Chris Eboch

From The Well of Sacrifice Author’s Note
    In the ninth century A.D. Europe was in the Dark Ages, with small feudal states where poor peasants worked for independent lords. Christianity was spreading across Europe while Islam extended throughout the Middle East and Spain. Maps showed only Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. Most Europeans thought the Earth was flat, and that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were the borders of the world. They had no idea that North and South America even existed. Christopher Columbus’s voyage was six hundred years in the future.
    In the ninth century A.D. the Mayan civilization was at its height. The empire that began to flourish around A.D. 300 had grown to include over one hundred city-states, some with fifty thousand people. The Mayan world covered what is today southern Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. According to Mayan mythology, the gods made the first people from corn. However, like other native Americans, the ancestors of the Maya probably migrated from Asia over a land bridge thousands of years ago. By 2000 B.C. they had reached Central America.
    They had no metal cutting tools or draft animals, and they used the wheel only on toys. Yet they built hundred-foot-high temples with stone that was brought miles through the jungle. They traded goods such as salt, honey, obsidian, and cotton with cities hundreds of miles away. They cut down dense forests and made rocky ground fertile with advanced farming techniques such as terraces and irrigation canals. They charted the paths of the stars and developed a calendar more complex than ours today. Their number system used the zero centuries before Europeans learned the concept.
    Priests ruled the Mayan cities and built great temples to show off their power. They claimed the ability to communicate with the gods, through bloodletting ceremonies and sacrifices such as the ones Eveningstar witnessed. The people believed that human blood fed the gods and earned their goodwill. The gods were complex and sometimes dangerous—Chac brought life-giving rain, but other gods were associated with drought, starvation, and war. The priests were also the nobility and the government, led by the Halach Uinic, the “true man” or king. This position was inherited by his eldest son.
    Most Mayan girls lived quiet, simple lives. Growing up, they learned weaving and housekeeping from their mothers. When they were old enough to marry, they started families of their own. Many died young, during childbirth or from disease. Eveningstar would have been unusual in any time and place. Yet every culture produces a few rare people like Eveningstar, whose courage and determination change society.
    Around A.D. 900, Mayan civilization collapsed. Many great cities were abandoned, seemingly overnight. Nobody really knows why. Some theories suggest earthquakes, disease, a foreign invasion, or civil war. Most likely, the cities simply got too big and could no longer support themselves when over-farming depleted the soil. Perhaps a combination of events was to blame.
    The Maya continued to build new cities, mostly in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, where they mixed with the Toltec people from central Mexico. But their Golden Age had ended. By the time Europeans explored the Americas in the sixteenth century, most Mayan cities were deserted and covered by the jungle, and the Mayan people were scattered throughout independent provinces. Though they resisted the Spanish invaders, they were slowly conquered, except for a few who retreated to hidden settlements deep in the jungle. Millions died from diseases brought by the Europeans, while Spanish missionaries destroyed many clues to Mayan culture, including all the books they could find.
    Some cities were completely destroyed and rebuilt by the Spanish. Other Mayan cities were abandoned and sometimes forgotten. The jungle took over, covering the great temples and palaces with earth and plants. In the early nineteenth century the word “Maya” did not appear in the dictionary. Then in 1839, an American, John Lloyd Stephens, and an English artist, Frederick Catherwood, explored Mayan ruins throughout Mexico and Central America. The illustrated books they wrote about their travels were best sellers and inspired other explorers. Eventually archeologists and anthropologists began to probe the secrets of the ancient Maya, clearing away the jungle and rebuilding the great temples. They are still at work.
    Today several million Maya, speaking at least thirty different Mayan dialects, live throughout Latin America. They live mostly in small farming villages, growing cotton, corn, beans, and squash as their ancestors did. Many other Mexicans and Central Americans have a mix of Mayan and Spanish blood.

    The fictional city where Eveningstar lived is set roughly in the area where Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize meet. The characters' names are translations of hieroglyphic names found on monuments and murals, while the gods’ names are given in Mayan. Although scholars have learned a great deal about ancient Mayan culture and history, we know very little about specific Mayan individuals of the past. The characters and events in The Well of Sacrifice are all fictional, but I have tried to make the setting and customs as accurate as possible. This story is one way of imagining how a great Mayan city may have been abandoned.