Burial Ground (20 page)

He panned along the edge of the jungle one
final time, and was just about to stop recording when something
caught his eye. At first, he thought it was another one of those
strange butterflies, but it appeared to hover in the shadows at the
base of a tree trunk without flapping its wings. He zoomed in and
stumbled backward in surprise. Another painted man crouched in the
darkness, unmoving, watching Jay even as he filmed him. A
sharp-toothed grin slashed the man's face, and then he
vanished.

"Hey," Jay called without turning. "There's
another one out there."

He panned the camera from left to right, but
there was no sign of the native.

The forest had fallen quiet, save the soft
sound of rain dripping from the higher reaches onto the
groundcover.

"Are you sure?" Colton asked.

"Of course I'm sure. I have him on film. He
was right over there." Jay pointed vaguely off to his right, and
turned to face the direction from which they had come. A blur of
black streaked between two trees. "There's another."

The rest of the group closed in around him,
their conversation forgotten.

There was more movement off to his left. He
whirled in time to see another shadow vanish into the brush.

"They're all around us," Jay said.

"Stay calm," Colton whispered. He placed a
steadying hand on Jay's shoulder. "Everyone form a tight line.
We're too exposed here. We need to get out of the open."

Rippeth resumed the point, flanked by
Colton. Morton brought up the rear, walking backward, while
Sorenson and Webber slipped into the middle of the group with the
poles that supported the crate on their shoulders, ready to drop it
and go for their weapons at a moment's notice. Together they
advanced into the unnatural twilight beneath the trees. No one
spoke. The tension mounted.

Jay kept the camera to his eye, but moved it
to either side of the path too fast for the aperture to reconcile.
He saw motion in every shadow, and felt the weight of unseen
eyes.

Why didn't they just attack?

And then it hit him.

They were being herded, driven like cattle,
but toward what?

12:43 p.m.

During the half-hour after leaving the
clearing, they had walked in an unnerving silence. Sam tried not to
think about her encounter with Merritt in the bushes, although she
was acutely aware of the lingering sensation of his warm breath on
her lips. Best to just keep him behind her and focus on what lay
ahead, which proved easier said than done. The natives had never
come right out and shown themselves, yet they made their presence
continually felt in sporadic glimpses of dark forms moving through
the shadows and the snapping of twigs when she knew good and well
that these men could move through the forest without making a
sound. What exactly were they doing? Sam and the others were being
ushered toward something, or were they instead being driven away?
It wasn't until they arrived at an impasse that she had her
answer.

A great wall rose thirty feet above their
heads. It was covered so densely with blooming vines that she had
to sweep them aside to reveal the construct formed of three-foot
cubes of chiseled limestone. The abutment reached up into the
canopy where it blended into the branches and leaves, and extended
as far as they could see in either direction. Her heart skipped a
beat. It was a fortification, but what was on the other side that
needed protection?

Dozens of moss-covered stone columns capped
with charred iron grates stood sentry every twenty-five feet or
so.

"Over here," Rippeth called. He had opened a
curtain of vines to expose a dark gap in the wall.

Merritt stepped up beside him, and together
they pulled away the vegetation to uncover a rectangular opening.
It was roughly six feet tall and three feet wide. A doorway.

"What now?" Galen asked. His face had paled
to a chalky white.

The rustling sound from the bushes behind
them made the decision for them.

Rippeth held a finger to his lips for all of
them to see, then raised his pistol and walked slowly out of sight.
Sorenson followed, face grim, gun raised. After a brief hesitation,
the rest fell in behind them, leaving Morton and Webber to defend
their rear.

Sam trailed closely behind Leo through the
veil of vines on the opposite side of the wall, and emerged into
shadows beside a large stone that appeared to fit into the gap
through which they had just passed. It was attached to a system of
pulleys and primitive wooden gears.

She drew a sharp intake of breath. It felt
as though she had stepped through some invisible temporal barrier
into the past. All of her professional life had been spent chasing
history, and here she stood face-to-face with it in all its
glory.

"It's amazing," she whispered, looking this
way and that, absorbing every minute detail in hopes of committing
it to memory.

Dahlia and Jay funneled in behind her. Sam
heard the director whisper for her cameraman to stay at her hip, to
record her reactions and get footage of everything she so much as
looked at. The recorder started to purr and she forgot all about
them in her excitement.

So much of her work was composed of
guesswork predicated upon supposition. Her job was to piece
together the lives of people who were no longer around to tell
their own tales, and now she had the opportunity to evaluate just
how right, and wrong, she had been. She forgot all about the fact
that she was being herded into the fortified city.

It reminded her of the Chachapoya fortress
at Kuelap, but with an undeniable Inca influence. The central path
upon which they crossed into the city was several feet lower than
everything else around it. Circular huts crafted from the same rock
as the fortifications had been built upon elevated stone platforms
and surrounded by cornices, with a single opening for a door facing
the main walkway. While maybe only six feet tall and twelve feet in
diameter, their conical, thatch roofs rose just as high as the
fortress walls into the overhanging trees, where they tapered to
sharp points. The faces of curious men, women, and children peered
out from the shadowed openings before quickly ducking back out of
sight. Massive kapok trees grew between the familial dwellings,
their branches laced tightly overhead, except where they were
pruned so as not to violate the integrity of the odd roofs. No
vines or lianas dangled from the trees, yet entire colonies of
epiphytes and bromeliads bloomed from the moss-covered trunks and
branches in beautifully orchestrated shades of pastel yellows,
purples, pinks, and blues.

The stones that lined the walkways and the
borders between the structures were carved with decorative friezes,
crafted with intricate zigzag and rhomboid patterns and sculpted
designs. Here she truly recognized the Inca influence. There were
depictions of serpentine, feline, and avian gods, especially one
that appeared to be a combination of all three; faces of men in
elaborate headdresses; and a series of images that appeared to tell
the story of moving from one village to the next. And all of the
designs were filigreed with gold.

Sam turned to her left at the sound of
running water. A thin stream, channeled by low, smooth blocks,
bisected the path perpendicular to the one they traversed. There
had to be a spring somewhere ahead that pumped the water down the
gentle slope, and somewhere out of sight was surely a mechanism of
reclaiming it.

Stone domiciles passed to either side,
perhaps twenty in total, before the path opened into a wide
circular courtyard roughly forty feet across. Thick-trunked trees
grew from the flat stone terrace at regular intervals. The lower
branches had been trimmed back to the trunks to encourage
proliferation in the upper reaches. Monkeys screeched above and
green parrots with red rings around their eyes cawed and darted
just overhead. The tree in the center had a thinner trunk than all
of the others and broad, eleven-fingered leaves that folded open
like hands. Sam recognized it as a cecropia tree, a sophisticated
evolutionary anomaly that fostered a symbiotic relationship with a
colony of cecropia ants. The ants helped the tree by defending it
from herbivorous insects and mammals, while the stems and branches
were riddled with hollow passages that provided a suitable home for
the colony, and food in the form of glycogen that grew from the
Müllerian bodies on the undersides of the leaves. One species was
contingent upon the other to survive.

To her right were two circular stone stages
separated by a short staircase, at the top of which was a much
larger rectangular building with six trapezoidal doorways. The
upper walls were designed with a step-fret frieze, while the
remainder featured a mosaic of multicolored quadrangular stones.
They were carved with more historical images, many depicting a god
with the face of a snake, the eyes of the jaguar, and a receding
crown of feathers. Sam imagined the domicile served as a palace of
sorts for the ruling family, in front of which various rituals were
performed.

Jay stepped in front of her to get a better
view through the lens, then ducked back in line.

"Talk to me, Sam," Leo whispered into her
ear. "You're the expert. What are we looking at here?"

Sam was still trying to decide. She had
definitely formulated a theory, but she didn't want to be rash. She
needed to be certain before she said the words out loud.

Leo's eyes locked on hers. His question
wasn't one that required a simple answer. There was another
question lurking beneath the one he had vocalized. He wanted to
know if they were going to have to fight their way out of the
village. What could she say? She was piecing it together as fast as
she possibly could, and she was every bit as overwhelmed as the
rest of them.

She averted her gaze and stared past Leo.
Through the maze of tree trunks she could see several tall stone
tiers ascending the steep slope of the mountain that served as the
rear fortification. At the top of each retaining wall grew green
tufts of plants, one of which she could readily identify. Maize. It
was only then that she knew beyond any shadow of doubt who this
lost tribe was.

"They're Chachapoya," she said, again
meeting Leo's eyes. "We had thought that after the conquest by the
Inca and then the Spanish occupation that their bloodlines had been
diluted into the general population. But this tribe must have
somehow eluded capture by leaving the traditional tribal boundaries
of the Utcubamba and Marañón Rivers." She became more and more
animated as she spoke. "All of the buildings and the layout of the
village are Chachapoyan, but the artwork on the friezes and the
main building are Incan. And do you see that terraced garden over
there? You'll find the exact same thing at both Kuelap and Machu
Picchu. These people fled here nearly five hundred years ago to
elude the conquistadors. They've survived in complete isolation for
longer than the United States has even existed."

Leo narrowed his eyes. "Both the Inca and
Chachapoya were warring tribes."

"And they could have already killed us if
that was their intention."

"We need to know right now if things are
going to get ugly."

There was movement to her left. Sam whirled
and saw three black-painted faces leaning around the trunks of the
kapoks. Each man held a bow with an arrow notched, pointed directly
at them. She glanced to her right in time to see more scrabble up
onto the stone platforms to cover them from above.

"Just keep moving," Colton whispered from
ahead of them.

Across the twin stages, in one of the middle
dark openings of the large dwelling, the shape of a man took form
from the shadows. He lingered in the darkness a moment longer
before stepping out onto the stone platform and into the light.

"My God," Sam gasped.

1:05 p.m.

"Here," Colton whispered. He reached around
Merritt from behind and pressed something against his belly.

Merritt knew the object by feel, and tucked
the pistol under his waistband.

He didn't like this. Not one bit. They had
been herded into the city walls, and now they were sitting ducks,
far too exposed as they slowly walked through the central
courtyard. He hadn't fired a weapon in half a decade, but that
didn't worry him nearly as much as how quickly the skills and the
ability to kill without reservation would undoubtedly come back to
him.

From the edge of his peripheral vision, he
watched the natives take their posts behind the trees to his left,
while they simultaneously assumed the higher ground to his right.
His fist found the grip on the pistol too easily and his index
finger caressed the trigger like an old lover.

What were they waiting for?

With his free hand, he pulled Dahlia behind
him so that he was between her and the natives. Her blonde hair
stood out like a bull's eye.

His heart pounded. Not with fear, but in
anticipation.

The man who had emerged from inside the
stone building strode to the edge of the platform and surveyed them
as though they were no more significant than a line of ants
marching through his kingdom.

He stood a full seven feet tall with the
ornate golden headdress, from which both real and filigreed
feathers stood like the rays of the sun to frame the crown that
covered the man's forehead and brow. It reminded Merritt of the one
he had discovered in Hunter's rucksack, only instead of golden
teeth along the front rim, these appeared to be made of bone. The
wrinkles on the man's face placed him somewhere in his fifties to
sixties, yet his body was as muscular and toned as that of a man
half his age. He bared his teeth as he watched them pass,
showcasing brown triangles that knitted together like the fearsome
jaws of a shark. Worse still was the fact that even beneath the
thick application of black paint, the scars covering the man's body
were clearly visible. Long, straight scars transected his chest and
abdomen, and curved around his shoulders and biceps. His legs had
been carved in numerous directions to create divots in the flesh
where the scars intersected. Even his face had been slashed in such
a way that it appeared cooked. His right eye was lower than his
left, and the cheek beneath was thinner, the bones more prominent,
as though a large section of meat had been torn away. He wore only
a gray skirt woven from alpaca wool, from which hundreds of dark
feathers hung to his knees. There were even feathers in his hair
and hanging by leather straps from the wide holes in his ears.