The Mayan Codex

55

Sabir sat on an upended barrel in the little shack that the Kabah gatekeeper had set up as an outlet for his soft-drink concession. He was still upset about the Maya guide’s response to Lamia’s face. He had never experienced anything quite like it. The man had taken one look at Lamia and then reacted as though he had seen a ghost. He had seemed truly terrified.

Sabir decided unilaterally that now Lamia and he were – how would one term it? – dating? – an item? – he would try to persuade her to go to Massachusetts General Hospital’s dermatology department in Boston once all this was over. He had a friend there, a senior consultant. He hadn’t seen the guy in years, but friendships were all about need, weren’t they? He’d call this person at home and seek his opinion about Lamia’s condition. Rekindle the friendship a little.

He knew he’d have to tread carefully around Lamia – she was hypersensitive about her face for obvious reasons – but he couldn’t imagine her objecting that strongly to his interference. All he’d have to do was to make sure she didn’t think he was doing the thing just for himself – that some unconscious part of him found her face distasteful, perhaps, and wanted it changed to suit him. If she ever thought that, he’d be sunk.

Lamia and Calque ducked in under the shade of the plastic awning just as Sabir was perfecting his game plan. Sabir wondered what they’d found to talk about out there in the heat. Maybe Calque was doing his Big Daddy bit again and had been reassuring Lamia about her face and the guide’s weird reaction to it. Maybe he ought to consult Calque about his idea for the dermatology clinic? Calque could be a know-it-all asshole when he wanted to be, but he was also oddly wise in the ways of women.

Sabir ruefully acknowledged that for a man of his mid-thirties age range, he was wildly out of practice in terms of female psychology. Still. When he looked at Lamia and thought of her in his arms, his heart took a pleasant little turn around his chest – he hadn’t felt like that for years, and he found it a very satisfying emotion indeed.

Calque sipped from his can of Sprite, his eyes playing over Sabir’s face. ‘Give us the quatrain again.’

‘Do you want me to write it down for you?’

‘No. Write nothing down. The Corpus might catch up with us again. I’m sure they’d be more than happy to have everything presented to them on a plate.’

‘Okay. It goes like this:

“In the land of the great volcano, fire

When the rock cools, the wise one, Ahau Inchal Kabah,

Shall make a hinged skull of the twentieth mask:

The thirteenth crystal will sing for the God of Blood.” ’

Calque shrugged. ‘Well? What do you make of it? We’ve looked at the Temple of the Masks. By a sheer fluke we’ve established that there were originally 942 masks, just as there were 942 Nostradamian quatrains. My view is that this number linkage is just a ridiculous coincidence, and not worth wasting time on. Do you agree?’

‘Personally? No.’ Sabir glanced across at Lamia. He sensed that she did not have her entire concentration focused on the subject at hand.

He reached across the table and took her fingers in his. He kissed them, and then pressed them to his cheek. He saw the sudden change in her expression caused by his unexpected movement – she seemed to sway back into view again, as if returning from a faraway place.

Frankly, he was astonished at his own audacity. What deep wells had that come from? He had always considered himself inept with women, and here he was working from a part of himself that he had never hitherto known existed.

‘What do you mean, no?’ said Calque. ‘You think there’s some link between an obscure site in the Yucatan and a sixteenth-century French scryer?’

‘But, Calque. We already know there’s some link. You’ve heard the quatrain. It’s categorical. Nostradamus wasn’t making all that up about “Ahau”, “Inchal”, and “Kabah”. He even got the spellings right, give or take an acute accent – except when he was purposefully obfuscating, as with Inchal. Almost as if someone was looking over his shoulder when he was writing the verse and making sure he didn’t blow it. And remember this. The manuscript had been hidden for more than four hundred years in a waxed and sealed bamboo tube secreted in the base of a statue of Sainte Sara when we found it. Impossible to tamper with. Impossible even to know it was there without Nostradamus’s say-so. So yes. I think we need to take every possible connection between Nostradamus and this place seriously.’

‘So what’s our next move?’

Sabir shrugged. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious. We come back tonight, when it’s dark, and we lever out the twentieth mask in the wall with the help of a couple of tyre irons. What else can we do in the circumstances?’