“They will need to bring neither food nor arms, for I, Nachi Cocom, and my people will provide these things. Thus can your people come on more quickly to ask the forgiveness of the god for traitorous acts, snake-like deceptions, and cowardly submission to strange white men.
“I have spoken. Messengers of Mani, eat, drink, rest, and then speed back the word of Nachi Cocom to—” and here again he smiled sardonically—“to his brother Ah Pula Xia.”
Thereupon the batab rose and departed, and his councilors likewise left the chamber.
But the chief councilor spoke in a whisper to his brother, leader of the warriors, and said:
“No man may know but the batab himself what thoughts are deep buried in his mind, but I know and fear that thin-lipped smile, and as he spoke to the messengers of Mani a strange feeling came over me like ek muyal, the black cloud. I had a fear of something, intangible but terrible; something he is planning that will bring down upon us the annihilating wrath of the gods.”
“Brother,” his companion answered, “do not voice such thoughts nor even think them. I have forgotten that you spoke. Remember that the will of the batab is supreme. We may not question it. I also felt your fear, but say no more!”
Swiftly, tirelessly the messengers of Mani sped on their homeward journey; over sunlit plains, threaded by the smooth worn paths of the jaguar and the wild boar; through cool forests whose shade beckoned enticingly; past wells of crystal-clear water where thirst cried to be quenched. But they stopped not at all until, as the sun sank slowly down into the west, they passed between the great parched corn-fields of Mani and at last reached the palace of the batab.
So quickly had the holpopes returned that the batab said of them, “They are birds, not men.”
And the nacon answered: “If they are birds, then are they eagles, for these three holpopes in the battle with the Uitzes killed three warriors and took three prisoners.”
The batab cast an approving glance at the deep-chested, thin-flanked young holpopes and said: