The Babylon rite

39

The Museo Larco, Lima, Peru

Hairless dogs.

That was one thing that united ancient Mexican culture with ancient Peruvian culture. What else?

Jess was sitting in the sunlit courtyards of the Museo Larco, enjoying some rare Limeno sunshine, taking a few minutes to relax herself, as best she could, after all the violence and grotesqueries of the last week. She’d been in Lima for three days, and this was the first day she had summoned the courage to leave her hotel room.

So here she was. The Museo Larco, the greatest collection of ancient north Peruvian art in the world; if she hadn’t been terrified for her life this might have been a nice afternoon jaunt, a chance to chill out in this pretty colonial palazzo, with its orange trees and fountains, and the gardens haunted by the strange, black, friendly, stray dogs, descendants of the hairless dogs once eaten by Aztecs and Inca and Moche alike.

A thought nagged at her. But what was it? Not the possibility of her illness; something different, very different. But the thought eluded her. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to meditate away the stress and tension.

When she opened her eyes again the little dog was just a few metres distant, gazing right at her, his sad head cocked imploringly, his hairless tail whipping. A Museo Larco security guard lazily clapped his hand, chasing the dog out of the courtyard, and into the street.

Jess rose and walked into the dark twinkling rooms of the museum. Her stride was purposive: she ignored the magnificent imperial Chimu goldwork, the warrior priest’s diadems from the Apogee Epoch, the sacred spondylus shell bottles, and went straight to the Moche collection.

Her eyes ran along the shelves, assessing the pottery of screaming bats, hunched demons, Moche with their limbs removed, Moche women having sex with the dead, or sex with animals. Nina moved down the aisle, examining the pottery of Moche people who deliberately skeletonized their faces.

The questions thronged. How did these last pots relate to the pottery showing sex with corpses and skeletons? More importantly: how did these pots relate to the death of her boss from Toronto, of her lover? How and why was the horror of Moche culture being re-enacted in the grubby streets of modern Peru? And maybe even in Scotland?

Jess sat down on a bench in the darkened chambers of the Moche rooms of the Museo Larco and went over what she knew.

She didn’t doubt that necrophilia actually took place in Moche society, there was too much ceramic and textile evidence for this. People had sex with the dead, and probably quite frequently, judging by the abundance of art dedicated to the theme. But equally some of the pots that showed people with skull-like faces raping women were probably representations of men who had slashed their own faces to look like skulls, cutting off their own lips and noses and slicing off the flesh from the cheeks, men who were maybe allowed to take women at will.

Imagine a society like that. People with no lips and noses and faces, wandering around, like living screaming skulls. Smiling, eating, having brutal and coercive sex. How did these skull-men avoid infection? How long did they live with these terrible wounds exposed? Weeks, months, years?

A tourist was gazing at one of the sex pots. A backpacker. Twenty-one or twenty-two. American maybe. And giggling. The backpacker turned to his friend. ‘Jesus, sweetheart, look at this — the guy is getting an enema. Gross!’

The girlfriend was apparently around the corner, behind a glass pottery cabinet. Jess heard her young voice. ‘Can we go, Todd? This stuff is just… ewww.’

They drifted away. Jess felt the helplessness weighing her down. She walked out into the patio once more. What a waste it all was, what a terrible waste. All that digging, all that thinking, all those horrific yet exciting discoveries, all those moments of terror or exultation: it had all been for nothing. The TUMP site was closed. Dan was dead. The police were scared, and shutting all the doors. And still the killers were out there. Were they coming after Jess?

She sighed and looked at the dog. The hairless dog with the sad, sad eyes, so similar to Aztec dogs. As she gazed, she remembered the men in the pyramid. Their accents.

The way they said the word ulluchu.

Accent. Aztecs. The Aztecs. Ulluchu. Accent.

Ulluchu was a pretty strange word. Oo-ll-oo-choo.

And yet there was one other word which was just like it, from a different culture a thousand years later, four thousand miles away. In Pre-Columbian Mexico.

The Aztec word.

Ololiuqiu. And ulluchu.

They were one and the same.