There would be no time in the course of the day to study the mosaics. If she wanted to do so, she was going to have to do it on her ‘own’ time.
It was creepier going to the temple at night alone than it had been during the day. She would’ve liked a weapon … a club, at least, to discourage any of the soldiers that took it into their head that her presence, alone at night, was an invitation.
She took a long gripped flashlight, deciding it was heavy enough to discourage anyone that might get that idea … as long as it wasn’t a gang.
Most of the floodlights had been focused upon the pit, leaving shadows along the wall, but the cross beams from one side of the chamber to the other chased away all but light shadows. Flipping the flashlight on that she’d brought with her, Gaby started just inside the door and walked slowly around the perimeter, trying to decide where the story began and ended. Was it in chronological order? Or any order at all? And was it as true and accurate an account of events as the recorders could manage? Or had politics influenced the account?
The walk-by didn’t enlighten her.
Returning to the mosaics on either side of the entrance, she stood and stared at each in turn, trying to interpret what she was looking at. Finally, deciding the depiction to the right of the door was the beginning, she settled on the floor and tried to figure out what the event was that was supposed to be depicted.
There were at least a dozen figures in it, all of them prostrated as if in worship. In the center of the group was fire that burned with blue flames. She’d been staring at it for so long the cold from the stone floor had turned her butt cheeks to ice before it finally dawned on her that the face she saw behind the column of blue flame wasn’t a figure on the other side as she’d first supposed. The face was a part of the column of fire.
She might have tumbled to that sooner except that the face wasn’t Anka’s. Getting to her feet stiffly, she moved a little closer, but the pattern of the colored stones was lost when she moved too close. Stepping back just far enough to detect the pattern, she examined the face in the blue flames for a while and then studied the other figures. One stood out because of the elaborate headdress he was wearing. A priest, she wondered? He looked older than the others, in fact his hair was white. Beside him was a woman, also white haired. Her garb, like that of the old man, was more elaborate than the simple clothing worn by the others, she realized.
Still clueless as to what the meaning was, she moved to the next depiction. This one was easier to decipher. It was a birth … obviously a birth of great importance to have found its way into the temple. The same blue column of fire appeared in it, and so, too, did the two elders that had figured prominently in the first picture.
The old woman had the baby’s head pressed to her bare breast.
The two old people weren’t a priest and a priestess. As impossible as seemed, it still appeared clear that they were the parents of the infant. The worshippers were around the threesome now.
After moving back and forth between the two pictures, Gaby decided the two elders were leaders, either a priest and priestess, or possibly a Chieftain/King and his wife. They were not only dominant figures in two different records, they were the only ones besides the figure in the blue flames that had any real detail to their features. And their garments were notably richer than the garb the others wore.
A man and his wife, then, had prayed for a child and been granted one?
A miracle child, because both were clearly far too old to bear a child, assuming she’d figured it out and that was what was happening.
The next five pictures were of battles, or maybe just one great battle that they thought had glorified the people enough to deserve several different viewpoints. Gaby gave them only a cursory glance before moving on. The segment following those depicted a boy or young man lying on an altar. Blood flowed from a chest wound. Gaby had just decided it must be a depiction of a sacrifice when she noticed that the same elders appeared in this picture, as well, once more prostrate in a worshipful pose, their faces lifted up as if in supplication to the blue flame.
After staring it for some moments, she moved back to the battle scenes she’d barely glanced at. She saw then that it wasn’t, as she’d at first supposed, a single battle. The pictures suggested different battles. At the center of each of the first two pictures was the old chieftain. In the first he held the infant, the second a tiny child. In the third the child stood before him. In the last two, the old man was absent, but a young boy stood at the center. She could tell by the size and build that he would barely have been pubescent even in the last of these.
A boy—the miracle child obviously—had led his people in battle? Many battles if she’d interpreted the pictures correctly.
And died, she saw, with a spear through his chest. Blue rays of light spilled through the gaping wound.
She stood thinking over what she thought she’d deciphered for some time, staring into the distance. She couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around it, however, and finally, deciding she was just too tired to think straight, she abandoned the quest for the night and sought rest.
She didn’t rest much. The scenes she’d studied so hard intruded into her dreams and whether guided by any truth or not, solidified in her mind as the story she’d pieced together. The child hadn’t merely been a miracle of birth, though. He’d been far more than that if he had led his people in battle—to victory many times—before he’d even attained adulthood.
It took all Gaby could do to focus on the task of separating and removing the remains in the pit the following day. Her mind kept wandering to the story of the mosaics. At lunch, instead of joining the others, she relieved herself, grabbed a drink and a sandwich, and returned to examine the pictures again to see if, with a clearer mind, she interpreted them differently.
Try though she might, she couldn’t pick up any other story that they might have been trying to tell.
It dawned on her, though, that Anka had lied to her. This was his temple. This temple was built to worship him and the story contained on the walls of his temple wasn’t just the story of the civilization that had built it. It was Anka’s story.
He’d been borne of human parents, or at least a human mother. The being in the first mosaic didn’t look like him because it wasn’t him. It was his sire, his true sire, a being just like him that had sown his seed in the withered womb of a woman far too old to bear children.
The next picture confirmed it, for her at least. It depicted the same boy on his knees, with no wound. The blue fire was all around him, and beyond the altar where he’d been lying was a huge crowd of worshippers, some prostrated on the ground, others with looks of awe or horror on their faces, some running or cringing as if fearful for their lives.
This was what Anka had implied, that he’d taken the body of the human when the soul had left it, but the pictures before that clearly gave that the lie. No ordinary human child would have been capable of the things attributed to this child.
Why, she wondered, had he lied to her? Why had he said the body they’d found entombed here wasn’t him when it was? And if he’d lied about this, what else had he lied about?
Doubts arose to plague her as she finished the day’s work, but she didn’t know if that was because she just didn’t want to believe Anka had lied to her or if there was substance to the thoughts. She did know, though, that historians had been known to exaggerate or outright lie. What if they’d only depicted the tale that way because they had wanted to believe he was special from the beginning? It wasn’t unusual at all for humans to claim kinship to the gods. Pretty much all of the ancient rulers had claimed to be gods, or the off-spring of gods. Was that all it was? Was she as guilty as they were of wanting to believe something that wasn’t true at all?
If that was the case, though, what about the old ruler and his wife? Had they just thought they were too old to bear a child and that was why they’d considered their son a gift of the god they’d prayed to? Or had they not t
hought any such thing, but told that tale to their people so that the people would look upon him with the ‘proper’ respect and awe? Had the man, old and perhaps in failing health and with no healthy heir to pass his reign to decided to protect his son with the lies?
It was a possibility she decided. The most significant miracle attributed to the young King of the Biac’s was his resurrection, and that would’ve been when Anka had taken over the boy’s body.
One other possibility emerged, but Gaby forgot all about it when they made a new discovery.
She had focused most of her energies on piecing together the story, had completely forgotten that her original reason for doing so was to see if she could discover some clues of what had happened in the temple. It took most of a week to remove the bodies to a special tent that had been set up to study the bones.
Gaby hadn’t really expected to find anything of any significance beneath the bodies, perhaps random bits of bone and/or more pieces of the garments she’d first found. She certainly hadn’t expected to find that the stones in the center of the pit had been removed and a shallow grave dug.
She hadn’t expected to find the mummified remains of a woman and her unborn child.
Chapter Fourteen
Temple priestesses, Gaby decided as she examined the pieces of garments she’d begun sifting from the debris beneath the skeletal remains. Only now and then did she find pieces large enough to identify patterns or specific parts of the garment. Most of the pieces were little more than swatches. Whatever materials had been woven to make up the primary parts of their garments had deteriorated beyond recognition. The bejeweled pieces threaded together with gold thread and attached to the woven gold were borders, she finally decided, trying to envision what the gowns might have looked like.
Simple in form and flowing lines, she was certain. Fastenings of any kind were rare on ancient garments, and few cultures had developed the tools to cut garments into precise shapes, so most were nothing more than a series of squares and rectangular pieces tied together. The larger pieces she found seemed to bear up that theory.
Dr. Sheffield had wanted to put some of the others with her, but she had convinced him that it would be better if she worked alone to gather the pieces of the garments since they were so fragile. Despite the number of bodies they’d found, the pit was not a very large one and it would be hard for several people to work inside of it without risking the loss or damage of what they might find.
It was a valid argument, but mostly she had just wanted to work alone. She worked better without the distraction—she had enough to distract her as it was.
As she worked, only half her mind was on the sifting search. The other half could not be dragged from the story Anka. Occasionally her mind would drift from the friezes to Anka himself and she would wonder where he was, what he was doing … if he’d found the woman she’d insisted he should look for. Those thoughts were far too painful, though, and she would shove them into the back of her mind and focus again on unraveling the mystery.
Without verification from Anka himself, she was never going to know for sure which of her theories was closest to fact. It was entirely possible that the answer to that was none. She’d realized after puzzling over whether or not the old king had made up the story that she had no way of knowing if there even was an old king. The ancients hadn’t liked mysteries anymore than modern man did. If they couldn’t solve them with actual facts, they made up things that seemed reasonable to them. The whole story might be nothing more than a myth to explain Anka’s arrival among them.
It certainly was if what Anka had said was true. No infant, toddler, or even young boy would have had the capability of leading an army, not a purely human one. An intelligent, already mature, being with powers far beyond humans might have directed a battle, even from within the body of a child. And, of course, she’d seen some of what he was capable of. Whatever the age or strength of the body he occupied, he could have thrown the opposing army into complete disorder, manipulated them into believing what he wanted them to believe.
So, she now had at least three theories. Any of them were possible, and she had no way to eliminate even one.
She had uncovered parts of the remains before she realized she’d found another body. Pausing when she felt a shape beneath the dirt she’d been brushing at, Gaby peered down at it for several moments before she realized it was a body and that this one had been mummified.
She had to revise that first assessment when she had cleared the dirt from around the body enough to see it better. Someone, she realized, had attempted to hide this body.
It had been wrapped, but unlike the mummified remains of their god, the preservation process had been haphazard. Whoever had done it had soaked the wrapping in whatever they used to preserve the dead, or at least the more important dead, but it looked like the job had been a hasty one, designed more to hide what had been done to the body than to actually preserve it. Then, it seemed obvious, they’d decided that wouldn’t hide the crime and instead of seeing that it was encased in a sarcophagus, they’d simply dug a hole in the middle of the fire pit, shoved the body in and covered it up.
There was no charring of the wraps that she could see, though, which seemed to indicate their crime had been discovered. Otherwise, a fire would’ve been built over it and most, if not all, of the body would have been burned.
She thought.
Because, clearly, the pit had been used as a fire pit at some point. There’d been a layer of ashy debris and partially burned timbers at the bottom indicating as much.
The body was buried beneath maybe a foot of dirt, though. The dirt would have kept it from catching fire, but then the body would have slow baked and that would’ve eliminated even the minimal benefits of the preservatives they’d used. The preservatives themselves might have caught fire, for that matter. They still hadn’t determined exactly what the natives had used in the process except that it wasn’t what the Egyptians had used.
When she’d summoned the men to remove it to the ‘morgue’ tent, Gaby followed them to examine the body. She knew from the size, even before she’d unwrapped it, that it must be another female, around the same age as the others.
There was some tissue left, not much, but enough to yield up the gruesome secret. This woman, unlike the others who’d been bludgeoned to death, had been strangled and stabbed repeatedly.
Serious overkill, and the assault was very personal.
Gaby thought for several moments that she would throw up. Women who died like this were usually murdered by their husbands or lovers.
She was still struggling to come to grips with that when she examined the woman’s abdomen in an attempt to pinpoint her age and discovered the tiny bones of her unborn infant.
Fighting for breath, she abandoned the tent.
She couldn’t fall to pieces, she told herself fiercely, struggling to take deep, calming breaths. Everyone would think she’d gone off the deep end to get so emotional about a corpse thousands of years old.
It wasn’t Anka who’d killed her, she told herself fiercely. She knew it couldn’t have been him. She knew him. She knew he’d never do anything like this.
She didn’t even know that the woman had any kind of connection with him beyond her presence in the temple!
Why then? And who?
When she’d calmed down a little, she began to wonder if the death of this woman was connected to the deaths of the others. She could carbon date, but that wasn’t going to be precise enough to prove or disprove a connection.
She’d gotten so wrapped up in trying to learn about Anka, she realized, that she’d completely forgotten her original purpose in trying to decipher the story on the walls. She’d been looking for answers to the deaths of the other women.
They weren’t sacrifices. She knew that, felt it in her bones. The act itself had been too brutal, not ritualistic. And the woman she’d just found certainly didn’t follow any previously known ritual sacrifice.
It took all she could do to make it through the remainder of the day with even an appearance of normalcy. The answers she was looking for had to be recorded in the history on the walls. If not in the main chamber, then it would be recorded somewhere else.
She was convinced it must.
She prayed it was, because she had to know the truth.
She hadn’t examined the whole frieze, though.
Deciding she would, that night, if she had to stay up all night to do it, she tried to focus on what an examination of the woman’s body would tell her. It told her a lot, but it didn’t really answer the questions pinging back and forth through her mind.
Swatches of long, black hair that had once flowed nearly hip length on the woman were evidence she’d been young—there were no silver threads among the black. The infant had been near to term. It was too large to have been far from birth, and it was a male child.
There were enough stab wounds to have killed her and the baby several times over, but she couldn’t tell if the woman had been strangled to death and then stabbed over and over, or if she’d merely been subdued by the garrote while she was stabbed to death. There wasn’t enough tissue left to determine that, but the baby didn’t seem to be the target. Rather his death seemed incidental. Most of the stab wounds were in the woman’s chest and back.
As revolting and thoroughly unsettling as those discoveries were, they paled beside the shock the entire archeology team received that afternoon.
After considerable thought and debate over just how to best utilize the treasure of the newly discovered city, the government had finally decided that turning it into a tourist attraction would bring in the most money. An entourage of specialists arrived that evening with the mummified remains of the god Anka encased in a clear acrylic coffin which they intended to display in its original crypt. The specialists who arrived with it were to begin right away to set up an electronic security system to protect the ‘living museum’.
Alien's Concubine, The Page 17