Today
the quetzal hides in the misty forests on the slopes where cypress and pine
begin to give way to the lowland jungle, not far from Great Hollow with Fish in
the Ashes. Perhaps he got his red belly from being so close to “him who goes
along getting hot,” there on the battlefield. When the one-quetzal banknote is
held up to the light, a watermark appears beneath the printed bird. It takes
the shape of a ghostly bust of Black Butterfly.
Black
Butterfly’s body is brought to King Quiché.
King
Quiché invites Peter Pallid to his court.
Peter
Pallid comes to the court, and King Quiché and all his subjects are baptized.
All,
that is, except one. It is White Sparkstriker who escapes, double and all,
untouched by the water, unmarked by the cross. A daimon with no horns, no tail,
no trident, but marked by the color red. Whenever the red daimon is not giving
advice to Black Butterfly in a play, all over again, she/he hides in the
forests of cypress and pine, in caves and canyons, and is sometimes seen on a
back street late at night. One shoe is missing, the shoe don Mateo of Middle
keeps inside his divining bundle.
Don
Mateo brought his bundle with him today, up here on Tohil’s Place on the day
Eight Bird, but he doesn’t need to open it and show us the shoe. We all got a
good look at it long ago, at his insistence. It’s a smooth, heavy, reddish
stone of igneous origin, about the size of a rabbit’s foot, and very much in
the shape of a shoe.
All
right then, but if all the rest of White Sparkstriker is red as well, why the
name? And the answer:
“Sometimes,
in a dream, White Sparkstriker is dressed entirely in silver. But the clothes
don’t quite touch the body, and the body is red.” Silver is made with fire, and
silver or red, this daimon stays close to the fire.
There’s
something right there in the name, too. Back when the New World Book was
written, the word “sparkstriker” all by itself, k’oxol, was the term for stones that were used to strike fire. So
White Sparkstriker escaped into the forest with her/his own kind of fire, not
the distant fire of Sun, not the fire off the wooden foot of Tohil as he spins
in his sandal, but fire made with sparks that fly off from stones. Today she/he
carries a stone ax that strikes lightning. And don Mateo says a stone is left
behind when lightning strikes the ground.
So here
it is again, in these very mountains:
Thunderbolt
A bit
of familiar folklore, this. A notion that turns up all over the world, long
since spiritualized by mythologists, or psychologists. Or else traced backward
through time and across continents to some anonymous and imaginary person of
remote antiquity, possess of an original mind—a person whose home, so the story
always seems to go, was somewhere near the middle of the Old World.
thun•der•bolt A flash
of lightning imagined as a bolt hurled from the heavens.
So says
the desktop dictionary. Even so, there are meteorologists and geologists who
know the thunderbolt as a physical object, if a troublesome object that doesn’t
quite belong to either of their sciences. They have a term for this object, a
term that appears elsewhere in the same dictionary:
ful•gu•rite A tubular body of
glassy rock produced by lightning striking exposed surfaces.
Wherever
lightning strikes sandy soil it leaves behind a fulgurite, a twisting glassy
mass encrusted with glassy beads.
Some
neighbor of don Mateo’s, watching from a distance, once saw lightning strike a
small red person up in a tree, but afterward could find no body beneath the
tree, nor stone. Perhaps that person had a stone ax, but who knows whether the
lightning came to it, or from it, or brought the ax with it. Wherever the
person went, there went the stone.
Everyone
who lives in these mountains has heard of White Sparkstriker, whether or not
they’ve ever caught a glimpse of her/him outside the play. But no one gives the
name Tohil to anyone or anything they see today, much less the name Tahil, left
behind a thousand years ago. These names turn up only in archives, in
excavations—and yet, once we’ve read them, even spoken them aloud, we move a
little closer to catching a glimpse of Tahil the lightning-striking ax, or
hearing an echo of Tohil whose name some people once heard as Thunder.
Tahil/Tohil, with one odd foot. This hard little shoe that weighs in the hand.
It looks like something smelted from ore. If we read this shoe as a sign, a
character recovered from a shattered inscription, it tells us Tohil got his
sandal really hot.
Or else
Sun got Sparkstriker’s shoe really hot. Never again has Sun felt so hot as on
that first day. After all, that was the only day Sun himself has ever been
seen. In the words of the Book,
“Since
he revealed himself only when he was born, it is only his reflection that now
remains.” The scribes who transposed these words from New World characters into
Old World letters felt the need to add an interpretation—or, to phrase the
matter more the way it is phrased in Quiché, they felt the need to tell the
reader what these words would say if we
could hear what was hidden inside them, namely,
The sun that shows itself is
not the real sun.
There
are people down around the Great Hollow today, people reckoned in the Book as
relatives of the Quiché, who at least allow us the sight of Sun for half of
each day. They say that when he reached noon on the day of his first
appearance, he placed a mirror at the center of the sky and then doubled back,
unseen, to the east. During the second half of that day only his reflection was
seen, and so it has been on every day since.
“Reflection,”
those people say, and so says the Book. Lemo’
is the word, and it’s also the term for mirror. But this mirror reflects,
during the second half of the day, what Sun did during the first half. Or else
it reflects, during our own times, what Sun did only once, and long ago. Coming
here among these Mayan nations, we seem to have entered a world where
reflections are not simultaneous with the things reflected. Reading the Book,
we may guess that reflections ceased to be simultaneous the moment vigesimal
beings lost their perfect vision:
“They
were blinded as the face of a mirror is breathed upon.”
And
what about the reflection in an ordinary mirror, seen close up? Leaving the
land where they say lemo’ and coming
back home won’t help. If any face is the true face of a vigesimal being, it’s
the one we all see in the mirror.
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