“What’s your fallback if everything goes belly-up?”
Jack gave Costas a harrowed look as they and Jeremy began to push the Zodiac back into the surf. “I don’t have one.”
Three hours later, after a jolting ride along a jungle track, they came to the entrance to Chichen Itza, some sixty kilometres inland from the beach. The ruins of the ancient city covered a vast area, though only the central precinct had been cleared of jungle and restored. Grey limestone structures reared above the tree canopy ahead, but Jack knew that all round them lay ruins submerged in the undergrowth that had entombed the city in the centuries since its abandonment. Some of the images seemed startlingly familiar, pyramids and colonnaded temples, but others were not: sacrificial platforms, terrifying hybrid animal and human sculptures, images that seemed from another planet. It was eerie, as if something were not quite right, as if they were entering a film set of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia where some attempt had been made at historical accuracy, but much had been left to the imagination of a designer rooted in some particularly lurid science fiction.
Jack was in the front seat of the four-wheel drive provided for them by the Mexican archaeological authorities, and as he opened the door he was greeted by an official who ushered them into the site. A few days earlier an earth tremor had caused concern about the stability of the ancient structures, and the site had been closed off to tourists while an evaluation was carried out. Jack thanked the official and found a shady place to unfold his map. He was joined by Costas. They were wearing shorts, T-shirts and jungle boots, but the summer heat was overwhelming and Costas was already dripping with sweat.
“Thinking fondly of our iceberg?” Jack asked, with some amusement.
“No way.” Costas puffed himself up, but looked doleful and hot under his panama hat. “Remember, I’m Greek? Heat’s in the blood.”
“Right.”
Jeremy walked over to them after talking in Spanish with the official, and pointed out a route on the map. “I was forced to spend a summer here as an undergraduate on a field training project, before I saw the light,” he said ruefully. “I’ll try to give a balanced account, but I have to tell you this place gave me nightmares. The Vikings were therapy after this.”
“What kind of time period are we looking at?” Costas asked.
“The Maya were one of the great early civilisations, as you know,” Jeremy said. “They flourished here around AD 300 to 900, that’s from about the end of the Roman Empire to the Viking age. But by the mid-eleventh century this place was ruled by the Toltecs, a warrior caste from the north. The Maya were still here, but they became the underclass, enslaved and brutalized. The Toltecs swept into the Yucatan around the time Harald was doing his stint in the Varangian Guard. A lot of what you see here isn’t Maya but dates from the Toltec period.”
They trudged along the path under the canopy of the jungle, passing the occasional iguana and a band of ring-tailed monkeys, their chattering competing with the raucous shrieks of toucans and evil-looking blackbirds. The heat was staggering, far more humid than Jack had experienced at archaeological sites in the Mediterranean, and he struggled to imagine people living normal lives in a place so far from the ameliorating effects of the sea. After a few minutes they came out into a wide grassy precinct surrounded by colossal stone buildings. It was an extraordinary sight, the quintessential image of ancient Mesoamerican civilization, dominated by an imposing temple that rose in stepped tiers like a pyramid.
“Don’t try to tell me these people weren’t influenced by the Egyptians,” Costas said, wiping the sweat from his face.
“That’s the Kukulkan Pyramid, the focal point of Chichen Itza.” Jeremy led them past the pyramid as he talked. “But that building over there is where most of the sacrifices took place,” he said. “The Temple of the Warriors. You can see the stone altar at the top where the living victims were tied down and had their hearts ripped out.”
“Delightful.” Costas grunted. “But I thought all that kind of stuff was exaggerated by the Spanish.”
“Nope.” Jeremy led them to the north side of the precinct, past a structure where Jack saw a carved stone glyph that looked strikingly familiar. Jeremy saw him hesitate and called back. “The eagle-god. It’s exactly the same as the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows. I’m sure it came from here.” He stopped beside the next building, a wide stone platform about his height, and waited for the other two to catch up. “You asked about sacrifice. This one’s my favourite. It’s called the Tzompantli, the platform of the Skulls. The rotting heads of enemies were exhibited here, and just in case you needed reminding they were carved round the platform edge.” They saw that the sides of the platform were covered with hundreds of leering skulls, their jaws gaping and eyes wide open in terror and anguish. “To cap it all, you have to imagine that all the buildings here, the pyramid and the Temple of the Warriors, this platform, were painted red.”
“With human blood, I assume.” Costas traced his finger over one of the skulls and grimaced. “I know we had our bad episodes-the Roman Colosseum, the Spanish Inquisition and all that-but genocide and mass murder were never institutionalised, never part of our way of life. For these people it was normal. You’re born here, you get sacrificed. There was something deeply dysfunctional about this society.”
“The Maya had quite a lot going for them,” Jeremy replied cautiously. “Amazing architecture and art, phenomenal economic organisation. States that would easily have vied with the early city-states of the Near East.”
“Four thousand years before the Maya,” Jack said.
“And the Maya had no bronze,” Costas added.
“Or iron, or wheels.”
“Right.” Jeremy smiled wryly. “This society was the pinnacle of what was going on in the Americas before the Spanish conquest. But everything went apeshit when the Toltecs showed up. They were the horror warriors of ancient Mesoamerica, the SS of their day. Everything you’ve heard about the Aztecs, those accounts of mass human sacrifice recorded by the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, magnify that several times and put it back five hundred years. Imagine the heart of darkness, apocalypse now, this is the place. The Maya themselves weren’t exactly averse to human sacrifice, but when the Toltecs arrived they turned this place into a death camp.”
“No wonder Reksnys settled here,” Costas murmured. “He would have felt right at home.”
“The fact is, for medieval Europeans this place would have been their vision of hell,” Jack said. “For the Vikings it would have exceeded their worst nightmares about the end of the world, about Ragnarok. For any prisoner brought here it would have been a one-way ticket to Dante’s Inferno.”
“There’s something else I want you to see,” Jeremy said, walking briskly on. “Follow me.” They passed the Platform of the Skulls and out of the central precinct, and then followed Jeremy along a wide processional way that led down a shallow gradient and through the jungle to the north. After about two hundred metres they scrambled down an irregular rocky slope and stood on the edge of an eroded platform. In front of them was a vast sinkhole, some fifty metres across and twenty metres deep, its rim overhung with lush greenery and the limestone walls receding inwards through a series of striated ledges. The pool at the bottom was a putrid green, covered with a dense layer of algae and fallen vegetation. There was no access point to the water, and they could see that for anyone unfortunate enough to slip off the platform there would be no escape.
“The Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza,” Jack murmured. “I’ve always wanted to see this.”
“Cenote?” Costas said.
“A Spanish word, from the Mayan dzonot, meaning ‘sacred well, well of sacrifice,’” Jeremy explained. “I was telling you about it on the beach. The whole of the Yucatan was once a coral reef, then it became a limestone plateau during the Ice Age when the sea level lowered. Over millions of years rainwater percolated into the limestone and created a huge labyrinth of caves and tunnels, filled with stalagtites and stalagmites. Then at the end of the Ice Age, eight thousand years ago, the sea level rose again and the system flooded. Caves with ceilings that remained above water eventually collapsed, creating sinkholes like this one.”