Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  West of the lake and the town of Las Figuras, the virgin forest resumed, broken here and there by cleared plots on which the Indians grew corn for two or three years, until the thin soil gave out. There was a single dirt road connecting timber camps, a couple of farm settlements within more extensive slash-and-burn acreage, and swampland in a basin dominated by a couple of oil drilling rigs. The land rose to a series of low hills, two of which had been extensively cleared. North of the hills was a dark lake much smaller than Petén-Itzá. The rust-red sun shed no more light, and darkness spread like a tide across the immense canopy of unbroken forest beyond the lake.

  On the dusky hillsides I saw cattle, and the buildings of a large hacienda that overlooked the lake. Some had zinc roofs and one building, the main house, had four tile roofs with the flat crowns of pyramids. The house was surrounded by a gleaming white wall. There was a satellite dish behind the house, then a landing strip equipped with lights and what looked like a VOR-TACAN cone in a protective enclosure. Parked on a graveled apron in front of a corrugated metal hanger were single- and twin-engined planes.

  "That is the hacienda," Veronica said.

  "Nice layout," Hazen said. "Why did they build it forty klicks from Cobían?"

  "Don Santiago owned this land. Almost as far as you can see in any direction from the hill. So I think there must be an important temple not too far away. But hidden and protected for many centuries."

  "Ruins? I'd like to have a look. Is that where Sharissa and her father were exploring?"

  "I doan know for sure," Veronica said. "Glen, you must set down close to the house. Leave the engine running. In case it is an emergency and there is no time to lose."

  From her backpack Veronica took a multicolored serape with a complex diamond pattern and put it on, then draped her head with a long blue shawl. The shoulder holster and the lady's pearl-handled pistol she wore were covered. I took the Firestar automatic from the duffel between my feet and checked the load, then tucked it inside my belt, under the long-sleeved shirt, where it was still about as obvious as an iguana sitting on my shoulder. But I wasn't going anywhere without it.

  As the helicopter banked into the wind and flew toward the apron end of the runway, a couple of men in denim workclothes and baseball caps came out of a stable and looked up. Veronica waved, and they waved back.

  "The tall one," Veronica said, "is Emano, Francisco's foreman."

  Having recognized her, the two men went back into the stable. Floodlights illuminated the outside of the house. Veronica spoke to Benito in Mayan as we touched down; he nodded. He was holding his shotgun across his lap. I had seen a couple like it on the streets of L.A. It was accurately called the Streetsweeper; wound up to full automatic, it fired twelve loads in three seconds, enough to blow the hinges off hell.

  Veronica looked at me as if she were trying to decide if I was going to be reliable.

  "Let's go," I said, scowling.

  We got out of the helicopter; the rotors were on idle. The chill in the hilltop air surprised me. We walked the fifty yards to the house, past a pen filled with ocellated turkeys, which had tails almost as colorful as peacocks. From somewhere else I heard dogs with deep voices, tolling our arrival. Hounds. Nobody came out to greet us. Veronica paused and rang the bronze bell suspended over a high wooden gate in the freshly painted concrete wall.

  Before long a pregnant maid who looked to be about fourteen years old answered the bell.

  They knew each other. The maid shook her head when asked about Francisco. Veronica asked her several more questions. The maid nodded, gestured, shook her head, shrugged a couple of times, smiled apologetically.

  Veronica turned and walked away from the gate, her face stony.

  "What is it? What's going on?"

  "¡Cho! They have left already. About five o'clock. Francisco and Greg Walker, together in Francisco's big pickup truck."

  "Together? What about Sharissa? Wasn't she with them?"

  "Juana says no, there was no girl when they come here by airplane, early this afternoon."

  "What the hell!" I pulled at her arm to stop her, and she inhaled painfully. "What do you mean? Sharissa's not here? How can you be sure? Aren't we going to search the house?"

  "No. Please let go of me. Juana is truthful. But if she did not see Sharissa, it does not mean she wasn't here. Unconscious maybe, hidden—I doan know! The fact is, they are gone, and we cannot find them now."

  "We have to find them!"

  "Look!" Grimacing, Veronica swept a hand toward the dark blue sky, the darker canopy of jungle, not a light showing for miles. "That is the biosphere out there. How big? Like another country. They left while there was still light to see. Even if we had something powerful to drive, and could find the track they use to go deep into the forest, we cannot get there in time. You have never seen anything like this forest at night. It is a darkness that swallows light. There is no chance to find them out there, none."

  "Has to be a chance. Understand? It's only six-thirty. There's another truck—" I pointed to a pickup down by a cattle chute. "We'll borrow that one!"

  She shook her head. "No, my friend. That truck would fall apart on a jungle track. Only good for farm roads; it does not have four-wheel drive. We would only strand ourselves."

  I saw Glen Hazen get out of the helicopter. "What's wrong?" he called. "Where's Sharissa?"

  There were tears on Veronica's face. She wiped them away with a weary hand, and shuddered in the wind that blew across the hilltop.

  I looked away from her and shielded my eyes against the glare of floodlights, facing the rising moon. It was full and looked startlingly close in the black sky. A blind man could have detected that huge moon by the prickling of his skin. It had a ruddy color, as if it glowed from the reflected heat of the no-longer-visible sun.

  Heat—

  "Oh, Jesus!" I shouted.

  Hazen crunched closer on the gravel walk to the house. "Isn't she here?"

  "No," I said. "Sharissa's out there, and we have to go get her. Come on!"

  They both looked at me as if I were babbling.

  "Greg and Francisco left about five," I said to Veronica. "It's six-thirty now. Probably they wanted to get where they were going before dark. So the site must be less than a ninety-minute drive from here—over a terrible road. How many kilometers could they cover in ninety minutes? Fifty? They could be even closer to us than that. Come on, damn it, get back in the helicopter, I know how we can find them!"

  Even with the helicopter's landing lights blazing, it was a tricky business flying low over miles of tropical forest after sunset. The immediate danger was running into an unexpectedly tall banak or ironwood tree, jutting dozens of feet higher than the surrounding canopy, like an unlighted radio tower. The ride was unpredictably bumpy, depending on the density of the cooling air above the canopy. If the rotor disk lost its cushion of air, for any number of reasons, the helicopter would turn into an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar anvil and plunge straight down. There was also the possibility that we would overfly a rebel camp in this wilderness, and be fired on.

  Hazen had confidence in his flying ability, but he wasn't in a good mood.

  "I don't understand why you lied to me," he said to Veronica.

  "Time," she said wearily. "Only because of the time."

  "Human sacrifice? Virgin sacrifice? What is this shit—it's his own daughter!"

  "You're an archeologist," she scolded him. "How many temples have you explored in this country? Once the stones of the adoratorios dripped with blood, offered in exchange for power. You think this has all changed, we are too civilized now? Human nature does not change. The ultimate power one has over another human being is in the shedding of his blood. How much more powerful is the man who sacrifices the beauty of one he truly loves in honor of his god? Is it not in the Bible? Is Greg Walker a common murderer, or is he a king of a lost people?"

  I said, "He claimed his father was someone named Don José Canek, or somethin
g like that." I didn't look up or otherwise take my eyes off the FUR screen, which was about the size of a laptop computer. Forward-looking Infrared. It scanned the area we were searching north of the lake, penetrating the thick canopy of leaves below. On the grid-marked screen appeared a tiny glowworm for anything larger than a jungle rat that gave off heat. I had a lot of glowworms that could have represented anything from jaguars to nocturnal feeders like the kinkajou or ordinary deer, but so far I hadn't come up with anything human-sized, or the glow representing the heat from a truck's hard-working engine.

  "Can Ek," Hazen said, correcting my pronunciation. "The name means 'Serpent-Twenty-Star.' He was the last ruler by that name of the Itzá Maya dynasty of Tayasal, the centers of which were grouped around Lake Petén-Itzá. They were big on human sacrifice. Lord Can Ek himself cut out the hearts of Dominican friars who came to Tayasal to convert him to Catholicism. Eventually the Spaniards conquered Tayasal and Can Ek. A Franciscan priest named Avendaño studied the sacred Katun prophecies and was able to convince Can Ek that the Maya world was coming to an end on March 13, 1697. Avendaño described Can Ek as being very different from other Maya: he was tall, handsome, much lighter in complexion. He baptized Can Ek, gave him his Christian name, and took him back to Spain. Where, I understand, he enjoyed a long life and many wives and mistresses. Anything yet?"

  Benito was shielding his eyes from the copter lights and staring down at the canopy. "There is the river again," he said. We had flown back and forth across it, a needlelike gleam appearing momentarily in the blanketing darkness.

  Hazen said, "I hope you realize that even if we locate the truck, there's no place to set down through the trees."

  "We doan know that for sure," Veronica said. "Because a temple will mean a village nearby. Probably it will be on water—the river, or a small lake."

  "Why?" I asked her. The helicopter shuddered and dropped sideways unexpectedly; the drop was only twenty feet or so, but I held my breath.

  "Why a village? The temple is a sacred site, visited by outsiders for many centuries. Then it must be maintained, and the approach to the temple kept clear. That is no easy job in the midst of a jungle. There must be caretakers, who need shelter and cleared land to grow food. In the museum of Kan Petén there are pictures of great pyramids so covered with earth and vegetation that many people walked past them before they were excavated, never knowing what they were. An entire city, three thousand buildings, fifty square miles, smothered by the forest!"

  That wasn't encouraging. My eyes and neck muscles were aching; I hadn't changed my disposable contacts for several days. Focusing on the small glowworm-filled screen for something I could put a name to was a severe strain. I had lost track of the time. When would we run low on fuel, and have to turn back? I didn't want to ask that question.

  Hazen had come up with the exact time of the lunar eclipse—when the earth's shadow crossed the face of the moon—from an ephemeris stored in the helicopter's navigational computer. Eleven-forty-eight P.M.

  Hazen made a course correction, and we entered another quadrant. Veronica was using binoculars to scan the monotonous canopy, and I was still glued to the screen, blinking and rubbing my forehead to try to ease the pain. How long did it take a truck's engine to cool off, after running for an hour, maybe an hour and a half? Would I be able to recognize the shape of a man on a thirteen-inch video screen? Was anyone down there, or were we far off the track, wandering blindly into nowhere despite all the electronic gear on board?

  Then something, a slightly larger glowworm than the rest, as the helicopter's nose swung a few degrees northeast. I used the trackball to isolate the signature, then with a keystroke produced the coordinates on-screen. I read them off to Hazen.

  "I want to have a closer look at this," I told him. "Could it be the truck?"

  "Too soon to tell. But it's bigger than an animal, unless it's a whale."

  We flew toward the signature on my screen, which was now about six klicks away.

  "Right on course. Can you get lower?"

  "Maybe it's not the best idea to fly directly over it. Whatever the hell it may be. Veronica?"

  "No, nothing yet," she said, looking through the binoculars.

  Vague shapes had begun to appear, and cluster, around the larger glowworm on my screen.

  "It's hot!" I yelled. "We've definitely found something." We were close enough so that I could see that the smaller glowworms were in motion, as if in response to the almighty racket of the helicopter coming in over thick canopy.

  "Could be people. Around a campfire, maybe."

  "Oh-oh."

  Veronica said, "I see a couple of lights. It might be a village. Yes, look at all the cohune palms, that is a sure sign—turn your searchlight on, Glen."

  I looked up from the screen and covered my eyes momentarily, hoping to wipe out the afterimage, then pressed my nose against the window just as the trees fifty feet below thinned out and we did a fast climbing turn over a clearing illuminated by the lights mounted on the nose and under the fuselage of the LongRanger. Hazen wasn't taking any chances on us being riddled by automatic weapons. I had a glimpse of the truck we'd been looking for, parked on a smooth white plaza that might have been paved with stone, some steep thatched roofs arranged in a compound, and several half-naked kids near the front end of the truck, staring up at us.

  "That was Francisco's truck," Veronica said calmly. "And this is the village I thought we'd find. Glen, go around again and land."

  "Taking a big chance—"

  "No, I doan believe any harm will come to us here. The temple is in another place. There is a ceremony tonight, so the temple will be guarded. But the village should be nearly deserted."

  We circled, and came in slowly over the treetops. The plaza below was about the size of a softball field, with the river at one end divided into several shallow streams by sandbars in this season of low rainfall. Curious kids scattered in the wash from the rotors. They wore breechclouts, or ankle-length skirts of white cloth.

  We took an elevator approach to the plaza, and did some bouncing on wind gusts. Hazen made three attempts before setting us down with a jolt on the heels of the skids. He swore under his breath. We were fifty feet from the truck, a big muddied Maxicab. Near the river, fishnets that glowed like pale moths in the moonlight had been hung from poles to dry. Downriver from the village there was a pigpen that looked predator-proof, with fencing of sharpened outslanting poles. Along the banks the huge trees spread gray roots that looked like the carcasses of prehistoric beasts. Dugout canoes were tethered to a stone quay.

  Hazen shut down the helicopter and we sat inside for a couple of minutes looking around the plaza, which was now deserted. Dogs were barking, but not showing themselves. Apparently there had been a recent feast. Mahogany tables grouped around a firepit were covered with clay dishes, pots, and calabashes. The remains of a couple of deer were suspended on spits over the still-smoking coals of the firepit. Maybe it had been the coals lining the pit, which was about six feet by ten feet, that I had picked up on the thermal imager, and not the truck's engine.

  Situated around the plaza were dozens of simple thatched huts made from roughhewn weathered poles. Each had a doorspace, but no windows. On the west side of the plaza were larger buildings, made of stone, with some walls covered in plaster and painted over with glyphs. But the buildings were too small to be temples. Storehouses, probably. Around the perimeter, large, perforated clay pots on pedestals glowed like jack-o'-lanterns at Halloween. They must have been lined with pyrites, or some other reflectant material.

  "Well, I guess they know we're here," I said.

  The bugs knew we were there, as soon as we got out of the helicopter. Veronica handed out spray cans of Off, and gave me a Maya scarf to cover my neck.

  From a distance came the sounds of drumming, and what might have been primitive wood or shell instruments. The music was mournful and eerie. There was a February chill in the air. A wind along the river swayed
the crowns of the high trees.

  "Do you have any flares?" Veronica asked Hazen. He nodded. "Bring them with you."

  "¿Á donde va?" Benito said to her.

  "To find the temple. You stay here. Don't let anyone come close to the helicopter."

  He looked disappointed, but not afraid to remain by himself. Veronica smiled slightly and kissed him, as if she were kissing him good-bye. I shuddered, feeling like a target in this open space. Veronica glanced at the automatic in my hand, cocked but not locked, and shrugged at my tension.

  "No one will be in the village but the very old, the very young, and the sick."

  I wanted her to be right, but I didn't put the pistol away. I walked across the plaza to the pickup truck and looked inside. There was a strong odor of cigar smoke, a couple of crushed Coke cans on the floorboard. The keys were in the ignition. On the narrow bench seat in back I saw a crumpled blanket, and, on the floor, a pair of desert boots. I looked at one of them. Size seven. They might have belonged to Sharissa. If so, maybe they had carried her to wherever they were going. I hoped that meant she was drugged, and not hurt.

  "Yes, she was brought here," Veronica said behind me. "This is the place of her destiny. And mine also."

  I looked at her. Her joined hands were against her chin, in an attitude of prayerful resignation. The drumming, the mournful lowing of horns, gave me gooseflesh.

  "Veronica, stop the bullshit and let's get going."

  Glen Hazen was shining the halogen beam of his light around the plaza. The captive peccaries were disturbed; so were spider monkeys in a large cage suspended from the branch of a tree. They expressed their annoyance by squirting streams of urine through the bars. The eyes of a shambling armadillo glowed redly for a moment at the edge of the plaza.

  "God Almighty," Hazen said. "We've traveled back in time."

  "They live here as they lived five hundred years ago," Veronica agreed. "They fish and farm and hunt the old ways, without guns or iron plows or machetes. They live peacefully. At least they did before tonight."