Heart of the World

Chapter XIX The Sacrilege

Now Maya bent over the form of her father and took the talisman from his neck.

"I feel like one who robs the dead," she said.

"Remember that it is to save the living, and be comforted," answered Mattai. "Come, let us be going, for the night draws on."

"Take a lamp, each of you," he said presently, when we had reached the further end of the great hall, where he unlocked the copper gates with a key from the bunch that hung at his girdle. We passed though, and, turning, he almost closed the gate, but not quite.

"Why do you leave the gates ajar?" I asked.

"Because there are none to follow us," he answered, "and who knows what may happen. Should we be forced to fly the Sanctuary, open doors are easier to pass than those that are shut."

"Who or what could force us to fly the Sanctuary?" I asked.

Mattai shrugged his shoulders and went on without answering. Now we passed down many stairs, along passages, and through secret doors, each of which Mattai left open behind us, till at length we came to a blank wall of marble. On this wall Mattai felt with his thumb, till he found a spot that, being pressed, slid back, revealing a keyhole into which he inserted a small silver key. Then again he pressed upon the marble, and a panel moved that might have been two feet wide by six in height, and we saw that light streamed through the opening. Beckoning to us he walked through the gap in the wall, and one by one we followed him into the Sanctuary of the Nameless god, and stood on the further side of the wall, huddled together and clasping each other's hands, for the place was awesome, and its utter silence and solemnity filled us with fear.

The first thing that caught our eyes, as was natural, for it was built into the wall opposite to us, and through it streamed the light that filled the chamber, was the most wonderful and mystic effigy in the City of the Heart. That effigy was a colossal mask of singular and fearful beauty, fashioned from polished jade, and similar in design to those which are to be found in the ruins of Palenque and other deserted Indian cities, whereof no man knows the age. This huge green mask was placed above the narrow door that gave entrance to the Sanctuary, and had been carved to represent the countenance of a being that, although its features were human, resembled neither man nor woman in its unearthly dignity and its stamp of cruel calm. The thick lips were curved with a contemptuous smile, and between them gleamed teeth made of white enamel; the nose was aquiline, with widespread nostrils that seemed to inhale the incense of worship; and the forehead, in whose centre appeared the impress of a woman's hand soaked in some scarlet dye, was broad, low, and retreating. Beneath the solemn and contracted brows were jewelled eyes. Through these eyes, and, indeed, from the entire surface of the mask, streamed light, making the face visible as though it were limned in phosphorus, for the jade was transparent as the thinnest alabaster, and behind it burned two great lamps that were named after the Sun and Moon.

Such was the effigy of the Nameless spirit that we now beheld for the first time, who had face but no form; the spirit, Mouth of the Heart, to whom every lesser god was subject, Utterer of the thoughts of the Heart of Heaven, Lord of power, Dweller in the darkness behind the Sun, Searcher of the secrets of death. Without pity was this god of theirs, and without wrath, who, clothed in eternal calm, so these people fabled, rested in a home of darkness, watching the shadow of events celestial and terrestrial in his mirror of the moon, and telling of them to the Heart which was his soul. The seal of the woman's blood–stained hand was set upon his brow because woman is a symbol of life renewed, the hand is the sign of purpose and the strength to do it, and by blood and anguish must every purpose be accomplished. But the Nameless one executed no purpose—that was the work of lesser gods. In the beginning the Heart thought and the Mouth blew with his breath, giving life to the earth, and causing it to roll forward among the spheres, and now the Eyes watched, ever smiling, while it and those upon it work out our doom, till at length its primal force grows faint and fails when, so said the priests, Heart and Mouth and Ears will think and speak and search, and at their command a new world shall arise from the corpse of the old, and a new life from the lives of those who dwelt upon it.

Therefore it was, though now faith waned among them with their waning energies, that the people, knowing no better creed, worshipped the threefold Fate without a name, whom they held to be master of gods and men. Therefore, also, long generations since, in this spot which we came to violate—to them the most holy on the earth—they set up effigies of a Heart, a Mouth, and Eyes, as symbols of his attributes.

The roof of the Sanctuary, which was of no great size, was vault–shaped, in imitation of the arching sky, and in it appeared a golden sun, a silver crescent moon, and the stars of heaven. Its walls were lined throughout with polished blocks of the beautiful stone known as Mexican onyx, fretted over to the height of a man with a border of hieroglyphics and effigies of the lesser gods in attitudes of adoration, all of them cast in gold and set flush with the face of the wall. The furniture was very simple, consisting only of stools cut from rich woods heavily gilded in quaint designs, and a small table whereon lay sheets of paper made of bark, together with brushes of reed fibre and pots of pigment, such as were used in the picture–writing of this people. Lastly, at that end by which we had entered the chamber, stood an altar of black marble written around with letters shaped in gold, and upon this altar lay something covered with a silken cloth.

For a minute or more we remained silent, contemplating these wonders; then, with a gesture of impatience, Mattai spoke in a whisper, saying:

"Let that be done which we have come to do, for now the sacrilege is committed and it is too late for doubts."

Speaking thus, he stepped to the altar and lifted the silken cloth that lay over the object which was upon it, revealing the image of a human heart fashioned in bloodstone and veined with arteries of gold. In the centre of this heart appeared a small and shallow hole that had been hollowed in its substance.

"This is the tradition," said Mattai, still speaking in a whisper, "that when the two halves of a certain talisman are placed in this hollow, the symbol will open and reveal that which has been set within it since it was fashioned by Cucumatz thousands of years ago, and there is this in favour of the truth of the tale that golden hinges appear upon the sides of the symbol. Now one–half of the talisman has rested here for many generations, till Zibalbay took it with him indeed, when he went out to seek for the other half, and yet the symbol has never opened; still, I am sure that it will open when the whole talisman is set in its place. In this matter, however, there is something more to fear than the vengeance of the gods, for, as I can read well—it is written in those letters that encircle the altar—an ancient tradition tells us that if the symbol be stirred from the place where it has lain for so many ages, the flood–gate will roll back and the waters of the lake will pour in upon the city, destroying it and its inhabitants."

"Yet the flood–gate cannot roll back when it is not shut, nor can the waters flow in during the dry season, when they are not on a level with the walls," answered Maya.

"They cannot, Lady, and yet other things may happen. Why was the Heart set thus? Was it not that in the utmost need of its worshippers they might choose death rather than defeat and slavery? And was this choice given to them in the wet months only? Be sure that if at this moment any despairing or impious hand tore yonder symbol from its altar, either the waters would rush up through the bed of the city, or subterranean fires would break loose and burn it. Still, though there is something, I think that we have little to fear, seeing that the writing says that, in order to bring about so terrible a doom, the symbol must be torn from its altar with might. And now to our task. Stranger, give to the Lady Maya your half of the ancient talisman, that she may set it, together with the half she bears, in the place prepared in the symbol."

Now with a sigh, seeing that it was too late to draw back, I undid the emerald from my neck and gave it to Maya, who laid it side by side with its counterpart upon the palm of her trembling hand, and stepped with it to the altar. Here she stood for a moment, then whispered in a faint voice:

"Terror has taken hold of me, and I fear to do this thing."

"Yet it must be done, and not by me," said Mattai, "or we shall have come on a fool's errand, and go back, some of us, to a fool's death," and he looked towards me.

"I will not do it," I said, answering his look, "not because I fear your gods, but my own conscience I do fear."

"Then I will," said the señor boldly, "for I fear neither. Give me that trinket, Maya."

She obeyed, and presently he had caused the two halves of the talisman to fall into their ancient and appointed bed in the symbol. In the great silence I remember the sound they made, as they tinkled against the stone, struck my ear so sharply that I started.

For some seconds, perhaps twenty, we stood still, watching the altar with eager eyes, but the symbol never stirred. Then I said:

"It seems, Mattai, that you must hide your lying writing elsewhere, since yonder heart will not open, or, if it will, we have not found the key."

"Wait a little," broke in the señor, "perhaps the springs are rusted." And before any of us could interfere to stop him, he placed his thumb upon the halves of the emerald and pressed so hard that the symbol trembled on its marble stand.

"Beware!" cried Mattai, and as the echoes of his voice died away all of us started in astonishment, for lo! the heart was opening like a flower.

Slowly it opened, till the severed talisman fell from it, and its two halves lay back on the marble of the altar, revealing something hidden in its centre that shone like an ember in the lamplight. We crept forward and looked, then stood silent and half afraid, for in the hollow of the heart, laid upon a square plate of gold which was covered with picture–writing, glared a red jewel shaped like a human eye, that seemed to answer stare with stare.

"If we stand like this we shall grow frightened," said the señor roughly, glancing round him as he spoke, "there is nothing to fear in a red stone cut like an eye."

"If you think so, White Man," answered Mattai in a voice that shook a little, strive as he would to command it, "lift up the holy thing and give me the writing that is beneath it. Stay, first take this, set it in the symbol, replacing the eye upon it," and he handed him the forged tablet.

The señor obeyed, nor did any wonder come to pass when he lifted that dreadful–looking jewel, and changed the true for the false.

"Read it," said Maya, as the tablet was passed to Mattai, "you have knowledge of the ancient writings."

"Perhaps it were best left unread," he said, doubtfully.

"Nay," she answered, "let us know the worst. Read it, I bid you."

Then he read these strange words in a slow and solemn voice:

"The Eye that has slept and is awakened sees the heart and purpose of the wicked. I say that in the hour of the desolation of my city not all the waters of the Holy Lake shall wash away their sin."

Now the faces of us who heard turned grey in the lamplight, for though the gods of this people were false, we felt that the voice of a true prophet spoke to us from that accusing tablet, and that we had called down upon our heads a vengeance which we could not measure.

"Did I not tell you that it were wiser to leave the writing unread," gasped Mattai, letting the tablet fall from his hand as though it were a snake.

The clatter of it as it struck the marble floor seemed to wake us from our evil dream, for the señor turned on him, and said fiercely:

"What does it matter what the thing says, rogue, seeing that you forged it as you have forged the other?"

"Ah! would that I had," answered Mattai; "but when doom overtakes you and all of us, then shall you learn whether I forged that ancient writing;" and he lifted it from the floor, and, hiding it in his robe, added, "Close the heart, White Man, and give back the severed jewel to those who wear it."

The señor obeyed, replacing the silken cloth over the symbol, so that the altar seemed to be as it had been.

"Now let us be going," said Mattai, "and rejoice, that if yonder eye has seen our wickedness, at least it is hidden from the sight of man. Doubtless the vengeance of the gods is sure, but that of men is swift."

As he spoke we turned to leave the Sanctuary, and of a sudden Maya screamed, and would have fallen had not the señor caught her. Well might she scream, for there in the narrow niche of the secret door by which we had entered, framed in it as a corpse is framed in its coffin, stood a white figure which at first I took to be that of some avenging ghost, so ghostlike were the wrappings, the snowy beard and hair, and the thin, fierce face. Another instant, and I saw that indeed it was a ghost, the ghost of Zibalbay, or rather his body come back from the boundaries of death to spy upon our sacrilege before it crossed them forever.

Yes, it was Zibalbay, for while he had seemed to be unconscious upon the bed in the chamber, his senses were awake, and oh! what must he have suffered when he, the high priest of the Nameless god, heard us plan our fraud upon his Sanctuary. Then, after we had left him, fury and despair unfettered the limbs that had been bound so fast and gave him strength to follow us, though they could not unlock his frozen tongue. He had followed; painfully he had crept down the stairs, along the passages, and through the open door, for the path was known to him even in the dark, till at length he came to the secret entrance of the Sanctuary. Here once more his force deserted him; here, unable to speak or stir, he had leaned against the wall and seen and heard all that was done and said.

Oh! never shall I forget the rage of his quivering face, or the agony and horror of his tormented eyes as they met our own. No course could have been so awful as that look which he let fall upon his daughter, and no outraged deity or demon could have seemed more terrible to the human sight than was the tall figure of this dying man, striving even in death to protect the honour of his gods, which we had violated in their most holy of holies. Never have I seen such a dreadful sight, and I pray that never again may I do so either in this world or the next.

The dying Zibalbay saw our fear, and with a last effort he staggered forward towards his daughter, his clenched hands held above his head. For a moment he stood before her as she lay upon her lover's arm staring up at him like a bird at a snake, while he swayed to and fro above her like the snake about to strike. Then, of a sudden, foam mingled with blood burst from his lips, and he sank down at her feet dead, dying in a silence that was more awful than any sound.

Of all that followed I need not write. Indeed, I cannot do so, for so great was my horror at this scene, and so intense the strain which was put upon my vital force during these hours, that I have little memory of what chanced after Zibalbay's death, till I found myself lying exhausted upon the bed in my prison cell.

Somehow we calmed and silenced Maya; somehow we escaped from that hateful Sanctuary, and by slow degrees brought her and the dead body of her father up the narrow stairs and passages to the hall above, where we laid the corpse upon its bed. Then Mattai left us, and I remember no more till the next morning when nobles and leeches came to watch by the body of the dead cacique, and to embalm it in readiness for the tomb.

The next two days went heavily for the three of us, oppressed as we were by the silent gloom of our prison and the memories of that dreadful night. The love between Maya and her father had never been deep, for they were out of tune with each other; still, now that he was dead she mourned him, the more perhaps because he had died hating and cursing her. By degrees she recovered from her superstitious fears, born of the writing in the symbol; but her father's maledictions she never could forget, and though she was willing to earn and to bear these for the sake of her love for the señor, I think that their memory lay between them like a shadow.

"Oh! why did I ever love you?" she would say. "What have you to do with me, whom race and law and fate have set apart from me?" And yet she went on loving him even more dearly.

I, also, was unhappy, for though I put little faith in these omens, or in the vapourings of dead prophets and the tricks of living charlatans, I felt that the ill–luck which had clung to me in the past was with me still. Things had gone cross with me; Zibalbay was dead, and Woman, the inevitable, had drawn away the heart of my friend and dragged me and my plans into the whirlpool of her passion, whence, if at all, they must emerge ruined and shapeless. Still, summoning the patience of my race to my aid, I bore these secret troubles as I might, giving counsel and comfort to the lovers, who, lost in their own doubts and difficulties, thought, as was natural, little of me and my lost ambitions.

At length they carried away the corpse of Zibalbay to be wrapped in its winding–sheet of gold and set with all ancient pomp and ceremony by those of its forefathers in the Hall of the Dead. Maya wept indeed, but I for my part was glad to see the last of him, and so, I think, was the señor, whose spirits had begun to fail him in the presence of so much remorse and grief.

That day—it was the day previous to the night of the Rising of Waters, on which we were to appear before the Council of the Heart in the Sanctuary—Tikal came to visit us. To Maya he bowed low, but on the señor and myself he looked with an angry eye—with the eye, indeed, of one who would have killed us if he dared. First, with many fine words and empty compliments, he offered her his sympathy upon the death of her father. For this she returned her thanks, quoting, however, with a flash of her old spirit, a certain proverb of her own people, of which the meaning is that the death of one man is the breath of another.

"My father was your foe, Tikal," she added, "and now that he is gone you will be able to sleep and reign in peace."

"Not altogether so, Lady," he answered, "seeing that he has left behind him a more dangerous rival to my power, namely, yourself. I will not hide from you, Maya, what you must soon learn, that a large portion of the people, and with them many of the nobles, accusing me of your father's murder, clamour that I should be deposed, and that you should be set in my place as cacique of the City of the Heart. Some few days ago I might have stilled their outcry by commanding you to be put to death, but now it is too late, for, since then, Time has fought for you, and doubtless your end would be followed by my own. When last we met, cousin, I asked you a certain question, to which you promised me an answer when your father was dead or recovered, and to–day I have come to hear that answer. While Zibalbay lived I had much to offer him and you in exchange for your hand, and I offered it freely. So high a value did I place upon it when it seemed lost to me, that I was prepared to lay down my power, to suffer your father to violate the laws, and to incur the eternal hate and active enmity of Mattai, his daughter, and his party. Now I must make you a lower bid: that of equal power for yourself; and for your friends here, whatever they may desire. Should you refuse me, this is the alternative: civil war in the city till one of us is destroyed, and instant death as the portion of these strangers.

"But, Maya, I pray you not to refuse me, for I have something more to offer you—my undying love. From a child I always loved you, Maya, although you have treated me coldly enough, and now day by day I love you more. Indeed I believed that you and your father were dead yonder in the wilderness, for then I had faith in Mattai, whom now I know to be a rogue, and Mattai swore that it was written in the stars. Even so I would not have wed another woman, for my heart bled at the loss of you, had not Mattai made this marriage the price of his support, without which I could not hope to be anointed cacique, seeing that I have many jealous enemies. It was ambition that led me to consent, and bitterly have I regretted my folly ever since; for if she who is called my wife loves me, I hate her, and by this means or by that I will be rid of her. Forgive me, then, my sin against you, remembering only that I have loved and served you in the past as I will love and serve you in the future, and that it was you who brought about these troubles because, though I prayed you to stay and did all in my power to prevent you, you determined to accompany your father upon his mad journey into the wilderness. Now I have spoken, and I thank you for the courtesy with which you have listened to me."

"You have spoken, cousin," she answered, "and your words have been gentle; yet, if I understand you right, some few days since you were in doubt as to whether it would not be better to murder me here in this darksome hole where you have placed us."

"If policy put any such thought into my mind, Maya, love drove it out again," he answered, with confusion.

"So you admit that this was so," she said. "Well, a day may come when policy might breed the thought, and love, grown weary, prove not warm enough to wither it. Also it seems that even now you threaten these my companions with death, should I refuse you your desire."

"If you should refuse me my desire, Maya, perhaps it will be for a secret reason of your own"—and he scowled at the señor angrily—"a reason that the death of these men, or of one of them, will remove."

"Be sure of one thing, Tikal," she broke in sharply, "that such a wicked deed would put an end for ever to your hopes of making me your wife. Now, listen. I have heard your words, and they have touched me somewhat, for I think that although you have broken your oath to my father, and your troth with me, at heart you are honest in your love. Still, I can give you no answer now, and for this reason, that the answer does not lie with me, but rather with the gods. To–morrow night we appear before the High Court of the Council of the Heart, and you yourself shall set the severed portions of the talisman that we have travelled so far to seek in the place prepared to receive it, in the symbol that is on the altar of the Sanctuary. Then, as my dead father believed—and he was gifted with wisdom from above—the god shall declare his purpose in this way or in that, showing his servants why all these things have come about, and what they must do to fulfil his will. By that will, cousin, and not by my own, I shall be guided in this and in all other things."

Now, Tikal thought awhile, and answered:

"And if nothing follows this ceremony, and the oracles of the god are silent, what then?

"Then, Tikal," she said softly, "you may ask me again if I will become your wife, and perhaps, if the Council suffers it, I shall not say you nay. Now farewell, for grief still shadows me, and I can talk no more."