The bird that sings when water moves

Somewhere in the Maya lowlands, in the fifth century. A feast, imagined.

The vessel is carried in by both hands and set down on its four square feet, and for a moment nobody speaks to it. It is black and burnished, about the height of a forearm, two tall cylinders joined side by side like twins who never agreed to separate. On top of each cylinder is a lid, and on each lid someone is waiting.

On the left perches the great bird. Its feathered wings are modelled and incised so finely that each plume has its own edge, its legs are scaled, its talons grip the rim. From its open beak hangs a serpent with a head at each end. It wears jewels: a diadem, round earflares, a heavy necklace with a pendant. Its square eyes, marked with a hooked pupil, are the eyes Maya artists gave to beings who could see more than people do. On the right lid, facing it, kneels a young man in a feathered headdress, holding out a bundle in both hands. He looks at the bird with a fixed, unblinking reverence. Between the two chambers, on the front, a small furred creature in a necklace, feline or monkey, scrambles upward toward them both.

Then someone lifts the young man’s lid, which is the one that comes off, and pours.

Water runs into his chamber and pushes the air ahead of it, through the hollow bridge between the cylinders and up into the other side, where the bird’s lid is sealed shut. Hidden inside the bird’s head is a small round chamber. The air finds it and comes out as a whistle. The bird, offered to, answers.

That is what the Met’s curators describe from an X-ray of the head: a whistle invisible from outside, built into a pot so that pouring would make it sing. The bird is the one scholars call the Principal Bird Deity, revered as a manifestation of Itzamnaaj, the old god of the sky, and the young man’s humble pose may be a trick, since in other stories the bird is brought down by a hunter with a blowgun. The vessel may belong to a set of three; one was excavated from a tomb at Calakmul.

In New York the lid stays on and the chambers stay dry, and nobody has heard the bird sing in a long time.

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