‘Don’t forget Belize,’ added Orlando smugly, trying to look mysterious.
Ruby stared at him for a few moments before bursting out, ‘Oh no, that’s it, isn’t it, Orlando? That’s what it’s all about? You don’t really give a shit about Guatemala’s old territorial claim over Belize. You want to go in there and rape its heritage. And then do the same to all of your neighbours. Please tell me I’m wrong. I really don’t want to be right about this.’
‘Ruby, how often have you been right about my intentions? We will soon have amassed knowledge of the ancient world that will enable us to replicate any of the technologies they enjoyed in their day.’
‘Enjoyed in their day? Did you say enjoyed? Yes, I suppose the people of Hiroshima enjoyed the technological advances of the Americans. We’ve just seen the evidence. Everything in these people’s day was blown up. It ended with a nuclear war. We don’t want to risk bringing it all back again and repeating their mistakes.’
‘How could we do that, Ruby? We are a different civilisation. We are their descendants. Of course we will not make the mistakes of the older generation. They have shown us how they went wrong.’
‘What do you mean? Have you found any written records from the era? Some ancient film footage perhaps?’
‘Oh no,’ said Paulo. ‘Film could not possibly last that length of time, but the scrolls were well preserved.’
Orlando looked at Paulo, and the latter ceased talking.
‘Scrolls? You mean the scrolls you stole from the Sphinx?’ Neither man gave any response. She carried on her questioning regardless. ‘Are you telling me those scrolls were contemporaneous with this ancient civilisation? Are you saying the Sphinx is twelve thousand years old and was built by people from this place?’
Silence. Ruby got the hint. She changed tack.
‘Do you think the Mayans knew about the war that killed their ancestors?’
‘They would have seen plenty of evidence of that destruction,’ explained Paulo, relieved to be able to talk again. ‘The temples may have been built as a reminder, for future generations, of the follies of the past. There would have been verbal accounts of the war, songs and poems, that kind of thing. Myths. We now believe that their tradition of smashing their pottery was less to do with releasing the spirits contained in it and more to do with commemorating the devastation of the nuclear explosions that took place many generations before. An event like that is hard to shake off in folklore.’
Paulo went on to explain the contents of some of the other pyramids. There were various types of weapons, the workings of which remained a mystery. There were pieces of metal and associated corroded electronics that some speculated might have been connected with receiving satellite signals. The poor state of the remains made it impossible to be sure at this stage, but the navigation system found in the aircraft Ruby had studied made it obvious that the ancients were space farers, so the theory was potentially valid. The Mayans seemed to have built a temple around every trace that then remained of their ancient predecessors. Whether their motivation was to erase their ancestors from history, to protect against their influence or simply to worship objects of mysterious origin was unclear.
They drove on until they reached a plateau overlooking the Great Plaza. Ruby couldn’t bear to look at what might have been done to two of the finest and grandest pyramids of Central America. When she had last seen them facing each other on the grassy plaza, their peaks higher than the surrounding jungle, they’d been fully restored and cleaned. It had been an awe-inspiring sight.
Paulo and Orlando were already out of the car before Ruby dared to open her eyes.
The plaza was unchanged. Her relieved lungs emptied themselves loudly.
At least, it appeared unchanged at first glance. The pyramids and the surrounding temples, palaces and stelae were all there, but the detail was wrong. There were ventilation shafts sticking out of the sides of the pyramids. She could see the steps at the base of one had been removed to accommodate a doorway, large enough to admit a truck. Around the lower levels of each pyramid were windows. Tourists no longer strolled on the plaza, just troops armed with machine guns.
‘The improvements are subtle, Ruby. I hope you approve of them,’ said Paulo.
She didn’t know how to respond. She was delighted that the main structures were mostly intact, but she abhorred the way in which their insides must have been hollowed out to create whatever kind of military installation this was.
‘Why couldn’t you just bring in some portable buildings and work from there?’ she asked.
‘Oh, we did that too,’ said Paulo, pointing at the courtyard behind one of the palaces in which stood an assortment of pre-fabricated structures.
‘And what is the purpose of these modifications?’
‘It’s a kind of centre of operations,’ Orlando explained, his eyes shining with his inner vision. ‘From the nearest pyramid we have the new command centre for the whole Guatemalan army. From the other one we assemble the knowledge and lessons learned from all of the different areas of research going on around us, and we decide how to implement that knowledge. Sometimes we are able to combine one or more of the ancient technologies to create what should turn out to be remarkable new developments.’
‘And by that I suppose you mean you’ve invented new ways of killing people.’
‘Killing people? You know that’s not my style. The real skill comes in preserving people, using people, and taking the enormous power they collectively possess and putting it to positive use. I think I have found a way of tapping that resource more effectively than anyone else has ever done.’
‘What are you going to do, lobotomise us all?’
Paulo cut in to prevent Ruby from digging any deeper holes for herself.
‘There is just one more facility we have not yet seen,’ he said. ‘Apart from the sleeping quarters, medical block and canteen facilities, of course. In the trees behind the Great Plaza we have constructed a series of large units in which the samples from other sites will be housed and studied. There’s no point in visiting them because they’re still empty.’
‘How very euphemistic,’ said Ruby. ‘I really thought more highly of you than this, Paulo. What you’re saying is that the finds you plunder from other countries, having fought your way into them and killed a lot of people, will be put in there. Can’t you see the reality is that people will die? How can you begin to justify that?’
‘I don’t justify it,’ Paulo replied meekly. ‘Don’t give me a hard time. I’m just doing my job. I’m not a soldier. I’m just putting up some buildings because I’ve been asked to. If I take a moral stance and refuse to do it, someone will fill my shoes instantly. Believe me, I have tried to minimise the impact of my work on the monuments at this site, but that has to be balanced against the time limits within which we have to work. It all boils down to a compromise in the end, but it doesn’t matter. I know what we are working towards and why. It all makes sense.’
‘This stupid new era? You believe all that, do you?’
‘I don’t need to believe it. I know it. One day you will know too.’
‘When are you expecting your first delivery of stolen artefacts, Orlando?’
‘Belize is proving a little tougher than we thought, but we’ll get through. It isn’t far to the most important sites. Just have to get past those damn British soldiers. What we don’t yet know is whether any of the thousands of smaller temples contain these relics. There won’t be time to investigate more than a few of them. Mexico is looking promising. We should be moving in any time now. Likewise, Honduras.’
Listening to this, Ruby felt one moment as if her face and neck were on fire, the next as if she’d been dunked in an ice bath. The sheer scope of this was breath-taking. She tried to reassure herself that this was just madness – but then, the gold aircraft was real, the residual radioactivity was real, the scrolls were real. Feeling as if her voice came from a long way away, she heard herself saying, ‘W
hat about the United Nations? You’ll never get away with this. If you start acting like a Bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein there’ll be sanctions and reprisals in no time. You’ll have a massive coalition army coming after you.’
Orlando was permitting himself a sneer, insofar as it was allowed to wrinkle his almost totally smooth brow. ‘Your grasp of archaeology is good, Ruby. Stick to your specialist subject. You know nothing about international politics. That is my subject and that is why I am doing this. Honduras is poor; there’s no oil there. No one’s going to help them. We roll into Mexico and everyone will turn a blind eye. That leaves Belize. Again, no natural resources. The only fly in the ointment is the British, who want to defend that patch of jungle, even though they know perfectly well it was stolen from Guatemala. But they’re on their own in this, and my boys know what they’re doing.’
He was probably right, Ruby told herself. There would be no coalition. The countries he planned to invade were not significant on the world stage. The developed world would make sanctimonious noises and continue their nice little lives and nobody would know what hit them.
‘Let me tell you one more thing, Ruby. Even if the major powers did decide to put up a coalition army against me, do you know how long it would take before a single soldier appeared on the scene? They would be stalled for weeks by attempting diplomacy first. They’ll try anything to keep out of trouble. By the time they’ve packed their soldiers and their body bags onto the boats, we will have entered the new era and they will be irrelevant. They might as well go home. Which is where you must soon go, Ruby. Your new home. There you will stay until I have need of you.’
‘For what, Orlando? I still don’t get it. Why do you allocate so much of your time and effort to keeping me like a pet?’
‘I told you, Ruby. I need you.’
She looked at him for a beat. Was she a toy for the man who had everything? If he enjoyed her company, he wouldn’t keep locking her away.
‘So you need me. I get it. Tell me this, though. Do you know why you need me?’
It was Orlando’s turn to pause and think before answering.
‘Because it is written that I need you,’ he whispered, as if ashamed to admit it.
‘And what the hell does that mean?’
‘There is an ancient script.’
She looked at Paulo’s face to find signs of a snigger, but his expression was as earnest as Orlando’s was embarrassed.
‘I’ve read a few old documents in my time, Orlando. So tell me about this one.’
‘A Greek text. Thousands of years old. It reads that knowledge will one day come to he who possesses a stone in a castle. A particular stone in a special part of the castle. A ruby stone. In a tower. It matches your name. A coincidence? Perhaps. But fate delivered you here, to me.’
‘Fate didn’t deliver me. A fraudulent offer of employment brought me here.’
Then something clicked. The stele Ratty had hidden from her in his turret. The diamond-shaped inscription Bilbo had copied in his diary – he’d said it had originally been coloured red. Ruby red? And it was adjacent to a carving of a battlement. A castle tower ...
A freaky fluke, she decided. At odds with her mother’s account of the origin of Ruby’s name, which had everything to do with the type of port she’d been drinking on the night of her daughter’s conception and nothing to do with ancient history. The connection was undeniably weird, but hardly sufficient to justify kidnapping.
‘Come on, Ruby. Let’s get something to eat, then I’ll take you up there,’ said Paulo.
‘Up where?’ Ruby felt deflated. ‘Are you going to let me out of these ’cuffs?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Orlando. ‘You know the answer to that. I want nothing more than to have you by my side willingly, unshackled. It pains me that I have to do this, but your presence remaining within my reach is more important than your comfort. There is much riding upon you, Ruby. Far more than you could possibly know.’
The absence of soldiers did not make Ratty’s progress into Guatemala any easier. The four-wheel drive capabilities of his vehicle helped him through the wildest parts of the track, though some of the deepest ruts and soggiest mud pools were only traversed after several attempts. The sudden appearance of an adjacent ravine left him with knuckles that were even whiter than usual and crossing the Chiquibul River – during which the water became deep enough for his car briefly to float – left him with some hairs on his head turned newly grey beneath the black dye.
Some strenuous miles later, the ancient, meandering Mayan pathway merged with a dirt road. His satellite navigation unit disputed the existence of the road, but that didn’t prevent him making steady progress along it, and soon, to the apparent delight of his electronic guide, he was on a recognisable route, heading north towards El Naranjo. There was a disturbing quantity of military hardware heading in the opposite direction to him, but, with his progress impeded by neither bushes nor border bureaucracy, he found himself with time to reflect upon what he had seen in his scan of the Caracol pyramid.
The face. Rendered in vulgar, almost neon, shades of orange, yellow, blue and green by the scanning equipment in order to highlight its texture and topography. There was a hint of an enigmatic smile and a knowing glint in the eyes. The face seemed to be several feet across, and was mostly intact except for a crack that gave one cheek an age-weary appearance. Without digging the thing up, Ratty had no way of discerning the real colours that lay behind the digitised gaudiness, but its smooth surface reminded him of fine Romanesque sculptures crafted from pure white marble.
He found himself thinking of the wide, full lips on that ancient stone face – cold, inhuman, inert. And yet his thoughts strayed beyond their lifeless context. He was imagining the lips to be curiously desirable, enticing, kissable. It was madness, of course. He was having romantic fantasies about a chunk of chiselled stone that had been buried for thousands of years beneath a pyramid. It made no sense at all. And yet it made perfect sense because he was attracted to that face at a deep animalistic level. It was a face that was always in his head, guiding him, castigating him, confusing him, yet never loving him even though he loved her.
* * *
The majesty of the twin pyramids dominated the area – two timeless creations that would far outlive the generation of scientists and soldiers now scurrying around at their base. Paulo and Ruby entered the Great Plaza.
‘Did they find anything inside these main pyramids?’ asked Ruby, partly from professional curiosity and partly just to keep a conversation going.
‘We excavated them very carefully. We cut through thick stone walls and found a chamber at the base of each of them. Both chambers were about the size of a small house, and had been perfectly sealed from moisture and air for all of these years.’
‘Why do you think they created those chambers?’
‘I have an idea that they were waiting for something, or someone, to put in there,’ said Paulo. ‘Or maybe it symbolised to them that they didn’t want to see the destruction of the previous era in their own era, that there would be no need in the future to build temples on old war artefacts. I don’t know really. Anyhow, we have enlarged and ventilated these rooms and added ante-rooms with windows. This is the nerve centre of the whole operation. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever been involved in, Ruby.’
‘But it’s wrong! Can’t you see? Don’t you have a conscience? Don’t you bastards sodding well care?’
The expression of indignation on Paulo’s face seemed false to Ruby. Even so, she found it comforting to recognise a spark of humanity still inside him.
‘I’m not allowed to tell you the whole story, and that hurts me because I know you would feel differently if you had that knowledge. Trust me on this one, Ruby. Soon we’re going to be living in a very different world.’
They reached the base of Temple II. He offered her a slug of mineral water from the bottle he carried in a leather contraption around his chest.
‘And where am I going to be living in the meantime?’ she asked between glugs.
‘Orlando asked me to prepare a special place for you, my dear. Ready?’
Paulo started to climb the pyramid, striding up the enormous blocks that constituted the stairway. Although an entrance had been cut into the steps at ground level, there was still enough width remaining for someone to pass comfortably on either side.
Ruby looked up, straining her neck in an attempt to see the top of the pyramid. From this angle it was so high and so steep that she couldn’t quite see its summit. She followed Paulo steadily upwards, panting as the heavy humidity quickly drenched her with sweat. Sometimes he stopped to help her, but mostly he let her struggle, tier by tier, some almost as tall as her.
‘Don’t look down,’ called Paulo from above, without looking down himself. ‘It’s a much steeper angle than a modern staircase. We lost a man last week.’
The higher they went, the narrower the staircase became. Ruby looked up and finally saw that Paulo had reached some kind of platform area and was standing there, catching his breath. A few more steep steps and she was up there with him, on a ledge high above the jungle canopy. Despite her determination to appear tough, she had to lie on the floor to regain some strength in her jelly-like legs for a few moments before forcing herself to stand. Shakily, and once again accepting some water, she realised she could see for miles. The patches cleared by Paulo in recent weeks were not detectable amid the overall ocean of green. Aside from the clear Great Plaza beneath her, and a couple of other peaks belonging to the taller pyramids, there was no sign from here of any of the industry that was taking place at Tikal. The treetops stretched as far as the horizon in every direction.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’
Paulo had spoken from inside the small structure that sat at the top of this pyramid, about six feet in from the edge of the stone platform. It was a single room, about ten feet wide, with an ancient-looking wooden lintel above its door. This, Ruby realised, was to be her new home. Still a little unsteady, she walked inside. There was a camp bed, a couple of boxes containing food and soft drinks, a covered bucket and a drum of water on a metal stand. Attached to it was a length of hosepipe.
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 24