Baktun

It was hard to blame them for needing to let off some steam, now and then: being a god was a lot of work. Creation, evolution, the continual need to build more for the humans to find as they carried on with their relentless exploration up, down and within. Oh, there were the bursts of nigh-omnipotence generated from the love and adoration (or in some cases, abject fear and obeisance) of all their followers, and the general sense of immortality certainly trumped any comparable health plan among the contemporary humans; but above all, there were the parties.

Generally hosted by whichever pantheon was experiencing a holiday at the time, the “Godhood Galas” were all the buzz amongst the immortals. A few of the big names would often put in an appearance – even some of the old school deities, like Odin and Ahura Mazda, (Krishna once allegedly appeared as Muralimanohara and accompanied a fairly impressive jam session with the band at a function a few decades back), but mostly it was an opportunity for networking and for the arguably younger of the most powerful entities in the universe to mingle and relax.

The most bountiful of the annual festivities culminated around the winter solstice. For days leading up to and following the night in which the planet earth was closest to the sun, most religions and cultures had seemed to center on this time of year for their greatest celebrations. Christian, Pagan, Hebrew, most of the largest religions had one reason or another to focus their thoughts on their primary spiritual figures, and the result was a surplus of faith-conceived energy for the recipients; namely, the gods and goddesses themselves.

They had taken to identifying the celebration by the relative date of the event, based on culture and calendar; a large silk banner with the words “Solstice 2012” hung above the marble archway, shifting into the most comfortable language for each pair (or set) of eyes that looked upon it. It had been a gift from Mercury centuries earlier, long before the general adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

“Ye know, Tak, there’s talk of cutting that ratty old relic down and putting up an HD flatscreen?”

Takhar silently chuckled at the comment, finishing the sip of mead he had been drinking before turning in the direction of the speaker. The other man was only a few inches taller than the swarthy-skinned Takhar, but his Gaelic features and broad shoulders made him look dramatically different.

“Noon, they’ve been saying that for years, now,” Takhar responded, raising his glass in greeting to his old friend. “Same people wanted a neon sign back in the 1970s.”

“I remember that going over…badly.” Lifting a large ornately engraved mug to his lips, the Celt took a deep draw before laughing, filling the air nearby with the sweet smell of well-brewed ale.

Takhar joined him in a laugh, and the two old friends greeted one another in an enthusiastic embrace.

They continued to catch up, gesturing around the crowded room, their voices kept raised just enough to carry above the music but not too far.

“So what happened to the horns, Noon? I haven’t seen you at one of these without the crown in… well, it’s been a while.”

The red-haired god shuffled nervously, his freckled skin darkening slightly under the festive lighting. “Well, I’ve been seeing someone, and…”

Eyes widening in unfeigned surprise, Takhar clapped the larger man on the shoulder. “Shut the front door! She made you leave the horns home?”

“It’s not like that, ráscán,” his friend scowled, “she just knows a woman cannae resist old Cernunnos, once he has his full rack set upon him.”

“So, in fact, she was doing all the ladies a favor, yes?” Takhar managed to keep a nearly straight face, only barely able to fix his eyes on his friend and not on the lovely golden-haired woman approaching him from behind.

Mistaking his friend’s focused expression, Cernunnos continued his defensive response. “Aye, that’s the way of it, sure enough.”

“And who are we discussing, I wonder?” Her voice seemed as the aural embodiment of velvet and honey, warm and filled with all manner of intimacies. Her eyes spoke with a silent tongue, explaining in no words at all that she could be trusted, could be relied upon with the most sensitive secrets. No human could deceive her; rumor suggested that only a handful of the gods could, too. And so it was that the lady Veritas had but a few friends among deity; but those would gladly risk it all in her defense, as would she for them. Fewer still than friends were the lovers she might take. Takhar masked his smile.

Cernunnos muttered awkwardly, running a hand through his eternally disheveled hair, which unfortunately exposed the faded strip of skin which was usually covered by his antlered crown or helmet. Veritas smiled, kissing him on the cheek.

“Hello, Takhar,” she said. “He’s not telling you what a terrible woman I am to him, I hope?”

He shook his head, but replied honestly. “He’s insinuating that you’ve made him leave his horns at home because of all the attention he receives from women - - ow!” The last was in response to his large friend slamming him in the shoulder with a balled-up fist.

“Dude!”

Takhar’s face darkened while Veritas laughed softly. “That was cruel,” she apologized. “I’m sorry, Takhar, I shouldn’t have asked you such a direct question.”

 “Of course,” he replied, finishing his drink. “Good mead this year. Who’s catering?”

“Their professional crew fell through, so Ninkasi stepped in,” answered Veritas without thinking, unaware that she’d even known that. Now it was her turn to blanch. “Fine, fine, that’s fair. I will behave myself.”

“Well, Vera,” he responded, a sparkle in his dark eyes, “Just be careful around me, you know how I work.”

She sighed. “You and I do share a common disadvantage.”

He placed his empty glass on a serving tray as it passed. “Because there can be no lies around you? Or because I’m a living Karma engine?”

Cernunnos laughed, a deep rolling sound that momentarily burst through the wave of music being played over the speakers. “Karma? Ye haven’t gone Hindu, have ye?”

“You don’t have to convert to appreciate the concept, my friend.”

“Tell that to the Christians.”

Veritas laughed, enjoying the tickle of the alcohol on her lips. “Try telling them anything.”

Takhar held up a hand to remind her how voices tended to carry here in the sky dome. “Let’s not have a repeat of the Crusades, shall we? You know how Jesus gets at these mixers.”

“Don’t remind me,” Veritas groaned. “Remember that one year he got loaded and kept hitting on me?”

“His dad was nae happy,” Cernunnos chuckled.

A thin, dark-skinned man wearing a tunic fashioned from leather and jaguar pelts, walked past them. He held a short spear in one hand, and a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. He briefly made eye contact with Takhar and the two men exchanged brief nods before the other man continued on into the party’s throng of guests.

His two companions noted the exchange, with Cernunnos watching the man until he vanished into the crowd.

“Aye, who would that be?” the Irish god inquired. “Don’ recognize the wee man.”

“I don’t imagine you would,” Takhar replied. “He’s old god – pre-Columbian. Weird to see him at one of these, especially with all the jokes that have been going around.”

“What jokes?” Veritas asked. “Who is he?”

“That, my friends,” the Serer god answered, “is none other than Kisin. Mayan, and he’s one of their death gods. The only death god, depending on what stories you listen to.”

“Och, aye, I’ve heard o’him,” the large god said. “He looks smaller than I thought he’d be.”

“Can you blame him?” Takhar shook his head. “2012 was a very bad year for him.”

Veritas frowned. “People can be so cruel.”

Cernunnos shrugged his large shoulders, putting his fists on his hips. “Yeah, they made a right bags of that whole end of the world bollocks.”

“Okay, seriously, Noon, you have to stop trying to sound like you’re from the street.”

“What?”

Veritas nodded in agreement with Takhar. “You’re over two thousand, my friend. Talking like that isn’t going to win you any followers.”

“Okay, all right, fine,” Cernunnos at last conceded. “I was just trying out a new thing; give me a break.”

His two friends laughed with him briefly until a commotion across the room got their attention. It was Kisin, standing in front of a couple of minor Babylonian deities, judging by their headgear. The crowd around the three of them instantly spread out into an informal circle of onlookers, while the two Babylonians squared off in front of the Mayan. The gathered group hushed quickly, aside from an occasional shout of encouragement for one side or the other to throw down.

“What’s going on?” Veritas asked, her vision blocked by the rest of the crowd.

Takhar shook his head, a feeling of anxiety growing in his chest. “Looks like trouble.”

“There’s always trouble at these, Tak,” Cernunnos chuckled softly. “Put a few hundred old gods in a room with this much liquor, someone’s going home bloodied.”

“Yeah, but I just hope they don’t - - - damn it,” Takhar interrupted his own statement as he saw the first punch get thrown, a sloppy right cross from one of the Babylonians. Fortunately, the two were clearly into their pints, and Kisin was able to dodge it easily and push the other god back and away from him. But in an instant, his other opponent was on him, and punches were quickly landed.

The room exploded in yells of “get him!” and “separate them!” while the three men punched and kicked at one another for several moments before being split up.

A pair of bouncers – huge and glowing elementals provided by Zeus and Odin – quickly hauled the three men to their feet and dragged them towards the doors.

“Come on,” Takhar said to his friends. “There’s going to be a problem, I think.”

“It’s just a fight,” Cernunnos scoffed. “And it’s not like any of those guys are in the big leagues or anything.”

But Takhar was insistent. “I’ll explain later.” The two others followed him as he made his way through the crowd, following the blue glow of the elementals.

By the time they cleared the exit, the bouncers were already heading back in, the three other gods having been unceremoniously deposited on the sidewalk. The two Babylonians were moving towards Kisin, who was sullenly standing over by one of the flame-gilded chariots stationed by the Valet desk.

Takhar pointed towards them, elbowing his tall friend. “Go discourage them,” he suggested.

Cernunnos cracked his knuckles. “Now it’s a party,” he said enthusiastically.

He caught the first Babylonian in the middle of an anti-Mayan insult, his right fist meeting with no resistance the side of the god’s face. The second Babylonian began turning towards the unexpected aggressor, but several seconds too late and too slow to be effective against the superior combatant. Cernunnos brought his arm back, catching the man in the throat with his forearm.

“Two Babs with one Stone,” Cernunnos joked, small wisps of smoke rising from the ends of his beard and the hairs on his head.

Satisfied that his friend had the other half of the situation well in hand, Takhar and Veritas drew near the angry-looking Kisin. Takhar saluted the man in kind greeting.

Kisin turned quickly, startled by Takhar’s approach, but Takhar held up his hands in a general gesture of pacifism.

“Hey, it’s fine, Kisin,” he said. “You remember me, right? I’m Takhar, we met a while back.”

Squinting, Kisin finally seemed to acknowledge him, and nodded slowly. “Celebration of the Norman Conquest, wasn’t it?”

Takhar chuckled. “That was the one. You were there with some lovely friend, weren’t you?”

“Tlazolteotl,” Kisin replied.

“Right. Very friendly girl – you still seeing each other?”

Kisin looked down at the ground, sighing. “No, it…didn’t really work out. Ironically, she cheated on me.”

Veritas glanced nervously at Takhar, but the Serer shook his head. “There are still a few monogamous gods, Vera.”

“No, no, I’m sure there are,” she said with a wink. “I’ve just never met one.”

Takhar thought this would be as good a time as any to introduce the two of them, even gesturing over towards their friend Cernunnos, who was at that moment shoving the two unconscious Babylonians into a rental rickshaw and paying the cab driver to haul them off to someplace in the middle of Siberia to sleep it off.

“So, what was that all about, Kisin?” Veritas asked him.

The Mayan god sighed. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said sadly. “The rest of the pantheon told me it was a bad idea.”

“Why is that?” she pressed.

“It’s the effing 2012 thing,” he said, finally. “Oh, sure, everyone’s been talking us up all year; in fact, the last two or three years have been better for us since… well, since Columbus, really. Coffers have been overflowing, we’ve even had converts. Do you know how long it’s been since anyone new came along and prayed to us?”

Cernunnos approached, clapping his hands against his legs. “Oh, don’t get me started,” he laughed. “None of us get a lot of traffic, these days.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Takhar nodded. “So is that why they were giving you a hard time? Prayer envy?”

Kisin shook his head slowly. “We’ve all been working overtime the past couple years. Eighty, ninety hour weeks. Haven’t even seen my kids in two winals. It’s been madness.”

“Overtime checks must be delicious,” Cernunnos said, trying to be positive.

“You get overtime?” Kisin looked shocked. “We’re salary.”

“Oh, jeez.”

Kisin nodded again. “It’s usually not so bad. Not too long ago, I would have loved to have had enough business to take up a whole day. But, bright side, I got my golf game pretty solid.”

“Golf?” Cernunnos’ face scrunched up. “I thought you guys played…what is that called, that game with the stone balls and the big stone rings? You know, like Football, but with death?”

“Pitz? Ollamaliztli?”

“That second one, I think,” Cernunnos said, running one of his beefy hands through his orange-tinged hair. “What’s the difference?”

“About a thousand years, give or take,” Kisin smiled.

Takhar glanced over his shoulder to make certain that the rickshaw was well gone. “So, those two – what were they saying that started this whole thing?”

Kisin sighed ruefully. “Well, you know the whole Mayan calendar thing, right?”

The Serer nodded. “I heard a few things, yes. I guess some of the mortals got, what, confused about it?”

“They buy a new Gregorian calendar every fricking year, and never moan about it. But my people come up with one calendar that lasts more than five thousand years – and with none of that leap year crap, no less – and do they give us any credit at all? No! And my calendar doesn’t make you have to count backwards.”

“Then again, no swimsuit models on your calendar,” Cernunnos chimed in. “Just the guy with his tongue sticking out.”

“One time!” Kisin groaned. “I told him not to carve it like that, but oh no, ‘you can’t silence my artistic voice’, he said. Freaking hipsters, I swear. So then, a few hundred years go by, everyone apparently forgets what a calendar is, and some nimrod gets it in his head that it is some kind of end of the world prediction. Who does that?”

“Christians,” Veratis winked, and the others nodded in agreement.

“Why would I want to blow all of this up?” Kisin said in exasperation. “Why would any of us do that? We made the stupid place here to be a land of growth and development, sure, but we made it out of love and that same artistic license to which idiotic calendar carvers ascribe!”

“It’s the whole mortality thing, you know?” Takhar mused. “They live temporally, these mortals. They think that since they die, everything has to die, too.”

Kisin exhaled loudly. “Talk about your delusions of grandeur. They wouldn’t know an apocalypse if one crawled up out of the primordial ooze and cracked them across the collective faces with a loaded ICBM.”

“Technically, ICBMs aren’t actually loa—“ Cernunnos began, but Takhar silenced him with a quick glare.

Takhar could hear a bit of a lingering drunken rage rising up in the Mayan deity – and it caused him no small amount of concern. “Look, Kisin, the party’s a bust anyway,” he lied gently. “Maybe you should just call it a night…?”

Kisin nodded his head, raised his bottle to his lips and finished off the last of the whiskey. “You’re probably right, Takhar. No sense pissing on about an end of the world anyway. Not like anyone would even recognize it if one happened.”

Cernunnos clapped him on the shoulder. “Mortals, right? Someone should show them what an end of the world really does look like, am I right?”

With a sullen grin, Kisin nodded at that, and handed the Irishman his empty bottle while Takhar flagged down another rickshaw.

A statuesque goddess stepped from the vehicle, gathering the folds of her elegant Greek dress around her as she stepped down. She nodded to Takhar and Kisin as the latter got into the rickshaw. Kisin waved his hand to Takhar.

“Thank you, my friend,” he said. “You gave me a lot to think about, and I won’t forget that. Please tell the others…well, I don’t know what to tell them. I suppose I just hope they’ll understand.”

“Understand what?”

But Kisin merely smiled enigmatically. “You’ll see.” He tapped the driver on the back and gestured for them to leave.

Takhar watched the rickshaw pull away, a sense of unease growing in his gut. The woman who had just emerged from the rickshaw turned again towards Takhar and leaned close. He then recognized her as Dione, Titaness of Greece. Her specialty was in prophesy.

“You’ll want to gather your friends and go after him,” she said. “You may wish to start in Central America.”

“Go after him?” he echoed. “Why? What… oh, good lord. He’s not going to… is he?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “You may wish to leave…now.”

He bowed respectfully, and gestured to Veritas and Cernunnos, who walked over as Dione left them to enter the party.

“Was that…?”

“The oracle, yes,” Takhar answered his large Irish friend. “And we have to go after Kisin, she says.”

“What? Why?”

The Serer shrugged ironically. “Oh, I don’t know, powerful and drunken death god, feeling a bit put out by accusations from his peers that he didn’t end the world last year? What could possibly go wrong?”

“Oh, hell.”

“Plus, Noon, what’d you just say to him? Something about ‘someone should show them what the end of the world looks like?”

“Shit.”

“Exactly.”

The band inside the dome was just breaking into an old R.E.M. cover song as the trio flagged down the next rickshaw and moved quickly to intercept the drunken path of destruction they were increasingly certain they would find.

* * * * *

They found him in Central America, standing atop one of the old structures in Xunantunich, a large set of Mayan ruins a few hours outside of Belize City. Kisin was dressed in a short-sleeved bowling shirt and cargo shorts, with light blue flip flops and ray ban sunglasses. To mortals, he would have looked precisely like a local, but dressed like a tourist.

As Takhar and his two companions approached, Kisin was holding up an iPhone and snapping photos of the area.

“It’s a funny thing, this place looks so much different without all the flowers and the animals,” he said with a shrug. “Though it really smelled like crap back then. Literally. Whoever gave mortals the idea for indoor plumbing, anyway?”

“Came from the Romans, would you believe it?” Takhar stood next to Kisin, sharing the view of the ruins. “Mantus, I think.”

Kisin chuckled. “Ha! That’s funny, I would have guessed Fontus.”

“I know, right? Funny world.”

The two gods stood side by side at the top of the pyramid, listening to the wind and the sounds of the distant tour guide explaining the extrapolated reasons for the great stone structures.

Takhar pointed a thumb down towards the tour group. “They ever get any of that shit right? The whole explanation for the whys and wherefores?”

“For these buildings?” Kisin shook his head. “They keep trying to say it’s from the Egyptians. As if we had cell phones back then. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why any of us bother.”

“It’s not like the old days, is it? Hard to fill a thimble with the actual faithful. Noon and Vera, we were just talking about that. Getting harder and harder to feel that old buzz from a city filled with adoring masses.”

Kisin shrugged his shoulders, releasing a long-practiced sigh of resignation. “Too many distractions,” he said. “Also, the internet is killing superstition. People only believe it if they read about it, or see a video about it. And that’s why,” he amended, gesturing down at the small gathering of tourists, “I’m starting with them.”

“Starting what with them?”

The Mayan god looked over at Takhar with an expression of surprise that the other god hadn’t already figured his intentions out. “The apocalypse, of course.”

“Wait, what?” Cernunnos took a brisk step forward but was stopped in place by a thunderous earthquake.

“Kisin, stop this madness!” Veritas pleaded. “The other gods will come here and stop you.” But as soon as the words left her mouth, she realized the truth of them. No one would come. None of the gods would raise a finger to impede his actions, even if they wanted to.

Which they did not.

Kisin paused, looking up at the sky. “Well, where are they, then? Here I am, about to sink an entire chunk of their continent, where are their lightning bolts and undead warriors? Where are the holy beams of fire from the sky, aimed to stay my hand?”

His eyes flashed from Takhar to Veritas to Cernunnos before slowly falling back to the Serer deity.

“They do not come, and you know the reason why. Even those whose followers number in the millions and who have the power to call down unimaginable wonders, know full well that the truth to their faith has failed to evolve past the astonishment of their majestic works and inexplicable miracles. The everyday miracles of breath and thought and feelings are ignored. The inventions of the modern day are looked at with more glee and amusement, having been forgotten that such devices were pure impossibilities only years before.”

“Cannae forget rainbows and wee bumblebees, no?”

With a wan smile, Kisin nodded at Cernunnos’ attempt at a joke. “We give them math, but they cannot explain how the bee can fly, nor why the rainbow is beautiful to them. They would prefer to argue the semantics of a subject no one can ever win, while the truth slips past their noses with every gentle breeze.”

“But that’s no reason to destroy it all,” Takhar said softly. “Death is no answer to faithlessness.”

“Is it not?”

Takhar looked down at the open spaces below them; the tourists had cleared out at the first earthquake, and as lightning began to pepper the sky, screams of fear could be heard in the distance. “Kisin, you can’t do this.”

“Of course I can,” the Mayan god replied casually. “This is my wheelhouse, the very thing they all prayed for me to do, centuries ago. I was created for the purpose of filling the faithless with fear and driving them to the forgiving bosom of the pantheon. The promise is thus kept.”

Vera stepped forward, a pillar of tranquility in the rising storm. She did not raise her voice to be heard above the tumult; Truth never speaks to the ears, but to the heart. “It will not accomplish that which you desire,” she said. “It will not make mankind love us, but they will fear us.”

Kisin laughed, and the clouds above them parted as large burning rocks tore through them to pummel the ground below them. “What care we gods for love? Are we all Venus or Aphrodite? Are we simple beings that only care for a singular form of belief? To fear us is an acceptable manner of adoration.”

Takhar stepped forward as well, to stand on Kisin’s left side. “But to know us is not to believe.”

For several seconds, the heavens fell silent. Screams still echoed across the jungle canopy, but they were mixed with the sounds of the wind blowing through the trees.

Kisin glared at him until he realized that Takhar was calm, serious. “What’s your point?”

“You know how this works, Kisin,” the Serer explained. “It is only in the struggle that their cries rise up; like a child’s kite upon the wind, it is only by restraint that we receive their prayers. It is their struggle through doubt that their love can find us at all. Or do you not feel their faith already waning?”

Kisin blinked slowly, then closed his eyes completely so that he could reach out, undistracted. It took him only moments to recognize the point Takhar was making.

“It… makes no difference,” he sighed. Almost immediately, the clouds began to dissipate, and the ground ceased its shaking. “They believe no more now than they did before I acted.”

Cernunnos and Veritas nodded in agreement.

Takhar looked out over the horizon, speaking the very words he had had to tell himself so many times before. It felt strangely cathartic to speak them aloud now. “All these displays do is cause people look to the heavens with curses or pleas on their lips, but no true faith in their hearts. Faith is found in the silence of the night, when confronting the darkness and despair of their own making.”

Takhar looked back over Kisin’s shoulder and nodded slightly towards his friends. Cernunnos in turn held out a hand to flag down one of the divine rickshaws, who appeared a moment later.

“Look,” Takhar said with a wry smile, “maybe we don’t have scores of the adoring masses, pleading their eternal loyalty to us, but we can always get a cab.”

Kisin chuckled at that, and Veritas nodded towards Takhar as well, confirming for him that the danger had passed, and that Kisin’s rage had faded.

They returned to the party, paid the driver and a pair of the other Mayan gods were waiting for them at the door. They clapped Kisin on the back in an enthusiastic welcome and the small group vanished again into the throng, leaving the trio of friends on the curb.

“How d’ye like that?” Cernunnos scoffed. “We talked’m from destroying the world, and not even a round of drinks fer our troubles!”

“If you were wanting gratitude,” Takhar said with a shake of his head, “you got into the wrong business.”

“Tis true, tis true,” replied his large Irish friend. “And in the end, I suppose it could’ve been worse,” he added, leading his friends back into the party.

“How do you suppose that, Noon?” Vera asked.

“It could’ve been one of them Norsemen tossers,” he said, taking a large mug of ale off a nearby platter. “Just be glad nobody’s giving them shit about that Ragnarok nonsense!”

From directly behind him, a broad shouldered man with long blonde hair threw down his own mug, causing it to shatter loudly on the floor. The band stopped, surprised by the sound, and the man spun, a mystical hammer appearing in his hand.

“That does it!” he yelled, pushing past Cernunnos and making his way quickly outside, where the rumble of thunder was already beginning to fill the air.

Cernunnos smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Please tell me that wasn’t - -“

Across the room, the Oracle looked his way, and shook her head sadly.

Takhar sighed, punching his friend on the shoulder. “Come on, you big idiot,” he said. “Let’s go try to calm Thor down.”

As the three friends once more left the celestial mixer, the band counted off again, jumping back into the song they had been playing.

“That’s right, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, aeroplanes…Lenny Bruce is not afraid….”