Thieves Till We Die by Stephen Cole

Author:Stephen Cole
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Young Adult, cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9781619630826
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Jonah decided to stay out of Tye’s way for the rest of the day. He was dying to talk with her again, but didn’t trust himself not to mess up like before. Besides, she needed to rest, while he needed to make sense of those sodding pictograms – both the one he’d put together with the help of the statuette, and the one in the codex.

After another few frustrating hours he went to see Con, to see how her own researches were going. He found her in her room, sprawled on her stomach on the bed, crunching crisps and flicking through a big pile of printouts.

‘Good afternoon, Jonah.’ She smiled at him and pulled off her glasses. ‘Delight me. Tell me you have had a breakthrough.’

‘A breakdown’s more likely,’ he sighed. ‘My latest theory on those symbols is that they both mean, “anyone trying to translate these will go mental”.’

She smiled. ‘I have a theory too. The heart in this pictogram – it could be a cacao pod.’

‘A what?’

She grabbed a piece of paper and leaned up to pass it to him, affording him a view down her pale blue blouse that Patch would have killed for. Jonah took the printout and tried to focus on the line drawing. It showed a man striking another man with a knife, and the blood falling against a tree covered in strange fruits.

‘It’s a cacao tree. The pods are its fruit – and from the seeds are made cocoa and chocolate, yes?’

‘The Aztecs were big on Dairy Milk, were they?’

‘They were very big on real chocolate,’ she told him. ‘Not sugary stuff – strong, bitter and spicy. They made drinks from it. People drank it at marriage ceremonies and baptisms, priests made special chocolate pastes and daubed them over temple walls.’

Jonah was left none the wiser by the picture and handed it back. ‘Is the guy in the picture being sacrificed?’

‘No. He is simply a nobleman, spilling some of his blood to honour the gods.’ She knelt up and patted the bed, indicating Jonah should sit beside her. ‘Chocolate was felt to be the blood of the earth, and there was a sacred association with human blood. Chocolate held deep symbolic meaning.’

He perched himself beside her. ‘Guess the Aztecs liked their deep, symbolic meanings, huh?’

‘Yes.’ She smiled at him, her pale eyes holding his. ‘In Nahuatl, Aztec poets and thinkers would often pair two words together to create a metaphor for something totally different.’

Jonah frowned. ‘How d’you mean?’

‘For instance, the words for “mat” and “seat”, when paired, were taken to mean “rulership”, yes? Because the rulers sat in judgement over the people, I suppose.’ Her eyes glittered. ‘And according to the experts online, “heart” and “blood”, when paired, were taken to mean “cacao”.’

‘So, you think the pictogram could be showing a cacao tree pod and not a human heart?’

‘It is possible.’

‘But not very helpful,’ Jonah pointed out. ‘We go from a heart dripping blood into a box, to a cacao pod dripping chocolate into a box.

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