by Lyn Hamilton
The Warrior Priest
The fanged god, the Decapitator, steps forward. The tumi is raised; gold flashes through the air. The Priestess raises the cup. Iguana and Wrinkle Face take their places at the head of the shaft. The great ceremony begins.
In the tomb, the sacrificed llamas, headless, rest on either side of the coffin, the Warrior’s dog nearby. The mummies of the female ancestors are placed in the tomb, two at the head of the coffin, two at the foot.
Iguana and Wrinkle Face, masks glinting in the light of torches, take the ropes and slowly lower the Great Warrior way down into the chamber. The body is placed in the coffin, head to the south, toward Cerro Blanco. With proper ceremony, the coffin is sealed with copper straps.
The guardians, those who will protect the Warrior through all time, go before the Decapitator. One is placed beside the Warrior, the other, feet cut off, in a niche above the coffin. Now the chamber can be sealed, the shaft filled.
The new Warrior Priest sits cross-legged on his litter, his standards to either side, his dog at his feet. The Bird Priest takes the cup of sacrifice from the Priestess and passes it to him. May our new Warrior save us from the water that rushes from the mountains, destroying everything in its path. He must: If he cannot, it is the end of our world.
13
Rolando guerra’s journey to his final resting place was more seething mob than funeral procession, the animosity of his friends and relatives barely held in check by the solemnity of the occasion.
It looked as if half the town had crowded into the Plaza de Armas as the casket, carried by six members of the Guerra family, went into the plaza and up the church steps. Guerra’s wife and two small children followed the coffin, the woman sobbing, and the children, a little boy and girl, looking perplexed. An older woman—Guerra’s mother, I surmised—walked ramrod straight and dry-eyed behind them.
Mayor Montero had sent one of his policemen to the hacienda to urge us not to attend the funeral in order not to inflame the situation, and it was good advice indeed. The crowd was an angry one, threatening to erupt at any moment, I thought, as Puma and I pulled back into a lane and retreated to the market area.
“Bad scene,” was all Puma said. It was a bad scene indeed. While the Guerras were, I gathered, considered loners, Rolando’s death had played into the anxiety people were feeling about the approaching El Nino, which, together with the invasores that came with it, threatened their livelihood and their safety.
The marketplace where I’d taken Ines to get some supplies was abuzz. There seemed to be a general feeling that Rolando shouldn’t have been looting, but there was an almost universal resentment of people who came from somewhere else. A few of the shopkeepers glared ominously at me as I went by, and one old woman slapped a flyswatter rather menacingly in my direction as I drew near her.
We had a conference that evening, in what we’d named the war room that heady night, which now seemed so long ago, when, flushed with enthusiasm for what we saw as the absolute Tightness of the cause, we’d planned Operation Atahualpa, our invasion of Cerro de las Ruinas.
This time, sitting around the dining room table after Ines had left for home, we had to decide whether to go on, after this latest grisly discovery, or to close up for the season, pack up the lab and head home.
“I don’t know,” Hilda said, her voice even raspier than usual. “I just don’t know. Part of me wants to go on, the other…” Her voice trailed off.
“We’re so close, Hilda,” Steve said. “I can just feel it. We’re going to find something big.”
“I know you think so. But is it worth the risk?” she replied.
“Of course it’s worth it!” Steve exclaimed. “Are you saying we should just give up and let the looters have it all? Hilda, you’ve been working toward this your whole career!”
“Maybe I picked the wrong career?” she asked with a tight little smile.
“I’m with Hilda,” Ralph said. “Yes, it’s important, but not worth getting killed over. And just carrying on as if nothing has happened. Unseemly, really. Guerra, for all his bluster, was just trying to make a living.”
“So was Al Capone, Ralph,” Tracey snorted. “Surely you’re not condoning looting.”
“Your comparison is odious,” Ralph snapped back. Everyone’s nerves were on edge. “I’m not condoning it. I just think we have to be sensitive to the people around here. Capone, I can only assume, lived in a nice home in Chicago, ate well. Guerra probably lived in a hut. And it’s a terrible way to go, choking on sand. My God.”
Ralph and Tracey glared at each other.
“Enough!” Steve sighed. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s hear some arguments pro and con, lay them out on the table, and then we’ll vote, okay? I’ll start. On the pro side, I think we’re close to finding a tomb, maybe an untouched one.”
“And maybe we’re not,” Ralph said morosely.
“Well, that pro and that con pretty well cancel each other out, I’d say,” Steve said. “Anyone else?”
Tracey put up her hand. “Guerra’s gone, so there should be no more incidents, should there? That’s a definite pro, wouldn’t you say?”
Everyone nodded, except me that is. I thought they were wrong. I’d seen firsthand the mood in town. In the first place, Guerra was not the only one involved in looting. His whole family was famous for it, and the rest of them were still among the living. It may have been obvious to everyone else what had happened. Guerra had been tunneling into the side of the huaca. His back dirt, the dirt from the tunnel he was digging, was piled up for all to see. He’d been in a hurry, and therefore careless, and hadn’t moved the dirt far enough away, or even on the right angle, to prevent it from sliding back into the tunnel. While the police were already calling Guerra’s demise death by misadventure, the unfortunate but perhaps predictable end of a careless huaquero, I was pretty sure the rest of the Guerra family didn’t see it that way.
By the end of the evening, everyone agreed to stay on, except Ralph, who was wavering. He said he’d think about it overnight.
Later there was a light tapping at my door. Steve stood outside with two glasses and a bottle of scotch. “Can we talk?”‘ he whispered. “Downstairs?”
I nodded and followed him down the steps. The power was out again, so I lit a couple of candles while he poured the drinks.
“What do you think of all this?” he asked as we settled into armchairs.
“I’m not sure what to think,” I said. “The mood in town is pretty ugly.”
“It is,” he agreed. “Do you think I’m crazy to encourage everybody to stay? Or do you think I’m just plain crazy?” He smiled wearily.
“Maybe,” I said. “To both.” I was kidding, of course, but he looked so pained, I felt bad. “Look,” I said. “They’re grown-ups. They can make up their own minds.” Why, I wondered, was he talking to me, instead of Tracey?
As if he could read my mind, he said, “I suppose you know about Tracey and me.” He paused. “You do know we are… ?”
“Yes.”
“I guess you couldn’t have missed all the creeping around in the night.” He laughed ruefully. “I feel kind of silly,” he went on. “A guy my age with a woman like that, twenty years younger. One of my students to boot!”
“She’s very attractive,” I said sympathetically. At least I tried to sound sympathetic, a difficult feat.
“My wife left me last year. For a younger man. Twelve years younger, in fact. I don’t know why it should be more humiliating to have your wife leave you for a younger man than it would be for one the same age or older, but it is. Maybe humiliating isn’t the word. Demoralizing would cover it better, perhaps.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. I thought of the dying days of my marriage to Clive and the parade of younger women I’d put up with for a while. Suddenly I was feeling genuinely sympathetic: humiliating and demoralizing indeed. “Been there,” I added.
“Have you? Really?”
I nodded.
“You probably won’t believe this, but the affair wasn’t my idea. It was hers. I was flattered, of course. I mean, it didn’t take much to persuade me. I gave it a couple of nanoseconds’ thought, I confess.
“But now…” he said softly. “Now I’m wondering why she… I mean, maybe this is the anxiety of a middle-aged guy, but I’m wondering if she did it for some other reason, to displace Hilda on the project or something.” He stopped. “I’m sorry, I have no business burdening you with this.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “But I don’t think you should assume that. You’re an attractive man, and you both share the same interests.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this, actually. Why would I ever try to convince Steve that everything was okay with Tracey, I wondered, when I found him rather appealing myself? But the fragility of the middle-aged man’s ego never ceases to amaze me, and I felt I had to say something to make him feel better, even if it wasn’t in my own best interests.
“Thanks,” he said. We talked for a few more minutes about the work, about his children of whom he was obviously very proud, about the approaching El Nino. Then he got up from his chair and came over to mine. Leaning over, he kissed me. It was a nice kiss, the kind that makes you think you might not mind making the guy’s breakfast for a while. We parted company at the top of the stairs, leaving me wondering what was going on. I like to think I am not lacking in self-confidence, but I try to temper it with a firm grasp on reality. The point was, a contest between me and Tracey for a man was not one I’d expect to win. Was I doing the same thing I’d thought Steve was doing, having self-doubts about a member of the opposite sex, or was there something more calculated happening? There was something about the conversation, I thought, that didn’t ring entirely true, but perhaps it was just that there was so much left unsaid.
The Hacienda Garua contingent hung in. Even Ralph decided to stay. The trouble was, most of the Peruvian crew wouldn’t come back to work at the site. If they’d thought the place evil with a few relatively harmless accidents, this latest incident hadn’t improved their impression of the place one bit. Pablo stuck with us, as did Ernesto, surprisingly enough, the fellow who’d cut himself so badly. I’d heard he had a wife and four children, so maybe a few evil spirits were not enough to deter him from earning his living. Tomas too agreed to stay on. The students all stayed, with the exception of Robert, who said he’d had enough and headed back to Lima.
The one positive aspect of all this was that I was able to get Puma a real paying job. When the Peruvian workers disappeared, Steve tried to carry on with the small team he had, but the work slowed considerably.
“I’ve just got to get more manpower out here,” he groaned. “We’ll never get this done.”
“I have an idea,” I said. “How about Puma? He couldn’t do the technical work, but he can carry the dirt and work the sieve. He could sure use some money, if there was some way we could pay him.”
“I pay the Peruvian crew,” Steve said, “and with several of them gone, there’ll be some money. When can he start?”
The answer was right away. “Amazing!” Puma said. “Working on an archaeological site! Do you think we’ll find treasure?”
“You never know,” I replied. “And even if we don’t, this way you’ll be able to make sure we don’t unleash some terrible curse.”
I’d meant it as a joke, of course, but Puma heartily agreed with me.
Puma, as it turned out, was a willing and hard worker—when he showed up. In the first place, he wasn’t an early riser. While the rest of us started work as soon as it was light, Puma usually turned up a little rumpled-looking, late in the morning. Some days he didn’t show up at all. It was annoying because we were sorely shorthanded, and everyone left had to pitch in. Steve didn’t seem terribly perturbed by it: He said it was pretty standard behavior for a boy that age, and that Puma would be paid when he showed up, and not when he didn’t.
I tried to talk to Puma about it. He was always very contrite, saying there was something else he’d had to do, and I had a feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me, but that was about it. Gradually, we all took the attitude that with Puma, like the magician he was, it was sometimes you see him, sometimes you don’t.
I was assigned to help Pablo, working beside him to catalogue all the little pottery shards he uncovered, making notes on the depth, the exact placement, and bagging and tagging them all. We started work right at dawn, and worked until the wind and the dust made it impossible to continue. Then we hauled everything back to the lab, and worked well into the evening cataloguing the day’s finds.
Even Lucho was called up for action, made to haul sand and staff the sieve. His complaining and shuffling drove us all crazy, but we needed him to work. What that meant was that the hacienda was left unguarded at least part of the day, before Ines came to make supper.
Tracey’s prediction that there would be no more incidents was regrettably not correct. While Rolanda Guerra might be gone, his family was not, and, as I had feared, they took to hanging around the site, watching us work with a real malevolence in their stance. They plainly blamed us for Rolando’s death, even though the police had made it clear to them that Rolando was looting illegally: He’d been caught red-handed after all, albeit almost dead at the time. The Guerra family, however, saw it differently. In their eyes, Rolando had been forced to take desperate measures because of us, measures that had ended his life prematurely.
The situation came to a head one day when I returned to the hacienda with Ines to find an axe through the beautifully carved front door, and a message for us sprayed across the front of the house. What the painter lacked in artistry, he made up for in brevity and clarity. Asesinos!—murderers—the message read. Lucho returned to his post as guard of the hacienda forthwith; Cesar Montero, the mayor, had a police guard posted on the site for a couple of days to deter the culprits, and Carlos, the landlord, tutted and clucked, and then sent a crew over to paint it out.
With all this drama and activity, it took me a while to realize that I hadn’t seen Puma recently. With some irritation, I headed over to the commune to get him. Nothing appeared amiss when I first got there. The place looked pretty much the same, laundry flapping in the breeze, a couple of the commune members working away at the far end of the garden. I checked the kitchen. Pachamama wasn’t there. Then I went to their little hut. There was only one sleeping bag— Puma’s, I thought, but he wasn’t in it. All of Pacha-mama’s belongings appeared to be gone. Everyone else was out working, so I headed for the main house once again and knocked on Manco Capac’s door. He was a minute or two in opening it, but cordial enough when he saw me. “Come on in,” he said. “Beer?”
“Not right now, thanks,” I replied.
“Mind if I do?” he asked, opening a little refrigerator in his room in anticipation of my reply.
“Of course not,” I said, idly thinking as I watched him reach for the beer that his refrigerator reminded me of the one I had at home, that is, virtually empty. Two thoughts then struck me: one, that this was the first time I’d thought about my home in a rather long time; and two, that there was a significant difference between his refrigerator and mine. While mine tended to yogurt well past its best-before date, various half-empty jars of heaven knows what, a couple of tins of tuna and salmon, and if I was lucky, white wine, his was rather more aristocratic: champagne, Perrier-Jouet if I wasn’t mistaken, judging by the flowers on the bottle—I’ve heard it’s lovely—and a couple of jars of a rather distinctive shape and color that I decided held caviar. There were a couple of other tins too, which, on closer examination I was sure, would prove to contain pate. Not your average supermarket peppercorn pate, either. Real foie gras, from France. Manco Capac might have come to live a back-to-basics life in Peru, but his definition of basic, in the food department at least, was definitely upmarket. It was also more than a little expensive.
Maybe, I thought, as he opened his beer, he’s treated hi
mself to these things because he has a cold. Come to think of it, though, didn’t he have the sniffles last time I was here? Maybe he has allergies, or maybe, and now light began to dawn, maybe his expensive tastes also run to cocaine.
