Tears of the Jaguar (5 page)

Eustachio had spotted Bowerdale and the
norteamericano
students as soon as he entered the site. He had hoped that they would have chosen to come later, but they were here and this made things difficult. There was only the one van in the parking lot, so the rest of the students were probably still in Valladolid, and there was no sign of Deborah Miller’s rental car. Yet. He knew her well enough already to know she couldn’t stay away, and then he would quickly run out of choices.

Fidelia would have told him he worried too much. “First, see that there is a problem, then worry about solving it,” she would have said. He missed her, suddenly. She would have known what to do. And maybe she was right. It had rained, hard, but it had rained many times before, and life went on unchanged, or almost unchanged. But he had to look. He had to be sure. It was his duty.

But how did you search for something you had never seen?

He doubled back, hobbling west toward the second
sacbe
and the perimeter wall. It would take him longer to walk around the edge of the site but it would help him stay out of the
gabachos
’ way. He was pretty sure he would see them before they saw him. No one knew this place better than Eustachio. Yes, the gringos had the fancy contoured maps, but he knew the stones themselves, and the trees. He knew the
motmot
in the branches and the skink that watched from the grass.

He reached to touch the sticky bark of a
chakaj
tree and crossed himself, then began his swift, limping walk. Hopefully, there would be nothing to find. A few minutes in, he spotted one of Bowerdale’s students coming through the brush. She turned but didn’t see him. He watched her balefully. If he’d ever learned his grandmother’s spells, maybe he could have slowed her. She was getting too close. If his misgivings about the state of the site were correct, if what he had guarded for so long might at last be visible, she would have to be stopped.

Alice wasn’t sure what she had signed up for, but it sure as shit wasn’t trekking around to see if a few rocks had shifted in the rain. She scowled to herself. Archaeology had seemed a hell of a lot more interesting before she’d actually started doing it. She remembered the lectures in her intro courses at Brandeis, all those beguiling photographs of statues and mummies. That had been cool, and she’d doodled little sketches of ancient coins and jewels in her notebook margins. Her first actual fieldwork had revealed that archeology was anything but exciting. Her team’s only “discovery” had been a few stones from an old foundation and a handful of potsherds that the dig leader had positively wet himself over. Three weeks of back-breaking digging and cataloguing for that: a footnote to some academic paper no one would ever read.

So she’d looked into doing site surveys. That seemed better. Less actual shouldering of pickaxes and more walking around
taking pictures and sketching. She had a good eye and a better hand, and had even considered being an art major once. She thought she’d hit the jackpot when she was selected by Bowerdale. He was, after all, pretty much the god of the field, even if his tales of past adventurers and the bags of money paid to him by the military got old fast. It had taken him exactly two days—right after some pompous speech about how the old ways were the most reliable, and that there was no substitute for staring through a transit lens with a pencil behind your ear—to suggest he wouldn’t mind getting into her shorts.

She had considered it, even been flattered by his interest, and for a few days had sort of flirted with him in a noncommittal kind of way. At first he had seemed to enjoy it, and she thought she’d found an easy way to stay on his good side, but it soon became clear that he expected something more tangible. She might have done it too. It was, after all, no big deal. But then he tried to stick his tongue in her mouth without asking, and Alice—who liked to make the first move herself—had told him where he could shove it. That had been the end of that. Now he barely looked at her except to complain about the way she was doing something. She had a nagging feeling that the glowing reference letter she had hoped to get from him at the end of all this was dead in the water.

She scowled up at Structure 2.

“Looks like a pile of old rocks,” she muttered aloud. “Which is what it looked like yesterday, and the day before.”

She rubbed a sunburned shoulder where she had a tattoo of a rose twined with barbed wire, two fat drops of blood dripping from the thorns. They’d have been done if Bowerdale had let them use laser measures instead of all the antiquated crap
he insisted was “field tested.” You could pick one up at Home Depot for like a hundred bucks but no, she had to use the leveling rod, as archaeologists have since time immemorial. As used by Morley, Thompson, John Lloyd Stephens, and all those other nineteenth-century geezers. She rolled her eyes and thought,
As used by the fucking ancient Maya themselves
.

Deborah Miller wasn’t much better than Bowerdale. True, she hadn’t shown up at Alice’s bedroom door with a bottle of tequila and an I’m-not-as-old-as-you-think speech, but she had his knack for ignoring her. The woman was clearly out of her depth. Even James said so, and he barely said anything negative about anybody. She was nice enough, Alice supposed, and she had a toughness that deserved some respect, but Miller didn’t like being questioned and that was what Alice did best. In other circumstances, Alice conceded, she might think Deborah Miller was OK, maybe even interesting if some of the stories were true. Like the one about working as an informant for the FBI during a case involving neo-Nazis and ancient Greek gold. But as her
boss
? Forget it.

She frowned and rubbed her arms, which were prickling as the morning’s relative coolness gave way to the ruthless heat of the sun. With her pale skin that never tanned, she had to wear long sleeves in spite of the soaring temperatures. Just as well, she thought. If she bared any more skin, poor James might lose his mind and Bowerdale might try his advances again. Alice snorted. She wasn’t a classic beauty queen, but with her slim figure, light blue eyes, and dark hair, most of the red-blooded men in her orbit seemed to think she was their best option. Lucky her.

“Goddamn Bowerdale,” she said, even though nobody was around to hear. “I wouldn’t mind taking him and throwing him right off the top of that—”

She heard something in the underbrush off to her left and stopped, peering, startled. She could see nothing but vine-strangled trees and an uncanny speckling of crimson flowers, but she was suddenly sure there was someone there.

“James?” she called. “That better not be you, asshole.”

There was no sound in response. She stood there, feeling the heat reflecting onto her from all sides and—behind it somehow—eyes.

She was on the west side of Structure 2, completely cut off from the central court and the others. She was alone. Doubling back would take longer than going forward, so she began to walk quickly, trying to deny her own fear. She glanced involuntarily off into the jungle to her left, stumbling as she did so.

It could have been an animal, she thought, a little desperately, a wild boar maybe. Maybe even a jaguar, which would be scary but kind of cool, so long as it didn’t fucking
eat
her.

For the first time she felt completely alone in the site, as if James and the others were hundreds of miles away, not yards. It was as if she had wandered into this ancient place by herself, a place in which she did not belong, a place that did not want her. She quickened her pace till she was jogging. Somehow, over the noise of her footfalls and increasingly labored breathing, she sensed movement back there in the trees. She began to run flat-out.

Alice was not athletic. Exercise bored her, and though she had cut down, she still smoked half a pack a day. But now she sprinted ahead under the shadow of the great ruined structure as if she were a marathoner. Fear made her legs churn. She felt as if she was trespassing, as if she was the first person to step on this path in a thousand years. All around her in the changeless forest,
she felt eyes in the leaves. Then, breathless, she rounded a corner and saw someone. A woman, tall and lanky...

Deborah Miller.

Alice called out, a joyous and unguarded shout of relief.

Deborah barely saw Alice come running around the corner because she was staring too intently at the space where the sinkhole had been. The girl looked rattled and seemed to have been running, but Deborah didn’t wait to hear explanations.

“Come here,” she called, and started pushing her way through the vegetation.

The girl was saying something in a panicky voice, glancing behind her, but she stopped as soon as she got close enough to see.

“Whoa,” she said. “What the hell is that?”

“That,” said Deborah, “was a
rejollada.”

“A what?”

“A sinkhole caused by erosion from collecting water. The water drains through the limestone but the sinkhole itself does not connect to the water table below. That’s what it was.”

“What is it now?”

“Now,” said Deborah, “it’s a
cenote
.”

The storm had caused a torrent in the underground rivers, and that torrent had caused massive subsidence under the sinkhole. Now the hole went all the way down to dark, rubble-strewn water.

“The water runs right under the site?” said Alice, who had forgotten her former panic.

“Yep,” said Deborah. She climbed to the edge of what had been the fifty-foot-wide
rejollada
but now had a yawning hole in its center about half that width. She peered down but could only see the contours of a dark cavern below.

“So everything, the pyramids and...everything, is sitting right on top of an underground river,” Alice said.

“At least one pyramid is,” said Deborah, noticing that for once the girl’s sneer had been replaced with a look of wonder. “There are several sinkholes around the site where the ancient Maya punched through the rock to reach the water below. There’s a well they made like that on the east side of the site.”

“We’ll have to cancel everything,” said Alice. “Nothing will be stable.”

“No,” said Deborah. “We won’t. But we will have to change our plans.”

Deborah crawled to the edge and looked down. The first few meters were a straight drop, but below that the hollow opened up into a cavern. The sunlight flashed on the water perhaps seventy-five or a hundred feet below, and it was bright enough to see ropelike tendrils reaching all the way down to the bottom: roots. Her eye followed them down and then back up. Along the way, a shape caught her gaze like a barb snagging in fabric, and she stopped to stare.

What the hell is that?

There was a square opening in the upper northern quadrant of the bowl perhaps twenty feet below her feet. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she realized what she was seeing.

“Steps,” she whispered.

And now that she recognized them she could see that the square opening was not simply a natural feature of the rock. It had hard, man-made angles, the sides marked with the telltale lines of regular stone blocks.

It couldn’t be,
she thought.
It just isn’t possible.

Alice, sensing her intensity, came to her side and stared down into the hole.

“What?” she said. “What are you looking at?”

“There’s a passage,” said Deborah. “The entrance must have been back here somewhere, hidden underground.”

“Where does it go?” said Alice.

Deborah looked north into the tangled scrub, but she could see nothing on the surface. She peered back into the hole.

She turned to look at the opposite side of the cavern, the side closest to the acropolis, and though the light was lower on this side she saw it immediately: a matching square hole, this one with fractured masonry where some of the blocks had been torn out by the collapsing rubble. The passage had extended right across the
rejollada.

“Where does it go?” Alice repeated.