Guards and warriors whistled and cheered. They beat drums and blew conch-shell trumpets. Their yelling faces and thunderous roars broke through in waves to Max as he fought the deafening sound of pounding blood in his ears. It was like a ribald crowd at an FA Cup final, only there was more to lose than the cup—and there would be no medal for the runners-up.
Xavier had football skills, and if anyone could keep the ball off the ground, he could. He outran Max and Tree Walker, his skinny frame sluicing sweat, his long hair flicking droplets to the ground as he twisted and turned, and on more than one occasion saved each of the others from dropping the ball.
It was, Max realized, an amazing achievement for the slightly built Latino boy. How much longer could any of them keep going in this crippling heat? Who would be the one to die?
Max could see Xavier was tiring. He had retrieved the
ball and, in what had to be a near impossibility with a ball that size and weight, bounced it from knee to knee. He cried out, “Max!”
With an effort Max would never have expected of the boy, he got the ball high enough onto his chest, dropped it again onto his knee and then hefted his scrawny leg upward so the ball was in place for a header. He jumped, making contact, and aimed the ball directly to Max.
Then Xavier sank to his knees. He was out of the game. It was down to Max and the other two now. Max struck the ball with his shoulder, and it felt as though he had been punched by someone twice his size. Muscles and tendons would not be able to last much longer. Faces blurred; Max felt giddy. He saw the children screaming, watched as Flint waved his hat and roared encouragement, as the guards in their war paint became a surreal and macabre tapestry.
The ball!
It was in the air. Tree Walker had kicked himself against the side of the wall, powered into it from a low angle and struck it with his elbow. His arm snapped. He writhed in agony.
Setting Star was too far away. She ran like a sprinter out of the blocks. The rising cacophony became deafening. Tree Walker would die. He was the last to touch the ball. She dived in a hopeless attempt to catch the ball and amazingly got an arm to it. It skidded against the side wall, caught the pockmarked face of a gargoyle and spun away into no-man’s-land. None of the players would reach it. Setting Star would die for her brother.
In a startlingly brief moment, Flint saw Max’s face. The whole world stopped for that one blink of an eye as, in some
kind of shocked understanding, he realized something about Max had altered. Every muscle in his body had contracted, a surge of power gathered down his back, his shoulders hunched, his eyes narrowed, and his teeth bared into a snarl.
Orsino Flint knew he was looking into the
ch’ulel
of the beast.
In three catlike strides, covering a huge distance, the ragged boy from England launched himself and leapt like a predator toward the stricken girl and the ball that was now only inches from the ground. There was a collective gasp from the crowd at the shock of seeing the impossible.
Silence fell.
Max’s attack, for that is what it was, never wavered. He stretched out; his sinews demanded he stop. The rush of air told a part of his brain that he was still off the ground.
He was too late!
The ball was on the ground.
Almost.
Max’s fingers curled like a jaguar claw and caught the edge of its weight. No human hand, let alone a boy’s, could stop it from rolling onto the grass. But Max’s did. It dug into the impenetrable, it squeezed the uncrushable, and it threw the ball of death clear from the girl.
The children cried out. The guards and warriors bellowed their approval.
They had their victim. The ball rolled away.
Max Gordon had sacrificed himself.
* * *
Riga clawed his way forward. The cheering had stopped, but now the jungle exposed the hidden city, and he followed the watercourses down the hillsides toward the blind side of a high pyramid where smoke and incense swirled across a small group of men who stood before a sacrificial stone.
The tumbling water would obscure any noise he made—not that he intended to make any—and he could see that one of the channels fed a waterwheel in a building adjacent to the pyramid. It had no doors, but the entrance was pitch-black. No light penetrated it. Maybe that was the way to get into this ancient settlement without being spotted.
Riga was no stranger to house-to-house fighting. He made his way down, scanning the ground for Max.
And then he saw him.
The guards had quickly surrounded Max and, as he staggered to his feet, made it clear by pointing their spears that he should move forward toward the huge steps of the pyramid.
Flint ran forward and helped the exhausted Xavier to his feet. “You did well, boy.”
Xavier nodded, grateful for the compliment from the man who had always been an enemy. After a moment, he got his bearings, watching the children run to Tree Walker and Setting Star. Max was already thirty meters away, surrounded by the grinning, joyful warriors. Now there would be blood.
“Max, no …,” Xavier whispered.
“We can’t help him now, son. We have to find a way out
of here. There might be a chance when they’re distracted …” Flint did not allow himself to finish the sentence.
“When they kill Max, you mean? No, no, we have to do something. We
have
to,” Xavier insisted.
But the brief thought of bravely trying to rescue Max was cut short as the guards turned back to Xavier and the others. They were to be herded along as witnesses to the sacrifice.
Max began the long climb upward. The steps were chest-high, and he had to lift himself up with his arms and drag himself up each level. This alone, without the exertion of the ball game, would have exhausted anyone. Perhaps it was designed so that the victim would have no fight left in him once he reached the sacrificial stone at the top of the pyramid.
He had to concentrate! He had to use every breath to feed his body, to hold on to his remaining strength. And each time he climbed higher, he looked around him. If nothing else, he would get to see the surrounding countryside, the other buildings, places his mother might have been. Perhaps she, too, had escaped from this terrible place. The thick curtain of crimson mist was beyond the perimeter of the buildings, and he felt the air grow hotter from the molten lava. The jungle sizzled and he could hear rocks cracking as the lava cooled.
Water tumbled down the hills through the trees and disappeared into the ground. There was no sign of any escape route. The sun was blistering; Max was weak from lack of food and water, and he was desperately thirsty. His knees and elbows were badly grazed and painful, and he could feel the bruises forming where the ball had struck his arms and chest. It felt as if he had been beaten with a baseball bat.
He glanced down and saw the others, under guard, watching him. He did not want to die like this and hoped against hope that at the top of the pyramid, the boy who wore his mother’s necklace might reach out compassionately and save him.
Crunching fear twisted his stomach. Had his mother been sacrificed? Was this the terror his father had run away from?
If you’ve got one breath left in your body, then you have a chance. Don’t die like a lamb to the slaughter, Max. Keep fighting, son. It’s your life. Don’t let the killers and the thugs take it easily from you
.
Dad’s voice. Why hadn’t
he
fought?
Two steps left.
He looked around. The panoramic view showed the mountains, the river, the smoldering, troubled volcano and the far horizon, where another world lay hidden beneath the rim of the earth. A crease in the tree canopy looked wrong. It was a strange shape, a gaping hole in the natural curvature of the treetops. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and stared into the glare. It was a camouflaged satellite dish nestling in the tree line above a partly exposed smaller building.
The breeze caught his face. It had changed direction. The incense and smoke cleared. He looked up into the eyes of the waiting men. Any thought of fighting his way clear and finding an escape through whatever lay at the back of this pyramid was snatched away. The shaman wore a painted wooden animal mask, some kind of mythical creature whose curved open jaw exposed vicious teeth like a snarling wolf. Even the boy wearing his mother’s pendant looked frightened. And, unexpectedly, there were four other men in attendance—
guards. The shaman lifted the sacrificial knife and pointed it at Max. There was no need for him to climb the next couple of steps. Two men jumped down and hauled him up.
Max shuddered, fear rippling through him.
A lamb to the slaughter
.
This is how they killed lambs. They cut their throats. Did they feel fear? Did they smell the blood of others? Max felt revulsion as he thought of the times he had seen lambs playing in the fields around Dartmoor High, because, like them, herded to the slaughterhouse, he was now helpless.
He could smell the men’s sweat, and the sweet, cloying incense stung his eyes. It was a nauseating mixture. The shaman was chanting something quietly beneath his breath. The guards waited, ready to do his bidding the moment an order was given. The others sat on stone benches awaiting Max’s execution, a cruel entertainment to satisfy an ancient ritual.
Only the boy stood. Max’s mouth was dry from the exertion and the heat, and now the smoke scratched the back of his throat. He needed to buy time. Every single second was vital now, because the longer he could delay the inevitable, the greater the chance of escape—somehow.
He gazed at the boy. “Don’t let them kill me yet. Please, before I die, tell me what happened to my mother.”
The boy turned to his elders, spoke quickly to them, and Max saw them nod.
Hope restored.
And then it got better. The boy offered Max an animal-skin water bag. Max grabbed it before anyone could change their mind and gulped as much water as his breath would allow. That water was high-octane fuel to his starved body.
The shaman snatched it away and commanded the guards, who then grabbed Max’s wrists.
“Wait! Not yet!” Max shouted.
Skin scraped from his back as they manhandled him onto the stone sacrificial table, his wrists and ankles held by the four men. The shaman put his hand on top of Max’s chest—to feel the heartbeat. Max squirmed. There was no need to feel for his heart as far as Max was concerned; it was banging so hard it would burst out of his chest of its own accord.
The shaman recoiled, pulling back his hand as if burned, said something to the other men, who looked scared, and then took a step backward.
The boy spoke again. “He says you are a creature of power and that he must call on all the forces of the Vision Serpent to destroy you. He will take your heart and burn it. It is the only way your
ch’ulel
can be sent back to the otherworld.”
Max twisted his head, trying to appeal directly to the boy, wanting eye contact. “Don’t let him kill me! Come on, mate. Help me out here! Come on!”
“I cannot,” the boy said, lowering his face to Max’s. His mother’s pendant swung close to Max’s eyes. Max struggled, but the men held him firmly. It couldn’t end like this!
“Your mother came here, by mistake. She was going to join your father on the other side of the mountains. At the sea. Have you seen the ocean?”
“What?”
“I have never seen it. Your mother told me many stories about it. I was sick. Your mother helped me. I was only a boy.”
Max had to concentrate more than he ever had before. He
had
to understand what was going on—what had happened.
This wasn’t a nightmare he was going to wake up from. This was moments before his own death.
Max cried out in despair and fear. He could not move a muscle. Now the men put their weight on his legs as he bucked again. The shaman said something to the boy, but he responded with a stinging reply, and the shaman obediently waited for the moment when he could plunge the knife into Max and cut out his heart.
“My mother! Tell me!” Max begged.
“Before the people came here and took the children’s parents away, everyone lived together. We are the last royal family of the Maya. We are descendants of the great kings. Many of those warriors do not belong in this valley. They were brought here by the outsiders. They made us their prisoners. It is because our people have something in our blood these men want.”
The boy gazed away across the darkening sky, as if seeking a way for his memories to escape. He quickly slipped the pendant over his head and curled it into Max’s open palm, his wrist held tight by the shaman’s henchmen.
“Your mother got sick. She saved me, but we could not save her. There was a white man here, the one who controlled everything. He had a helicopter, but he would not take your mother. He left her to die. He did not want her to speak of him. Two of our people took her through the Cave of the Stone Serpent, but only one survived. Your mother told us that if we could find your father, he would get her to a doctor.”
“My father?” Tears welled in Max’s eyes.
The boy nodded. “She said he was beyond the mountains. Your father carried her for days through the jungle. He ran
until he could run no more. At the place where the white stone stands at the ocean. That is where he buried her. That is all we know.”
Dad ran. He ran to save her! Farentino lied! I got it wrong. Dad had run to
save
her
!
The boy touched Max’s forehead. “It is the time we call blood sun, when the sacrifice must be made. Go to your mother. She is waiting for you in the otherworld. Do not be afraid.” He stepped back.
This was it.
The shaman raised the knife, the light glinting on the blade; a wave of sound came from below as the children, Flint and Xavier screamed for Max’s life.
Max lifted his head. Tears stung his eyes. He gripped the pendant until it cut into his skin.
Mum, Dad. I’m sorry
!
Please help me
. Then that moment of pure love and desperate fear deserted him.