Curses!

you couldn't get very far without them. Vines and roots were everywhere, flourishing and intrusive, and every archaeologist of the Maya had had the frustrating experience of working for days to free something, then becoming preoccupied with something else for a week or two, and returning to the original stela or carving to find it more deeply embedded in vegetation than before. All the major sites employed teams of machete-wielding workmen to chop back the jungle continually. Without them the long-lost cities would be engulfed again in a few seasons—as indeed many of them had been.

The lichen-stained skeleton in the entryway of the Priest's House had been there a lot longer than a season or two; longer than a century or two. The dead gray color of the bone, the dry, crumbly edges, the absence of even a dehydrated shred of tendon or ligament all suggested three to four hundred years. The vegetation was a clue to time too. Intrusive as it was, it couldn't have taken less than three centuries to choke the vestibule the way it had. There were fungous gray plants hanging from the roof—where you could see the roof—pulpy mosses oozing from the mortar of the stone walls, tightly packed trunks and roots and vines everywhere, springing from the inch or two of black soil and rotting vegetable matter that had blown in over the centuries, a grain or two at a time, to cling anywhere it could.

And the skeleton had surely been there longer than the vegetation. That was obvious from the way the roots of some of the oldest plants, gnarled, bulbous, woody monsters with warped and blackened leaves, twined around and through the bones. Sometimes they sprang from the bones. Wormlike tendrils crawled from the eye sockets and the nasal cavity, from the shoulder joints and the vertebral foramina; even from the braincase, erupting in a thick, ugly snarl from the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through which the spine joins the brain. The leisurely violence of their grip had slowly splintered many of the bones and twisted the skeleton into grotesque contortions. The pelvis was cracked and turned backward, the skull almost upside down.

He had used the machete to chop some elbow room for himself, but for the last two and a half hours he'd been working more delicately, with shears, knife, and dental pick. Now, although he still had a long way to go, he'd pruned enough to have his first close look.

The skeleton was on its left side, curled in the fetal position. This was archaeology's most commonly encountered burial position—it required the smallest hole—but this body hadn't been buried. It lay on the stone floor just inside the entryway, squarely blocking it. He could see a few scattered jade beads beneath it, and near one forearm was a thin, crumpled metal bracelet. The clothing had long since rotted away.

It was a male this time; Harvey would certainly have pointed out the overhanging brow ridge, the sturdy mastoid processes, and the rectangular orbits of the skull. And through a net of straw-colored root tendrils, much of the pelvis could be seen. That too was distinctively masculine. Gideon didn't have to apply the anthropologist's literal rule of thumb for the greater sciatic notch—(stick your thumb in it; if there's room to wiggle it, it's female; if not, it's male)—to see that there was hardly room for a pinky, let alone a thumb. Besides, a disc of obsidian gleamed darkly in the dark tangle beneath the skull, and it was the stern Bishop Landa himself who had noted disapprovingly that “the men, and not the women, wear mirrors in their hair.'

It seemed to be a man of middle age. Too early yet to come up with anything precise, but the cranial sutures were almost obliterated except for a few spots on the Iambdoid, so he had probably been in his forties anyway, an estimate supported by the carious, deeply worn brown teeth. (The Maya had lived on stone-ground corn—which meant that they consumed a lot of corn-ground stone as well—and the result was molars that were often eroded to raw little stumps by the time they were thirty. Anyone who thought that dental cavities had come in with refined sugar had never seen an early American Indian skull.)

He took half-a-dozen flash pictures with the Minolta single-lens reflex and made a quick sketch. Then he turned the skull to see the face better, cringing a little at the sight of the snaky, freshly severed roots bursting from the eye sockets, as in an edifying carving on a medieval coffin. The struggling roots had first pried the bones in and around the sockets apart, then gripped them firmly where they were, so that the face of the skull seemed out of focus, with some parts of it closer than others.

He unscrewed the clamp on the lamp tripod and brought the bulb as far down as it would come, shifting it to throw its light laterally across the skull. All the little bumps and grooves were thrown into sharp, shadowed relief, and he leaned closer to see what there was to see. He blinked, surprised, then used his sensitive fingertips to explore further, particularly around the eye sockets. Odd, the individual bones of the orbit hadn't been pulled apart over the years at all. They'd been shattered. And most of the cracked shards of bone had been forced inward, not outward, which was not at all the way you'd expect roots thrusting out from the braincase to do it.

It was almost as if...

Again he sat back on his heels, frowning.

It was almost certainly as if...

* * * *

...almost certainly as if the eyes had been gouged out,” Gideon said, looking from Abe to the others. “In fact,” he added, “there's no ‘almost’ about it.'

The crew was gathered in the lacy shade of a few drowsing acacias, sitting among the masonry blocks of the West Group. It was the only sizeable shaded area in the plaza; the rest was scrubby lawn, open to the sun. As a result it was a favorite place for lunch and early-afternoon snoozing. Most lunches, like today's, were relaxed show-and-tells at which the staff chatted about the morning's progress.

Everyone except Emma and Preston Byers was eating boxed sandwich lunches from the hotel. The Byerses, having forsaken meat some time before, were making an abstemious meal of soy cakes packed in plastic envelopes, mung bean sprouts they claimed to have grown on the windowsill of their room, and bananas.

They had, it seemed, sold their fast-food empire and now ran Wellbeing, a mail-order supplier of New Age essentials for living. Like Leo, they had brought with them an ample supply of brochures, one of which Gideon had been unable to avoid.

'The Midwest's gourmet holistic-macrobiotic supermarket,” it said. “Bulk organic grains (whole-milled), rice koji, masa delight, chewable bee-pollen tablets (a proven skin rejuvenator), dandelion thunder, tofu cream cheese, 30 varieties of kelp (unsurpassed for cleansing the colon), nori, fucus tips, 120 varieties of natural nut butter. Books on therapeutic drumming, Tibetan stress reduction, other life-enhancing studies. Wide range of energy-balancing crystals.'

At Gideon's words Emma had looked significantly at Preston, who continued to chew, smiling absently at her. Worthy Partridge stopped munching his turkey sandwich and looked up uneasily, as if, whatever this meant, it couldn't be good news. But this was his standard reaction to new things.

Leo Rose also responded in his characteristic way, with his honk of a laugh. “The curse of Tlaloc lives,' he whispered.