Priestess of Paracas

by K Patrick Donoghue

  Wari Ruins

  Ayacucho Valley, Peru

  September 28

  The solitary stroll through the ruins had been medicinal for Pebbles, though it had been difficult for her to relax at first. Early in her walk, she had stopped to scrutinize fallen structures and imagined how they might have looked once upon a time. She would close her eyes and try to fit the imagined structures into the layout of the city she recalled from Citali’s visions. But the exercise proved fruitless, which should not have surprised Pebbles. The ruins were a conglomeration of original structures, renovations and new buildings erected by successive occupiers of Wari. But she had given the exercise a shot anyway because the renovated courtyard and replacement tree had stimulated a vision yesterday.

  Once she dispensed with the idea of recreating the layout of the city, she followed Sanjay’s advice. She found a patch of ground that looked down upon a field of strewn ruins and sat down, letting the mild springtime temperature, budding greenery and soft breeze relax her mind. She watched puffy white clouds move slowly across the blue sky until they, combined with the warmth of the sun, lulled her eyes to close.

  Breathing in deeply, Pebbles gathered the fragrant scents of the flowering bushes in the field of ruins. She listened to leaves fluttering and birds chirping. She could hear distant conversations and laughing from other tourists walking the grounds as well as the occasional vehicle passing on the road behind the ancient walls that marked the borders of the city.

  Just as it seemed she might fall asleep, a sound cut through the background noise. It was a bird call, a high-pitched staccato. Pebbles’ eyes flashed open. On a rock within a stone’s throw was a yellowish bird. She recognized it immediately — an Andean flicker.

  The bird called again, and the vision began.

  Stay low! Do not let them see you!

  Crouching down behind bushes, she watched them trudge along the bank of the river. Most of them looked exhausted, some wearing bandages covering wounds that still seeped blood. At the vanguard, one of them stood on a boulder and scanned the area.

  You will not see my footsteps, you fool! I know better than to walk in soft soil.

  The man on the boulder scolded the others for walking too slowly. He exhorted them to speed up, but they seemed to ignore him.

  What a strange collection of men.

  Most were fat and old. The few young ones were skinny, their steps weak. Yet, the one on the boulder and the one bringing up the rear looked like hardened men, warriors. Citali smiled.

  The battle goes ill for the masked bitch. She sends only two good men to track me.

  While those two men were obviously shrewd — they had tracked her this far despite her best efforts to mask her trail — the others slowed them down too much. Lifting her gaze, she looked down the line of the river to the mountains in the distance. If she quickened her pace, she could go around them and lose them in the mountains, but she would have to wait until nightfall. There was too little cover to attempt to bypass them now.

  Citali watched them until the man on the boulder climbed down and joined the others. Edging from the cover of the bush, she slinked forward. On her third step, she heard a bush rustle and a bird’s panicked flapping. Rapid shrills followed. Citali froze and dove to the ground, cursing herself. Looking up, she saw the birds shoot from their holes in the rocks as they sounded their alarms.

  No! You fool! How did you not see the nests! Get up! Get up and run!

  As shouts from the men tracking her echoed in the valley, she scrambled up the sandy rocks, kicking up a cloud of dust the men would surely see. Citali cursed but it was too late to think about masking her escape.

  Go! Go! Into the mountains! Quickly! Do not look back!

  As soon as the vision ended, Pebbles found the flicker had hopped its way closer to her. It was now just a few feet away. It pecked at the grass around a rock and then looked up at her, puffing out the yellow feathers on its chest as it eyed her suspiciously.

  Pebbles reached in the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out her cell phone. The bird, frightened by the quick motion, flew away deeper into the ruins. Rising to her feet, she texted Sanjay and Cesar, asking them to meet her at the ticket office. Then she sent off a message to Anlon. “Any pictures yet?”

  She was halfway back to the entrance when her phone buzzed. It was a reply from Cesar. “Be there shortly.”

  Neither was there when she arrived at the ticket office. She ducked her head around the corner to look in the parking lot. They were not there either. Just another tourist van with a waterfall painted on its side.

  A wave of dizziness swept over Pebbles. She staggered and reached out to steady herself against the museum wall as a flurry of images sped through her mind.

  …a massive waterfall…wading through water…a hand reaching down…other hands pulling her out of the water…a bonfire…a stick streaking gold paint on her arm…standing on the prow of a boat, arms raised, holding something heavy…torches all around…people chanting…ducking down by the waterfall…pushing through the thicket…disappearing into blackness, her feet deep in mud…reaching into her bag…a glint of light…diving into the water…the swipe of blade across her throat…the roar of the waterfall…

  Mountaintop

  Churcampa District, Peru

  The drive to Churcampa was not without drama. While the main road looked less treacherous than the switchback they had forgone, it still had its fair share of hairpin turns as it climbed up the mountain. As such, Anlon avoided making conversation with Mereau so as not to distract Jennifer. Inside, however, he was burning to question him.

  During the earlier, less dicey, part of the drive, Mereau told them his gensae, his magnetic sixth sense, detected incredibly strong magnetism in the ground beneath their feet and in the walls of the mountain ringing the plateau. This led him to suspect a meteor had blasted a crater into the terrain, scattering its magnetic debris throughout the area.

  “If you examine the plateau closely, you will see there is an unnatural gap in the walls of the mountain through which we drove up from the river,” Mereau had said. “You will also notice a significant amount of water erosion on the remaining crater walls. At some point since the crater was formed, I believe it became a lake. Water drained down from the top into the lake, until something caused the wall near the river to give way and drain into the river valley. An earthquake, perhaps.”

  He also explained his “how clever of them” comment.

  “Even with Citali’s necklace, Muran would never have found the cave,” Mereau had said. “She would never have detected the beacon. There was too much competing magnetism.”

  “Beacon? What beacon?” Anlon asked.

  “I do not know for certain, but I suspect the cave was marked with a magnetic beacon similar to those we used to mark our Maerlifs.”

  A Maerlif, Anlon recalled, was a Munuorian burial chamber. Most often, they were burrowed into the sides of a volcano, a symbolic gesture that returned the souls of dead Munuorians back to the source from which they believed all life sprung. In these crypts, they laid to rest their most honored dead…along with the dead’s private supply of the Munuorians’ special stones. It was in such a Maerlif on the slope of the Mount Pelée volcano on the Caribbean island of Martinique where Jacques Foucault had discovered the crypt of Mereau and his memory stone over four hundred years ago.

  But the Munuorians had also hastily created other Maerlifs to cache supplies of their stones along their trade routes prior to the destruction caused by the asteroid close encounter ten thousand years ago.

  Believing there was no way to protect their island homeland from the devastation, they divvied up their inventory of stones and stored them in newly constructed Maerlifs across the western hemisphere. Some were built into hillsides near shorelines or major rivers, others into mountain slopes near prominent landmarks known to the Munuorians.

  Their logic had been simple. If any Munuorians survived the asteroid, they wou
ld need their special stone tools to rebuild. By storing them in multiple locations, they increased the odds that some of the tools would also survive.

  As soon as the road straightened out, Jennifer, apparently also curious to question Mereau, asked, “If this whole area is super-magnetic, what good would a beacon have served?”

  The answer was one that Anlon knew and one Jennifer would have recalled if she had been able to devote her full concentration to the question. Anlon, Pebbles, Jennifer and Cesar had discovered one of the Maerlifs in a jungle of eastern Nicaragua the previous year.

  “Remember the Maerlif we found in Nicaragua,” Anlon said. “The beacon did more than just mark the general location of the crypt; it told us which of the rocks in the Maerlif wall was the entryway.”

  “Ah, that’s right. If we had picked the wrong rock to move, the Maerlif would have caved in.” She glanced up at the rearview mirror, presumably to look at Mereau. “So, you think there’s a Maerlif inside the cave?”

  “It may not be a Maerlif in the classic sense, but, yes, now I see this place, now that I know of its magnetism, I do think we are likely to find a structure inside the cave that served a purpose similar to a Maerlif.

  “Remember also what Pebbles told us of the conversation between Citali and her brother. Marleau told Citali to take that which was given to the dwellers. And then we have Rashana’s message to Citali. She said Muran sought that which was hidden.”

  Anlon’s mind once again thought of Rashana’s message. Take the river, lead her into the cave. “Now the part about leading her into the cave makes sense. That’s all Muran needed. She would have been able to find the beacon on her own once she was inside the cave, but not until then.”

  “Yes, now you see why it was so clever to mask the Maerlif’s location inside a highly magnetic environment. It is curious, though, why the builders wanted to hide its location. I get the sense, based on what Pebbles has shared with us, that whatever was hidden inside the cave, presumably some of our Tyls, was put there a long time ago, long before Muran’s path brought her to this part of the world. What led survivors among my people to climb so high into the mountains and stash their stones here?”

  As they neared the outskirts of Churcampa, Anlon disappeared into thought. There was something that just did not fit with Mereau’s theory. If Citali, Nonali and her brother had access to a stash of Munuorian stones, why would she have taken them to the dwellers, whoever they were? Why wouldn’t Citali or her brother or others of their people have used the stones to defend themselves against Muran and her army?

  The longer he pondered the questions, the more an answer began to form. Citali was called the Keeper. Pebbles had indicated Marleau said they had protected what was hidden. Perhaps Citali, her brother, and the generations of their people before them who had protected what was hidden, who kept what was hidden, had not been Munuorians. But they had known Munuorian survivors of the day of darkness. And for some reason, the Munuorians had entrusted Citali’s people with their stones. Anlon shared these thoughts with Mereau and Jennifer.

  “It could very well be as you say,” Mereau replied. “But, remember, Citali was also called Seer. She wore the necklace. She was revered as a priestess. These bits we know about her suggest she had some mystic power. To me, knowing how intense the magnetism of the necklace was, it suggests to me she had gensae. That leads me to believe she was a descendant.”

  The van slowed and stopped at an intersection. Jennifer turned and looked at Anlon and Mereau. “What about the elongated heads? Maybe there was something biologically different about Citali and her people that gave them an ability to sense the magnetic field that had nothing to do with Munuorians.”

  Anlon nodded. The thought had occurred to him as well. Cesar had said the DNA from elongated skulls discovered at the Paracas necropolis were genetically linked to people of Eastern European origin, people who lived far from where the Munuorian homeland was located. Anlon did not recall whether Cesar had mentioned if the Paracas mummies’ DNA showed a genetic mutation that produced the elongated skulls but if there was a mutation, it likely meant their brains would have been shaped differently and been larger than brains of humans with normal-shaped skulls. Was it possible certain regions of their brains had been oversized as a result? Specifically, could the structures that control sensory perception have been more prominent features of their brains, heightening their abilities to interact with the world around them, including an ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field?

  “I think you’re on to something there, Jen. I’ll have to remember to ask Cesar if the Paracas mummies’ brains have been scanned. Their bodies are supposedly well-preserved, but I’m not sure whether that applies to their brain tissues.”

  The conversation continued as they passed through Churcampa. As they neared the last buildings of the small town, Jennifer looked for a place to park the van. Soon after, the backpack-laden hikers set off along the mountain ridge.

  Anlon was surprised at the temperate climate. At almost eleven thousand feet above sea level, some two thousand feet higher than the valley below, he expected it to be significantly cooler. But much like Ayacucho and the Wari ruins, it was pleasant despite constant gusts of wind. He guessed it was somewhere in the high 50s or low 60s. Anlon mentioned his surprise to the others.

  “Yeah, it’s another check mark next to Pebbles’ vision about the mountain,” Jennifer said. “I remember asking her if it was cold. You know, figuring it was night, it was windy and Citali was on top of a mountain. Pebbles said the only time she remembered Citali being cold was when she crouched down to cover her bare legs and feet underneath her poncho. Who goes hiking up a mountain in bare feet and bare legs if they know they’re going somewhere really cold?”

  The first stretch of the ridgeline they were able to traverse was along the main road leaving Churcampa, and Anlon was glad they had decided to leave the van back in town. The road hugged a narrow strip that abutted a steep cliff and there were several hairpin turns that would have made for some very uncomfortable moments of driving.

  Their good fortune continued once the ridgeline flattened onto another plateau, for the road continued on for the next two miles, making for an easy walk past a number of cultivated fields on both sides of the road.

  “Who grows crops on the top of a mountain?” Anlon had asked at one point.

  “Uh…people who don’t want to walk or drive all the way down in the valley for food,” Jennifer had replied. “Given how warm it is, they probably grow all kinds of crops up here.”

  When they reached the point where the road began to descend back into the valley via switchbacks, they stopped and Anlon retrieved his laptop again. Pulling up the screenshot of the satellite image of the mountaintop, he pointed to the spot where he estimated they were standing, and then dragged his finger along a two-mile swathe of roadless ridgeline.

  “This is the area where I think we should search. We’ll have to work our way over the crest, and it looks like there’s a fairly steep decline, but it looks walkable.”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to serpentine down, create our own switchbacks, but we should stay a good distance back from the edge.”

  “Agreed.” Anlon pointed toward the end of the two-mile swathe. “That area, right there, is where I’m betting the cave is. Look at the shadows in those crevices.” He looked up at Mereau. “Do you think you can detect the beacon if we get close enough to it?”

  Mereau pulled off his backpack, unzipped the center pocket and withdrew a bowl-shaped stone, the Munuorian Tyl known as a Breylofte to Mereau and a Sound Stone to Anlon. Holding the tool up, Mereau said, “If there is a beacon up here, this will find it.”

  Wari Ruins

  Ayacucho Valley, Peru

  Propped up against the museum wall, Pebbles looked at the concerned faces of Sanjay and Cesar. A crowd of tourists stood behind them, bottles of water held forth in their hands.

  “Are you all right?” Cesar asked.
/>   She nodded.

  “You had a vision?”

  She nodded again and held up two fingers. “The taxi. Is it here yet?”

  “It is.”

  “Have you heard from Anlon?”

  She watched as Cesar looked to Sanjay, who shook his head to say no. Cesar said, “Not yet. Why?”

  Pebbles slid her cell phone from the hoodie pocket. No notifications. “Can you help me up?”

  “Of course.”

  Reaching out her arms, she pushed her butt off the ground while the two men tugged her arms until she stood. “Where’s the taxi?”

  Sanjay pointed to the left. Pebbles looked at Cesar. “What do you know about waterfalls around here? Not the one the taxi driver was talking about. Not that one.” She pointed at the picture of Catarata Batán on the tourist van. “I’m talking huge. Crazy long. Like a waterfall from the top of a mountain. Only it’s in a jungle.”

  Cesar stared at her for a few seconds, a frown on his face, then shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, let’s go. Maybe the driver will know.”

  Pebbles started for the parking lot. As the three of them approached the taxi, the driver stepped out, a smile on his face and a large bag in his hand. He raised it and said something in Spanish, presumably announcing lunch had arrived. She turned to Cesar. “Ask him about the waterfall.”

  Cesar engaged the driver in a short back-and-forth conversation. The man nodded enthusiastically and said, “Catarata las Tres Hermanas.”

  “Trey what?” Sanjay asked.

  “Tres Hermanas,” Cesar repeated. “The three sisters. He says it is the third tallest waterfall in the world.”

  “Spell it,” Pebbles said, pulling out her cell phone. As Cesar recited the spelling, Pebbles entered the name in her web browser. As soon as the first picture populated her screen, she looked back up at Cesar. “Where is it? How far?”

  Cesar conversed again with the driver. This time, the dialogue included expansive hand gestures on the parts of both men. When they finished, Cesar said, “It is located in Otishi National Park, according to our friend here. It is about two hundred fifty kilometers from here, but...he says it is not accessible by road. Only by boat. And he says it is dangerous. The waterfall sits at the edge of the jungle. He says it is home to an indigenous tribe that isn’t very friendly to outsiders.”