“Well, I spend the rainy season, when fieldwork is impossible, doing research and writing papers on the various rulers of this region.
“A couple of years ago I was reasonably sure I could find the tomb of a prominent Maya ahau—a nobleman— dating from the late classical period. I’d found a fragment of stone that indicated he’d been buried with a jade mask.
“Anyway, I could hardly wait until the rain stopped so I could go back looking for it. I found the tomb, all right, underneath a pyramid in the forests of the southern Yucatan, but there was no mask.
“What there was, however, was evidence of very recent entry into the tomb. The footprints were very new.
“About a year and a half later, six months ago, a jade mask appeared at auction in Europe. I couldn’t afford it, of course. Tens of thousands of pounds sterling. Now that there are export controls on pre-Columbian artifacts, they’re very scarce in Europe, and very pricey. Quite beyond my means.
“I can’t prove it, but I’m sure it is the mask I was looking for.
“What really burns my butt about this, if you will excuse the expression,” he said heatedly, “is that this is the second time this has happened to me here.
“The first season I was here, I was lucky enough to find another tomb, and this one, too, had recently been plundered. I have no way of knowing what treasures were taken from that one.
“It’s almost as if someone’s looking over my shoulder as I do my research, then he gets there first and profits from it. Irritating as hell, I must say,” he concluded.
“Are you looking for something special at this site?” I asked.
“Not really. It’s just a ripping great site, that’s all.”
“What made you choose archaeology as a career in the first place?” I asked.
“Exactly the question my parents asked me when I told them my choice of studies many years ago.” He laughed, then added soberly, “We’ve been rather politely estranged since, actually. They thought the life of a Harley Street physician more suitable for their offspring, you see.
“But I grew up reading about the great British explorers and archaeologists. While my friends dreamed of being soldiers and statesmen, I devoured the stories of Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb, Sir Leonard Woolley in Mesopotamia, Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos on Crete. As long as I can remember, an archaeologist was what I wanted to be.”
“Any regrets?”
“Of course. I dreamed of fame and fortune, but in reality, the big discoveries are few and far between. And I haven’t found my own Lord Carnarvon to bankroll my work. But perhaps life never works out exactly the way we want, and no occupation is as exciting as it appears when we first choose it.
“To be perfectly honest, the life of a Harley Street physician has never had any appeal for me, nor has the family’s seat in the House of Lords. That will go to my older brother when our elderly father dies, and he’s welcome to it.”
We were both silent for a few moments. I thought a little of the disappointments in my life—how I’d developed my business from scratch, nurtured it, suffered through the first tenuous years. I’d only made one mistake: I’d married my first employee, a designer by the name of Clive Swain, and given him a half interest in the business as a wedding present.
Suddenly Jonathan reached across the table and took my hand. “My only real regret is that I haven’t been able to find a woman prepared to share my peripatetic and occasionally frustrating lifestyle…
“At least not, perhaps, until now,” he said, squeezing my hand.
We went back to the hotel, and when no one was at the hotel desk for a moment, I rushed him up the staircase. Staying with friends of your parents can have its drawbacks.
At some point in the night, while we were companionably curled up together, Jonathan said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day at the morgue, about the police investigation of Don Hernan’s murder.”
“Ummm.”
“I think maybe you’re right. Martinez is a bit of a weird duck, isn’t he? Maybe there is something strange about this investigation.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you go back to the morgue?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Don Hernan was probably killed outside the city. He had dust on his shoes and trousers, and there were traces of forest vegetation on them.”
“Maybe you and I could do a little research on this ourselves?”
“Like what?” I said cautiously.
“Well, Don Hernan called you down here on a project. Maybe we should try to figure out what the project was.”
“I guess,” I said noncommittally.
We drifted off to sleep.
Sometime later, in the very, very early morning, he got up to leave. We were both a little embarrassed at the thought of his going out the front door, so I showed him how to exit through the bathroom window. He said it made him feel like a teenager all over again.
BEN
In one of those extraordinary coincidences that divert, if not entirely change, the course of history, Hernando Cortes managed to arrive in the New World in the year 1 Ben, which also happened to be the year that the Aztecs had prophesied that Queztalcoatl would return from the eastern sea.
Presumably the pale and bearded Spaniards, attired in their suits of armor and plumed helmets, bore some passing resemblance to the locals’ idea of a pale-skinned serpent god. One thing is certain: they came from the right direction.
The Mesoamerican equivalent of a year was eighteen times the twenty-day Tzolkin, or 360 days, plus five very unlucky days at the end to make their calendar square with their knowledge of the solar year. Solar years were named for the day on which they began. Without going into the intricacies of it all, the Tzolkin and the year, in this case 1 Ben, arrived at that same combination once every fifty-two years. Cortes was a lucky man.
The result of this convergence was that Cortes and his army were, for a time at least, considered gods and treated with the appropriate respect and fear. Cortes was able to press the psychological advantage and by 1521, just two years after his arrival, had conquered the Aztecs.
In 1697, the Itza fell to the Spaniards, the last of the Mesoamerican groups to do so, notably at the start of Katun 8 Ahau, a Katun, or twenty-year cycle, that always signaled trouble for the Itza. The Spanish generals may or may not have understood the Maya calendar by this time, but they invariably profited from it.
What armies, the prophecies of the Maya calendar, and superior weapons could not do, smallpox, influenza, measles, and the Spanish liquor aguardiente did. The diseases alone wiped out ninety percent of the native population within a century of the Europeans’ arrival.
But the principal agent of European culture was the church. The Spaniards brought with them their rituals, their images, and of course, their priests. The Franciscans were given an exclusive in the territory: they were the only order allowed into the Yucatan.
Knowing the power of a language, both written and spoken, many of these friars strove systematically to wipe out any traces of it. To do that they made the performance of Maya rituals and the ownership of Maya books punishable by torture and death. Maya children, when they were educated at all, were educated in Spanish and Latin only.
Diego de Landa, a Franciscan friar who later became bishop of Yucatan, was one of the worst. In the 1560s in Mani, a site near Uxmal, one of the most beautiful Maya cities, Landa held a full-blown auto-da-fe. Huge bonfires were built, onto which all the books Landa could find were thrown. Thousands of Maya were tortured, hundreds died.
To add insult to injury, one of the few eyewitness accounts we have of Maya life at the time is Landa’s own Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan of 1566. The book, which loosely translates as a report on things of the Yucatan, was written to the King of Spain in the defense of the friar’s outrageous behavior. It is a second-rate account, and basically chronicles a lifestyle he tried desperately to stamp out.