The Mayans didn’t appear to mind. They marched along in a line, singing a song in a language unfamiliar to Stuart but not dissimilar to Nahuatl. The melody was dirge-like, but peculiarly haunting, as it vied with the rapid staccato drumming of the rain.
“Old Mayan lullaby,” Chel explained, “learned at one’s mother’s knee. A tradition the Aztecs haven’t managed to eradicate, not for want of trying. Most of these men don’t understand the actual words. Mayan is a dead language, its use forbidden. But they know what the song is about.”
“Which is?”
“The twin brothers Hunahpu and Xbalanque and how they played the ball game against the Lords of Death in the underworld. The Lords of Death cheated, trying to injure the twins both on and off the court. They still couldn’t beat them, so they killed them.”
“Cheery.”
“It has a happy ending. Happy-ish. The brothers were resurrected and turned the tables. They tricked the Lords of Death into letting themselves be slain with a knife, making them believe that they would be resurrected too. From that day on Death no longer had quite such a hold over humankind. Its power was not completely broken, but it had to play fair forever after. No more luring the innocent and unwary into its domain, as it had done.”
“So then, inspirational.”
“Very much so. Afterwards, Hunahpu and Xbalanque rose into the sky to become the sun and moon, eternally alternating but interconnected.” Chel chuckled, casting an upward glance. “Not that we’re seeing much of Hunahpu today.”
“You said something last night about a schedule. A cosmic clock.”
“I did. You’d like me to explain?”
“Anything to take my mind off this pissing rain.”
“Well now, first off, I don’t want you getting the impression that I’m some kind of fruitcake who puts his faith in prophecies and the like.”
Stuart shot him a wry sidelong look. “From the sound of it, that’s exactly what I’m going to end up thinking.”
“The truth is, I do sincerely believe that the Empire’s dominance is coming to an end. Things can’t go on like this. The Empire has become decadent and corrupt at every level. It’s had its time; its comeuppance is due. You feel that too, don’t you? That the Age of Aztec has run its course?”
“All empires collapse eventually,” Stuart said. “Although this one does seem to have lasted longer than most. Alexander the Great didn’t manage to conquer the entire world. Neither did the Romans. But has the decline begun? I don’t know. Perhaps.”
“It just so happens that we’re in a time of endings. Have you heard of the long count calendar?”
“Vaguely. It’s the Mayan equivalent of the tonalpohualli.”
“Equivalent!” Chel snorted. “It was the forerunner. The Aztecs copied their calendar from us. Mayan astronomers devised it, the Aztecs took it and modified it and claimed it as their own, much as they do everything. The tonalpohualli is based on our dual calendar, which consists of the haab and the tzolk’in. The haab is the solar calendar, and the tzolk’in the base-twenty calendar, with a two-hundred-and-sixty-day cycle. The two calendars turn and turn, one inside the other, a wheel within a wheel, meeting again at zero every fifty-two years. However, there is a further, larger unit of time called a b’ak’tun, roughly four centuries. Thirteen b’ak’tun s constitute a ‘world age,’ the time it’s reckoned it takes for Creation to commence, evolve, and be complete. That’s approximately five thousand, one hundred and twenty-five solar years. With me so far?”
“My head’s starting to swim,” said Stuart, “but that could just be rainwater.”
“According to a Mayan sacred text, the Popul Vuh, the current world age — the fourth — began in 3114 BC Gregorian.”
Stuart did a swift bit of mental arithmetic. “Five thousand years ago, give or take.”
“It’s nearing its climax,” said Chel. “Another Creation is due to begin.”
“When, precisely? Soon?”
“Four Flower One Movement One House.”
“Very soon. That’s just over a trecena from now.”
“Fourteen days on the nose. Of course, none of this is widely known. When they invaded, the Aztecs suppressed all Mayan culture, including the Popul Vuh and the concept of world ages. They stole what they liked the look of and stamped out the rest. But we know. A few of us, true Maya, have kept our folklore and beliefs alive. We’ve passed our culture on down through the generations orally: the legends, the myths — like the story of Hunahpu and Xbalanque — the learning, the lore, all of it. We remember what we used to know, even if no one else does.”
Stuart thought of the books in his library. He’d done much the same thing as the Maya, in his own small way. He’d sought out and bought novels and works of nonfiction that pre-dated Britain’s fall. Extraordinarily expensive, some of them, and only available from a handful of very greedy and jealous collectors. Not illegal to own, but no self-respecting subject of the Empire would dream of having them in the home, let alone displaying them openly on shelves. Precious artefacts from the time when Britain was Great and a slave to none.
“So if the fourth world age is nearly over,” he said, “will there be a fifth? Or is now the time to find a remote cave and start stocking up on provisions?”
“Some believe the end of the fourth age heralds apocalypse,” said Chel. “Not me. I think there’ll be a fifth, and a sixth, and many more. Why not? The long count calendar is a cycle, not a straight line. Everything comes round again. What’s inarguable is that the completion of thirteen b’ak’tun s is a significant date. It’s a period of transition as oneworld age pivots around and becomes the next. Creation begins anew. Life is transformed.”
“The Empire falls.”
“If it’s to happen, when better? We can look on this as an auspicious time to be undertaking our mission. The stars are aligned in our favour. The universe is smiling on us. A state of flux approaches, and in flux anything is possible.”
It would have been easy to dismiss outright Chel’s talk of world ages and periods of transition — to treat it as meaningless mumbo-jumbo number wrangling.
Stuart, however, was in a state of flux himself. So was the forest he was trudging through, literal flux, as the clouds continued to dump water onto it in epic quantities, turning the ground to an ankle-deep mush of dirt and leaf mould. Nothing seemed stable, as the rain beat down on Stuart’s skull and made the world around him a smeary green blur. Time itself became elastic. So did distance. He lost all sense of the hours passing and couldn’t even guess how far he and the guerrillas had been walking. They climbed and descended ridges, pushing through thick stands of fern and bromeliad, ducking beneath vines, straddling over rotten deadfall trunks, wading through the slurry the soil had become. Only when the greyness of the daylight darkened did Stuart realise that nightfall was on its way.
They bivouacked beneath an enormous cedar that provided some shelter from the continuing rain. No one could get a cooking fire started, so they ate their tinned rations cold.
When they woke the next morning, it was still raining. They squelched on through the rain on a westward course. The Mayans were no longer singing to counteract the rain. Zotz cursed the rain. All Stuart could think about was the rain. The rain had soaked into his brain. He felt like a sponge filled with rain. His clothes hung heavy with rain. There was only rain. There had only ever been rain. There would only ever be rain. Rain reigned.
They spent another night shivering beneath the tarpaulins they were using as tents. Sometime during the small hours the rain stopped. Everyone snapped out of sleep, startled by the sudden hush. Nobody could quite believe the watery onslaught was over. Even the forest fauna took a while getting used to the idea, but once one animal let out a first tentative hoot, the others pitched in. The nocturnal chorus was back with a vengeance, louder than ever as if to make up for its silence the previous night. The frogs in particular were overjoyed, creaking and booming.