Carved into the surface was a crude relief of a man, short and barrel-chested, but without the hawkish profile of the locals or their flattened skulls. The light was low enough that she got as much from her fingertips as from her eyes, and she swept them over the slab hungrily. The carved figure wore the feathery wings of the Ek Balam kings, and he brandished a sword in his one good hand. The other was missing from the elbow. And on either side of the figure was a letter, not a Mayan glyph, but an English letter: an E and a C.
Edward Clifford.
They were all around her by then. No one spoke, but their shadows made it even harder to see, so someone trained a flashlight on the stone. Then they used mattocks and picks to prize the stone free, working them into the crack around the edge and then leaning all their weight on the handles. The stone was heavy, but they worked silently, sweating, adjusting, until a finger of dark space appeared down the left edge. Then they moved to the right side and repositioned their tools. Krista caught Porfiro’s eye as he wiped the perspiration from his unreadable face.
Everyone pitched in. Even the CIA men used crowbars and logs as levers to work the slab free. Aguilar began repeating a Spanish word she didn’t know, and it became a rhythm they worked to, straining in unison, pausing, then pulling again, until—with a low, rasping, groan, the stone began to move. They slid it to the side rather than flipping it over, so that they were less likely to break it, and then stood there in silence, panting, hands on knees, staring.
Chapter Seventy-Five
It was hard to see past the grave goods to the human remains, but Aguilar would have a fit if he started moving things out of the way, so Chad Rylands shifted his position and guided the beam of his flashlight as carefully as he could. The right arm of the skeleton was severed just below the elbow. Even from here, and surrounded by all this gaping and gasping, it was clear that the bones of the thighs and upper arms were severely shortened, and the skull was disproportionately large with a prominent forehead. Below the knee and elbow the shortening was less profound, but the feet seemed undersized. He would need proper analysis to see if they displayed the separation between the third and fourth digits characteristic of achondroplasia, but he was as sure as he could be: this was the skeleton of the dwarf whose hand lay under the great pyramid in Ek Balam. The discoloration of the bones fit Miller’s guess as to the date of internment—about three hundred and fifty years ago—but confirmation would take analysis of a kind he couldn’t do squatting by a hole in the ground of some Mexican forest. If only he could get all that other stuff out of the grave, and get rid of his gawking colleagues, he could get some real work done.
Chapter Seventy-Six
Nick Reese had not removed the camera’s viewfinder from his eye since the grave had been opened. He zoomed and fired the shutter, aware of little beyond the tiny electronic pop of the flash followed by its faint recharging whine. As he recomposed and shot, parts of the ancient Jewel House inventory he had read a thousand times in documents from the interregnum ran through his head. He carried a copy of the 1652 transcription made by Cromwell’s agents folded inside his camera case, and though he couldn’t have recited it perfectly, the items chimed in his memory as his eyes raked the contents of the grave.
One large blue sapphire, ten large diamonds, and as many rubies. 232 pearls. Four rubies in a fleur-de-lis, seven diamond crosses. 20 sapphires, 83 pearls. A small crown found in an iron chest, formerly in the custody of Lord Cottington, weighing 2 1b. 10 oz., whereof three ounces are allowed for the weight of the stones. The globe, weighing 1 lb. 5 oz. Two coronation bracelets, weighing 7 oz.: Three rubies balases, set in each of the bracelets. Twelve large pearls. Two scepters, weighing 16 oz. A long rod of silver gilt, weighing 11.5 oz. One gold cup set with two sapphires and two rubies balases, weighing 15 oz. Diverse pieces of broken gold enameled, put together in a bag, weighing 5 lb.
Queen Edith’s crown, enriched with garnet, pearl, sapphire, and some stones, weighing 50 oz.
King Alfred’s crown of gold wire-work, set with precious stones and two little bells, weighing 79 oz.
A dove of gold, set with stones and pearl, set with studs of silver gilt. A large gold staff with a dove at the top. One small staff, with a fleur-de-lis on the top. Two scepters—one set with pearls and stones, the upper end gold, the lower end silver.
The queen’s crown of gold and precious stones, weighing 3 1b. 10 oz.
The imperial crown of massy gold, weighing 7 1b. 6 oz., enriched with precious stones...
He couldn’t be sure, was too excited to judge, but he thought most of it was here. Maybe all of it. Centuries of history and culture—all long since deemed irretrievably lost—lying heaped among bones in the Mexican dirt. Nick zoomed and snapped and recomposed in a kind of frenzy, willing the flash to charge faster.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Deborah saw the gleam of bright metal in the flashlight, and the sparkle of gems, but her eyes stayed on the skeleton beneath. The bones were dark and stained, but she felt no revulsion, only a warm sense of recognition and closure that blended equal parts joy and sadness. The figure was twisted slightly to one side and the skeleton had collapsed, but her eyes moved to the skull, and for a moment it was like looking at someone she had known long ago. The body seemed small so that she was forcefully reminded that they had first assumed the bones had come from a child. As the flashlights played over the grave, and Nick Reese’s camera flash began to fire, Deborah sank to her haunches and put her hands to her face, thinking of the child born misshapen and despised to an outcast mother on the slopes of Pendle Hill, and all he had gone through before being laid to rest so very far away.
Beside the body lay a rusty sword with a basket hilt.
Edward’s sword, she thought. The sword that had hacked away his arm at the elbow as part of an honor debt aimed to protect the people who had taken him in, people among whom he did not belong.
And around him the jewels he had kept to commemorate a man who had spared his miserable and embattled mother, the jewels that had once meant everything to the old world order and its version of power, now returned to the earth in a land that would abandon monarchy entirely.
The skeleton wasn’t much more than half her size, and Deborah knew why she empathized so much with this forgotten outcast, the man whose size and shape, combined with his intellect and stubbornness had made him a perpetual outsider. She knew that feeling. She sensed it in people’s eyes as they flashed up her six-foot, two-inch frame, when they asked what her husband did, how old her children were, or when she’d last taken a vacation, and then gave her that confused look, their lips always holding back the questions she heard in her mother’s voice:
Why can’t you be normal?
Or the franker notes of contempt and hostility.
Weirdo. Loser. Freak.
As she sat gazing into the tomb, she suddenly realized that the body had been buried with more than the treasure he had brought with him. There were jade beads and decorated ceramics, sea urchin spines and a wooden jaguar mask with inlaid shell eyes: Mayan grave goods fit for a king.
So Edward had found a way to fit in after all.
Ken Jones’s satellite phone beeped. Deborah didn’t take her eyes off the grave, and it was at least a minute before Jones appeared next to her in the dim light.
“Miss Miller,” he said. “Are you familiar with Adelita Lacantun, Eustachio’s granddaughter?”
The name brought Deborah round sharply, but there was an odd sense of whiplash, almost like vertigo.
“Yes, of course. She helped out at the Ek Balam site some. Why?”
“She seems to have gone missing.”
“Missing?” Deborah echoed, stricken with dread. “What do you mean?”
“She was last seen in the company of an American woman identified by the people in the pueblo as someone who worked on the site before it was closed. We think it was Marissa Stroud.”
Chapter Seventy-Eight
It was a log
istical nightmare, not unlike the original tomb find. Aguilar straightened his aching back, leaning and arching against the strain, and began planning. The daylight was gone and they would need work lights to do any real detailed study, but they couldn’t leave the artifacts in the ground exposed to the elements. A stiff breeze had been building and there was a good chance they would get rain—maybe a lot of it.
They had plastic storage bins in the van. They would have to move everything there, slowly and as carefully as possible, videotaping everything as they did so. Reese, the Englishman, could do that. The rest would do the loading. Maybe the CIA guys—the black guy and the gray-suited one who had led the raid on the lab—would help. If they didn’t they’d be here till morning, and it had already been a long, stressful, and exhausting day. Aguilar would do the artifact retrieval and any immediate conservation that seemed necessary, but all they could do was label everything, pad it, and box it up.
Aguilar blew out a long breath. He was still sweating from moving the stone, and the prospect of the recovery effort, an effort that should properly take days, seemed impossibly wearisome.
Madre de Dios, he thought. Why can nothing go smoothly on this godforsaken project?
There was a tarp in the van that they might be able to set up on logs and wires as a shelter over the grave like the makeshift tent they had put up to cover the laptops. That would buy them some time if there was a sudden downpour.
Yes, he thought. That should be their first priority.
Second, actually. First he needed a drink. He had a bottle of tequila under the van’s driver’s seat, which he had intended to share with Krista back at the hotel, but that would have to wait. He couldn’t afford to be even slightly out of it while they worked, and besides, he felt a headache building just behind his eyes. He was dehydrated.
“Water break, everyone,” he said. “Then we erect a shelter over the site and start moving everything into storage. OK, Deborah?”
She was still perched on the edge of the grave, looking at the body. She could have been miles away, and when she heard her name she looked up, her face blank, then nodded silently. She was giving him control of what happened next, which was probably smart. She had been out of it since they had gotten word that Eustachio’s granddaughter had been kidnapped. Aguilar felt ashamed that he seemed to feel less for the girl than Miller did, but he had a job to do, and one of them needed to stay focused. He took a long draft from the water cooler, which wasn’t as warm as it had been earlier, thank God, and then he handed it off to Krista, watching her pale throat as she swallowed.
“Let’s conserve those flashlights,” he said. “We’re going to be here for a while and we don’t have backup power beyond the spare batteries.”
The cooler had made the rounds, and when it came back to him he lifted it high and turned on the tap so it poured straight down his throat till he couldn’t swallow anymore. He offered it to Krista again and then considered the ground. They were going to need to get the van as close as possible without damaging anything on site. He took a few steps and shone the flashlight onto the weedy grass scanning for stones. The last thing he wanted was to damage the underside of the van.
Back there in the dark he heard someone laugh. Rylands, perhaps. Aguilar didn’t think he’d ever heard Rylands laugh before, but it wasn’t surprising that it should come now. There was an exuberant mood around the camp. Even the CIA agents felt it: a bubbling of excitement and satisfaction. They didn’t know what they had found yet, but however dubious they might be of Deborah’s tales of crown jewels, they knew they had something important, even if it wasn’t Mayan. They were about to write their way into archaeological history. Already had in fact.
He didn’t like moving too far from the others and into the darkness of the woods where the vehicle was parked. There was something primal about the forest that made you feel like the trees were watching, whispering to each other as the wind stirred them. The van looked out of place there, unwelcome, and despite the heat that continued to hang in the dark air, Aguilar shivered. He returned his light to the ground and kicked at a rock, planning which way he would drive through the site. The stone rolled, but not far enough, so he stooped, picked it up, and flipped it a few yards into the trees. He reached for another and was still bent over when he saw the snake.
It was a heavy-bodied thing with a triangular head, a fer-de-lance, he thought, and quite lethal, but there was something odd about it. It was too big, for one thing, and seemed to coil into the underbrush yards away. As Aguilar watched, it seemed to flicker with a greenish light that pulsed down its length. He took an unsteady step backward, only to find another one, curling through his legs. He cried out and jumped sideways, almost dropping his flashlight, but as he moved the beam over the ground he saw more of them. A nest? No, it was worse than that. They were coming up out of the ground, and as the soil broke apart he could see bodies under the earth, some skeletal, but others still holding the remains of flesh and fiber. One of them, he was suddenly sure, was Eustachio, though how he could be here, Aguilar could not begin to guess.
The ground in front of him split open like a husk, and another corpse was pushed up to the surface, a long, sickly orange serpent spewing from its mouth. Aguilar turned to run, but the ground was alive with snakes, boiling up out of the earth, slithering out of the eye sockets and rib cages that lay inches below the surface. Dimly, like someone in a dream, he became aware of screaming back where the others were, though he could not take his eyes from the ground to look.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Deborah knew what had happened the moment the beam of her flashlight seemed to swirl, its particles slowing and drifting in a haze that scattered color. She had drunk last, and only once, but she felt the force of the drug in a rising terror that was amplified by the scenes around her. Someone was screaming. Krista, she thought. Rylands had sprinted off into the darkness like he was being chased, and one of the CIA agents was lying on the ground, his eyelids fluttering and a ribbon of blood running down his head. She fought to make sense of it all.
She had been talking to Jones about something important, though she couldn’t remember what, and then he had stopped talking. She wasn’t sure what had happened next, but a moment later he was on the ground. It looked like he was having some kind of seizure.
It’s not real, she thought, mouthing the words, whispering to herself. It was the water. While we were moving the stone, someone got to the water...Chattox. Or Old Demdike.
But she knew it wasn’t them, knew it was someone else, someone she knew, though she couldn’t find the name. She turned and shone her flashlight back to the grave, and there was someone there, crouched over, scrabbling at the dirt. A woman. And in the grave laid out, pale in death, was Adelita.
The woman turned toward Deborah, but she had no eyes, and the mouth hung open as if the jaw were disconnected. It was black inside and wide enough to fall into.
Ma?
The word ran up her throat from her belly, tearing as it came, so that she felt her insides wrenching and buckling.
No, she countered. Not real.
Deborah tried to take a step toward her, but it was like pushing against something with substance, yielding, black and viscous as if the night itself had coalesced and begun to harden. It came from the woman’s mouth. The darkness seemed to spew from her gaping jaws. It surrounded her, a deep, oily blackness that grew more solid by the moment. Deborah pushed against it but could not take the step, and then something hit her and she fell.
It was Nick Reese. He had run into her full pelt, not seeing her at all, so there was no bracing for impact, no slowing before the collision, and she went down hard, holding her head. He fell half beside her, half on top of her, and his breathing was fast and uneven, his eyes mad.
“Get me out of here!” he gasped, still not really seeing her. “I shouldn’t be here.”
Deborah clutched the spot above her eye where he had hit her with his head, and rolled, the
darkness seeming to brighten with the pain of the impact, but her head cleared a little, and she seized him by the wrist as he rose and tried to run.
“It’s not real,” she managed. “It’s the water. That woman...” She turned but was disoriented. “How much did you drink?”
“What?” He looked at her as if he had never seen her before, his eyes moving uneasily from her face to the darkness behind her. “I don’t belong here.”
“How much did you drink?” she said again. She felt clearer already, as if telling him what had happened had somehow convinced her own senses. But somewhere back there the eyeless woman still clawed in the dirt. Deborah could sense her. She was coming now, with those hollows where her eyes should be and that terrible, gaping cave of a mouth.
Not real!
“How much did you drink?” she repeated, focusing on Nick.
“I don’t know,” he said. “A cup?”
She sat up and swept her flashlight over the clearing. It was chaos. The others were doubled up, shouting, pointing at nothing, running. Two of them—including one of the CIA men—were lying down, motionless. Jones was on his hands and knees, his arms over his head. Either the others had drunk more than she had, or Stroud had used a considerably greater dose of her toxic cocktail this time.
Stroud! That was her name.
Tears of the Jaguar Page 30