‘No. Not if you chew the seeds well. Not if you ask the right questions.’
Sabir poured the seeds into his mouth. The Halach Uinic did the same. So did Ixtab. Sabir saw that the guardian was drinking his mixture, as was the Chilan.
Calque shrugged and popped the peyote into his mouth. He began to masticate the pulp, a disgusted expression on his face, as if he were being forced to swallow a tablespoonful of castor oil.
Lamia was the last to make up her mind. She turned and looked into the darkness surrounding them for a very long time. Then, with a shudder, she placed the peyote on her tongue.
90
At first Sabir felt very little. It was almost as if the datura wasn’t working. Perhaps they’d given him a bunch of sunflower seeds to chew on by mistake? Every now and then he found himself stretching his hand out as if he were reaching for a cigarette. But he had never smoked. This fact struck him as strange.
The Halach Uinic’s voice droned on. He and the Chilan had been praying for over an hour now, and the sound had become like a sort of sonic wallpaper behind which Sabir could dimly make out the presence of other people. But the room was entirely dark – not a sliver of light entered from anywhere. Even the stones heating the air were dark – Sabir had assumed, for some obscure reason, that they would glow like household coal.
Thanks to the heat from the stones he was now sweating uncontrollably. He began to picture himself as a cold bottle of beer on a midsummer’s day. The thought of the beer made him want to salivate, but he found that he couldn’t produce any spit at all. He thought about asking for a glass of water and then decided against it. The idea of the seven of them sitting packed together around the stones and still not being able to see each other struck him as ludicrous in the extreme.
Every now and then there was a mild clattering and banging – the susurration of things being shifted and of liquid being poured. Sabir reckoned that this represented the sound of the Halach Uinic, Ixtab, and the Chilan arranging their offerings in the dark. Each had brought with them various vessels filled with deer blood, sacpom resin, and certain other accoutrements, while Ixtab, as usual, had been carrying her shamanic bag of tricks.
Sabir began to muse on what was secretly hidden inside Ixtab’s bag. A powder compact? A lipstick? A cell phone? He began to giggle at the thought of Ixtab as some sort of super-urban Maya princess. The idea was so absurd that he felt an overwhelming urge to communicate it to the assembly at large so that everyone else could appreciate it too. But for some reason he found himself unable to speak.
Slowly, Sabir began to realize the full enormity of what was happening to him. He no longer felt remotely claustrophobic. In fact he had not felt claustrophobic since entering the sweat lodge. This fact struck him as so absurdly unlikely that he began to search around inside his head in a vain effort to reclaim the comfortably ingrained emotions of fear he had now so palpably lost track of. But try as he might, he couldn’t reconnect with them. Was it someone else who had been claustrophobic, then, and not him?
He felt around with his fingers, anxious to know who was sitting beside him. The process was a difficult one, however, as he did not wish to invade anyone else’s privacy. By a process of elimination, he decided that the Halach Uinic was sitting directly opposite him, with the Chilan on the Halach Uinic’s left, and Ixtab on his right – the sounds of praying were coming from over there, and they were site specific. This left the guardian, Lamia, and Calque as his potential next-door neighbours.
Sabir lowered his nose and began sniffing. For some reason he felt that he ought to be able to tell who was sitting next to him simply by their smell. This seemed entirely reasonable, to his way of thinking, and he was surprised that more people didn’t use the procedure in the ordinary run of their lives. He had a sudden clear vision of approaching people on the street and sniffing at them. Of discovering their secrets that way. Whether they were menopausal, on heat, full of testosterone, angry, in love, etc., etc. Someone or something had come up with this theory before, but he couldn’t remember who or when.
‘It was dogs!’ he screamed, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice.
The Halach Uinic and the Chilan stopped their chanting.
‘I knew it. Dogs go around sniffing.’ Sabir raised one hand to his face in yet another cigarette-smoking movement. He swept the hand out in an arc, like an over exuberant actor, then stopped abruptly when he felt some resistance. But the resistance wasn’t physical. He was only inferring it. ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ He had forgotten to use the person’s name, but he suspected it was Calque.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘I knew it. I nearly hit you.’
‘You were a long way off. You were nowhere near me.’
‘Oh yes?’ Sabir allowed himself to flop backwards. He lay, looking up at where the roof was supposed to be – but it might as well have been the floor for all the evidence it gave of its existence. ‘Can anyone tell me why I’m here?’
The Chilan and the Halach Uinic began their chanting again.
Sabir decided that he would go to sleep.
91
Athame had been lying without moving for close on three hours. During the whole of that time, the Halach Uinic and the Chilan had only stopped their chanting once, when someone – she supposed Sabir – had shouted out something about dogs.
She had taken to working on one part of her body at a time. Small movements. Flexions and tensions. Tiny spasms of the muscles designed to keep the blood flowing around her body and to protect her from cramp. She wondered how much longer she would have to suffer this torment for the sake of – well what? Nobody had said anything worth missing supper for so far.
At one point her cell phone began to vibrate. Fortunately for her, the bass-baritone droning emanating from the Chilan and the Halach Uinic, with the occasional contralto interjection from the witchdoctor woman, more than compensated for its sound, and Athame was able to dampen it with her hand until it switched itself off. She had arranged with Abi that he only let any of his calls run for two rings – if she didn’t answer, it meant that she was otherwise engaged. This foresight had now saved her from the embarrassment of premature discovery – a discovery which would have forced her to act in a manner directly contrary to Madame, her mother’s, wishes. Athame was sufficiently level-headed to realize that in those circumstances Abi would gleefully have fed her to the dogs, transferring all responsibility for his own maverick actions onto her head.
Once, when the chanting became especially raucous, Athame achieved a partial change of position, turning from facing the wall to facing outwards. What were these people thinking of? Why were they all sitting in a pitch- dark space chanting nonsense? She began to regret her super-smart, on-the-hoof idea of sneaking inside. Now, given the impossible situation she had contrived for herself, she knew that she would have to see the thing through until the bitter end.
She silently prayed that Abi might somehow be able to deduce what had happened to her, and detail one of the others for skull and codex duty.
92
The temporary camp had gone quiet. People were either curled up on the ground or sleeping in hammocks they had strung up between the trees. Some had attempted to build bivouacs out of palm fronds and plastic sheeting, but most seemed content to lie out beneath the stars.
Abi had the entire area covered. With Oni and Berith back at the warehouse, he still had Vau, Rudra, Aldinach, Alastor, Athame, Asson, Dakini and Nawal to police the temporary camp. Each was in contact with him
