long enough to have a dream, anyway. In the middle of it, I heard my name—Eva, Eva—being repeated softly, and at first I thought Stefan was calling me, the timbre was so close, and then I realized it was Jan, who was trying to wake me without startling me. “Look,” he said. “Down by your feet.” He had the flashlight on, but shielded by his jacket so the light was very dim. I could just make out something moving around in the passageway on four legs, not large but definitely alive. It was sniffing the air and its eyes shone wildly green. It turned, and I saw the sweep of a long tail.
“A coati snooping around to see what we might have in our packs,” he said. “I did not want it to frighten you.”
Half-asleep as I was, the coati looked like an emissary from another world. “Oh, wow,” I whispered.
The creature seemed more interested in me now that it had heard my voice and came closer, bobbing its small nose toward my boots. Sometimes on trips like these, I’ll find myself in a situation that is so un-Chicagolike that I start thinking about what it would have been like to stay there. But when I try to imagine Chicago, it is as weird as the place I’m in. So over the years, I’ve stopped trying to figure out why I’ve chosen the life I have. In spite of occasional bouts of homesickness for a home that doesn’t exist, it’s been a good way to handle things. Except that this unexpectedly trusting animal was all of a sudden making me feel wistful. Or maybe it was the pipe, still lingering in the air.
“Still raining?”
He nodded.
“You must know this place pretty well. Rikki said you were here for six years.”
He cleared his throat, nervous, probably, about talking so much. “There is no place like Tikal, that is certainly true.”
“What do you mean?”
He readjusted the flashlight so we could see each other’s faces. The coati was speculatively circling around us. “This is where the Classic Maya culture probably got started. If you are an archeologist, it is like getting to work at the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates.”
I nodded. I may be ignorant, but I can recognize the seat of Western civilization when I hear it.
“My training was all in Asia Minor. But years ago I met a Mayanist at a conference in England and he convinced me that the most exciting digs in the world were taking place here in Central America and Mexico.”
“Why?”
“The breakthroughs in glyph translation. It was finally starting to open up after centuries of false starts. It was the linguists and ethnographers who were responsible, not so much the archeologists. But I wanted to be here so that when they started to put together the written history of this culture and they needed people who knew the sites and where the inscriptions were, I could help.” He stopped abruptly, as though he’d just inadvertently dominated an entire dinner table conversation.
“Go on,” I said. “Please. I don’t know much about all this.”
But he’d withdrawn again. “Not much to tell. I was lucky enough to be here for some interesting burial discoveries, and my wife . . . well, being here for six years, you get to know a place because each site is different. You will see what I am talking about when we get to Palenque. To be here when the dynasties were being compiled was a rare privilege. I am glad Rikki could be in on part of it, even if he was just a child.”
“You have an outstanding son, by the way.”
In spite of the pipe, he looked as somber as ever. “How so?”
I didn’t much want to get into the details—I don’t like revealing my soft spots—but I did say that Rikki had an ability to relate to adults in a way that was almost unnerving, and that he was one of the most courteous teenagers I’d ever met. Also impressively intelligent.
Jan seemed pleased. “If things had gone better, he would have been a good epigrapher by the time he was twenty. He was taking what his mother taught him and training himself. I will never catch up with him as it is. I am better in the dirt.”
“So his . . . mother was a Mayanist too?”
I felt him pull away, as he’d done in the dark tomb when I leaned against him. I thought he might not answer at all. After a moment, however, he said, “Considering she was self-trained, quite a good one. She is gifted in languages, but took a degree in art history. It was a good combination for work in Central America.”
I was trying to decipher the tenses. I took another stab at it. “Rikki said I might be meeting her soon. In Palenque.”
He nodded.
“Well,” I said, “I’m looking forward to meeting Rikki’s mother.”
I thought this was subtle, but apparently not. He made a little motion with his hands, as though to brush away my words. Then he got to his feet and walked quickly toward the door of the passageway and stood there for a few minutes. When he came back, he said, “We can go now.”
I got the message. We gathered up our packs, re-strapped everything, and headed back out into the jungle. I looked behind me just as we went out into the night. The coati had vanished.
Poor Rikki was waiting for us, wet and shivering but loyally marking out the spot. It can’t have been any fun hanging around alone that way, especially with the deluge going on and only a pocket-size penlight for a weapon. “You’re some guy,” I said and patted him on the shoulder.
Back in the death chamber, we set up the tripod and lanterns and off-camera flashes, just like the night before. The first glyph I’d photographed and drawn had been so faint that I hadn’t really had a chance to absorb it, except as a technician. This one was quite clear, however, and I spent some time just looking at it before going to work. I’m no handwriting expert, but I was positive my first impression was right—neither the professional scribe nor the amateur cartoonist had done this particular glyph. It seemed to be in another hand entirely; the brush lines were thinner, and the proportions were different. It was larger, for example, than the official glyphs, but smaller than the teddy bears. And it seemed to have been placed to catch the eye, as though all the other painting had been done first and this one was added as an afterthought.
“Jan,” I asked casually, “is this one of the glyphs that has been translated?”
He paused over the tripod, as though considering whether or not this information might ruin me as an accomplice, then said, “It has.”
“What does it mean?”
He paused again, this time looking at Rikki, who was clearly dying for me to know, then gave an exasperated sigh. “It has several meanings. It is a very common glyph—you find it almost everywhere, including in some month names, some god names, and in a lot of the iconography. Nothing mysterious.”
I waited.
“The most common meaning seems to be k’in, which refers to the sun,” he added reluctantly. “Also, time in general. And k’in is the name for day. So you can see this is a very mundane sort of glyph, really.”
Which is why, I thought, we just army-crawled thirty yards to get to this chamber. Which is why we are hiking around in the middle of the jungle at night and poor Rikki is probably going to die of pneumonia.
“I
