Crusader Gold

17

Later,how much later she could not tell, Maria surfaced from a terrifying pit of darkness, her mind clawing its way out of some unremembered horror. She seemed exhausted beyond belief, spent by her struggle against the faceless demon of her dreams, yet she felt weighed down by the heaviness that follows deep sleep. For what seemed an eternity she lay motionless, drifting in and out of consciousness, waiting for her body to respond. She sensed her breathing, felt the hardness of the surface beneath her, a crick in her neck. She was lying in a foetal position on her right side, her hands tucked between her legs. Slowly she opened her eyes. It was dark, but not as dark as her dreams. From the corner of one eye she saw a flickering, a candle. The wall in front of her was covered with shapes, colours. She saw splashes of red.

Her breathing stopped. She went rigid. O’Connor’s study. She shut her eyes tightly, yearning for that darkness again, anything to blot out a reality she scarcely believed, a horror she tried desperately to push back into her dreams.

She felt a burning pain in her left cheek. A light touch seemed to play across it, a hint of a breeze. Suddenly she shrieked and sat bolt upright, her heart pounding and the blood rushing in her ears, frantically slapping at her face as she scrabbled backwards. She hit a wall, her breath coming in ragged gulps, then heard the flutter of wings swoop over her and disappear.

She raised her hand and felt a sticky wetness on her cheek, then looked up. The candle revealed a pointed ceiling, high-sided, made of small stone blocks covered with patches of plaster. It looked old, decayed. At the apex she could make out a line of darker shapes, hanging in a row.

They had been feeding on her.

She began to retch, folding her arms tight against her stomach and leaning to one side. She smelled the metallic breath again. She tried to throw up, retching over and over, desperate for something to expiate the revulsion she felt, the stain of death and violation that overwhelmed all her thoughts, that was all she could remember of what had gone before.

She gave up, tried to calm herself, panting. She closed her eyes, her bleeding cheek pressed hard against the damp wall, desperately seeking strength. She was pouring sweat, rivulets of it dripping over the caked blood on her face. She looked down. She was only wearing her khaki trousers and a T-shirt, torn and soiled. Someone had stripped off her sweater. Her watch was missing. She was burning hot, feverishly hot. She suddenly felt terribly dehydrated, desperate for a drink, and began to lick the sweat and blood off her lips.

She pushed herself upright again, swallowed hard and forced herself to look around. Everything looked damp, covered in green slime. She was in a rectangular chamber about ten metres long and five metres wide. There was some kind of entranceway at one end, a deep cut into darkness.

She thought of the buildings she knew at Iona, the old chapel on the north side, the refectory. She quickly dismissed all of them. The floor where she was now was natural rock, limestone by the look of it, smoothed in places but nothing like the granite bedrock at Iona. In the centre was a circular slab of wood, like a lid, as if this were a well-hood. The lid looked like an exotic hardwood, darker even than old oak. At the other end of the chamber was a mass of fallen masonry, clogging the space from ceiling to floor. From the white patches in the rubble she could see where stones had been recently removed, flung out on to the floor. Where the wall protruded from the rubble it was covered with wooden boards, a crude protective screen that extended for three metres or so towards the centre of the chamber opposite her.

Maria raised herself, pushing up against the wall behind, feeling woozy and unstable. She stood for a moment while a wave of dizziness passed, then hesitantly stepped to where she had seen the splashes of colour. The heat was stifling, like walking in a sauna. One thing was for sure, she was no longer in the western isles of Scotland. The walls looked as old as the monastery, but everything else told her she was almost inconceivably far removed from Iona. It was a possibility her mind simply refused to analyse any further.

She tottered across to the wall opposite. The single candle that provided the only illumination stood on a small flat stone in front of her. She picked it up, throwing shadows in a demented dance all round the chamber, then held it with both hands to stop it shaking. She peered at the wall.

Her jaw dropped in amazement.

She blinked hard. She knew her body was on its last reserves, that she had been without food and drink for hours, days. She could be hallucinating. She looked again.

The red splashes were truly there. They were blood. But they were not real blood, as in O’Connor’s study. This was a different kind of horror. She saw blood spurting out of necks, blood gushing from bodies gouged open, blood spilling in a livid slipway down a stepped slope.

It was a fresco, a wall-painting of unimaginable barbarity, a mass execution. Naked victims were being led up one side of a high temple. At the top, one was splayed out and held down on an altar, the executioner’s hands plunged into his innards, another figure holding up a ripped-out heart. Maria felt her stomach convulse again. The executioner was a fearsome giant, stripped to the waist, with a sloping, flat forehead and hooked nose, wearing a loincloth and an elaborate headdress. Above him were stylised symbols. Jaguars, birds, garish monsters. The symbol directly above the executioner looked familiar. Maria flashed back to the moment the nightmare began, when she had been in her study at Iona, peering at the picture of the eagle-god pendant Jack had sent her.

She blinked hard, trying to register what she was seeing. She took a few faltering steps back, the candle wavering in her hands. To the right she could see the victims assembled, like prisoners after a battle. The wall-painting was clearly a narrative, a progression of scenes in a story, going from right to left. She looked at the ceiling again. She tried to marshal her thoughts, to think like someone whose mind was highly trained. As if in another lifetime, she remembered her tutorials years before when she and Jack were undergraduates together, on the history of architecture. Corbel vaulting. One major civilisation had built all their vaults this way, had never learned to make an arch. One civilisation, famous for its architecture, infamous for its cruelty.

She looked back at the wall. Corbelled vaulting. Narrative scenes from right to left. Fearsome warriors with flat foreheads. The symbols, glyphs. Human sacrifice on a temple altar, sacrifice on a prodigious scale. She began to think the unthinkable.

The Maya.

She staggered back, hit by a wave of dizziness, then rallied her strength and took a few steps to the right, until she was standing beside the wooden lid. She held the candle up against the wall. She was midway between two scenes, the first of the paintings. The scene at the outset showed a naval engagement, long canoes full of warriors, one with a square sail. The next scene showed a bloody battle, this time on land. Warriors dressed identically to the executioner were battling other warriors, those who would soon become prisoners. All had sloping foreheads, but the vanquished were even bigger, giants. All were stripped to the waist. In the foreground were the dead of both sides, some dismembered, some in a river, seemingly underground. The victors were wielding clubs and maces, the vanquished swords and axes.

Maria stopped herself. Swords and axes.

She looked more closely. She began to tremble, and made herself steady the candle. The sloping heads of the vanquished were not foreheads, but the nose-guards of helmets. They were stripped to the waist but wore leggings, not the kilts and loincloths of the victors. They were bearded. They were blond. They had broadswords and huge, single-bitted axes.

Varangian battle-axes.

Maria reeled. It seemed as if she were dreaming the final chapter of the story that had possessed her for days now, a chapter so extraordinary it could only be fantasy. She wished Jack were here next to her, his calm, reassuring voice telling her this was all the stuff of fiction. She looked back at the scene of sacrifice, to the altar and the executioner where the wall seemed to be oozing blood. She staggered back and sank against the other wall, shutting her eyes tight, desperately trying to wake up back in the monk’s cell at Iona, to feel the warmth and steady breathing of another beside her.

“Dr. de Montijo. So good of you to come. The effects of the drug will wear off shortly.” A voice was addressing her, a real voice. “You are in Mexico.”

Maria jolted blearily awake. “Yes,” she said, the word coming out even before she had registered what was happening. “I know.”

“How?” The voice sounded shrill, testy.

Maria tried to stand, but slipped down the wall again to where she had been lying. She could see nothing, her vision blinded by a torch shining directly into her face. Her mouth was bone-dry, and her voice was a croak. “I worked it out.”

The torch snapped down and she saw a short, wiry man standing in front of her, his black hair slicked back from his forehead. She guessed he was about seventy, his hair obviously dyed, though he had the physique of a man thirty years younger. He had washed-out grey eyes.

The truth dawned on Maria. She looked at him with sickening certainty, scarcely believing she was finally in his presence. Everything else, her appalling state, even O’Connor’s death, was eclipsed from her mind. He was the one. She fought to control her emotions, to keep her cool. She was suddenly wide awake. “Pieter Reksnys. I see your father taught you well. Lithuanian, I believe? The master race.”

A hand shot out and gripped Maria’s neck like a vise, displaying lightning agility for a man of his age. He jerked her towards him and raised her up, holding her almost off the ground. Through the suffocating pain Maria sensed something familiar, a nasty tang to his breath, a familiar odour. “Never speak of my father again, Jew,” he hissed. “And don’t think he was the only one who pulled the trigger back then. I had plenty of diverting entertainment with the children.” He dropped Maria and stood over her while she coughed and retched. “I only wish my own son had been alive then. He would have done his grandfather proud.”

He kicked Maria over on to her back, ostentatiously wiping his shoe on the ground afterwards. Maria saw another figure advancing on her. His head was held low, his hands clenching and unclenching, his movements sickeningly familiar. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her over to the wooden lid, kicking it roughly aside and shoving her over the hole underneath. She could see nothing but blackness, a yawning depth that brought with it a waft of cooler air, as if there were water somewhere far below.

“Don’t worry.” She was yanked up against him, and she saw the ugly scar. “I reserved the blood-eagle for your boyfriend. When I throw you down into the underworld you won’t even die. At least that’s what the Toltecs told their victims.” The voice was hoarse, ugly, less refined than his father’s. He made as if to push her in, then pulled her back roughly. “My kind of people.” He laughed, an insane, high-pitched cackle, then hurled her down on the ground. “Now the felag has some use for you. Enjoy our little vacation hideaway while you can.”

“The true felag died out seven hundred years ago.” Maria raised her head and tried to stare at Loki. “Harald Hardrada’s men would never have admitted scum like you. They wouldn’t even have considered you worthy of a blood feud.”

Loki lunged at Maria, but Reksnys held him in check. “Not yet,” he muttered. He turned to Maria, speaking with mock apology. “My son still has these romantic notions. He thinks he’s in the SS.”

“Too weak for that.”

Loki lunged again and once more Reksnys held him back, then his voice hardened. “Our felag was a means to an end. No more, no less. And it looks like we will have the last laugh on Harald Hardrada.”

Loki snarled and turned abruptly away, heading quickly out of the entranceway at the side of the chamber. Maria crawled back against the wall. Reksnys tossed her a small water bottle. “So now we have become acquainted. I need some expert assistance. You are going to help me.”

He took out a digital camera and pointed it at her. Maria began to lose all feeling, sinking to the floor, then looked up at Reksnys and remembered what he and his son had done. O’Connor had ensured that justice was carried out against Reksnys’ father, had staked his life on it and had paid the ultimate price. She owed it to him to do everything in her power to see that the job was finished. And she owed it to herself.

She would be strong.

Jack stood pensively in the control room on Seaquest II, cradling a coffee and watching a cloudburst release a shimmer of rain far out to sea. The sky had an ominous grey overcast, the high clouds they had seen on the beach that morning having been replaced by a dark mass rolling in from the Caribbean. Where the sun shone through, curtains of light hung and twisted and mingled in the sky, like the northern lights they had seen in Greenland but heavy with the portent of weather to come.

“It looks like we’re in for some rain.” The Canadian captain of Seaquest II came up beside Jack, peering out to sea through his binoculars. “We’re almost into hurricane season. As a precaution I’m closing down shop. We’re moving farther offshore and I’m battening down the helicopter in the hangar.”

Jack grunted. It was not the news he wanted to hear. “Thanks. Do what you have to do.”

The captain left for the bridge and James Macleod got up from the computer console where he had been evaluating data from the icefjord. Everyone in the room was aware of Jack, but had been keeping their distance. Some of them had been on the first Seaquest and could remember the loss of Peter Howe in the Black Sea, how Jack had taken the responsibility personally. Maria had been enormously popular among the crew and scientists alike during their sojourn in the icefjord. Even Lanowski was subdued, quietly passing Jack a series of printouts of the longship in the iceberg he had finalised from the photogrammetric images.

Macleod sidled up to the window beside him. “How long do you think we’ll be here, Jack?” he asked quietly.

Jack turned and looked at him, his face drawn and distant, then stared back out to sea. “I don’t know, James. I just don’t know.” He pursed his lips and put down his coffee. They had been back on board for almost six hours now, and there was still no word from Iona. All they had to go on was a brief phone message to IMU headquarters from O’Connor’s colleague in the monastery, the man Jack remembered seeing briefly in the church. Apparently the police were keeping the scene completely under wraps, and there was a media blackout. But there was no doubt of the facts. Father O’Connor was dead, and Maria was missing.

“We have to assume she’s been kidnapped.” Ben had been within earshot, and had moved up to Jack’s other side. “Until there’s a body, that is.”

“I know.” Jack exhaled forcefully, then stood back from the railing with his hands on his hips, his usual demeanour returned. “We have to keep on top of this. We have to assume we’ll be hearing more soon. Until then there’s nothing we can do. It has to be situation normal.” He looked at Macleod, his expression grim but determined. “There’s your answer. My plan after visiting Chichen Itza had been to collate all possible evidence from the north Yucatan datable to the second half of the eleventh century, to the time when Harald might have been here. Wall-paintings, glyphs, structures. Anything that might provide a clue.” He gestured to Jeremy, hunched over a screen in the corner, surrounded by open books. “I put Jeremy on it the moment we got back.”

“He’s taken the news very badly,” Macleod murmured.

“He revered O’Connor,” Jack said quietly. “And Maria’s his mentor. For someone like him, that’s like pulling the rug out from under your life.”

“He’s got us now,” Macleod replied.

“He’s a good guy,” said Jack.

Costas had been tapping at the workstation next to Jeremy, and leaned back on his chair as they looked over. “Jack. Something to look forward to. I’ve jumped the gun and been in touch with the IMU guy for the Caribbean, Jim Hales out of Grand Cayman. You know he’s an old pal of mine from the US Navy submersibles research lab. He was straight on to Mexico City and they’ve given us the go-ahead for Chichen Itza. Amazing how that guy clears the red tape. Any time you want to talk setting up a project in that cenote, I’ve got the contact numbers.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Jack caught Costas’ eye, and knew they both sensed the need to keep positive, to look ahead. “I’ll put first claim on the sub-bottom borer after the Golden Horn’s done. Jeremy, you in on this?”

Jeremy looked at them, pale and distracted. “Huh? If Maria will let me.” He suddenly checked himself, and the room went silent.

“She will,” Jack said firmly.

Jeremy tried hard to keep a brave face. “Anyway, I’m not sure if the Well of Sacrifice is where I want to do my first open-water dive.”

“Don’t worry.” Costas stretched his hand over and placed it on Jeremy’s back. “We’ll do some coral first.”

A red light began flashing in the centre of the room. Ben looked at Jack, his face deadly serious. “To the bridge.” The two men quickly made their way out of the control room and up the stairway, followed by Costas. The captain was busily engaged with the chief officer at the binnacle but immediately gestured to the chart room. “Priority message on the security channel.” Ben was first in the room and snatched up the radio receiver, talking quickly and then putting it down. “That was IMU HQ. There’s been an email message. It’s directed us to a secure site and given us a password.”

Costas was already seated at the computer beside the chart table. “Okay. We’re on line. Address?” Ben read it out and Costas tapped the keyboard. “Password?”

Ben hesitated, then glanced at Jack. “Menorah.”

Costas let out a low whistle. “Well, that gives the game away.”

Jack’s knuckles were white as he gripped Costas’ chair, and his voice was hoarse. “We guessed who we were up against. This confirms it.”

“It’s addressed to you, Jack.” Costas leaned aside to let Jack read the short email that had appeared on the screen.

To: Jack Howard

You and Kazantzakis will arrive by Zodiac at 2300 this evening at the beach landing point you visited this morning. Bring cave diving equipment. You will blindfold yourselves and await our arrival. Any attempt to involve security or make contact with an outside body and your colleague will be executed.

“Maria’s alive,” Jack breathed. “Thank God.”

“The beach landing point,” Ben murmured. “Doesn’t surprise me they knew where we were. Probably the Mexican police. If it’s Reksnys, he’ll have prying eyes everywhere along this coast.”

“And cave gear,” Costas murmured. “What the hell’s that all about? I’m not going cave diving while it’s raining. All the air pockets will flood.”

“They must have found something,” Jack said.

“That password?”

“I truly hope not.”

“Maria’s somewhere here, near us,” Ben said. “They must have flown her in from Iona. Reksnys has a private jet, and his own runway in the jungle. It’s one of the few things you can’t disguise from satellite surveillance. And he must have known Seaquest II was on the way here even before they hit Iona.”

“My guess is the hit was a one-man show,” Jack said bleakly.

“Loki.”

“We’ve been sent a photo. Better prepare ourselves.” Costas clicked on an attachment below the message, and a picture began to download. It had been taken with a flash inside some kind of chamber with an irregular stone floor and old walls covered in green growth. As the image opened they could see a figure slumped on the floor, a woman. It was horrifying, an image of torture, the kind of image that leaked out of Iraq and untold Third World hellholes. She was filthy, wearing a clinging T-shirt partly ripped open over her breasts. Her dark hair was matted to her neck, and her arms were streaked with green from the floor. She had been trying to look at the camera but had flinched in the flash. Her eyes were puffed up and closed, her mouth flecked with white, and she had an ugly abrasion over her cheekbone which was oozing blood and pus.

Jack felt a lurching shock of recognition. “Maria.” He felt physically sick. His hands slipped off the back of the chair and he sat down heavily on the bench beside it. As he looked at the image again, his horror turned to anger, to seething rage.

The captain appeared at the door. “Message from Iona. There’s a police forensics guy who’s been allowed to talk to us.” He saw the screen, faltered.

“Coming.” Jack’s voice was cold, emotionless.

Ten minutes later Jack was back in the control room. It was empty except for Jeremy; Macleod and Lanowski had left for the bridge deck a few minutes before. Jeremy was still at his screen, working quietly, printing images from the web and bookmarking pages of Toltec art. Above him the window was flecked with the first lashings of rain, and Jack could see that the weather was deteriorating rapidly. He paused, feeling utterly drained from what he had just heard, looked again at Jeremy, then made his way through the consoles. He did not know how to break the news. He pulled up a chair and flipped it round to sit with his back to the window, then looked intently at Jeremy’s images.

“Good work,” he said quietly. “I could never have interpreted this stuff. I didn’t do Mesoamerican archaeology like you.”

“I’ve made one really interesting discovery.” Jeremy passed Jack a sheet of paper. “You remember the ancient Aztec prophecy about the return of the god-king Quetzalcoatl? When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlan in central Mexico in 1519, the emperor Moctezuma thought Cortes was Quetzalcoatl. It’s one reason the Spanish conquest happened so quickly.”

“Go on.”

“Well, Quetzalcoatl was a Toltec, a semi-legendary king. According to Aztec legend at the time of Moctezuma, he’d been exiled from their kingdom five centuries before, and promised to return from the land of the rising sun.”

“Five centuries before,” Jack mused. “That puts it in the eleventh century, smack in our period.”

“Right. The land of the rising sun, due east from the Aztec heartland in the vale of Mexico, was almost certainly the Yucatan peninsula. There’s some historical corroboration for this, because that’s about the time the Toltecs invaded Chichen Itza.”

Jack looked hard at Jeremy, began to speak, then decided to let him carry on.

“It gets really intriguing when you look at the Maya sources,” Jeremy said. “What we know of the final years of the Maya comes mainly from the Books of Chilam Balam, the Jaguar Prophet, mostly written down by local scribes in the Latin alphabet after the Spanish conquest. The books were hidden away and jealously guarded. Each one relates to a different community in the north Yucatan, a bit like the Norse sagas in Iceland. One of the most extraordinary prophecies concerns the arrival of bearded men from the east.”

“Bearded men?”

“You follow me? A lot of scholars have dismissed this as a later embellishment. Some of the books weren’t written down until the eighteenth or even nineteenth century. But another book’s just come to light, in the Vatican archives in Rome, of all places. It looks like the earliest of them all, partly written in Maya script, apparently confiscated by the first Jesuit missionaries in the Yucatan in the sixteenth century. It contains the legends and prophecies of the Maya community north of Chichen Itza. There’s the same story of bearded men, but with a twist. In this one they have a king, and he fights a great battle with the oppressors of the Maya, presumably the Toltecs. Then he disappears into the underworld, and the Maya await his return. It may be the origin of the Quezalcoatl prophecy of the Aztecs, except in the Maya story he’s called Wukub Kaqix, the monstrous bird-diety, the eagle-god.”

Jack glanced at a picture of the jade pendant pinned beside the monitor. “Pretty standard image around here.”

“But also the name of Harald Hardrada’s ship, the Eagle. In the Norse sagas there are some hints that when the Vikings burnt their boats, went to war with no intention of returning, they sometimes cut off the stems of the ships and carried them forward like battle standards. It was a signal that they would fight to the death, that they were on a one-way trip to Valhalla. It was a way of striking fear into the hearts of their enemies. Maybe that’s what happened here, and the local Maya saw it.”

“Fantastic. This is fantastic, Jeremy. This is just what we’re looking for.” Jack suddenly leaned forward and put his head in his hands, all pretence at bonhomie gone. He could keep it from Jeremy no longer. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. We’ve had news from Iona.”

“I know.” Jeremy spoke softly, and put down the book he had been holding. Jack gazed up at him. He looked a world older than the ebullient graduate student he had first met the week before. “I knew from the moment I heard O’Connor had been murdered. He spoke of it, prepared me for it. I know what happened in Iona.” Jeremy paused, tried to speak, then the words came out as a hoarse whisper. “The blood-eagle.”