could hack it out here,” he said.
“Can you believe it?” she said, tears welling up in her eyes just a bit. “I turned down Paris for this.”
McCarter took the notebooks from her and sat down. “We’ll get you there,” he said. “In the meantime, you want to help me with what’s basically a pointless academic question?”
She unshouldered her rifle. “Sure, maybe it’ll help me feel normal again.” She sat down next to him. “What are we trying to figure out?”
“Hawker asked me a question about this place,” he said.
“Hawker?”
“He’s quite smart,” McCarter said. “Despite what he’d have us think. He notices things. And of all people, he noticed that the Chollokwan have an unexplainably strong interest in an abandoned temple that has nothing to do with them. Any thoughts?”
She took a moment, looking around at their surroundings. “Only that he’s right,” she said.
They discussed the question for a while, talking the subject around and bouncing thoughts off of each other, but no real progress was made, until they considered a different question, one that had been with them from the beginning: Was this temple or city Tulan Zuyua?
“It all starts there,” McCarter noted.
“We can’t prove it either way,” Susan said.
“No,” he agreed. “But it does seem possible. Seven Caves, the Place of Bitter Water, glyphs that reference things that occurred before the original Maya left Tulan Zuyua.” He scratched his head. “If we were to assume it to be true, would that help us? I mean, what do we know about Tulan Zuyua that might tell us something?”
“Humans were given their gods there,” she said. “And they left in an exodus, of sorts.”
“Right,” McCarter said. “And from what we’ve found—or rather, what we haven’t found—it doesn’t seem like this place was occupied for very long.” He was referring to the lack of everyday items that formed the bulk of any excavation: the pottery for cooking and carrying water, the tools, the bones of animals consumed for food, all of which piled up in ancient garbage dumps. Nor had they found extensive writing.
“We saw glyphs on and inside the temple, as well as one of the smaller structures—the beginning of something, but not a body of work like the gardens of stone at the classical Mayan cities. And in certain places, the work seems to have been cut short, like half-finished sentences. All of which suggests a sudden exodus to me.”
“You think they fled,” she guessed.
“Abandoned the place,” McCarter said. “A little different than the orderly departure described in the
She seemed to agree. “What else do we know?”
McCarter rubbed the sandpaper stubble on the side of his face and then reached for his notes. He began to flip through the pages once again, going backward this time, starting from the most recent and moving toward the beginning of the expedition. It was a trick he’d learned long ago, one that forced him to review the written pages, to study the words, instead of just scanning what he knew to be coming next.
Page after page moved through his hands—drawings he’d made, notes he’d scribbled that seemed almost indecipherable now. He squinted at the chicken scratch and racked his brain and then continued to backtrack. The pages flew by one at a time, until finally he stopped and held his place.
His fingers rubbed at the paper, the tactile sense of its fiber familiar to him, the half-circle stain from a coffee mug reminding him of the day he’d written on that particular page.
He stared at his own writing and the glyph he’d transcribed, one that he’d copied not in the clearing or at the temple but back at the Wall of Skulls. His eyes scanned it repeatedly as his mind made a leap it would not have been capable of just days before. He’d found his key.
He marked the spot in his notes, and began to riffle through the rest of them in search of a drawing he’d made at the base of the altar inside the temple.
He told Susan what he was searching for. She produced a printout of a photo she had taken with her digital camera, before it and the printer had succumbed to the electromagnetic degradation.
McCarter thanked her and took the photo. He scrutinized the image for a moment and then referred back to his bookmark. Firmly convinced, he turned the picture in Susan’s direction.
“This set of glyphs,” he said, pointing to the left side of a photo that had been taken inside the temple. “Do you remember what we decided about them?”
Susan examined the picture briefly, mumbling to herself as she translated. “The offering to the one for whom the temple was built. Which would be the Ahau: the king.”
“Correct. And this is the point of all that deference,” he said, moving his finger to the right side of the photo and pointing out another more opulent, yet unreadable glyph—unreadable because it was damaged, smashed as if by a hammer or a stone. It wasn’t the only glyph that appeared to have been damaged in that way but it was the only one on that particular section. It had left McCarter with the distinct impression of vandalism. The fact that it was probably the Ahau’s name only made the feeling stronger. He thought of the Pharaohs erasing the name of Moses from all the obelisks in Egypt.
Susan examined the photo again and sighed.
“Unknown,” she said. “The glyph clearly represents a name, but being damaged and this far from the rest of Mayan civilization, we might never find a matching symbol, in which case we would have to assign it a name ourselves.”
As always, McCarter thought, a textbook explanation. “That’s what we assumed at the time. But in fact, we already know who this is, though the answer will surprise you.”
She looked at him with suspicion.
McCarter folded the page of his notebook over and handed it to her. On the page in front of her was the drawing he’d made at the Wall of Skulls. The undamaged portions in the photo were identical to his markings. Next to it McCarter had scribbled a name, an English translation: Seven Macaw.
“That’s impossible,” she said. “Seven Macaw was one of the wooden people. Part of their pre-history, their pre-human mythology.”
He arched his brows. “Think about the description of the wooden people,” he said. “With no muscle development in their arms or their legs. No fat to speak of. With masklike faces and deformed bodies.”
“The body in the temple,” she said.
“Exactly,” he replied. “At the time of the wooden people, we have Seven Macaw holding himself out as a god, right? The leader, at the very least. But the authors of the
“Subhuman,” she said.
He nodded. “But in a place of power he becomes something more. Instead of a pitiable creature, he becomes an abomination: Seven Macaw.”
She glanced at the photo of the vandalized glyphs as he went on.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Seven Macaw was described as having a nest made of metal, and possessions that could create light. In fact, he claimed to be the Sun and the Moon and that he could light up the whole of the world, but even the writers of the
He nodded toward the temple. “If Danielle is right and that body down there is indeed the remains of a person who traveled here from the future, I’m guessing they would have come in some type of vessel; something ancient people might have described as a nest made of metal. I mean, what would they say if a plane crashed here, or a space capsule like Mercury or Apollo? Even our spotlights illuminated a large swath of ground before they were destroyed, who knows what type of lighting someone from the future might have.”
“But not enough to light up the world,” Susan noted.
“No,” McCarter agreed, “whatever they might boast.”
“That would fit,” she said, excitedly. “I mean, if they did have such things, primitive people would have a hard time describing them.”
McCarter nodded, but remained quiet for the moment. He was thinking of the skull in the cave and the golden filaments that ran from the eye sockets back across the top of it. He thought about his uncle, who had a titanium
