"And Quintanodan the priest?" Chiun asked.
"He was a wandering holy man, possessed of the Sight. Quintanodan promised to bring back the power of Kukulcan to my kingdom in exchange for one service: that, on the return of the god, I should sacrifice my granddaughter Nata-Ah to the fire mountain Bocatan."
"And you thought we were the returning gods," Remo said.
"For Kukulcan, I would sacrifice the last of my dynasty," the old king said with dignity. "But at the fire mountain I saw that you did not wish this sacrifice. I knew then that Quintanodan was still my enemy."
"Still?"
"He is Olmec," the king said. "I have known for many years. But I said nothing, because without the power of Kukulcan I do not wish to wage war with the Olmec, who are sly and murderous and will burn my city and kill its women and children. I retained the priest, keeping spies secretly trained on him and avoiding any talk of important matters in his presence. Since he has been with me, the Olmec have not attacked."
"But if he was your enemy, why did you listen to him?"
"I am a foolish old man," the king said. "I thought that perhaps, after all the years I have given him shelter and position, he would see the good of my people and come to be loyal to me. But I know now that he wished only to kill my only successor and end my rule in Yaxbenhaltun so that the Olmec warriors could attack and conquer my people without resistance."
"Why did he try to kill Po?"
"Because I called him the voice of the gods. In the prophecy, the voice of the gods is to lead my kingdom to greatness. By pretending to recognize the lame boy as that voice, I forced Quintanodan to show his true nature. Now that I have banished him, the priest will return to his people to wage war on my kingdom."
"Then why did you let him go?" Remo asked. "You could have had the priest killed on the volcano."
"For two reasons," the king said. "The first is because this is a holy day. Ten years ago did Kukulcan appear from the sky in his flaming chariot. On this day every year, it is forbidden to kill in anger. I banished Quintanodan to the land of the dead, to return to the tribe of jackals that spawned him."
"But why? You said yourself he'll organize an attack."
The king shook his head. "I have told you there were two reasons why I dismissed Quintanodan. I saw what you did today, how you rescued the boy from the gaping mouth of Bocatan."
"So?"
"You are my second reason," the king said. "When I saw you fly into the depths of the fire mountain and return with the boy unharmed, I knew that the gods had returned. The prophecy is come to pass."
"But we're not gods," Remo explained.
The king's eyes sparkled. "Perhaps you are not Kukulcan. But you are worthy still. You will protect us from the Olmec."
The old man was seized with an attack of coughing.
"Stay with him," Remo said to Chiun. "I'm going to the spaceship."
?Chapter Nine
While Chiun and the boy stayed with the king, Remo and Lizzie made for the small craft locked into the inner walls of the Temple of Magic.
"This was the panel," Remo said, going over to one of the brightly colored cloth squares lining the aisle of the ship. "I fell into it. It exploded into dust."
"I know," Lizzie said. "I saw it, too. That was another time, far in the future. The cloth is whole again now, because the incident of your falling into it hasn't happened yet. That's still thousands of years to come."
"It's hard to understand," Remo mumbled, pulling the cloth away. "It happened, I saw it happen, and now it didn't happen. Hey, here's something."
Behind the curtain was a metal console. The metal glowed with the same greenish tint as the fragile exterior of the ship. Remo pressed it with his fingers. It was harder than steel. He rushed to the ship's doorway and pounded on the metal. "It's holding," he said.
Lizzie did the same. "It must weaken with age," she said. "But it's got to be a powerful alloy to last all those years."
"Where did they come from?" Remo said slowly, walking back to the console. "This is no flaming chariot. Whoever Kukulcan was, he wasn't a god. This thing is some kind of transport." He ran his hand along the dark console. His fingers stumbled across something. "Lizzie, bring your flashlight over here."
The beam illuminated two small horizontal panels filled with numbers. One series read 0811 2032. The other, 0810 3104 (–).
"What's the minus for?" Lizzie asked.
"I don't know. But here's what I ran into." He pointed out a broken switch above the plates containing the digital series.
"Are you sure?" Lizzie asked skeptically. "There was an earthquake going on, you know."
"Yes, I'm sure," Remo mimicked.
"You don't have to get nasty. How could you tell you ran into a switch? It could have been anything. It all happened so fast—"
"I can feel these things," Remo said. "It was a switch. If it had been anything else, I would have known— oh, never mind. You wouldn't understand."
Lizzie trained the flashlight on his face. "Say, you're not exactly normal, are you?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"What you did at the volcano today. No human being could have jumped into that hole, caught a falling body, and somersaulted out."
"I didn't somersault. I climbed out."
"How? That's molten lava in there."
"On my back," Remo said, pushing aside the flashlight.
"Where are you from, Remo?"
Remo sighed. "Newark, New Jersey. Now quit asking questions and give me the flashlight."
The sound of distant footsteps brought him to attention. "Turn that off," he whispered. "Someone's coming." He led her down the darkened aisle of the craft.
"See what I mean? I don't hear anything," Lizzie said.
"That's because you're always talking. Shut up for once, will you?" They crouched down.
A young man with an ocote torch entered alone and went straight for the panel covering the digital sequences. Remo widened his pupils to allow for the darkness and focused on the man's hands. They were touching the sequences, somehow altering the numbers. The process took less than a minute. When he was finished, the young man turned and left without disturbing anything else in the ship.
"What'd he do?" Remo mumbled, scanning the digital panels again and again. "0811 2032," he read. "0811 3104 minus. Minus. What the hell does minus mean?"
"Wait a second," Lizzie said. "Read that again."
"What? The numbers? Can't you see them? You're the one with the flashlight."
"I want to hear them."
Remo sighed. "All right. Oh eight, eleven, twenty thirty-two. Oh eight, eleven, thirty-one oh—"
"Four," Lizzie finished breathlessly. "Thirty-one oh four."
"Minus."
"Exactly." Her eyes glinted. "It's staggering. This is going to make me the foremost authority on Mayan history in the world. The great Dr. Diehl himself is going to take courses from me."
"Before you write your Nobel Prize acceptance speech, would you mind telling me what is exactly?"
She looked up at him. "Look," she said, pointing to the numbers. "These are dates. Eight, eleven, 2032. August 11, in the year 2032, obviously the present day for the time travelers— the day when their spaceship crashed."
"And the other one?"
"The king said that today is ten years to the day from the time Kukulcan came. Remember that we're back in time, far back. The minus stands for B. C. It has to. That man came in here to change the date from 8/10 to 8/11. It's August 11, 3104 B. C. Ten years to the day when Kukulcan first came here in 3114. The magic date. The beginning of time. That was it."
"Wait a minute," Remo said, making a face. "There are holes a mile wide in that. In the first place, how do these people know to move the years backward instead of ahead? They don't know they're living three thousand years before Christ."