Curses!

Chapter 3

"Hot” didn't begin to describe that memorable afternoon. It had been like a steam bath, only worse because there was no way to get up and walk out. The temperature had been a hundred degrees, the relative humidity had been a hundred percent, and breathing had been like inhaling through a wad of warm, wet cotton.

The brief rain had ended twenty minutes before, one of those hot slashing torrents that fell on the jungle canopy like a waterfall and then stopped as if someone had turned off a tap. Already the half inch of water that had slicked the ancient Mayan ceremonial plaza of Tlaloc had disappeared, sucked down through the porous soil of Yucatan and into the great natural limestone caverns below. The moment the rain had stopped the sun had reappeared, enveloping the world in vapor. The dense green foliage that pressed in on the plaza from all sides, the thousand-year-old stones of the crumbling temples, the thatch-roofed archeologists’ shed-all hissed and steamed in the rain's aftermath.

Gideon was sitting on the veranda of the shed, at the rickety work table nominally under the protection of the eaves, but now mostly in the sun. Like everything else, he was, if not hissing, at least steaming. It poured from his sweaty khaki work clothes, from his curled, stained straw hat, from his very pores. He took another swig from the scarred bottle of warm grapefruit soda, grimaced, wiped his perspiring forehead with an equally wet forearm, and thought wistfully and fleetingly of Yosemite in the snow, and of the cool and windy Mendocino coast. Then he sighed and returned his attention to the brown, roughly globular object, also steaming, on the work table in front of him. It was the latest find brought up by the divers from the cloudy green depths of the sacrificial cenote: a human skull, the fourth so far.

He turned it slowly in his hands. Like most Mayan sacrifices it was young. None of the sutures had even begun to close, which meant it hadn't lived to make it out of its twenties. Nor out of its teens, he thought, running his finger over the chewing surfaces of the teeth. One of the third molars had fallen out after death, but the other one was freshly erupted, as cleanly sculpted as a dentist's model, with no wear on it. That would make eighteen or nineteen a reasonable guess at age. And guess was the right word. Third-molar eruption was wildly variable, but what else was there to go on? After the first twelve or fifteen years, the skull has precious little to reveal about age until the thirties. That left a lot of room for guesses.

"All right, Harvey,” he said to the pudgy, balding twenty-five-year-old with the studious manner who sat attentively beside him, “what would you say about age?"

Harvey Feiffer adjusted his posture alertly. “Um, eighteen to twenty?” he ventured. “The left third molar-"

"Good. What about sex?"

"Um, female?"

"Right again. How do you know?"

"Gee, lots of things. There's no supraorbital ridge, and the occipital protuberance is practically nonexistent. And those mastoid processes are just smooth little bumps."

Gideon nodded his approval. In some ways Harvey was one of his better graduate students. He worked hard and he was enthusiastic about anthropology. He had jumped at the chance to accompany Gideon to Yucatan as a research assistant.

"What else do you see when you look at it?” Gideon asked. "Whom do you see?"

"Um, whom?” Harvey chewed on the corner of his lip, wiped sweat from under his collar with a handkerchief, and timidly took the skull, being careful to cradle it in his palms in the approved manner. No fingers in the eye sockets. “There are a lot of interesting things, really,” he said, buying time. “It's on the small side, and definitely brachycephalic, although not as much as the cranial deformation makes it look.” He darted a glance at Gideon to see if he was on the right track and received a noncommittal nod. Then he glided his stubby, nail-chewed fingers lightly over the surface as Gideon had taught him to do. “The, uh, superior and inferior nuchal crests are poorly developed, and the temporal lines…"

Here in a nutshell was Harvey's problem; an overmeticulous concentration on minutiae, a relentless focus on detail at the expense of pattern and meaning. He had been a late convert to physical anthropology, switching as a junior after hearing Gideon give an all-university lecture on the evolution of the primate hand. Until then he had been a sociology major, and Gideon wondered if both fields hadn't been bad choices, for Harvey Feiffer had the precise and exacting soul of a good accountant.

Once, in an unusually loose moment over a couple of beers, he had said to Gideon, “You know what's so great about physical anthro? There's nothing to argue about; there are right answers. In sociology, if you say, like, familial norms determine infant behavior, the first guy you meet on the street will tell you that's wrong; his kid had a personality all his own from the minute he was born. But if you point at a bump on a bone and announce it's the anterior obturator tubercle, boy, it's great-nobody says peep."

"…and the nasal bones are typically Mayan,” Harvey was now rattling on, “and there seems to be a hole drilled in the upper left incisor. Oh, and there are some Wormian bones at the lambdoidal suture, and-"

Gideon repressed a sigh. “Harvey, hold on. Step back from it a minute.” Obediently, Harvey leaped up. “No,” Gideon said with a smile. “I meant step back mentally. Try to look at the skull as a whole, as part of a person. What can you say about her?"

Harvey slid back into his cane chair and frowned terrifically. “Um, about her? Well, I'm not sure…"

"Do you think she was a pretty girl?"

Harvey wriggled uncomfortably. It wasn't his kind of question. No right answer. “It's hard to say. From the Maya's point of view, I guess she was."

It wasn't a bad answer. By today's standards she would have been far from pretty, but surely the Maya would have thought her beautiful with her delicate, broad skull and those extraordinary, convex nasal bones. To make her prettier still her forehead had been artificially flattened when she was an infant, so that the top of her head was squeezed into the pointy hump they found so attractive. And the hole bored in her tooth had certainly been for a faceted jade pellet that was probably still at the bottom of the cenote. No doubt her ears had been pierced for pendants, her nasal septum for a plug, her left nostril for a gem. Very likely, her eyes had been permanently crossed in childhood by long months of focusing on a little ball of pitch dangling from a string tied to her hair. All to make her desirable.

He let out a long sigh. Amazing, the number of ways you could mutilate and deform human flesh and bone, given a little ingenuity. All that work and pain to make her desirable, and then they had killed her before she was twenty. And all Harvey saw was tubercles and protuberances.

"Okay,” Gideon said gently, “let's see if we can't look at her as a human being now, not just a mass of skeletal criteria. For example-"

"Gideon! Dr. Oliver! Hey, where are you?"

He recognized Leo Rose's bellow of a voice and sighed again. Tlaloc was one of those Horizon Foundation excavations that was supervised by professionals but staffed by pay-for-the-privilege amateurs who worked for two weeks or a month and usually turned out to be both the chief pleasure and the chief pain of the dig. Pleasure because of the artless, enthusiastic interest they showed in almost anything at all; pain because this same interest meant the professional staff rarely got ten minutes in a row to work on something without having to answer a well-meant but often inane question.

"Over here, Leo. We're behind the shed."

Bearlike and rumpled, the California real-estate developer lumbered into sight around the corner of the thickly overgrown Priest's House. Or what they called the Priest's House. Anthropologists didn't really know what these buildings had been, any more than they knew what any ancient Mayan building had been, or what the Maya had called their great cities and ceremonial centers (if they were actually ceremonial centers), or even what the Maya had called themselves. There was a hell of a lot, when you thought about it, that anthropologists didn't know and probably never would.

Leo was bouncing with excitement. “We found a fake wall, can you believe it? With a kind of little hidden room behind it, and this fantastic stone chest in it. Come on, we figured you'd want to see this. Oh, hiya, Harvey."

Gideon didn't have to be asked twice. He was up at once, carefully placing the girl's skull on the bean-bag ring that served as a cushion. Was there anyone on a dig, amateur or professional, who didn't harbor secret hopes of sealed rooms behind false walls? Not since Howard Carter knocked down that wall in 1922 and walked into the untouched tomb of Tutankhamen, there wasn't.

"Where? In the temple?"

"Underneath. In the stairwell."

Clearing the rubble-filled stairwell was the major ongoing task of the Tlaloc excavation. Since the dig had opened more than two years before, the director, Howard Bennett, had worked steadily at it with changing crews, boring down into the flattopped pyramid on which the little Temple of the Owls sat. Gideon, on leave from his teaching post, had come to Yucatan only two weeks before-when they had begun to bring up bones from the cenote-but he had long since learned that Howard's enthusiasm was centered on the buried passageway. Howard had staked his reputation, such as it was, on the unearthing of some great find when they finally got to the bottom. Why else, he wanted to know, would the Maya go to all the trouble of packing a perfectly good stairwell with tons of debris, if not to hide something of tremendous importance?

Gideon had been doubtful. Sometimes there were treasures at the bottom of such rubble-packed passages; much more Often there was nothing. The Maya had made a practice of enlarging their pyramids by using an old one as the core of a new one erected on top of it. The Pyramid of the Magicians at Uxmal had five such masonry “envelopes,” one inside the other, like the layers of an onion. And when the Maya built this way, they usually blocked up any hollow spaces in the original pyramid; for structural soundness, not to hide anything. But a false wall and a sealed room that was something else again.

"Did you reach the bottom, then?” Harvey asked as they trotted across the grassy plaza toward the pyramid.

No, Leo explained, huffing for breath, they hadn't found the base of the stairwell yet, although they had now dug down twenty-four steps. No, the hollow wall had been discovered on the landing that was just twelve steps down from the temple floor, at a level that had been exposed and unremarked for a year. Someone had noticed that the mortar on one of the walls was different, more crumbly, and when Howard had probed between the blocks of masonry with the point of a trowel, they had come loose.

At the foot of the pyramid Gideon nodded to the two straw-hatted Mayan laborers enjoying their break-cigars and lukewarm tea-on the bottom steps. In return he received two decorous, unsmiling nods. He jogged up the steaming, worn steps, Harvey bumping along beside him and Leo gasping behind, then entered the small building on the pyramid's flat top: the Temple of the Owls, so-called on account of the frieze that ran along its lintel. (They didn't look like owls to Gideon, but no one had much liked his “Temple of the Turkeys” suggestion.)

Inside, the structure was bare, with the look of a burned-out tenement. Ceilings, walls, and floor were coated with a limestone stucco made dismal and blotchy by centuries of intrusive plant growth, since removed, and a millennium of damp heat, still very much present. Only near the roofline were there a few faded streaks of green, blue, and red to suggest what it might have looked like in A.D. 900. The one unusual note was the square opening cut in the floor, and that, of course, led into the stairwell.

On the landing twelve steps below, most of the west wall had already been taken down, with the removed blocks neatly stacked and numbered with felt-tipped markers. The crew and another Mayan laborer were gazing mutely at the opening. Two portable lamps on the landing threw their garish yellow light into the small, astonishing room before them.

It is one of the great thrills of anthropology to look at something that was sealed up a thousand years ago, by the people of a great and vanished culture, and has lain unseen ever since. But this was something more, something out of a fairy tale…the Crystal Cave, was it? The room was a jeweled, sparkling white, made all the more dazzling by its contrast with the grimy stairwell-a fiercely glittering ice grotto in the heart of the Yucatan rain forest. But the ice was crystallized calcium carbonate, of course: stalactites on the ceiling, stalagmites on the floor, and a glistening, petrified sheen of it on the walls.

In the center was a waist-high stone chest three feet square, made of four massive slabs standing on their sides, and capped by a great, overhanging stone lid eight inches thick. The lid too was coated with crystal deposits, but through the milky veneer Gideon could see an intricately carved surface of extraordinary beauty. There were Long Count dates around the rim, and in the center a lovingly worked figure of the halach-uinic, the True Man, emerging from or disappearing into the jaws of an Underworld serpent. The red paint had faded to a pale rose. Other than that, the chest might have been finished that morning. The lid was magnificent, in itself a find of the first order. Gideon hardly dared think about what might be under it.

Howard Bennett hadn't seen him come in. Shirtless and built something like a sumo wrestler-sleekly corpulent, with thick, soapy flesh sheathing a heavily muscled frame-he was staring avidly at the lid. On his gleaming neck and shoulders, the skin twitched like a horse's. Gideon heard him laugh deep in his throat, softly and privately. The sound set off an odd shiver of apprehension at the back of Gideon's scalp.

Howard looked up to see the newcomers. “What do you think now?” he said, half exultantly, half challengingly. Gideon had not made a secret of his doubts about there being anything to find.

"It's fantastic,” he said sincerely. “I was dead wrong. Congratulations."

Under its sheen of sweat, Howard's beefy, dissipated face was deeply flushed. He wiped perspiration from his upper lip with the tip of an old paisley bandanna tied around his throat and laughed.

Howard Bennett laughed easily and often. His loose, jovial personality was an asset for his one-of-a-kind vocation: directing excavations manned by well-heeled amateurs as keen on vacationing as on digging. After a day at the site he was always game for an evening at the nearby Club Med or even a four-hour round trip to Merida, to the Maya Excelsior Bar, or La Discotheque, or the Boccacio 2000. At the Maya Excelsior, in fact, he was a Saturday-night fixture; he sat in with the small band, playing jazz clarinet, at which he was extraordinarily proficient.

He had had a brief university career; three years at three different institutions. He'd been a lackluster teacher, a less-than-responsible faculty member, and an indifferent researcher. But his formidable field methodology put him in demand as an excavation supervisor, and he was, to Gideon's knowledge, the only person who did this sort of thing for a living. He'd been on Latin American digs for over ten years now, the last two at Tlaloc. In that time he'd been back to the United States only twice, to renew his passport and visas. For more than a decade he had lived a gypsylike existence in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.

Gideon had briefly worked with him three years before, at a Mixtec site in Oaxaca, and had been worried about him then. Now it was worse. Howard's centerless, hard-living existence was showing: He was putting on weight, his features were getting blurry, and he was now finishing off a couple of beers at lunch in addition to his evening drinking. And he wasn't very interested in talking about archaeology with Gideon. His conversation ranged from griping about how miserably archaeologists were paid to frank envy of the way some of the rich amateurs could afford to live. For Howard, ten years of rubbing shoulders with high-living stockbrokers and businessmen had not been salutary. He was drinking more, deteriorating mentally and physically, and drifting deeper into professional obscurity.

At least he had been, until this startling find. He grinned at Gideon, blond eyebrows beetling. “What does it remind you of?"

"Palenque,” Gideon said quietly.

"Yeah,” Howard breathed. “Palenque!"

It would make anyone think of Palenque, the elegant ruin three hundred miles to the south in the even denser jungles of Chiapas. There, in 1952, in the staircase of a somewhat larger pyramid under a somewhat larger temple, Alberto Ruz Lhuillier had also found a room sealed behind a false wall, also containing a stone chest, much bigger than this one, with a finely carved lid. Inside had been one of the great finds of Meso-American archaeology. It was the skeleton of the ruler known as Pacal, lying regally on his back, swathed in the rich trappings of a Mayan lord: necklace laid upon necklace, enormous earrings, funerary mask, and diadem, all of polished jade; intricately carved rings on all ten fingers; a great pear-shaped pearl; a jade bead delicately placed between his teeth as food for his journey; a jade statue of the sun god at his feet to accompany him.

Howard stared hungrily at the chest. “What do you think is in it?” he asked Gideon and laughed again. His stiff, straw-blond hair was dark with sweat, as furrowed as if he'd been swimming. Gideon didn't like the feverish-looking red patches on his cheeks, or his vaguely reckless manner.

"Not much; the interior dimensions can't be more than two by two,” Gideon said reasonably, but Howard's excitement was practically crackling in the dank air, beginning to get to him. He felt the beginning of an ache at his temples and made himself relax his knotted jaw muscles. “If it's another royal burial I'm afraid they've scrunched him up a little to fit him in."

It was meant to ease the atmosphere. Harvey laughed dutifully, and a few of the crew members snickered, but Howard brayed; a nasal yawp that made the others glance uncomfortably at each other.

"You know what I'm going to do?” he said abruptly. “I'm going to get the lid up. Right now.” He rubbed his hands together mirthfully while sweat dripped from his chin. He turned to the laborer and spoke tersely in Spanish.

"Avelino, I want a tripod with a hand winch rigged up. And some bracing poles. Go tell the others."

Gideon frowned. This was a tricky operation, better left until the next day when preparations could be more calmly made. He began to say something but changed his mind. No director liked having his authority contested in public, and the leadership of the dig belonged in Howard's hands. Gideon was only there for a few weeks, strictly to analyze the skeletal material. Besides, it was always possible that Howard knew what he was doing.

For the moment it seemed that he did. His directions were concise and accurate, and the tiny Mayan workmen were used to lifting heavy things in cramped spaces. Working efficiently, they spoke quietly to each other in their soft, rustly language. In twenty minutes they had one edge of the lid raised three or four inches, enough to force several wooden rods under it to prop it up.

Howard jumped forward as soon as they were in place, his flashlight already flicked on. He knelt in front of the chest like a man before an altar and shone the light into the narrow opening, leaning forward to get his eyes up against the crevice. For long seconds there was no sound other than the clinking of the metal flashlight barrel against the rim of the chest as he moved it along.

He peered into the chest without saying anything, forearms braced against the rim, forehead leaning on them. The only sound now was an erratic flutter above their heads, like spattering fat: insects igniting against the lights. Nobody in the crew spoke, nobody moved. If they were like Gideon they weren't even breathing. Howard's back was to them, his soft, slabby shoulders buttery with sweat. He looked, thought Gideon, as if he were well on the way to melting into a greasy puddle at the foot of the chest, like something out of H. P. Lovecraft.

"Jesus Christ,” he said; tight-voiced and expressionless. “Gideon, look at this."

Swallowing hard, his neck aching with anticipation, Gideon moved forward, not sure whether Howard was looking at the find of the century or the letdown of his life. When he stepped into the recess, stalagmites crunched underneath him, a startlingly crisp sensation in the mucky heat. He dropped to one knee beside Howard while the others watched avidly. Howard shone the light into the chest for him.

Gideon leaned intently forward, profoundly grateful for his life. What other occupation offered moments like this?

Once he got used to the bobbing shadows from Howard's trembling flashlight his reaction was piercing disappointment. There was nothing in the chest but a few dusty, common objects like hundreds of other objects from dozens of other digs: a few jade beads in a heap; a pair of ear ornaments made from scallop shells; two painted plates; and two slim, rectangular, neatly folded bundles of bark lying side by side, also daubed with paint. They all had value from a scholarly point of view, but they were definitely not the find of the century. Why in the world had the Maya gone to such elaborate trouble to hide and preserve this homely junk?

But Gideon was a physical anthropologist; bones were his specialty, not artifacts. Howard was an archaeologist, and he knew better. The flashlight jerked in his hand.

"A codex!” he whispered thickly.

Gideon looked again and of course they weren't simple bundles of bark at all. Now he could see the glyphs across the tops of the leaves and the comicstrip-like panels with their gaudy drawings as the beam from Howard's flashlight picked them out. It was a Mayan codex, a pre-Conquest Mayan “book,” lying on its spine, opened in the middle so the two halves lay flat.

His lips parted for speech, but he couldn't think of anything to say. Maybe it was the find of the century after all. At least in Mayan archaeology.