The Babylon rite

11

Tomb 1, Huaca D, Zana, north Peru

She could hear voices in the redness.

‘Jessica. Jessica!’

Someone was pulling her; sideways. She coughed, and coughed again. Spluttering the dust from her mouth, rejecting it, puking it up.

‘Give her the water!’

Another voice. Larry. She opened her eyes but all she could see was the redness. She shut them tight again. A cold sudden splash of water dragged her back to reality.

‘Jessica!’

It was Dan: she could sense his touch, his fingers wiping the dust from her face with a cloth. Washing out her eyes and her mouth. Again she peered, and this time she saw.

She was still in the passage chamber at the entrance to Tomb 1 of Huaca D. Beams of light pierced the floating clouds of red dust, beginning to settle: beams cast by the headtorches of her friends and colleagues, Larry, and Dan and Jay, who were staring at her: dark shapes behind the beams.

‘Jess. Jessica. Are you OK?’

Her voice was a dusty croak. ‘I think so — think so, I…’ Faltering, she choked up some phlegm, and spat it on to the passage floor.

With a shudder, Jess grabbed the cloth from Dan, and started rubbing the dust from her own face, and hands, and her shoulders. Get rid of this filth. She was covered in the stuff, hundreds of pounds of it must have fallen from the vault above, raining down on her head.

‘It’s cinnabar powder,’ said Dan. ‘Just cinnabarite.’

Urgent and repulsed, Jess pared the disgusting powder from under her fingernails. The powder had a definite scent, not quite pungent, but organic, and dirty, and soiling. Like something excreted by insects.

So it was cinnabar? Powdered ore of red mercury, used on corpses as decoration since the early Stone Age.

And then the anxiety came rushing back.

‘Hold on. Cinnabar is mercury,’ she said, ‘it’s a poison — ’

Dan spoke, his voice softened by affection. ‘Yes, Jess… That’s why you got a dumping. The Moche put it in some of their tombs as a booby trap to ward off graverobbers. It’s triggered by opening the door.’ His headtorch was bobbing as he nodded. ‘It was lethal millennia ago, but it’s inert after so long: really — there is no risk, Jess. It’s just a shock when it happens.’ The headtorch turned, its beam circling like a lighthouse beam in the sea fog, through the floating red dust. ‘Larry?’

Larry Fielding’s laconic voice emanated from the reddened darkness. ‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘It happened to me at Huaca de La Luna in Trujillo. Few years back, when Tronna first sent us here, we were tryin’ to get into Burial 5, you know, the famous one, with the princess.’ A chuckle. ‘Freaked me out. Like being in a little avalanche. But I was fine!’

‘But I passed out?’ Jessica said shakily.

‘Seems so,’ said Dan. ‘Only a few seconds, though — just the shock, I should think.’ A heavy pause. ‘Look. If you wanna go back we totally understand. Larry can help you, you can come back later.’

The idea of scuttling back to the TUMP lab for a shower, then waiting, lamely, to hear what they had found, was surreal. And she definitely didn’t want any indulgent treatment from Dan, just because they were having an affair: secret or otherwise. Her defiance resurged. They were still here. At the door to Tomb 1 of Huaca D. What was beyond that door? She urgently wanted to be here the moment it opened, like Lord Carnarvon in the Valley of the Kings, like every explorer in human history, she wanted to say: I was there.

‘No way!’ Her voice had regained its edge.

‘Go, girl!’ Larry laughed.

‘OK, then.’ Dan was deciding. ‘OK, let’s get this done. A few more minutes and we’ll be in the tomb.’ Slowly, he shifted left, in the fetid confines of the dark passage, and began tugging once again at the rock doors to Tomb 1. The slates shifted as he spoke. ‘You know, this is actually a damn good sign. The Moche only used cinnabar as a deterrent for their most precious graves. That’s right, Larry, right? What did you find in the Huaca de la Luna?’

From down the passage came the reply. ‘Oh, wow. The lot. A main skeleton: the warrior priest, buried with his tumi. Decapitated llamas, that was nice, and tons of grave goods — a headdress made from desert fox bones, this fantastic wooden club…’

Dan was still working at the door. A faint crack of blackness could be seen — beyond. The tension was thick in the air, replacing the crimson powder of lethal cinnabar. Jessica guessed that all of them were feeling it, the rising tide of excitement.

Jay spoke up. ‘Didn’t you find blood on that club?’

The door was definitely opening. Larry replied, ‘Yeah, it was covered in this… like… black stuff. Horrible. We did immunoanalysis. It reacted to human blood antiserum only.’

The door was opening further. Larry added, ‘It had been used so often, to kill people, ritually, that the blood had soaked through the wood. Like jam in a sponge. Yuk.’

They were seconds from entering Tomb 1, Huaca D.

Dan interrupted, his voice strained by exertion. ‘Looking back, ah, you know, with what we know from Jessica and Steve Venturi, I reckon — ah-’ He was pushing at the door now, and it was opening easily. ‘I reckon that, ah… the mace must have been used in the sacrifice ritual. When they were done drinking blood, they just lined victims up, hit them with the club, bludgeoned the brains away — so all we need to do is know why: who they did it for, who they, ah… worshipped. OK… ah… I think I think we’re in. I think we’re in the tomb! ’

Even the veteran professional calm of Dan Kossoy was affected by the excitement: he said nothing more. But the beam of his headtorch told the story.

The door was open.

Jessica breathed the ancient air exhaling from Tomb 1. It seemed to be respirating, releasing a long ancient sigh of relief, or submission. This was nonsense, of course. It was just some ventilation, air blowing through the entire huaca, now that the door was fully open, the desert wind whistling through, probably from their entrance to some further concealed exit — air sucking from one end to the other.

The smell was tainted with an old putridity, something ancient, and distant, and incorrigibly dead.

Jess looked around. Was she the only who had noticed this disgusting odour? No. Jay had a sleeve over his mouth. But Dan Kossoy seemed entirely unfazed.

‘It’s an unbroken Moche tomb all right. A big one. I know that singularly lovely perfume. Come on. Let’s go see.’

One by one they crouched and waited to pass through the portal of Tomb 1, Huaca D. Jess felt, for a fraction of a moment, like a Second World War POW in a movie, waiting to use the secret tunnel to escape from the Nazis. The difference was, they were going further into the imprisoning evil.

The first thing she noticed was the size of the tomb: it was huge, big enough to stand in, and it stretched deep into hidden darkness. Mud steps led down. So that was how it worked. The Moche must have dug down, to make this vast tomb, then built the adobe pyramid over the pit.

Her feet crunched on something. What? She shone her headtorch down on the floor.

A thousand glittering corpses sparkled back at her: the desiccated carapaces of beetles, iridescent, still showing their sinisterly gorgeous colours: purples and lurid greens and deep dark blues.

‘Skin beetles! Omorgus suberosus. Flesh-eating Coleoptera. The Moche worshipped them — they worshipped skin beetles and blowflies. We see them on ceramics. Familiars of the unknown god, perhaps? Hmm.’ Dan Kossoy was standing close to Jess as he said this. Very close. The beams of their headtorches crossed like battling swords as they both stared at the floor. She felt his hand reach for her hand and grasp it discreetly, giving a brief, secret, affectionate, reassuring squeeze. Then he pointed. ‘And here, these are fly puparia. Thousands of them. But… my goodness. Look. Here — totally staked out.’

Jessica gazed. The dead beetles formed a kind of stencil or silhouette: and they surrounded a skeleton of a smallish human figure.

Protected by the sealed door, the corpse had rotted slowly, free of any covering. The body must have been totally naked for there were no clothes, no adornments, no headdresses or weapons or grave goods: it was stark naked. And it was, as Dan said, staked out.

Hoops of metal fastened the wrists and ankles to the floor. Worst of all: the skull was screaming, locked in a rasping howl of pain, yellowy teeth grimacing. This person, this adolescent or young woman or man, had died in agony.

‘Dan!’ It was Jay, calling. ‘Dan, come and see!’

They ran over. Another skeleton was staked to the floor along the side of the tomb, near the adobe wall.

‘Another girl, it looks like.’ Jay said. ‘No feet. Chopped off. Must be a human sacrifice, right? And here. Birds? Avian skulls. Vultures — must be vultures.’

Jessica knelt by the skeleton. It was adorned with a necklace of some sort; she shone her flashlight. The necklace was maybe copper, and decorated with small, symbolic commas embossed into the metal. She had seen these before, many times, in Moche art. They were called ulluchus. No one truly knew what they were: stylized drops of blood, maybe; perhaps blood of the primary deity.

But who was the god who demanded these strange rites? What kind of ancient faith demanded this horror?

‘Dan!’ Another shout across the tomb. This time it was Larry.

The finds were coming fast. The tomb was littered with many skeletons, filled with precious grave goods: it was a rich and wonderful prize. Wooden weapons mouldered in the gloom. Broken vessels, in the shape of naked prisoners, squatted in the dust, next to little copper bottles for coca taking, and endless broken potsherds with the strange comma-shaped blood drops, more ulluchus, and then — quite wonderfully — a spray of tiny pink coral cylinders, still pretty after fifteen hundred years, where a glorious headdress had rotted away. This was a high-status tomb, a tomb of nobles surrounded by sacrificial companions.

One especially high-status skeleton, possibly a princess, with a great owl headdress, featured another severed ankle, like the skeletons outside. Why? It was inexplicable. This couldn’t be a sacrificial hobbling to prevent a concubine or a slave from fleeing in the afterlife: this was a noble. Why would she have this bizarre amputation? And how did it fit with the puzzling aspects of the other severed limbs?

The puzzle was too hard. Jess felt the throb of a headache as she walked carefully between the skulls and the ribcages.

In the gloom of the Tomb 1 she could hear the others enthusing over this grand discovery. The worry of the last hour was gone; Larry and Jay and Dan were chattering excitedly.

‘Brilliant, just brilliant, this is excellent…’

‘We need to grid this, today — and we need Kubiena boxes.’

‘I’ll go back and grab the cameras.’

Part of her was pleased for them: Jess could understand the excitement. But she just couldn’t share the elation. Because she couldn’t shake the primary image from her mind: that terrible first skeleton staked out in the mud floor, surrounded by the purple and green shells of a million skin beetles.

The anguished, frozen, terrified howl of the skull told her one thing: the victim had surely been tied to the floor, then fed alive to the insects.