The Hero Twins

There were once two brothers named One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, fathers of twins. They loved to play the ball game on a court above the underworld. The lords of the underworld, called Xibalba, heard the noise of their play through the cracks in the earth and grew angry. They sent up messengers to summon the brothers down to play with them.

The brothers came down. The lords of Xibalba tricked them at every turn, made fools of them in the testing houses, and at last killed them both. They buried One Hunahpu's head in a forked tree at the side of the road, and the tree at once put out fruit. The lords of Xibalba forbade anyone to come near the tree.

A young woman of Xibalba named Lady Blood, daughter of one of the lords, heard about the tree and came to look. She reached out for one of the strange fruits. The skull of One Hunahpu spoke from the tree. "Stretch out your hand," he said. She stretched it out. He spit into her open palm. "From this you have something. By my spit you have conceived." She wiped her palm on her dress. There was nothing there. But she went home pregnant.

Her father grew angry. He ordered her killed. She fled up out of Xibalba to the surface of the earth. She gave birth to twins, two boys: Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the Hero Twins. They were the children of the buried brother, raised by their grandmother on earth.

The twins grew clever. They had the ball gear of their father stored in the rafters of the grandmother's house. One day they took it down and began to play the ball game on the same court above Xibalba. The lords of Xibalba heard the noise again, and again were angered, and again sent messengers up to summon the players down.

The twins were warned by their grandmother and by a louse and a frog and a snake and a bird, in a chain of messengers. They went down ready.

The lords of Xibalba had set their tests. There were six houses of trial: the Dark House, the Cold House, the Jaguar House, the Bat House, the Razor House, and the Fire House. Anyone who survived all six played the ball game with the lords for the right to live.

The twins went into the Dark House first. The lords gave them a torch and two cigars and said: light all of these and burn them all night and bring them back unburned in the morning. The twins, knowing the trick, replaced the torch with a macaw's red tail feather and put fireflies on the ends of the cigars. In the morning they brought back unburned torch and cigars. The lords were astonished.

In the Cold House, the twins kept warm with their own fire and survived the night. In the Jaguar House, they fed the jaguars bones to chew so they would not look at the twins. In the Razor House, they spoke to the razors and persuaded them to cut only animals, not them. In the Fire House, they kept down low and the flames went over them.

In the Bat House, they hid inside their own blowguns. But the great Killer Bat, Camazotz, came in the night, and Hunahpu's curiosity got the better of him. He looked out of the blowgun. The bat snipped off his head with one bite. The head rolled out the door and fell onto the ball court below.

His brother Xbalanque, in despair, called for help. The animals of the world brought him a turtle. He carved the turtle with the features of Hunahpu and set it in place of the missing head. He told a rabbit to wait at the edge of the ball court. The next morning the lords of Xibalba came down to play, expecting an easy victory now that one twin was decapitated. They threw the ball. Xbalanque hit it out of the court on purpose. The rabbit, on cue, hopped out from the brush. The lords ran after the rabbit, thinking it was the ball. While they were gone, Xbalanque slipped over to where Hunahpu's real head was, took the turtle off, replaced the real head, and Hunahpu was whole again.

When the lords came back, the twins were standing together unhurt. They played and won.

The lords had one more plan. They built a great fire pit and challenged the twins to leap over it. The twins knew the fire pit was the trap. They walked up and jumped in.

The lords thought they had won. They burned the bodies and ground the bones into powder and threw the powder into the river.

But the powder would not float away. The next day, fish appeared in the river. By the day after that, the fish had become two boys, naked and laughing, walking up out of the water as the twins again. They came back as wandering performers, dancers and tricksters. They came into Xibalba in disguise.

They put on a show for the lords. They danced. They cut a dog open and brought it back to life. They burned a house and put it out. The lords were delighted. The lords said: cut us open and bring us back to life. Try it on us.

The twins took the highest two lords of Xibalba, killed them, and did not bring them back. The other lords saw what was happening and tried to escape. The twins held them. They revealed themselves. "We are the sons of those you killed."

The lower lords of Xibalba, terrified, threw themselves on their faces and begged for mercy. The twins agreed not to kill them, but on a condition: from now on, Xibalba would have no power over real people. They could only afflict those who had committed real wrongs. They could not just take anyone they wished. The lower lords accepted.

The twins climbed up out of Xibalba. They went up into the sky and became the sun and the moon. There they are still, burning over the world. Their father, One Hunahpu, was the maize god. They had risen from the place of the dead and made it less dangerous, and they had become the great lights of the day and the night.

This is what the K'iche' people of Guatemala remember. The Hero Twins are still up there. The lords of Xibalba are still down below, but their power is held to its limits, by the bargain.