‘You see,’ she said, pointing to the mound. ‘You see how the ah-nunob have desecrated the temple. But soon their time will be over. Soon, the cycles will turn.’
I followed her gaze but saw only the rubble-strewn mound, the path worn by workmen snaking around it. An iguana stared back at me from its perch on a weathered temple stone.
‘What day is it, Ix Zacbeliz?’ she asked.
I knew that she wanted to know the day in the Mayan calendar. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We use a different calendar now.’
She frowned. ‘You don’t know? Then how do you know what to do each day?’ She seemed more confident than she had when she first appeared. She stood straight, with her hand resting lightly on the conch shell at her belt. ‘Don’t you know the cycles of time, Ix Zacbeliz? You know that what has passed will come again, repeating endlessly. You must learn what day this is, so that I can advise you. The time is near for Ix Chebel Yax to return to power.’
‘I’ll try to figure it out.’
‘You must.’ She was watching me with a disconcertingly direct gaze.
‘Yes, I will,’ I said, a little sharply. ‘But right now I am concerned with this excavation. Can you tell me how much further we will have to dig here? And what will we find in the end?’
But she was not there. The wind hissed like snakes in the dry blades at my feet, rattling the tarps and sending dust devils scurrying about the mound.
At dinner that night, I missed having Diane and Barbara there. Only John and Tony had remained in camp; all the others had run away to Mérida, to sleep in clean beds and take hot showers. The three of us sat together in the plaza, drinking coffee and aguardiente while the sun set. John and Tony talked while I stared out into the dusk beyond the plaza. The moon was just above the trees – a thin crescent with the horns pointing aloft. For once the shadows were quiet: the priest had finished scraping the jaguar skin; no wood-carvers worked by moonlight.
‘What do you think, Liz?’ Tony asked.
‘What? I wasn’t listening.’
‘John was talking about problems at your favorite site.’
I looked at John, suddenly attentive. He hunched his broad shoulders forward slightly, as if to protect himself against me. ‘What sort of problems?’ I asked.
John wrapped both big hands around his coffee cup. ‘Work’s going slowly. I leave to check on Carlos’s crew, and when I come back, the men have always been delayed. The sifter is torn. The head of a pickax has come loose. A man is stung by a scorpion. Someone saw a rattlesnake. Always something.’
‘You put Pich in charge of that crew, didn’t you? He’s usually very hard-working.’
John shrugged. ‘Not this time.’
‘I’ll ask Salvador what he thinks,’ I said to Tony. ‘Maybe we need to shift the crews around.’
‘Sounds like it,’ he said.
After a time, I excused myself and wandered by Salvador’s hut. I could see the silhouette of a man standing in the yard, having a smoke. I called to Salvador and he came to the albarrada, the wall of limestone fragments that surrounded the solar, the yard around the house. Lighting a cigarette, I leaned against the wall beside him.
Here, the air smelled of greenery. Within the solar, the growth was lush. Maria kept a careful garden: an avocado tree shaded the doorway to the house; chili plants and herbs grew beside the albarrada. I could smell the sweet oranges that hung from the tree on the far side of the yard.
‘How goes it?’ I asked.
‘Well enough.’ I watched the red tip of his cigarette glow brightly for a moment, then fade to dull red. I could not see his face.
‘It’s quiet with the others gone,’ I said.
‘Yes. It is always quiet here.’
‘John tells me that the work goes slowly at his site,’ I said. ‘He says that there always seems to be a problem.’
He ground his cigarette out on the limestone wall, and red sparks scattered on the rough stone. ‘This is not a lucky time of year. And that is not a lucky place,’ he said. ‘The work goes slowly because the luck is bad.’
I offered him another cigarette and lit it for him. By the brief flame of my lighter, I saw his face: calm, considering, steady. When the cigarette was burning, he spoke again. ‘When we had cattle here, the animals would always spook near that place. It is unlucky.’
‘You did not speak of this before.’
The cigarette hesitated halfway to his mouth. ‘You would not have listened before,’ he said. He was invisible in the darkness, and he knew that.
‘We have to dig there,’ I said. ‘It’s the most promising site we’ve found.’ A pause. The tip of his cigarette glowed brightly as he drew in the smoke. ‘Can we use more men there? Would that help?’
‘It is a narrow passage,’ he said. ‘Only three can work there at a time: one to move rocks, one to move dirt, one to sift.’
‘Perhaps a different three workmen,’ I said. ‘Men who do not know or care that it is an unlucky place.’
‘Perhaps.’ His tone was noncommittal. ‘I will assign a different three.’
That evening I sat in my hut, consulted my reference books, and calculated the date according to the Mayan calendar. It wasn’t an easy task. Sylvanus Morley, a noted Mayanist active in the early 1900s, had derived a formula for the conversion of Mayan dates to dates in the modern calendar, but apparently it had not occurred to him that someone might want to convert from the modern calendar to the Mayan.
After much calculation, checking, and rechecking, I decided that today was Oc in the tzolkin or sacred almanac, the fourth day of Cumku, the last month in the haab or vague year. The Mayan year was almost over. The year’s end, a period of five days of bad luck, would be upon us in sixteen days. I wondered if the proximity of the year’s end was the reason for Salvador’s fear of bad luck. We were also, according to the Long Count, about to reach the end of a katun, a time of change.
In any case, the day Oc was not too bad a day. In the glyphs, it is portrayed by the head of the dog that guides the sun in its nighttime journey through the underworld. I suppose, if I were writing a newspaper horoscope based on Mayan days, I could interpret it as something like ‘A day to receive guidance.’
That night I dreamed clearly. I dreamed of Los Angeles, the tacky battered crackerbox of a city that I left so long ago.
The sun was just up and the morning light was pale. The world had no hard edges: a soft blur of gray-green formed the shrubs in a neighbor’s yard; a slash of dark brown was a broken fence that marked the property line between two pale brown lawns, splashed with dark green where crabgrass grew. An old Volkswagen bug – dull blue flecked with rust – rested on its wheel rims in a weed-filled drive. The tires were flat; they had been flat for many years. The city was silent. No dogs barked; no birds sang; no cars drove past. The people were gone.
Diane walked beside me, a round-faced five-year-old with solemn green eyes. Her small soft hand was in mine and she trudged beside me without complaint though we had been walking for a long time.
Under our feet, the sidewalk was cracked and buckled. Diane tripped at a place where one cement square was higher than another and I caught her as she fell. When she looked up at me, her eyes were filled with tears.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’
She shook her head, but the tears started to spill over. I was caught by the strange restlessness that forced me to keep walking despite the blisters on my feet. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We have to keep going.’ She did not move, even when I took her hand and tugged on it. ‘If you won’t come,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to leave you here.’
The tears were rolling down her round cheeks and falling to make dark spots on the cement. I swung her into my arms, arching my back to lift her. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. In that moment, I heard the coughing roar behind us. I glanced back to see a jaguar slip from behind the Volkswagen and begin to pace us, following without haste, as if confident of his prey.