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“Your heart sees alligators?”
He laughed. She really enjoyed his easy laughter, both the sound of it and how it made her feel. As if she was funny, witty, and smart.
“Or…” He rapped the pencil’s eraser against the eye. “I.” Then the heart. “Love.” Then the alligator. “Alligators.” He lifted his shoulder, rubbing against her again despite their continued efforts to remain apart. “I don’t, but I’m really good at drawing alligators.”
“You are,” she said, hearing the laughter in her own voice.
He turned the page in his direction again, scratched a few lines, and turned it back. “This is the symbol for teeth, called tiantli in the Aztec language. But it was also used to represent the letter t. And this,” he tapped what also looked like teeth, except these had a roof on top, “is the symbol for la, which is used to indicate an ‘l’ sound at the end of a word.”
“What is that thing?”
“I don’t know. Something that sounded to the Aztecs like ‘la.’”
“How could anyone know what was being written with all those possible meanings?”
“The Aztecs knew, or at least those who could read and write did. And while the Aztec may have been the only civilization at that time with universal schooling for both sexes, the majority of the population was still illiterate. They didn’t need to read or write unless they worked for the government or the church.”
“So how do we know now what they were saying then?”
“Some of the codices reconstructed after the conquest have Spanish translations below them.” He frowned. “Of course many of those translations were merely what the Spanish wanted the texts to say.”
“Let me guess: Any bearded guy was labeled Jesus, even in a story about an ancient god of the sea.”
“Stop me if you’ve heard this before,” Teo murmured.
“I did a report on the Crusades,” Gina said. “Imposing their own interpretations on every ancient legend appeared to be SOP for all Christian conquerors. So my question remains—how do we know what the Aztecs were really saying?”
“We don’t. To make it even harder, Aztecs didn’t write in a linear fashion like we do.” He used his finger to draw a line across the page, left to right. “They drew a picture. Things that were farther away at the top, things that were closer at the bottom. All of them interacting in strange and mysterious ways. To translate, one has to pick through and interpret.”
“Kind of a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ for the sacrificial crowd?”
“Yes. Although I’ve never found Waldo in any of them.”
“Thank God,” Gina muttered. The idea of that bespectacled candy-cane shirt–wearing doofus peeking out from behind an Aztec pyramid was both amusing and a little creepy. “I don’t understand how, with all those options, you manage to figure out anything at all.”
“That’s why my mom had six possible places where the superwarrior could have been buried.”
“Did she also have six possible translations for what else a superwarrior might be?”
His eyes, darker in the dim light and shaded behind the lenses of his glasses, narrowed. “I don’t follow.”
“If the place of his burial could be one of many, maybe he could be one of many, too?”
“One of many what?”
“How should I know?”
“Here.” Teo scooted closer again, flipping pages until he found what he wanted. “These are the glyphs my mom interpreted for the superwarrior legend.” He pointed to an obvious soldier. “You see how this drawing is much bigger than the others?”
“Yeah.” It was, in fact, twice as big as the others. “Like I said, maybe they labeled him as super just because he was taller than everyone else. I read somewhere that the reason David was able to fell Goliath was because the giant wasn’t exactly gigantic, just larger than the average Philistine.”
“David was still a pretty good shot. The smaller the head of the giant, the better that shot becomes.”
“Good point,” Gina agreed. She studied him a moment. “You believe the stories in the Bible?”
“Yes,” he said, shocking her. As he was a scholar, some might even say a scientist, she’d expected him to say no. He was just one surprise after another.
“If I don’t believe those stories, how could I ever believe these?” Again he tapped the notebook.
