“Ah,” he said. “So, you have a dance with time.”
“Dance with time?” I echoed.
“Well, you must be preoccupied with it if you saw the calendar. Are you worried about growing old? Or running out of time? Or—”
“I heard a voice, too,” I said. “The centipede said K’iin.” I knew that word. It meant sun or day.
His face went pale. He began to shoo me away. “Time for you to go. Ha! I meant to say you must go. I didn’t say time. Okay, buh-bye.”
“Wait! What’s wrong?”
Rosie paced nervously, grunting trails of smoke. Was this why she had brought me here? To see an ancient calendar? To hear a voice whisper sun or day? Did she know Ah-Puch would come to tell me good-bye? There was no way she could have known that little peace walk would bring me face-to-face with a killer arthropod. Unless Ixtab’s dumb orb had messed with my dog’s brain somehow.
The spirit twisted his fingers. “Please. You really have to go now.”
“What are you so afraid of?” I asked as a sick dread filled me. “K’iin? The calendar?”
“Would you quit saying that word?” He glanced over his shoulder. “We are not to speak of this.”
“Why?”
“Because what you saw”—Kip looked around, then leaned closer—“it’s sacrilege. Do you hear me? I could lose an ear or an eye if caught talking about it.” He shuddered, grasping his lobes. “I like my ears and eyes.”
“Look,” I said angrily, “you’re going to lose a lot more than that if…”
The guy’s face was filled with terror. I took a breath. Getting mad at him wasn’t going to give me the answers I needed, and blaming him wasn’t going to make me feel better.
“Sorry,” I said, more calmly this time. “I have to know. Please. I think this is why I was supposed to come here. For this message.” A message someone didn’t want me to receive.
He stared at me with wild eyes. “You must go!”
“I’m not leaving until you tell me.”
Clenching his jaw, he turned away.
“I’ll put in a good word for you with the gods…” I said in a last-ditch effort.
He snapped his attention back to me. “You’ll ask the gods for a favor? For me? A new greenhouse, maybe? Bigger than my sister’s?”
“Yes. I’d be happy to.” Not that the gods ever listened to me. Or were even still around, but I made the silent vow anyway: If I see them again, I’ll make sure you get a new greenhouse.
“And you promise never to come back here?”
I agreed immediately.
He rubbed his head as his eyes flitted everywhere. “K’iin is a calendar created by the time goddess at the beginning, before there was anything,” he said quickly.
Fire sped through my body, carrying the memories of Pacific being the creator of time and Ah-Puch saying something about Ren. It was all connected. But how?
And then I remembered that night in the boat with Itzamna, and his claim. “I thought Itzamna created the calendar,” I said, feeling more confused than ever.
“The human one, yes. But K’iin,” he continued, “keeps time for the whole universe. Do you understand? Not the world—the universe! There are different strands of time—not that I understand any of that. It’s all tied up in the goddess’s magic rope, the one she is to carry for all eternity.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“Spirits talk,” he said. “We’re masters of gossip. Once, a rotten little mountain spirit tried to steal a story for his own and—”
“Back to K’iin?” I prompted.
He sneezed, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Yes. Yes. When Pacific was exiled, she sealed the calendar and hid it so the gods would never be able to access its knowledge without her,” he said. “The mountain spirits claim to know where she put K’iin, and so do the air spirits. Hmph. If anyone knows, it would be an earth spirit!” He squinted one eye. “But those who went looking for it—they never came back.”
I suddenly felt like I was test-flying the world’s fastest rocket and was about to get sucked into a black hole. “So, no one ever found it?”
Rosie drew closer, like she didn’t want to miss the answer.
“Did you not hear me?” Kip shook his head. “Of course not. Who wants knowledge that could bring about their own death?”
“But what’s so great about the calendar?” I asked. “I mean, even if someone found it, how could they use it?”
Kip rubbed his chest in small circles like he had a bad case of heartburn. “K’iin means sun or day, but it also means T-I-M-E.” He spelled out the word. “Legend has it that if you find this calendar—which you won’t, because the goddess is very good at hiding things—and you stand before it…” He stroked his chin. “No, maybe you sit before it, or…It doesn’t matter. But you have to pay—”
“Pay?”
“You know what? You interrupt a lot,” he said.
I tried to keep my cool, but I was ready to blow. “Please go on. You were saying something about payment?”
“It’s no biggie—just an offering of some sort. You can’t expect to get something for nothing, can you?”
It felt like I was having a heart attack. “Right, but there are good kinds of offerings, like cookies, and bad kinds, like blood, or my heart, or…” I shook away the thoughts. “And what would I get in return?”
A smile slowly spread across his face. “Ah, yes. You’d be able to see across all time and dimensions.”
A calendar that could see across time and dimensions? My mind was officially blown. At the risk of having the guy threaten to cut off a finger again, I asked, “It sounds super cool and all, but why would someone want to see across time?”
“For knowledge. To find something lost. Or hidden,” he whispered.
Like the stolen gods! Yes! Now we were getting somewhere.
“But that doesn’t explain why the centipede would want to kill me.”
Rosie’s claws erupted from her three paws. Her shoulder muscles tensed. Now she reacts? I thought.
Kip raised a finger, “Ah. Because the dead cannot spill secrets.”
“Well, I didn’t die.”
“Good point,” he said. “No more questions.” He sneezed three more times. “You’re making my allergies worse.”
“Just one thing,” I said. “If someone wants to know the future, why not just visit a seer?”
He thought about it, then lowered his voice, “Seers have a limited view of the human experience in this world.”
“And?”
“And K’iin describes the idea of the sun and its relationship to the universe. I really hope someone teaches you these facts. I mean, it’s kind of embarrassing that you don’t know this stuff already. We got it drilled into us…. Oh, never mind,” he said. “Let me explain it the way it was taught to me. The sun…the big orange ball in the sky?”
“I know what the sun is!”