Indiana Jones and the Secretof the Sphinx (22 page)

Indy planted the torch in the mud in front of the empty altar and took a pair of leather gloves from his pocket. His face was covered in mud and sweat, and his bruised hands ached as he snugged the gloves over them. The descent into the cavern beneath the Temple of the Serpent had been as difficult and as dangerous as he remembered it, but with an important exception: There was no giant snake this time. Shattered bones from the thirty-foot anaconda Indy had killed years earlier littered the banks of the subterranean pool.

Indy retrieved the bulky velvet bag from the satchel slung over his shoulder, and from the bag he removed the Crystal Skull. The light of the torch was refracted and magnified in the depths of the skull, and danced across the floor and walls of the cavern. For a moment Indy was mesmerized by the display, and he considered keeping the skull.

"No," he said aloud. "I don't know who you were—or are—but this is where you belong."

The altar was cut into an alcove in the wall of the cavern. Indy planted his feet firmly on the ground, made sure he had his balance, and carefully placed the skull atop the altar. Then he stepped back, half expecting some trap to spring out of the base of the altar or to fall from above.

"Good," Indy said.

He smiled, took off his gloves, and touched the brim of his hat in farewell. Then, when he picked up his torch and turned to leave, he heard it: a swirl of water, a slithering noise from the mud bank, and the awful hissing sound of a very large snake breathing. At the far end of the torch's circle of light he saw an amber, slitted eye the size of a cantaloupe moving toward him.

The snake he had killed in this cavern before had been the largest one he had ever seen, and when he'd returned to Princeton he had asked a herpetologist if anacondas of thirty feet in length were unheard of. No, the expert had said, there were tales of them growing even bigger in the depths of the rain forest.

This snake made the other one seem small.

"Not again," Indy moaned.

The snake slithered toward him.

Indy drew the revolver.

There was no place to run; the snake was so long that it completely cut off the route back to the entrance to the subterranean pool, and to try to swim would be surrendering an even greater advantage to the snake.

Indy stumbled backward and fired three rounds at the snake's eye. If it had any effect, the snake did not show it. The snake opened its hinged jaw—showing fangs that were as big as sabers—and flicked its spongy pink tongue toward Indy. Like all snakes, its eyesight was bad, but its senses of smell and taste were keen.

Indy squeezed into the alcove beside the altar and fired twice more. The snake struck, but its open mouth was larger than the alcove, and the fangs grated against rock.

Flinching from the strike, Indy threw himself backward and hit his head on the lintel of a stone portal in the back of the alcove. Because the portal was small—less than five feet high—and in the shadows behind the altar, he had not noticed it before. More important, the portal was too small for the snake to come through.

It was a moment, however, before Indy realized this. The blow to the back of the head had nearly rendered him unconscious, and for a few minutes he sat on the floor of this new passage while his stomach churned and pinwheels of light danced in front of his eyes. When he felt the back of his head, there was blood on his hand.

Still, Indy smiled at his good fortune.

He picked up the torch and struggled to his feet to explore this new passage and get away from the angry hissing on the other side of the portal. The ceiling was low, and he had to stoop as he inched along.

Then the passage ended.

It ended not in a doorway, or a wall, or even the rubble of a collapse. It ended in a kind of cloud filled with darkness that was beyond darkness, a malevolent void that refused to be dispelled by torchlight. Instead, it seemed to soak up the light and yield nothing in return. And, it was growing—or simply coming toward him.

Indy searched the corridor for a recognizable doorway, or a crawl space, or some exit that was an alternative to
whatever
was in front of him and the angry and very large snake behind.

There was none.

Indy switched the torch to his left hand, then extended the fingers of his right. Carefully, he touched the cloud. His hand disappeared in the void, but there was no sensation of feeling—not even the feel of his fingers tucking into his palm as he made a fist.

He quickly drew back his arm, and was relieved to find that his hand was still attached.

Indy glanced behind him, then looked around at the barren corridor again. Of the three choices open to him, two offered certain death: starving to death in the bowels of the temple, or being crushed in the coils of a giant anaconda. Although the third choice seemed only to suggest disaster instead of promising it, he was hesitant to take it. But as the cloud began to envelop him in wispy hollow tendrils, his torch began to dim and then sputter. Afraid that he would be suffocated like the flame if he did not push on through the cloud to the other side, he held his breath and plunged into it.

He found himself in sunshine.

I must have hit my head harder than I realized, Indy said to himself, rubbing his neck and blinking against the brilliance of daylight. Then he closed his eyes and opened them again.

As his eyes slowly adjusted, the outlines of the city of Cozan rose around him. Indy was kneeling on the bottom step of the Temple of the Serpent. Birds and monkeys were thick in the nearby trees, and somewhere a jaguar growled.

Only, this was not the corpse of a city that Indy remembered finding—this was a living metropolis, and it was still in its youth. People filled the streets and moved in the shadows of buildings that Indy had seen only as heaping ruins amid the encroaching jungle. The structures were magnificent limestone monuments, trimmed in green and terracotta. The number of buildings, however, were fewer than the ruins of modern-day Cozan would indicate there to have been. Behind him was the Temple of the Serpent, but it was smaller—it was much lower and had fewer courses than he could recall.

Indy stepped down from the temple onto the broad flagstones of the busy main thoroughfare. Although he gaped at the people he passed—robust, brown-skinned people dressed mostly in tunics made from fibers of the maguey plant—none of them so much as returned Indy's stare.

Many of them hastily bartered corn, fruit, and spitted meat at the thatch-covered stalls on either side of the street, while others seemed to be nervously awaiting some event. They glanced up at the sky from time to time, or noted the diminishing length of their shadows on the flagstones with the same expression as a businessman on Wall Street would glance at his wristwatch.

The sun was almost overhead.

Whatever event was being anticipated, it was obvious that it would take place at noon.

Although here in British Honduras one would expect to find Mayans, Indy mused, these people had the sharper features of the Aztecs of Central Mexico. Yet, there were none of the easily recognizable trademarks of Aztec culture. Indy could not identify their speech, but he knew it was not Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The predominant feature of the glyphs that decorated the Cozanian monuments was a stylized spiral that unwound to the right; it could be a representation of the conch shell, Indy thought, or perhaps a star or comet. Nothing was known of the history of Cozan, except that it had once been a great city but had been abandoned because of some evil, and even that came from folklore; before Indy had discovered the city for himself, he'd doubted its existence.

The city's name, Cozan, was borrowed from a sixteenth-century translation of a little-understood Mayan phrase in which the Spanish word for heart,
corazon,
figured prominently. Sometimes it was rendered as
del mal corazon,
or heartless; at other times the Mayan place name for the lost city defied translation, but the closest one would be the "heart of evil."

The warriors, who seemed to be everywhere, carried obsidian blades at their belts and, slung over their shoulders, wicked-looking throwing sticks made from oak branches. They strolled the avenue in pairs and occasionally stopped to warn a merchant or a citizen that they should be finishing their business, because the ceremony was about to start.

The class distinctions went far beyond warrior and citizen, Indy discovered. Another class made up at least a third of the population. Their faces were dusted with blue powder, making them appear like ghosts following behind their masters and mistresses. Their eyes were vacant, devoid of hope, and Indy guessed why: Blue is the color of sacrifice.

Indy had often dealt with the remains of sacrificial victims, and with few exceptions they had always seemed to submit themselves willingly for the good of the community, often after a period of a year or so in which they were treated like heroes and honored as royalty. Even when their hands were bound behind their backs, or when a ligature was found around the vertebrae of their necks, there were indications that they had submitted voluntarily, rather than having been murdered. These slaves, who were apparent war prizes, were not looking forward to their contribution to the great chain of being.

"Excuse me," Indy said, going from one citizen to another.

"Pardon me, may I have a moment?" Apparently, none of them could see or hear him.

Indy reached out to touch a passing warrior, and the man jumped back as if he had been stung where Indy's fingers had made contact with his arm. Convinced he had been bitten by an insect, he waved a hand in front of his face and kept moving.

Then, at the sound of a conch shell trumpet, the throng fled the center of the street and took up positions along each side. The blue-faced slaves fell to their knees and lowered their foreheads to the ground. The warriors stood at attention, obsidian-tipped spears at the ready.

A shaman crab-walked toward the pyramid, dusting the street with a branch. In his other hand he held a mace made from a human thighbone with a smooth river rock lashed to the end. He was nude except for a breechcloth, and elaborately tattooed with the nationalistic right-facing spirals Indy had already seen on the glyphs. He wore a gruesome mask made from the front half of a human skull and decorated with jade and obsidian. Sticking like a rhino's horns from the forehead and nasal cavity were two wicked-looking flint points.

This monster with a human hidden beneath often rushed the crowd, shaking the mace at them and driving them back in terror. Whatever god of death or destruction this joker was supposed to represent, Indy decided, the citizens obviously believed he was the real deal.

Indy tapped him on the shoulder and was delighted to see the medicine man spring backward, alarmed at an apparent manifestation of
real
magic. He savagely shook his mace in Indy's direction, but kept moving toward the temple.

Following the shaman was a phalanx of priests, dressed in cotton tunics dyed in terra-cotta and green and emblazoned with the Cozanian spirals. The center priest carried a hat-sized oak box in his hands.

Behind the priests, on a litter borne by slaves, came a strikingly beautiful woman. She wore a simple cotton gown, and was unadorned with jewelry or any other sign of class or authority. She was tall, perhaps six feet, and the muscles in her exposed arms and calves suggested that she was athletic. She reminded Indy of a jaguar because of her sleek black hair and broad face and her liquid green eyes.

Their eyes seemed to meet as the litter swayed past.

For a moment, Indy was sure that she had seen him. Her expression was one of puzzlement and alarm, and she sat up and looked over her shoulder at the spot where the stranger had stood. This time, however, her eyes searched the crowd without finding him.

Behind the litter limped a half dozen blue-faced slaves driven by a group of soldiers. The slaves were of both genders, young and old, and their feet were bound with a length of rope, which was just long enough to allow them to walk, but no more. As they shuffled past the crowd threw garbage at them and shouted insults. The children in attendance were encouraged to dash out and swat at the slaves with sticks. They did so with glee, then raced back to the protection of their mothers' legs.

When the procession reached the bottom step of the pyramid, the litter was gently placed on the ground. The Queen stepped from her throne with the grace and agility of a big cat, then proceeded to climb the steps. She was followed by the priests and the others, and finally the rest of the city surged onto the pyramid. Indy followed along with the flow of the crowd up the side of the pyramid, and when he reached the apex he was astonished to find not a temple but a concave area containing a sacred well. In twenty or thirty centuries, course after course would be added to the pyramid and this area would actually become the subterranean pool at the bottom of the Temple of the Serpent.

The high priest placed the wooden box he carried on a stone altar and lifted the Crystal Skull from it. It looked as finished as the day Indy had discovered it. The priest held the skull aloft, and the crowd averted their eyes as the sunlight gathered in the prisms behind the eye sockets and shot dancing rainbows of light over their heads. Only the Queen—and, of course, Indy—did not look away. Then the priest began speaking in a ritual monotone, and Indy guessed that he was reciting a history of the skull. The skull-masked shaman went into a pantomime. Although Indy did not understand one word of the speech, from the playacting Indy guessed that
they
had found the skull in the jungle one day as well, perhaps at the bottom of a sacred well or a cave littered with the bones of unimaginably old human sacrifices. Since that time, the skull had apparently become the state religion, a religion based on war and conquest—and an unquenchable appetite for human sacrifice.

Fascists, Indy said to himself. I hate these guys.

As the priests concluded the recitation, another of the priests removed the wooden box and the Crystal Skull was placed on the stone altar, gazing out over the sacred pool. As the high priest began to chant a sacred song, the Queen waded into the pool, her arms outstretched. Her cotton gown swirled around her. Then, when she was chest-high in the water, she stopped and placed her hands atop her head.