thousand dollars was eating into him like nitric acid. Maybe he could have driven the gringo up to eight?
‘Where do I pick up the material?’
The Mexican glanced around the cantina. It was an all-male watering hole, as good as empty now in the early afternoon, with most of its denizens either taking their siestas or pretending to work. ‘You coming alone?’
‘Yeah. I got a car. Easy to move the stuff into the back.’
‘You ever done this before?’
‘No.’ Alastor smiled. The stress lines in his face looked like glacial grooves. ‘This is all new to me.’
The Mexican grinned. He already knew he had a real sucker here. This proved it once and for all. No one admitted to inexperience in his world. In his world everybody had done everything a thousand times over. ‘We meet this evening. Six o’clock. There’s a cave complex near Valladolid. They call it the Gruta de Balancanche. We meet in the car park there. You can’t miss it, man. It’s only a few kilometres south of Chichen Itza.’ He frowned at Alastor. ‘You remember now. Nothing bigger than twenty-dollar bills?’
‘Seven thousand. That’s what we agreed?’
The Mexican almost gave himself away then. He almost laughed. This gringo was priceless. One felt tempted to pick him up in one hand and twirl him about one’s head like a lasso. ‘Yeah. Seven thousand. You get the best ordnance in the whole of Mexico, I promise. I tell you this. You’ve come to the right place.’
‘I know that, my friend. I know that very well.’
67
Lamia settled herself on the ground. She curled her legs beneath her and off to one side just like the Maya women she saw scattered about the compound, all of whom were either weaving, pounding maize, cooking, or endlessly patting tortillas into shape – and pretending not to watch the gringos, and, in particular, the gringa with the damaged cheek.
Lamia flashed a look at Sabir. There was a hunted expression on her face he had never seen there before.
‘What do you think they are going to do with us?’
Sabir squatted down beside her, his eyes fixed on the two guards standing at the edge of the clearing, their rifles at the ready. ‘Between you and me, they can do anything they want. Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody gives a damn about us. They could kill us and bury us somewhere in this endless scrubland and no one would be any the wiser. Then all they’d have to do would be to strip down the Grand Cherokee and ship it over to Guatemala. We changed our dollars into pesos on the US side of the border, Lamia, and we paid cash all the way down for everything we bought, including gas, food, and accommodation. It seemed like a heck of a good idea at the time. As a result there’s no official record of us anywhere beyond Brownsville.’
‘I don’t think they’ll do what you suggest. Acan is a nice boy. He’s not a killer.’
‘I don’t think so either.’
Lamia let out a heavy sigh. She was clearly grateful that Sabir was agreeing with her. ‘What have they done with Calque?’
‘They’ve got him over the other side of the clearing. He’s probably eating something. Or perhaps the priests are putting on his skin like a cloak and eating him? Christ, maybe I got it all wrong, and we’re next for the pot after all?’
Lamia threw a handful of dirt at him. She laughed in delight when he lost his balance trying to dodge it, and went sprawling.
Sabir stood up and made a great play out of shaking out his shirt. ‘I guess I deserved that. I never realized you were such a dangerous and impulsive woman.’ He grinned and resettled himself at the squat, pleased that he had triggered her change of mood.
‘Do you have any idea where we are?’
‘Yes, oddly enough, I do. On the way here I saw a sign that said Ek Balam. And there’s a pyramid over there. Can you see it? Just peeking through the trees. So it seems we’re at or near the site, which, if I remember correctly, is situated a few miles north of the main Cancun turnpike, just up from Valladolid. Frankly, they don’t seem too worried about us knowing where we are.’
‘That might mean that they don’t need to bother themselves with what we know because they’re going to kill us anyway. Maybe you were right in the first place?’
‘Yeah. And maybe the cup’s half empty, and never half full. No, Lamia. I think we’ve set them a problem that they’re going to have to work out for themselves. You saw how they responded to the crystal skull? And now they’ve got this man with the book to deal with too. That’s quite enough for one day. I’m convinced these guys are bona fide Maya, and that they genuinely thought we were grave robbers or something, and simply stepped in to protect their holy sites. I’m trusting that Calque can straighten them out on that angle. He’s good at that sort of thing.’
‘And my brothers and sisters?’
Sabir threw back his head as though he’d been slapped. ‘Let’s hope that they did indeed lose us back there near Jaltipan.’
‘Have you any reason to suppose that they didn’t?’
‘No. None whatsoever. But I wouldn’t like to imagine how far they’d go to get their hands on the skull and the book. The minute you bring firearms into an equation, like these Maya have, all rational judgement flies out the window. People behave like animals. I’m not so dumb that I don’t realize that if it came to a fight between these people and the Corpus, the Corpus would win hands down. That the way you read it?’
Lamia nodded. Here eyes were like dark wells within the paler framework of her face.
68
It was late afternoon by the time the Halach Uinic had succeeded in assembling all the people he would need for the ceremony of the tearing of the flesh. For this was what he now felt was necessary if the decision he had come to that morning in the car was to be acted upon.
After private prayer and a lengthy internal debate, the Halach Uinic had decided that he must offer himself up as a sacrifice to propitiate the gods, and through them, the composite, alchemical God that was Hunab Ku – the one monotheistic God who encapsulated and concatenated both Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcan.
The Halach Uinic didn’t intend to sacrifice himself in any purely physical sense, needless to say. That sort of thing was well past its sell-by date. The Spanish colonizers had been right to ban human sacrifices – there was a time and a place for everything, and in the early twenty-first century, unnecessary death, even if followed by inevitable rebirth, was notably inappropriate.
No, the sacrifice the Halach Uinic intended to make was a harder one than simply the giving up of one’s own life. The offering back of the book and the crystal skull to those who had found them needed to be paid for. And he, as chief representative of all the other priests, was the one who needed to do the paying.
He glanced across at the main temple. Everything was ready. The priests and the shamans were in place. The steps up to the top of the pyramid had been decorated with water lilies, pitaya flowers, and fronds from the corozo palm. Ritual objects and offerings of all sorts had been arrayed up the steps, including cigars, orchids, chocolate, sugar candy, aguardiente, burning bowls of sacpom tree resin, and many candles. Prayers had been chanted and fires had been lit. The lilies were correctly placed facing in towards the fires, showing a symbolical willingness to face the flames. The Calendar of the Days had been formally counted out by one of the priests, and white copal incense from the north of Mexico was being burnt as a nod to wider confraternity. Crosses had been drawn in honey on each of the steps leading to the top of the pyramid, reflecting the chaacoob – the four directions of the compass – each direction with its colour laid out in spices within the circle. East was red, north was white, west was black, and south was yellow.
The shamans and the iyoma – collectively known as the ajcuna, or spirit lawyers – each carrying their own
