Ruins (12 page)

"But Xitaclan was special?" Mulder asked. "More than just another set of ruins?"

Rubicon drew a deep breath and paused to lean against a mahogany tree. "My Cassandra thought so. It existed for a long time, from pre-Golden Age through the Toltec influence and later human sacrifices."

Through her own misery and weariness and sticky perspiration, Scully looked in the archaeologist's intense blue eyes—to her surprise she saw that the old man did not look at all uncomfortable in the jungle. He seemed more alive and animated than she had seen him since the first day back in the pre-Colombian exhibit in Washington, D.C. Doing field work, the old archaeologist seemed in his element, on his way to rescue his daughter and also to explore uncatalogued Maya ruins.

When the shadows grew long in the jungle, Aguilar's native workers proved their worth yet again. They labored quietly and vigorously to set up camp, selecting a low clearing near a spring. They hacked away shrubs and weeds to open a sleeping space, then set up the tents where Mulder, Scully, Rubicon, and Aguilar would spend the night, while they themselves found other places to camp, presumably in the trees nearby. Scully watched the Indians moving with precision, using few words, as if they had done the task many times before.

Rubicon pressed Aguilar for more information about when he had accompanied Cassandra and her team out to the ruins, two weeks earlier.

"Yes!" the guide said. "I brought them out here—but because they intended to stay for many weeks doing their excavating, I left and went back to Cancun. I am a civi-lized man, eh? I have work to do."

"But she was fine when you left her?" Rubicon asked again.

"Ah, yes," Aguilar said, his eyes shining. "More than fine. She took great pleasure in encountering the ruins. She seemed very excited."

"I look forward to seeing them myself," Rubicon said.

"Day after tomorrow," Aguilar answered, nodding enthusiastically.

They sat down on fallen trees and rocks to eat a cold dinner of rolled tortillas, chunks of cheese, and fresh unidentifiable fruit the native guides had harvested out in the jungle. Scully drank from her canteen and ate her meal, slowly relishing the taste, happy for the opportu-nity just to sit down.

Mulder shooed gnats away from his red banana. He spoke to Scully around a mouthful of fruit. "Quite a bit different from last night's four-star restaurant." He stood up and went into her tent, where the bags had been stowed, rustling around in the packs and clothes.

Scully finished her own meal and sat back, drawing a deep breath. Her legs throbbed with weariness from fighting her way along each step of the path.

Mulder came out of the tent, holding something behind his back. "When I was doing preliminary research on this case, I remembered the story about Tlazolteotl." He glanced at the old archaeologist. "Am I pronouncing it correctly? Sounds like I'm swallowing a turtle."

Rubicon laughed. "Ah, the goddess of guilty loves."

"Yeah, that's the one," Mulder said. "A guy named Jappan wanted to become a favorite of the gods—sort of a midlife crisis. So he left his loving wife and all his pos-sessions to become a hermit. He climbed a high rock in the desert, spending all his time at religious devotions." Mulder looked around at the jungle. "Though where he found a desert around here, I'm not sure.

"Naturally, the gods couldn't turn down a challenge like that, so they tempted him with beautiful women—but he refused to yield. Then Tlazolteotl, the goddess of guilty loves, appeared to him as a real knockout. She said she was so impressed with Jappan's virtue that she just wanted to console him. She talked him into coming down from his rock, whereupon she successfully seduced him—much to the delight of the other gods, who had been just waiting for him to slip up.

"The gods punished Jappan for his indiscretion by changing him into a scorpion. From shame at his failure, Jappan hid under the stone where he had fallen from grace. But the gods wanted to rub it in, so they brought Jappan's wife to the stone, told her everything about his downfall, and turned her into a scorpion, too."

He smiled wistfully at Scully, still hiding something behind his back. "But it's a romantic story after all. Jappan's wife, as a scorpion, ran under the rock to join her husband, where they had lots of little baby scorpions."

Vladimir Rubicon looked up at him, smiling. "Won-derful, Agent Mulder. You should, uh, volunteer to work at the museum, just like I do."

Scully shifted her position on the fallen tree, then brushed crumbs from her khaki vest. "Interesting, Mulder—but why tell that story now?"

He brought his hand from behind his back, holding out the ugly smashed remnants of an immense black scorpion, its many-jointed legs dangling in jagged direc-tions. "Because I found this under your pillow."

Yucatan jungle

Saturday, early morning, exact time

unknown

As they prepared to break camp in the morning, Mulder noticed that his watch had stopped. His first automatic thought was that sometime in the night their group had experienced an unexplained alien encounter. Then he realized that the time stoppage probably had more to do with the jungle muck than any extraterrestrial phenomena.

Shucking his outer layer of wet and dirty clothes, he pulled on another set that would get just as filthy during the day's trek. Mulder decided to wear his New York Knicks T-shirt, the one with the torn sleeve, since it didn't matter if it stained or tattered further.

Scully emerged from her tent, slapping at bug bites, her eyes droopy and half-closed from too little sleep.

"Good morning, Sunshine," Mulder said.

"I'm considering being reassigned to the Records Section," she said, yawning and stretching. "At least those people have a clean, dry office and a vending machine down the hall."

She took a drink from her canteen, then dribbled water in the palm of her hand, splashing it on her face, rubbing it across her eyes. She blinked until her eyes cleared up, then waved away a cloud of mosquitoes. "I never truly appreciated the wonders of a bug-free work environment."

Fernando Aguilar stood by a tree, staring into a small shaving mirror. He held a straight razor in one hand. His .ocelot-skin cap dangled from a broken branch within arm's reach. He turned around to grin at them, his cheeks soaped up. "Buenos dias, amigos," he said, then went back to stroking his cheeks with the blade, his eyes half closed with pleasure. "Nothing like a good shave in the morning to make one feel clean and ready for the day, eh?"

He flicked soapy stubble off the razor's end with the precision of a professional knife thrower, splattering a white pattern across the ferns. "A secret, Senor Mulder: I mix my soap with bug repellent. It seems to help."

"Maybe I'll try that," Mulder said, rubbing the stub-ble on his chin. "Which way to the nearest shower?"

Aguilar laughed, a loud, thin sound that reminded Mulder of the squabbling cries of howler monkeys that had kept him awake through the night.

The local workers took down the camp, rolling up clothes and supplies into duffel bags, knocking down the tents and folding them into compact packages.

They moved with remarkable speed, packed up and ready to go in no time.

Vladimir Rubicon bustled about, pacing impatiently as he munched from a small bag of raisins. "Shouldn't we be off soon?" Mulder saw bloodshot patterns around the old archaeologist's bright blue eyes and knew that Rubicon hadn't slept well, though he was apparently accustomed to such conditions.

Aguilar finished shaving and wiped his now-glistening face with a bandanna, which he tucked into his pocket. He spun the ocelot-skin cap on one finger, showing off, then settled it firmly on his head. "You are right, Senor Rubicon—we should be off to find your daughter. It's a long walk yet, but if we keep up a good pace, we can reach Xitaclan before nightfall tomorrow."

They set off again through the jungle. The quiet and solemn locals took the lead, hacking with their machetes, with Aguilar right behind to guide them.

A flock of butterflies, a cloud of bright color and flut-tering wings, burst from a clear pool beside a fallen tree. They looked like a spray of jewels flashing into the air, as bright as the numerous brilliant orchids that dotted the trees around them.

Snakes dangled from branches, looking at them with cold eyes. Mulder wished he had taken more time to study the poisonous species in Central America. For safety reasons, he chose to avoid all the snakes.

They had been on their way for no more than an hour before rain began to sheet down, warm and oddly oily. Rivulets trickled and pattered like streams from the scooped banana leaves, washing away spiders, insects, and caterpillars from above. The wet air seemed ready to burst with its newly released lush scents.

Aguilar pinched the brim of his spotted hat so the water ran off in a spout.

His wet ponytail dangled like a limp rag between his shoulder blades. He flashed a grin at Mulder. "You asked for the showers, Senor. It seems we have found them, eh?"

Wet leaves, moss, and rotted vegetation clung to them. Mulder looked at Scully and Rubicon, whose clothes were spattered with green streaks, brown smears of mud, and clinging yellowed fern leaves. "We've certainly man-aged to camouflage ourselves," he said.

"Is that what we were trying to do?" Scully answered, brushing her khaki pants. Ever-present mosquitoes swarmed around her face.

"I certainly wouldn't be inspired to build towering temples and pyramids in an environment like this," Mulder said. "It's amazing to me that the Maya could have created such an enormous civilization here."

"At least the temples would have been dry inside," Scully said, flinging water from her hair.

Rubicon's face showed a dreamy look. "Human inge-nuity always surprises us when we look back through his-tory. It would be so wonderful just to have five minutes in the past to ask, 'Why did you do this?' But we have to make do with tiny clues. An archaeologist must be like a detective—uh, an FBI agent of the past, to unravel myster-ies where the suspects and the victims turned to dust a thousand years before any of us were born."

"I was impressed with the scientific and astronomical achievements the Maya made," Mulder said, "though some people think their civilization may have had some help."

"Help?" Rubicon asked, distractedly pushing a leafy frond away from his face.

"Uh, what kind of help do you mean?"

Mulder took a deep breath. "According to Maya leg-end, their gods told them the Earth was round—quite an observation from a primitive people. They apparently knew of the planets Uranus and Neptune, which weren't discovered by Western astronomers until around the nineteenth century. Must have had great eyesight, consid-ering they had no telescopes.

"The Maya also determined the Earth's year to within one five-thousandth of its actual value, and they knew the exact length of the Venusian year. They calculated other astronomical cycles out to a span of about sixty-four mil-lion years."

"Yes, the Maya were fascinated by time," Rubicon said, not rising to the bait.

"Obsessed with it."

"Mulder," Scully said, "you're not going to suggest—'

He swatted away a biting fly. "If you look at some of their carvings, Scully, you'll see figures that are unmis-takable—a towering form sitting in what has to be a con-trol chair, just like an astronaut in the shuttle cockpit. Fire and smoke trail from the vehicle."

Amused, Rubicon countered with a story of his own. "Ah, yes. 'Chariots of the Gods.' Interesting speculations. I'm required to know all such tales and legends. Some of the stories are, uh, quite amazing. This is one of my favorites—you know that Quetzalcoatl, or Kukulkan as the Maya called him, was the god of knowledge and wisdom?"

"Yes," Mulder said, "he supposedly came down from the stars."

"Uh, supposedly," Rubicon said. "Now, Kukulkan's enemy was Tezcatlipoca, whose mission in life was to sow discord." Rubicon slipped his glasses on his nose, though they were perfectly useless in the jungle rain. It seemed to be a habit of his, a required action for the telling of a story.

"Tezcatlipoca came to an important festival disguised as a handsome man and called attention to himself by dancing and singing a magic song. The people were so captivated that a multitude began imitating his dance— uh, sort of like the Pied Piper. He led them all onto a bridge, which collapsed under their weight. Many people were hurled into the river far below, where they were changed into stones."

Rubicon grinned. "In another city Tezcatlipoca appeared with a puppet magically dancing on his hand. In their wonder to see this miracle, the people crowded so close that many of them suffocated. Then, pretending to be dejected at the pain and grief he had caused, Tezcatlipoca insisted that the people should stone him to death because of the harm he had done. So they did.

"But as Tezcatlipoca's corpse rotted, it gave off such a dreadful stench that many died from smelling it. At last, in sort of a commando mission, a series of brave heroes, one after another, succeeded in dragging the body out of town, like a relay race with a stinking cadaver, until finally their city was free of the pestilence."

They continued to slog along through the jungle. Rubicon shrugged his bony shoulders. "They're all just legends anyway," he said. "It's up to us to listen to the stories and learn what we can from them. I'm not going to tell you which to believe."

"Everybody else seems to," Mulder said quietly, but he did not bring up the subject of ancient astronauts again that day.

The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia Saturday, 1:03 p.m.

Striding down the corridor of the East Wing of the Pentagon, Major Willis Jakes fell into his typical routine of spotting landmarks, memorizing the route so he could trace his path back under any circumstances. Normally he would have noted a broken tree, a rock out-cropping, or a gully in the barren highlands of Afghanistan, tromping through the fever-infested swamps of Southeast Asia, slipping into Kurdish territory in the northern moun-tains of Iran. Now, though, instead of wearing a camou-flage outfit or a survival suit bristling with small weapons and resources, Major Jakes sported his full military dress uniform, neatly pressed and smelling of laundry deter-gent.