The Babylon rite

32

Witches’ Market, Chiclayo

‘Qasiy chay ruwasqaykita osqhayman!’

This wasn’t the curandero. Jessica opened her eyes. She looked up and left. It was Larry Fielding. And he was shouting at the wizard.

‘Mana ruwanki chayqa qanmantacha yachakunki!’

Behind him was a policeman. A policeman? The Peruvian officer had a gleaming peaked cap, and a hand poised on the butt of a gun, ready to draw.

The wizard shrivelled away: cowering and protesting. Larry reached and pulled the rank cloth from Jessica’s mouth; she phlegmed the horrible taste into the dust and coughed up her questions.

‘What the — what the? Jesus — Larry — how did you find me?’

He shrugged: a bashful saviour. ‘I was watching you, and you seemed evasive. We gotta watch out for each other! Didn’t quite believe your supermarket shtick.’

‘But…’

‘The market traders told me someone had grabbed you so I went to get the cops to help.’

As the boy unfastened Jessica’s bonds, Larry snapped questions at the shaman, who grovelled his replies.

‘Kay warmika milloymi apamun nunakunata.’

Larry nodded, grimly and disdainfully.

Jess stood up. There was still lizard blood on her stomach. The policeman handed her a handkerchief; she did her best to rub the gore from her skin. The Quechua conversation rattled around the shack, coarse and staccato, like dried beans in a gourd. Larry was the only one in the TUMP team who could speak the ancient Incan tongue.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What were they doing?’

He put a firm hand on her shoulder. ‘It was just an exorcism. They weren’t going to kill you, or even harm you. They just think you need exorcising.’ He glanced around the sun-lanced shack, at the witchy little dolls, the sprigs of dried monkey paws.

‘Exorcising! Why?’

Larry shook his head. ‘You know why. They think TUMP is hexed! They reckon we have cursed the area, stirring all these ancient Moche demons — like the pishtacas.’ He gestured at her rolled-up jeans. ‘They weren’t actually going to cut off your feet, it was just symbolic. They were trying to placate the Moche god by performing, I guess, a phoney Moche ceremony.’

The policeman spoke, impatiently, and in very fast Spanish. But Jess could clearly discern the meaning: he wanted them to leave the market.

‘We’d better go,’ said Larry. ‘This is their world. The Quechua speakers. We’d better go now.’

Jess was unlikely to disagree. Unsteadily she walked out of the shack. In the darkened aisles of traders she breathed the reeking air of the main market with abject relief; it was just as it always was. People were sitting at dirty counters drinking from steel mugs of coca tea, eating rancid plates of brown octopus, and buying eels in bottles. And monkey paws.

Behind them, in the shack, Jess could hear the policeman yapping angrily at the bruja. ‘What will happen to them?’

‘Slap on the wrist, maybe. The police sympathize with the locals. They don’t want us here either, Jess.’ He grabbed her by the elbow and they stepped into the grubby sunshine of Chiclayo. Black turkey vultures circled, inevitably, in the dusty blue sky over the dusty orange cathedral. As if the whole city was carrion.

‘The cop told me something.’ He gazed at her. ‘That gunman who came for Dan has been here too, with friends, asking questions, terrorizing people, asking about us in Zana. And asking about McLintock.’

‘ Here?’ Jess shook her head. ‘They came here?’ She was still trying to shake off the memory of the little boy with his dirty, wet finger circling her ankle with warm blood. ‘And this guy, McLintock. How does he fit into this?’

Larry ignored her question. ‘There’s something else you need to know.’

‘What?’

‘They’ve made a discovery. At Huaca D.’

‘I know, I was there. I-’

‘No. A new discovery. This morning. A major, major discovery. Dan phoned me an hour back. And it changes everything. Apparently.’ Larry sighed. ‘That’s all I damn well know! That’s all Dan said. It changes everything.’

They sprinted to the car.

Two hours later she was back in Huaca D. The same dust, the same sleeping bones; yet this time it was all different.

‘ All children?’

Dan nodded, making the beam from his headtorch jiggle forlornly. ‘All of them children.’ He stepped into the antechamber. ‘We broke in by accident, this morning. One of the villagers put a shovel through the wall; we found a little passageway, and then this. We hadn’t geosurveyed this section, we had no idea; this is so unusual.’

Jess stared. Her hands were shaking with the tension. This discovery was a revelation: it altered everything — as Larry had said. The large, low antechamber, concealed beyond the main tombs of Huaca D, contained more skeletons than any other Moche tomb to date. Here they were, laid out in little sleeping rows.

All of them children.

Dan stooped to the nearest line of small and silent bones. ‘We’re guessing they were first sedated, at least I hope they were sedated, maybe with nectandra, then their throats were slit and their chests cut open. Here, look, you can see the breastbone. This one here.’

Jessica leaned. The breastbone was crudely severed. ‘A heart extrusion?’

Dan sighed and nodded and rubbed a dusty hand over his dusty face. He looked wearied: even in the quarter-light of this dismal adobe hall she could see he was beyond tired. He was vanquished. But his voice retained some professional lucidity.

‘Probably they used a tumi blade. To hack the children open. Alive. Some of these fibrous remains imply… look-’ He pointed. ‘The children were tied by the hands and feet before the ritual began.’

Jess felt sick. First the horrors of the witches’ market, now this. She gazed at her shaking hand, and wrestled away the terror.

Dan was intoning now, like a priest who had lost his faith, who nonetheless had to deliver a sermon for Easter, ‘The remains are, we think, the earliest evidence of ritualized blood sacrifice and of the severe mutilation of children, the earliest evidence that has so far been seen in South America. It may even be the biggest mass sacrifice of children… anywhere in the ancient world.’

Picking up a flashlight, Jess played it along the dormitory of bones. The quiet little children were all present and correct, all tied and hacked and dismembered, and left here. In neat little rows. She remembered her own nursery school, in sunny LA, when they would sleep in the afternoon. This was like that, but satanically upended. Here was a kindergarten of evil. Like the children of the Goebbels family, in the Berlin bunker, schlaft gut, schlaft gut, meine kindern.

‘It’s ghastly,’ was all she could say. ‘Ghastly. Just… just ghastly.’ Her flashlight played across the hideous space and picked out a different bone, a larger, cruder, horsier skull. Just visible in the morbid shadows at the far corner of the antechamber. ‘What’s that?’

‘A llama head.’ Dan’s voice expressed a shrug. ‘There are other llama remains all around. Jay thinks they probably had a feast. As they did it. Eating llama as they killed the children.’

‘Horrible.’

‘Possibly they played music as they did it. Feasting and music, and killing their children.’

‘How many corpses?’

‘Eighty.’

Jess swayed in the darkness. The orphanage of sleeping bones stared back at her, reproachfully. A gassed Montessori; a tiny Holocaust school for infants. It was worse than Jessica’s experience of Calcutta. It reminded her of her father in the hospice. The absolute tyranny of death: the oncoming darkness.

One small skull was tilted to the side, as if the child had tried to sleep as they cut open his chest. Tears sprang to Jessica’s eyes.

‘Are you OK?’ Dan touched her gently on the arm.

‘Yes.’

‘I heard what happened in Chiclayo, eh, Larry told me on the cell — sweetheart, are you sure?’

Her headtorch caught his face. She muttered, ‘Really, I’m fine. It was just a ritual, imitative magic, apotropaic theatre.’

‘Getting rid of the evil we bring? Ah, yes.’

The adobe dust hung in the ancient air. She said, ‘They think we are the vampire gringos, Dan. Like in the Inca legends of the conquistadors, the white men who eat the fat of the Peruvians: the pishtacas. And they also think we are digging up demons. Digging up the God Who Mustn’t Be Named, the terrible god we cannot identify. That’s what Larry said.’

‘Who knows, they might be right? Eh?’ He gestured across the pitifully neat little remains, the speechless silenced rows of infant skulls and infant femurs, stretching into the darkness of the antechamber. ‘You know, this really is different. Unique. What are we digging up? Mm? What kind of people? Maybe it should be closed down.’

‘You should be pleased.’ She tried to sound sincere, even encouraging. ‘This is a tremendous find. As you say, Dan, there probably isn’t anything like it in the literature.’

‘Oh, of course. But…’

‘But what?’

He seemed to shiver. ‘Do you mind if we step outside?’

Stepping outside meant a short, muddy crawl through the zigzagging adobe corridors into the wider tomb which had contained the insect corpses and the coral headdresses, only some of which had been removed. The ground was now carefully latticed with strings, marking out square-metre grids. A low wooden bench had been brought into the tomb, where the archaeologists could have lunch and talk. They both sat down. The great mud tomb was otherwise empty.

‘The child sacrifices make nonsense of it all,’ Dan said at last.

‘Sorry?’

‘The pottery in the antechamber with the children is precisely datable. By style.’

Jessica was perplexed. ‘And?’

‘ It is not coincident with any El Nino event. There were no El Nino events which might have, eh, triggered these sacrifices.’

With his hard hat taken off, Dan’s hair hung lank and lifeless. Jess stared away, embarrassed somehow. She looked along the lamplit tomb, where the princess had been laid out. The princess who cut off her own feet during her life, for no reason at all.

Dan remained quiet, so Jess reached out a hand and squeezed his hand. ‘Which means your theory is wrong.’

‘Yep. Which means that my damn theory is wrong. I’ve been wrong all along. And you were right, Jessica, the Moche were just… they were just…’

‘Evil?’

‘Perverse. Deviant. Wicked. Psychotic. Maybe downright evil. I don’t know. Whatever you like.’ He ran tired fingers through his hair. ‘I’m not sure I want to do this any more.’

‘But you’ve made a major discovery!’ Jess could feel her lover’s anguish. It was unjustified. He was beating himself up too much. ‘Dan, come on. Don’t say this. So you found something that changes the paradigm, but you still found it. You! You did it.’

‘And the guy with the gun?’ Dan looked at her. ‘And Casinelli? And now you in Chiclayo? This may embarrass you, Jessica but I don’t care. You know that I have strong feelings for you. Heck, you know I love you. Don’t you? And I know you don’t love me but there it is. And I cannot put you in any more danger.’ He talked over her protests, and continued, ‘Whatever this is we’ve somehow strolled into, we’ve stirred up something we don’t understand. I’m not risking lives any more. And I’m not telling lies any more.’

Jess caught the word. And examined it. And asked, ‘ Lies? ’

He rubbed some dust off his shirt, another hockey team T-shirt now stained red with adobe mud, like unwashable old blood from a horrible fight.

‘What lies, Dan?’

‘McLintock. When that… the gunman asked me about him, I knew exactly who he meant. I knew very well.’

‘Sorry?’

Daniel Kossoy could barely bring himself to look her in the face. But he tried. ‘Archibald McLintock was a Scottish historian. He visited me, very discreetly, in Zana about a year and a half ago. Long before you came. No. Wait.’ He lifted a hand to halt her questions. ‘Wait, Jess. Let me finish. He wanted, eh, to know about the Moche, everything. Especially the ulluchu: he was fascinated by the mythos of the ulluchu, the blood of the gods.’

‘Why?’

‘He had a theory. That there isn’t just an unknown Moche god: he thought there was an unknown, ultimate god, underlying all pre-Columbian American cultures. A god that unites the Aztecs and the Hopi and the Moche, the Anasazi, the Chavin, the Nazca and Apache and Cahokians, all of them, which explains why they were all so obsessed with cruelty, and ritualized violence, and sacrifice.’

‘So he had a theory, so what, why did you lie?’

‘Because he paid me money.’ Dan’s eyes were shining with guilt. ‘At first I said to him I was busy and didn’t have time to talk, which was true, but then he offered me money, and TUMP needed money, and the money was… eh… very good, ten thousand US, enough for a few months’ digging, but I knew it was probably illegal, not going through the proper channels, and anyway McLintock swore me to secrecy, so that was the deal. So I took the cash, and said nothing. And I gave McLintock a secret tour of the site, and told him everything, even the stuff we haven’t published. And then he disappeared, went to Lima, I think. I don’t know.’

‘And you never told anyone?’

An agonized shrug. ‘I never told a soul, Jess. But now you know. You. The person who means more to me than anything. But it’s over now. There’s too much violence. Even this McLintock guy is dead. I have no idea what is happening but I’m gonna hand in my notice, if TUMP want to continue — and they probably will, now we’ve found all these poor kids — then they can appoint someone else. That’s if the police don’t close us down, which they might, because we are disturbing the locals.’ He spat out the words. ‘Damn it all, Jess. Just damn it to hell. I’ll be glad to get out of here, out of this disgusting place.’

Jessica couldn’t find the words. What to say?

‘The irony is,’ Dan went on, ‘I believe McLintock may have been on to something. A proto-god. A uniting mythology, underneath it all. It makes a kind of sense. There are too many sinister similarities between all these American cultures. Something unites them. A god, a hidden god, a terrible god, the god of death and of blood.’ He laid a gentle hand on her arm, lifted her wrist, and kissed her chastely on the hand. ‘There. Jessica Silverton, sweetheart. If you want to be famous, pursue that, make that your thesis. You are young and bold. I am not. I am done. But be careful. Beware the demons of the Moche.’

He didn’t even say goodbye. He just switched off the tomb lights, turned and crouched, and began the long crawl back to the huaca entrance, through the dark adobe tunnels.

Jessica followed him, churning with emotion. Suddenly, and to her own surprise, she wanted to tell Dan about her father, and about the doctor: she had to tell someone, she had to share and divide her anxieties, and he was the only man she could really trust. Maybe she even loved him back; her sudden feelings were stronger than she had suspected. She didn’t want to lose him.

Strapping her hard hat on her head, and turning on her headtorch, Jess crawled urgently through the narrow, claustrophobic, zigzagging tunnels. Dan was so eager to get out he was twenty metres ahead, a barely glimpsed glow of receding light.

The final corner turned: and now Dan was gone, he’d stepped out into the fresh air.

Jessica urged herself on, to confess and to share, but then she halted, her heart straining with fear, in the last yards of darkness, looking towards the grey light outside.

She could hear voices. Curt, laconic, contemptuous voices. And it wasn’t Larry or Jay. It sounded like the intruder in the lab, the same man, the same accent. The same violent sneering voice.

This time there was no argument, no preamble, no chance for Dan to escape his fate. The sullen gunshot echoed down the adobe passageway. Another shot confirmed the horror: they had shot Dan! Jess could actually see his body, fallen at the entrance, blood trickling into the dust.

She gazed, paralysed by terror.

Then a torchbeam pierced the dark of the passage. Jessica pressed herself flat against the mud walls, trying to hide. A figure was kneeling at the adobe entrance, peering in, pointing the torch up the tunnel.

‘Marco! Creo que hay alguien aqui.’ I think someone is in there.

They were going to search the huaca.

Jessica began to back up the passage. Crawling with infinite and painful slowness, away from the light.

But the torchbeam followed her.