by Lyn Hamilton
The Priestess
Still the decapitator waits, tumi blade in one hand, the other still empty. And with him the Priestess, with hair of snakes, she who holds the golden cup that soon will contain the sacred liquid, the blood of sacrifice.
While they wait at the huaca, we prepare the Warrior’s shroud. Three woven cloths will cradle him. The golden helmet with its feathered plumes, the gold and silver back flaps, the gilded bells, are placed first.
The litter that will support him on his descent lies beneath him. He rests on a second headdress, a gold crescent crowned by flamingo feathers. In his right hand we place the golden scepter, symbol of his earthly power, in his left, the silver, smaller. A gold ingot rests on his right hand, a silver on his left.
On his face we place five gold masks, on his feet, silver sandals. Three pairs of ear flares accompany him: one pair the sacred white-tailed deer, the second golden spiders, the third a feline head that represents the creature that can cross the line between the two worlds marked by the double-headed serpent—the world of now, the world of the ancestors.
Three pectorals of shell beads, thousands of them, in cream and green, pink and white, we have placed on his chest, wristbands to match on his arms.
Next comes his necklace of peanut beads, as always gold on his right, silver his left, sun/moon, earth/sea duality; then a second necklace of gold spiders and a third of discs of gold and turquoise.
To cover him we place his banners, his standards, symbols of his earthly powers: rough cotton onto which we have sewn golden discs and his image, the image of the warrior god. Then the shroud is wrapped around him.
The offerings are all assembled; the guardians, those among us who will accompany him, have been chosen.
Soon the ceremony in the great plaza will begin.
8
Even as I pondered which path to take, all the players in this macabre little drama, as if moved by some invisible director’s hand, were, like me, being drawn to take their place upon the stage. Some were driven by desperation, others compelled by avarice and greed, still others by obsession, and there were those still blissfully unaware of the role others, more malevolent, had chosen for them. Like stock characters in a modern morality tale—the Hero, the Villain, the Temptress, the Witch, the Magician, the Fool—from the four corners of the globe, we assembled in Campina Vieja to play the roles assigned us.
It was a concept, I’ve since thought, that would have resonated with the Inca, who called their huge, yet short-lived empire, Tahuantinsuyo, Land of the Four Quarters. At the time of the first European contact with the Americas, Tahuantinsuyo was the largest nation on earth. At its center was the glittering city of Cuzco, the navel of the Inca universe, just as Campina Vieja was to become the heart of this drama.
From the northern quarter, if you count my point of origin, Chinchaysuyu for the Inca, came I, the Narrator perhaps, or worse yet, the Fool. For me, the journey from the comforting cocoon of Lima, possessing as it does that essence that all large cities share, was an exercise in shedding my old identity, along with preconceptions, as a snake sheds its skin. It was not so much that the journey was extraordinary, just one filled with quirky moments, that made it clear that Rebecca wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
The flight to Trujillo had been uneventful, unless you count playing bingo rather than watching a movie an event, and I found the Vulkano bus station without difficulty. A bus trip in that part of the country, apparently, is an exercise in participative democracy. Passengers preoccupied themselves with shouting instructions to the driver, telling him he was lingering too long at any given stop, or that he wasn’t driving to their particular specifications.
We were on the Panamericana Norte, the Pan-American highway, that hugs a narrow strip of desert crisscrossed by river valleys, most of them dry, between the sea on one side and the Andes on the other. From time to time we’d pass a little town, sometimes a small forest or some farmland, but by and large the land on either side of the highway was desert, very dry. Sometimes I could see tire tracks leading off the highway, in what appeared to be a straight line to nowhere. In the distance are the mountains, looming up out of the sand. As austere as it may sound, it was actually quite beautiful, the colors of the desert, the golds, browns, the burnt greens, cinnamons, and dusty rose, playing against the blue-green of the sea, and the hundreds of greys, greens, navy blues, and purples of the mountains.
And what of the other characters? the other quarters? From the south, Collasuyu, comes the Magician.
With the help of several vocal backseat drivers, the bus driver stopped regularly to disgorge passengers and pick up others, sometimes in little towns, more often than not at a marker—a little stand or a sign— at the side of the highway.
At one of these stops, a young couple loaded down with enormous backpacks got on. They both looked about fifteen to me, but to be realistic I’d put them in their early twenties. Gringos. She wore jeans with holes at the knees; a halter top that revealed her suntanned middle and a hint of navel; lots of jewelry, most notably silver rings on every finger and a pair of long silver earrings that looked vaguely Navaho; and a halo of long wavy hair around a small face that gave her the appearance of a Titian Madonna. He had hair almost as long as hers, cutoff jeans, a T-shirt frayed at the shoulders where the sleeves had been removed, and a neat little row of tiny safety pins in one ear. On one arm he had a large tattoo with a skull and crossbones and a succinct suggestion that the Establishment—such an antiquated term—perform an anatomical impossibility on itself. As they passed my seat, I idly wondered if their parents, particularly hers, knew where they were and what they were doing. Advancing middle age can be tiresome.
Several moments after the bus started rolling again, the young man walked to the front of the bus and, turning to face the crowd, pulled out a deck of cards. He spoke no Spanish, and, with the exception of me, no one else on the bus spoke English, but he kept up a patter that would have made a showman proud, and soon had everyone’s attention as he demonstrated several card tricks. After that, he took a newspaper, asked in sign language for one of the men sitting in the front seats to check it out carefully, folded it into a cone shape, and then, pulling a bottle of water out of a bag he carried with him, poured the water into the cone. He then very quickly inverted the cone over the head of the nearest passenger, who ducked away, much to the amusement of the other passengers. No water came out of the cone. There was a smattering of applause. He grinned, and then, still talking, poured water out of the cone and back into the jar.
There was even louder applause this time and I could certainly see why. While I’m not exactly a fan of magic acts, I had to admit the young man was very good. He had no sleeves in which to hide anything, and I was close enough to be able to watch him pretty carefully. I could not see how he had done it. He did a couple of other tricks, one with a coin, and another with a plastic tube, both of them equally baffling. As he came to the end of his performance, the young woman made her way from the back of the bus with a baseball cap and began to collect tips. I could see that those ahead of me had given very small coins, brown ones which I knew to be almost worthless by North American standards, and although I knew I had to be careful with money, I gave the Peruvian equivalent of about three dollars. The young woman looked suitably impressed with my generosity as my coins dropped into the hat, and a few minutes after the act was finished, the young man plopped into the seat beside me.
“Speak English?” he asked. I nodded. He was an American.
“The name’s Puma, after the wild cat that roams around here,” he said. “My girlfriend’s name is Pachamama. That’s the native word for Mother Earth. They aren’t our real names,” he added, “just ones we’re using for now.”
I would never have guessed. Not that I could be judgmental. “I’m Rebecca,” I said, taking his proffered handshake and complimenting him on his magic act.
“What are you doin‘ in the back of beyond?” he said. “If you do
n’t mind my asking.”
“I’m going to work at an archaeological site,” I replied.
“Wow!” he exclaimed. “Amazing!”
“How about you?” I asked politely.
“We’ve been doin‘ the sites, Inca mainly, down south. But now we’re gonna join a bunch of people, a commune sorta, not too far from here. We’re gonna grow our own food and stuff.”
How sixties, I thought. “What a lovely idea,” I said.
He looked carefully at me to see if I was kidding, and apparently concluded I was taking him sufficiently seriously. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered solemnly. “We’re here to ‘excape’ the end of the world.” Inwardly, I groaned.
“There’s gonna be a huge ‘pocalypse, you know,” he added. He didn’t appear to know or care that apocalypse starts with an “a.” “Earthquakes, fire, volcanoes, floods, everything. Followed by nuclear holocaust.” It sounded like overkill to me.
“Right at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999,” he went on. “I seen it, in my head, I mean. All the capitalist countries, the United States, Europe, everything, will be destroyed. You’re lucky to be here.”
We were silent for a moment or two after that conversation stopper. Then he went on. “I’m a little worried about your archaeology site, now that I think about it. You might find a tomb or something and unleash some terrible curse.”
“I’ll try not to do that,” I replied.
“Good.” He grinned, getting up and heading back to his seat. “Thanks for the donation.”
I turned back to watch the scenery flashing by. Peru, it seemed to me, was a land of geographic extremes, from the world’s driest desert, the Atacama in the south; to some of the richest ocean waters, teeming with marine life, created by the cold Humboldt from Antarctica and the warmer Pacific current coming south; to the Andes, the world’s second greatest mountain range. In this part of the world, there are no foothills. You could crawl out of the Pacific, cross a few miles of arid desert, and come upon a wall of rock rising almost vertically from the desert floor. Beyond that is the rain forest, in some cases, in others huge grassy plateaus and jagged valleys.
The area is unstable, geologically speaking, with the oceanic Nazca plate sliding under the South American continental plate at a rate that, while imperceptible to us, is the fastest tectonic activity anywhere. It is this action that created the Andes and an extraordinarily deep ocean trench off the coast. It is also the reason for a geological instability that results in bad earthquakes on a reasonably regular basis and sporadic volcanic activity. Puma’s and Pachamama’s choice of Peru as a place to avoid the cataclysmic upheavals of Armageddon was, from that standpoint, a poor one.
This is Moche country, I thought and marveled at it. How could such a remarkable civilization, capable of the art I had seen and held, flourish in such an inhospitable place? I wondered. But it had. Around 100 B.C., some kind of political alliance coalesced in the Rio Moche Valley, then spread north. Enormous complexes were built at Cerro Blanco, a capital city dominated by two enormous pyramids, the Huaca de la Luna and the Huaca del Sol, temples of the Moon and the Sun.
For several centuries, the Moche consolidated their position by building ceremonial and administrative centers in the river valleys—control of water being absolutely critical to their empire in such an arid part of the world—to the north and south of their capital. They had a system of canals, high up in the Andes, that diverted water from the river chasms in the mountains to irrigate the desert lands.
The Moche had a complex social structure, with an elite, a warrior class, artisans, and commoners; they practiced elaborate rituals, many of them involving human sacrifice; buried their most important citizens with treasures that rival the Egyptians; and had a vivid mythology, tantalizing hints of which remain.
Late in the sixth century, though, environmental catastrophe began to wreak havoc on the northern coastal desert. Long periods of blistering drought interrupted by sudden and devastating flooding destroyed much of Cerro Blanco and other Moche cities. There were attempts to rebuild, but the damage to the empire proved irreversible, and gradually the Moche culture faded away to be replaced by others. And it was a very long time before the grandeur of that period became known and appreciated once again.
It occurred to me, as I pondered the rise and fall of civilizations, that I might better spend my time contemplating events a little closer to home. I felt I hadn’t always been thinking as clearly as I might like in the last little while, not since I’d found Alex barely conscious in the shop, and the charred body of Lizard, and certainly not since my grisly discovery at the Ancient Ways Gallery in New York.
I could laugh at Puma’s notions about “ ‘pocalypses” and the dangers of unleashing curses from tombs, but there was no question I felt that all the bad things that were happening were linked to some Moche artifacts, and that strange things had started happening right after I’d acquired the so-called replicas. Furthermore, almost everyone who had some association with them, however tenuous, had endured some unfortunate happening in their lives, some of them coming to a very bad end indeed. Even A. J. Smythson, the late owner of the Smythson Gallery, who hadn’t actually acquired them but was supposed to, had died a horrible death.
The point was, I didn’t believe in curses, not when I was being rational, anyway.
And now here I was on a bus headed for the purported point of origin of at least one of these artifacts, the flared vase from Campina Vieja. I was almost three hours north of Trujillo, four or five hundred miles north of Lima, and a lifetime away from the people I cared about.
This is nuts, I thought. Go home. You can persuade Rob of Alex’s innocence and yours. He’s angry, but he’ll get over it, and he will help put this right.
“Campina Vieja,” the driver called out. I’d arrived at my destination, good idea or not. I disembarked. So did my two young friends.
Steve Neal had said that he’d be in town to meet me, and he was as good as his word. For the very few minutes I had to wait for him, I did a quick survey of my surroundings. I was in a reasonably large town and across from a bustling open-air market. I also watched the two young hippies—really there was no other word for them, as outdated as the term might be—try to negotiate their onward journey to the commune.
The preferred method of transport in Campina Vieja appeared to be motorcycle taxi. Puma and Pachamama carefully counted out their change—they were obviously broke, even more so than I—and then tried to negotiate the fare with one of the drivers near the bus station.
They were at a serious disadvantage, not speaking Spanish, and dealing with a destination that was either unknown to the driver, or one which he didn’t want to go to. Eventually they picked up their packs and started to walk. Shortly after, Steve Neal pulled up in a grey Nissan truck.
For the next half hour or so, Steve did a few errands around town, giving me a running commentary on the place as he did so. We picked up four large plastic cubes of water, a tank of propane and some kerosene, and then we were headed out of town on the northbound Pan-American highway once again. A couple of miles out of town, I saw up ahead of us the two young people, trudging along the edge of the road. They were covered in dust, and the young woman, in particular, looked tired.
As reluctant as I was to pursue this relationship—inhabitants of communes waiting for the end of the world are not exactly my cup of tea—my maternal instincts, usually dormant, were roused, they looked so forlorn. I told Steve about them, and he pulled on the shoulder several yards ahead of them, and I got out and waved. The two of them ran to catch up to us.
“Steve,” I said, “these are my new friends Puma and Pachamama.”
I could see mirth touching the corners of Steve’s eyes and mouth, but he managed to control himself. “How do you do,” he said gravely, shaking their hands in turn. I explained where they were headed, and Puma showed him some directions. “Throw your stuff in the back and hop in,”‘ he
said, gesturing to the backseat. “We have one stop, but it’s on our way.” The two grinned ear to ear with gratitude.
Puma sat up front with Steve, while I took the backseat with Pachamama. She didn’t have very much to say, but I noticed Puma was doing card tricks for Steve, which must have been a little distracting.
A few miles out of town, Steve made a left turn on a dirt road that ran between two buildings. Standing in front of one of them was a tiny woman, skin very brown and wrinkled, wearing a brown felt hat the shape of a lamp shade, an embroidered blouse covered by a brown vest, a short full skirt of navy blue over leggings, and black work boots. Her dark hair, streaked with grey, was twisted into two long, thick plaits. Beside her were two very large woven baskets in bright colors, pink and orange and green. Steve pulled the truck up beside her, loaded the baskets in the back, then helped her up into the back of the truck as well.
“Ines Cardoso,” he said, getting back behind the wheel. “Our cook. With our dinner,” he added.
