The team must have been thrilled by that, Gaby thought wryly, wondering how much of the city the ‘helpers’ had damaged or destroyed in their enthusiasm to dig it up.
One definite improvement was that the government had brought in a huge diesel generator and set up floodlights around the perimeter. Of course it was obvious the objective was to secure the site from possible looters, but it was welcome as far as Gaby was concerned nevertheless since the light and increased round the clock activity was bound to discourage the local wildlife from wandering into camp.
It still had the look of a prison, which was unnerving.
Gaby arrived at the site near dusk. She was disappointed on one level since it meant she couldn’t set to work right away. On another, she was relieved. The trip had exhausted her physically and the prospect of a decent night’s sleep was welcome.
The group gathered for dinner, but Dr. Sheffield refused to discuss the find that had inspired him to solicit her participation again. She could see that he, all of them, were struggling to contain their excitement, but as Dr. Sheffield pointed out, they wanted her to view it with fresh eyes, unprejudiced by their own speculation.
They had plenty to talk about that didn’t pertain directly to the find she’d been sent to investigate. The carbon dating of the mummy’s wrappings had placed the date of his burial during the age of the Olmec civilization. The team had discovered a number of other artifacts that substantiated that finding, but nothing that pointed to the city having been built by the Olmecs. The only conclusion that could be drawn from that was that a rival tribe had arisen to build an impressive civilization at virtually the same time.
The theory that they were working on was that the people of the city, which was still unnamed, had been driven out by the Olmecs, who’d prevailed with their own civilization until the Toltecs had overrun them.
Gaby couldn’t see that there was anything to substantiate that theory beyond the fact that it was already established that the Toltecs had reigned supreme until the Incas had risen to power. None of the artifacts she was shown showed any influence from the little known Olmec culture. If the Olmecs had destroyed the culture that had risen to power with this city, it seemed logical that they would then have taken over it and left their own mark on it. Instead, everything seemed to point to the conclusion that the city had simply been abandoned and that pointed to some natural disaster not a manmade one—famine or disease most likely, or maybe both. The city was too high for flooding to be likely besides the fact that they hadn’t uncovered sediment that pointed to that. There was also no evidence of volcanic activity or earthquake.
Everyone at least agreed that there seemed to be a strong ‘old world’ influence in the art and architecture of this culture, including Egyptian, but it had emerged with an individuality that made it difficult to pinpoint any definitive influence from any single group. And, of course, nothing had been found, beyond that influence in style, that tied any of the cultures of the Eastern hemisphere to the west.
Gaby felt, almost from the moment she arrived, that eerie sense of being watched that had plagued her almost from the start of her first visit. It wasn’t inconceivable that Anka had followed her ‘home’ or even that he’d returned when she’d sent him away, but she decided she was probably just imagining it.
There seemed no reason for him to return. He wasn’t bound to the place, obviously, or even bound to the body that he’d once occupied. That had been returned to the country of origin long since.
Scientist or not, disbeliever that she’d thought she was, she realized that she had ‘accepted’ that Anka was a ghost. What he actually was, was so completely beyond the realm of her understanding that it was easier to think of him as a ghost, something she’d never believed in, or thought she hadn’t, than what he actually was, an alien being. Even now, she was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, trying to make him fit some mold, any mold that was even a little familiar.
If he had been a ghost, maybe he would’ve been capable of some of the things he’d done anyway. But there would’ve been rules that applied, unwritten rules, maybe, but established behavior patterns that were generally held to be true.
He would have been tied to this place because this was where he’d died.
He hadn’t actually died, however, because he’d never really ‘lived’. Only beings of a biological nature were bound by the cycle of birth and death. Anka simply existed. It was almost as hard to fully grasp that concept as the infinity of the universe, and that had always given her a headache. Everything had a beginning and end. That was the one law of nature that mankind held as a universal truth, and no one could wrap their mind around the concept of infinity.
She couldn’t in any event.
She decided, though, that it was wishful thinking on her part that made her ‘feel’ Anka’s presence. He was gone, off to find a willing candidate for his current project, producing off-spring, she didn’t doubt.
He was amazingly single-minded when he set out to do something, she thought somewhat irritably. She would have been much better off if he’d only singled her out because he enjoyed the fucking. Then she would have had him until he’d grown bored with it and her and moved on. The procreation thing … well, that had very definite limitations. Even if she had been able to accept the ‘new’ Anka, even if she’d gotten used to him looking so radically different than the man she’d fallen for, time was her enemy in that little game. He didn’t strike her as a man, or being, of infinite patience. She doubted he would’ve been satisfied to wait around months and months before he finally had to accept that he couldn’t get a child on her.
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 hea
d. “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 wit
h 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.
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