Deity Read online

  DEITY

  by

  Theresa Danley

  WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Published by

  WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  Whiskey Creek Press

  PO Box 51052

  Casper, WY 82605-1052

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Copyright Ó 2012 by Theresa Danley

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61160-253-1

  Credits

  Editor: Marsha Briscoe

  Printed in the United States of America

  Other Books by Author Available at Whiskey Creek Press:

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Effigy

  Science unearths a deadly prophecy…

  A priceless Mesoamerican artifact is stolen from the University of Utah, sweeping archaeologists on a desperate recovery mission south of the border. The team must decipher clues to find the priceless effigy of Quetzalcoatl. They are in a race against the coming solar eclipse, all the while dodging a corrupt Mexican police force still on the hunt for a sadistic murderer.

  Dedication

  I give credit to God for the gifts of creativity and storytelling. Again, I wish to thank the work and research of John Major Jenkins and his book, MAYA COSMOGENESIS, 2012, for their inspiration. And a special heartfelt thank you goes to my husband, Bryan, and all my family, friends and neighbors who continue to support me through my writing journeys.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The archaeological record of the ancient Toltec capital of Tula, in what is now known as the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, indicates a disturbance within the city around AD 987. The peaceful artisans and master craftsmen of Tula’s early years transitioned into a militaristic faction centered upon human sacrifice. Artifacts dating to the later period of Tula’s existence offer a signature of this shift in ideological thinking.

  But the Aztecs told a different story.

  According to legend, inner strife had befallen the Toltecs when followers of the Tezcatlipoca cult sought to overthrow the city’s high priest, Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. They’d succeeded in their cause, banishing the priest to the coast of Veracruz and there setting him adrift on a raft of snakes. As he drifted away, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl vowed to someday regain his throne in the capital of the Toltecs. And so the legend ends, leaving believers hopeful and waiting for his prophesied return.

  Across the Gulf of Mexico on the very tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, lay the remarkable ruins of the Mayan city, Chichen Itza. Archaeological evidence in the city’s art and architecture indicate a high degree of Toltec influence there, suggesting an invasion of Toltec factions into Mayaland and thus converging two distinct cultures uniquely in Chichen Itza.

  But the Maya tell a different story.

  Legend claims that around AD 987, a highly influential man arrived on the shores of Yucatan. Who he was or where he came from, legend does not clarify, and the depth of his influence on the Mayan culture may never be fully realized. However, his presence was certainly notable enough to remain in the local mind centuries later.

  To the Maya, this man was simply known as Kukulkan.

  Prologue

  December 16, 2012

  Metropolitan Cathedral: Mexico City, Mexico

  “La serpiente! La serpiente ha venido!”

  The words echoed urgently between the saints, lifting to the olive rafters between which was emitted the gloriously white sunlight. Cardinal Balbás split the light as he chased the trailing echoes down the eastern nave, conscious of his vestments scooping the air about his legs. His eyes remained fixed upon the child.

  Why weren’t the auxiliary bishops around when he needed them? Where was Father Ruiz?

  Cardinal Balbás didn’t like to rush through the cathedral. It felt disrespectful, but he had to hurry, prompted by the little boy running ahead of him, and the Sunday mass about to begin behind him.

  “Es la serpiente!”

  What was Felipe talking about? The boy understood his meager tasks well enough to relieve the deacons of his special needs, but even without them, it wasn’t like Felipe to disrupt preparations. Whatever the cause, the young altar boy had been urgent, tugging on the archbishop’s robes with increasing frequency. Cardinal Balbás tried to shoo him back to the pews until finally, with nobody else around to usher him away, he agreed to investigate what had frightened the child. There was still time before the call to worship.

  The organ began to play, compressing time with its hauntingly distant tones. Cardinal Balbás had to get back. Still, Felipe led him onward, his peremptory cries about a snake dipping in and out of the groping notes.

  Finally, the boy stopped and turned to face the opening of a chapel. Given the iron grate that spanned the opening, Cardinal Balbás knew immediately which chapel he’d been led to. The Capilla del Santo Cristo y de las Reliquias.

  Felipe now had a firm grip on the iron bars, rocking his body back and forth. His lips were still murmuring and his rocking grew with alarming intensity. His head was colliding with the bars by the time Cardinal Balbás reached his side.

  “¿Qué es?” Cardinal Balbás asked as he pried the boy’s fingers from the bars.

  “Nuestro salvador es conquistado!” Felipe cried. Cardinal Balbás noticed the tears streaming down his face. “Nuestro salvador es perdido!”

  Cardinal Balbás set the trembling child aside, leaving him to shift anxiously back and forth on his feet. He turned back to the chapel’s grate and peered through the bars. As expected, the chapel was still, slumbering in the silence of old things set aside. The dim light made it difficult to see the ornate altar looming in the darkness.

  He reached for his key and placed it into the lock. As soon as it clicked loose, the altar boy rushed forward and swung the gate open.

  “Felipe, no!”

  Cardinal Balbás reached for the boy’s altar robes, but Felipe was too quick. He squirted into the chapel, completely ignoring the altar and instead lunged for the side wall where he finally collapsed, weeping.

  “Jesús!Jesús!”

  Cardinal Balbás searched the wall above the prostrate child. He spotted the gilded crucifix that had occupied that wall for centuries, but it had changed. His breath caught in his throat. There, instead of Christ hanging on the cross, Cardinal Balbás found himself face to face with the menacing snarl of a serpent’s head.

  The snake had come indeed.

  PART 1

  Tuesday, December 18, 2012

  KIN

  “In the very far distant past it was written in this land so that it would be known by whoever wished to know the story of the Katúnes.”

  -Chilam Balam

  Yucatan

  Lori Dewson drummed her fingers on the hood of the car. Impatiently, she watched a set of headlights approach, flickering through the skeletal trees like a mesmerizing strobe. They passed in a shocking blur that flashed precariously close to Mike who was working the car jack in the gravel just off the narrow shoulder. He seemed not to notice
any peril from his position there within the dome of the grounded flashlight already trained squarely upon the rear tire. Lori paid attention to little else. The passing car’s wake gusted against her in an eerie blast and then dissolved with the engine that faded behind southbound taillights. Just as quickly as it had spit the car out, the haunting silence of the forest swallowed it up once again.

  I should be there by now.

  She should have been there days ago.

  “Isn’t this great?”

  Lori glanced over her shoulder where she found Gabriella’s silhouette propping a foot up on the front bumper of Mike’s car in an exaggerated effort to stretch her leg muscles.

  “I love the morning colors,” Gabriella said. “Just look at that sky.”

  Lori noticed the pre-dawn glow but only by its barest reflection in the rock-pelted bumper. Yes, the Mercury was old enough to have a metal bumper, another detail that reminded her of why she wasn’t where she needed to be. The car was worth little more than the footstool Gabriella now used it for. At this point Lori swore it was bound and determined to leave them all stranded before reaching Chichen Itza. Not that a 1982 Mercury Zephyr was an ideal car to tour Mexico in, unless one hoped that even a car thief would pass it by. It had been evident from the start that merely driving the clunker across Salt Lake City was testing its endurance, a gut feeling that became reality when the alternator went out a mere seventy miles out of town. Lori knew then that this trip in this car was a bad idea, but there were no other immediate options.

  Now, after a repaired alternator, two flat tires and a leaking gasket, she couldn’t help but wonder if the trip was really worth this much frustration.

  “Just look at that rich color lining the treetops,” Gabriella said. “It’s almost like gazing into the depths of the clearest blue ocean. A diver’s blue. Scuba Blue.”

  Colors seemed to be the extent of Gabriella’s observations. For ten days straight she’d passed the miles by commenting on an object’s color, its tint, hue, shade and contrast. She’d compare everything to her mind’s pallet, often speculating the effect should a new color be added to it, and then giving the colors a new name of her own.

  Like Scuba Blue.

  “How about cerulean?”

  Right on cue, Gabriella’s re-labeled blue prompted a Crayola box response from Mike who worked at the lug nuts on their third flat tire. He seemed unperturbed by the disruption in their travel. In fact, he’d handled all of the delays in stride as if rebuilding his car was all part of the journey toward his anticipated world apocalypse.

  “Oooh, cerulean!” Gabriella blurted. “That’s good, Mike. It’s the kind of blue that turns green eyes turquoise.”

  Gabriella chuckled, apparently impressed with a brief revisit of yesterday’s color discussion—the greenness of Lori’s eyes. Thirsty Green, she called them, much like that of the Yucatan forest.

  Lori couldn’t argue with that last observation. Despite the thick tangle of trees they drove through, the green was sparse. The trees and brush had a parched appearance against outcroppings of brackish limestone and the more Lori thought on this point, the more she realized that she couldn’t remember when they’d last driven by a river or creek, or any body of freshwater for that matter. They hadn’t seen so much as a trickle in a day and a half.

  Lori forced a grin back at Gabriella. She had grown tired of color-coded I-spy games a good thousand miles ago, but she wasn’t going to be rude. After all, despite the setbacks with the Mercury, Mike and Gabriella had been gracious enough to let her tag along. With her own car totaled two weeks ago by a drunk who thought he could cut through her apartment building’s parking lot at seventy miles an hour, Lori was still waiting for the insurance company to settle. Of course, she was allowed to rent a car at their expense, but not to drive it to Mexico. That left her on her own for this last minute trip, and with her savings sorely depleted, renting a car was out of the question. Even if she could have afforded a ticket, high interest in the whole 2012 phenomenon oversold all flights to Mexico, and that left Lori with Mike and Gabriella.

  It was by chance that she met Gabriella in line at the campus Starbucks where the exuberant art major gloated about going to Yucatan for the “2012 event” with her history buff of a boyfriend. Gabriella suspected he was going to propose there, which seemed ironic to Lori considering Mike was expecting the world to end three days from now.

  “It’ll be the end of the world as we know it,” he explained, to which Gabriella rolled her eyes and mumbled something about his habit of overreacting to things.

  “It’s the end of the Mayan five thousand year calendar,” Mike retorted. “The Chinese I Ching confirms it. Two ancient cultures half a world apart from each other predicted the end of the world in 2012. Now that ought to stand for something.”

  “Nobody modern or ancient can predict the end of the world,” Gabriella argued, turning to Lori for support. “You’re the scientist, Lori. Tell him how ridiculous he sounds.”

  A debate about the significance of 2012 wasn’t something Lori cared to take part in, even if it was steeped in her field of archaeology. There was too much science to debunk the doomsday predictions and yet, she decided to let her only mode of transportation have his fun; like allowing children to hold onto Santa Clause a little while longer. If she wanted to stick with Mike and Gabriella until they reached Chichen Itza, Lori decided it best to keep her responses as neutral as possible.

  “I guess time will tell if Mike’s interpretation is correct,” she said.

  “It’s not just my interpretation,” Mike argued. “The whole world is preparing for the end!”

  Lori knew that to be another one of Mike’s overstatements, but she had to admit, with all the crazy ideas out there, it was easy to believe the whole world was in 2012 chaos.

  “So why are you going to Mexico if you don’t believe in all this 2012 stuff, Lori?” Gabriella challenged.

  “I’m sure it has something to do with that Effigy,” Mike guessed.

  In a round-about way, he was right. Her discovery of the highly valuable Effigy of Quetzalcoatl had made Lori an instant celebrity on the University of Utah campus, not to mention across the country. The find immediately stirred the archaeological community into a revival on Mesoamerica’s influence on Southwestern cultures and everyone, it seemed, was left speculating on how such an effigy came to be interred in an Anasazi grave. The most popular theory concluded that trade relations between Mesoamerica and the Southwest accounted for the artifact’s presence in Utah.

  Lori had a theory of her own.

  The precious jade and turquoise relic had been crafted as a bust of Mesoamerica’s flying serpent deity, Quetzalcoatl. The effigy itself was believed to be the deity’s personified power entrusted to the Toltec high priest who borrowed his god’s name and became known as Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl.

  In AD 987 Topitzin Quetzalcoatl was overthrown from his own city and, according to one legend, was sent adrift on a raft of snakes from the coast of Veracruz. Another legend claimed Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl lit himself on fire and ascended the sky as the morning star, Venus. As for the Effigy, until Lori discovered it, legend thought it had been lost or destroyed after the priest’s banishment. One interpretation of the latter version of the myth offered an explanation to the Effigy’s fate—that it was the Effigy, the Power of Quetzalcoatl, and not Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl himself, that had combusted and sailed the skies as the morning star.

  Having found the Effigy herself and now knowing for a fact that it had not been destroyed, Lori didn’t believe it was the morning star. She didn’t believe Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl floated eastward on a raft of snakes either. Instead, she believed the banished Toltec priest fled north, to the furthest reaches of Anasaziland, taking the powerful emblem of his god with him to the grave. That was how she came to believe the Effigy wound up in Utah, and she was prepared to go to Mexico to prove it.

  Or disprove opposing ideas, rather.

  W
ith the bones of the man buried with the Effigy finally excavated, Lori could only sit and wait for the biological team to complete the meticulous cleaning and preservation before she could study them. It proved to be an excruciating wait, especially when, not wanting any outside opinions influencing her own study, she chose to ignore the preliminary reports until she’d had a good look at the remains herself. However, it was during that time that she received an e-mail from Dr. John Friedman:

  Lori:

  Thought you might be interested in this fresco recently discovered by Dr. Matt Webb. He found it in Yucatan, near the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza and believes it records the arrival of Jesus in the New World. You’ve probably already noted its striking similarity to The Trader. However, I conjecture that this frescoe may provide further evidence of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl arrival in Yucatan?

  John

  Lori opened the e-mail’s attachment and found herself looking at an extraordinary anthropomorphic pictograph. Dr. Friedman was right. The broad-shouldered stance of the figure on her computer screen looked very much like the petroglyph pecked into the alcove just above the Anasazi grave. The petroglyph became known as The Trader because of its resemblance to a man carrying a trade good to market. The name was further extended to the remains buried beneath the petroglyph—the man Lori speculated was Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl himself.

  But while she waited for The Trader’s bones to be processed for study, Lori decided she could at least start proving her theory by disproving Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl’s arrival in Yucatan.