The Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh

The story

Beneath the earth, where hunters never go, there was a kingdom called Xibalba, the Place of Fear.

It was ruled by twelve lords, and the two most terrible were called One Death and Seven Death. They spent their days on their stone benches, dreaming up traps. To travellers who arrived, they offered a seat of red-hot stone. To warriors, a cup of icy water. And no one ever went back up again.

One day, as they sat in the shadows, they heard something.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

A sharp, steady sound, coming from far above. A rubber ball was bouncing on the ball court over their heads, and every blow shook a little dust down from the ceiling.

“Who are they?” growled One Death.

“Two boys,” said a servant. “They are playing ball. Their names are Hunahpu and Xbalanque.”

The two lords looked at each other. They knew that name. Long ago they had killed a man called Hun Hunahpu, and his brother too. They had also played ball, and they too had made far too much noise.

The twins were that man's sons. They had been born after his death, and they had only one wish: to become the best ball players in the world. They had been brought up by their grandmother, Xmucane, in a house in the countryside. Their older half-brothers, Hun Batz and Hun Chouen, were jealous of them, until the twins played a trick on them and turned them into monkeys, and off they leapt through the branches.

Now Hunahpu and Xbalanque practised every day. But they knew that sooner or later the lords of Xibalba would send for them.

One morning four owls arrived.

“The lords invite you to play with them,” they said. “Come at once.”

Before leaving, the twins planted two maize plants in their grandmother's house. “As long as the plants are green,” they said, “we will be alive. If they dry up, it will mean we are dead. Do not cry.”

They went down a steep path, across two black rivers, and came to a hall with a row of seats. A man made of wood and a man made of straw, dressed as lords, sat on the first two.

But the twins had sent a mosquito ahead of them. In the dark it had bitten the lords one by one, and at every bite someone had cried out his own name or his neighbour's. The wooden dummies, of course, had said nothing.

So when the hall opened, Hunahpu and Xbalanque walked straight past the dummies without a glance. They greeted the real lords one by one, calling each of them by name: “Good morning, One Death. Good morning, Seven Death.” From the benches at the back, not a single laugh rang out. It was the only time anyone down there was ever lost for words.

“Do sit down,” said One Death, pointing to a bench.

“No, thank you,” answered Hunahpu. “That is a burning-hot stone. Nobody sits on that.”

Whatever smiles were left faded away.

So the lords led them off to spend the night in the House of Darkness, and gave each of them a pine torch and a cigar. “In the morning,” they said, “you will give them back to us whole.”

It was impossible. A lit torch burns down; a lit cigar burns down. But the twins had thought of everything. On the torch they put a few red macaw feathers, which from a distance looked like a flame. On the tips of the cigars, two fireflies. In the morning, everything was whole.

The lords roared. They sent the twins into the House of Cold, where the frost bit to the bone, and in the morning they found them alive. Then they shut them in the House of Jaguars, but the twins, with bones in their hands, fed the beasts until they were full. So the lords sent them into the House of Bats.

There, among the shadows, flew Camazotz, the death bat. Hunahpu hid inside his blowgun, but he wanted to peek out for a moment to see if it was day yet, and the bat caught him.

For a whole night, Hunahpu had no head.

The lords took his head to the ball court and used it as a ball.

Xbalanque did not lose heart. He called all the animals of the earth, and from among everything they brought he chose a squash, carved it carefully, and put it in place of his brother's head. It looked real. Then he made a plan with a rabbit, and told it to hide on the court. At the start of the game, when the ball was thrown into the air, the rabbit bounded out of the court. The lords and the crowd ran after it, and in the commotion Xbalanque took back Hunahpu's real head and put it in its place.

When the lords realised, they were furious. The ball they were now playing with was the squash, and during the game it burst into a thousand seeds.

“Burn them,” ordered One Death.

They built a great pyre. But the twins knew this was their last trial, and they had decided to face it in their own way. They climbed onto the flames by themselves, and their ashes were thrown into the river.

On the fifth day, two little boys popped up out of the water. They were two fish, or rather two boys with fins, and they were handsome and full of jokes. The next day they were boys again, dressed as jugglers, and they began to travel from village to village, dancing.

They did incredible things. They burned down a house and built it up again. One would let the other kill him, as a trick, and the other would bring him back to life with a single breath.

Word reached Xibalba. “Bring them here,” ordered One Death. “I want to see.”

The twins were led into the hall. They put on their show before the lords, and it was so marvellous that all twelve lords clapped.

“Do it to us!” shouted One Death. “Kill me and bring me back to life!”

So the twins took One Death, and then Seven Death, and let them die. But they did not bring them back to life. The other lords, seeing the trick, fled into the shadows and surrendered, begging for mercy. The twins told them who they really were: the sons of the Hun Hunahpu they had killed.

“You will never be as powerful as you were,” they said. “We will leave you this kingdom, but you will no longer have the power to kill those who do not deserve it.”

Meanwhile, in the house in the countryside, their grandmother had never stopped watching the two maize plants. On the day of the pyre they had drooped, and she had wept in silence. On the fifth day they had stood up again, as green as before.

The Popol Vuh says that in the end the two brothers rose into the sky: one became the Sun, the other the Moon. And the K'iche' Maya who told this story in the evening, around the fire, would tell the children to look up: in that light was someone who had conquered fear without using force.