“Still have a bad feeling?”
“More and more,” said Remi. “I’m just going along with this to show you what a great sport I am.”
“We’re almost in,” Sam said.
Remi stepped back from the opening and let Sam haul the last few rocks away. Then he said, “We’re in.” He stood, took the flashlight from his pack, aimed it into the opening, and crawled inside.
There was silence. Remi sat still for a minute, listening. Finally, her curiosity overpowered her caution. She took her own flashlight out and entered.
As soon as she was inside, she realized that the space was large and hollow. Her flashlight beam caught white stucco walls covered with realistic murals of old Mayans. There were many glyphs, and between them were pictures of dozens of men in feathered headdresses and wearing jaguar skins. Some carried short spears, round shields, clubs with sharp obsidian teeth. They were going into battle.
When her flashlight reached the floor, Remi jumped and gave a small cry. Lying on the other side of the chamber was a corpse. The body was in a state similar to the mummified man she and Sam had found on Volcán Tacaná in Mexico. His skin was brown and leathery, his body skeletal. He was lying near a second doorway. There were strips of cloth, a tanned belt, and boots on him, and beside him was a broad-brimmed felt hat.
Sam appeared in the second doorway. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you.”
“Every day is Halloween lately,” she said. She knelt by the dead man and gave him a closer look. “What do you suppose got him — a jaguar? His clothes are torn, and he has big wounds.”
“Take a look at his revolver.”
Remi saw the old-fashioned, long-barreled revolver by his right hand. She bent low to look into the front of the cylinder and then rotated it. “He fired all six.”
“Right. And I don’t see any jaguar bones.”
“Do you recognize the gun?”
“It looks like a Colt Single Action Army, which would date it — and him — at 1873 or later.”
She said, “His skull is crushed on the left side.”
“That was one of the details I was going to mention after we were outside in the daylight.”
“This man was clubbed to death,” she said. “He was murdered.” She got up, and they both walked into the inner chamber. Inside was a low bier made of cut stone. On it lay a skeleton adorned with a gold breastplate, a strip of gold with carved jade stones for a headpiece, jade ear plugs. There was an obsidian knife, a club, and a large number of carved-jade and beaten-gold objects.
“The tomb is intact,” said Remi. “How can it possibly be intact? Whoever killed that guy out there must have known there was gold in here.”
Sam and Remi both heard a shuffling sound and then another. They stepped to the doorway. Gathered in the outer chamber were a half dozen people from the nearby town — Señora Velasquez; Pepe, the mechanic; Señor Alvarez, the restaurant owner, his son, and two others they didn’t know. Three of them were holding guns of some description, the others knives, and all of them looked furious.
Sam said, “Hello, ladies and gentlemen.”
Señora Velasquez said, “Come out of there very slowly and carefully.”
“We meant no harm,” Remi said. “We just saw that—”
“Quiet or you’ll be as dead as he is.”
Sam and Remi walked past the armed townspeople into the sunlight. Waiting in a large circle around them were about fifty other residents of Santa Maria de los Montañas. Some of them held machetes, others axes or hatchets. There were a couple of baseball bats. A few people held hunting rifles or shotguns, and there were pistols nearly as old as the one beside the man in the tomb.
The menace was palpable. The rifles and shotguns were aimed at Sam and Remi. There were two men with ropes, which seemed even more ominous than the weapons.
A man they had not seen before stepped out of the crowd. He had the sun-darkened face and sinewy arms of a farmer. He looked at Sam and Remi with eyes as hard as obsidian. “I’ll volunteer to dig graves. We can throw the bodies down from here and bury them where they fall. Who will help me?”
Chapter 27
“I’ll help dig graves.” A second man stepped forward and joined the first on the outside of the circle. After that, a couple of others just waved hands and joined the burial crew.
Pepe the mechanic stepped into the circle. “Remember, we have no reason to make these people suffer. Someone shoot them in the head with a hunting rifle and make it fast.”
Sam spoke loudly. “We would like to know why you would want to harm us at all.” He whispered to Remi, “Help me with the language.”
Remi called out, “We came to your town twice. Both times, we told whoever would listen what we were doing here. Yesterday we told Father Gomez what we were going to do today. We came with the most peaceful of intentions.”
Señor Alvarez, the restaurant owner, said, “I’m sorry that you have to die. Nobody here hates you. But you’ve found this place. It’s a sacred place to us. We’re not rich people, but we have a rich past. Our town was founded as part of this complex nearly two thousand years ago. This was a refuge where the people of the city twenty miles to the east came after they were defeated in war. This mesa is one of the highest places in Alta Verapaz. The king and a few loyal survivors came here, turned and fought. Then, hundreds of years later, a period of war came again. Then again. Each time a king of the city was defeated, he and his faction fell back to this place and held out. Up here there are the remains of five great kings. When the Spanish soldiers came the first time, the king prepared the place one last time. But they defeated the Spanish again and again and never needed to come here. Instead, they made peace with the priests. The watchtower on the hill was torn down and made into a church. Nobody from this town has ever betrayed its secrets.”
Sam said, “This place can’t be a secret forever. It’s marked on a map in a Mayan codex we found on a volcano in Mexico. It’s shown up on satellite photographs and been noticed by university professors.”
“We don’t have to let you dig up our ancestors and steal their belongings,” said Señora Velasquez. “You’re like Columbus and the Spanish. You think knowing about them makes them yours.”
Remi said, “You don’t have to let us study your special place. If you didn’t want us to climb up here, you could have told us while we were with Father Gomez. We thought we were finding a place nobody knew about.”
There was a roar of derisive laughter as the townspeople looked at one another with grim amusement. One of the men was angry. “You see graves on a satellite photo and think it’s all right to dig them up? It never seems to occur to you people that we know anything about the places where we’ve always lived. It was our ancestors who built these tombs, who made the mesa into a fortress. We’ve all been coming here since we were small children. Do you think we can’t see walls and burial mounds? You think that if we don’t dig up our ancestors and sell their treasures, we must be ignorant.” He turned away from Sam and Remi and took a rifle from one of the men near him. He cycled the bolt to load a round.
“Stop!” The voice was powerful but strained. As everyone turned to look, Father Gomez’s head rose above the rim of the plateau by the trailhead, and he took the last step up onto the plateau. He was panting and wheezing from the long, steep climb. He held up his arms. “Stop! Don’t do this. Arturo, put down that rifle. What you’re about to do is just murder. It has no higher meaning.”
The angry man looked at his feet, then opened the bolt of the rifle and handed it back to its owner.