood Sun

The warrior’s eyes watched him from the jungle below. It was his duty to guard the Cave of the Stone Serpent-a portal to the underworld, the place of death. But now he gazed with increasing fear.

In the legend of time, the Spearthrower clans had been defeated in great jungle battles because they could not throw their lances in the dense undergrowth. A new clan had emerged carrying shorter, flint-headed stabbing spears. They were brutally effective in close-quarter battle.

He saw a figure step out of the Serpent’s jaws and stand on its tongue. He carried the weapons of a jungle warrior: a blowpipe, a knife and a stabbing spear. Blood streamed from his head and face, washing into the river, causing the waterfall to turn red. Blood was sacred to Mayan life and war. Seized by a primal fear rooted in thousands of years of memory and legend, the warrior ran into the jungle. He must report what he had seen.

The Serpent had created a projection of its own being in another form, its wayob, and sent it into the world of man-it was a manifestation of death.

22

They clambered down and moved across the shallow sandbanks into the edge of the jungle. Flint made them wash the blood away while he went foraging in the undergrowth. He soon returned and gave Max and Xavier a handful of leaves. “Chew these into a pulp, then put them onto the cuts,” he instructed them, shoving some into his mouth. Within a few minutes of dressing the wounds, the steady flow of blood from the bat cuts stopped.

The shadows were deepening, and a moment of silence fell across the forest before the night sounds started.

“We need to get out of the open and deeper into the jungle in case anybody sees us,” Max said.

“There’s no sign or smell of anyone. It’s been a tough day; we need food.” Flint took the straw hat off and ran his fingers through his long hair, pulling it back behind his ears. He was looking over the terrain.

“Where would you choose?” he asked Max.

Max looked around. There were slabs of rock that reminded him of a tor back on Dartmoor. Prehistoric man had once made his campfires on those rocks and used them for lookouts and shelter. He pointed with the broken spear. “I’ll climb up there and see what I can find,” he said.

“What do I do?” Xavier said.

“You come with me and I’ll show you how to catch a snake. Then you can skin it,” Flint told him.

Xavier’s face said it all. “I go with Max,” he said with a grimace.

As Flint turned away and quickly disappeared into the jungle, Max clambered up onto the rocks. Xavier had no desire to be left standing alone, so he exerted himself in trying to match Max’s mountain-goat agility.

When Max finally reached the top, he found he could see deep into the forest, and looking back to the river and the cave mouth, it was obvious they were on the bend of the river. The rocks sheltered a now overgrown clearing, in which stood an abandoned hut. Xavier was bent double from the exertion.

“Down there,” Max said. “It’s perfect. Out of sight but with a clear view of these rocks and the river beyond.”

“I’ve stayed in better slums,” Xavier said. “But after hanging out with you, that place is like a hotel.”

Xavier began to move forward, but Max reached out his hand and stopped him. He pointed with the spear. “Look at that,” he said quietly.

Xavier turned to face Max’s line of sight. The sun had already disappeared below the mountain peaks, needles edging against the dark sky, but far away in the jungle, a curtain of mist was drawn across the valley. And it was bloodred. They stood for a few moments trying to understand what they were looking at.

Flint, huffing and puffing with his smoker’s cough, climbed up behind them, a dead snake in his hands and fruit tucked into his shirt. Max recognized the diamond-shaped head of the snake, one of the deadliest pit vipers in the tropics. Without a doubt, Orsino Flint was an expert survivalist-no one tackles a three-meter fer-de-lance without knowing what they are doing. He turned back to look at the veil of blood. Flint’s eyes squinted. The breeze was picking up. He sniffed the air. “Aha. You smell that,” he said.

Max nodded. He, too, had caught the slightly disgusting smell of sulfur on the wind.

“That’s an open stream of lava. The rising mist is from the damp jungle. This whole area was once an active volcano. Now it’s just that one mountain bleeding into the land. The mist is the lava’s reflection,” Flint said.

“Dangerous ground. I don’t want to go anywhere near it,” Max said. “At first light, we’ll find a track and see where it leads us. The pyramids and buildings in my mother’s pictures are out there somewhere. We find them and I might find out what happened to her.”

“And then?” Xavier asked.

Max shook his head. He wanted to go home, but the thought of facing his father again twisted something inside of him. He felt no compassion or understanding for what his father had done. Max knew his dad had failed to beat his own fear about something out here. He was determined to find the truth about how his mother died, but there were moments he wished he had not embarked on such a torturous journey. From the very start, it had caused pain and hurt, and the truth of his father’s actions tore at him.

There was no point talking about it. He didn’t want his own fears bubbling to the surface. Best no one saw that.

The embers of the fire burned in the stone hearth that Max had made in the hut. They had grilled and eaten the snake, and even the reluctant Xavier had admitted it wasn’t so bad and that it tasted like chicken. But now the breeze began to blow through the hut’s windows. As Max peeled fruit and handed it to Xavier, Flint began closing the wooden shutters.

“It’s already hot in here,” Max said. “We need some air.”

“It is not good to have the night wind move across your body when you sleep,” Flint told him as he fastened the shutters. “Some winds are malevolent; they are night spirits. You understand that? Your ch’ulel, it can be attacked.”

“Ch’ulel?”

“Ch’ulel is your life force, your spirit,” Flint explained. “It is vulnerable when you sleep. We’re intruders here, but our presence will be known. There are different ways of stopping us. Shamans can take on the form of animals and travel on the wind.”

“The wayob?” Max asked.

Flint nodded. “The windows stay closed.”

Xavier pulled fruit strands from his teeth. “Y’see, chico? Peasants. These people live in the forest and they start thinking like monkeys.”

In an instant, Flint had a knife at Xavier’s throat. Xavier choked. Max’s reactions were just as quick as he gripped Flint’s knife hand.

“Flint! Stop it! We’re in enough trouble as it is. Leave him.”

Flint pulled back but gestured with the knife. “Do not insult a man’s beliefs, drug scum. They sit more deeply than the heart.”

“Apologize,” Max told Xavier, who stared at him in disbelief. “Go on,” Max urged him. “If he wanted to kill you, he could have. I couldn’t have stopped him. He was warning you. If I were you, I’d apologize.”

Xavier grimaced as if the fruit had been sour. “OK. So … so you believe in evil spirits. OK. That’s cool, amigo. It was a joke. OK? I was joking.”

Flint muttered and backed himself into a corner, where he lay down with his back to the wall. “You are the ignorant one, boy. Your ch’ulel has already been corrupted. The dark ones took your childhood. You should ask for forgiveness and one day, maybe, you will understand what it means to live like a human being instead of a cockroach.”

Xavier flinched, and this time Max’s hand restrained the boy. “Leave him, Flint. Xavier tried to start a new life for himself and his brother. He’ll come right.”

Flint grunted, rolled a cigarette and let it smolder in his lips as he pulled his hat down over his eyes. He gave a rattling cough, his lungs struggling with the smoke. Both he and Xavier settled down. Max gazed into the fire. He knew about shamans and the creatures they could become. The shaman in Africa who had saved his life had taken