The Long March, Pt 1 [After a childhood underground, a young woman emerges into a desert that she prays is deserted]
This story has been inspired both by the great photography of @zaebars for the #descriptionsonthespot challenge and the #steemitwriteoff challenge on rites of passage hosted by @truthmomma and @tralawar. Thanks to all involved for the creative ideas.
Chapter 1
There are always three on a Long March, so that when one dies, the survivors can give each other hope.
One of the mothers, Chen, woke me the morning we left the pyramid.
"Itzel", she said from the doorway, "you can have your man, if you march today".
I had been waiting for this news for so long that I had begun to lose hope. Immediately, I was awake.
"Who will march with us, Mother Chen?", I asked.
"I will", Chen said. The news shocked me and, though I tried to hide how I felt, Chen must have seen my reaction because her eyes went hard, and her small frame seemed to tighten in the doorway. I had known Chen my whole life, and she was the invincible one, the fiercest of the mothers. At my initiation, after the medicine was placed under our tongues, her's was the last face I saw before the visions began, and the first face I saw when the kaleidoscope of light subsided and the gods crumbled again to dust. When those terrors came back to me at night, I calmed myself by remembering the strength of Chen's arms holding me down. I knew that she was growing old but, still, surely it was not yet her time to leave - how could she be the one chosen to march with us?
"Can I tell Tzacol?", I asked.
"I am not dead yet, child", Chen said. "See to your family, I will tell your man".
I did as Chen instructed and said my farewells. My mother had been strong. I gave my training knife to my sister, Xquiq, and she promised that she would make her Long March to join me when she was old enough. My father, knowing this to be a lie, began to weep, and then Xquiq had wept with him. My mother almost marched me from our cells so that, in our last moments together, neither of us lost our honour. "Don't cry", she whispered to me, "even when the road is hard".
I was given no time to mourn those I left behind. Instead, I was guided up the steps of the central pyramid by a mother whose name I did not know. The higher we climbed, the brighter it became. We reached levels that I had never visited before and, in places, the walls were lit with shafts of sunlight. Up there, the sunlight possessed an energy that pulsed and burned in a way that it never did on the farm plateaus: a whiteness that made the dust dance and the carvings on the walls lick back and forth. Those carvings were of things that I half-knew, or realised that I knew when I saw them: a jaguar catching a missile in its paws; maize spilled from the belly of a conquistador; a field of mirrors; a snake walking upright as men burrowed beneath the earth. The carvings made me dizzy and I began to focus, instead, on the mother who was leading me upwards And yet, still, I saw the carvings twisting around at the edges of my vision, the half light making a cruel history of shadows, of smoke-coloured skulls and dancing fire, of men who were not quite men, of women offered up as gifts - and, not for the last time on my Long March, I wished for total darkness.
We came to a staging room at the very top of the pyramid, with a flight of stairs that ran up to a hatch in the ceiling. The hatch was half open, and the light that streamed in had a physical heat to it. My eyes burned and, involuntarily, I turned my head towards the relative darkness of the passageway and, when I closed my eyes, the after-image of a carved skull pulsed there. The skull did not belong to a man, because it was longer in the jaw and higher in the dome, but it must have come from a creature of intelligence. I felt that the skull's eye sockets could see me and, as my vision adjusted and the after-image shifted, it was as if the skull began to track me, all the way across the red sands of my Long March.
"We will stay here until you adjust to the light", Chen said. She was standing in front of a metal desk. Behind it sat the Abbess Mother, who I had met only once, at my initiation.
"It is nothing, Mother Chen", I said, and forced myself to turn back towards the light. "I was just surprised."
The Abbess Mother tutted. "Don't be ridiculous, child, you are no good to us blind. Chen has told me of your strength, and I have no reason to doubt her. She tells me that you think well of this man, Tzacol, too."
The Abbess Mother gestured towards the other end of the staging room and I saw that Tzacol had been escorted through a doorway opposite and stood blinking in the corner. He smiled at me, and I was pleased to see that he had not wept.
We stayed in that staging room for two hours, as Chen and the Abbess Mother explained the route of the Long March to me, and Tzacol stood listening in the corner. We were to go South to Copán, a pyramid ten days walk past the point that our gliderail construction crews had reached. Copán was the pyramid that the gliderail would eventually reach, many years after our deaths. Our task was to deliver an elaborate piece of machinery, built in our foundry, that this other pyramid (which would become my pyramid) needed to construct the gliderail engine itself. When the machinery appeared on the desk, I could not fathom its use, but its teeth and metallic sharpness pulled me back to the carvings I had seen, and I shivered. I could sense Tzacol reacting to it too, but I thought he understood something of the machinery's purpose, and perhaps had even been involved in its construction. Still, he kept his counsel.
While we spoke, the mother who had escorted me up the pyramid leant over the desk and tapped a message, in single bits, into the wiring of an eagle scout. This would be sent ahead to Copán, both to tell them of our departure, and so that both pyramids knew when they should stop hoping, and begin to mourn our failure.
When we finally climbed up to the hatch and emerged into the light, I was blinded by the force of the sun. I had never known such heat, or such pain, but I knew that I was still alive from the sound of the eagle scout's wings, and the cool fluttering of displaced air as it took flight. With my eyes still closed, I felt the Abbess Mother kiss my cheeks goodbye. When I was able to open my eyes, we were alone, the three of us - Chen, Tzacol and I - on a roof at the apex of the pyramid. The hatch was closed, and even the guards had retreated inside. Below I could see the green vegetation that fringed our pyramid and then, beyond that, nothing but red dust and bare earth for a hundred miles. Chen nodded to me, and I took my first step down the steep staircase of the outer wall, my first steps outside the pyramid that had been my home, and the first steps of the Long March that would mark the beginning of my new life with Tzacol.
To be continued
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