“For one thing, you carry weapons. For another, none of you have cameras.”
He turned to Danielle. “And then there’s the object you brought with you. Something we have been waiting to see. You wish to deliver it to the Temple of the Jaguar, but you’re afraid of what will happen if you do.”
McCarter did not know how this man knew what he knew. But in McCarter’s weakened state it seemed ominous to him. “Or if we don’t,” he replied.
Father Domingo nodded in response to his statement. “Fear is the domain of the evil one,” he said. “Jesus told the mourners who believed their daughter had died to fear not and believe only. And she was healed. If you act out of fear, you will always make the wrong decision. You must act out of faith, whichever way you decide to go.”
“Easy for you to say,” Danielle replied. McCarter would have seconded that.
Father Domingo nodded. “Perhaps it is. And perhaps I can show you something that might make it easier for you. Come.”
He led them past the altar to a small door. Using a key on the modern padlock he released the cast-iron latch. The door creaked open. A long, wooden stairway beckoned.
With Hawker and Danielle’s help, McCarter followed Father Domingo down stairs made of old, lacquered pine. They arrived at a large wine cellar. Brick walls faced them on two sides and five huge oak barrels sat recessed within the earthen wall.
“San Ignacio was originally a fort and then a mission,” Father Domingo explained. “And after the conquest of Mexico it was turned into a monastery. The soldiers began to grow grapes here and when the monks took over they improved the vineyards and had these casks built. We still make wine and much of it will be served tonight as part of the novena, our celebration of the nine days before Christmas.”
Father Domingo walked slowly as he spoke, stopping finally at the last of the heavy casks. He slid a flathead screwdriver between two planks on the face of the barrel. Using a small hammer, he tapped it in farther. Taking great care not to bruise or split the wood, he levered the plank outward.
“Nice hiding place,” Hawker said.
“It even works,” he said grinning. “This one is the best wine of the bunch.”
He reached inside and pulled out a thin, flat box, like those used for long-stemmed roses.
McCarter hobbled forward as Father Domingo placed the box on the wine presser’s table. An inscription on the lid read: EN EL ANO DE DIOS MDCXCVIII.
“In the year of our Lord,” McCarter read aloud. “Sixteen ninety-eight.”
“Must be a rare vintage,” Danielle said.
Father Domingo looked up. “Very rare,” he said. “There is no other like it that I know of.”
Father Domingo opened the box. Inside, wrapped in a towel and then a layer of fireproof Nomex fabric was a sealed plastic bag. Within that was a cracking folded parchment wrapped partially in silk.
Father Domingo laid the parchment down, unfolding it with the greatest of care. On the top half of the yellowing paper they saw Spanish writing in faded blue ink. The bottom half was covered with symbols: Mayan hieroglyphs.
“What is this?” McCarter asked.
Father Domingo smiled. “The history of the church is not one of honor at times. Certainly not in this part of the world. When the conquistadors came, the church followed, and what wasn’t stolen by the men of Cortez was burned and broken by the church. Soon almost everything that had once been here was swept away. Lives taken, traditions banned, books and parchments thrown into the bonfire by the thousands, until there was little left but a pile of useless ash. If they could have, they would have swept the stone monuments into the sea.”
McCarter nodded sadly and turned to Hawker and Danielle. “Only four parchment books of Mayan writing are known to still exist. We call them codices — the Madrid codex, the Paris codex, the Dresden codex, after the cities they’re stored in. There is a fourth called the Grolier fragment. Four out of thousands. A few short pages of astrological studies are all that remain from hundreds of generations of Mayan civilization.”
“And the church was the chief destroyer,” Father Domingo said sadly. “A sin we shall bear until the day of judgment.”
“But this book,” McCarter noted, seeing there were several folded pages. “How did it survive?”
“Much of what God has done, he does through the fallen and the weak,” Father Domingo said. “In this case, in the darkest parts of the church’s shame there were those who spoke out. A missionary named DeVaca was one. One of the men whom his testimony reached was among the first to come here to San Ignacio. His name was Philippe Don Pedro. He had come from the Basque region of Spain, where he had owned a vineyard, only to see it burn once, and then after he rebuilt it, to see a pestilence destroy his vines.
“He came to the New World a broken man, a peasant priest. But when he arrived here he saw hills that would bring good wine and flat lands that could be irrigated and turned into productive fields. But he also saw that the people who lived here were happy and peaceful even if they were not yet Christian. And so he lied. His reports to the diocese described a place no one would want to set foot in, teeming with mosquitoes and fever and swampland. Surrounded by the most unproductive soil.”
“And Philippe Don Pedro found this parchment?” McCarter asked.
“No,” Father Domingo said. “When the oldest man of the village lay dying, he called for Don Pedro. He said he had lived in other villages before fleeing to the mountains and that Don Pedro was the only honorable man he had seen among the new regime. He promised he would convert to the religion of the cross, if only Don Pedro would protect for all time the last words of the old man’s dying world. Words no longer written, barely spoken.”
“The hieroglyphics,” McCarter said.
Father Domingo nodded. “As the story goes, Don Pedro asked the old man if he knew what converting meant. His reply was that his people, the Maya, had always known that only sacrifice and blood could atone for sins. If Don Pedro would tell him that Christ had done this for all, then he would believe.”
McCarter nodded. For many Central American religions, the story of Christ sacrificing himself on the cross, his life and blood offered for salvation, made perfect sense. Their kings and priests gave blood sacrifices of their own, cutting themselves and passing barbed ropes and other serrated objects through earlobes, lips, and tongues.
And while most in the church saw no similarity whatsoever in these actions, it made many of the indigenous people of the region easy to convert. At least partially.
It seemed they could be inclusive and worship both Christ and their own gods in a side-by-side sense. Only when they were forced to give up all other trappings of their former religion did the resistance began to stiffen.
“So the old man converted and gave Don Pedro the parchment,” Danielle said.
“And Don Pedro promised to protect it,” Hawker guessed.
Father Domingo nodded. “He wrote on it in Spanish the words that the old man told him. It reads, En los últimos días antes del Sol Negro, ellos vendrán. Tres blancos y uno negro, tres hombres y una mujer, y tres viejos, uno joven, tres sin ira, uno sin paz. Ellos decidirán el destino del mundo.”
As McCarter listened to these words, he translated them roughly in his head.
He looked at Danielle, and then Hawker. Danielle spoke very good Spanish and by the look of shock on her face she’d clearly translated the words. Hawker looked suspicious but wasn’t as fluent.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“In the last days before the Black Sun, they will come,” Father Domingo said, his voice resonating off the stone walls. “Three white, one black; three male, one female; three old, one young, three without anger, one without peace.”