Curses! (3 page)

"...and the nasal bones are typically Mayan,” Harvey was now rattling on, “and there seems to be a hole drilled in the upper left incisor. Oh, and there are some Wormian bones at the lambdoidal suture, and—"

Gideon repressed a sigh. “Harvey, hold on. Step back from it a minute.” Obediently, Harvey leaped up. “No,” Gideon said with a smile. “I meant step back mentally. Try to look at the skull as a whole, as part of a person. What can you say about
her?"

Harvey slid back into his cane chair and frowned terrifically. “Um, about
her?
Well, I'm not sure..."

"Do you think she was a pretty girl?"

Harvey wriggled uncomfortably. It wasn't his kind of question. No right answer. “It's hard to say. From the Maya's point of view, I guess she was."

It wasn't a bad answer. By today's standards she would have been far from pretty, but surely the Maya would have thought her beautiful with her delicate, broad skull and those extraordinary, convex nasal bones. To make her prettier still her forehead had been artificially flattened when she was an infant, so that the top of her head was squeezed into the pointy hump they found so attractive. And the hole bored in her tooth had certainly been for a faceted jade pellet that was probably still at the bottom of the cenote. No doubt her ears had been pierced for pendants, her nasal septum for a plug, her left nostril for a gem. Very likely, her eyes had been permanently crossed in childhood by long months of focusing on a little ball of pitch dangling from a string tied to her hair. All to make her desirable.

He let out a long sigh. Amazing, the number of ways you could mutilate and deform human flesh and bone, given a little ingenuity. All that work and pain to make her desirable, and then they had killed her before she was twenty. And all Harvey saw was tubercles and protuberances.

"Okay,” Gideon said gently, “let's see if we can't look at her as a human being now, not just a mass of skeletal criteria. For example—"

"Gideon! Dr. Oliver! Hey, where are you?"

He recognized Leo Rose's bellow of a voice and sighed again. Tlaloc was one of those Horizon Foundation excavations that was supervised by professionals but staffed by pay-for-the-privilege amateurs who worked for two weeks or a month and usually turned out to be both the chief pleasure and the chief pain of the dig. Pleasure because of the artless, enthusiastic interest they showed in almost anything at all; pain because this same interest meant the professional staff rarely got ten minutes in a row to work on something without having to answer a well-meant but often inane question.

"Over here, Leo. We're behind the shed."

Bearlike and rumpled, the California real-estate developer lumbered into sight around the corner of the thickly overgrown Priest's House. Or what they called the Priest's House. Anthropologists didn't really know what these buildings had been, any more than they knew what any ancient Mayan building had been, or what the Maya had called their great cities and ceremonial centers (if they were actually ceremonial centers), or even what the Maya had called themselves. There was a hell of a lot, when you thought about it, that anthropologists didn't know and probably never would.

Leo was bouncing with excitement. “We found a fake wall, can you believe it? With a kind of little hidden room behind it, and this fantastic stone chest in it. Come on, we figured you'd want to see this. Oh, hiya, Harvey."

Gideon didn't have to be asked twice. He was up at once, carefully placing the girl's skull on the bean-bag ring that served as a cushion. Was there anyone on a dig, amateur or professional, who didn't harbor secret hopes of sealed rooms behind false walls? Not since Howard Carter knocked down that wall in 1922 and walked into the untouched tomb of Tutankhamen, there wasn't.

"Where? In the temple?"

"Underneath. In the stairwell."

Clearing the rubble-filled stairwell was the major ongoing task of the Tlaloc excavation. Since the dig had opened more than two years before, the director, Howard Bennett, had worked steadily at it with changing crews, boring down into the flattopped pyramid on which the little Temple of the Owls sat. Gideon, on leave from his teaching post, had come to Yucatan only two weeks before—when they had begun to bring up bones from the cenote—but he had long since learned that Howard's enthusiasm was centered on the buried passageway. Howard had staked his reputation, such as it was, on the unearthing of some great find when they finally got to the bottom. Why else, he wanted to know, would the Maya go to all the trouble of packing a perfectly good stairwell with tons of debris, if not to hide something of tremendous importance?

Gideon had been doubtful. Sometimes there were treasures at the bottom of such rubble-packed passages; much more Often there was nothing. The Maya had made a practice of enlarging their pyramids by using an old one as the core of a new one erected on top of it. The Pyramid of the Magicians at Uxmal had five such masonry “envelopes,” one inside the other, like the layers of an onion. And when the Maya built this way, they usually blocked up any hollow spaces in the original pyramid; for structural soundness, not to hide anything. But a false wall and a sealed room that was something else again.

"Did you reach the bottom, then?” Harvey asked as they trotted across the grassy plaza toward the pyramid.

No, Leo explained, huffing for breath, they hadn't found the base of the stairwell yet, although they had now dug down twenty-four steps. No, the hollow wall had been discovered on the landing that was just twelve steps down from the temple floor, at a level that had been exposed and unremarked for a year. Someone had noticed that the mortar on one of the walls was different, more crumbly, and when Howard had probed between the blocks of masonry with the point of a trowel, they had come loose.

At the foot of the pyramid Gideon nodded to the two straw-hatted Mayan laborers enjoying their break—cigars and lukewarm tea—on the bottom steps. In return he received two decorous, unsmiling nods. He jogged up the steaming, worn steps, Harvey bumping along beside him and Leo gasping behind, then entered the small building on the pyramid's flat top: the Temple of the Owls, so-called on account of the frieze that ran along its lintel. (They didn't look like owls to Gideon, but no one had much liked his “Temple of the Turkeys” suggestion.)

Inside, the structure was bare, with the look of a burned-out tenement. Ceilings, walls, and floor were coated with a limestone stucco made dismal and blotchy by centuries of intrusive plant growth, since removed, and a millennium of damp heat, still very much present. Only near the roofline were there a few faded streaks of green, blue, and red to suggest what it might have looked like in A.D. 900. The one unusual note was the square opening cut in the floor, and that, of course, led into the stairwell.

On the landing twelve steps below, most of the west wall had already been taken down, with the removed blocks neatly stacked and numbered with felt-tipped markers. The crew and another Mayan laborer were gazing mutely at the opening. Two portable lamps on the landing threw their garish yellow light into the small, astonishing room before them.

It is one of the great thrills of anthropology to look at something that was sealed up a thousand years ago, by the people of a great and vanished culture, and has lain unseen ever since. But this was something more, something out of a fairy tale...the Crystal Cave, was it? The room was a jeweled, sparkling white, made all the more dazzling by its contrast with the grimy stairwell—a fiercely glittering ice grotto in the heart of the Yucatan rain forest. But the ice was crystallized calcium carbonate, of course: stalactites on the ceiling, stalagmites on the floor, and a glistening, petrified sheen of it on the walls.

In the center was a waist-high stone chest three feet square, made of four massive slabs standing on their sides, and capped by a great, overhanging stone lid eight inches thick. The lid too was coated with crystal deposits, but through the milky veneer Gideon could see an intricately carved surface of extraordinary beauty. There were Long Count dates around the rim, and in the center a lovingly worked figure of the
halach-uinic,
the True Man, emerging from or disappearing into the jaws of an Underworld serpent. The red paint had faded to a pale rose. Other than that, the chest might have been finished that morning. The lid was magnificent, in itself a find of the first order. Gideon hardly dared think about what might be under it.

Howard Bennett hadn't seen him come in. Shirtless and built something like a sumo wrestler—sleekly corpulent, with thick, soapy flesh sheathing a heavily muscled frame—he was staring avidly at the lid. On his gleaming neck and shoulders, the skin twitched like a horse's. Gideon heard him laugh deep in his throat, softly and privately. The sound set off an odd shiver of apprehension at the back of Gideon's scalp.

Howard looked up to see the newcomers. “What do you think now?” he said, half exultantly, half challengingly. Gideon had not made a secret of his doubts about there being anything to find.

"It's fantastic,” he said sincerely. “I was dead wrong. Congratulations."

Under its sheen of sweat, Howard's beefy, dissipated face was deeply flushed. He wiped perspiration from his upper lip with the tip of an old paisley bandanna tied around his throat and laughed.

Howard Bennett laughed easily and often. His loose, jovial personality was an asset for his one-of-a-kind vocation: directing excavations manned by well-heeled amateurs as keen on vacationing as on digging. After a day at the site he was always game for an evening at the nearby Club Med or even a four-hour round trip to Merida, to the Maya Excelsior Bar, or La Discotheque, or the Boccacio 2000. At the Maya Excelsior, in fact, he was a Saturday-night fixture; he sat in with the small band, playing jazz clarinet, at which he was extraordinarily proficient.

He had had a brief university career; three years at three different institutions. He'd been a lackluster teacher, a less-than-responsible faculty member, and an indifferent researcher. But his formidable field methodology put him in demand as an excavation supervisor, and he was, to Gideon's knowledge, the only person who did this sort of thing for a living. He'd been on Latin American digs for over ten years now, the last two at Tlaloc. In that time he'd been back to the United States only twice, to renew his passport and visas. For more than a decade he had lived a gypsylike existence in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.

Gideon had briefly worked with him three years before, at a Mixtec site in Oaxaca, and had been worried about him then. Now it was worse. Howard's centerless, hard-living existence was showing: He was putting on weight, his features were getting blurry, and he was now finishing off a couple of beers at lunch in addition to his evening drinking. And he wasn't very interested in talking about archaeology with Gideon. His conversation ranged from griping about how miserably archaeologists were paid to frank envy of the way some of the rich amateurs could afford to live. For Howard, ten years of rubbing shoulders with high-living stockbrokers and businessmen had not been salutary. He was drinking more, deteriorating mentally and physically, and drifting deeper into professional obscurity.

At least he had been, until this startling find. He grinned at Gideon, blond eyebrows beetling. “What does it remind you of?"

"Palenque,” Gideon said quietly.

"Yeah,” Howard breathed. “Palenque!"

It would make anyone think of Palenque, the elegant ruin three hundred miles to the south in the even denser jungles of Chiapas. There, in 1952, in the staircase of a somewhat larger pyramid under a somewhat larger temple, Alberto Ruz Lhuillier had also found a room sealed behind a false wall, also containing a stone chest, much bigger than this one, with a finely carved lid. Inside had been one of the great finds of Meso-American archaeology. It was the skeleton of the ruler known as Pacal, lying regally on his back, swathed in the rich trappings of a Mayan lord: necklace laid upon necklace, enormous earrings, funerary mask, and diadem, all of polished jade; intricately carved rings on all ten fingers; a great pear-shaped pearl; a jade bead delicately placed between his teeth as food for his journey; a jade statue of the sun god at his feet to accompany him.

Howard stared hungrily at the chest. “What do you think is in it?” he asked Gideon and laughed again. His stiff, straw-blond hair was dark with sweat, as furrowed as if he'd been swimming. Gideon didn't like the feverish-looking red patches on his cheeks, or his vaguely reckless manner.

"Not much; the interior dimensions can't be more than two by two,” Gideon said reasonably, but Howard's excitement was practically crackling in the dank air, beginning to get to him. He felt the beginning of an ache at his temples and made himself relax his knotted jaw muscles. “If it's another royal burial I'm afraid they've scrunched him up a little to fit him in."

It was meant to ease the atmosphere. Harvey laughed dutifully, and a few of the crew members snickered, but Howard brayed; a nasal yawp that made the others glance uncomfortably at each other.

"You know what I'm going to do?” he said abruptly. “I'm going to get the lid up. Right now.” He rubbed his hands together mirthfully while sweat dripped from his chin. He turned to the laborer and spoke tersely in Spanish.

"Avelino, I want a tripod with a hand winch rigged up. And some bracing poles. Go tell the others."

Gideon frowned. This was a tricky operation, better left until the next day when preparations could be more calmly made. He began to say something but changed his mind. No director liked having his authority contested in public, and the leadership of the dig belonged in Howard's hands. Gideon was only there for a few weeks, strictly to analyze the skeletal material. Besides, it was always possible that Howard knew what he was doing.

For the moment it seemed that he did. His directions were concise and accurate, and the tiny Mayan workmen were used to lifting heavy things in cramped spaces. Working efficiently, they spoke quietly to each other in their soft, rustly language. In twenty minutes they had one edge of the lid raised three or four inches, enough to force several wooden rods under it to prop it up.