Tears of the Jaguar (7 page)

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“What?” The voice came from behind her.

Bowerdale
.

“What is it? What can you see?”

And then he was inside and he stopped talking.

“The plaster is intact,” said Deborah.

“Yes,” Bowerdale managed.

“Are you getting all this?”

She took her eyes off the monumental structure to look at him and saw that he had the video camera at shoulder height, its video screen unfolded so he didn’t have to look through the eyepiece.

“Shall we?” she said, nodding toward the great jaws of the building.

She moved into the hollow, stepping carefully over the fang-like teeth that lined its lower lip and then stood to the side so that Bowerdale and his camera could see in.

Inside the gateway was a recess ten feet deep. At the back, lolling in a stone construction that was half box and half throne, was a skeleton, now fragmented, but still wearing a green stone mask with white eyes made of shell. The remains of the rib cage were dotted with fragments of bone and jade that had once been necklaces and other adornments. Around it, arranged on the ground and on shelflike alcoves built into the larger hollow, were grave goods: Ceramics. Amphora-style jugs. An inverted red bowl with a parrot effigy. Flaring side bowls paired lip to lip. A trichrome open bowl and other polychromatic vessels. Deborah moved the beam of light and caught the flash of obsidian blades. The chosen weapon of human sacrifice for the Maya.

“Shine the light there,” hissed Bowerdale, whose voice was low and hoarse. “What is that, chert?”

Deborah shone the light on what looked like flint tools and nodded, before her attention moved to a dark greenstone axe head. And there was more. There were carved bone tubes that might have been feather fan holders or bloodletting instruments. There was jade jewelry, some of it a rare blue color. There were two metates, the stone mortars used for grinding corn. Then
there were stingray spines and red ocher sticks. There were bones, some of them parts of deer heads, and when she looked back to the collapsed skeleton she saw that it was wearing a large round pendant carved from bone into the shape of a human skull, the eyes set with jade. The skeleton was flanked by clay statuary not unlike the figures on the Zac Na, and in its fallen lap were bundles of what looked like bones.

Human bones.

The skulls, which looked too small to be adult, were set apart from the bundles, staring sightless toward them.

Sacrificed, then
, she thought. The fact of it still registered, despite her excitement, lodging like something cold and dark in her stomach.

“Congratulations, Miss Miller,” said Bowerdale from behind the camera. “We just made history.”

“What’s that?” she said, gesturing to a small bundle beside the throne. It was wrapped with fabric that was—incredibly—intact.

Bowerdale peered at it, then handed her the camera.

“Here,” he said. “Hold this.”

He produced a pencil and began to tease the wrapping open gently.

“We should wait till we can do this properly,” said Deborah, but he had already got the first of the fold open, and the rest unrolled with it.

Inside were bones, mostly small, though two were about a foot long. Inside the bundle something dislodged, giving off a metallic flash as it fell onto the stone floor.

“What the hell?” breathed Bowerdale.

Deborah shone the light onto the floor, and Bowerdale got down on his knees and carefully picked it up.

It was a fragment of dull yellow metal, about three quarters of an inch long, inlaid with a remarkable pale crimson stone, translucent as crystal. Bowerdale held it up, his face quizzical in the flashlight beam, then turned back to the bundle he had unfurled.

“There are more fragments here,” he said, pointing with the pencil. “And there’s something else.”

But he didn’t need to say that because Deborah was already staring at it dumbstruck. It was a rod of yellow metal, perhaps eighteen inches long, and on one end there was something that looked like a dove, white and glossy as enamel. There was also a polished wooden log inlaid with jade and, encircling one of the many small bones, what looked like a ring engraved with an unusual design.

“What the hell is that?” Bowerdale whispered, his voice carrying the same baffled awe that Deborah felt breaking out all over her like sweat.

“If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d say most of this stuff was...”

“Gold,” he finished for her.

It can’t be
, she thought.
It’s not possible
.

There was no gold in the Yucatan. That’s part of the reason why the Spanish paid it so little attention. And the tomb was too old for there to be imported gold from other parts of Mexico.

And yet
, she thought, dazzled by the way it sparkled in the beam of her flashlight,
there it is
.

Porfiro Aguilar looked at the chaos of half-unpacked lab equipment and wondered, not for the first time, what the hell he had been thinking. It was one thing to sign on as assistant field director to the woman from the States, but handling artifact analysis and conservation for an entirely new find was nuts. He would be stuck in Valladolid for weeks. He hadn’t even seen the tomb yet and didn’t know when he’d be able to go.

Sweating, he put a box of sample containers on his desk. The air-conditioning in the lab whirred like a stalling biplane, cooling the room by ten degrees, maybe less. Outside, the usual hundred-degree midmorning heat blazed. Sometimes he really hated the Yucatan.

Porfiro Aguilar was from the hip Colonia Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City, which, with its museums, clubs, and café culture, was another country entirely. He had been raised in Santo Domingo but had been a bit of an urban sophisticate even
before he had the money to live that way, and he felt almost as out of place in a provincial town like Valladolid as the damned
gringos
. Almost as out of place as Miller herself, who—he imagined—was out of place everywhere. She could have been pretty if she wasn’t quite so angular and awkward in her movements. She had to be a couple of inches over six feet tall, which meant she loomed over almost everybody but Bowerdale. Her thick, unruly brown hair was always pulled back, but he had a feeling if she took it down and put some makeup on her dark almond-shaped eyes, she’d turn a head or two. Still. Her workaholic personality made it impossible for him to see her as anything besides yet another boss.

He had seen the village where Miller was staying, the way the people lived there. Naked kids on dirt floors. Pigs and turkeys everywhere you looked, all waiting to be Christmas or Easter dinner. Those Goddamned palm-thatched roofs. Everyone still living off corn three hundred and sixty-two days a year as they had before the Spanish—his true ancestors—arrived. It was the fucking third world. Aguilar had made the Maya his professional life, and was proud of their history and achievements, but when he had to deal with their living descendents, he felt something like contempt. He didn’t like the feeling—hated it, in fact—but there it was. In the end he had more in common with
norteamericanos
than he did with the Maya. He even looked more like them, and until he spoke, he could pass for one of them on their streets. In Ek Balam, everyone but Miller and Bowerdale was a head shorter and two shades darker.

He liked Miller well enough. She knew her own mind and wasn’t too proud to let him know when she needed help. Bowerdale, however, was a smug son of a bitch. He was good at his job, sure,
but he’d take advantage of anyone if there was fame or skirt to be had and never feel bad about it. Aguilar bore his prejudices against the Maya with the humility of failure and sin. He felt no such failure for hating Bowerdale.

Aguilar rolled his eyes at the sight of Miller and Bowerdale walking into the lab together, looking earnest, excited. Bowerdale handed him the only sample taken from the tomb: a fragment of gold-colored metal mounting a pale, red, uncut crystal the size of a bottle cap.

“What am I looking at?” said Aguilar, adjusting the setting on his microscope.

“We were kind of hoping you could tell us,” said Miller.

Aguilar peered at the red stone again and, sensing Bowerdale watching him critically, felt a sudden flash of anger.

“I’ll need to do some serious analysis before I can tell you anything concrete,” he said, as calmly as he could manage, “but I can give you some preliminaries.”

“Shoot,” said Bowerdale.

“Well,” said Aguilar, pushing back from the microscope, “I think it’s fair to say that I’m not nearly as stupid as you think I am, and that the next time you want to see if I know my job you can look at my damned resume.”

He stared them down, his face flushed with anger. Miller looked at Bowerdale, and then back to Aguilar.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“You didn’t get this stone from the site,” said Aguilar. “I am as good at my job as anyone you might have brought from the States.”

For a moment Miller looked genuinely taken aback.

“No one doubts your credentials, Aguilar,” she said.

“So what’s this about,” he shot back, with a curt nod at the red stone. “Where did it come from?”

“I was there when she went in,” said Bowerdale, as if his word was worth more then Miller’s. “She got it from the chamber under the acropolis.”

“Where did you find it?” said Aguilar, his eyes still on Miller.

“In the tomb,” said Miller. She said it carefully, emphatically, and held his eyes. He held them for a long moment and then shrugged.

“I don’t understand how that could be possible,” he said, his voice carefully neutral.

“And yet,” said Bowerdale, with a smug smile.

There was a long silence. Aguilar shrugged.

“OK,” he said, “I need to do some tests but I am as sure as I can be that the stone isn’t Mayan. My guess is that it’s from Europe. I’d need better equipment than I have here to estimate its age, but I’d say it was mined a long time ago. It’s clearer than any natural stone I’ve ever seen. Then there’s the metal, yellow and malleable.”

He gave them a pointed look and they glanced at each other, but he still saw confusion rather than amusement. He decided that maybe this wasn’t a practical joke after all.

“This isn’t Mayan,” he said, becoming more serious. “It’s gold.”

“It’s not the only piece,” Miller said. “The stone—what is it?”

“Corundum, probably,” he answered. “The red kind, which makes it...”

“Ruby,” said Bowerdale.

“Of a sort,” said Aguilar. “Paler than usual.”

“What’s it worth?” said Bowerdale. “The stone.”

“As jewelry? Less than you’d think. The color is too watery. So,” he said, and paused, “you want to explain how an early medieval European crystal shows up in a Mayan tomb?”

“Someone must have gotten inside fairly recently,” said Bowerdale.

“And put artifacts
in
the tomb?” Miller replied, studying the crystal. “That would make a change. And besides, I’d swear that entrance has been covered up for a long time.”

“That’s your opinion as an archaeologist, is it?” said Bowerdale.

“I’ve seen packed earth before,” she said. “It takes time to settle as densely as the dirt over that passage. At least a hundred years, maybe five times that.”

Aguilar watched her closely, trying to see how sure she was.

“You said you’ve never seen anything like it before,” she said, turning to him.

“Natural crystals are almost always flawed at the microscopic level,” he answered. “This is clean.”

“You think you could search for these same properties and see if anything comparable has been turned up elsewhere?”

“I can try, but I can’t do much more than look at it and do some rudimentary chemical tests here. I’ll need to send it to a more advanced local lab, then to the US for further tests, which means clearing it with the government first.”

Mexico owned everything that came out of the tomb regardless of who found it.

“Do it,” she said.

“You’re going to have to lock the site down, you know,” he added.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what this is,” he said, nodding at the gem, “but it complicates what was already a remarkable find.”

“There’ll be a feeding frenzy,” Bowerdale said, cutting in. “We need to manage publicity.”

“Probably so,” she said.

“So we talk to no one,” Bowerdale pressed. “Strictly
need to know
.”

Miller took a breath as if to steel herself. “I’ll make that call, thanks, Martin.”

Bowerdale’s eyes hardened and his smile quivered, as if threatening to turn into something nastier, but then he recovered his composure and snapped his smile back into place.

“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “What
ever
you say.”

He strode out. Miller watched him go, then turned to Aguilar, who met her eyes, held them for a moment, and then nodded fractionally in approval.