She straightened her shoulders, still smiling. ‘It took some time for my words to be heard by all. The h’menob softened the prophecy, but they could not deny it or destroy me, for either of those would have meant bad luck. So the people began leaving the city, slipping away into the forest. Stoneworkers toppled the monuments that they had carved, workmen threw down their tools and left temples half finished. After the farmers left, the fields were poorly tended and there was famine. There was pestilence. It takes time for a city to crumble. But it happened, here and in the other cities. My enemies were destroyed because they had tried to destroy me. That was the order of the katun. That was what Ix Chebel Yax said would be.’
She laughed and the sound was like branches rattling against one another in a high wind. ‘The h’menob said I was mad. I was mad because I said words they did not wish to hear, because they could not control me, they could not drag me along like a tethered dog. And so they said I was mad.’
The Mayan empire was overthrown and the cities abandoned because of an angry prophecy from a vengeful goddess.
‘You know that I am not mad,’ she said. ‘You and I understand each other. We have much in common.’
Someone knocked on the lintel of the door to my hut.
‘I had enemies,’ Zuhuy-kak said softly.
‘Liz?’ I recognized the questioning tone as my daughter’s.
‘Yes.’ Zuhuy-kak was gone, vanished back into the shadows. ‘Come in.’
Diane stopped just inside the door, as if unsure of her welcome. Her hair was still down around her shoulders, and her eyes were large in the candlelight. She had the look of a lost child wandering in the night.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I saw your light.’ She shrugged, then sniffed the air. ‘What’s that smell?’
I sniffed, smelling the lingering aroma of incense. ‘Candle wax,’ 1 said. ‘And a hint of insect repellent.’ I tapped a cigarette from my pack and lit it.
She kept standing in the doorway, looking uncomfortable.
‘Sit down,’ I said.
She perched awkwardly on the corner of my footlocker. ‘I’m just feeling restless. It happens sometimes. If I sleep when I’m feeling like this, I have nightmares.’ She shrugged. ‘So I stay up. Why are you still up?’
‘I was planning to go to bed soon. After this cigarette.’
‘I didn’t mean to interrupt. I mean, if you were working on something…’ She slurred the words ever so slightly. She had been drinking with Tony – that explained why she was brave enough to come visit me, yet still feeling awkward enough to require an invitation to sit down.
‘It’s all right. Has Barbara already gone to sleep?’
‘A while ago. The whole camp seems to be asleep.’
‘You never liked being in new places when you were a baby,’ I said, surprising myself a little by remembering. ‘You cried whenever we traveled. And when you were little, you had bad dreams.’
She would walk at night, a diminutive child dwarfed by her flannel nightgown. I would tuck her back in, rock her to sleep, curl up beside her, and listen to the whisper of her breath coming and going.
Diane shrugged a little, leaning forward. ‘I still have bad dreams. I always have trouble sleeping in a new bed. When I went to college, I was insomniac for a month. I told Dad about it and he prescribed sleeping pills. I don’t use them much.’
‘Robert always did prefer external remedies,’ I said dryly. ‘He always treated the symptom, not the cause.’ A pause. I took a puff on my cigarette and watched Diane’s face.
‘What’s the cause?’ she asked.
I shrugged. ‘If I knew that, I’d sleep better myself.’
She nodded, staring into the darkness, avoiding my eyes. ‘Tell me…’ she began, then stopped and started again. ‘Tell me what it was like when you started to go crazy.’
The hut was very quiet, a crystalline silence that seemed ready to shatter. A pool of darkness had gathered at her feet. ‘Robert called me crazy,’ I said softly. ‘I never agreed.’
‘You don’t think you were?’
‘I think that a great many people we call insane are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I shrugged. ‘I opposed the societal norms, so I was crazy by Robert’s definition. Out here, no one calls me crazy.’ I studied her in the dim light. Her head was bowed and her hair hid her face. ‘Why do you ask?’ I wanted to go to her, to touch her on the shoulder and stroke her hair, but I could not make myself move.
‘I think… I thought before I left that I might be going crazy. I thought coming here was crazy.’ Her voice was low. ‘After Dad died and I quit my job, I didn’t know what to do. I kept walking and walking – pacing from one room of the house to another, moving a knicknack from a shelf to a side table and back. Just walking and walking, with no purpose.’ One of her hands rubbed the other, scratching a mosquito bite and raising a red welt. ‘I thought about killing myself, just so I could rest.’
I took a long drag on the cigarette. ‘When Robert had me committed, the doctors at the nuthouse had to tend to my feet. I had infected blisters, all over the bottoms and sides of both feet. The doctors asked me why I hadn’t stopped walking when my feet hurt.’ I shrugged. ‘I wanted to leave and I couldn’t. Walking seemed like a reasonable reaction.’
She was looking at me now. ‘Was coming here a reasonable reaction for me?’
‘I suppose it was,’ I said.
Her smile was tentative. ‘Last night was the first time I slept a night through in weeks. I had dreams, but I slept the night through.’
I glanced at the clock on the shelf. The luminous dial showed midnight. ‘I’ll walk you to your hut,’ I said. ‘Survey comes early tomorrow.’
She nodded slowly but did not move. ‘You and Tony took Carlos off survey.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We thought that Barbara had a large enough crew and John needed a little help.’
Her expression did not change. ‘I wanted to tell you: I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time now. I’m not stupid.’
‘I know that. I—’
‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate your concern. But you made me feel like a fool.’ She was watching my face.
‘I didn’t intend that.’
I could not read the expression in her eyes. ‘All right.’
‘I’ll walk you to your hut,’ I said.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She ducked through the door and left me alone with the shadows.
Tony and I walked out to the plaza by Structure 701 on Tuesday morning. We walked slowly, and the shadows of Mayan women passed us on the path. They carried gifts to the temple: baskets filled with maize, pots of freshly brewed balche, woven cloth, cured deer skins. Preparations for a festival, no doubt. I tried to eavesdrop on two old women who were chatting about the misbehavior of their neighbors – particularly about the bad housekeeping of one woman. But the women spoke quickly, and Tony kept interrupting with comments about the weather and the dig, and I could not follow their conversation.
The shadows faded before we reached the plaza. The sun was hot. The three workmen who had levered the stone from its place stood in the shade, smoking and sharing water from a gourd, while Tony and I squatted by the upturned slab, brushing away the loose dry dirt that clung to the stone surface. On its underside, the slab was carved with a series of glyphs.
The stones on all four sides of the area that the slab had covered looked like they could have been walls. The center was a tumble of boulders and fill. I sat back on my heels. ‘A corridor, I’d guess. Intentionally filled.’ I looked at Tony. ‘Leading to a burial filled with pottery, jade, and obsidian artifacts.’