would weigh ten tons or more, making it impossible for any more Zipacna to escape from the underworld.
As the Chollokwan men left to get more stone, Danielle rested against the wall, the sledgehammer heavy in her hands. Her gaze drifted around the room and then back to the ruined altar, where a trace of light caught her eye.
“What is that?” she said, gazing at a soft glow amid the debris.
As Hawker and McCarter looked on, she leaned the sledgehammer against the wall and stepped toward the object. Crouching amid the dust and pulverized rock, she cleared some of debris aside and the glow brightened marginally. She reached down and pulled a glowing object from the mess. It was a triangular-shaped stone, the size of a large dictionary.
She gazed at it, wiping the dirt and dust from its surface, running her fingers over its smoothed corners and beveled edges. It seemed to be made of a clear substance, and it felt like some type of heavy acrylic.
“It’s warm,” she said, carefully feeling the object.
“What is it?” Hawker asked.
She shook her head. “I have no idea. Unless it’s from …” She considered the fact that the Martin’s crystals and the small radioactive cubes had sat in revered positions on the altar. It made her wonder if she might have found what she was looking for after all.
Upon rescuing Susan and finding the cave to be barren, she’d concluded there was nothing there to be found. But after Kaufman’s explanation of the electromagnetic radiation, she’d begun to doubt that assessment. The electro-magnetic pulse had to come from somewhere.
“Remember the Tulan Zuyua story,” McCarter said. “The parsing out of the gods, their essence given in special stones.”
Danielle nodded and as she stared at the stone once again, a presence appeared in the foyer to the altar room. She turned to see the Old One standing there, another native supporting him. He looked as frail as ever, but his eyes were bright. He walked slowly toward Danielle, regarding the glowing stone as he went. He did not seem to be surprised.
Without Devers there to translate, they did not understand him.
“I think he says it’s the heart of Zipacna,” McCarter guessed.
She looked down at the stone and then tried to hand it to the Old One, but he refused, holding a hand out and pushing it gently back toward her. He looked into the pit, logjammed by the growing pile of rubble. Seeming pleased, he turned and walked over to McCarter. He opened the palm of his hand and displayed a small object.
McCarter looked closely. It was a compass, one that looked to be a hundred years old. It had to have been Blackjack Martin’s.
McCarter took it almost reverently.
“For the journey,” the Old One said, with words McCarter recalled from the meeting in the village.
Next, he went to Hawker, presenting him with an obsidian spear tip, before touching the latest of Hawker’s wounds and speaking the Chollokwan word for warrior.
Hawker bowed in thanks and the Old One turned back to Danielle, placing his hands together like a yoga master once again. Looking her in the eyes, he spoke the word
McCarter recognized that word too. “He’s calling you the Old One,” McCarter explained. “But it doesn’t mean old, it means
Danielle nodded, surprised by the compliment. She mimicked the Old One’s actions with her hands and smiled at him. He smiled back, then turned and, with the help of his assistant, began to walk away.
The next day, with several Chollokwan warriors as escorts, the NRI group left the clearing, in the midst of what had become a variable but near-constant rain. What had been a four-day hike in dry weather became two weeks of slogging through the mud. And even as they reached the river beside the Wall of Skulls, the skies darkened and the rain poured down upon them once again.
Danielle shivered in the cold, but her eyes caught sight of things she hadn’t noticed before: fine mist spread on a fern like beads of liquid silver, fuchsia-colored orchids among the trees and a brilliant yellow flower closing up suddenly just as the downpour began.
She’d been in the rainforest for over a month and, until now, hadn’t noticed any of it. She almost wished they would encounter another line of industrious ants for McCarter to point out and marvel over.
From the Wall of Skulls they turned south and hiked back toward the Negro. Five days later they hailed a passing vessel—a diesel-powered barge loaded down with mahogany and trailing a second bundle of logs in the river behind it. As they clambered aboard, Danielle looked back for their Chollokwan escort, but the natives had already gone.
Aboard the vessel, the NRI team thanked their new hosts, politely deflecting questions about their battered and grungy appearance, until eventually they were left alone to ponder their own unanswered thoughts.
McCarter found himself spending a great deal of energy thinking about the temple they had left behind. Despite what they’d learned, it remained in the greater sense a mystery. One that left him to guess, mostly, with big gaps in what they could prove or even grasp—much like the study of archaeology itself. Still, in a private discussion, he offered a theory of the temple they’d found. He looked at Danielle. “I admit to having a hard time accepting what you suggested, about the cave and the body. But like you, I can’t explain it any other way. Especially considering what we found,” he said, referring to the stone in her pack.
“If you’re right, the deformed body we found was probably one member of a group. A team of people or perhaps even test subjects in an experiment who came back in time. When they got here they found a world that did not agree with them, sun and rain that burned their skin. With few other options to choose from, they forced the natives who lived here to build that temple as a cap over the cave, training the natives to use rope and tackle and stone. Imposing themselves as demigods in the process, perhaps even over the nascent beliefs these people had begun to develop. In the
Susan sat next to McCarter. “I’ve been thinking about the heroes who vanquished Zipacna,” she said. “They were shown to have trapped him. But he’s never described as being killed, just subdued beneath the mountain of stone. I wonder if that was supposed to be some kind of warning, if the original tellers of the story knew the Zipacna could get out again if the temple was opened.”
“A warning, hidden in plain sight,” Danielle said. She looked at the water gliding past. “Like the floating body we found.”
McCarter nodded, guessing the Chollokwan had dumped the man in the river as a warning to the Nuree tribe, but also, knowing what the water did to the Zipacna, they could be sure the larva growing inside him would not survive.
“Honestly,” McCarter said, “I could see this place influencing many of the Mayan legends. The evil beings of the underworld: the Xibalbans, the wooden people, Seven Macaw and Zipacna. We tend to think linearly in the Western world, one answer for one question. But in many older cultures, things were not as black and white. Oral tradition meant constant changes to the story. Groups intermingled, often borrowing from one another and repeating themselves with different variations. From the same base come different versions of the truth.”
Danielle looked his way. “I can understand that. I came here looking for the source of those crystals, thinking they were part of some machine, a creation from a more advanced time. They were parts to us, really—like spark plugs or fuel injectors—and we wanted the whole engine. But to the Chollokwan they were sacred objects that could help bring the rain. Relics from the original Black Rain. And who’s to say they’re wrong? We returned them to the tribe and the rains came. Two versions of the truth, both correct in the eyes of the respective beholders.”
McCarter listened and nodded, then looked over to Hawker, who had been quiet since they had left the clearing. McCarter wondered what Hawker was thinking. While his own mind tended to concentrate on what they could figure out, he’d noticed that Hawker tended to focus on things more remote than the question at hand.
“Any thoughts?”
Hawker smiled, as if he’d been caught at something. “It just makes me wonder,” he said. “I’ve been on a few journeys in my life. Seven days across unpaved desert in a truck, two months on a freighter that seemed to find one storm after another. I wouldn’t have made those without something important to do on the other end. But this,
