CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Indians kept me in a small hut under guard at all times. I was the sole survivor; even the other sailors with my fragmentals in them were dead. My new home was a building typical of the tropics, a wood structure with woven walls. A hanging cotton blanket served as a door. The real purpose of the long house was to keep off the rain and provide the privacy and personal space that all humans crave.

In the morning, the villagers brought me corn gruel to eat and in the evening I ate fish and tortillas. My arms and legs were usually bound behind me, and loosened for each meal and calls of nature. My bed was a straw mat with a cotton covering. I had certainly suffered through worse physical discomforts. My captors were not cruel; they just did not want to lose their prize.

Few had ever seen a European, and so they came to gawk. Many were bold enough to touch me, especially when I was bound. I rewarded them with fragmentals and within a couple of days was quite familiar with the village. Fewer than a hundred people lived here, divided into two major kin clans. They went to other villages to find brides. They lived off corn fields that they burned from the jungle, and fish that they caught in the swampy waters.

I looked for someone who was corrupt enough that I might take him or her as a host, and leave Alonso de Aux to be sacrificed, but there were no corrupt ones. Plenty of pettiness, but no true evil. Even the gossipy wife of a village headman tattled with foolishness, not malice. It seems to me that corruption requires a power imbalance or anonymity. The village was too small to have significant differences in social status and no one could conceal their crimes.

This village had seen its share of misery. I did not have to use my fragmentals to see the pockmarks on almost everyone’s bodies, especially their faces. Smallpox. The disease usually did not kill so many when it visited European villages and cities, but it devastated the Mayans and other New World nations.

Like others, I assumed that Indians were weaker in some way and smallpox killed them more easily. It was not until this century that scholars began to understand why smallpox was so devastating in the New World. The Indians were just as strong as the Europeans, but they were virgin territory for smallpox. When the pox arrived, often before anyone had yet even seen a white man, everyone got sick. Most people will survive the ten-day-long ordeal of pox if they are cared for. But when everyone is sick, then no one is left to do the nursing. When there is no one to gather food or to cook it, most die.

Yaki considered me his own special trophy. He often came to the long house after working in the fields. He sat in the corner, allowing me to marvel at his talent. Taking a raw hunk of black obsidian, he chipped away with a stone. Instead of creating a knife or a scrapper, he crafted a work of art. He made trees, corn husks, and symbols of gods and spirits crowned with feathered headdresses, all intricate, so fragile, yet so full of grace. His father had taught him the skill, and when his parents died of the pox, a horde of obsidian was left behind.

One evening, a couple of weeks after the shipwreck, I watched him tap away. The sunlight of the setting sun came through the door, partially blocked by the hanging blanket, illuminating the room in dark red. After only a half hour of work, he had two figures, a man and woman, facing each other, still connected by a fragile bridge of stone.

“I will marry soon,” he said. “And this will be a gift for her.”

I knew their language because my fragmentals brought that knowledge to me, but I pretended to learn it by degrees. Even so, the villagers were astonished at my seemingly quick progress.

“Who?” I asked.

“She is called Malia. She is from the Quic village, down by the Tzolaab river,” he replied. “She is of the Water clan. My grandfather married into the Water clan with a girl from that same village.”

“You are of the Corn clan, right?”

“Yes.”

“Is this a good match?”

“Yes, grandfather threw the stones and found that Malia and I will mix well.”

“Have you ever met her?”

“No,” Yaki replied ruefully. “But grandfather says she is pretty and a hard worker. She has already had the sickness and survived.”

I listened to him describe his plans for her. A long house to be built. Many of the villagers would go to the other village for the wedding feast. Grandfather would determine the auspicious day.

“You are waiting until after I am sacrificed, aren’t you?” Ulán had decided on the autumn equinox, which left me with another month to select a new host or escape.

Yaki flushed. “Yes, we are.” He hurried to speak further: “But you should not fear the sacrifice. Grandfather says that sacrificial victims are like warriors who fall in battle or women who die in childbirth, they all are guaranteed a place in the thirteen heavens. You will be in paradise, where there is no war, always enough food, and everyone is happy.”

“You think so?” I asked.

“Well, yes. Even though you are from across the sea, you will probably go to the thirteen heavens.” His mind reached out for new thoughts. “Or maybe you will go to the heaven that your dead god has provided.”

I smiled. My dead god—that is what they had learned of Jesus Christ. The stories that priests and monks taught were filtering through the continent, seemingly faster than the conquistadors.

One day when Yaki took me outside so that I might urinate, he pointed to a nearby long house. Holes in its thatched roof and a collapsed wall indicated that it was one of the many abandoned homes in the village. “That is where I used to live,” he said. “My mother, father, sisters, and brothers all died in there. They are also buried there.”

I touched him and felt his sorrow. Among the mix of memories, I also perceived his fierce determination to live. And to live is to take a wife and raise children, to continue on. Such an earnest youth; I grew quite fond of him.

During later conversations, he told me of the ruins not far from there. Great stone walls, a pyramid even taller than the temple in Izamal, all overgrown with jungle. These were the homes of his ancestors. The Mayans had once been a great urban civilization, but were now little more than a rural shadow.

One day he brought me a book. He did not know how to read, but the painted drawings enchanted him. The pages were made from bark, smeared with bitumen, and stretched into sheets several feet long. It was like the illuminated manuscripts that were produced only a century ago in Europe, rather than the new books of the printing press.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“A priest of the goddess Ixchup came through here five years ago and left it with us. He said he would return for it, but he has never come back. I have heard that the priests of the dead god burn every one of these that they find.”