Words of Love - By Hazel Hunter Page 0,21

the dip between her breasts. The tank top was wet just below them. It was warm but not that warm.

“It’s the first test,” she said, turning to focus on him. “It’s the language of Zuyua.” She glanced at the glyphs. “So that means,” she paused as though she were doing division in her head. “We need to find a plumeria flower.”

Now it was Brett’s turn to blink as he shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “A what?”

“The white flower,” she said again, as though it were obvious. “The sacred flower of the Maya.”

“Okay,” said Brett. “You’ve lost me. What does a large hat have to do with a flower?”

“It’s the test,” she said. “The language of Zuyua. It’s like a riddle. Well, not really a riddle.” She paused. “Okay, it’s a pun. Think of it as a pun.”

Brett shook his head again. This was not helping.

“A pun? You mean like a joke?”

Jesse quickly shook her head and scowled.

“Oh no. Not a joke at all. A sound-alike word.” She grimaced a little. “That’s not right either. What am I trying to say?” She glanced at the glyphs. “A metaphor.”

“The rattle is not the thing,” she said. “The rattle is the sound. It’s the sound that a rattlesnake makes. But the way that rattlesnake is written is actually lord snake.”

“Okay,” Brett said, nodding. “The white rattle is lord snake.”

Jesse smiled and nodded her head quickly.

“Exactly. But lord snake is also the lord of the twentieth day on the cyclical calendar. And the word for the twentieth day of the calendar is tonalamatl or flower. And the most sacred of all Maya flowers is the plumeria and it’s white.”

“Whoa,” Brett said. “Take me through that again.”

She repeated the sequence–the chain of soundalike words and look-alike glyphs, tracing the thread of the real meaning from start to end.

“Wow,” Brett said quietly.

It was more than a metaphor, much more. It was several ancient dialects, the images used in the glyphs, the calendar–he shook his head.

“How do you do that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I wish you could see how I see it.”

Suddenly, he remembered where he’d seen a flower.

“I know where it is,” he said, grabbing her hand. “This side.”

As they rounded the right corner of the pyramid, Brett could almost see it.

“There,” he said pointing.

The central staircase was flanked on both sides by wide, flat seams of stones that went from the top to the bottom. But, at the bottom, the seams ended in ornate carvings. They were blocky and roughly the shape of a cube but they were plumerias–both of them, though not identical. They had always bothered him and now he knew why. Instead of the correct five petals, the one on the right had a strange looking sixth one. The flower on the left had five petals but the glyph of a jaguar at the center.

He and Jesse stood between the two, at the center of the staircase. He crouched to see them from eye level. There had been no way for him to know to concentrate here. The entire pyramid was covered with symbols like these. He must have walked past them dozens of times but, without knowing they were important, they were just more architectural detail.

From the low angle, he realized that both cornices had slots underneath them, deep grooves in the stones on which they sat. And the flowers themselves seemed to have thick, square stems.

They were levers.

“A green jaguar is seated over the sun,” he muttered, as he quickly strode to the one on the left, the one with the jaguar glyph, and pushed down on it.

“No, Brett!” Jesse yelled, reaching for him, but it was too late.

As the lever went down, a single block in the fourth step simultaneously raised and dirt immediately spewed out–directly at them. Though Jesse got her hands up in time, the mass of dirt knocked her backward. It hit Brett lower and he was able to stay upright.

“Jesse!” he screamed.

Even as he reached out to her, the dirt was quickly becoming a stream. He was having a hard time keeping his feet and she was starting to slide away. It was up to his knees now but he surged forward with it. Jesse was barely keeping her head above the surface. He bent low, thrust his hands into the still rising dirt, and grabbed her around the midsection. He pulled up as her stomach jackknifed around his arm but she was clear.

She landed on her feet next to