THE INSURGENCE of CHAN SANTA CRUZ

CHAPTER TEN

Chankik meditated until twilight before entering the cave. A bloody stain leaked across the sky from west to east as the sun sank over the treetops and a chilly wind arose. He passed the cenote with its rank smell of dead fish and the crumbly white earth, useless for the growing of the corn, which dissolved into a mass of roots and vines, slippery as the brackish algae on the surface of the water.

A cold shadow passed across his shoulder and he glanced instinctively to his left. On the branch of a dead tree, an old, gray owl regarded him with its cold and baleful eyes, yellow as death by wasting. Chankik whispered a prayer and hurried towards the cave. If it was the will of the bacabs that he should die, then it would be. He had gambled his life, trusting his owns considerable powers, on the assumption that the gods of the old walls, despite their anger at the mazehualob, had not yet thrown their allegiance to dzulob who occupied the city of the Holy Cross, but were only testing their Christians as Juan de la Cruz tormented his Capitan Job. And if they would not help, he reckoned that life under the Mexican thumb would not be worth living anyway.

The night sky further darkened, like corrupted blood, and the cave before him vomited a torrent of bats, which took to the air with a squeaking, and squealing of a thousand rusty wheels across an ancient, cobbled street. Behind the bats an odor, dank and moldy... thick with vile vapors of reptilian hunger... hung, curtainlike, across the entrance to the cave. Chankik stepped through it, staring inwards to adapt his eyes to the darkness. Rustling noises passed his ears. He took a step forward and another as the floor began to sink.

A cold, wet object slithered across his foot as something else fell from a short height with a dull and muffled plop. Miguel Chankik continued walking forward down the grade, which became soggier and slippery with moss. Finally he turned a corner and saw a faint, flickering light, the reason for which he had entered the gate of Hell.

Before the light a shallow pool of perhaps twenty meters' length writhed as a living being would, athrong with snakes who poked their snub noses and forked tongues in the direction of the brujo. Green snakes, brown snakes, cascabels and vipers; poisonous, constrictive, the serpents dragged themselves on their bellies or floated upon standing water, waiting for the return of the bats, or for the entrance of any foolish penitent of insufficient powers. Miguel Chankik stepped in the water to his knees, and the snakes swarmed round his feet like cats; he reached down, allowing the largest of the vipers to crawl up his arm. Holding the snake below the tail he studied it and, satisfied with what he'd seen in its eye, replaced it in the water. Another raised itself upon its coils and Chankik, bending slightly, scratched its belly. The snake sank back into the mire and slithered away, the curandero continued towards the flickering light with deliberate but probing steps that eased around the squirming reptiles underfoot.

The ground began to rise and the knee-deep water gave way. Chankik confronted a solitary candle, flickering dimly in the dark. He clapped four times, and an old woman shuffled round a corner towards the light. Her hair was mottled gray and white, the color of the belly of a frog, her eyes extinguished, blinded and oozing a yellow pus, reflecting the dancing of the light.

From his belt, Chankik took a dried tortilla, pressed it into the woman's hands and, as she sucked on it, made his petition. "The dzulob have scattered us, abuelita. They occupy the temple of the Holy Cross and try the mazehualob with bullet and machete, with the blood vomit and red death. Juan de la Cruz has turned his face, our sins have given him offence, he leaves us to our suffering. Who will rid this Christian nation of plague? Abuelita, bring forth the xtabai! Lead her into Santa Cruz of this Bravo, let her steal the mind and soul of this commander of the Mexican devils, let him be confounded as the King of Babylon who threw his uniform aside and ate grass. Call the xtabai to guide the dzulob, by their greed, into the center of the earth, from where they may never find their way back to the One True God. By your pardon, Abuelita!"

The old woman lowered the tortilla, spit running down the pressed corn. Her toothless gums opened and an inquiring hiss exited the wrinkled lips. She opened her arms and Chankik grasped her, both falling to the smooth mud at the edge of the pool beneath the candle's flickering glow. Never once did the abuelita moan as Chankik sealed his bargain, but she hissed and hissed, and the snakes of the cave emerged from their crevices and from the rotten lake, stood on their tails and hissed and rattled, also, their applause. "To the Xtabai's coming," Chankik gasped, "Thy Will be done!" and with a final shudder the candle swooped, dipped and died out.

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