Kingdom Keepers VII (9781423190431) by Pearson Ridley

Author:Pearson, Ridley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Pr

OUTSIDE THE TUNNELS, Tia Dalma takes her rest in the shade of a tree beneath the blue moonlight. It is sweltering, the air thick as mud. Jungle birds caw and complain. Creeping critters crush and disturb the oversize foliage, their intrusion very much felt though they go unseen.

Tia Dalma raises her hand like a priestess. The buzzing jungle goes instantly quiet. As still as a pond on a windless morning.

A rhythmic thumping intrudes, like a hammer striking metal. It amplifies the pain in her head, encouraging anger to rise from her belly like lava. A mechanical, entirely human sound, it has no place in the thick of the Mexican jungle. She wills it away, but to no effect. The unwanted clanging is as steady as a heartbeat.

The remains of the walls and temples are revealed in the moonlight as rubble, oversize cubes of weathered limestone tossed about as if a child has wrecked his castle of wooden blocks. They form a festive weed-and-vine-covered courtyard, with a sacrificial table at its center. Two pyramids have been lopped off at the top, like bridal cakes decapitated. A third remains intact, the stones stacked in diminishing tiers like massive stairs rising to the heavens. The rock is crusted with colorful lichen, reminding Tia Dalma of spilled blood, with white splashes of bird droppings and vivid green weeds, air plants, and orchids forgoing dirt and living off the wet of the air itself. The pyramid has stood scabbed in silence for thousands of years, has no doubt witnessed atrocities, marriages, deaths and births, cyclones, deluge, and drought. But this constant, dull pounding from the distance arrives as an abomination.

Already agitated by her general lack of progress in the catacombs, Tia Dalma can take it no longer. A woman who gets what she wants and suffers no fools, she plots her course, electing to climb the stepped central stripe that symmetrically divides the pyramid. No stranger to religious ceremony, she is mindful of this elaborately carved aisle’s possible significance, imagining—even sensing—a procession of high priests ascending it in colorful robes as thousands of jungle-dwelling peasants gather to witness the spectacle. She can see herself among them—a high priestess, in gold and jewels, clad in a breastplate of hammered silver and a necklace of mummified animal heads, carrying a black ironwood staff topped with the hollow-eyed stare of a human skull. She carries herself accordingly as she climbs: square-shouldered, straight-backed. Her mystic powers transcend the present; instead of the intrusive pounding, she hears thousands of voices chanting a guttural language she cannot understand. It drives her and the priests ever higher. No commoner is allowed the privilege of seeing the world from the top of the temple’s peak, of looking into the future, of viewing the past, of talking directly to the gods.

Wooden drums take up the beat of the chant as the priests climb higher. The high priest arrives at the summit, stops, and turns dramatically to look down on his flock. His face is painted like a monster’s.

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