Alien's Concubine, The (23 page)

One would’ve thought that a being that
existed for centuries would have all the patience in the world.
After all, time couldn’t mean much to someone like that.

She didn’t like to think that there
might be a reason why he’d become impatient. Regardless of what
that meant in relation to her own life span expectations, she
wanted to think of him being forever. She could live with her own
mortality. She couldn’t bear the thought that he might simply cease
to exist.

Needless to say, she didn’t rest much
despite the opportunity to do so. She was almost as tired when she
woke the following morning as she had been when she went to bed,
but excitement threaded her veins as she rose and performed her
morning ritual. By the time she was prepared to face the day her
heart was already skipping with expectancy.

The scary ladders leading down into
the pit had been replaced by an even scarier switchback track that
was dangerously narrow and steep. Metal poles had been planted
along the outer edge and a guy wire threaded through to give the
illusion of protection, but it didn’t do a thing for Gaby. She was
as certain as she wanted to be that one body slamming into the
‘safety fence’ would be enough to take out the whole fucking lot of
them and the only result would be that one arrived at the bottom
with a ton of wire and posts instead of just rocks and dirt. Burros
had been added to the equation, too. Everyone mounted on one,
including her, even though she trusted her own surefootedness much
more than she trusted theirs, and the entire team wound downward on
the smelly beasts.

It was rather like an excursion into
the Grand Canyon, except the pit wasn’t even nearly as deep and
probably not nearly as safe, either. The temple, its upper reaches
wreathed in the morning mists, was an awesome sight to behold. Most
of the focus of the digging had been concentrated around unearthing
the structure and it was massive. Staring at it as they wound
downward, Gaby marveled at the construction of such a mammoth
structure by primitive man, wondering how many generations had
labored on it. It seemed impossible to believe that it hadn’t taken
generations to build, but then it was staggering that they’d
managed it at all.

“
The remains we discovered
are on the lowest level,” Dr. Sheffield said as they reached the
bottom and he managed to maneuver his burro alongside
hers.

Gaby dragged her gaze from the temple
and looked at him. “How many?”

He shook his head. “We haven’t
determined. I decided to leave the chamber untouched until you
could examine it. I didn’t want to take the chance of disturbing
possible evidence.”

They stopped outside the entrance,
which Gaby saw had been sealed and obviously broken into when
they’d uncovered the lowest level. Dr. Sheffield moved to a small
generator and started it. Light immediately flooded the interior
and spilled out of the entrance.

Gaby studied it while she waited for
Dr. Sheffield to rejoin her. “If you don’t mind,” she said when he
came to stand beside her, “I’d like to go in alone for now and see
what my first impressions are.”

Dr. Sheffield frowned but finally
nodded in agreement. Calling to the other team members, he led them
away.

The sense of Anka’s presence was far
stronger now, but then so were her memories. Shrugging it off after
a while, Gaby braced herself and moved to the entrance. From the
opening, she saw that the chamber was enormous, maybe three times
the size of the chamber they’d first found near the top of the
edifice. Columns sprouted from the floor like a denuded forest—a
manmade forest because they were lined up in neat, precise rows.
Even with the lights that had been rigged up inside, there were
shadows and Gaby tried to envision what it must have looked like in
the days when the place was used—for whatever purpose it had
served. It seemed it must have served some purpose. She couldn’t
imagine that they would have built something like this if it hadn’t
been a place of gathering.

The proportions also suggested that
there must have been hundreds of souls who had gathered. Maybe it
hadn’t merely been a temple for worship? Maybe this had been the
center for government as well as worship?

As she stepped inside and looked
around, she saw that an elaborate frieze ran the perimeters of the
walls just as they had in the burial chamber of Anka. Early
cultures rarely had a written language, but they still liked to
record the events of their lives and generally did so in
pictures.

She felt the urge to examine them, but
she’d been summoned to examine the remains found inside. Letting
out a shaky breath, she moved to the low wall that formed a pit in
the center of the great room. She would’ve suspected that it had
been built as a fire pit, probably for light more than heat except
for the scaffolding around it that indicated something else
entirely.

But maybe that had been the original
purpose?

Scanning the ceiling above the pit,
she saw nothing that looked like soot to support that theory and as
she drew closer, she also saw that the workmanship that had gone
into building the pit wasn’t the same careful craftsmanship that
had gone into building the temple. It looked hastily and
haphazardly done, as if the workers hadn’t been as skilled or they
had just been in a hurry to get the job done and it actually was
rushed.

Stone slabs had been stacked beside
the pit, which meant it had been sealed when Dr. Sheffield’s team
had found it.

Ignoring that for the moment, Gaby
climbed the scaffolding at last and looked down into the pit.
Horror filled her as she stared down at the skeletal remains, their
bare skulls grinning up at her in frozen screams. This, she saw
instantly, was no ordinary burial pit. The corpses had not been
carefully prepared for burial and carefully settled in their final
resting place. They’d been murdered and tossed into the pit—or
maybe even tossed inside and buried alive.

Chapter Thirteen

A shudder went through Gaby. Bile rose
in her throat.

As her shocked gaze inspected the
tangled bodies, she saw fury in the slaughter. There were broken
bones and cracked skulls. She didn’t believe this was no more than
the result of careless burial. Whoever they were, they’d been
brutally attacked and beaten to death, not offered up in any kind
of ritual sacrifice.

Loathe as she was to enter the pit,
there was no way to examine them and determine if her first
impression was right except to join them. Her flesh crawled at the
thought, but after a moment she took her recorder out and turned it
on. Making a note of the date and time, she recited her first
impressions and finally moved to the ladder to climb
down.

She wasn’t prone to such fanciful
notions as ‘feeling’ a sense of brooding evil, and yet as she
carefully climbed down the ladder, she felt just that, as if
something undetected by her normal senses resided there. Brushing
the thoughts aside, she knelt beside the first body and examined it
carefully. It was the body of a woman barely five feet in height.
The size threw her for several moments. She glanced around, noting
that none of the skeletons within view looked much, if any, bigger
and she thought at first that the bodies might be children. The
skeleton she was examining was definitely a woman, though. The
bones of her pelvis indicated she’d given birth, so she was mature
enough for that. Given the life spans and practices of the
ancients, she might still have been young enough to be considered a
child by modern standards—maybe no more than thirteen to fifteen
years of age, but by ancient standards a girl capable of bearing a
child was a woman full grown.

There was a hole in her skull nearly
as big as Gaby’s fist. It didn’t take a scientist to figure out the
cause of death. She examined the broken bone anyway, just to be
sure it was unlikely to be the result of something that had
happened after death. When she’d satisfied her initial impression,
she moved to the next body, and then next. She lost track of the
time as she studied one after another.

Dr. Sheffield startled the hell out of
her when he appeared above her some time later. “Ready to break for
lunch?”

She stared up at him blankly, trying
to get her racing heart under control. Food was the furthest thing
from her mind, but she nodded anyway. The urge to race from the pit
into the sunlight was nearly uncontrollable once the offer was made
to relieve her.

A portable chemical toilet had been
set up near where the others were working, she discovered when he
led her to where the others had gathered around an umbrella shaded
portable table to eat their sandwiches. She hated the things but
they beat the hell out of squatting in the woods and baring her ass
to snake bite. The thing still had to be inspected for deadly
critters before she could use it.

When she’d used a canteen to wash up,
she joined the other members of the team at the table. No one said
anything for a few minutes, but she could feel their questioning
gazes as she struggled to eat the food provided.

“
What did you make of it?”
Dr. Sheffield finally asked.

Giving up the effort to chew and
swallow, Gaby set the remains of her sandwich down. “It was a
massacre. The thing that puzzles me is that they were entombed at
all.”

His brows rose. Everyone at the table
exchanged glances. “You don’t think it was a sacrificial
bloodletting?” Mark asked finally.

Gaby shook her head. “Those women were
butchered. Clearly, the motivation was rage.”

“
Women?” Sheila gasped in
obvious shock.

Gaby glanced at her in surprise and
then looked at the others. She could see this was news to them.
“Granted I’ve only examined maybe a third of them, but, yes, it’s
all women as far as I can tell in my preliminary examination. The
bodies were tossed into the pit after they were killed—at least
most of them seemed to be. They’re lying on top of one another, but
the sizes of the skeletons indicate women.” She cleared her throat,
swallowing against the sickness that cloyed her throat. “Some of
them were still alive when it was sealed, probably already dying,
but not dead.”

Several of the students looked
downright green at that announcement. Even Dr. Sheffield and Dr.
Ramiro, who was new to the dig, looked more than a little
disturbed.

“
You’ve determined this
for certain?”

“
There are … claw marks
along the sides in several places.”

She was relieved they accepted it at
that and didn’t demand a more detailed explanation or question
whether or not she was certain that the marks been made by someone
trying to claw their way out. She was as certain as she could be
that it wasn’t tool marks. In the first place, there could be no
rhyme or reason for tool marks inside, especially not in that
pattern. In the second, one of the women had died with her arm
extended and her hand resting against the wall she’d been clawing
at.

Reluctance coiled in her belly when
everyone rose to return to work, but she did her best to look
unconcerned even if she couldn’t manage the enthusiasm everyone
else displayed at getting back to the adventure of discovery. By
late afternoon, she’d counted twenty eight bodies. As far she could
tell, that was all, but they wouldn’t be absolutely certain until
the remains had been removed and all bones accounted
for.

She’d discovered bits and pieces of
garments strewn among the skeletal remains. It seemed improbable
that ordinary garments would have survived so long without
something that would’ve been used to preserve them despite the fact
that the crypt seemed to have been sealed quite well—and clearly no
effort had been made to preserve the bodies entombed. A closer
examination revealed that they were extraordinary. Gold threads had
been woven together to form the pieces she unearthed and jewels
were sewn into the garment to form decorative patterns.

That only deepened the mystery of the
bodies, though. Their connection to the temple itself seemed
inarguable. She couldn’t imagine that ordinary citizens would have
worn such things. Priestesses? But if that was so, why had they
been murdered and by whom?

She realized as she trudged back to
the living quarters of the archeology team that evening that it was
unlikely she would find the answers to the mystery in the tomb
itself. They might never know. It seemed equally unlikely that the
deed would’ve been recorded in the pictorial record on the temple
walls, but she decided it was worth a look. She might at least find
something that hinted at the reason for the massacre.

As tired as she was once she’d bathed
and eaten, she was still restless, her mind on the walls of the
temple and the clues she might find. She would have to begin
excavating the bodies the next day, or at least oversee the work to
try to keep the remains from being tossed together and pieces
separated from the proper owner. Otherwise she was going to have
her hands full just with the sorting. And, of course, once all the
bodies were removed she would be caught up in sifting the debris
beneath them for clues, and then after that she would be tied up
with carefully examining each body to record everything that could
be discovered.