"I thought I might undertake a rearguard action. Balam and I could do a lot of good." Her head twitched as Balam took down her kill, a deer. After feeding herself, Balam would bring what was left back to them. A small fire was safe here under the thick leaves of the trees. The smoke would not show if they put it out quickly. She picked up the driest wood she could find.
"You could do more by getting us to Belize." Uman helped her gather fuel for the fire.
"This is my home. Shouldn't I defend it?"
"If this is your home, then your people are my people." Uman spoke patiently. "I think that the saints have chosen this way to ask for your help in saving our people."
"Which 'our people'? Jokers and aces, or Indians?"
"Why do you think it matters?"
Suzanne was furious. She was being guilt-tripped by an Indian shaman. She hated being wrong. Nothing more was said until after the deer had been cooked over the open flames. The fire brought up images from her past, from New York and from the sanitarium. Few of them were good memories. To clear her mind, she sent it out around the jungle among the monkeys and the birds. They had no past to haunt them. At the very edge of the area she could read, she caught indications of the army. They were setting up camp for the night.
"I got involved before. People got killed; some of them were 'my' people. Are you sure you want my help?" She leaned back against Balam's warm fur, trying to look bestial. She suspected it worked from the look in McCoy's eyes.
"We all have our nahuals, the animal spirits who accompany us in life. You just seem to have more of them, and the power to speak to them directly. A great gift." Uman was not at all discomfited by her display.
"Okay." Suzanne sighed. Maybe she had become too human. Leaving the two men to their own devices was something she could not accept. "McCoy, they used to call me Bagabond, a particularly horrible nickname I always thought. If you use it, I'll hurt you."
"Nooo problem." He dug into his camera bag. "You should have a couple of these, too."
She snatched the two plastic film canisters from the air.
"If only one of us makes it, something will get through." McCoy looked back at her without drama.
"Four hours of sleep, then we move on." McCoy was already out. When she looked at Uman, she saw that he also knew how close their pursuers were. In the flat Peten, with the trees alternating with broad savannahs, it would be much easier for the helicopter gunships to spot them. Up until now, they had had a relatively easy time, moving east through terrain that could shelter them. Now they would be moving through country where the smoke from a fire could be seen for kilometers. Before, they could use trails that had existed for centuries, sometimes millennia, and avoid leaving signs of their passage. The land they were entering was sparsely inhabited. They would be cutting their own paths through thick undergrowth. The border with Belize seemed even farther away.
Before Uman slept, she asked him why he had not gone to earth in the Highlands, where it would have been safer for him. He took his time in answering. As the fire died, the hieroglyphics that marked his body seemed to brighten and dim as they shifted. The priest brought his right hand down his left arm, fingers moving rapidly across the words as if he were a blind man reading braille, but without showing any sign of knowing what they meant.
"That one had become my friend," he said, nodding at the sleeping McCoy. "He would have been killed if I had left him. And I, alone of my town, survived. I do not believe that this could have happened by some chance. The saints are protecting me. I must honor their desires. I could not honor them by hiding for the rest of my life."
Saints had become a Maya codeword for the old gods, fit one way or another into the Catholic pantheon. As a lapsed Catholic, she was fascinated by the way it had been done over the centuries, with the gift of Mayan gods' attributes to the various saints. In her part of the country the fundamentalist protestants had made little progress in converting the people to their new Christianity.
"But, if you don't reach Belize, your knowledge as a Chuchkajawib, a mother-father of the people, could be lost forever."
"No. Those I have taught who then returned to their own villages will continue the rituals and follow the old calendar." Uman smiled across the tiny clearing, lit now only by the waxing moon high overhead. It was a sad smile, Suzanne thought, but not hopeless, only resigned. "I am told by my blood and my readings of the seeds that I am destined for a long journey. Perhaps it is the longest one, perhaps not. I can only hope that the ending of that journey will benefit my people. I will have no other memorial. My family and friends have vanished as surely as our ancestors a thousand years ago, according to the archaeologists. Myself, I think they are still here in each of us. I will not see our people vanish. Our stories of creation tell us of world upon world coming into being and then destroyed. It may be that it is time for ours to return."
"I heard about the Hero Twins. They fought back to regain the ancient Maya lands and rights. Do you believe they could do everything it was said they could?" Suzanne had heard word-of-mouth, third- and fourth-hand tales of magic abilities and blood sacrifices. She had found it hard to credit.
"Yeah." McCoy coughed and sat up groaning. "I never saw them personally, but I saw some very impressive footage of what they could do. I know the people who covered the Maya uprising. They believe. Me, I think maybe they were aces. Or maybe they really were the reincarnation of the heroes of the Popol Vuh. They came close. A lot of U.S. money went into defeating them. Some of that money was probably from the Card Sharks, but most of it was because Washington and a number of other countries in and out of this hemisphere couldn't let them win. Their success would have meant revolutions by native populations from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. Nobody wanted the American Indian Movement getting any ideas. Is there any venison left? I'm still starving."
Suzanne cut some meat from the haunch she had wrapped and put beside her pack.
"Thanks, babe." McCoy waved the meat at her before biting off a chunk. The taltuza hissed and the jaguar growled. Suzanne confined herself to a baleful glare. McCoy smiled broadly back at her.
"Time for all good revolutionaries to shut up and get some sleep."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Twenty kilometers behind them, in an army camp of thirty Kaibiles, three helicopters landed. Two were gun-ships to be used in aerial reconnaisance. The other, larger, chopper brought two passengers. Even the fearless Kaibiles turned aside as they got off and made their way to the commanders tent. The stench was overwhelming, that of a long-dead animal left in the sun to rot. Forewarned by a downwind breeze, the colonel, sliding on his reflective Raybans, stepped out to meet his new allies. The smaller man introduced himself as Dr. Peter Marcus Alvarado, a New York associate of Dr. Faneuil. The effect of his perfectly tailored jungle fatigues was marred slightly by the two white smears of menthol beneath his nostrils. The second thing he did was proffer the colonel a small blue jar of Vicks VapoRub.
The other man was the source of the vile smell. Crypt Kicker. Despite the heat, he was dressed entirely in black, including a mask and cowl. The mask was designed to cover one side of his face. At six feet, two inches, he towered over the others in the camp, but his body was misshapen. One shoulder rose above the other, and he dragged his left foot when he pulled himself across the ground of the encampment. What most caught the eyes of the Kaibiles was the flaming red cross on his chest. Speculation ran the range between an agreement between militant Protestants and the government, the return of General Efrain Rios Montt's regime to power, or perhaps a radical right Catholic movement, as to who had supplied him. Answers were not forthcoming.