but none of these colors has degraded at all.”
The coils of the serpent were all around them, above them. Some of the scales were rippling masked faces; some human, some demonic, and some animal, each of them idealized, all of them a great artist’s representation of Maya fears and hopes.
“The depth…” Lina said. “There’s a strange kind of dimensionality to everything, a depth that most Maya art shuns. This isn’t intentionally flat or linear. It…breathes.”
Hunter could only stare. Every time his flashlight moved even slightly, he would swear that the coils of the snake twitched. Like all great art, the serpent had a life independent of its maker. It simply
Another light clicked on. He started, then realized Lina had turned on her flashlight while he stared in awe at the slowly writhing snake. Her light was broader, warmer, more gold than blue. Closer to candlelight, but without its grace. The broad beam moved with deliberation over the walls and ceiling, up and down and then up again, a serpentine motion that was hypnotizing.
He moved his flashlight enough to see her face without distracting her. The gold buried in her dark eyes flashed and sparked, a mystery he would never solve, even more compelling to him than the images covering the walls.
The beam continued its circuit of walls and ceiling, then began all over again. Silent tears gleamed on Lina’s face as the beauty and meaning of what she was seeing began to sink in.
“And to think Philip wrote this place off as a pimple on the history of the Maya,” she said after a long silence. “This is one of the biggest complete wall paintings I’ve seen in the Maya style. The technique is incredibly refined. It must have taken years to execute.”
Hunter could only watch the serpent watching him.
“You know what this is?” she asked finally, her voice husky with excitement.
“A snake. A really, really big one.”
“It’s Kukulcan in his serpent aspect. It has to be.”
“So you’ve seen something like this before?” Hunter asked, unable to take his eyes off the endless, seething sea of scales and feathers.
“No, not this big, not this detailed,” she said. “Even the paintings in the Peten don’t compare to this. Peten’s art is shallow and flat. But this…Bonampak might compare, maybe, but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe this.”
“Is there any way to date the room?” Hunter asked. “I mean the painting, not the site itself.”
“We can try to find soot for carbon dating, maybe even take some paint samples.” Yet even as she spoke, she was shaking her head. “I couldn’t bear to chip off a single piece of this. You could reach out and touch Kukulcan, feel the wind off its wings, breathe the sacred presence.”
“That’s the breeze through the hallway,” Hunter said.
She gave him a glance from gold-shot dark eyes. “You hope it is.” But she smiled, understanding a modern man’s unease with ancient things that had no good explanation. “I’d guess that this temple is between four and five centuries old. I’d have to do some soil analysis and compare construction styles and techniques. Someone— generations of someones—have kept this in beautiful shape.”
“PFM,” he said absently.
Hunter was compelled by what his penlight revealed. The snake figure ended or changed before repeating itself. It was hard to tell. The whole painting flowed, seethed at the edges where darkness was.
The broader beam of Lina’s light joined his, and he saw the serpent’s jaws were gaping, revealing rows of teeth and a very wide red human tongue. There was an eerie, almost human aspect to the face, but it wasn’t benign or inviting. The artist had captured the raw, primal majesty of a god that was worthy of awe and reverence. Its eyes were open, glowing gold with ruby irises. When the angle of the light changed, the pupils seemed to flicker between the vertical slit of a reptile and the rounder aspect of the human.
In candlelight, the effect would be terrifying.
The mouth was big enough for a large man to be swallowed inside. Hunter wondered if the man would emerge again, filled with godlike knowledge, or simply disappear to be digested by darkness. His skin rippled in primal response, making body hair stand on end.
He had no desire to be the priest-king swallowed by this god.
Hunter’s pencil beam moved on to another part of the wall. A figure leaped out of time. He was a tall, muscular, idealized man wearing a mask.
“Lina,” he said, “I need some more light over here.”
With a reluctance that said more than words, Lina’s light moved slowly to join his.
The figure was wearing a mask made of obsidian, gleaming and black as midnight water. The mask had aspects of bird and bat, beast and human.
Her breath came in, stopped. “That’s a painting of the missing mask. It shows how it was meant to be used, in whose honor, in which ceremony.”
Hunter stared at a representation of the mask that had been stolen from the shipment seized by ICE.
The figure wearing the mask had a single hand outstretched to the mouth of the serpent, fingers wide in courageous expectation. The other figures around him were very small, barely ankle-high, signifying their relative unimportance.
“This was a priest-king,” Lina whispered.
“The marking on his chest.” Hunter’s voice was like hers, hushed.
“Blood. See the torn edges of the skin around the nipples? The blood dripping from beneath the loincloth? He cut himself beyond the point of pain to reach a different kind of consciousness.”
Hunter winced. “Glad I was raised in a church where all we did was peel off a little cash for the Communion plate. Damn, it takes huevos or insanity to slice into your own dick.”
“Look at the pattern of the fallen blood,” Lina said. “There, between his feet.”
Uneasily Hunter looked. Blood that had dripped and streamed red became transformed into a blue glyph on the floor. “Kawa’il. Again.”
“That’s who the offering is for, but who is the man performing the ceremony?” she asked. “I don’t see any sigils or historical glyphs indicating house and lineage and battles.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Very. There should be exploits, explanations, genealogies.” She swept the beam around but found only a sea of colored scales, the serpent in its thousand aspects, watching her.
“Over there,” Hunter said. “The priest or king or whatever is reaching for something.”
Slowly she turned her flashlight to find the figure of the priest-king and then followed his arm out to the hand, fingers gently splayed.
She and Hunter both saw something in the space between the serpent and the man’s outstretched hand.
“It looks like a small niche cut into the wall,” Lina said.
Hunter followed her, keeping close.
Flames or beams of radiance were painted around the niche, but they glowed a faint blue instead of red or orange or gold.
“Lightning,” she said. “Another manifestation of Kawa’il.”
Hunter played the thin beam over the niche. “Wonder what was in here. It can’t have been much more than fifteen inches long and maybe ten high, ten deep. Too small for a decent shrine.”
She thought of the missing artifacts. “The obsidian mask wouldn’t fit there, not with its ceremonial feathers and fastenings. The opening’s not long enough for a scepter. A censer, maybe.”
He went closer, ran a finger lightly over the ceiling of the niche. “No soot. No matter how magic the ventilation, burning enough copal leaves a residue.”
“Okay, the niche didn’t hold a small censer. The god bundle would fit, but not its sacred box. A ceremonial knife isn’t compatible with the narrative.”
“What narrative?”
“The room is a story of the opening of a conduit between gods and man,” she said. “The giving or taking of knowledge.”
