In the Courts of the Sun (12 page)

[7]

T
he game board was in the middle of the page, flanked by two figures. An overlord in jaguar-lineage regalia sat on the left, arms folded. According to Michael Weiner’s notes, which floated annoyingly over the image, he was probably an ahau named 9 Fanged Hummingbird, who ruled from 644 to roughly 666 in a city in Alta Verapaz that Weiner’s team had identified as Ixnich’i-Sotz—or, as the locals now called the ruins, just Ix. The portrait glyph above the other figure, who sat facing the future on the southwestern side of the board, seemed to read as something along the lines of Ahau-Na Hun Koh, that is, “Lady 1 Tooth”:

The bottom right of her face was painted black, and so was her right hand, which also, maybe through a
lapsus peniculus
, seemed to have seven fingers. Her clothing seemed to be partly in the style of Teotihuacan, the then-capital of highland Mexico. There was a Muwan Bird and a double-headed serpent bar over the figure, and, underneath them the creature Mayanists call the Cauac Monster—a stocky, crusty character somewhere between an alligator and a toad—opened its jaws, ready to swallow the scene whole. A row of glyphs at the top said the Game was played on 9 Overlord, 13 Gathering, 9.11.6.16.0, that is, Thursday, July 28, AD 659. A second row at the bottom gave the starting date of the Mesoamerican calendar, and then on the lower half of the page there was a block of ten glyphs:

It was definitely part of a warning table. That is, it was an interpreter’s catalog of major dates, with key astronomical events and notes on the historic and hypothetical future events on those dates. Some of the numbers were written with formal head variants and some were in bar-and-dot notation. Time-wise, they were all over the place.
Hmm. On the other hand, if you just looked at the verbs, it seemed like the whole thing was conceived of as a record—or “score,” as we call it in chess—of a hipball game. That is, the terminology was similar to what the Maya used in their sacramental ball game, which I guess you could say was something between handball, volleyball, and soccer, but with a solid rubber ball the size of a basketball and you bounced it off, mainly, your hips. Anyway, whatever its oddities were, if this was only one page out of eighty the book was a bonanza. The biggest problem for Maya epigraphers is that so few texts in the old script have survived. For a lot of words there’s only a single glyphic example—
Marena must have said something again, and I must not have answered.
“Jed?” she asked.
“Huh? Sorry. I got distracted. To me it’s kind of a big deal to see this.”
“Can I call you Jed?”
“Hmm? Oh. Sure. I mean, it’s the States, people I’ve never even met call me Jed.”
“ Yeah. So what do you think?”
“Well, uh . . . ,” I went, “well, the language, that’s definitely lowland Classic period. But the graphology, I mean, the style of the drawing, that looks a little post-Classic to me. Like AD 1100 to 1300. Just offhand.” Is this a test? I wondered. Maybe if I don’t come up with something I don’t get another peek?
“That’s right,” Marena said. “Michael said it was a copy from seven or eight hundred years later. But still it’s, uh, pre-Contact.”
“Did Michael Weiner say this Lady Koh character was definitely from the Maya zone? Or was she from Teotihuacan?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t say. Is that really how you pronounce it?”
“What? Oh, yeah,” I said. “Tay-oh-tee-
hwha
-cun.”
“Damn, I produced a whole game about it and I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all this time.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “Nobody knows a lot about the place. Including what its actual name was.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s a mysterious place.” It was true. Nobody knows what language they spoke, or what they called themselves, or who their descendants were. But the main thing nobody knows, or rather, the main puzzle about the place, was how their city had sustained itself longer than any other city in the Americas and had flourished as the center of Mesoamerica for eight hundred years. And even after its destruction, the general location seemed to retain its power. Seven hundred years later, under the Aztecs, it was the site of the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, and now five hundred years after that, it is again.
“So what else strikes you about the page?” Marena asked.
“Well, otherwise the dates look pretty straightforward,” I said. “But some of the verbs here are on the tricky side. I’d bet a lot of them are pretty much unique variants. I’d have to spend some time going through this with my dictionaries.”
“Touch something and it’ll give you Michael Weiner’s translation,” she said.
I did. The Mayan line grayed out and English glosses came up over it in blue. From the look of it Weiner had been able to solve almost 90 percent of the text.
“Hmm,” I said. Just offhand, I didn’t see any blunders. I’d always thought that Michael Weiner was a bit of a doofus, but maybe he wasn’t. Anyway, I didn’t know him. I’d just seen him a few times on
Secrets of the Ancient Ones
. He was a big, basso-voiced New Zealander with a beard who’d somehow gotten into New World archaeology, and the Discovery Channel was trying to position him as a kind of Mesoamerican-studies equivalent of Steve Irwin. He’d always be, say, walking through the market square at Teotihuacan, and he’d go, like, “This was the Rodeo Drive of ancient Mexico.” Like, great line, mate. And you’re the Benny Hill of archaeology.
Still, I thought, he’d sure gotten a lot out of this page. All the known Maya texts are frustratingly terse. This was the most narrative glyphic Maya writing I’d seen, and it was still pretty spare. The first phrase,
b’olon tan,
meant “ninth goal,” suggesting that there had been eight goals, or captures, already, on pages I wasn’t seeing. This meant that the Game had been played with nine separate runners—and you could also translate
runner
as “quarry” or even “ball”—instead of just one. This would have made the Game 260
⁹
—that is, 1,411,670,956,537,760,000,000,000 times as hard to play as the one-stone version Taro and I had worked with. Anyway, it looked as though each time a runner had been captured it had been on a different intersection on the board, and each of those intersections corresponded to a unique date in the Maya calendar. Then, on the facing page, each of those dates—which Weiner had correlated on the overlay with Common Era ones—had a column of glyphs below it that said something about something that had happened, or was going to happen, on that day. A lot of these were celestial events, but near the bottom of the columns they started getting into historical ones. The first line of glyphs next to the twelfth goal started with 3 Tooth, 15 Jeweled Vulture, 10.14.3.9.12, a date Weiner had converted, correctly, to August 30, 1109. In his gloss Weiner had written, “Chichén abandoned?” As any tour guide will tell you, Chichén Itzá was the biggest Maya polity of that period. The next date was May 14, 1430. The gloss was “Mexican warriors take Champotón.” At that time, Champotón, in Campeche, had been what they called the “seat of the k’atun”—that is, the closest thing to an international Maya capital. It sounded way too specific to me, but when I clicked on the pop-up it said that Weiner had gotten geographical data for the site out of the astronomical numbers. Specifically, he’d given each of the events a latitude. And when I clicked on the astronomical glyphs, it did seem to work out. Each cluster gave a generic “place of ” phrase followed by a separate date for the first solar zenith, that is, the first day in the spring when the sun is directly overhead, which, of course, gets later as you move farther north.
“Do you happen to know anything about this latitude business?” I asked Marena.
“Sorry?”
“I’ve never seen any Maya inscription where they specifically make a point of the latitude. I mean, I can see how you can derive it, but it’s definitely a new wrinkle.”
“Huh.”
“Can I possibly look at the other pages?”
“Hmm . . . well, okay,” she said. “Don’t tell anybody.” She looked down and scribbled at a big touch-screen. I flipped forward to the next page. It didn’t have any pictures, but it said the next event was in AD 1498, in Mayapán, and it said something about how the “Laughing People,” that is, the Ixians, were going to be eaten by “carnelians,” that is, rubies or, metaphorically, pustules. Weiner had noted it as “Smallpox arrives from Hispaniola?” The fifteenth goal was February 20, 1524. The Codex had marked it with the phrase “Tears [under the] copper giant,” and under that Weiner had written “Last significant Maya resistance surrenders to Pedro de Alvarado at the Battle of Xelaju.” The next one was a date I knew as well as if it were tattooed on my wrist: 10 Razor, 16 Dark Egg, 11.17.2.17.18, or July 12, 1562. Weiner had marked it “auto-da-fé, Mani.” It was the day Fra Diego de Landa burned all the remaining Maya libraries in the Yucatán. I’d always hoped I wasn’t related to the bastard.
I was getting a funny feeling about this. It’s got to be a fake, I thought again. Except the book just didn’t look like forgeries usually look. It was too weird. Good forgers tend to be pretty conservative. And it wasn’t just weird in what it said, it was that too many of the glyphs were unfamiliar forms, the sort of thing you’d only expect if you found a bunch of new texts from a city that was a little off the track. Which I suppose a really brilliant forger could just make up . . . except there was also this sense of rightness about it. It had the discordant ring of truth.
“Did Taro mention how many stones he thought they were using?” I asked.
“Sorry?” Marena asked.
“Uh, the number of runners. That they used when they played the Game.”
“I don’t know what that is,” she said.
“Never mind, I’ll ask him later,” I said.
At the seventeenth goal, March 13, 1697, Martín de Ursúa y Arizmendi captured the Ahau Kan Ek’, the king of Nojpetén at Tayasal, on Lake Petén Itzá, the last holdout of traditional Maya culture. It was the last place they still kept the Long Count. After that there was July 29, 1773, the day of the earthquake in Antigua Ciudad Guatemala, when they decided to move the capital to where it is now, and then May 4, 1901, the day General Bravo occupied Chan Santa Cruz, the last stronghold of the Maya rebels in the Yucatán. The third-from-last date was November 9, 1954. In a freeish translation, the full gloss would read:
Last b’ak’tun,
Seventeenth k’atun
First tun
Zeroth uinal
And thirteenth sun,
Six Cane, Four Whiteness,
Kaminaljuyu,
Not Kaminaljuyu:
Enough are deceived
By a far-off ahau
And we shoulder the blame.
We scamper away
From the shit-stinking men.
We hide in the bushes
Like monkeys, like rats.
We prepare for the grayness.
It was the date Castillo Armas marched into Guate City during the CIA coup, when, like I think I said, things started going really bad. And there were only three dates after that. The first was the one I’d seen in the
Time
article, the date of the explosion in Oaxaca:
Last b’ak’tun,
Nineteenth k’atun
Sixteenth tun,
Seventh uinal,
Zeroth sun,
Four Overlord
Eighteen Stag
Now,
Underneath Choula
Our names are unmade
In a fresh lake of knives
And we shoulder the blame
The last date was the big one. It was a little under a year from today:
Kan Ahau, Ox K’ank’in,
that is, 4 Overlord, 3 Yellowribs, 13.0.0.0.0, or December 21, 2012, the last day of the Maya calendar and the date that people who were both credulous and gloomy said would be the end of time.
Last b’ak’tun,
Last k’atun,
Last tun,
Last uinal,
Last sun,
Last watchfire,
Four Overlord,
Three Yellowness:
With smokeless eyes
Flesh Dropper sees
Four hundred Boys
And what they say.
They are more than before,
And yet there are none.
They beg him to give them
A thing the Flesh Dropper
Can only deny them.
Total the suns
Of their festivals,
Total the suns
Of their tortures:
One total wins easily.
Look for the place
Of denial, betrayal:
You still will not see it.
Look everywhere
For the Flesh Dropper: still
You can catch him and yet
You will not see his face.
Suns with no names,
Names with no suns:
Take two from twelve:
And it totals the Prankster,
The Sovereign One Ocelot.
Hmm, I thought.
Not too clear about all that. Need to put some thought in on it.
En todos modos,
what’s the really close one again?
I skipped back to the second-to-last date: 9 Imix, 9 K’ank’in, 12.19.19.0.1, or Wednesday, December 28, 2011. Five days from today. The gloss, roughly, was:
The last b’ak’tun,
In its nineteenth k’atun,
The nineteenth tun,
Zeroth uinal, first sun,
On 9 Sea Rattler and 9 Yellowness:
Now some fled northward
And into the city
Of pilgrims in daylight.
It ends on the Zeroth sun
As a warlock sprays fire
From razors, from flint,
And we shoulder the blame.
Weiner had also given a more literal translation of three glyphs from the middle of the last stanza: