Sanibel Flats

Ford said, 'Keep going. It's getting good.'

'Oh, man, it gets better and better. See, the Maya fascination with time, numbers, astronomy was all related to their dependency on agriculture. It was their religion, trying to predict the weather, trying to control the growing seasons. Appease the gods; stuff like that. Scratch any religion, and you come up with the day-to-day fears of its followers. The Maya were nature worshippers, worshippers of the seasons. Hell, supposedly the only time they copulated was in the spring. The Aztecs sacrificed as many as twenty thousand people in a single day, but the Maya didn't go in for that. Even before killing an animal, they had to whisper the prayer 'I have need' to explain themselves to the gods. Piss off the gods, and they'd send bad weather, destroy the crops.'

Ford said, 'So Alvarado attacked the peaceful Tlaxclen priests.'

'Right. But here's the clincher: He forced about ten thousand Kache warriors to go with him and help fight. Maybe the Kache still thought he was Quetzalcoatl. No one knows, but they followed him. It was a long march into the mountains; took them several days to get there, and Alvarado only carried enough food for his own men. The Kache warriors were starving, and Alvarado told them they had to eat the bodies of their enemies. Can you picture it? The Maya weren't pacifists, but they weren't murderers either. Now they were being forced into cannibalism. It was bloodbath time. Human butchery. A monk traveling with the army described in writing how children were killed and roasted in Alvarado's presence; how men were murdered just so their hands and feet—the tenderest parts— could be eaten. When Alvarado confronted the Tlaxclen priests at this mountain lake—'

'Ojo de Dios,' Ford put in. 'That's the name of the lake: God's Eye.'

'The Eye of God, yeah—jeez, I love the names people give stuff down there. Anyway, when Alvarado got to the lake, the Tlaxclen sent out six thousand warriors. They wore cotton shirts and feathers and blew conch-shell trumpets to make sure they didn't take this Spanish geek by surprise. Honorable to the end, man. Six thousand spears against armored soldiers on horseback and ten thousand Kache warriors. Bummer odds, but the Tlaxclen still fought. When the priests saw the slaughter, they began to throw their religious artifacts into the lake. Stone calendars and tablets. Legend says there was a big stone star chart with emeralds marking constellations. They didn't want Alvarado to have them; that would have been sacrilege, man.

'Apparently this lake is real deep, and the stuff was never found. Alvarado looked, too. He'd heard about those emeralds. People have searched ever since, but no luck—probably because there were a bunch of earthquakes in the years following the conquest.

'Anyway, the Tlaxclen were enslaved. So were the Kache, for that matter. But because the Kache had helped the conquistadors, they were of a slightly higher rank than the Tlaxclen. The Kache were given better food, better jobs; they were given the bulk of the land when the Spaniards pulled out. Hell, the Spaniards didn't want it. No gold in Masagua, right? So the Kache became the ruling, upper class. Now, you'd think the Kache would've treated the Tlaxclen pretty good. Like out of remorse. But they didn't. It's one of those perverse quirks of human nature that we end up hating people who have seen us humiliated. Plus, the Tlaxclen had added to the humiliation by fighting the Spaniards, and the Kache despised them for it. They became even crueler than Alvarado.'

Tomlinson was combing his fingers through his hair, excited. 'Do you see the significance of all this, Doc? Goddamn, it's as amazing as it is tragic. Within the space of a couple of weeks, the two-thousand-year-old social and religious foundations of an entire people were destroyed. The Kache had been defeated by a handful of men, surrendered without a fight. They had not only murdered their brothers, but they had eaten the corpses. Humiliation like that doesn't just last for a few years, it lasts for generations; hundreds of years.

'The Tlaxclen went from high priests to slaves, and at the hands of their own people. The Ceremony of Seven Moons—the thing that had always united them—was lost, then Catholicism was forced on them. But here's the thing that interests me—' He slid forward in his chair. 'One of the Tlaxclen priests decided the religion and the ceremonies of his people should be recorded. This priest was a smart dude, man. He saw what was going on around him, and he knew this wasn't just some minor defeat his people had suffered. It was for all time. So he confided in one of the Spanish monks. Musta been a couple years after the conquest; one of them, you know, had to learn the other's language. And this monk wrote it all down. Of course, even the Tlaxclen had probably lost the secrets of Mayan glyph writing by this time—this was way after the Mayan Classic Period, like I said. But, from what I read, the monk may have gotten the whole story, step by step, on the ceremonies, religion, philosophy.

Everything. He compiled it into a book, ink on parchment, called the Kin Qux Cho. I translate that as Rituals of the Lake.

Ford looked at him. 'You can read Mayan?'

Tomlinson seemed slightly offended. 'Goddamn, I spent the whole day poring over that stuff. Who wouldn't pick up a little? Besides the written Mayan was translated into phonetic archaic Spanish; it's maybe two hundred words, and those are mostly nouns. What's to learn?'

'Oh,' said Ford. 'That's all it is.' He knew only a handful of people familiar with written Mayan, and only one who could read archaic Spanish—Pilar. He said, 'And I thought it was hard.'

'You want something hard, try reading those Mayan glyphs. It's gonna take me at least a week just to figure out their damn calendar. They had three different systems: the Calendar Round—that's the fifty-two-year cycle—the Sacred Round, and the Vague Year, all computed on a vigesimal count, which is a snap, but everything over the number ten is in glyphs, which is a bummer, man. '

'Now you want to learn how to read Mayan glyphs? I don't get it, Tomlinson. What's the point?'

'The Kin Qux Cho, man. The book, that's the point. It was written four hundred and fifty years ago, but no one even knew what it was until about eight years ago. Some graduate student discovered it while going through the archives there in the museum, but the damn Masaguan government immediately took control of it. No one's had a look at it since. No one knows for sure what's in it; it's all speculation. See, the way I see it, the descendants of the Kache probably still run the country, the upper class—'

'They don't think of themselves as Kache or Tlaxclen anymore, Tomlinson—except for maybe some of the mountain people.'

'It doesn't matter what they call themselves. They're still Kache, and they still must have one hell of a sense of shame about what happened to them. Why else would they put that book under wraps? Why else would they be so afraid of their past? Do you see the damn irony, Doc? It hit me yesterday when I was out on my boat meditating. Sitting there drifting, watching the sunset, and all of a sudden, bam, there it was. These people are acting out the whole conquest scene over and over again. Like punishing themselves in utter damn humiliation. The fighting, the revolutions, killing their own kind—just like when Alvarado came. And they're still following the white god, Quetzalcoatl, only now Quetzalcoatl goes under a couple of names, like the Soviet Union and the good old U.S. of A.' Tomlinson was nodding, feet moving, pleased with himself. 'What a study, man. Parallel the religion and philosophy of pre-Alvarado Maya with the Maya of today. Take pure data four hundred and fifty years old, juxtapose it with current data. See what little quirks survived. Genetic memory, man, don't sell it short. That stuff runs deep in an isolated race. Find out if they haven't incorporated some of the old religion in with their Catholicism—'

'Oh, they have, they have,' said Ford. 'I've seen it. They burn candles before old Mayan carvings. They hold crucifixes but chant in Tlaxclen.'

'See! It's all falling into place, Doc. Meeting you, hearing about those sharks, my brain coming back to life. It's like preordained, man. Don't doubt for a second that everything in this world happens at exactly the right time. It all falls into place, just waiting on us to come along. I know. ' Tomlinson looked at the horizon and sniffed. 'Karma's my business. Now I just need to get my hands on a copy of that damn book.'

'You make it sound like it won't be easy.' Speaking as if uninformed, but Ford knew that it wouldn't be easy. Now, in fact, it might be impossible.

'Maybe not. But academicians stick together, man. Flash the right credentials, see the right people. The Masaguan government will have to release that book someday.'

'If the government has it.'

'What? I had all the latest data on the screen yesterday, man. Supposedly they keep it in the Presidential Palace, locked up. Like a national treasure, proud enough to show it off, but too ashamed to let anyone translate it. You know something you're not telling me?'

Ford had hardly touched his evening quart of beer, but now he took a long drink. He knew something, but he wasn't going to risk telling Tomlinson. Not yet. He knew the Kin Qux Cho was no longer in the Presidential Palace. He knew that Pilar Santana Fuentes Balserio had been the graduate student who, eight years before, had discovered the significance of the book. And he knew that it was Pilar, working with an