Burial Ground (21 page)

Upon closer scrutiny, Merritt could tell
that the other natives on the circular stages to either side of the
stone staircase were similarly scarred, though to nowhere near the
same degree.

He imagined some rite of passage ceremony
like a bris, only instead of being circumcised, these boys were cut
to within an inch of their lives. What kind of monsters were they
dealing with here? Any tribe willing to torture its own members
would surely be willing to do far worse to them.

The man, whom Merritt could only assume was
some sort of leader or chief, inspected them like livestock, as
though he were accustomed to the sight of strangers walking through
his village. He bellowed something Merritt couldn't understand in a
deep, thunderous voice.

As one, all of the natives lowered their
bows. The arrows remained notched, but at least they were no longer
an immediate threat.

Merritt looked back at Sam. A puzzled
expression crinkled her pale face. When he turned back to the
building, he saw only the silhouette of the man disappearing into
the dark doorway.

"What just happened?" Merritt whispered.

"Just keep walking," Colton said, picking up
the pace. He caught up with Rippeth at the front of the line and
the two men spoke in hushed tones.

Merritt noticed he had unconsciously
fingered the safety off on the weapon, and clicked it back on
again. As much as the feel of the cold steel in his hand repulsed
him, he couldn't bring himself to release it. He drew reassurance
from its familiar power.

They walk in formation through a small
village in the sand. He adjusts his grip on the Heckler & Koch
HK416 clasped in his hands. Terrified faces peer out from behind
boarded windows in whitewashed buildings scored by sand and smoke.
The horrible silence. He fears the attack will come at any moment,
from anywhere and everywhere, and the knowledge of what they will
do to these people, what they have already done...

The path forked at the edge of the central
courtyard. One branch veered to the right toward a series of
staircases that ascended the sheer slope to where topless women
tended to flourishing crops in stone-walled gardens. They weren't
slathered with paint like the men, and had far lighter skin than
Merritt would have expected, only a few shades darker than his own.
The women stopped and watched them as they reached the
intersection, and resumed their tasks when Rippeth led them down
the path to the left, which descended toward the outer
fortification.

Painted men continued to parallel their
progress from the shadows. They darted from behind one tree to the
next, weapons at the ready.

Ahead, a lone figure stood before an
identical contraption of pulleys and gears to the one they had seen
upon entering the village. The large stone that served as the door
was still fitted in place. An alpaca grazed at the base of an agave
plant beside the path. It was the same man they had encountered in
the light gap. He gripped the handles of the gears and looked to
the other natives as if seeking permission.

"You'd better open that gate," Rippeth said.
"Now."

He raised his pistol and pointed it at the
native's chest.

The man quickly recoiled.

An arrow sang through the air.

Rippeth cursed and his weapon fell from his
grasp. He grabbed his right hand by the wrist. Half of the arrow
protruded from either side of the base of his thumb. Blood flowed
freely from the wound. Cradling the hand to his chest, he dropped
to one knee and reclaimed his weapon in his other hand. He pointed
it toward the trees, where now all of the natives had their bows
raised.

"No!" Sam shouted.

She shoved through Merritt and the others
until she reached Rippeth, and stood between him and his
assailants.

"What are you doing?" Rippeth asked. He
tried to sight down the barrel around her, but she moved from side
to side to block his shot. "Get out of the way!"

"When you raised your gun, they perceived it
as an act of aggression," she said. "They could have killed you,
but they didn't."

"That doesn't change the fact that they shot
me!"

"In the hand. It could just as easily have
been through the neck."

Merritt studied her. She could have been
killed stepping between the trained soldier and his target. He had
seen it in the man's eyes.

"Everyone lower your weapons," Sam called
without breaking eye contact with Rippeth.

"You're out of your mind," Rippeth said.

"Would you just lower your gun before you
get us all killed!"

With obvious reluctance, Rippeth slowly
allowed his pistol to fall to his side.

"Thank you."

Sam turned to face the native who again
stood at the gears. He glanced to his armed companions, then
unlatched the handle and cranked the wheel of the contraption. With
the grinding sound of stone on stone, the massive slab inched
backward from the wall to reveal the dark passage.

They passed through cascading streams of
vines and shadows to find themselves in the jungle. Again there was
the grinding sound as the stone slid back into place, sealing them
outside the village.

"You should have let me shoot them," Rippeth
said. His lips pursed over his clenched teeth as he yanked the
arrow out of the back of his hand and cast it into the forest.

Sam said nothing, and instead shed her
backpack, opened the flap, and removed a long-sleeved shirt. She
ripped it at the seam and tipped her chin toward Rippeth's bloody
hand.

He appraised her for some time before
holding it out.

She wrapped the wound twice around and then
tied the fabric tight. Rippeth flexed his fingers into a fist, but
the thumb didn't respond.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That's going to have
to do for now."

Rippeth whirled and stormed away from her
down the earthen path.

The others followed in silence. Merritt had
to jog to catch up with Sam.

"What did he say back there?" he asked.

"That I should have let him kill them."

"No. Back there in the village. The man with
all of the scars and the headdress. I saw the look on your face
when he spoke. You understood him, didn't you?"

Sam looked off into the forest as she
whispered to him.

"It was a dialect of Quechua I've never
heard before, so I can't be completely sure."

"Okay. So what do you think he might have
said?"

She turned to face him and their eyes
locked.

"It sounded like he said something to the
effect of 'Let them pass. They are dead already.'"

1:32 p.m.

Sam hung back toward the rear of the group.
Her thoughts were a blur. She had seen so much, too much. It was
sensory overload on a scale she'd never experienced before. She
could spend a lifetime cataloguing and studying just what she'd
been able to see from the central path leading through the village.
What else could be stored inside the buildings? What other
surprises lurked just out of sight? All of the answers she had
sought during the course of her education and career were somewhere
within those city walls, which were now falling rapidly behind her.
Not only could she unravel the mystery of the disappearance of an
entire culture half a millennium ago, but she could hear it told in
the words of the people themselves. How had they managed to stay
hidden for so long in an age when technology had shrunk the globe
to the size of a pebble and laid bare so many of its secrets? They
couldn't be more than forty-five miles from Pomacochas, and yet it
might as well be a thousand.

She wished she could turn around and head
back to the village, if only to memorize the history told through
the carvings on the stone walls. There was so much they didn't know
about the Chachapoya. No one was even sure what language they had
spoken. Some speculated Aymara like so many Andean tribes, while
others believed they spoke Quechua, especially following their
defeat at the hands of the Inca. And now she had incontrovertible
proof that they did indeed speak a variant of Quechua, but at the
moment there wasn't a blasted thing she could do about it.

The Chachapoya were an enigma. Even that
name wasn't what the tribe had called itself, but rather what it
had been called by others. The name was most likely a corruption of
the Quechua words
sacha
and
puya
, or "people of the
clouds." They were known as ferocious warriors who lived high in
the mountains under the cover of cloud forests where they thrived
as a sovereign nation until falling to the Inca under the rule of
Tupac Inca Yupanqui in roughly 1475. Within a hundred years, the
Spanish arrived and began their systematic conquest of the entire
continent, bringing with them their Christian God and a host of
European diseases. One of the few historical documents that even
mentioned the Chachapoya was in the written account of Pedro Ciezo
de León, who described them as "the whitest and most handsome" of
all of the natives he had encountered.

So who were these people who were markedly
taller than the average Peruvian Indians, nearly as pale as
Caucasians, and lived in such secrecy? She had spent nearly the
last decade trying to figure out just that. The first Chachapoyan
ruins had been discovered at Kuelap more than a century and a half
ago, and now here she was, a quarter-mile from the answers to all
of her questions, and all she had to do was ask. Instead, they were
traveling in the opposite direction. She wanted to scream.

Why didn't she just turn around and return
to the fortress?

Unfortunately, she already knew why. She
needed to earn their trust before they would welcome her and share
the mystery of their heritage, and banging on the stone walls and
demanding admittance wasn't the way to do it. There would be plenty
of time over the coming years to break down the barriers. That is,
if they let her. An entire colony didn't survive in isolation for
so long without going to great lengths to preserve its
anonymity...

She stopped walking abruptly and Merritt
bumped into her from behind. Her features crinkled as she followed
that line of thought.

There was no doubt in her mind that these
people wished to remain concealed from the rest of the world. So
why had they allowed her group to walk freely through their
village? The tribe had to realize that once they returned to
civilization, they would report their discoveries. Unless...

Let them pass. They are dead already.

Unless they were certain that Sam and her
companions would never be leaving these mountains.

A chill crawled up her spine. She wrapped
her arms around her chest to combat the sudden onset of shivers.
What awaited them down the path ahead?

"Look over there," Galen called from around
the bend in front of her. "Back behind those trees."

Sam followed the sound of his voice to where
the others had gathered around him at the side of the path, where a
thinner branch diverged into the dense rainforest. At first she
didn't see anything, but after taking several steps deeper into the
jungle, the structure resolved from the trees. The stone walls were
just like those that surrounded the village, only nowhere near as
intimidating. They were only fifteen feet tall, and covered with
vines and lianas. Soil had been mounded over the roof of the
structure to support a thriving crown of flowering shrubbery.

She wasn't even within twenty feet of the
building when a stick snapped underfoot, and the screaming
began.

Sam ran toward the front of the construct.
From the other side of the wall she heard horrible cries and the
sounds of a struggle. They weren't human screams, but she had no
idea what kind of animal could make such awful noises. She brushed
aside the vines in search of the entrance, and found that the stone
cubes weren't fitted snugly together like those that composed the
fortifications. Between the sides of each were six-inch-wide gaps,
through which she could see only swatches of the dim interior.
Columns of light shined down to the inner, straw-lined floor from
holes in the earthen roof. They swirled with dust raised by a
stampede of dark bodies. She smelled dry grain and manure, but it
wasn't until a snuffling snout pressed into the gap in front of her
that she understood.

"It's a barn." She tentatively reached
through the gap and allowed the alpaca to nuzzle her fingertips
with its wet nose.

"Why would they keep them closed up like
this?" Galen asked. "Surely an outdoor pen would serve the same
purpose. And the animals would be able to graze in the
sunlight."

"You've heard of veal, haven't you?" Merritt
asked.

"Galen's right," Sam said. "Why wouldn't
they just fence off this area? Nearly all of the indigenous ruins
in Peru have alpacas grazing everywhere. They actually live there.
Why would these animals need to be caged like this?"

The screaming died down and the dust started
to settle. She could see dozens of the wooly beasts through the
crevice. Most of them were clustered together in the middle of the
large room in a maze of support columns. The interior space was
reasonably large, perhaps a hundred square yards, but it wasn't
nearly large enough to accommodate so many animals. It was inhumane
to keep them like this when they could be roaming the jungle with
little chance of wandering off. It didn't make sense. Were the
Chachapoya worried that the alpacas would escape and return to
their native highlands, or were they keeping them in there for
their own protection? Why else would they possibly need to enclose
them behind the same kind of walls they had used to build their
fortress? And by that same logic, why weren't the animals within
the fortifications with the village where there were groves of
trees and fields of crops?