She went on as if she were talking to herself. “We had to leave the camp at once, leaving all our things there. Luckily, we managed to stumble on this place, which the Morcegos seem to be afraid to enter… We’ve been here ever since. Unfortunately,” she added with a sigh, “when we went back to the camp the following day, those monsters had destroyed everything and taken away anything that could have been of any use to us. We could only find these few flashlights,”—she pointed at some headlamps on the floor beside her—“and we try not to use them because we don’t have any more batteries.”
I waited a few seconds to make sure she had finished her story, then said, “But I don’t understand. Why do you say the Morcegos won’t let us leave here alive?”
Valeria looked at me out of those intense blue eyes in a face framed by jet black shoulder-length hair. She forced herself to continue. “The following morning, two more of our group tried to escape in broad daylight. They hoped to reach a village and get some help for the rest of us.”
“What happened?”
She pointed at the entrance door. “The next day we found their heads stuck on pickets, right at the foot of these stairs.”
“Jesus Christ…” Cassie whispered with a hand on her chest.
Valeria turned to her and raised one eyebrow. “And by the way,” she added, “one of them was wearing a yellow raincoat just like the one you have tied around your waist.”
The fire was crackling faintly, barely lighting up five downhearted, dirty, gaunt faces. The shadows it made danced like dark ghosts on the wall behind us.
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” the professor said, a long time after Valeria had stopped talking and all of us had sunk into an awed silence.
“Is there anything in all this that does?” I said gruffly.
He shook his head, not paying any attention to me, deep in his own thoughts. “Those Morcegos…” he murmured, “I honestly don’t understand how a tribe, no matter how isolated it might be, could have degenerated to this level of savagery and disproportionate violence. They seem to have lost all trace of humanity.”
Valeria frowned. She looked honestly surprised by her father’s words. “Humanity?” she asked. “Who said anything about them being human?”
Now it was the turn of Professor Castillo to look surprised. He blinked with half a smile on his face which faded as soon as he realized his daughter was serious. “Of course they’re human! What are you suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, Eduardo. I’m only saying, as an anthropologist, that I’ve never heard of any race which has even remotely distanced itself so much from Homo Sapiens.”
“Are you… talking about a new species?” Cassandra said with more than a touch of skepticism.
“I don’t know whether they’re a new species or an ancient species. But I do know, without a shadow of doubt, that they’re another species.”
“Y un carajo another species!” Cassie objected vehemently. “They’re human. Stinky, deformed, and certainly sons of la gran chingada. But most certainly human.”
Valeria appeared to be counting to ten under her breath before she gave an answer. “Excuse me, Ms…”
“Brooks,” she reminded her, although they had formally introduced themselves moments before. “Cassandra Brooks.”
“You’re an archeologist,” she said haughtily, “but I’m a reputed anthropologist. This is my field, and however much you might know about rocks and ruins, your opinion is of no value in this particular case. Of those present here,” she added, simply stating the point without pride, “I’m the only one with enough knowledge of human beings and their behavior to be able to reach reasonable conclusions.”
Cassie went all red in the face. However, exerting unheard-of control over her feelings, she kept her opinions and insults for another time.
The positions of the two women seemed irreconcilable. It looked as though every time one of them opened her mouth the other appeared ready to jump at her throat for no apparent reason. A clear example of hate at first sight.
The professor intervened at this point. “There’s something else I don’t understand. What does Morcego mean?”
“Bat in Portuguese,” his daughter said. “I thought you would have guessed it; in Spanish it’s murciélago. Because of their exclusively nocturnal habits, their intolerance of light, and their black skin, they’re known all over the Amazon as batmen: homes morcegos. Although, until we came here we thought it was just a myth, like werewolves or the living dead.”
“Have you guys seen one up close?” Angelica asked. “We’ve heard them moving about in the shadows, around the temple almost every night. But we haven’t had the chance to observe them properly.”
The professor pointed at me, and Angelica waited for me to speak.
“Yeah, well…” I said. “It was very dark down there, but I saw one less than three feet away.”
She opened her eyes wide. “Deus meus… What was he like?”
“Ugly,” I replied without thinking. “Incredibly ugly.”
“Did he look like a man?” Valeria asked.
“Well… yes and no,” I said, trying to remember. “He had arms, legs, nose, mouth, and everything a human is supposed to have… but at the same time everything was different. The limbs were too long and the face… well, I couldn’t say, because I only saw it briefly, but I thought the cranium was too elongated, like a football. Besides, the eyes were too big and very black, like a cat’s at night. And the jaw was… I don’t know, jutting forward, almost like a snout, with a black mouth and gums full of long sharp teeth. The truth is”—I turned first to the professor and then to my ex-girlfriend who were listening with great interest—“I just have no idea what those creatures might be. But I’m sure of one thing: they aren’t like any other being of any race I know of.”
There was almost a whole minute of worried, wondering silence before anyone spoke. It was Professor Castillo who said, more to himself than the others: “What possible relationship could there be between the Morcegos and the ruins of this city?”
“I don’t think there’s any,” I said, as if it were something obvious. “Long ago, maybe, they came upon the ruins of the Black City. There were dark sewers and holes here where they could hide, and they settled here like rats in an abandoned barn. They couldn’t have found a better place.”
“That’s what I mean. It makes no sense.”
“Of courseit makes perfect sense. This is Morcego paradise!”
The professor shook his head emphatically. “That’s why it doesn’t make sense. Don’t you see? These creatures are so adapted to this particular place that they couldn’t survive anywhere else. Their nocturnal habits are a consequence of their morphology, and that is the result of a specific habitat. This habitat,” he stressed, tapping the ground with his foot.
“The professor is right, Ulysses,” Cassandra said. “Without all those tunnels to hide in, they couldn’t survive the light of day. They must have been here for a very long time.”
“How long is a very long time?” I asked.
Cassie shrugged her shoulders, admitting she did not have the answer. “It must have been right after this city was abandoned.” She looked at the professor as if seeking his agreement and added, “Perhaps four or five thousand years at the most. It’s hard to tell.”
“Four or five thousand years?” Valeria sneered and laughed exaggeratedly. “Don’t be silly, Ms. Brooks. A species needs tens or hundreds of thousands of years to evolve. Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared more than ninety thousand years ago, and in all this time we have barely changed.” Her voice turned suddenly serious. “This new species is infinitely older than this city.”
“But that contradicts what your father just said, doesn’t it?” I said in an effort to help Cassie.
I immediately realized I had made at least two mistakes.
The first one was to contradict her, which was something she did not seem to appreciate at all. The second one was more se
rious, and for that I was punished with an icy glare. It regarded her being related to the professor as her father.
“Eduardo is… or was, to be precise, Professor of Medieval History. I”—she stressed this by pointing to herself—“am a physical and social anthropologist, specialized in indigenous cultures.” She fixed her blue eyes on me. “So, who do you think is right?” She went on without waiting for an answer, “This city might be four, five, or ten thousand years old, but make no mistake, that would have been very much later than the appearance of the Morcegos.”
“Our hypothesis is that they might have inhabited some region nearby with a network of natural caves,” Claudio said, indirectly supporting his boss’s claim. “Then, when this place was abandoned, they found somewhere better to settle and moved here.”
“Or maybe... it could be that they did that before,” I said without thinking; it had just occurred to me.
“How do you mean?” Claudio asked.
“What if the Morcegos didn’t arrive after the city was abandoned, but were the reason why it was abandoned?”
Cassandra’s voice sounded dull and distant, as if she were reluctant to ask the question. “Do you mean—?”
I looked at her directly. “I mean that maybe the Morcegos came to this place while it was still inhabited, and then they killed everyone.”
Valeria’s team did not seem to have considered that possibility, since neither they, nor the professor or Cassie found any immediate way of refuting it.
In fact, no one said a word for a whole minute as we weighed up the likelihood of a genocide. In the end, needless to say, it was the professor’s daughter who shook her head.
“No,” she said categorically. “That’s not possible. There would be proof of it.”
“Proof?” Cassandra exclaimed, not willing to miss her opportunity. She spread her arms wide to encompass that whole shadowy hall. “Where? How do you know that wasn’t what happened? Can you by any chance read cuneiform writing?” She grinned mischievously.
“She can’t,” Claudio said unexpectedly, “but I can.”
“You?” Cassie could not believe it.
“I wrote my thesis about the proto-Elamite writings of the southeastern Middle East between 3200 and 2900 B.C. It’s not strictly like the one found here, but it’s quite similar.”
“And have you…” Cassie was nearly speechless, “have you been able to… translate anything?”
The Argentinian smiled showing his perfect teeth, and said nonchalantly, “Not a single word.”
“Then,” the professor intervened, “how do you know that Ulysses’s theory is not valid?”
Claudio turned to Valeria before he answered. “I guess… Doctor Renner is thinking of the bas-reliefs.”
“Bas-reliefs?” Cassandra asked as she leaned forward. “What bas-reliefs?”
“The ones in this temple.”
“And where are they?” Her gaze searched the darkness to either side.
The professor’s daughter smiled again—when she did, her features softened quite a bit—and looked at Cassandra’s feet.
“Under your butt,” she said, showing her white teeth. “Right underneath your pretty butt, you’ll find just as many as you want.”
65
Valeria led the way down a narrow spiral stone stairway, followed by Cassie—each of them with a flashlight—the professor, and me, carrying a humble burning torch each as if we were the losing Olympic relay runners.
“Are you sure it isn’t dangerous to go down there?” the professor asked his daughter uneasily. Whether this was out of fatherly protection or simply because he was still scared stiff, I had no way of telling.
“Don’t worry, Professor. As I said before, for some reason the Morcegos don’t come in here.”
“All right, but… would you mind not calling me “Professor”? After all… well ahem, I am your father.”
“Sure. And what do you want me to call you? Daddy?” She said with her usual touch of sarcasm.
“If you call me Eduardo that’ll be fine.”
“Very well, Eduardo. Anything else?”
From behind, I saw Professor Castillo raise his hand to say something else. But he stopped the gesture in midair and remained silent.
A few moments later we arrived at the temple basement, right under the spot we had been sitting on moments before, just as Valeria had said.
This underground turned out to be as bleak and oppressive as we had imagined it would be. A series of thick columns supported a low heavy ceiling. Like the floor and the walls, this was made of the ever-present black granite which the whole city seemed to be built from.
We followed Valeria as she moved to our left until we reached the nearest wall. Cassandra approached it in awe and the professor and I followed her, speechless.
“It’s a story,” Valeria announced behind us, very pleased with herself as master of ceremonies. “What you see here is the account of the origins and history of the people the Menkragnoti call The Ancient Men.”
By the light of the torches we could now see that the walls of this chamber were carved from floor to ceiling with figures and illustrations, all of them masterfully chiseled. None of us could understand the symbols that accompanied them, but it was like reading a comic book in a foreign language. We could not understand everything, but with a little imagination we could follow the plot reasonably well.
The extensive, dramatic bas-relief covered three of the four walls of that dark basement, some sixty feet by thirty. It was so meticulous, so explicit that it left the three of us confused and incredulous. In the end there was only one possible explanation for the events it told: the author had been completely insane.
In outline, the story told how the gods chose them—a village of fishermen and merchants—and no others, in order to enlighten them with the wisdom that would make them the chosen people. Later guided by those same gods, they settled in what would be their “Promised Land,” a small island shown between two masses of land. There they would be safe from the still uncivilized tribes of the nearby continental coasts. But over time, thanks to superior technology and social organization, the Ancients—we decided to call them this for short—conquered the fertile fringes of the coast to the north and south of their island. In the process the natives were driven inland.
It was at this point where the story turned truly strange.
At some moment in their history, long after they had arrived at their island and managed to establish what seemed to be a fabulous maritime empire, the same gods who had extolled them decided to punish them by sending a flood of apocalyptic dimensions which nearly destroyed them altogether.
According to the explicit engravings on the wall, they were first hit by a gigantic wave which leveled temples, pyramids, and palaces on the capital-island as well as their lesser settlements and areas of cultivation on the coast. The water covered every vestige of what until then, judging by the illustrations, had been an advanced civilization with constructions similar to the ones we had seen in the Black City.
It seemed that at first, the survivors had sought refuge among the peoples they had expelled from their lands so long ago. But those, furious after having been forced into submission for generations, decided to finish what the gods had started. They harassed the Ancients mercilessly, so that in the end, weakened by the catastrophe, they had to take to sea in search for somewhere new to settle.
What those survivors did not know was that the sudden rising of the waters had brought with it a change in the temperatures, the winds, and currents they knew so well. As a result of this, the ships were dragged toward the setting sun and lost at sea for a long time. But at last, with all hope lost, destiny took pity on them and showed them land on the horizon.
There was a problem, though. Those lands were already populated by other tribes: primitive people who offered them water and food but did not allow them to stay. The chiefs of these tribes suggested they go up that muddy river-sea where th
ey would find extensive, almost empty inland prairies. Here they could establish themselves freely, without interference.
The leaders of the Ancients had no desire to mix with people who were clearly their cultural inferiors, but at the same time much greater in numbers. They were also wary of settling near the fierce ocean again, so they took the advice and sailed up the river-sea into what was then an endless savannah. After a long journey they came to a lake with fertile shores, no inhabitants, and plenty of game. Here they established their first settlement. In time it would become the Black City.
Valeria admitted to having spent many hours here with Claudio, studying every inch of the huge mural. She showed us the bas-reliefs and helped to clarify some of the details for us, then went back upstairs. We were left alone with our torches and our doubts.
While I enjoyed the reliefs that explained the foundation of the Black City on the shores of a lake that was no more, Cassandra was looking at the section of the mural that showed the monstrous wave crashing against the island with its temples and strangely shaped pyramids.
She fingered the silhouette of the immense wave. “Don’t you think that looks like a tsunami?”
I was beside her in two strides, shining my torch on the image. “It certainly does.”
“The strange thing is that in the images that come later, the island is shown permanently buried under water,” she went on in a low voice, so I could not tell whether she was talking to me or to herself. “As far as I know, a tsunami doesn’t do that.”
“Well, after all it’s not a photo, is it?” I reminded her tapping the wall with my fingernail. “It’s only an interpretation someone made of a story passed on orally, probably after centuries.”
“Yes, you’re right there. But if that’s the case, what do you think happened? Do you think there’s some other reason why the island sank? Because if there isn’t, they’d have rebuilt their city instead of coming here on ships, don’t you think?”
“I can think of a logical explanation,” the professor said by my side. “And that is that the island never sank in the first place.”
BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 28