The Falling Woman

by Pat Murphy

  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.

  I went to the cenote that night after dinner and I sat by the pool, listening to the sound of the crickets and watching the shadows of peasant women come to fetch water. Zuhuy-kak did not come to join me. My daughter did not come. I was alone, and when the moon rose, I went to bed.

  Friday was Akbal, a day of darkness. It is governed by the jaguar in its night aspect, lord of the underworld.

  On Friday, Tony went with me to the site. By noon, the workmen had loosened and removed another stone, making an opening large enough for me to slide through on my belly, pushing my flashlight before me.

  The skeleton lay on a stone slab, flat on her back with her legs stretched out. Her rib cage had collapsed; the flashlight beam shone on a jumble of pale crescent-shaped bones and glinted from the smooth jade b
eads scattered among the ribs and vertebrae. One arm lay over her ribs and across the pelvic girdle; the small bones of her hand were strewn between her thighbones. The other arm was crossed over her chest and the finger bones were lost in the confusion of ribs and vertebrae. The bones of her feet and toes had been scattered, perhaps by mice scavenging for food. Not far from the arm that was crossed over her chest, an obsidian blade lay on the stone platform. Nearby, the stone was stained by a splash of red: cinnabar spilled from the scallop shell that lay beside her.

  Her skull was deformed, flattened at a steep angle to make an elongated expanse of forehead. Her mouth had fallen open and the teeth were intact. I recognized Zuhuy-kak by the jade inlays in her front teeth. A white shape lay by her pelvis and I played the light on it: the conch shell that had dangled from her belt. One thighbone had a knot in its center: a break that had not healed properly.

  I heard Tony slide through the narrow gap behind me. His flashlight beam played over the pots that surrounded the skeleton: a jug in the shape of a turkey, a cream-colored three-legged bowl painted with glyphs, a squat vase in the shape of a spiraling shell, an incense burner in the shape of a jaguar, an assortment of bowls, jars, jugs, and vessels.

  Tony’s flashlight stopped, spotlighting a large bowl at the skeleton’s feet, a vessel as big around as the circle I could make with my arms. It was elaborately decorated with glyphs and pictures. The ceramic lid had been knocked askew. Tony stepped closer, peering into the bowl, then gently lifted the lid aside.

  A skull the size of a large grapefruit smiled out at us – a dark-eyed child whose teeth had long since left the jaws. Smooth and pale, the skull nestled among the curving ribs and long bones like an egg among twigs. Here and there, the bones were touched with cinnabar. By the look of things, the skeleton of the child had been disinterred, cleaned, dusted with cinnabar, packed neatly in the bowl, and buried again. I stepped closer, and the dark sockets of the eyes, set low beneath the flattened forehead, followed me. So frail: I could easily snap these ancient ribs in my hands. So young. The bones had been arranged with care, gently placed in the bowl, and I wondered who had tended to them.

  In the end, the grand movements of civilizations matter little. What matters is the skull of a child beside the skeleton of its mother. I glanced up at Zuhuy-kak’s skeleton and the obsidian blade beside her. What mattered was how this child had died. A cool damp breeze touched me and I shivered.

  ‘It goes on,’ Tony said, and for a moment I did not understand. Then I followed his flashlight beam with my gaze and realized that the darkness was a sloping passage, the beginning of a limestone cavern extending down beneath the earth. The limestone walls were studded with fossil seashells. The hairs on my arms prickled and my skin rose in goose bumps. I could smell water somewhere far away. No sound but Tony’s breathing and mine. He stepped toward the opening.

  ‘No,’ I said sharply. ‘Don’t go in there.’

  It was not until he looked back at me that I realized I had spoken too loudly.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ he said, stepping toward me.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘nothing.’

  ‘We have our work cut out for us,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t counted on spelunking.’

  ‘We aren’t equipped for it,’ I said. I played my flashlight over the walls and knew that there were shadows just beyond the reach of the beam. I did not want Tony to go into the cave. I did not want anyone to go into the cave.

  ‘That’s never stopped us from doing anything before,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if John wants to organize an expedition tomorrow.’

  We began excavation of the burial that day, setting John and Robin to work with trowels and whisks while the men continued bringing down the wall. When the survey crew returned, they all trooped down to the site and exclaimed over the skeleton. We finally quit working when the sun went down.

  20

  Diane

  On Friday night, I woke to the sound of stealthy footsteps on the path. The hut was dark. Barbara breathed in a steady rhythm. Maggie mumbled something in her sleep and shifted uneasily in her hammock. Robin breathed softly, like a small animal curled in a burrow.

  I don’t know what woke me – a change in the song of the crickets, the hooting of an owl, something. I don’t know. But I sat up in my hammock and stared out through the open door, then left my hammock and stood by the opening. The dirt floor was cool beneath my bare feet.

  The lights were out; the moon was down. The sky was immense, endless blackness dotted with too many stars. Even Tony was asleep – the light by his hut was out. A bat flew overhead, briefly blocking out the stars and chittering in a high-pitched excited voice.

  I saw something move in the shadows near the water barrel. I watched carefully, and it moved again, a darker shadow within the shadows. ‘Is someone there?’ I said softly, not wanting to wake the others. ‘Who is it?’

  No answer. I thought I knew the answer: waiting in the shadows was an old woman dressed in blue.

  In the starlight, the world was black-and-white, a late feature on a black-and-white TV. In late-night movies, monsters live in the shadows. The heroine always goes to investigate and the monsters always get her. Always. When I watched late-night horror movies, I never knew why the heroine didn’t just go back to bed and pull the covers over her head and sleep until morning, when the sun would come out and the birds would sing and the vampires and werewolves would go back into hiding. I was no late-night-feature heroine; I could go back to bed and sleep until morning.

  Except for the uncertainty. The lingering doubt that had been nagging at me since I saw the old woman in the monte. The suspicion, faint but growing stronger, that I was going to be as crazy as my mother someday soon. I was afraid of things that were not there. I saw shadows by day; I heard noises at night. When I was not aware of them, my hands formed fists – they were doing it now.

  I snatched my flashlight from the table, slipped through the door, and hurried along the path toward the shadow, hurrying because if I did not hurry I might go back to bed and lie awake all night, listening for the sound of footsteps coming nearer.

  The figure beside the water barrel did not move as I approached. I shone my flashlight beam into the shadows, and my mother blinked in the sudden light. Tousle-headed, clad in blue pajamas, barefoot, and blinking like an owl. Her eyes were large and her face was haggard. I touched her shoulder and felt the frail bones beneath the thin layers of cloth and flesh. She was trembling. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m watching over the child,’ she said. Her eyes had turned away from the light, but they focused on nothing.

  ‘You scared me,’ I said. ‘You didn’t answer when I called.’ She was not listening.

  ‘Someone must watch over the child,’ she insisted. ‘She’s too young to be left alone.’ She was looking at my face, but I didn’t think she saw me. ‘I can’t run away again.’

  I put my arm around her shoulder and tried to turn her away from the hut. She would not move. I could feel her trembling.

  ‘I’ll watch her,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep her safe.’

  ‘You must be very careful,’ she said to me owlishly. ‘She is stubborn and she doesn’t want to leave. But it isn’t safe here.’

  ‘I’ll be careful.’

  ‘How do I know I can trust you?’

  ‘I’m a friend of hers. A very good friend.’ I hesitated, then said softly, ‘Tell me – what must I watch for?’

  ‘The old woman,’ she said, blinking into the shadows. ‘Watch out for the old woman.’

  She let me lead her through the silent camp to her hut. In her hut, I lit the candle on the desk. The big stone head watched from the corner as I helped my mother to bed. I used the sheet that had been bunched at one end of the hammock to cover her. Her skin was hot and dry, and I wondered if she were running a fever. She tossed and turned in her sleep. When she spoke in Maya to people I could not see, I told her that everything would
be all right. I hoped that I was not lying. I sat beside her, listening to the sounds outside and holding her hand.

  When the faint gray light of dawn shone through the open door, my mother was sleeping quietly. I blew out the candle and returned to my hut. I had just finished dressing when Barbara woke.

  ‘Come on,’ I told her. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  She blinked at me sleepily. ‘Hey, give me a minute to wake up.’

  I waited for her to roll out of bed and dress, and we walked out into the plaza. ‘I was thinking of sticking around here to see what Liz turns up in the tomb today,’ she said. ‘After all, this is our first big find.’

  ‘Whatever’s in the tomb now will still be there on Monday,’ I said. ‘Are you willing to go without a hot shower to see it one day sooner?’

  ‘You’ve got a point there.’ She stopped at the water barrel and splashed water onto her face. ‘You sure are eager to go to town all of a sudden. Did Marcos steal your heart?’

  I shook my head, wondering how much I could tell Barbara. ‘I just need to get out of here.’

  ‘More troubles with Liz?’

  I nodded.

  She studied my face, then shrugged. ‘I suppose you’re right. The secrets of the ancient Maya can’t really compete with a hot shower. Let’s go.’

  We arrived in town early in the morning and had breakfast at the usual table beneath the trees that shed yellow flowers like a cat sheds fur. Emilio arrived with his hammocks at the usual hour, bought the customary round of coffee.

  It was Barbara, not I, who asked about Marcos. Marcos, it seemed, was busy that day; he had business that took him elsewhere. Emilio was evasive; he would not look at me. Barbara frowned and asked him a few questions in Spanish, then shook her head. We finished our coffee in silence, then Emilio said that he would be selling hammocks in the zocalo. He would meet us at lunchtime, he said.