Burial Ground

by Michael McBride

  "No!" Sam shouted.

  She shoved through Merritt and the others until she reached Rippeth, and stood between him and his assailants.

  "What are you doing?" Rippeth asked. He tried to sight down the barrel around her, but she moved from side to side to block his shot. "Get out of the way!"

  "When you raised your gun, they perceived it as an act of aggression," she said. "They could have killed you, but they didn't."

  "That doesn't change the fact that they shot me!"

  "In the hand. It could just as easily have been through the neck."

  Merritt studied her. She could have been killed stepping between the trained soldier and his target. He had seen it in the man's eyes.

  "Everyone lower your weapons," Sam called without breaking eye contact with Rippeth.

  "You're out of your mind," Rippeth said.

  "Would you just lower your gun before you get us all killed!"

  With obvious reluctance, Rippeth slowly allowed his pistol to fall to his side.

  "Thank you."

  Sam turned to face the native who again stood at the gears. He glanced to his armed companions, then unlatched the handle and cranked the wheel of the contraption. With the grinding sound of stone on stone, the massive slab inched backward from the wall to reveal the dark passage.

  They passed through cascading streams of vines and shadows to find themselves in the jungle. Again there was the grinding sound as the stone slid back into place, sealing them outside the village.

  "You should have let me shoot them," Rippeth said. His lips pursed over his clenched teeth as he yanked the arrow out of the back of his hand and cast it into the forest.

  Sam said nothing, and instead shed her backpack, opened the flap, and removed a long-sleeved shirt. She ripped it at the seam and tipped her chin toward Rippeth's bloody hand.

  He appraised her for some time before holding it out.

  She wrapped the wound twice around and then tied the fabric tight. Rippeth flexed his fingers into a fist, but the thumb didn't respond.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "That's going to have to do for now."

  Rippeth whirled and stormed away from her down the earthen path.

  The others followed in silence. Merritt had to jog to catch up with Sam.

  "What did he say back there?" he asked.

  "That I should have let him kill them."

  "No. Back there in the village. The man with all of the scars and the headdress. I saw the look on your face when he spoke. You understood him, didn't you?"

  Sam looked off into the forest as she whispered to him.

  "It was a dialect of Quechua I've never heard before, so I can't be completely sure."

  "Okay. So what do you think he might have said?"

  She turned to face him and their eyes locked.

  "It sounded like he said something to the effect of 'Let them pass. They are dead already.'"

  VII

  1:32 p.m.

  Sam hung back toward the rear of the group. Her thoughts were a blur. She had seen so much, too much. It was sensory overload on a scale she'd never experienced before. She could spend a lifetime cataloguing and studying just what she'd been able to see from the central path leading through the village. What else could be stored inside the buildings? What other surprises lurked just out of sight? All of the answers she had sought during the course of her education and career were somewhere within those city walls, which were now falling rapidly behind her. Not only could she unravel the mystery of the disappearance of an entire culture half a millennium ago, but she could hear it told in the words of the people themselves. How had they managed to stay hidden for so long in an age when technology had shrunk the globe to the size of a pebble and laid bare so many of its secrets? They couldn't be more than forty-five miles from Pomacochas, and yet it might as well be a thousand.

  She wished she could turn around and head back to the village, if only to memorize the history told through the carvings on the stone walls. There was so much they didn't know about the Chachapoya. No one was even sure what language they had spoken. Some speculated Aymara like so many Andean tribes, while others believed they spoke Quechua, especially following their defeat at the hands of the Inca. And now she had incontrovertible proof that they did indeed speak a variant of Quechua, but at the moment there wasn't a blasted thing she could do about it.

  The Chachapoya were an enigma. Even that name wasn't what the tribe had called itself, but rather what it had been called by others. The name was most likely a corruption of the Quechua words sacha and puya, or "people of the clouds." They were known as ferocious warriors who lived high in the mountains under the cover of cloud forests where they thrived as a sovereign nation until falling to the Inca under the rule of Tupac Inca Yupanqui in roughly 1475. Within a hundred years, the Spanish arrived and began their systematic conquest of the entire continent, bringing with them their Christian God and a host of European diseases. One of the few historical documents that even mentioned the Chachapoya was in the written account of Pedro Ciezo de León, who described them as "the whitest and most handsome" of all of the natives he had encountered.

  So who were these people who were markedly taller than the average Peruvian Indians, nearly as pale as Caucasians, and lived in such secrecy? She had spent nearly the last decade trying to figure out just that. The first Chachapoyan ruins had been discovered at Kuelap more than a century and a half ago, and now here she was, a quarter-mile from the answers to all of her questions, and all she had to do was ask. Instead, they were traveling in the opposite direction. She wanted to scream.

  Why didn't she just turn around and return to the fortress?

  Unfortunately, she already knew why. She needed to earn their trust before they would welcome her and share the mystery of their heritage, and banging on the stone walls and demanding admittance wasn't the way to do it. There would be plenty of time over the coming years to break down the barriers. That is, if they let her. An entire colony didn't survive in isolation for so long without going to great lengths to preserve its anonymity...

  She stopped walking abruptly and Merritt bumped into her from behind. Her features crinkled as she followed that line of thought.

  There was no doubt in her mind that these people wished to remain concealed from the rest of the world. So why had they allowed her group to walk freely through their village? The tribe had to realize that once they returned to civilization, they would report their discoveries. Unless...

  Let them pass. They are dead already.

  Unless they were certain that Sam and her companions would never be leaving these mountains.

  A chill crawled up her spine. She wrapped her arms around her chest to combat the sudden onset of shivers. What awaited them down the path ahead?

  "Look over there," Galen called from around the bend in front of her. "Back behind those trees."

  Sam followed the sound of his voice to where the others had gathered around him at the side of the path, where a thinner branch diverged into the dense rainforest. At first she didn't see anything, but after taking several steps deeper into the jungle, the structure resolved from the trees. The stone walls were just like those that surrounded the village, only nowhere near as intimidating. They were only fifteen feet tall, and covered with vines and lianas. Soil had been mounded over the roof of the structure to support a thriving crown of flowering shrubbery.

  She wasn't even within twenty feet of the building when a stick snapped underfoot, and the screaming began.

  Sam ran toward the front of the construct. From the other side of the wall she heard horrible cries and the sounds of a struggle. They weren't human screams, but she had no idea what kind of animal could make such awful noises. She brushed aside the vines in search of the entrance, and found that the stone cubes weren't fitted snugly together like those that composed the fortifications. Between the sides of each were six-inch-wide gaps, through which she could see only swatches of the dim interior. Colum
ns of light shined down to the inner, straw-lined floor from holes in the earthen roof. They swirled with dust raised by a stampede of dark bodies. She smelled dry grain and manure, but it wasn't until a snuffling snout pressed into the gap in front of her that she understood.

  "It's a barn." She tentatively reached through the gap and allowed the alpaca to nuzzle her fingertips with its wet nose.

  "Why would they keep them closed up like this?" Galen asked. "Surely an outdoor pen would serve the same purpose. And the animals would be able to graze in the sunlight."

  "You've heard of veal, haven't you?" Merritt asked.

  "Galen's right," Sam said. "Why wouldn't they just fence off this area? Nearly all of the indigenous ruins in Peru have alpacas grazing everywhere. They actually live there. Why would these animals need to be caged like this?"

  The screaming died down and the dust started to settle. She could see dozens of the wooly beasts through the crevice. Most of them were clustered together in the middle of the large room in a maze of support columns. The interior space was reasonably large, perhaps a hundred square yards, but it wasn't nearly large enough to accommodate so many animals. It was inhumane to keep them like this when they could be roaming the jungle with little chance of wandering off. It didn't make sense. Were the Chachapoya worried that the alpacas would escape and return to their native highlands, or were they keeping them in there for their own protection? Why else would they possibly need to enclose them behind the same kind of walls they had used to build their fortress? And by that same logic, why weren't the animals within the fortifications with the village where there were groves of trees and fields of crops?

  She thought of the man she had seen with the lone alpaca. Had he taken it out of this very pen in order to allow it to stretch its legs and graze?

  And why had the alpacas reacted as they had at the sound of her approach?

  She withdrew her arm from the hole, and in doing so noticed that the edges of the stones around it weren't smooth and even. They were carved with notches as though poorly chiseled, or deliberately scraped with sharp objects.

  "There's a gate over here," Dahlia said.

  Sam walked along the face of the structure to where the blonde woman held back the curtain of vines so Jay could film the interior. A foul gust that reeked of dust and feces passed through an iron grate that was moored by iron rungs to stones set into the earth. Through the slots she could see a short stone corridor that branched at a ninety-degree angle to the right to prohibit visibility directly into the chamber. Was there another gate at the far end of it? Why else wouldn't the alpacas have approached the gate if she was right and the man came here to take them out for exercise?

  The rock edges around the gate had been carved as well, and all of the rust had been scraped from the iron rails. Some even appeared to have been scored down to the virgin metal that had only recently been exposed to the elements.

  Galen crouched beside her and sifted through the dirt. He pulled out a filthy brown feather. He blew off the dust and spun it between his fingers by the quill. Sam only now noticed that there were feathers all over the ground. They blended perfectly into the mat of dead leaves and sticks. Galen tucked the feather into the breast pocket of his khaki cargo vest, looked up at the sky, and then back to the ground.

  He shook his head and furrowed his brow.

  "What is it?" Sam asked.

  Galen seemed to puzzle over her question before finally speaking.

  "The walls make sense, but why would they need to build a roof over the animals?"

  "To protect them from above," Jay said, retreating from the bars to capture better footage of the entire building.

  "Possibly," Galen said. "But if that were the case, then why wouldn't they have done the same thing for their village?"

  "You think it's possible that they're shielding their livestock from some sort of birds?" Sam asked.

  Galen just chewed on the inside of his lip as he appraised the structure.

  "I'm beginning to wonder...," he finally said.

  Sam followed his gaze to the threshold, where the stone edges had been chiseled away.

  It almost looked as though the rock had been carved in an effort to pry the iron gate loose.

  VIII

  6:36 p.m.

  Leo didn't care if Sam believed that the tribe wasn't hostile. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. The natives had killed his son. They had allowed Hunter to reach his destination, and then they had stalked and murdered him. When he ultimately found the source of the placers and concluded that his son's party hadn't mutinied against him, he would have all of the proof he needed. And then he could return to the village and let them know how he felt about the cowardly act of stabbing a man in the back.

  He glanced back at Sorenson and Webber, who ferried the crate affixed to long wooden dowels on their shoulders.

  Oh yes, he would show these natives exactly how he felt.

  Darkness descended upon the forest. The heat began to dissipate by degree, which only served to amplify the humidity, and welcome more mosquitoes to the ranks swarming around them. They were still more than an hour from the formal time listed for the setting of the sun, but the high mountains bathed them in premature shadows. Soon they would need to pitch camp for the night if they were to rest up for the final push during the coming day. He had compared the maps to their current position on the GPS unit. Tomorrow they would reach their goal, he could feel it.

  Leo's heart raced at the prospect. Within twenty-four hours, he would learn the answers to the questions that plagued him about his son's death.

  Twenty-four hours and he'd finally be able to determine what he needed to do about it.

  Few vines eclipsed the trail and the branches were easily enough shoved aside, which allowed them to advance at a rapid pace. Unlike the path leading into the jungle from the river, this one appeared frequently used. Rippeth scouted ahead, often disappearing entirely. He held his gun in his left hand, and cradled his bloody right against his gut. The man had barely spoken since leaving the fortified city. Flames burned behind his eyes. He was obviously itching to extract a measure of revenge, and soon enough Leo would give him the opportunity.

  A glimmer of red sparkled through the branches of the trees. It grew brighter and brighter until they pressed through the final stand of trees and stepped out onto the bank of a small lake, upon which the reflected brilliance of the setting sun shimmered. The water was still and crystalline. A startled school of fish darted from the shallows, leaving a cloud of silt in their wake.

  "It's beautiful," Galen said.

  Leo nodded his agreement. It truly was a breathtaking sight. The lake was circular, and perhaps a hundred yards across. Waterfowl appeared as dark dots in the very center. The jungle encroached to the edge of the water on all sides. Sheer, tree-covered mountains rose up into the low-lying clouds ahead and to both sides, forming a bowl to cradle the lake.

  "This is their pacarisca," Sam said. "The Chachapoya always built their villages near one. It's generally a lake or river, sometimes a mountaintop. They regard it as their point of origin, the sacred place where their souls---for lack of a better term---were born. Somewhere nearby we'll find their chullpa, their tribal burial site. The dead are always interred close to the metaphorical point where their lives began, the completion of the circle of life, if you will."

  Leo wondered what Hunter must have thought when he came upon this incredible sight. Had he camped here as well before beginning what might have been the last day of his life?

  Rippeth emerged from the forest twenty yards up the bank, strode directly to Colton, and whispered something into his ear. Leo watched Colton closely. His old friend's stare darted to the point where Rippeth had appeared, and then back.

  Leo sauntered over to join them, but by then they were already done speaking.

  "Why don't you guys start setting up the tents," Leo said, and, without a backward glance, joined Colton as he walk
ed northwest along the muddy bank, which was choppy with alpaca hoof prints.

  Rippeth vanished into the trees, with Leo and Colton directly behind him. They followed the shivering bushes that trailed Rippeth deeper into the jungle. The smell hit them first, the awful stench of decomposing flesh. Leo had to cup his hand over his mouth and nose until he adapted to it. Another dozen paces and the sound of buzzing flies reached them.

  "Jesus," Leo gasped as they stumbled into a circular clearing. The largest kapok tree he had ever seen stood in the center. Its trunk was so wide that even if all three of them joined hands, they wouldn't be able to encircle it. All of the shrubs and undergrowth had been torn out to expose the rich loam in a fifteen foot radius around the behemoth. The massive branches formed a leafy roof five feet over their heads. Lianas coiled in serpentine fashion around the trunk. The smooth gray bark looked as though it had been assaulted by an angry group of ax-wielding lumberjacks. There were cuts and gouges from the ground clear up to the first row of branches. Amber sap bled down the surface like wax on a candlestick. Several ropes had been tied around the tree, their frayed ends dangling toward the dirt.

  Bones were scattered everywhere throughout the clearing. Some were still tacky with rust-colored blood, while others had yellowed with age and started to deteriorate. Bloodstains decorated everything in arcs and spatters, upon which the flies swarmed like seething black scabs.

  "I told you it was a mess," Rippeth said to Colton, who had crouched to inspect the remains.

  Leo didn't have to study the bones to recognize to which species they had once belonged. Wiry wool clung to the surrounding bushes, against which it had been blown into small drifts at the edges of the clearing.

  A light flashed from his left. Colton had turned on his penlight and now used it to scrutinize the sloppy earth. It was growing darker by the minute as the lingering residue of the sun faded from the sky.