12.21 by Dustin Thomason

moment she saw the codex, Chel had wanted to call Victor Granning, but she was too afraid of how he might react. They hadn’tspoken in months; she had good reasons for avoiding him. “We’ll be just fine on our own,” she told Rolando.
    “Okay,” he said. He knew better than to press. Granning was a sore spot. Chel loved her old mentor, but he was too much of a diehard. And a little nuts.
    Trying to put Granning out of her mind, Chel studied the puzzle of “stacked” glyphs Rolando had started to assemble from the first page:

    Mayan glyphs came in two basic varieties. They could be combinations of syllables strung together to approximate the sound of words (just like English or other alphabetical systems). But often they were more like Chinese, with each glyph or glyph combination symbolizing an object or idea. Once Chel had broken the blocks down and deciphered each component, using the established catalogs of one hundred fifty decoded syllables and the catalog of the eight hundred-plus known “picture” glyphs, she strung them into sentences.
    Words like
jäb
were entirely familiar; it was the same word the modern Qu’iche used for
rain
. Some, like
wulij
, could only be loosely translated, because there was no corresponding word in English: to
take down
was the closest she could get, carrying none of the religious implications the word had in Mayan. Researchers had identified about a hundred fifty glyphs that still hadn’t been deciphered, and not only did a few of these appear on the very first page of the codex, there were others Chel had never seen before. When the entire text was reconstructed, she suspected there would be dozens of new glyphs to analyze.
    Three hours later, Chel’s legs had cramped, and her eyes were so dry and irritated that she had to replace her contacts with the glasses she hated. But finally they had a rough translation of the first glyph block:
    Come rain is none, ___ of nourishment, ___ star’s half cycle. Harvest, take down fields of Kanuataba, raze ___ and trees, push out deer, birds, jaguar, land guardians. Rededication ___ tracts. Destroy hillsides, swarm insects, fed leaves soils are not. Have none, shelter, animals, butterflies, plants given by Holy Bearer for spirit lives. Bear no flesh, animals, cook us
.
    Yet for Chel, these literal words weren’t enough—a completed translation had to capture the essence of what the scribe was trying to convey. Codices were written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, and they were often very formal in tone. So she did her best to insert missing words from context and typical word pairings seen in the other books until they had a better rendering of the first paragraph:
    No rain has come to give nourishment in a half cycle of the great star. The fields of Kanuataba have been harvested and destroyed, the trees and plants razed, and the deer and birds and jaguar guardians of the land have been pushed out. Farming tracts cannot be rededicated. Hillsides have been ruined, insects swarm, and soils are no longer fed by falling leaves. The animals and butterflies and plants given by the Holy Bearer have nowhere to go to continue their spirit lives. The animals bear no flesh for cooking
.
    “It’s talking about a drought,” Rolando said. “Who would’ve been allowed to write something like this?”
    Chel had never seen anything like it. Written Maya records were generally ancient press releases for kings. The royal “scribes” who wrote them—half press secretaries, half religious leaders—didn’t dare mention anything that undermined their rulers.
    Never before had Chel seen a scribe writing about the difficulties ofdaily life. Predictions of rain were inscribed on stone columns at the ruins and in the Madrid and Dresden Codices, but for a scribe to report an ongoing drought was unheard of. It was a king’s job to bring the rains, and such a discussion would embarrass any king who couldn’t deliver.
    “Only a scribe