Beautiful Sacrifice

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HUNTER STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE SMALL CLEARING where Lina had parked the Bronco. The vehicle looked undisturbed, yet they had rarely been without the presence of voices on the wind.

“Wait,” Hunter said as Lina headed for the Bronco.

He circled the vehicle, saw nothing suspicious, and waved her over. After they got in, he watched Lina back the Bronco until she found a place to turn. She hadn’t said a word since the cenote.

“You drive very well,” he said.

“I thought you were mad at me.”

“I’m mad at the situation, not you.”

She got the vehicle straightened out and gave him a long look.

He smiled gently.

After a moment she put the Bronco in gear and headed back toward the main road.

“I’ve been driving estate roads since I was old enough to see over the dashboard,” she said. “Philip liked having someone to run errands for him on the digs. That way he didn’t have to leave a site for months at a time.”

“The villagers don’t drive?”

“Once a dig is set up, Philip doesn’t allow any vehicle but his own in the area.”

Hunter smiled thinly. “That puts the brakes on the size and quantity of what people can steal.”

“We have very little theft here.”

Crutchfeldt’s words about grave robbers at work on Reyes Balam lands echoed in Hunter’s mind, but he didn’t say anything. Whoever or whatever El Maya was, he terrified people to the point that outside artifact poachers apparently didn’t set foot on Reyes Balam lands—or if they did, they died.

“Loyalty is good,” Hunter said, “but not all humans are.”

“If theft occurs, it’s punished the Maya way.”

“Which is?”

“If the thief is from outside the estate lands,” Lina said reluctantly, “the villagers beat him. Savagely. If the thief is from one of our villages, he gets the beating after his right hand is chopped off with a machete.”

“That would limit the thieves,” Hunter said mildly. No scary El Maya mastermind necessary. Just a kind of pragmatism the civilized world shuns. Life lived very close to the bone.

“It’s the dark side of a quiet village,” Lina said. “I understand why the customs exist, but I don’t like all of them, any more than I like their preferential treatment of men over women. I don’t like the second-class citizenship of most Maya in Mexico either. Things are changing, but slowly. It’s education that works in the long run.”

“Choices,” Hunter said.

She nodded, then concentrated on a difficult stretch of the miserable “road.” He settled back and kept note of the state of the track, the compass in the dashboard, and any landmarks the jungle permitted. He could mentally retrace every bit of their way, starting at the compound and working outward. It was a skill that had become habit in his childhood, where river marshes and brush formed an enticing maze for a curious boy.

Lina turned onto the main estate road, followed it for a time, then turned off onto a side road that slowly unraveled into a limestone track barely worn through the relentless vegetation. The track dodged around bigger and bigger trees until only trunks and vines and the most shade-hardy shrubs existed at ground level. The effect was almost parklike, but experience told Hunter that walking wouldn’t be easy.

With automatic motions, Lina turned the Bronco and backed down the roughest trail until she finally came to a stop.

“We’re here,” she said, turning off the engine.

He looked around and saw nothing much different than he had been seeing. “If you say so.”

“The foot trail is off to the left.”

She reached for the backpack, only to have him snag it first.

“It’s less than a kilometer,” she said.

“What is?”

“A surprise.”

Hunter compared where they were to the map he had built in his mind of the Reyes Balam estate. Right now they were perhaps two kilometers as the crow—or macaw—flies from the compound itself, and about a quarter of that to the Jaguar Cenote.

Eagerly Lina got out and headed for the trail that experience rather than her eyes told her was waiting. Hunter shut the Bronco door quietly behind him and walked into another aspect of the jungle world.

Copal and ceiba trees dominated the jungle, tall and mighty, their branches lifting to an unseen sky and their roots gripping the earth like a thousand snakes. For a moment Hunter saw the world as the Maya had. A huge ceiba tree was the only thing stitching the world together, the World Tree rooted in hell and holding heaven in its arms.

If the tree released its grip, reality would fly away.

The hair on the back of his arms and neck stood up. The last time he’d sensed anything like this, he had been far out from civilization, alone in the desert, at the edge of lost, in the presence of something that was far bigger than he was, something utterly indifferent to all things human.

The raucous call of a macaw grounded him again. Up above his head, a toucan snapped its bill. The thick, heavy bill looked like a fighting claw without a crab. The green on green of the jungle seethed with hidden life. Even when the jungle looked quiet, it was alive, moving, breathing, as restless in its own way as the sea.

And as relentless.

“Hunter?” Lina called softly.

He turned and walked toward her. She watched him, enjoying the lithe efficiency of his movements. He was the only man she’d ever known who was as comfortable in the wilds of the inhuman jungle as he was in the human jungle of a big city. She could picture him on a dig with an ease that was frightening.

I’ve always wanted a man who could handle both city and jungle. Question is, can I handle him?

She didn’t know. Part of her—the part that thought of her parents’ marriage—was wary of finding out. The rest of her hummed with anticipation.

“Are we there?” he said.

Lina realized she’d been standing and staring at Hunter. She shook herself.

“Until we reach the path, try not to leave any sign that we were here,” she said.

He gave her a questioning look.

“I…” she began, then stopped, wondering how to explain. “Where we’re going is very special. Villagers know about it, of course, but rarely visit.”

“Taboo?” he asked.

“Not exactly. Their lives and ceremonies center around the Jaguar Cenote, the Cenote de Balam, so there’s no reason to hike deep into the jungle. Village life doesn’t leave a lot of time or energy for sightseeing.”

“No tours?” he asked dryly.

“None, thank you very much. We don’t want this place trampled or loved to death. Leave that for the better-known sites, with their groomed grounds and guards and partially excavated ruins.”

“I’ll be more careful with the jungle than it will be with me,” Hunter promised.

Lina smiled. “The jungle thanks you.”

She turned and pushed gently through a barrier of young trees, vines, and shrubs struggling against one another in the small opening left when a copal monarch had fallen.

Watching, listening, Hunter followed, feeling like a water bug in a marsh. Everything was much bigger than he was, older, tougher. The vegetation’s struggle for light—for life itself—was timeless, all the more primal for its silence.

“Why didn’t the Maya worship the strangler fig tree?” Hunter asked. “It can kill the biggest of trees.”

“Many of the ceiba trees have just four main branches, like the four cardinal points. The roots are thick and obvious, their shoulders visible at the base of the trunk.” Carefully she picked a way through the thicket of shrubs and vines. “The ceiba trunk goes up and up and up, like a pillar separating the overworld from the underworld. No other tree is quite like it.”

Only after Lina and Hunter had passed through the tangle of plants did she unclip her machete. She checked her wrist compass, adjusted course, and set off. He followed her over rocky ground, around godlike ceiba trees growing taller and taller despite the weak soil feeding them. Some of them had grown together until their trunks were intertwined in unnatural embrace. The ground around them was sterile, sucked dry by the needs of the mighty trees.

The trail Lina followed was more unreal than real, better suited to four feet or wings. Claw marks reached above Hunter’s head on one of the copal trunks. Resin bled out, hardening in the air, ready to be used for the sacred, scented fire of Maya ceremonies.

“Jaguar,” Lina said, gesturing to the claw marks. “Though I don’t think we’ve had anyone on the estate grounds killed by one since I was a little girl.”

“You better be kidding.”

She smiled and then spoke with the softness the jungle seemed to demand. “I am. Mostly. Our entire holdings are protected land for jaguars. No hunting allowed. No scientific study either. Abuelita firmly believes the cats should be left alone as long as they leave the villagers alone.”

“What happens if a cat starts snacking on the locals?” Hunter asked.

“Then the family or the villagers take care of it. That’s as it must be. If the cats didn’t respect and avoid people, there soon would be no jaguars at all.”

The path became more obvious, although far from a well-beaten trail. Their feet made little noise and less impression on the jungle debris covering the ground. Only the occasional stain showed where boots had left marks on limestone rubble. The strident bird and monkey calls became part of the background, like an erratic heartbeat, noticeable only in its absence.

A striped iguana watched them, clinging to the side of a rock as big as the Bronco. There was a rough face carved on the stone, barely visible through an overgrowth of lichen and moss. Hunter couldn’t tell whether the face was a finished work or started and then abandoned because of one crisis or another.

Lina never paused. Nor did she find any need for her machete. Finally she clipped it back in place, deciding that Philip must have been on the path recently.

He promised not to dig here without telling me. It was the price of me leaving him alone for the last four summers.

But she knew that sometimes Philip’s promises were forgotten before the echo of the words had died. He wasn’t treacherous, simply self-absorbed. Something else would claim his attention and mere words exchanged between people would fade to nothing at all.

The canopy above them rustled and a flock of macaws burst through, leaving in their wake a random rain of droppings and half-eaten fruit. Red and blue streaked by, like tropical fish fleeing danger through a green sea.

Gradually Hunter noticed a random scattering of modern debris mostly hidden among the vines and moss—cigarette butts, scraps of greasy paper, broken glass winking from beneath green leaves, petals where no flowers were blooming nearby. Some of the petals were fresh.

Lina paused, listening.

Faint voices came from ahead.

Hunter’s hand touched the small of her back. His lips brushed over her ear.

“More villagers?” he asked very softly.

“Sounds like.” Her voice wasn’t as soft as his. She was curious rather than wary. “Probably they’re including some of the old places in tonight’s celebration. It’s a very big moment for the Maya.”

Hunter was remembering Crutchfeldt’s words about grave robbers and a man whose name it was death to speak. All things considered, assuming El Maya was a legend wasn’t smart.

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” Hunter said.

She waited, listening. “They’re gone now.”

“The back of my neck itches,” he said.

“Use more insect repellent.”

“Lina—”

She held up her hand, stopping his words.

Nothing came through the jungle but silence.

She waited for a long ten count, then another. When the small and large sounds of the jungle slowly returned, she looked at him.

“They’re gone,” she said.

“So are we,” he said, turning back toward the Bronco.

“I’m on Reyes Balam land. The locals know me. As long as you stay with me, they won’t bother either of us. In fact, they probably left rather than disturb me.”

Hunter stood and smelled the air, listened, and waited.

“Smoke of some kind,” he said finally.

“The jungle is too wet to burn,” she said impatiently.

“Cigarettes aren’t.”

“I’ve seen the litter. We’ll pick it up on the way out. If it’s messy again in a week, Abuelita or Carlos will send someone to clean up. The locals can treat their villages like garbage dumps, but not the rest of the Reyes Balam lands, especially around ruins.”

With that, Lina headed up the trail once more, her stride purposeful. Hunter knew he had the choice of dragging her screaming back to the Bronco—dumb idea, considering the protective natives—or following her.

Muttering curses that could shrivel leaves, he walked quickly after her.

“It’s just over the next rise,” she said without turning around.

Hunter eyed lichen-covered rubble that was more green than gray. Emerald spikes of aloe plants dotted the ridge like a low fence. Where the limestone pushed through the thin soil in great lumps, shrubbery flourished in the sun beyond the overwhelming reach of ceiba and copal trees.

Lina pushed through the undergrowth, gathering new welts to match her old. Behind her, Hunter did the same. Neither of them commented on the small wounds. Both understood that the jungle was its own master and exacted its due from soft-skinned trespassers.

In tandem, Lina and Hunter climbed down to a low outcrop of limestone that overlooked a small clearing ringed with more of the misshapen ceiba trees. The roots were unusually gnarled and twisted, more like strangler figs than ceiba. Even for vegetation powerful enough to hold overworld and underworld together, life right here was a raw struggle.

At the center of a clearing Hunter saw a mound that had once been far taller than he was. Now it was about his height. The rubble surrounding it was at least twenty yards across. All of it had been consumed by the jungle, though the biggest limestone blocks were still fighting for their place in the sun.

Hunter took a slow, deep breath. Perhaps smoke from clove cigarettes, perhaps a dead campfire, perhaps his instincts working in overdrive. Whatever had happened here recently wasn’t happening at this moment. He no longer felt watched with predatory interest.

And he still didn’t like the fact that he had felt that way.

“Any back roads from here to Tulum?” he asked.

“None that don’t pass over estate lands. As a cat sanctuary, we’re off-limits to tourists and hikers. Besides, there’s not much here to see. No beaches. No mountains or canyons worth mentioning. No striking ruins. No village fairs. Bird-watching is average, at best. Cenote de Balam is barely known beyond the boundary of the estate itself.”

Hunter nodded slowly. “What you’re saying is that the area is pretty much a blank spot on the map.”

“A lot of the Yucatan is like that. Without rivers to provide food, freshwater, and relatively easy access, or any wealth to be mined once you manage to get deep into the jungle, this area has been left alone. Around Tulum there is the biggest underwater cave complex in the world, all gnawed out of limestone one drop at a time. But none of the underground passages connects with our cenotes.”

“Somebody liked it a long time ago,” he said, looking at the rubble mound.

“Even before the Maya came, there were people here. Some of the oldest human skeletons in the New World have been found deep in the flooded caves of Tulum. They come from a time when an ice age locked up so much water the sea level was much lower than now.”

“What about this site right here? Has this been dug?”

“No. There were—and are—more promising sites. But this one is my favorite. There’s something about the isolation, the feeling of time made tangible.” She half smiled. “I’ve never been able to explain it. This site simply draws me.”

He studied the overgrown remnants of what had once been a substantial structure. Very faint paths webbed around the mound, leading to the far side.

“So, what is this place?” Hunter asked as he looked for any sign of an entryway.

“It’s a tomb. We think.”

“‘We’?” Hunter asked. “Philip comes here?”

“Not since we measured it. Ten years ago I found this site and some others by using remote sensing techniques. Spectral analysis of satellite images of the jungle pointed me in the right direction. Even overgrown sites reflect light differently from undisturbed jungle. Philip listed them in order from most promising to least and went to work.”

“With your help?”

Her mouth tightened. “When I insisted. And I insisted that I be here for any excavation at this site. So”—she shrugged—“he put it at the bottom of the list.”

“And you’re still waiting.”

“Most of the time, I don’t mind. Part of me likes knowing the mound is here, untouched.”

A breeze came, swirled. It sounded like snakes crawling around them, a dry scrape of scales. The haze in the sky was still thin, barren of rain.

“What do you think the rubble once was?” Hunter asked.

“Philip says it was like the rest of the Reyes Balam sites, only much smaller, a sixteenth-century pimple on the bitter end of the Maya road.”

“After the Spanish?” Hunter asked, measuring the rubble and the jungle with the eyes of a predator rather than a tourist or an archaeologist.

“We’re not entirely sure, but yes. Most of our Reyes Balam sites were created by people fleeing population centers after the fall of the Maya civilization, which preceded the Spanish. Some of the sites we’ve found were active several generations before 1550, but after that, the sites grew quickly in size and number.”

“Vanquished kings looking for new thrones.”

Lina smiled. “I doubt that our Maya ancestor was a king. More like a favored son who saw the Spanish handwriting on the wall and put his X on the winning side. But the Balam genealogy insists he was a king. We have a family crest in Madrid to support that claim.”

Hunter shook his head. “And you just want to be plain old Lina Taylor, Ph.D. Must really make your family crazy.”

“They return the favor.”

The breeze lifted again, almost secretive in its hushed presence.

With pale eyes Hunter searched the jungle. If there were any more mounds, he couldn’t see them beneath the thick growth.

“Mind if I walk around the edges?” he asked.

“Go ahead. If there was anything of obvious archaeological significance, Philip would have been here, rather than scrambling around in Belize.”

“Philip sounds like the type who couldn’t overlook any chance, however slim or distant, to get one up on a rival.”

“You haven’t even met him, yet you already know him.”

“You’re a good teacher.” Hunter jumped lightly down from the outcropping, then turned and held his arms up for Lina.

She could have jumped down just fine without him, and both of them knew it. So she smiled and let him lift her. Before he put her down, he gave her the kind of kiss that made the world spin around her.

“Your father may act like an ass,” Hunter breathed against her lips, “but he contributed sperm toward one extraordinary offspring.”

Lina blinked against a sudden sting at the back of her eyes. “Thank you.”

“I didn’t do a thing. You did.”

Before she could say anything, he lowered his head just enough to sink into her mouth. She flowed against him like warmth from a fire, sinking into him in turn. Finally, slowly, he raised his head.

“Either we stop now or we go for ticket sales and a limestone mattress,” he said hoarsely.

“Ticket sales?”

“The locals lurking out in the jungle.”

“Oh.” She sighed. “I’m willing to try the limestone mattress, but not the tickets.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Figured.” He blew out a hard breath and reminded himself of all the reasons it would be really stupid to let down his guard long enough to do what his body was demanding. “C’mon, let’s take a walk around the ruins.”

She led him to a reasonably clear thread of path and set out toward the mound.

“Who do you think is buried here?” Hunter asked.

“Somebody more important than the folks who built the tomb,” she said dryly. “But on the scale of Maya monuments, this is really small change. It’s isolated, unconnected to any other sites.”

“Could have been a secret place.”

She gave him a startled look over her shoulder. “That’s what I think. Or rather, what I feel. This is an unusual site.”

“Why don’t you explore it?”

“Philip has first rights on all the ruins on Reyes Balam land. It was part of the prenuptial agreement he signed. In return, he gave up any legal claim to Celia’s name or inheritance.”

“He gets first dig rights and walks away from the sure thing—money.”

Lina laughed oddly. “Celia married to get out of the Yucatan. Philip married to get exclusive digging rights in the Yucatan. The old Chinese curse—may your fondest wish come true.”

Hunter whistled softly. “Life’s a tricky bitch.”

“Oh yeah. Even back then, Philip was drawn to hints of Kawa’il. He met Celia on a university-sponsored dig on Reyes Balam lands. When I read Moby-Dick on the way to my undergrad degree, I thought of Kawa’il. It’s Philip’s white whale, his obsession. The more it eludes him, the greater his need to pursue.”

“I saw the movie. Didn’t end well.”

The feeling of being watched returned. It wasn’t simply the sensation of being in a jungle that felt alive and other.

“Are you sure we’re alone out here?” Hunter asked, switching to English.

“As long as we aren’t testing mattresses, we’re okay,” Lina said in the same language. “The local Maya knew about this place long before anyone cared. It wasn’t disturbed then. It won’t be looted and sold on the black market now.”

Something rustled out at the edge of the clearing, twigs whipping against what sounded like flesh. The wind blew hot, feeling too dry for the jungle.

Hunter followed Lina around to the back of the mound and nearly ran into her when she stopped dead in the path.

“What—” he began.

She pointed, her finger trembling. Her voice made clear it was rage, not fear, coursing through her. “Some of the rubble has been moved.”

Whoever had done it had been careful to disturb as little of the overgrowth as possible. It took Hunter a moment to see what Lina saw.

“I can’t believe looters are here,” she said hoarsely.

Hunter had drawn his gun from beneath the backpack. He held the weapon along his leg, not wanting to spook Lina unless he had to.

“Neatest looters I ever saw,” he said.

She closed her eyes and tried to manage the rage that had flooded her at the thought of her secret place being pillaged. After a moment she opened her eyes and saw what Hunter had.

A casual visitor wouldn’t have noticed the subtle movement of rubble and overgrowth. There were none of the potholes and garbage and careless piles of dirt that were signatures of an illegal dig.

The breeze shifted shadows and sunlight. Something gleaming in the disturbed area caught Hunter’s eye.

Metal, not glass.

He followed a very faint trail winding amid overgrown blocks of rubble. Within four steps he saw the gleam of fresh brass. He bent and picked it up with his left hand. It was slightly cooler than his skin, no warmer or colder than the ground itself. On the back of the cartridge, the head stamp read 7.62 × 39. He rolled it in his fingers and passed the open end under his nose, smelling for gunpowder but getting only the faintest trace. Probably his imagination.

“How long since the last rain?” Hunter asked Lina as she hurried to him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It can rain every day, but the weather’s been weird here just like it has up in Houston.”

He wrapped his fingers around the spent cartridge. “This smells dead. It could have been fired days or weeks ago. Brass is still shiny.”

She looked at the gun in his right hand.

“Wrong caliber,” he said, smiling faintly.

What he didn’t say was that he would bet good money that the spent brass had come from an AK-47.

“But—” she began.

“Quiet,” he breathed. He pressed her behind him into a shallow alcove in the mound of rubble. “Someone is out there.”