Beautiful Sacrifice

hand, guiding the beam of light while she spoke. “Look at the big candles at the four corners of the room, look at their colors. Sak, the north, is white; Kan, to the east, is yellow for the sunrise; Boox, to the west, is black for sunset; and Chak, to thesouth near the shrine, is red for blood. This is a sacred place.”
    “Or it’s narcos stashing stuff here and trying to freak out any locals,” Hunter said, but he didn’t really believe it.
    “There’s nobody out here to frighten. No water but rainfall. Very little game to eat. No fruit trees to draw even monkeys. If narcos set this up, they’re only scaring themselves. Besides,” she said, releasing his hand, “can’t you feel it? This is a place of power, of worship.”
    Hunter felt it. He just wasn’t happy talking about it.
    Looking for a vent or some way for the smoke to escape, he moved the beam of his light overhead. Lines of blue raced over the ceiling and down the wall, everywhere blue, gleaming and silent, calling across the centuries. Gradually he realized that there was red and white and black, even jade green gleaming in polychrome pictures; but the impact came from the many shades of blue, the voice of a god pouring from images of feathered deities and serpents.
    There was not an inch of walls or ceiling left bare.
    Lina let out a sound that could have been awe or disbelief or both mingling as the serpents did, indistinguishable.
    “Late Post-Classic Mayan glyphs,” she said faintly. “Very refined glyphs, very precise. As elegant in their own way as the Lindisfarne manuscript. The culmination of millennia of culture striving to describe the unknowable.”
    Slowly Hunter played the thin light beam over the walls around the entrance where they stood.
    “That’s not a mass of snakes as I first thought,” Lina said. “It’s a single gigantic serpent, made up of countless others.”
    “I can’t see where one ends and the other begins,” he said.
    “You’re not meant to.”
    A sea of scales and massive wings covered in rainbow feathers arched over the entrance to the room. Each movement of the flashlight revealed more details, more complexity, more colors that seemed to change as they watched.
    “This is impossible,” she said in a whisper.
    “The clean air?” he said, still clearly caught by that unexplained reality.
    “No. The range and subtlety of color is fantastic. Look at these rich greens. You expect to see blues endure, but none of these colors has degraded at all.”
    The coils of the serpent were all around them, above them. Some of the scales were rippling masked faces; some human, some demonic, and some animal, each of them idealized, all of them a great artist’s representation of Maya fears and hopes.
    “The depth…” Lina said. “There’s a strange kind of dimensionality to everything, a depth that most Maya art shuns. This isn’t intentionally flat or linear. It…breathes.”
    Hunter could only stare. Every time his flashlight moved even slightly, he would swear that the coils of the snake twitched. Like all great art, the serpent had a life independent of its maker. It simply was .
    Another light clicked on. He started, then realized Lina had turned on her flashlight while he stared in awe at the slowly writhing snake. Her light was broader, warmer, more gold than blue. Closer to candlelight, but without its grace. The broad beam moved with deliberation over the walls and ceiling, up and down and then up again, a serpentine motion that was hypnotizing.
    He moved his flashlight enough to see her face without distracting her. The gold buried in her dark eyes flashed and sparked, a mystery he would never solve, even more compelling to him than the images covering the walls.
    The beam continued its circuit of walls and ceiling, then began all over again. Silent tears gleamed on Lina’s face as the beauty and meaning of what she was seeing began to sink in.
    “And to think Philip wrote this place off as a pimple on the history of the Maya,” she said after a long silence. “This is one of the biggest complete wall paintings I’ve seen in the Maya style. The technique is incredibly refined. It must have taken years to execute.”
    Hunter could only watch the serpent watching him.
    “You know what this is?” she asked finally, her voice husky with excitement.
    “A snake. A really, really big one.”
    “It’s Kukulcán in his serpent aspect. It has to be.”
    “So you’ve seen something like this