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I was going to send it to Raj and Kurtz, anyway, just in case this person was a total dumbass, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath in the meantime.
It was short and very much to the point.
Tomorrow is the last Day of the Nemontemi. They will discover whether the sacrifice has been enough to bring about the chicuace tonatiuh or whether the cycle will renew and the sacrifices will begin again.
I had no idea what the fuck most of that meant, but the parts I did get—namely the bits about “sacrifices”—were not good.
I forwarded it to Raj.
About five minutes later, my phone buzzed.
“The fuck does that mean?” Raj wanted to know.
“Not a clue,” I replied, trying to keep my voice pitched low so that I didn’t wake Taavi.
“Did you ask Taavi?”
“He’s asleep,” I replied. “I’ll ask him when he wakes up.”
“Ask me what?” a sleepy voice wanted to know.
“Or now,” I said to Raj. “Putting you on speaker.”
I set the phone down, then pulled up the email on my laptop to show Taavi.
He squinted at it, reading. “TheNemontemiis—I think—the Aztec equivalent toUayeb. The unnamed or unknown days.”
“The fuck does that mean?” I asked him.
“For us, it’s bad luck. You don’t want to be doing anything important—travelling, starting anything new—duringUayeb. It’s the final period of the cycle before everything turns over to a new cycle,Pop.”
“Pop? Like… soda pop?” I asked.
Taavi snorted. “A similar sound, but it translates to ‘mat,’ specifically a sleeping mat. They often symbolize unity and… fecundity.”
“Who is ‘us’?” Raj wanted to know.
“Maya,” Taavi answered. “For the Aztec… let’s see… I think that would beIzcalli?”
“What does that mean?” Raj asked.
“Give me a second.” Taavi gestured at the laptop, and I nodded, assuming he wanted to look something up. He typed into a browser, surprisingly quickly for only using one hand, then answered Raj’s question. “Growth.”
“So they’re what… months?”
“More or less,” came Taavi’s response. “It’s a cycle of twenty days—there are eighteen of them, followed by five unnamed days.” He stepped away from my computer, and I resisted the urge to put my hand on his back.
“The unlucky ones?”
“Yes.”
“And what’s…” I broke off and just pointed at the words.
“Chicuace tonatiuh?”
“Yeah. That.”
“I think… Something about a sun?Tonatiuhmeans ‘sun,’ I think.” He shrugged his good shoulder.
