I went to the tomb site at nine and found John shaking the sifter. He wore a red bandanna tied over his nose and mouth to block the clouds of dust that rose as he shook the rectangular screen, sifting potsherds and stone chips from the dirt. When I hailed him, he laid the sifter down, waited a moment for the dust to clear, then pulled down the bandanna, exposing clean skin. ‘We’re finding chips of flint,’ he said. ‘And a few large potsherds. And we have something that looks a hell of a lot like a wall.’
The flint was a good sign. Generally, the fill that led to Mayan burials and tombs contained flint chips.
The workman who was carrying a bucket of dirt up the eight stone steps from the lower level grinned when he saw me, recognizing the opportunity for a break. He asked if I wanted to take a look at the work so far. His grin widened when I said yes, and he called down to the other two workmen. Their jeans were stiff with dirt; their bare chests were powdered with white limestone dust. I offered each one a cigarette and they retired to the shade to smoke.
I stepped down into the tunnel and blinked for a moment in the sudden darkness. The air was humid and smelled of sweat. The passageway ran about six feet beyond the last step, dark and narrow enough to be oppressive. A pickax, a trowel, a whisk broom, and a bucket lay on the stone floor where the men had abandoned them.
John was right: the stones at the end of the passageway did look like a hastily constructed wall. The stones were not as neatly aligned as the stones of the side walls, but they were not as jumbled as the ones that the workmen had extracted from the passageway.
‘What do you think?’ John asked. He had stopped on the bottommost step. ‘A dead end?’
‘Have them clean it up a bit,’ I said, pointing to the side walls. The corner where the walls met the floor was filled with dirt. ‘They’re getting careless. Document this, then go on through.’
I took the larger sherds back to Tony for analysis. I left the sherds, described briefly the situation at the tomb site, and retreated to my hut to rest. The fever made me weary, lightheaded.
That evening, I sat in the plaza after dinner, drinking gin and listening to Robin and Tony discuss the sherds. Tony had dated a large gray sherd to the late Pure Florescent Period, at about the time that construction of new buildings at Dzibilchaltún had ceased. He speculated that the largest sherd was a piece of water jar. The clay was coarse-grained and tempered with calcite sand; the jar had been burnished slightly when leather-dry and coated with a layer of wet clay, the slip that gave the jar its gray finish. I did not care about the particulars as much as I did about the conclusion. ‘No earlier than AD 900,’ Tony said. That fit with my estimates and with the date we had deciphered on the capstone of the tomb. Whatever was beyond the wall dated from about the time that the Mayan cities had been abandoned, sometime after the Toltecs had invaded this region.
Tony and Robin went on about the sherd for a long time, but I stopped listening. Maggie sat at a nearby table, writing a letter. Probably a note to a boyfriend back home. Diane shared her lantern light, reading a paperback novel. I watched her, but she never turned a page. Occasionally, she looked up, stared out into the darkness beyond the lantern light, then returned to the same page. She started when I sat down beside her.
‘How was survey?’ I asked her.
‘OK.’
‘The book any good?’
She shrugged and showed me the cover. A romance novel by the look of it. ‘Not much choice in Mérida,’ she said. ‘It was this or a western.’
‘Are you finding archaeology a little dull?’
She shook her head with a quick jerk. ‘Not really.’ She sat with her hands in her lap, clutching the book. She did not look at me. The darkness was all around us. Tony and Robin were absorbed in their discussion; Maggie had left for her hut.
‘What did you and Barbara do this weekend?’ I asked.
‘We visited Chichén Itzá on Saturday.’
‘What did you think of it?’
She bit her lip, staring out into the darkness. ‘I don’t know. I thought… I didn’t like some of the carvings. Skulls. Jaguars holding human hearts. It seemed pretty harsh.’
‘That’s the influence of the Toltecs,’ I said. ‘A group from the Valley of Mexico that invaded this area and took Chichén Itzá as their capital city. Most of the Mayan sites show the Toltec influence in later years. The warrior on the stela you found is a Toltec. The woman at his feet is a Mayan goddess. The original Mayan work is buried beneath the work of their conquerors.’
‘What happened to the Maya?’
I shrugged uncomfortably. ‘They worked the fields and went on living their lives, I suppose. Added the new gods to their pantheon. People who were unwilling to accept the new ways kept quiet or died, I would guess.’ I stopped talking. ‘You must be getting bored with all this.’
‘Not bored.’
I waited, but she did not continue. She gazed off into the shadows, and I could not read the expression on her face. The muscles in her neck were tense. ‘What, then?’ I asked.
She glanced at me. One hand tapped the book restlessly into the palm of her other hand. ‘I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen. Sometimes I’m afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’ My voice was low.
She shrugged, a quick jerk of the shoulders, as if she were shaking off an insect. ‘I don’t know. If I knew, maybe I could do something.’ She shook her head. ‘Or maybe not.’
‘You could go to Cancún,’ I said urgently. ‘I will meet you there after the dig is over. The Caribbean coast is—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay.’
She went to bed shortly after that. I returned to the table with Tony and Barbara and listened to them talk. Tony, I noticed, was not drinking. After a time, I went to bed myself.
The week passed. We were short on workers. The incident with the stela had frightened a number of the older men away. But our luck improved.
I did not see Zuhuy-kak. I looked for her, but I did not see her. When I went walking in the morning to look for her, I met Diane by the cenote. When I went walking in the evening, I met Diane by the Temple of the Dolls. When we met, we returned to camp together in silence. I had little to say to her. I felt I had already said too much, drawn her in too close.
Wednesday was Ahau, the day of the sun, a favorable day. No equipment broke down; no men fell sick. I could not quite shake the fever, and it made me restless and irritable. I was content only when I was sitting at the tomb site, watching the men work. But even there I was plagued by chills and shivering.
I dreamed that night, strange vivid feverish dreams. I remember dancing in the rain, holding an obsidian blade. The moon shone down, almost full, and I was young again. My robes swirled about me. A feeling of power that surged through me, a great ancient power that stemmed from the moon.
Thursday was Imix, the day of the earth monster, a dragon-like creature with a protuberant nose. A good day for digging, for taking things to their roots. Late in the afternoon, Pich finally worked one stone of the wall free, pulling it from the place where it had rested for a thousand years.
I was on site – I spent most of the working day on site – and I went down into the tunnel. Cool moist air blew through the gap in the wall. With a flashlight, I peered through the opening, trying with little success to see what lay beyond the wall. A large open space, a low platform, vague pale shapes that could be pots or skulls – I could see little. The wall was about a yard thick.
The workmen stayed late on Thursday, but at five o’clock it was clear that we would not remove another stone that day. We stopped then, covered the opening with a tarp, and reluctantly left the site.