“It was good of you to come all the way back here to report this to me,” said Father Gomez.
Sam held up both hands. “No, please. That wasn’t the only reason we’re here.”
Remi said, “We told you that we were rushing to verify, photograph, and register the Mayan sites in the codex. That’s the other reason why we’re here.”
“Here?” Father Gomez looked shocked. “Not in Santa Maria de los Montañas?”
“Not in the town,” said Sam. “We think it’s above the town, on a plateau. The map shows it as something that looks like a tower or a fort.”
“Very interesting,” said Father Gomez. He looked uneasy. “Would you please allow me to hire a guide for you? I’d hate to have you get lost up in these hills.”
“No thank you, Father. We have the precise location on GPS and also aerial photographs,” said Remi. “We’re getting good at finding these places. What would be helpful is if you could tell us where we can store our car safely.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “There’s Pepe Rubio’s garage. He’s the town’s mechanic and keeps cars overnight quite often.”
“That sounds perfect,” said Sam. “He can give us an oil change at the same time.”
Remi stood and began clearing the plates from the dining table while Sam and Father Gomez chatted. As she entered the kitchen, she caught Señora Velasquez stepping back from the door as though she had been eavesdropping. Remi smiled and handed her the plates, but Señora Velasquez didn’t return the smile.
They set out from the priest’s house, and Remi told Sam about Señora Velasquez. “I’m sure she was listening,” said Remi.
“No harm done. We would have been happy to have her join in the conversation.”
“I know. But I’ll bet a lot of people around here wonder how their secrets get out.”
Soon they found Pepe’s garage. They could see they had the right place from the cars parked all over the block and in front of the house. They found Pepe putting on a set of tires. Sam hired him to service their car and keep it safe.
Pepe referred them to the nearby house of the Pérez family, who were willing to rent them a guest room for the night. In the evening, they ate at the small restaurant where they’d had breakfast with Father Gomez and Dr. Huerta on their first visit.
The following morning, as the sun grew bright, they set out on foot to find the structure they’d seen on the map in the Mayan codex. It was a beautiful day as they crossed the fields, cleared for planting corn and beans, and then entered the forest. After some searching, they found a path that led up the side of the plateau, above and beyond the town.
After climbing about a hundred feet on the path, Remi stopped. “Look at this.”
She stood at a place where the path turned upward and to the left. There was a steep incline to the next level, but they could see that it had been reinforced with slabs of rock laid horizontally like giant steps.
“I guess this means we’ve found the right trail,” Sam said. He joined her in climbing toward the turn ahead.
“That’s right,” she said. “But in all the other sites we’ve visited, the stone was all overgrown. This is exposed.”
They walked along the path, climbing steadily. Sam said, “This is closer to a place where people live than the other sites were. And it does make sense to use a perfectly good path when you find one instead of blazing a new trail.”
They climbed for a while, unimpeded by thick brush or centuries of fallen earth. Remi said, “The part I haven’t figured out yet is why.”
“I know,” Sam said. “Maybe there’s something else up there — good fields or something.”
“I’d hate to carry the harvest down this path,” Remi said.
“Then what do you think it could be?”
“I’m hoping it’s a shortcut to another village that has an air-conditioned spa and restaurant.”
“A good working theory,” he said. “I’ll accept it until we find something better. That’s the way we scientists operate.”
In ten more minutes, they reached the head of the path. They climbed up onto the level top of the plateau and looked around. There were several large mounds of earth that might be buildings, but they were not on the scale of the buildings in the cities they had found. They weren’t high or steep, and the plateau wasn’t large enough for monumental architecture. It was only about three hundred feet across.
They both noticed something else. The perimeter of the plateau had a low ridge around it like the rim of a bowl. They walked along the ridge, taking pictures, and then Sam stopped at a section that had fallen down. It revealed the ridge to actually be a pile of stones and earth.
“It’s a wall. It’s like the old Roman forts you find in Europe — low walls of stone piled up to stop an enemy attack. This was built for a battle.”
“It’s not like any of the other ruins we visited,” Remi said. “It feels different — not empty, somehow.”
They walked the rest of the way around the plateau. In the middle of the flat space, there were more low mounds of earth and stone, all of them overgrown with small plants. The only sounds on the plateau were the movements of the leaves in a soft wind and the calls of birds. At times, it was so quiet that Sam’s and Remi’s footsteps were the loudest sounds.
Remi said, “This isn’t a place where people would live. It reminds me of the cenote a few miles from here. The wall around it seemed to be made for a last stand too.”
“I know what you mean,” said Sam. “This and the cenote must be relics of a war between cities.”
They came across a trench about three feet deep and only wide enough for a man to stand in it and dig. It ran from the stone wall at the rim of the plateau for about a hundred feet and directly into one of the mounds. “Uh-oh,” said Remi.
“Do you know what that is?”
“I think it’s the kind of trench that pot hunters and grave robbers dig to find underground chambers and caches.”
Sam raised his satellite phone and took a few pictures of it, then sent them to Selma. He and Remi walked along the trench, looking into it. “If that’s what it was, it seems to have failed. It doesn’t lead to a bigger hole, where they might have found something and dug it up.”
The trench stopped at the base of the mound. When they reached the spot, Remi said, “It doesn’t seem to have stopped here. The rocks that are piled on the side of the mound are different. I think somebody dug into the mound and then covered the hole after they were done.”
“It’s puzzling,” said Sam.
“The word is ‘creepy,’” Remi said.
“Creepy, then.” He bent and began to lift the stones that had been placed in the opening and toss them to one side.
“You’re going to dig into it? That’s not why we came here. We were just locating sites, photographing them, and describing what’s in them so David Caine can register them.”
“I can’t very well describe what’s here unless I know,” said Sam. “This could be anything.”
“It could be a tomb. Judging from the trench, that’s what whoever beat us here thought.”
“Or it could be a pile of the right-sized rocks for throwing down at invaders. Or a big pile of potsherds, which, as you know, is the most common find at any archaeological site.”
Remi sighed, knelt beside Sam, and began lifting stones from the mound and tossing them aside. They worked until the stones revealed the straight, even sides of an entrance. “A doorway,” she said. “So much for the rock-pile theory and the broken-pot theory.”
“Still have a bad feeling?”
“More and more,” said Remi. “I’m just going along with this to show you what a great sport I am.”
“We’re almost in,” Sam said.
Remi stepped back from the opening and let Sam haul the last few rocks away. Then he said, “We’re in.” He stood, took the flashlight from his pack, aimed it into the opening, and crawled inside.
There was s
ilence. Remi sat still for a minute, listening. Finally, her curiosity overpowered her caution. She took her own flashlight out and entered.
As soon as she was inside, she realized that the space was large and hollow. Her flashlight beam caught white stucco walls covered with realistic murals of old Mayans. There were many glyphs, and between them were pictures of dozens of men in feathered headdresses and wearing jaguar skins. Some carried short spears, round shields, clubs with sharp obsidian teeth. They were going into battle.
When her flashlight reached the floor, Remi jumped and gave a small cry. Lying on the other side of the chamber was a corpse. The body was in a state similar to the mummified man she and Sam had found on Volcán Tacaná in Mexico. His skin was brown and leathery, his body skeletal. He was lying near a second doorway. There were strips of cloth, a tanned belt, and boots on him, and beside him was a broad-brimmed felt hat.
Sam appeared in the second doorway. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you.”
“Every day is Halloween lately,” she said. She knelt by the dead man and gave him a closer look. “What do you suppose got him — a jaguar? His clothes are torn, and he has big wounds.”
“Take a look at his revolver.”
Remi saw the old-fashioned, long-barreled revolver by his right hand. She bent low to look into the front of the cylinder and then rotated it. “He fired all six.”
“Right. And I don’t see any jaguar bones.”
“Do you recognize the gun?”
“It looks like a Colt Single Action Army, which would date it — and him — at 1873 or later.”
She said, “His skull is crushed on the left side.”
“That was one of the details I was going to mention after we were outside in the daylight.”
“This man was clubbed to death,” she said. “He was murdered.” She got up, and they both walked into the inner chamber. Inside was a low bier made of cut stone. On it lay a skeleton adorned with a gold breastplate, a strip of gold with carved jade stones for a headpiece, jade ear plugs. There was an obsidian knife, a club, and a large number of carved-jade and beaten-gold objects.
“The tomb is intact,” said Remi. “How can it possibly be intact? Whoever killed that guy out there must have known there was gold in here.”
Sam and Remi both heard a shuffling sound and then another. They stepped to the doorway. Gathered in the outer chamber were a half dozen people from the nearby town — Señora Velasquez; Pepe, the mechanic; Señor Alvarez, the restaurant owner, his son, and two others they didn’t know. Three of them were holding guns of some description, the others knives, and all of them looked furious.
Sam said, “Hello, ladies and gentlemen.”
Señora Velasquez said, “Come out of there very slowly and carefully.”
“We meant no harm,” Remi said. “We just saw that—”
“Quiet or you’ll be as dead as he is.”
Sam and Remi walked past the armed townspeople into the sunlight. Waiting in a large circle around them were about fifty other residents of Santa Maria de los Montañas. Some of them held machetes, others axes or hatchets. There were a couple of baseball bats. A few people held hunting rifles or shotguns, and there were pistols nearly as old as the one beside the man in the tomb.
The menace was palpable. The rifles and shotguns were aimed at Sam and Remi. There were two men with ropes, which seemed even more ominous than the weapons.
A man they had not seen before stepped out of the crowd. He had the sun-darkened face and sinewy arms of a farmer. He looked at Sam and Remi with eyes as hard as obsidian. “I’ll volunteer to dig graves. We can throw the bodies down from here and bury them where they fall. Who will help me?”
Chapter 27
SANTA MARIA DE LOS MONTAÑAS
“I’ll help dig graves.” A second man stepped forward and joined the first on the outside of the circle. After that, a couple of others just waved hands and joined the burial crew.
Pepe the mechanic stepped into the circle. “Remember, we have no reason to make these people suffer. Someone shoot them in the head with a hunting rifle and make it fast.”
Sam spoke loudly. “We would like to know why you would want to harm us at all.” He whispered to Remi, “Help me with the language.”
Remi called out, “We came to your town twice. Both times, we told whoever would listen what we were doing here. Yesterday we told Father Gomez what we were going to do today. We came with the most peaceful of intentions.”
Señor Alvarez, the restaurant owner, said, “I’m sorry that you have to die. Nobody here hates you. But you’ve found this place. It’s a sacred place to us. We’re not rich people, but we have a rich past. Our town was founded as part of this complex nearly two thousand years ago. This was a refuge where the people of the city twenty miles to the east came after they were defeated in war. This mesa is one of the highest places in Alta Verapaz. The king and a few loyal survivors came here, turned and fought. Then, hundreds of years later, a period of war came again. Then again. Each time a king of the city was defeated, he and his faction fell back to this place and held out. Up here there are the remains of five great kings. When the Spanish soldiers came the first time, the king prepared the place one last time. But they defeated the Spanish again and again and never needed to come here. Instead, they made peace with the priests. The watchtower on the hill was torn down and made into a church. Nobody from this town has ever betrayed its secrets.”
Sam said, “This place can’t be a secret forever. It’s marked on a map in a Mayan codex we found on a volcano in Mexico. It’s shown up on satellite photographs and been noticed by university professors.”
“We don’t have to let you dig up our ancestors and steal their belongings,” said Señora Velasquez. “You’re like Columbus and the Spanish. You think knowing about them makes them yours.”
Remi said, “You don’t have to let us study your special place. If you didn’t want us to climb up here, you could have told us while we were with Father Gomez. We thought we were finding a place nobody knew about.”
There was a roar of derisive laughter as the townspeople looked at one another with grim amusement. One of the men was angry. “You see graves on a satellite photo and think it’s all right to dig them up? It never seems to occur to you people that we know anything about the places where we’ve always lived. It was our ancestors who built these tombs, who made the mesa into a fortress. We’ve all been coming here since we were small children. Do you think we can’t see walls and burial mounds? You think that if we don’t dig up our ancestors and sell their treasures, we must be ignorant.” He turned away from Sam and Remi and took a rifle from one of the men near him. He cycled the bolt to load a round.
“Stop!” The voice was powerful but strained. As everyone turned to look, Father Gomez’s head rose above the rim of the plateau by the trailhead, and he took the last step up onto the plateau. He was panting and wheezing from the long, steep climb. He held up his arms. “Stop! Don’t do this. Arturo, put down that rifle. What you’re about to do is just murder. It has no higher meaning.”
The angry man looked at his feet, then opened the bolt of the rifle and handed it back to its owner.
Father Gomez seemed to be relieved, but his expression showed he knew this was not over.
Pepe, the mechanic, spoke. “You’re not from this town, Father. You’re not one of us. You don’t know.”
A man who seemed to be a relative of Señora Velasquez said, “Since the days of the kings, we’ve had nothing except this place. The walls are where brave men and women fought to their deaths, and great leaders lie inside each of these mounds. Nobody has been allowed to desecrate this place or take away what’s buried here. The second king who led his people up here respected the remains of the first, and the one after that respected him.”
He paused and pointed at the mound Sam and Remi had reopened. “Only once before did a stranger make it up to this spot. He’s lying in there now, although it�
�s been more than a hundred years and nobody now alive has seen him before today. Everyone knows that he was killed by townspeople with hoes and hatchets. The secret was safe again.”
“No! No! No!” said Father Gomez. “I may not have been born in Santa Maria, but I’ve lived here longer than many who were and I’m responsible for the state of your souls. Do you think the men who committed that murder a hundred years ago aren’t suffering for it in hell?”
A few people looked down at the ground and others crossed themselves. A couple spat.
Pepe said, “We’ve lived for centuries at the mercy of men in Madrid or Guatemala City, signing pieces of paper to make other rulers over us and control what we have — men who never even saw us. This is more of the same. All we’re doing is trying to protect the bodies of our ancestors from the men far away who own everything.”
Father Gomez took a breath to speak, but Sam said, “Hold it, Father.” He turned to the people in the circle. “My wife and I had no plans to take anything away from here. The people we work with are university professors who are only interested in gaining more knowledge about the Mayan people. We’re here for that reason alone. There are other people who already have maps with this spot marked. One of them is Sarah Allersby, who owns the Estancia Guerrero. Even if you kill us, she and people she hires will come to find this place. She’ll dig up whatever there is and leave things looking like this.” He turned and nodded toward the open trench.
People were disturbed, in doubt, murmuring among themselves, while others seemed to be angrier. Small arguments began.
A new voice came across the plateau. “Señor Fargo is right. Listen to him.”
People turned their heads to see Dr. Huerta come around the mound near the trailhead.
“What are you doing here?” asked Señor Lopez, the storekeeper.
Dr. Huerta shrugged. “I noticed people were gone, so I asked some of your children. And, over the years, I’ve found that whenever there were a lot of people out, carrying sharp objects and firearms, there has been plenty of work for a doctor.”
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