Hunt at The Well Of Eternity

Chapter 21

The valley was beautiful, no doubt about that, Gabriel thought as the group topped a small rise that gave them a good view of the land spread out before them. Lush and green, stretching for miles between the gorge known as the Blade of the Gods on the west and a wall-like range of cloud-wreathed mountains to the east, the valley gave every appearance of being, as Mariella had said, paradise.

What looked, at first glance, like several small hills rose from the valley floor about a mile away. Gabriel looked closer and realized that instead of hills, they were Mayan pyramids that were so covered with the vines that had grown over the centuries they looked like natural formations rather than man-made structures. A shorter, squatly built hump near the pyramids was probably some sort of ancient palace.

“I don’t believe it,” Cierra said as she trudged along beside Gabriel. “Why has this place never been discovered before now?”

“Think about how inaccessible it is,” Gabriel said. “If you came up to that gorge and didn’t know there was a bridge over it, you might just turn back. And Mariella said there are no passes through those mountains to the east, so nobody could get in that way.”

“Yes, but it should have been spotted from the air,” Cierra insisted. “That’s the way some of the other lost Mayan cities have been found, by people searching with planes and helicopters.”

“Again, the mountains probably have something to do with it. They’re high enough so that an approach from that direction wouldn’t be easy. Not impossible, mind you, but not easy, either. And even if somebody flew over the valley, what would they see? Some hills?”

Mariella was walking in front of them, flanked by two of Esparza’s men. Esparza was up ahead, striding along with Podnemovitch beside him. Mariella turned to look at Gabriel and Cierra, and it was obvious she had been listening to their conversation as she said, “Cuchatlán was abandoned by the Maya earlier than any of their other cities. The vegetation has had more time to cover the old ruins. That’s why they’re so well hidden. You would have to know it was there, like Granville did, to have much of a chance of finding it.”

“You still insist that fantastic story about the Well of Eternity is true?” Cierra wanted to know.

“Of course it’s true. Would so many people have died because of it if it was only a legend?”

Gabriel refrained from reminding her how full history was of men dying because of legends.

Mariella stumbled a bit as she turned toward the front of the group again, caught herself, and passed a hand wearily over her face. Gabriel thought she looked more fatigued, more haggard, than she had earlier.

Almost like she was starting to show those more than one hundred fifty years she claimed to possess.

Gabriel moved up beside Mariella. Esparza’s men watched him closely but didn’t try to stop him. “Who exactly lives here now?” he asked. “You said the Maya abandoned the city when they began moving northward into Chiapas and the Yucatan.”

She nodded. “Other Indians in the region moved in once the Maya were gone. When Granville and his men—and I—reached Cuchatlán…I think it was in 1866, though of course it was hard to keep track of dates here in the jungle…the Indians who had established a village near the ruins welcomed us. They shared the waters of the Well with us, though we didn’t understand yet what they could do. Granville’s men liked it here, and so did I. We persuaded him to stay for a time, to let the men rest. He’d been talking about taking samples of the water overseas, offering it to Queen Victoria if Great Britain would throw all its power and influence behind a new Confederacy.” Mariella smiled. “But he’d been talking about it less and less as time went on, and he talked about it less still once we were here. Finally the beauty of this place seduced Granville, just as it did the rest of us. He has never left. His men married into the tribe. Over the decades we have all become one people, the people of Cuchatlán.”

“Wait a minute,” Cierra said. “If this is true, if all of you who live in this valley are well over a hundred years old, the population should have increased exponentially until there were thousands and thousands of you…perhaps hundreds of thousands.”

Mariella shook her head. “The waters of the Well do not confer invulnerability, just immunity to aging. It’s true that they allow us to recover quickly from illness or injury, but if someone is hurt badly enough, he dies. Accidents happen. People are crushed by snakes or mauled by jaguars. They have falls. Such things keep the population down.” A sad smile came over her tired face. “And truly, everything comes with a price. People who drink from the Well of Eternity…have very few children.”

“It causes sterility,” Gabriel said.

“Not in everyone. But the women of the valley have a hard time getting with child. And when they do, the pregnancies are difficult. The babies often do not survive.”

“It sounds like something in the water causes genetic mutations,” Cierra muttered reluctantly, realizing, Gabriel figured, that this admission on her part was tantamount to an admission that everything Mariella had told them might be true.

“The gods give with one hand and take away with the other,” Mariella said.

Esparza looked back at them. He had evidently been listening, too. “Once my scientists have analyzed the water and unlocked its secrets, something will be done about the side effects. The water will be perfected by the time I am ready to share it with the world.”

“You mean sell it to the world, don’t you?” Gabriel asked.

“Anyone who brings such a boon to mankind as eternal life deserves to be rewarded, don’t you think?” Esparza chuckled. “And with more than mere wealth. How does…emperor sound to you?”

“Of Cuchatlán?”

“Of the world, Mr. Hunt.”

“It sounds like the ravings of a madman,” Gabriel said.

Esparza’s mouth tightened into an angry line, but he didn’t say anything else to the prisoners. Instead he turned to Podnemovitch and ordered, “When we get there, have them taken to the palace with the others.”

“The others?” Mariella repeated. “My husband! Where is my husband?”

“Don’t worry about General Fargo,” Esparza said. “He’s alive, merely a prisoner now, like the rest.”

Gabriel wondered how Esparza had managed to conquer the whole valley with only a handful of men, but he got the answer to that question a few minutes later when they entered the village and he saw the machine guns. Previously mounted on the trucks, they had been taken loose from their mounts, hauled all the way here, and set up to rake the village’s wooden huts with deadly .50-caliber fire. Several of the huts had been shot practically to pieces. General Fargo must have ordered his men to surrender rather than have all the people of Cuchatlán slaughtered.

“Didn’t you have any modern weapons to defend yourselves?” Gabriel asked Mariella in an undertone. “Your people must have some money if they travel out of the valley from time to time, like you said. You could have bought some.”

“Granville gave up war when he decided not to leave the valley,” she said. “He said the weapons his men had were enough to protect us from wild animals and for hunting. He said he had had enough of killing.”

That was an admirable attitude, thought Gabriel…but only if everybody else you were likely to encounter shared it. If they didn’t, then sooner or later you were in for a lot of trouble. As General Fargo had discovered today.

Though it had worked for him for a long time. Gabriel had to admit that much. Fargo had had almost a hundred and fifty years in these idyllic surroundings, with a beautiful, intelligent woman at his side. That was way more than any normal man could hope for.

The three pyramids formed a rough triangle, with the palace sitting along one leg of the triangle between two of them. In the center of the triangle was a broad, round plaza made of intricately interlocking flat stones. The stones had been painted subtly differing shades of green and brown and tan, so that from the air they would look like a clearing in the jungle, but not necessarily a man-made one. A large, flat, circular stone sat in the middle of the plaza. It was probably ten feet in diameter, a couple of feet thick, and must have weighed at least a thousand pounds. It wasn’t so heavy that it couldn’t be moved if enough men were pushing it, though. That was obvious from the markings on the flagstones where it had been shoved aside.

The circular stone was a well cover, Gabriel realized as he saw the four-foot-wide hole that had been revealed when the rock was moved. “The Well of Eternity,” Esparza said in a voice that betrayed a touch of awe as he came to a stop beside it.

“The Maya used to sacrifice virgins by throwing them in wells like that,” Cierra said. “They were considered entrances to the realm of the gods.”

Esparza smiled at her. “Don’t worry, my dear. Such a fate won’t befall you. As I’m sure Mr. Hunt can attest, you would hardly qualify anyway.”

Cierra’s eyes narrowed angrily, but she didn’t say anything else. Esparza motioned to his men, and the prisoners were prodded on toward the palace.

Although it was a lot shorter than the nearby pyramids, no more than thirty or forty feet tall rather than a hundred feet or more, its base shared the same sort of construction. A series of terraced steps, only rising to a long, columned building instead of continuing on up to tiny temples.

For no particularly good reason other than raw curiosity, Gabriel counted the steps as they were marched up to the palace. There were thirty of them, each a little more than a foot tall. When they reached the top, they were herded through an arched entrance into a room with more steps, these leading down.

“See that they’re locked up,” Esparza told Podnemovitch. “I’ll decide what to do with them later.” He smiled at Mariella. “We might as well allow Señora Fargo to be reunited with her husband for a short time. We are not brutes, after all.”

Podnemovitch and his men marched the three prisoners down the stone stairs, which were lit by occasional candles guttering in niches set into the walls. The walls were made of large blocks of stone, and as the group went deeper, beads of moisture began to appear on the walls, trickling down them. Gabriel estimated that they had descended far enough to be underground now, and the dampness confirmed that guess.

The stairs finally came to a stop in front of a door that was nothing more than a single massive slab of stone. Several of Esparza’s men occupied the space in front of the door. They were holding automatic weapons.

Podnemovitch motioned for the guards to step back. The big Russian pushed a small lever that protruded from the wall, and with a grating sound the door began to move inward in a slow, ponderous swinging motion. It was a good two feet thick.

“A counterweight and balance mechanism,” Cierra said under her breath. “Fascinating.”

Gabriel found it interesting himself, though it wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a mechanism. Ancient architects in vanished civilizations all over the world had been capable of some amazing things, despite the rather primitive tools with which they had to work. They had some surprising holes in their knowledge, though, he thought, recalling that the Maya, for example, had never mastered the concept of the wheel. If they had, there was no way of knowing how far their empire might have extended.

“Inside,” Podnemovitch ordered. Heavily outnumbered and under the gun, the prisoners had no choice but to obey. Gabriel, Cierra, and Mariella moved into the vast, open space on the other side of the door. Sunlight filtered down through occasional cracks in the ceiling and it was just bright enough for Gabriel to be able to make out shadowy figures spread around the room. As the door scraped shut, those figures began to converge on the newcomers. Gabriel felt a shiver go through him. They were like phantoms flocking around newly lost souls who had just arrived in purgatory.

That sensation went away, though, as the other prisoners came closer and he saw that they were just men and women like himself…well, just like him other than the fact that some of them might be hundreds of years old.

And some of them looked it, too. Many of the faces peering at him were lined and cracked by the ravages of time. He wondered what the hell was going on here. Wasn’t the Well of Eternity supposed to keep these people young and vital?

“Mariella!” a husky voice rasped. “My God, is it really you?”

The crowd of prisoners parted to let a tall man through. As he stepped forward, Mariella cried, “Granville!” and rushed into his arms.

He held her tightly and trembled with emotion. “That..that scoundrel who calls himself Esparza said that you would soon be his captive, but I was praying that it wasn’t so! Oh, my dear, I wish you had never come back to Cuchatlán.”

“I would have come back no matter what,” she whispered. “I could never be away from you for long, my love.”

The man kissed her, hugged her, stroked her hair. Then he looked past her shoulder at the other newcomers and asked in a voice that still held a soft Southern drawl, “Who are these people?”

Gabriel hadn’t gotten a good look at the man yet, but as Mariella turned and led him forward into one of the slender shafts of light, Gabriel saw him clearly. The man was tall and lean, with deep-set eyes and a closely trimmed beard. The beard was completely white, as was the shock of hair on his head. Deep trenches were etched in his cheeks. He looked a lot older than he had in the picture Gabriel had seen in the book at Olustee, but that made sense considering that this man was probably more than a hundred and seventy years old. Gabriel’s heart thudded hard in his chest as that realization sunk in. He didn’t doubt Mariella’s story anymore, not at all.

“Gabriel Hunt,” Mariella said, “I would like for you to meet my husband, General Granville Fordham Fargo.”