The Hero Twins in Xibalba

The summons comes by owl.

Four owls fly up from Xibalba — Shooting Owl, One-Legged Owl, Macaw Owl, Skull Owl — the messengers of the Lords of Death. They climb the cliff road that joins the upper world to the lower, and they perch in the courtyard where the Twins are playing ball.

One Death and Seven Death send for you, the owls say. They have heard the noise of your ball. Their floor shakes. They want a game.

The grandmother of the Twins begins to cry. She knows what happened to the Twins’ father. One Hunahpú had played ball above Xibalba and the Lords had heard the noise and called him down, and he had gone, and they had killed him in the House of Knives, and they had hung his head from a calabash tree at the road-fork, and the head had spat into the hand of a maiden who passed by, and that was how the Twins were conceived. The story is in the family.

But the Twins are not their father.

We will go, says Hunahpú.

They take their blowguns. They take a hair from their grandmother’s head and a feather from a parrot and the breath of a mosquito, and they go down the cliff road into Xibalba.

---

The road tries to kill them first.

The river of blood — they walk on their blowguns laid end to end across it. The river of pus — same. The crossroads of four colored roads, where most travelers choose wrong and are lost — they send the mosquito ahead to bite the Lords on the bench so they can hear which is which by the cries.

The Lords of Xibalba sit in a row on a long bench in the council house. The first two are mannequins of carved wood — the trick that gets every traveler. The Twins walk past the mannequins.

Greetings, One Death, says Hunahpú to the third one on the bench.

Greetings, Seven Death, says Xbalanqué to the fourth.

The Lords look at each other. No one has ever named them on the first try.

Sit down, says One Death, gesturing to a stone bench.

That bench is hot, says Hunahpú. We will stand.

The bench is glowing. They have not even sat in it. The first trick has failed.

The Lords are angry. They send the Twins to spend the night in the Dark House.

---

There are six houses of trial in Xibalba.

The Dark House — pure night, no fire. The Twins are given torches and cigars and told they must return them in the morning unburned. They put fireflies on the tip of the cigars and red macaw feathers on the torches, and the lights flicker all night, and in the morning the cigars are whole and the torches are whole. The Lords gnash their teeth.

The Razor House — knives that move on their own, slashing at anything that breathes. The Twins speak to the knives. We give you the flesh of all animals to cut, they say, if you stop cutting at us. The knives agree. They have always wanted that contract.

The Cold House — wind from the icefields blowing all night. The Twins burn pine cones. They are warm.

The Jaguar House — full of jaguars. They feed the jaguars bones. The jaguars are satisfied.

The Fire House — flames floor to ceiling. They are not burned.

The Bat House — the killer bats of Xibalba, Camazotz, the lords of the leather wing. The Twins climb into their blowguns to sleep. But Hunahpú looks out at dawn to see if the sun is rising, and a bat — Camazotz himself — sweeps down and shears off his head.

The Lords of Xibalba take the head. They hang it over the ball court for the morning’s game.

---

Xbalanqué is alone with a corpse and a brother’s head he cannot reach.

He thinks for a long time. Then he calls to the animals — the rabbit, the deer, the coati — and he tells them what to do.

He carves a head from a squash, a chilacayote gourd. He sticks it on his brother’s body. He whispers into the gourd, and the gourd opens its eyes. It is not a perfect head. It will fool the Lords for a few innings.

The game begins.

The Lords have brought their own ball — Hunahpú’s actual head, painted, hard as rubber. Xbalanqué bounces it once, twice, and on the third bounce hits it so hard it flies into the brush at the edge of the court. The rabbit, who has been waiting in the brush — paid in advance — bolts from cover. The Lords, every one of them, chase the rabbit. They are gods of decay but they cannot resist a bouncing thing.

Xbalanqué runs to the head. He pulls the squash off his brother’s neck. He puts the real head back. Hunahpú stands up, alive, and the brothers walk back onto the court holding the squash where the ball used to be.

When the Lords return — empty-handed, panting — the Twins serve. The squash splits open against the wall of the court. The seeds spill across the floor.

That, says Hunahpú, is the trick. Now you know what we are.

---

The Lords decide to kill them properly this time.

They build a great oven and dig a stone-lined pit and fill it with fire, and they invite the Twins to leap over it four times, as a game. The Twins know. They have seen the script.

A game? says Xbalanqué. Very well.

They join hands and jump straight into the fire.

The Lords cheer. They are finally rid of these troublemakers. They grind the bones of the Twins to powder and pour the powder into the river that runs under Xibalba, the way you drown unwanted ash.

The river carries the bone-meal a long way. After five days, in a quiet bend, two boys rise from the water — fish-tailed, then human-tailed, then human. They walk out onto the riverbank dripping and stretching their fingers as if they have been folded up.

They are the Twins again. Death has not held.

---

They go back to Xibalba in disguise — as wandering performers, ragged, painted with soot. They dance the dance of the weasel and the dance of the swallow. They sacrifice a dog and bring it back to life. They burn down a house and unburn it. The Lords hear about them.

Bring those poor fellows here, the Lords command. We want a show.

The Twins arrive at the council house. They dance. They sacrifice each other — Xbalanqué cuts Hunahpú into pieces, then claps once, and Hunahpú stands up whole. The Lords are delighted. The Lords are screaming with laughter.

Do it to us! shouts One Death. Sacrifice us! We want to feel it!

As you wish, say the Twins.

They cut One Death into pieces. They do not clap.

They cut Seven Death into pieces. They do not clap.

The remaining Lords look at each other and at the floor and they understand, all at once, that the dance was never a dance.

From this day, the Twins announce, you will not have great offerings. You will receive only the broken pots, the gum of the resin tree, the things people leave for the dead in passing. The high prayers will not come to you. You will be lesser.

The Lords of Xibalba kneel. They accept the demotion. There is nothing else to do.

---

The Twins go to the calabash tree at the road-fork. They take down their father’s skull. They speak to it. They cannot quite bring him back — some debts of death are permanent — but they place him in honor at the center of the field, where the maize will grow, and where farmers ever after will speak to him at planting.

Then they climb.

They climb the smoke of a great fire. They climb past the upper roads of Xibalba. They climb into the firmament. Hunahpú becomes the Sun. Xbalanqué becomes the Moon. They take their places in the sky, and the four hundred boys who had died unjustly long ago become the stars around them — the Pleiades, called Motz in K’iche’, the seed-cluster of heaven.

The world below has its lights now. The maize will grow.

---

The Popol Vuh was written down in K’iche’ Maya, in Latin script, sometime between 1554 and 1558, by an anonymous noble who knew that the Spanish were burning every codex they could find. He copied it in secret. The original is lost. A Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez found a copy around 1701 and translated it into Spanish, and that is the only reason any of this survives.

The story is older than the manuscript by uncountable centuries. The Hero Twins appear on Maya pottery from the Classic period, eight hundred years before the conquest. They are still in the sky. The maize is still grown by farmers who, in some villages, still speak to the seed at planting.

The Lords of Death were not destroyed. They were demoted. That is the Maya wisdom: you cannot kill decay. You can only refuse to give it the high offerings. You can only send the children up into the sky to become the lights.