“It says the same thing in the Book of Genesis.”
“I thought the Bible defines one god as the creator,” Alred said as Porter reached into his briefcase and pulled out his scriptures.
He put them on the table and Alred’s eyes widened. The black book with worn gilding was at least three inches thick, and as he opened it, she could see the onion skin pages. “Here. Genesis 1:26. ‘And God said, Let us make…’” He shot his face up at Alred’s.
“What happened to Judeo-Christian Monotheism?” said Alred.
“ Vayomer elohim vaaseh adam btsalmenu kdmutenu. The Hebrew word for God in this verse is Elohim. As in Cherub im and Seraph im, the — im implies plurality, just as — es in the English language. And the gods in this scene are obviously planning to come down and create. Here: chapter 2 verse 4 and 5: ‘…in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew…’
“‘Thus it was created in the darkness and in the night by the heart of heaven,’ says the Popol Vuh.” Porter looked up from his books.
Alred nodded. “Is that the Mormon in you speaking, or the scholar.” She didn’t know why she listened. She was sure she could find a Jew capable of explaining why their monotheistic religion had a deity with a name implying plurality.
“The scholar, actually!”
“You’ll bring up The Books of Chilam Balam next,” said Alred.
“You know I can find Semitic relations with the name Balam, but I wanted to point out the Popol Vuh. See these names?” he indicated the pad again. “I’ll read them for you.”
“Please.” Alred closed her eyes.
“This one, Vucub Cakish, a main character in the book,” he said. “Did I pronounce that right?”
She nodded.
“And this… Xbalanque.”
“Small Jaguar,” Alred said, opening her eyes and folding her arms.
“What?”
“That’s what the name means.”
“Well,” said Porter, “both correspond to…names in the Book of Mormon. But neither Vucub Cakish nor Xbalanque were available to scholars let alone anyone else until Carl Scherzer translated the text in Vienna from the original language into Spanish in 1857…many years after the publication of the Book of Mormon.”
“Really,” she said, skepticism in her voice. “What Book of Mormon names exactly.”
“Well in a section called the Book of Ether, there is a person by the name Akish. That’s not a stone’s throw from Cakish.”
“But ambiguous enough for debate,” said Alred.
“True. The second might take a deeper dive, but look. Break up the name Xbalanque. Of course the x in older Spanish and Portuguese languages is pronounced sh. And you know vowel shifts are common enough that rarely can we trust vowels at all in etymology.”
“Okay, you’ve effectively turned Xbalanque into the word SH-B-L-N-Q,” said Alred. “Where’s your correlation.”
Was she humoring him? Or just hoping he’d get it over with.
“Do you believe the q with an n preceding it could fall off the end of a word?”
“Why not.”
Porter tightened his lips together, then softened. “And an m is interchangeable with an n?”
“Are you patronizing me?” she said lifting her brow. “We all know p and b, t and d, k and g, l and r, and other such combinations can be found in the evolution of languages. Balam and Balan are essentially the same name. What’s your point.”
“There is both a Shiblon…and a Shiblom in the Book of Mormon. Incidentally, the Hopi Amerindian tribe professes even today that they come from the ‘great red city of the south.’”
“Oh, really,” she said, relaxing with the realization that the further Porter babbled into American anthropology and philology, the more he left behind his area of scholarly specialty.
“Yes. There is a similar mention in the Book of Mormon about groups of people departing a city they called Zarahemla. By a strange coincidence, in Arabic, dar or zar is one word for settlement, and ahmar means red. Zarahamra and Zarahemla,” Porter tilted his head. “Could be nothing, but seems enough evidence to at least warrant serious consideration of transoceanic contact with the Old World even without Ulman’s codex.”
“Did our conversation just leave the Popol Vuh?” said Alred.
“The Mayan Indians possess plenty of proofs of Near East connections if you ask me,” said Porter.
“All long shots?” said Alred. “Give me one.”
Porter raised a hand and let it flop as if he’d already spoken his thought. He grabbed his copy of the Popol Vuh, flipped the torn up pages, and read a line. “‘In this way they carried Avilix to the ravine called Euabal-Zivan,’ pardon my pronunciation, ‘so named by them, to the large ravine of the forest, now called Pavilix…’ Pavilix, in Mayan-”
“Means in Avilix,” said Alred. “Tell me your amazing fact.”
Porter didn’t speak, his face shining as if it was obvious. “The Mayan prefix p can be defined in?”
“That’s right.”
“The letter b is simply a voiced p.”
“Are we back to sound shifts?”
“The Hebrew mirrors the Mayan in this case. B is the prefix used at the very beginning of the Torah or the Old Testament: B-reshit bara Elohim et ha-shamaim vet ha-aretz. B-reshit, in the beginning… See it?”
“And what does this have to do with our precious KM-2?”
Alred realized she was sitting in a tight ball, limbs wrapped together like tape, strapping her to the chair. Her eyes had found their usual hard stare. Her skin had paled in the dim library light. Her auburn hair had turned to dark gray.
Licking his lips, Porter visibly debated his response. “I…found something even better while translating. Something I know…you won’t believe.”
“I’ll believe anything less subjective than the ride you just took me on,” she said. “What.”
Porter scratched his forehead and gazed at the shelves around him, holding volumes of their own secrets. “I probably shouldn’t…say…yet.”
“Because we’re at war?” she said, leaning forward and propping her hands on her knees as if about to spring at him. She tried to loosen at least her shoulders. “Or because you’re not sure about your facts?”
Porter sagged in his seat. The fire in his pupils dimmed. “Alred…I’m not trying to fight you. I really wish we could work together on this. That’s what Kinnard wanted us to do.”
So little he knew, she thought, squinting with her eyes and her lips.
“Do you have the codex here?” she said.
“I do,” he said.
“You go everywhere with it?”
“No,” he said, before holding his breath. “I hide it in the vent in my office. The heat’s not too bad for it.”
“We should trade off,” said Alred, thinking him foolish with the manuscript, “a day at a time.”
Porter made his mouth into a tight line and nodded.
Alred stood.
“I guess you got the carbon dating results,” Porter said.
“That why you forgot about our meeting at Bruno’s?” Alred drew a manila envelope from her portfolio.
“Are you asking me if I’m insecure about the results?”
Alred stood in silence, waiting, the envelope in her hands.
He stared at it. “Tell me, when was the Valley of Guatemala populated…according to the facts?”
She said nothing.
Porter listened.
The delicious smell of dry paper moistened the air around them-the splendor of all good libraries.
“Archeological evidence suggest 600 BCE,” Alred said.
He smiled. “Then I’m not worried a bit!”
Taking a breath, Alred looked at her package. “There’s been a delay. Dr. Atkins wants to take another cut of the codex.”
“She’ll burn it all if she has the chance.” Porter took KM-2 carefully in his hands and slipped it into a brown paper sack. “What’s that,” he said, looking at her envelope.
Alred pushed her lips to one side of her mouth, looking at it. She pulled at the manila flap and withdrew a folded sheet of newspaper. “Dr. Masterson wanted me to give this to you.”