Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  Jones held her eyes for a long moment, then nodded.

  “OK,” he said. “You want to know everything? Fine. But this stays between us on pain of serious charges leveled...”

  “Yes,” said Deborah, “we know. Get on with it.”

  Jones took a long breath, then said, “Lasers stir up specific kinds of atoms and light comes out. If you reflect those photons back into the excited atoms, still more light is generated, but this time the light comes out only in one direction. All the light has the same wavelength and color—depending on the gain medium, which determines the types of atoms used. Direct all that light and it will incinerate whatever you target. Not surprisingly, the military has been chasing lasers for decades, but they couldn’t generate the power required to do what we wanted them for.”

  “Knocking missiles out of the sky,” inserted Nick.

  “Among other things, yes,” said Jones, “although our goals are pretty modest right now. We’ve tried chemical lasers fuelled with ethylene and nitrogen trifluoride, but they’re too bulky and the chemicals have to be constantly replaced. If these things are going to be successful, they need to generate at the very least a hitting power of about a hundred kilowatts: enough to detonate an incoming mortar round. The chemical lasers didn’t come close, nor did the free electron lasers that were supposed to arm Reagan’s Star Wars program in the eighties. So we went back to the solid state lasers that we were working on back in the sixties using slabs of artificially created corundum: specifically ruby. We’ve made big strides, but the power output is still low, and the crystals heat up too much, so you need a minute or more of cool-down time between each burst, which is no use in a battlefield situation.”

  “And you think,” said Nick, “that the gemstones we found in Ek Balam, of which there are more somewhere in Uxmal, are better.”

  “That’s what it amounts to,” said Jones. “We don’t know exactly what they are because we haven’t seen more than those low-level tests you performed, but the chemical composition is extremely unusual, and yes, the combination of iron and chrome might well enhance the optical properties in ways significantly improving the capability of the laser. But it’s the crystalline structure that’s getting the attention, because it looks like it might lead to considerably less phonon scattering, slower heating, and faster cooling cycles. That means more power ready for rapid use and reuse. Personally, I’m skeptical, but there is no question that they are very fine, very rare stones without flaws, and it is possible—possible—that they may be considerably more efficient than those we have been working with. If they are, we can use them and, more importantly, learn to replicate them. But, like I said, I’m skeptical.”

  “It hardly matters how they work at this point,” said Deborah. “It’s about what this dealer—Dimitri—thinks and what he is prepared to do to get hold of them.”

  “It’s also about who he might sell them to,” added Nick.

  “He might sell them to us,” said Jones. “But only if we offer him the most. More likely, they’ll end up in the hands of military scientists in rogue nations or undesirable organizations. We have intel to suggest he’s talking to practically everybody; and you can imagine what top brass thinks of rogue nations or terrorists building portable military lasers faster and more powerful than ours.”

  “If they could bring down a shell or missile,” said Nick, thinking aloud, “they could bring down aircraft.”

  Jones nodded.

  “With a single burst,” he agreed. “With a rapidly cycling laser you could knock down an entire squadron in seconds while covering your ass from anything incoming. You can do a lot of things with a powerful, rapid-fire laser. If someone—a terrorist organization, for instance, could get hold of a weapon like this, particularly if it’s relatively small and mobile—well, it would be a game changer. We can’t let that happen. If there are more gems buried around here, we need to find them before Dimitri does.”

  Blood and tears, thought Deborah.

  “So where do we look?” asked Nick.

  Jones looked at Deborah. “I was kind of hoping you could tell me,” he said. “Deborah?”

  How the hell should she know? She wasn’t an expert on Uxmal, wasn’t even an expert on the Maya. Hell, she wasn’t even really an archaeologist! She was a museum director. She knew less about this place than all of the people who worked for her. What did she know that could possibly help them now?

  Edward Clifford.

  She knew more than any of the others about him, and suddenly, as she stepped out into the sun and gazed up at the pyramid whose base they were skirting, she thought that that might be enough.

  Maybe. Just maybe.

  She shielded her eyes and stared. The pyramid had stepped levels, and in the center was an opening in the tapering shape of the typical Mayan arch, above it what looked like chambers and structures on the top.

  “We start there,” she said.

  “The Pyramid of the Magician?” said Nick. “There are dozens of structures on this site. Why there?”

  “Because the Pyramid of the Magician is only one of its names,” she said. “The first archaeologists to come here were told a legend about how the pyramid was built in a day by a man who came from the nearby village of Kabah. He was unusually small, something the Maya, for some reason, associated with mystical power. The other name for the structure is the Pyramid of the Dwarf.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  The pyramid was roped off—the only part of the site that was—but a flash of Jones’s badge got them access with no problem. Getting permission to do any kind of excavation, on the other hand, was another matter entirely. There was no sign of anything useful in the stone rooms on the top or in the hollows cut into the pyramid body, neither the one facing the entrance nor the one on the west side that overlooked the Quadrangle of the Nuns. There could, of course, be secret chambers inside or beneath the pyramid itself, but they had no way of knowing and wouldn’t know where to begin digging even if they were sure there was something to be found. From the top they had been able to look out over the whole site, particularly the Quadrangle, above which chairs had been set up in readiness for the evening’s light show. It was supposedly an impressive event, complete with booming soundtrack that echoed across the pyramids, inaugurated in the 1970s during a visit by England’s Queen Elizabeth.

  More royalty, Deborah thought.

  She sat with Nick Reese and Kenneth Jones under a tree at the pyramid’s base and drank water in silence.

  “I could get a fleet of bulldozers and we could level the damned thing,” said Jones, after an hour of pacing in the hot sun.

  “That had better be a joke,” said Deborah.

  “Not sure my government would think the preservation of a Mexican ruin was worth letting weapons technology onto the open market,” he said.

  “Maybe that’s the problem with governments,” said Deborah.

  “Hold it,” said Nick, heading off the spat before it could flare up. “Just explain to me why you think the legend of the pyramid being built by a dwarf is relevant. Because Edward de Clifford was a dwarf? That’s it?”

  “There’s also the witch connection,” she sighed, “though frankly I don’t know what to do with that.”

  “Right,” said Nick. “It’s not like Lady Anne Clifford was a witch!”

  And there it was. Deborah sat up.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “Lady Anne was a witch?”

  “No,” said Deborah. “But she also wasn’t Edward’s mother. Edward’s name wasn’t de Clifford. It was Davis. His mother’s name was Janet. But...oh my God...”

  “What?” said Nick.

  But Deborah just leapt to her feet and snatched out her cell phone, looked at it.

  No signal.

  She glanced up at the pyramid, which was about a hundred feet high, then scanned the horizon. There were no phone towers, but the Great Pyramid over at the south end rose considerably higher than anythi
ng else in the site, including the Pyramid of the Dwarf.

  She began to run.

  She crossed the grass in long, powerful strides, running like a giraffe through the ball court, past the house of the turtles and the western side of the governor’s palace, along a roughly marked dirt path through thin, scrubby trees. At the foot of the Great Pyramid, she paused for breath, then started to climb. The steps were high and narrow with clean, sharp edges, sheer as a ladder, and she did not look down until she reached the top, sweating heavily with the exertion, but all focus on the signal display on her phone. Two bars, which was good enough.

  She tried the hospital first, but Hargreaves had been discharged. She tried Lancaster castle and was told that he was resting at home and no, she could not have his home number. She asked for Barry in the gift shop and had Hargreaves’s number thirty seconds later.

  The professor answered on the second ring.

  “I was wondering when I’d hear from you,” he remarked.

  Deborah began to say some conciliatory things about his injury but he cut her off.

  “We can catch up later, lass,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I thought the de in de Clifford was some old French form, but in the letter he sent to Lady Anne he crossed out “dev” not just “de.” He had started to write his birth name and replaced it with his adopted name: Clifford. I think he was writing Davis, his birth biological mother’s name: Janet Davis. But the vicar at Newchurch warned me about spelling variants, and I’m wondering now if he wasn’t writing Davis, but Device.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Hargreaves. “Then Janet Davis could be...”

  “Jennet Device,” said Deborah. “The nine-year-old girl on whose evidence her mother and the others were convicted of witchcraft and executed in 1612.”

  Hargreaves blew out a low whistle.

  “But that wasn’t the end of her story, was it?” said Deborah. “In 1612, she was a witness for the prosecution, but in 1633, she was a defendant, right?”

  “Right,” said Hargreaves. “She would have been about thirty then, and this time the star witness was an eleven-year-old boy called Edmund Robinson who had axes to grind against a lot of local people and was looking to make some money as a witch finder. Seventeen people were convicted and sent to Lancaster Castle, one of them being Jennet Device—Janet Davis—but the case attracted attention. Several of the women were taken to London to be examined by jurists and medical men for signs of witch marks on their bodies. William Harvey, the king’s physician, who was always close by—the king had had childhood rickets so he kept a good doctor at hand—examined the women for unnatural markings in July, 1634. The king himself interviewed them.”

  Deborah turned to face the stone carved macaws on the temple frieze and said, “Say that again?”

  “The accused were interviewed by King Charles the First himself,” said Hargreaves. “He was curious about witchcraft, as his father James had been, and he was particularly intrigued by this case.”

  “Because he knew the son of one of the accused,” said Deborah. “What happened?”

  “It’s not clear,” said Hargreaves. “The king pardoned them all. The Robinson boy’s story collapsed under cross-examination and the women were sent back to Lancaster, though some of them were still in prison a year or so later, presumably because they had debts to pay off. We don’t know what happened to Jennet. She vanishes from the prison records probably because she died, though she may have been quietly released.”

  Deborah thanked him and promised she would call again soon. She owed him, she said. Again.

  After she had hung up, she sat where she was feeling the hot sun burning her pale arms, gazing out over the site as bees buzzed around her head. The temple at the top was so high that the jungle looked like carpet, level and unbroken by anything except the soft yellow stone of the structures, and when she gazed off to the horizon she could see the curvature of the earth itself as if she was looking out over the ocean.

  So now you know, she said to herself.

  Edward’s fortunes at court rose on his intellect, and perhaps because the king, having suffered rickets as a child, was less quick to see the dwarf’s physical limitations as a sign of evil and corruption. But Edward’s fortunes fell when his biological mother was dragged once more into whatever passed for headlines in the 1630s.

  She thought of the lines from the courtier’s diary that Hargreaves had e-mailed her before his attack: ‘Tis one thing to have a beggar, a whore, and a famous fool for a mother, ‘tis something quite different for that mother’s evil to be made manifest in the shrunken child.

  So. Edward’s mother was charged and brought to London to be gawked at as a witch from the wilds of Lancashire, already famous because of the 1612 trials. How people had found out, she couldn’t guess, but someone had put two and two together and it had all come out, Edward’s humble origins and his mother’s tortured and infamous history. Edward tried to protect her, and the court started whispering and pointing.

  Witch child. Freak.

  The king had protected him as best he could, even protected Jennet, throwing out the trumped-up charges against her—actions that would make Edward a confirmed royalist throughout the Civil War, even if his faith in monarchy fell away thereafter—but he couldn’t protect Edward’s reputation at court. He was damned by association.

  Guilty until proven innocent.

  Since he’d been unable to change what he looked like and who his mother was, Deborah saw now why he had taken one of the crown jewels to Malkin Tower where his mother had lived. Perhaps it was where he’d had also been born, and she suspected that the stone had been buried as a memorial to Jennet Device. She must have been dead by the time Edward came to Mexico. The jewel he had buried there was indeed a kingly gift, a fragment of the crown worn by one who had saved her from execution, though he had not been able to save himself. The king was executed in 1649 and Edward fled the country immediately after.

  Edward had never forgotten either of his mothers, the one who birthed him and the one who raised him, and in different ways—she thought—he loved them both. But Lady Anne was prominent, powerful, and very much alive when Edward met his end. Jennet was none of those things, and it was, she thought, to Jennet that Edward would have consecrated the remaining jewels. Some would lie with the arm he sacrificed for the Mayans he lived with, but the others would lie in his final resting place, and that, she felt sure, would not be somewhere bound to him so much as it was bound to her.

  Nick reached the summit of the pyramid first.

  “You’re fast,” he said breathelessly

  Jones was right behind him, but he clearly didn’t like heights.

  “Next time you need to make a call,” he said, tearing his gaze from the long drop down the side of the structure, “just ask to borrow my satellite phone, OK?”

  “The legend says that the Pyramid of the Magician was built by a dwarf born out of an egg by a witch from Kabah,” said Deborah again, the elements of the story chiming in her mind as she made the connection. “Since the Maya associated dwarves with power and magic, Edward’s height actually helped him for the first time in his life when he came here. He knew he was dying, and he had decided that England might be better off without kings after all, though he had loved one for the favor he had bestowed upon his family. He decided to bury the stones in the earth, in a shrine to his poor, wretched birth mother.”

  “Where?” said Nick, glancing from a pocket map up and over the site spread out below them.

  Deborah reached over, took the map, and flipped it over. On the other side was a set of inset archaeological plans to other smaller sites in the Uxmal region: Sayil, Labnah, and Kabah. In the last of these, in a scattered site split by Highway 261, was a remote building.

  “There,” she said.

  It was labeled simply “The Witch’s House.”

  Chapter Seventy

  Marissa Stroud had almost reached Merida when the pho
ne rang. She had been driving nonstop for two hours, and the rental car’s air-conditioning was loud and ineffectual, so she almost didn’t hear it. She snatched it up and said simply, “Yes?”

  “They are making for Kabah,” said the voice.

  “Not Uxmal?”

  “They think the grave is in Kabah, a monument to his mother.”

  “His birth mother was one of them?” she said, awed.

  “One of the witnesses in the first trial, and one of the accused in the second.”

  “Jennet,” said Marissa, and she almost sighed with pleasure.

  Of course.

  That was the link she had not been able to make. But any frustrations at being beaten to the punch by Miller were utterly overshadowed by Marissa’s joyful wonder at the perfection of the thing: Clifford was the son of a witch and had borne those hallowed gems to a land where magic still ran deep.

  It made sense, and not simply in terms of plausibility. There was a symmetry to it, and that was all to the good. Symmetry was good. Balance. The universe required equilibrium. The anthropologists called it sympathetic magic, when you enacted something in ritual to make it happen in reality—sticking pins in a clay image to make someone lame—but there was more to it than that, and it had much to do with equilibrium. The Maya scattered blood so that Chaak would bring rain. Sacrifice was about gifts to the gods, but it was also about balance.

  “Where in Kabah?” she asked.

  “A place called the Witch’s House.”

  Again, Marissa smiled at the symmetry of the thing. She wondered if Edward Clifford had come to Uxmal and heard the tale of the dwarf magician hatched from an egg in Kabah, or if his being here had somehow shaped the legend itself. The story was reported to John Lloyd Stephens in 1840, and it was considered an ancient tale, but how ancient? Eight hundred years, or only two hundred?