The Maya priest chanted louder, raising his hands further into the heavens. Imploring his pagan sky god to accept the sacrificial corpse on the altar, he waited for an answer. When it came, the young Spanish friar swallowed his doubts and prayed louder to his own god to spare him from the barbaric horror he was seeing on this terrible day.
Then the priest plunged the sharpened stone blade into his friend’s stomach and ripped it open. Juan screamed, but his terrified cries were muffled by the blood flowing up through his throat. The priest tore at his body again and again, slicing thick, rugged gouges into his painted flesh as the storm grew wilder around them.
Alfonso was horrified. He witnessed the evil, depraved chanting and crazed dancing in circles, and in the sky the storm grew stronger. The hailstones grew in size, almost as big as a man’s fist. The power of the wind increased tenfold, scratching at the tops of the palms and tearing their leaves off. To save themselves, the men around the altar dropped to their knees and grabbed hold of its thick, stone legs. As they fought the strength of the storm, it increased yet again.
This time, the palm tree trunks were wrenched from the earth and flung like pinewood splinters across the complex. Some smashed into sculptures and others ripped through the thatched roofs of the villagers’ dwellings. Above, the sky darkened further, churned by the growing violence of the divine storm. Alfonso had never seen anything like it, but the men around him knew what it was and had a name for it.
It was a warning from Hurakán.
A hurricane.
The god of storms was angry. Their offering was clearly not good enough and they had enraged him with their disrespect. Perhaps increasing the offering might appease the great sky god of storms? Alfonso’s skin crawled when he saw the men turn and look at him. The priest screamed from the top of the pyramid in the howling gale.
The words were in Mayan, but Alfonso knew they could mean only one thing.
“Bring him!”
They grabbed his arms and dragged him over to the steps. This time, there was no dancing or singing or music. This time there was only a desperate fear in the faces of the tribesmen around him, and perhaps the faintest glimmer of hope that sacrificing the second friar might be enough to appease mighty Huracan.
He summoned all his strength and screamed for his life. “No!”
Looking up the steps, he saw the priest, arms still raised to the sky and muttering a hypnotic mantra up to the racing black clouds above his head. Hailstones smashed down, one striking Alfonso’s shoulder and making him cry out loud in pain. Then another hit the head of one of the men dragging him and broke open his skull. He crashed down to the ground and the other men screamed in terror and fled, desperate to escape the brutal vengeance of the storm god. The priest screamed at them to stop, but his pleas fell on deaf ears and they scattered into the forest like frightened rabbits, leaving Alfonso unguarded in the chaos.
He knew his shoulder had been badly wounded by the massive, sharp hailstone, but that was the least of his worries. Standing alone at the base of the pyramid, he looked up and saw only the priest. He was taking cover from the hailstones beneath a stone overhang above the altar, and Juan’s savagely desecrated body was hanging off the altar, his broken limbs jutting out at awkward, sickening angles.
There was no hope for his old friend from Salamanca, but Alfonso still had a chance. If he acted quickly. With his hands still tied behind his back and pain throbbing in his shoulder, he turned and ran down the bottom few steps of the pyramid’s south side. He scanned the area and saw the rainforest was the best place to disappear completely from the terrified tribe behind him.
Dodging the hailstones, he weaved through the huts and alleys until reaching the jungle and then ducked inside the treeline. His chest burned with the strain of the sprint, but he was out of sight and safe for now. He fought to control his breathing and slow his pounding heart, but then he saw something that made it beat even harder in his chest. Something which made him question all over again everything he believed about the world and the heavens above it.
As the priest’s chants grew louder and he raised his tattooed arms, still dripping with Juan’s blood, high into the air, the hailstorm intensified again in strength and power. The old shaman began twirling his bloody arms in a circle above his head, and as he did so a giant twister appeared in the sky above the temple, as if in response to the priest’s will, as if the storm were obeying his mystical chants and movements.
The storm was now more powerful than anything Alfonso had ever witnessed. A vast, swirling gray maelstrom of flashing thunderbolts and howling winds and hailstones like fists rained down all over the complex. The priest stood at the top of the temple, calm now, almost serene as he hummed his mantra with his eyes closed and directed the raging tempest as if it were his puppet.
The storm obeyed. When the priest moved his arms one way, the eye of the storm followed. When he moved them back, it followed again. When he screamed, the winds intensified.
“Dios, ayúdame…”
But Alfonso didn’t wait to see if God would help him or not. He sat down and pulled his bound hands under his backside to bring them around to his front. Then, he made the sign of the cross over his face and chest, turned on his heel and scrambled away into the jungle. He had to
