The Mayan Conspiracy (51 page)

As the creature came back down it lashed out at Putock, and he stumbled back with a vertical gash from his shoulder to his waist. But even as he fell and his life poured out onto the stone of the temple roof, Putock saw the damage he’d done.

The animal grabbed frantically at the embedded spear, splintering the shaft into kindling in an attempt to
pull it free. And then, as it realized it couldn’t overcome the wave of attackers, the beast turned toward the dark hole in the temple’s roof.

It stumbled forward, no longer interested in the fight. But the main body of the Chollokwan force had reached it now and they overran the beast, bringing it down with heavy blows and the weight of their own bodies.

It tried to throw them off, rearing up one more time and howling thunderously, as if the titanic sound of its own voice might somehow set it free, but as the last spear was driven home, the Zipacna buckled and collapsed under the weight. Its head hit the stone with a heavy thud.

For a minute or two longer, the Chollokwan continued to hack at it. But as they exhausted the fury in their hearts, they began to step away. One by one they turned from the hideous creature, moving to their wounded and cleansing themselves in the falling rain.

At first, no one in the NRI group stirred. They looked on in disbelief, unsure of what to do. Danielle gazed through the storm, but not a single beast could be seen alive. The only things moving in the clearing were the native warriors and the wind-driven sheets of rain. It was hard for her to believe, but the madness had finally come to an end.

As her sense of balance returned, she asked McCarter and Devers to speak with the Chollokwan, and then began to pick her way across the temple’s roof, looking for Hawker. As she approached the stairs, he reappeared.

He struggled to the top, looked over the carnage and then glanced at her and the others. Seeing that they were
safe, he turned around and sat down on the top step, looking out over the rain-soaked clearing.

Danielle made her way to where he was and sat down beside him just as the thunder crashed again. “You okay?” she asked, half shouting to be heard above the storm.

He looked at her and nodded, appearing too exhausted to speak.

She looked across the clearing at another flash of lightning and then pulled her wet hair back from her face. The rain was still pouring, but the wind was at their backs. “I can hardly believe it’s over,” she said. “I can hardly believe we’re still alive.”

As he managed another exhausted nod, she turned her eyes skyward, squinting as she looked up through the rain, laughing at the sudden joy that it brought to her. “It’s a beautiful feeling, being alive.”

He turned to her and smiled, a satisfied look creeping onto his face. “They have a saying in Africa: the rain is life.” He looked around and then back into her eyes, staring at her for a long moment. “The rain is life,” he repeated. “The rain
is
life.”

The thunder crashed above them and he closed his eyes and leaned back against the temple’s wet stone roof.

She smiled and then reached out to touch his face. Without a word, she lay down beside him, both of them alive and reveling in the glorious, pouring rain.

THE WEATHER PATTERN
had changed across Brazil. The feared El Niño and the high-pressure ridge that had been funneling dry air into the Amazon were gone, replaced by a steady flow from the north, which pumped massive quantities of moisture from the Caribbean out over the heart of the rainforest, bringing clouds and rain that stretched unbroken from central Brazil to the coast. At the clearing where the temple stood, it would rain without end for nine solid days.

Amid the sheets of pouring rain, the Chollokwan began the somber after-tasks of war. As they swept their dead from the field, they came upon the body of Pik Verhoven and carried it off without a word. In time they would place his body beside the other warriors, and the cremation ceremony would begin. Around the great fires there would be sorrow, but also chanting and singing as the smoke carried brave spirits to the sky.

The NRI team’s survivors would not witness the ceremony, as they remained in the clearing with a group of Chollokwan warriors.

Under partially reconstructed tents they waited out
the rains. On the second day the Chollokwan brought them food. With game in short supply, it was a powerful gesture.

As he finished a small bite of some type of fish, Hawker turned to Danielle and McCarter. “How long do you think it will take them to cut a new stone for the temple’s roof?”

“They said it would be done,” McCarter replied. “But I didn’t see any stonework at their village. Truthfully, I doubt they have the skills.”

“That’s what I thought,” Hawker said. He put down his plate, slipped out of the makeshift tent and hiked toward the temple through the misty rain. McCarter and Danielle followed him, crossing the clearing, climbing up the stairs of the temple and then down into its interior.

Cautiously, Hawker disconnected the trip-wired explosives and removed them. A moment later he was raising a sledgehammer and smashing it into the curved wall around the well. The rock cracked and split and shards flew in all directions. Another blow sent huge chunks over the edge, crashing down into the water below.

Alerted by the noise, several of the Chollokwan came into the temple. At first, they appeared surprised by the commotion, but they quickly realized what was being done. They grouped together to assist, turning their attention to the massive chunks of rock lying about, pieces of the stone that had once sealed the building. They slid the jagged sections toward the well, lifting them up and dumping them into the pit one by one.

As they worked Hawker continued his assault on the
well’s surrounding wall, and when that was finished, he turned his attention to the altar. The natives shouted to their brethren up the stairs, and soon a daisy chain of sorts had begun, with the Chollokwan bringing in baskets full of rock and wood and even small boulders, all to be poured into the well.

Exhausted, Hawker relinquished the hammer to McCarter, and after a few minutes he turned it over to Danielle, as they took turns destroying the altar. In thirty minutes the job was all but finished, the bulk of the Mayan altar broken up and shoved over the edge, a massive pile of stone jamming up the hollow well.

The Chollokwan continued to add to the pile, promising to fill the well right up to the top. The plug of rubble would weigh ten tons or more, making it impossible for any more Zipacna to escape from the underworld.

As the Chollokwan men left to get more stone, Danielle rested against the wall, the sledgehammer heavy in her hands. Her gaze drifted around the room and then back to the ruined altar, where a trace of light caught her eye.

“What is that?” she said, gazing at a soft glow amid the debris.

As Hawker and McCarter looked on, she leaned the sledgehammer against the wall and stepped toward the object. Crouching amid the dust and pulverized rock, she cleared some of debris aside and the glow brightened marginally. She reached down and pulled a glowing object from the mess. It was a triangular-shaped stone, the size of a large dictionary.

She gazed at it, wiping the dirt and dust from its surface,
running her fingers over its smoothed corners and beveled edges. It seemed to be made of a clear substance, and it felt like some type of heavy acrylic.

“It’s warm,” she said, carefully feeling the object.

“What is it?” Hawker asked.

She shook her head. “I have no idea. Unless it’s from …” She considered the fact that the Martin’s crystals and the small radioactive cubes had sat in revered positions on the altar. It made her wonder if she might have found what she was looking for after all.

Upon rescuing Susan and finding the cave to be barren, she’d concluded there was nothing there to be found. But after Kaufman’s explanation of the electromagnetic radiation, she’d begun to doubt that assessment. The electro-magnetic pulse had to come from somewhere.

“Remember the Tulan Zuyua story,” McCarter said. “The parsing out of the gods, their essence given in special stones.”

Danielle nodded and as she stared at the stone once again, a presence appeared in the foyer to the altar room. She turned to see the Old One standing there, another native supporting him. He looked as frail as ever, but his eyes were bright. He walked slowly toward Danielle, regarding the glowing stone as he went. He did not seem to be surprised.

“
Garon Zipacna
,” he said.

Without Devers there to translate, they did not understand him.

“
Garon Zipacna
,” he repeated, thumping lightly on the center of his chest.

“I think he says it’s the heart of Zipacna,” McCarter guessed.

She looked down at the stone and then tried to hand it to the Old One, but he refused, holding a hand out and pushing it gently back toward her. He looked into the pit, logjammed by the growing pile of rubble. Seeming pleased, he turned and walked over to McCarter. He opened the palm of his hand and displayed a small object.

McCarter looked closely. It was a compass, one that looked to be a hundred years old. It had to have been Blackjack Martin’s.

McCarter took it almost reverently.

“For the journey,” the Old One said, with words McCarter recalled from the meeting in the village.

Next, he went to Hawker, presenting him with an obsidian spear tip, before touching the latest of Hawker’s wounds and speaking the Chollokwan word for warrior.

Hawker bowed in thanks and the Old One turned back to Danielle, placing his hands together like a yoga master once again. Looking her in the eyes, he spoke the word “
Ualon
,” nodding at her.

McCarter recognized that word too. “He’s calling you the Old One,” McCarter explained. “But it doesn’t mean old, it means
Chief
.”

Danielle nodded, surprised by the compliment. She mimicked the Old One’s actions with her hands and smiled at him. He smiled back, then turned and, with the help of his assistant, began to walk away.

The next day, with several Chollokwan warriors as escorts, the NRI group left the clearing, in the midst of
what had become a variable but near-constant rain. What had been a four-day hike in dry weather became two weeks of slogging through the mud. And even as they reached the river beside the Wall of Skulls, the skies darkened and the rain poured down upon them once again.

Danielle shivered in the cold, but her eyes caught sight of things she hadn’t noticed before: fine mist spread on a fern like beads of liquid silver, fuchsia-colored orchids among the trees and a brilliant yellow flower closing up suddenly just as the downpour began.

She’d been in the rainforest for over a month and, until now, hadn’t noticed any of it. She almost wished they would encounter another line of industrious ants for McCarter to point out and marvel over.

From the Wall of Skulls they turned south and hiked back toward the Negro. Five days later they hailed a passing vessel—a diesel-powered barge loaded down with mahogany and trailing a second bundle of logs in the river behind it. As they clambered aboard, Danielle looked back for their Chollokwan escort, but the natives had already gone.

Aboard the vessel, the NRI team thanked their new hosts, politely deflecting questions about their battered and grungy appearance, until eventually they were left alone to ponder their own unanswered thoughts.

McCarter found himself spending a great deal of energy thinking about the temple they had left behind. Despite what they’d learned, it remained in the greater sense a mystery. One that left him to guess, mostly, with big gaps in what they could prove or even grasp—much
like the study of archaeology itself. Still, in a private discussion, he offered a theory of the temple they’d found. He looked at Danielle. “I admit to having a hard time accepting what you suggested, about the cave and the body. But like you, I can’t explain it any other way. Especially considering what we found,” he said, referring to the stone in her pack.

“If you’re right, the deformed body we found was probably one member of a group. A team of people or perhaps even test subjects in an experiment who came back in time. When they got here they found a world that did not agree with them, sun and rain that burned their skin. With few other options to choose from, they forced the natives who lived here to build that temple as a cap over the cave, training the natives to use rope and tackle and stone. Imposing themselves as demigods in the process, perhaps even over the nascent beliefs these people had begun to develop. In the
Popul Vuh
we see this as the ascent and self-magnification of Seven Macaw.”

Susan sat next to McCarter. “I’ve been thinking about the heroes who vanquished Zipacna,” she said. “They were shown to have trapped him. But he’s never described as being killed, just subdued beneath the mountain of stone. I wonder if that was supposed to be some kind of warning, if the original tellers of the story knew the Zipacna could get out again if the temple was opened.”

“A warning, hidden in plain sight,” Danielle said. She looked at the water gliding past. “Like the floating body we found.”

McCarter nodded, guessing the Chollokwan had dumped the man in the river as a warning to the Nuree
tribe, but also, knowing what the water did to the Zipacna, they could be sure the larva growing inside him would not survive.