Curses! (8 page)
Either way, it didn't much matter anymore. Abe had engaged guards to watch over the site at night, and the official stairwell excavation was about to reopen. There would be no more secret digging. Still, Gideon would dearly have liked to know what had been going on.
He turned in his chair and gave his attention to Dr. Garrison, who had just cleared her throat meaningfully.
"Copies are now being made for each of you,” she said, “but I think we should begin without waiting further. Dr. Villanueva and I must leave for Mexico City in less than an hour. An early-morning press conference has been scheduled."
She straightened her pince-nez and folded her hands before her on the table. “I have rendered this material in as exact and literal a manner as possible, leaving interpretation to others,” she explained. “The polysynthetic Mayan characteristic of reliance on verbal nouns has necessarily been transformed into our own grammar. Beyond that, I have tried to be consistent with the historical conventions that have applied to previous works. I can assure you,” she added unnecessarily, “that I have used no poetic license."
She began to read aloud with a velvety Georgia accent curiously at odds with her precise diction.
"'The day Katun Thirteen Ahau,'” she intoned. “ Itzamna, Itzamtzab is his face during its reign.’”
Julie leaned over to Gideon and whispered: “This is a translation?"
Gideon spread his hands but said nothing. Explaining the Mayan system of dating would be hard enough with a couple of hours at his disposal. There wasn't much sense in trying to do it in an aside.
Dr. Garrison continued. “'Those who come here to this place Tlaloc to disturb our bones and the dust of our bodies, let them know that many punishments will come to them. These are the punishments that will come to them.
"'First, the bloodsucking kinkajou will come freely among them.
"'Second, the darkness will be sundered and turned to light, and the terrible voices of the gods will be heard in the air, and there will be a mighty pummeling of the soul so that the spirit languishes and faints. Their treasures will be lost and their
batabobs
and
ahlelobs
will desert them...’”
The pince-nez were plucked off. “I'm afraid I have no wholly unambiguous referents for
batabobs
and
ahlelobs
in this context."
"The
batabob
was the governor of the area, the big chief,” Abe said promptly. “The
ahlelob
, I think, was the assistant chief."
She looked at him. So did Gideon, to whom it came as a surprise that Abe knew something about the Mayan language. No, not a surprise; an item of interest, maybe. Gideon had been astonished too many times by the range of his knowledge to be surprised anymore.
Under Dr. Garrison's uncompromising stare Abe smiled and shrugged modestly. “I guess I read it somewhere?"
"Thank you.” With her index finger she found her place again.
"Maybe we can get
him
to play Trivial Pursuit with us,” Julie whispered to Gideon.
"Not with me,” Gideon muttered back.
"'Third, the one called Tucumbalam will turn their entrails to fire and bloody flux.’”
This caused Worthy to grimace and push the rest of his ice cream away.
"'Fourth, the one called Xecotcavach will pierce their skulls so that their brains spill onto the earth.’”
"Yuck, I'm grossing out,” Leo announced, shoveling ice cream into his mouth.
Emma leaned stiffly toward him, her face intense. “Sh!” she whispered sharply. “This isn't a joke!"
Gideon frowned. Dim memories stirred. Wasn't it Emma who had belonged to some oddball group dedicated to the otherworldly theories of Von Daniken, or Velikovsky, or someone like that? Yes, it was, he recalled. Once she had cornered him into a long, dippy discussion of how it was that a carved, five-thousand-year-old Japanese Dogu figure wore what could only have been an astronaut's helmet and goggles. ("And, as you must know, Dr. Oliver, goggles hadn't even been invented in the Stone Age!") He had spent much of his subsequent time in Yucatan trying to stay out of her way without offending her.
Leo mimed a good-natured apology and quieted.
Dr. Garrison had paused coolly at the interruption. Now she continued the litany of calamity.
"'Fifth, the beast that turns men to stone will come among them from the Underworld.
"'And all this will be only the beginning of their vexation by the devil, for the Lords of Xibalba will come and gouge out their eyes, and cut off their heads, and grind and crumble their nerves and their bones, and torment them until they die and are no more.
"Only thus will Vucub-Came be satisfied, and Holom-Tucur, who has a head but no body, and Balam-Quitze, and the Lord Hun-Hunahpu, and Gekaquch, and the Lords Zibakihay and Ahquehay, and the Lords..."
"Do you suppose this goes on much longer?” Julie whispered.
"I don't think so,” Gideon said. “It's only one page long."
Balam-Arab, and Mahucatah, and even Ah Puch, who never tires.’”
"Mayan god of death,” Gideon murmured knowledgeably, impressing Julie with another bit of arcana pulled from who knew where.
"'And when all this is done and the light turns to darkness for all time, there will be terrible mourning and crying..."
Dr. Garrison paused, letting the somber words hang on the air. By now the lush, rhythmic Georgia accent seemed to suit them. “Mohh-nin'...and crahh-in'..."
"'For it will be,'” she concluded mellowly, watching her audience and not the paper, “'the end of the cigar.’”
"The end of the cigar,” she repeated, cutting off any possible incipient ripple of laughter, “is a Mayan metaphor for closure, for the end of life."
She removed her pince-nez and with her thumb and forefinger slowly rubbed the indentations in the bridge of her nose. “For the end,” she said, “of everything."
Humming to himself, beginning to relax, even enjoying the feel of the sweat pooling at the small of his back, Gideon snipped with the pruning shears here, there, tugged gently at a sturdy brown root, and sat back on his heels to study the situation a little more.
It was good to be working with his hands again, good to have a new skeleton to himself. (He had been guiltily relieved when Harvey somewhat shamefacedly announced his preference for nonskeletal work this time.) He snipped again, tugged again, and with an exclamation of satisfaction freed a gnarled three-inch root segment and tossed it through the doorway behind him. He laid the shears down next to the machete.
Machetes and pruning shears were hardly tools of the trade, but in the scrubby, stubborn jungles of Yucatan you couldn't get very far without them. Vines and roots were everywhere, flourishing and intrusive, and every archaeologist of the Maya had had the frustrating experience of working for days to free something, then becoming preoccupied with something else for a week or two, and returning to the original stela or carving to find it more deeply embedded in vegetation than before. All the major sites employed teams of machete-wielding workmen to chop back the jungle continually. Without them the long-lost cities would be engulfed again in a few seasons—as indeed many of them had been.
The lichen-stained skeleton in the entryway of the Priest's House had been there a lot longer than a season or two; longer than a century or two. The dead gray color of the bone, the dry, crumbly edges, the absence of even a dehydrated shred of tendon or ligament all suggested three to four hundred years. The vegetation was a clue to time too. Intrusive as it was, it couldn't have taken less than three centuries to choke the vestibule the way it had. There were fungous gray plants hanging from the roof—where you could see the roof—pulpy mosses oozing from the mortar of the stone walls, tightly packed trunks and roots and vines everywhere, springing from the inch or two of black soil and rotting vegetable matter that had blown in over the centuries, a grain or two at a time, to cling anywhere it could.
And the skeleton had surely been there longer than the vegetation. That was obvious from the way the roots of some of the oldest plants, gnarled, bulbous, woody monsters with warped and blackened leaves, twined around and through the bones. Sometimes they sprang
from
the bones. Wormlike tendrils crawled from the eye sockets and the nasal cavity, from the shoulder joints and the vertebral foramina; even from the braincase, erupting in a thick, ugly snarl from the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through which the spine joins the brain. The leisurely violence of their grip had slowly splintered many of the bones and twisted the skeleton into grotesque contortions. The pelvis was cracked and turned backward, the skull almost upside down.
He had used the machete to chop some elbow room for himself, but for the last two and a half hours he'd been working more delicately, with shears, knife, and dental pick. Now, although he still had a long way to go, he'd pruned enough to have his first close look.
The skeleton was on its left side, curled in the fetal position. This was archaeology's most commonly encountered burial position—it required the smallest hole—but this body hadn't been buried. It lay on the stone floor just inside the entryway, squarely blocking it. He could see a few scattered jade beads beneath it, and near one forearm was a thin, crumpled metal bracelet. The clothing had long since rotted away.
It was a male this time; Harvey would certainly have pointed out the overhanging brow ridge, the sturdy mastoid processes, and the rectangular orbits of the skull. And through a net of straw-colored root tendrils, much of the pelvis could be seen. That too was distinctively masculine. Gideon didn't have to apply the anthropologist's literal rule of thumb for the greater sciatic notch—(stick your thumb in it; if there's room to wiggle it, it's female; if not, it's male)—to see that there was hardly room for a pinky, let alone a thumb. Besides, a disc of obsidian gleamed darkly in the dark tangle beneath the skull, and it was the stern Bishop Landa himself who had noted disapprovingly that “the men, and not the women, wear mirrors in their hair."
It seemed to be a man of middle age. Too early yet to come up with anything precise, but the cranial sutures were almost obliterated except for a few spots on the Iambdoid, so he had probably been in his forties anyway, an estimate supported by the carious, deeply worn brown teeth. (The Maya had lived on stone-ground corn—which meant that they consumed a lot of corn-ground stone as well—and the result was molars that were often eroded to raw little stumps by the time they were thirty. Anyone who thought that dental cavities had come in with refined sugar had never seen an early American Indian skull.)
He took half-a-dozen flash pictures with the Minolta single-lens reflex and made a quick sketch. Then he turned the skull to see the face better, cringing a little at the sight of the snaky, freshly severed roots bursting from the eye sockets, as in an edifying carving on a medieval coffin. The struggling roots had first pried the bones in and around the sockets apart, then gripped them firmly where they were, so that the face of the skull seemed out of focus, with some parts of it closer than others.
He unscrewed the clamp on the lamp tripod and brought the bulb as far down as it would come, shifting it to throw its light laterally across the skull. All the little bumps and grooves were thrown into sharp, shadowed relief, and he leaned closer to see what there was to see. He blinked, surprised, then used his sensitive fingertips to explore further, particularly around the eye sockets. Odd, the individual bones of the orbit hadn't been pulled apart over the years at all. They'd been shattered. And most of the cracked shards of bone had been forced
inward,
not outward, which was not at all the way you'd expect roots thrusting out from the braincase to do it.
It was almost as if...
Again he sat back on his heels, frowning.
It was almost certainly as if...
...almost certainly as if the eyes had been gouged out,” Gideon said, looking from Abe to the others. “In fact,” he added, “there's no ‘almost’ about it."
The crew was gathered in the lacy shade of a few drowsing acacias, sitting among the masonry blocks of the West Group. It was the only sizeable shaded area in the plaza; the rest was scrubby lawn, open to the sun. As a result it was a favorite place for lunch and early-afternoon snoozing. Most lunches, like today's, were relaxed show-and-tells at which the staff chatted about the morning's progress.
Everyone except Emma and Preston Byers was eating boxed sandwich lunches from the hotel. The Byerses, having forsaken meat some time before, were making an abstemious meal of soy cakes packed in plastic envelopes, mung bean sprouts they claimed to have grown on the windowsill of their room, and bananas.
They had, it seemed, sold their fast-food empire and now ran Wellbeing, a mail-order supplier of New Age essentials for living. Like Leo, they had brought with them an ample supply of brochures, one of which Gideon had been unable to avoid.
"The Midwest's gourmet holistic-macrobiotic supermarket,” it said. “Bulk organic grains (whole-milled), rice koji, masa delight, chewable bee-pollen tablets (a proven skin rejuvenator), dandelion thunder, tofu cream cheese, 30 varieties of kelp (unsurpassed for cleansing the colon), nori, fucus tips, 120 varieties of natural nut butter. Books on therapeutic drumming, Tibetan stress reduction, other life-enhancing studies. Wide range of energy-balancing crystals."
At Gideon's words Emma had looked significantly at Preston, who continued to chew, smiling absently at her. Worthy Partridge stopped munching his turkey sandwich and looked up uneasily, as if, whatever this meant, it couldn't be good news. But this was his standard reaction to new things.
Leo Rose also responded in his characteristic way, with his honk of a laugh. “The curse of Tlaloc
lives,"
he whispered.
Worthy was unamused. “I don't see anything funny in that. Could it possibly be true, Gideon?"
