The Annihilators

by Donald Hamilton

  Frances said, “Don’t be stupid. He’s just offering you some coca leaves for the pain…”

  I didn’t follow the rest of that, because I’d suddenly become aware that there were more people in the cave now: white-clad figures standing silently at the edge of the light, mostly men but some women. When I looked back to Marschak, he was chewing obediently, and his color had also improved. Epifanio approached me.

  “El Viejo wishes to speak with you. And the lady also.”

  “Sure.”

  We moved over to where Cortez was sitting. A couple of men had come forward carrying between them a large square of canvaslike cloth full of firewood; they were laying a fire in the pit before the jaguar altar with its two snarling heads.

  “Gracias, guerrero,” the old man whispered, looking up at me. “It was well done.”

  I wasn’t too sure of that. He still didn’t look very good. It could have been done better, or at least faster. But I said modestly, “Por nada.”

  “And thank you, too, señora.” Cortez started to say more, but changed his mind and gestured to Epifanio to take over instead.

  The younger man said, “The Old One finds your language difficult to speak. He asks me to explain to you, señor, why you were chosen to help. He says that the old warrior in your party, the former general, was too old and might not have believed; the elderly do not accept unfamiliar ideas readily. He says that the young warrior, the capitan, was troubled in his mind and might not have heard; it is difficult to reach those with heavy troubles. The others…” Epifanio shrugged. “They were not guerreros. One cazador, perhaps, a hunter, the others, nada. So you were chosen.” He smiled faintly. “Besides, only you had a gun, señor.”

  I said dryly, “Yes, I can see that might have made a difference. But what about your own people?”

  He smiled his thin young smile again. “With all due respect, señor, it was felt better that gringos should fight gringos. Now the Old One would request of you a great favor.”

  I said in their formal way, “It is granted.”

  “The captives, the prisoners. Your prisoners.”

  “They are his,” I said. “He earned them. I was only the weapon in his hands.”

  Epifanio looked at me sharply. “I am sorry. I may have spoken badly. I did not realize that you understood…”

  But Rutterfeld, who’d been listening to every word, spoke sharply: “What is this? What do they want with us? What will be done to us?”

  And Frances had touched my arm. “I don’t get it, Sam. What’s going on?”

  I said, “Hell, you’re the archaeologist; you’re supposed to know their customs. What does it look like is going on? They’re lighting the sacred fire. They’re reconsecrating the ancient altar—look at them—and they have here three lousy gringo criminals who’ll never be missed, whom they carefully baited and trapped in their sacred cave beside their sacred underground lake. Well, Cortez did, using himself as bait and me as the trap. If they’d grabbed three respectable American tourists, out of our group, say, they’d have had endless official troubles. Three of their own? I don’t know if their religion permits the use of their own; anyway, prisoners of war were the customary subjects for this kind of ceremony, I think you told us; and here are three very suitable POWs. Armed, they invaded Copalque with hostile intentions, didn’t they? And they were taken in fierce combat by that great warrior ally of the ancient Melmec people, Sam Felton, who has just waived all rights to the warm bodies.” I grimaced. “That’s why the old man didn’t want any of them killed. He wasn’t being humanitarian, just practical. You can’t sacrifice a dead man properly.”

  “Sacrifice!” Frances gasped; and Rutterfeld was protesting shrilly; and Marschak was cursing rather repetitiously. Frances grasped my arm: “But, Sam, we can’t let them—”

  “Let?” I said. “Look around, sweetheart. Count noses. Even if I wanted to shoot down a bunch of nice local citizens for the sake of these three creeps, the pistol’s only got five chambers. Besides, I’m a firm believer in freedom of religion. And I must say I’m a little surprised at your attitude, professor.”

  “What do you… Oh.” I saw her face change, and a speculative gleam came into her eyes.

  “That’s better, Dr. Dillman,” I said. “How many of your professional colleagues have actually seen this ritual performed?”

  She licked her lips. “Of course… of course I’ll never dare to publish… And it will be a totally degenerate form of the old ceremony after all these years, but still…”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Rutterfeld shouted at me wildly, “It is insane! You are a white man, you cannot allow these little brown niggers to—”

  “Oh, shut up!” That was Kronbeck, the diminutive gunman, opening his mouth for the first time since his capture. “I told you we had no business in the fucking jungle messing with a bunch of Indians; now shut up about brown niggers. Felton, or whatever your name is…”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “You did a slick job of sneaking up on me. Okay, no hard feelings. As between one lousy manhunter and another, how about asking that high priest j.g. to pass those painkiller leaves around. Tell him I have a hell of a headache and that’s no lie.”

  “Sure.”

  But when I started to speak, Epifanio raised his hand. “I heard. It would have been done in any case. Un momentito.”

  I asked him, “Will we be permitted to remain?”

  Epifanio said, “It is the wish of the Old One that you should do so. He thinks the lady will find answers to some of the questions she has been asking. And you, señor, I think you will find it interesting, also.”

  Some men were untying the prisoners and leading them away, Rutterfeld and Marschak still protesting loudly. Cortez was moving off, helped by two women in white huipiles. Elaborate courtesy was still the order of the day, and I said to Epifanio, “Inform the Old One that we are grateful for the privilege he has accorded us.”

  The young man bowed ceremoniously. “You honor us all by your attendance, señor, señora. Over here, if you please.”

  Moments later we were seated in the semidarkness on a flat rock some distance from the lighted altar, aware of others in the gloom all around us. I felt Frances search for my hand and grasp it tightly.

  “Privilege!” she breathed. “I’m not so sure…”

  But the drums were starting now, just a faint, whispering, throbbing sound at first, gradually becoming louder. I’d heard drums before, all kinds of drums, from the full U.S. Naval Academy Band giving Sousa hell as the midshipmen passed in review on the banks of the Severn where I’d been sent for boat training once, to a couple of old gents with tomtoms beating out the rhythm for a harvest dance at one of the smaller pueblos near my boyhood home in Santa Fe, New Mexico; but it was very different hearing them reverberating and reechoing hypnotically in this underground temple. Epifanio had thrown something on the fire that was filling the cave with a strange, thin sweet-smelling smoke.

  They didn’t hoke it up. They used the electric lights they had instead of going in for flaming torches. They wore their own clothes instead of cobbling up tawdry imitations of the elaborate costumes of their ancestors. This was not an artificial revival, a nostalgic restoration, of an ancient rite, meaningless today; this was their living religion and their living ceremony—but I couldn’t help wondering how many of them also turned up at the local Catholic Church on Sunday, keeping on the good side of the Christian god as well.

  Even the knife Epifanio produced from his sisal bag and unwrapped and presented with deliberate ceremony to Cortez as he appeared in the lighted area was no exercise in nostalgia. Obsidian was out, steel was in. It was a thick, brutal, businesslike blade apparently ground down from a heavy machete. But the grip was lovely, all gold and jade, their one concession to the glorious past.

  They took Marschak first, perhaps afraid that he’d die on them if he had to wait. They had stripped him and washed him and disguised his wounds
somehow. He looked enormous among all those short people, and soft and white and flabby, as he was led naked to the altar and made to lie down across it, obviously drugged, while the old priest—showing no signs of his recent beating—stood back gripping the great sacrificial knife. The drums were louder now and the scented mist was heavier. Cortez stepped forward and struck skillfully and powerfully. The body on the altar arched itself in blind agony; there was a formless bellow of sound above the rhythmic sound of the drums.

  Cortez passed the bloody knife to Epifanio, standing behind him. The old man leaned over and reached with both hands into the gaping incision he’d made. Distantly I was aware of Frances’s nails biting into my skin as she gripped my hand fiercely. I heard her make a small gagging sound as she watched the disposal of the now incomplete body in the sacred cenote, which accepted it and caused it to vanish in a manner inconsistent with the normal laws of hydraulics, I thought; but I didn’t seem to be thinking very clearly any longer.

  The disembodied heart lay, dripping, in the old priest’s hands. They had another way of dealing with that, we learned, that Frances also found unpleasant. I was a bit annoyed by her queasy reactions, in a vague sort of way. For a tough scientist she was really pretty sensitive; but I reminded myself that after all, while I had encountered a few fresh corpses in the line of business, in her profession the poor girl was accustomed to dealing only with dead people who’d been dead for thousands of years.

  Then the young priest was passing among us with the receptacle containing the first blood of the evening’s first offering, making the purifying mark on the face of each worshipper; but the smoke seemed to be getting thicker and the cave was becoming very hazy. Another picture was breaking through; another scene quite near in place but incredibly distant in time, of a great wide sunlit area crowded with people and dominated by three great pyramids…

  18

  Achuac was having a good day, I reflected after the second sacrifice as I stood at attention in the hot sunshine before my squadron, Dog Squadron, in the place of honor, the place of greatest danger, at the end of the Great Court, the way to the King’s Road and the jungle, the way they would probably break and flee if panic should strike. Fox Squadron on my left held the open space between the Pyramid of the Priests and the Great Pyramid. Wolf Squadron, on my right, closed the last opening, between the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of the Warriors.

  I hoped the people would not break. Not that we could not hold them; the King’s Axes would not be overrun by an unarmed mob, even one as large as this, a whole nation gathered for a final day of worship and sacrifice. Enemy armies had attempted it and had died under the great stone weapons wielded by us, the axemen of the king, somewhat assisted by the darting spearmen, who are useful for harassing the attack and harrying the retreat although the Spears are, of course, never required to endure the full shock of battle.

  But I hoped very much that our people would stand firm on this great day, this last day, the Day of Ixchal. There must be no shame today; and Achuac, the High Priest, had started well, although he was no longer young and his wrist did not have its former strength and cunning. He had been known, sometimes of late, to need more than one stroke of the knife to reach the heart, a dreadful portent of disaster—in fact there was often betting in the ranks on the day’s performance, although the penalty for such sacrilege, if discovered, was death, of course.

  Normally we would have had a new high priest by now, a younger and stronger man who could be relied upon at the altar; but with the Day of Ixchal in sight the priesthood had closed ranks behind the old man who had guided us and our king, Becal Xia, spiritually through these last difficult years and who therefore deserved, they said, the honor of officiating to the very end. And at the very end. Today.

  We—the highly placed men and women of my generation—had always known. We had known that the honor would be ours; that we would be the ones to lead our people into the Place of Night to meet the Lords of the Night, going not as before singly at the call of Ixchal, but all making the deliberate dark pilgrimage together to complete with courage and dignity this Great Cycle, allowing the sun to rise tomorrow on the beginning of the next, as the gods required.

  We had served our purpose. We had made our contribution; but perhaps over the centuries sin and evil had grown among us that could only be eradicated in this way; perhaps the time had come for the world to see a shining new people, starting afresh where we had once begun when our own Great Cycle was clean and new. So the gods said, or were said to have said—but doubt was blasphemy and I was in no position to indulge in further sacrilege after flouting the commandments of my gods and the edicts of my priests in the most awful and wonderful way possible…

  But old Achuac was doing very well indeed. He had now completed the third and final offering with a fine stroke and was holding the heart aloft for the crowd to see—and behind me, I knew, the men of Dog Squadron were nudging each other in unmilitary fashion, reminding each other of bets won and lost. Even on the Day of Ixchal, even with no hope of ever collecting on a successful wager, a soldier will gamble; and it is better for an officer to look straight ahead and feign total ignorance.

  Looking over the heads of the great crowd, I could see her now with the others—her equals in rank and all their maidens—up there behind the high jaguar altar, with the plumes of her rank on her dark head, and the priestess-robes half-concealing her strong smooth body but open in front to reveal the fine breasts with which I was well acquainted; and the elaborate waistcloth; and the gleaming jewels.

  It had been madness, of course; but when one knows the day of one’s death, even the hour, one does not look quite the same way upon the rules that have bound men of all previous generations, to whom lying with a virgin Priestess of the Jaguar would have been quite inconceivable. They would probably have been rendered impotent by the mere idea of such sacrilege and would have deemed that a just punishment from the gods for even entertaining the thought of such wickedness. But I had not been rendered impotent, knowing that there were only a few months left; if the gods required punishment, I would be with them soon enough, for them to deal with as they pleased.

  Nor had she been rendered unresponsive by the disrespect she was showing for her holy position among the god’s attendants, by the sacred oaths she was breaking, by the risk we were both taking. Not that the risk was not considerable. The punishment prescribed, as is well known, is cutting and maiming in certain ways for both the man and the woman who must then—no longer recognizable as man, no longer recognizable as woman—be exposed to the populace in all their bloody naked mutilated shame to be pelted with rocks and filth for the specified time after which, if still living, they must be put to death in the manner reserved for the lowest criminals, and those who deliberately spit upon the gods.

  But with the Day of Ixchal so close, after which there would be no more such pleasure ever, at least not for us, we had not counted the risk, my priestess and I; if anything, it had made our illicit lyings-together more desperately satisfying, helped by the knowledge that we had to make a few months take the place of the lifetime we would never have…

  But now the time of the king had come; and Becal Xia was stepping forward up there to perform his part of the ceremony, a handsome figure of imposing dignity in his plumes and cloak but, some said, not as much his own man as some kings who had ruled us in times past, more a puppet moving at the wishes of the priests. But those who said this did not say it aloud. And the priestesses were now descending the tall steps of all the pyramids with the graceful gliding motion that, my priestess had told me, took years to master and yearly cost them several novices because a fall was not only dangerous in itself but was a sign of the gods’ displeasure, so even if you survived falling, you were instantly put to death where you fell.

  The king had ceased his ritual of farewell. Old Achuac stepped forward; and the horns blew; and it was time for me to make certain that Dog Squadron was ready to stand firm if the cr
owd broke; but my people did not break. They did the directed thing with the material that had been given them, the little cakes that, my priestess had told me, had been prepared from a certain root. Like their king they took the bitter medicine that had been prescribed for them. Then Becal Xia was falling, dead, along the path of death that had been painted for him down the front of the Great Pyramid with the blood of the sacrifices that had preceded him; and the crowd before me was no longer before me. They were going down, all of them; and I watched my nation die.

  The horns blew once more. I gave the opening command and the Axes separated to let the Spears come through. I gave the closing command, and we waited and watched as the spearmen of the now-dead king swept along the Great Court searching and probing while we stood ready to receive with the axes any who had betrayed their faith, our faith, but they shamed our doubts; they had faithfully taken the death that had been given to them. Not one of the thousands now lying there required the thrust of a spear; not one rose and fled alive to be dealt with by an axe. I was proud of them all, and I asked their forgiveness for the precautions we had taken that their faith and courage had rendered foolish.

  It was the time of the Spears; and they formed and the priestesses passed among them with the cups of death—no death-cakes now—and they were soon down. Then it was our time, the time of the Axes, the time of Ixchal; and high on the Great Pyramid Achuac had a cup in his own hand; and my priestess was coming to me. There were no horns now; the blowers had gone before us. We were the last.

  I watched her come and behind me her maidens were sharing their final cups with the men of the Axe. She held out the cup to me, and the thought was in my mind and in that moment I knew it was in hers as well: the thought that it would be very easy now. There were no eyes left to see, there were no spears left to probe. We could drink without drinking and die without dying and rise again; together we could leave this place of death. Together and alive.