"The Main God be witness! Supplies in the inland Maya jungle are extremely limited, and the roads are terribly hard to travel—harder even than the Zacatecas Wasteland. The Maya Tribes even have a special description for it: 'trees as many as grass, gathering into an endless sea of grass, an endless sea of forest!'..."
"It is precisely because of the limits on jungle supplies that after the collapse of the Mayapan Kingdom, the wars and slaughter between the clan chiefdoms almost never saw expeditions of more than ten thousand men. The usual scale of fighting in the jungle, even for three great clans with populations of several hundred thousand like the Xiu, Canul, and Kapul, was at most the deployment of several thousand warriors..."
"In an environment like this, the defending side clearly held the advantage of terrain! Therefore, the dozen or so clans that split off after Mayapan's fall, even after fighting each other for decades, never saw any one side able to destroy another... The clan states warred without end, yet there was no sign at all of any reunification..."
"On one hand, the warriors of each clan slaughtered one another along the borders, fighting over strongholds, farmland, and water sources. On the other, the God-descendants of the ruling clans intermarried, each side able to climb the family tree to claim kinship. The status of the God-descendants of each clan stood far, far above that of warriors. Even if they were captured in war, they were rarely killed, unless it was a blood feud like that between the Xiu and Cocom... Hmm, intermarriage? Kinship? Xiu and Canul?..."
The jungle beneath the moon was deep and dark as the sea. The Lantern Cicada had fallen silent, and low frog calls gradually drummed through the forest. The Lowland Maya was