little passageway, and then this. We hadn’t geosurveyed this section, we had no idea; this is so unusual.’
Jess stared. Her hands were shaking with the tension. This discovery was a revelation: it altered everything — as Larry had said. The large, low antechamber, concealed beyond the main tombs of Huaca D, contained more skeletons than any other Moche tomb to date. Here they were, laid out in little sleeping rows.
All of them children.
Dan stooped to the nearest line of small and silent bones. ‘We’re guessing they were first sedated, at least I hope they were sedated, maybe with nectandra, then their throats were slit and their chests cut open. Here, look, you can see the breastbone. This one here.’
Jessica leaned. The breastbone was crudely severed. ‘A heart extrusion?’
Dan sighed and nodded and rubbed a dusty hand over his dusty face. He looked wearied: even in the quarter-light of this dismal adobe hall she could see he was beyond tired. He was vanquished. But his voice retained some professional lucidity.
‘Probably they used a tumi blade. To hack the children open. Alive. Some of these fibrous remains imply… look-’ He pointed. ‘The children were tied by the hands and feet before the ritual began.’
Jess felt sick. First the horrors of the witches’ market, now this. She gazed at her shaking hand, and wrestled away the terror.
Dan was intoning now, like a priest who had lost his faith, who nonetheless had to deliver a sermon for Easter, ‘The remains are, we think, the earliest evidence of ritualized blood sacrifice and of the severe mutilation of children, the earliest evidence that has so far been seen in South America. It may even be the biggest mass sacrifice of children… anywhere in the ancient world.’
Picking up a flashlight, Jess played it along the dormitory of bones. The quiet little children were all present and correct, all tied and hacked and dismembered, and left here. In neat little rows. She remembered her own nursery school, in sunny LA, when they would sleep in the afternoon. This was like that, but satanically upended. Here was a kindergarten of evil. Like the children of the Goebbels family, in the Berlin bunker, schlaft gut, schlaft gut, meine kindern.
‘It’s ghastly,’ was all she could say. ‘Ghastly. Just… just ghastly.’ Her flashlight played across the hideous space and picked out a different bone, a larger, cruder, horsier skull. Just visible in the morbid shadows at the far corner of the antechamber. ‘What’s that?’
‘A llama head.’ Dan’s voice expressed a shrug. ‘There are other llama remains all around. Jay thinks they probably had a feast. As they did it. Eating llama as they killed the children.’
‘Horrible.’
‘Possibly they played music as they did it. Feasting and music, and killing their children.’
‘How many corpses?’
‘Eighty.’
Jess swayed in the darkness. The orphanage of sleeping bones stared back at her, reproachfully. A gassed Montessori; a tiny Holocaust school for infants. It was worse than Jessica’s experience of Calcutta. It reminded her of her father in the hospice. The absolute tyranny of death: the oncoming darkness.
One small skull was tilted to the side, as if the child had tried to sleep as they cut open his chest. Tears sprang to Jessica’s eyes.
‘Are you OK?’ Dan touched her gently on the arm.
‘Yes.’
‘I heard what happened in Chiclayo, eh, Larry told me on the cell — sweetheart, are you sure?’
Her headtorch caught his face. She muttered, ‘Really, I’m fine. It was just a ritual, imitative magic, apotropaic theatre.’
‘Getting rid of the evil we bring? Ah, yes.’
The adobe dust hung in the ancient air. She said, ‘They think we are the vampire gringos, Dan. Like in the Inca legends of the conquistadors, the white men who eat the fat of the Peruvians: the pishtacas. And they also think we are digging up demons. Digging up the God Who Mustn’t Be Named, the terrible god we cannot identify. That’s what Larry said.’
‘Who knows, they might be right? Eh?’ He gestured across the pitifully neat little remains, the speechless silenced rows of infant skulls and infant femurs, stretching into the darkness of the antechamber. ‘You know, this really is different. Unique. What are we digging up? Mm? What kind of people? Maybe it should be closed down.’
‘You should be pleased.’ She tried to sound sincere, even encouraging. ‘This is a tremendous find. As you say, Dan, there probably isn’t anything like it in the literature.’
‘Oh, of course. But…’
‘But what?’
He seemed to shiver. ‘Do you mind if we step outside?’
Stepping outside meant a short, muddy crawl through the zigzagging adobe corridors into the wider tomb which had contained the insect corpses and the coral headdresses, only some of which had been removed. The ground was now carefully latticed with strings, marking out square-metre grids. A low wooden bench had been brought into the tomb, where the archaeologists could have lunch and talk. They both sat down. The great mud tomb was otherwise empty.
‘The child sacrifices make nonsense of it all,’ Dan said at last.
‘Sorry?’
‘The pottery in the antechamber with the children is precisely datable. By style.’
Jessica was perplexed. ‘And?’
‘ It is not coincident with any El Nino event. There were no El Nino events which might have, eh, triggered these sacrifices.’
With his hard hat taken off, Dan’s hair hung lank and lifeless. Jess stared away, embarrassed somehow. She looked along the lamplit tomb, where the princess had been laid out. The princess who cut off her own feet during her life, for no reason at all.
Dan remained quiet, so Jess reached out a hand and squeezed his hand. ‘Which means your theory is wrong.’
‘Yep. Which means that my damn theory is wrong. I’ve been wrong all along. And you were right, Jessica, the Moche were just… they were just…’
‘Evil?’
‘Perverse. Deviant. Wicked. Psychotic. Maybe downright evil. I don’t know. Whatever you like.’ He ran tired fingers through his hair. ‘I’m not sure I want to do this any more.’
‘But you’ve made a major discovery!’ Jess could feel her lover’s anguish. It was unjustified. He was beating himself up too much. ‘Dan, come on. Don’t say this. So you found something that changes the paradigm, but you still found it. You! You did it.’
‘And the guy with the gun?’ Dan looked at her. ‘And Casinelli? And now you in Chiclayo? This may embarrass you, Jessica but I don’t care. You know that I have strong feelings for you. Heck, you know I love you. Don’t you? And I know you don’t love me but there it is. And I cannot put you in any more danger.’ He talked over her protests, and continued, ‘Whatever this is we’ve somehow strolled into, we’ve stirred up something we don’t understand. I’m not risking lives any more. And I’m not telling lies any more.’
Jess caught the word. And examined it. And asked, ‘ Lies? ’
He rubbed some dust off his shirt, another hockey team T-shirt now stained red with adobe mud, like unwashable old blood from a horrible fight.
‘What lies, Dan?’
‘McLintock. When that… the gunman asked me about him, I knew exactly who he meant. I knew very well.’
‘Sorry?’
Daniel Kossoy could barely bring himself to look her in the face. But he tried. ‘Archibald McLintock was a Scottish historian. He visited me, very discreetly, in Zana about a year and a half ago. Long before you came. No. Wait.’ He lifted a hand to halt her questions. ‘Wait, Jess. Let me finish. He wanted, eh, to know about the Moche, everything. Especially the ulluchu: he was fascinated by the mythos of the ulluchu, the blood of the gods.’
‘Why?’
