Alred’d had enough of Stratford’s Michael H. Weiss Memorial Library a year ago when she’d lost herself among the stacks as a research assistant for Dr. Ulman. She loved working for the man, but disliked doing everyone else’s dirty jobs. That’s why she had put her trust in Dr. Masterson, before he’d betrayed her. The more she progressed with Ulman’s find, the more she disliked it. She wanted to throw up every time she saw Porter’s codex.
It wasn’t Porter’s anyway. He was hogging it.
No matter. Alred was good. She didn’t need the manuscript in her possession to succeed. She used it often enough and took adequate notes.
But she hated it anyway. The codex and everyone attached to it were ruining her life. She had to conquer the project.
Porter seemed to recreate his office wherever he went. From the many opened and discarded volumes, he had one book open before him, a number of his fingers stuck in the pages he’d passed.
“Since you didn’t show up,” Alred said, “I decided to ask Bruno about you. Then I read for a while.”
“Were we meeting there?” said Porter.
Alred smiled a little. “You’ll make a great absent-minded professor.”
“It is my highest aspiration,” Porter said with a growing grin as he leaned back a bit, shadow dribbling over his face as he pulled away from the only light in the room.
“5:00,” said Alred, checking her watch to see exactly how many hours ago that had been. She leveled him with a dry gaze.
Porter’s glow dulled. As if just remembering his small bag beside his book, he jumped, “Want some pistachios?”
“Food’s not allowed in the library. I thought Mormons were supposed to be perfect.”
“Ah. ‘A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid…Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’”
“Shakespearean all of a sudden?”
“Matthew 5:14 and 16.” Pulling a legal pad from beneath two others, he flipped through the sheets and handed it to Alred.
“What am I looking at,” she said, examining a chart without lines.
“On the right side we have the English,” Porter said, interlocking his fingers as he relaxed.
“ This is English?!?” Alred squinted at the scribbled words.
Porter cocked his head to the left and wiggled a finger in his ear. “My second grade teacher said I was doomed if I didn’t practice better penmanship. Thank goodness for the personal computer! Anyway, I feel a little rushed.”
“This supposed to be Mayan?” she said, looking at logograms drawn in the middle column of the sheet.
Porter leaned forward, snatched the pad from her, and pointed at one Mayan glyph on the page. “What’s this?”
“I don’t know. You said this was supposed to be Mayan? Looks like a hand.”
“Right. How do you pronounce that?”
“If this is your best attempt at Mayan, I’d say this character is manik…pronounced keh.”
“Look at this letter,” Porter said, sliding his finger left to a more simple squiggle.
“Is that supposed to be a hand?” Alred said. “Let me guess. You pulled it off the codex.”
Porter shook his head. “It’s the Hebrew letter k. It is kaph, a hand. Tell me if I’m mistaken, but doesn’t the Yucatec Mayan kab have the same meaning?”
Alred looked up, scanning her memory. “It does, if I recall.”
“The West-Semitic word for hand or palm, represented by the image of a hand in ancient times, was also pronounced… kap. As far as our current study goes, these connections shouldn’t surprise us. There is a link between the Middle East and Mesoamerica. Both Dr. Albright and Dr. Peterson have publicly noted it.”
“I recently found a paper from a professor of the University of Calgary who supposes a connection between three letters of the Mayan calendar to the Hebrew alphabet,” said Alred.
Porter lifted a finger. “I have some of those here! The Hebrew lamed and the Mayan lamat. A similarity so obvious, one might suppose it to be complete fraud created by those desiring to prove relationships between the Old and New Worlds. Yet here it is, solid fact. Tell me it’s a coincidence.”
“But these correlations are not proven.” Alred pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat on it, looking around at the quiet library. Was anyone else here? Most of the lights had been turned off. She smelled moist carpets and shifted the points of her heels on the wood floor running from the window behind Porter to the stairway some thirty feet behind her. “Are they trying to conserve energy here?”
“These logographic systems sound too much alike to go unnoticed. Did you know the Chinese character for boat is made up of three pictures with distinct definition? The first meaning a vehicle, the second is the number eight, and the third, a clear depiction of a mouth. A vehicle with eight mouths?”
“Does this have an application to Mesoamerican languages?” said Alred, wrinkling her brow.
“Both have connections to Biblical tongues,” said Porter, lifting an open hand. “Noah’s ark had eight mouths: Three sons and their wives, and also Noah and his wife.”
“Doesn’t folklore school us that Noah brought two of every kind of mouth on the planet?”
Porter smiled, but his excited eyes didn’t waver. “More, actually. But…there were only eight humans on the ark. All ideograms, like Egyptian, Mayan, and Chinese-in fact all letters! — originate from preconceived mental images. Why did the ancient Chinese, when desiring to write the word boat, describe such a detailed picture that has no reference to floating or even water? Why was a vehicle with eight people on it so clearly representative of this particular word?”
“You’re shooting in the dark,” Alred sighed.
“Isn’t that what all scholars do, followed by an analysis of facts explaining their assumptions?” said Porter.
“What’s the rest of this?” Alred said, looking at the pad full of foreign figures and badly scrawled English.
“Ever heard of the Popol Vuh, a Mesoamerican codex written not long after the Spanish conquered the area?”
“Did you forget my area of expertise?” Alred smiled. “ The Book of the Council. I’ve quoted it. It was created by American Indians of the Quiche tribe, the most powerful nation in the area and also a branch of the Maya.”
“Right, in 1524, a general under Cortez forced the Quiche to surrender, burning their capital city, Utatlan.”
“You know some American history,” Alred said, her eyes relaxing. “The Popol Vuh was one of the few books that survived the period. Most of the native libraries were decimated by the Spanish inquisition, ruining our chance to obtain a detailed history of the Maya.”
“Some Mayan codices survived the Conquest,” Porter said quickly.
“Most are fakes.” Alred crossed her legs. “The Popol Buj, or Popol Vuh as you call it, was only one of four authentic works we know of. What about it?”
“Well, you know it is a collection of oral tales recorded by the Quiche nobles,” said Porter.
“I am well aware of the book’s background, Porter. Do you also know that we don’t have the original?”
“Is that supposed to preclude what I’m about to say?”
Alred paused. “I’m the Mesoamerican scholar here.”
“I…realize that. That’s why I think you’ll appreciate this. Especially in light of our new study. I have the book right here.” He picked up an English copy from under a thick lexicon of Hebrew words. “Listen to this: ‘… they planned the creation.’”
“Is that why we’re talking about the Popol Vuh?”
Porter looked at her, shock on his face.
Was she supposed to understand something in all this rhetoric?