She stood and walked out into the sunlight. Neither she nor the Maya spoke. The other man was concentrating on drinking his water, not even noticing her arrival. Sated at last, he looked up to meet blue eyes staring at him.
"Shit!" He tripped in his haste to back away. The weight of the swinging cameras destroyed his balance and he sat down hard, hands splaying out behind him. But he did not reach inside his vest. No gun. "Uman, there's a fucking jaguar over here." His Spanish was poor, mixing in the English obscenity and rising in pitch. "Jose ..."
"Don't move and you'll be okay. Balam, watch him." The verbal order was for the reporter's benefit. Suzanne used the jaguar's eyes to keep track of the journalist. Her own eyes never left the Maya. Now she saw why the image she had taken from the margay was so confused. The right side of his body was human, but the left explained his slow pace. He appeared to be made of stone, a living stele from a dead Maya city, complete with inscriptions and carved images. A joker, beautiful and grotesque. But what took her most by surprise was that the carvings seemed to change every time she blinked her eyes.
She shook off her fascination to check the surrounding jungle for more trouble through the eyes of nearby birds. Everything was quiet. The men had gone directly from the fields to the forest. The people were located strategically outside the village in hiding places established years before her arrival. Even the children waited with the patience taught by generations of people living under the shadow of a would-be conqueror. It always impressed her, this implacable patience under the worst of circumstances.
The Maya before her gazed back with the same unwavering stare, not insolent or even hostile, never subservient ... just patient. The two sides of his face almost matched, contemporary man and ancient king, for just an instant before changing again. He spoke briefly in a language with which she was unfamiliar. After the years she had spent here, she could manage Quiche and her high school Spanish had become near-fluency, but that was all. She shrugged her lack of comprehension and he switched to Spanish.
"We need to rest." He maneuvered his body by swinging it on the pivot of his left leg and gestured to include his white fellow traveller. "We won't stay long."
"No, you won't." Suzanne stared pointedly at their bedraggled clothes. "Who's chasing you?"
The Maya's body shimmered as the hieroglyphs spun out their messages too quickly for the eye to follow. Almost idly, she wondered if he could read them and what the words held for him. His eyes moved to the journalist still seated in the dust before returning to Suzanne's.
"Are you an Evangelical or perhaps with one of the Catholic Action missions?" His question was asked with a lightness of tone that belied its importance.
"No, I'm not here to save any souls. Nor am I a misguided norteamericano liberal in Guatemala to help the rebels." Here, she deliberately looked over at the photojournalist. "I'm here because I love this land. It's my home now."
She thought but didn't say that, even in high summer, life in Guatemala beat the hell out of Central Park and steam grates in the Manhattan winter. Her eyes unfocused slightly as she flashed through the consciousness of innumerable creatures going about their lives throughout the forest, then came back hard to the intruders in her life.
"I'm here as a friend; the people are kind enough to let me stay. I avoid politics, all politics. I've found it's the best way to stay alive. Who's after you?"
"The Kaibiles." Before Uman could answer, the journalist spoke. "Josh McCoy, sometimes of New York."
"I can't say I'm pleased to meet someone leading the Guatemalan Army's finest counter-insurgency troops to my front door." Responding to the emotions coming through the two-way mental link with Suzanne, the jaguar growled softly as it continued to stare at McCoy's throat. Now the sweat streaming down his face was not due to the exertion or the humidity.
"Uman lost them. He says his blood told him which way they'd go. He was right." McCoy got up slowly, arms staying away from his sides, using his shoulders to readjust the position of his pack and cameras. "And I thought he was just another joker when I met him. I don't have any idea what you know about the Maya but he's a ckuchkajawib, an ajk'ij, umm, a priest-shaman type. Sometimes they're called Daykeepers. You'd think I'd know better by now. You guys tap into things I never believed existed."
"What?" Suzanne was startled by his assumption and fiercely angered by the knowledge of her it implied.
"Look, Animal Lady, it's not exactly SOP for somebody to have a pet jaguar or use a taltuza as a living stole, right? In fact, you probably fall on the side of the aces. I don't know you, so you've kept it real quiet, but you're from up north." He looked around the tiny village with contempt. "It's a long way to run, but I've got to admit it makes a great place to stick your head in the fuckin' sand."
The pitch of the jaguar's growl increased as the rage she felt grew. More than a little of her anger came from the fact that she had entirely forgotten the taltuza, a little raccoon-like beast she had taken in and nursed back to health last winter. It had taken a liking to lying across her shoulders all day. She no longer even noticed it, it was so much a part of her. Her subconscious took in the information the taltuza provided as if it came from her own senses. Only the intercession of the Maya priest broke the tension between them.
"I'm hungry, I'm tired and I must cast the tz'ite seeds to find our path. Your village is safe for now." Uman blinked slowly in his exhaustion. His flat tone implied that he was more than slightly annoyed by their antipathy. Suzanne hesitated, staring at McCoy with the same hungry intensity as the jaguar.
"I'm Suzanne Menotti. Inside, there's food." She stood aside and waved them into her home of plastered and white-washed cornstalk walls with an exaggerated half-curtsey for McCoy. "It may be a trifle humble for your tastes. And watch out for the pit trap just inside the door."
"Lady, after Australian grubs, anything's an improvement." Skirting the jaguar who had moved to stand at Suzanne's side, the reporter followed Uman inside. Left outside, she scanned the surrounding jungle and then swept her left hand down sharply in a gesture meant to be seen by the village sentries who watched nearby. As she bent to enter, the people began to return to their interrupted lives.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
The scent touching the nose of a peccary rooting for food brought Suzanne fully awake. As she rolled on the sleeping mat to her feet, she sent Balam, the black jaguar who had been her companion for two years, to warn the Eks, who would again oversee the evacuation of their village. They had agreed with Suzanne that the refugees could stay overnight but no more, and all traces of them had to be gone in the morning. The villagers were used to the disruption of the army patrols looking for rebels in their midst. She never would be. Years of living on the street had paradoxically made her as fiercely territorial as a jaguar.
Gunpowder and human sweat. Those were the smells she had caught through the peccary's sense. Soldiers. Or some guerrilla band. Scent could not tell her whether it was the government army or the Guatemalan Army of the Poor, or gods knew what other splinter group. Enemy or friend, it was best to hide first and determine the level of danger later. In either case, the strangers were likely to mean more trouble for the village.
"Up. Now." She nudged the Daykeeper Uman awake, then shoved the reporter hard. They slept under her roof because, since she had no family, she had the most room. And that way she could watch them. "We're leaving."