Beautiful Sacrifice: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

The air was definitely cool, dry. A slight draft flowed out from the dark opening at the bottom of the steps.

  “Okay, I’ll think about going modern.” She reached for the flap of the backpack Hunter wore and fished blindly around for one of the heavy flashlights she’d packed.

  But when she retrieved it, she hesitated.

  His small beam switched on again. The thin light burned blue across the darkness.

  “Is that some kind of censer at the back?” he asked.

  She moved to stand beside him on the narrow landing at the top of the steps. At the far side of the large room there was a stone carved like a grimacing face. Air seemed to breathe out from the mouth and eyes and cutout sigils in the cheeks and forehead.

  “More like a grate, I think,” she said. “The air coming out is fresh, dry, quite cool. Eerie.”

  She felt Hunter beside her, close and warm, definitely real.

  “The grate could lead to an underground opening into a cave system,” Hunter said.

  “The would explain the temperature, but the dryness?”

  “Damned odd,” he agreed. He moved his hand to the left, revealing another bit of the room. What had looked like a dim shadow flared into startling life. “But so is a shrine with only red petals. No whole flowers that I can see.”

  “At least the flies don’t like it.”

  “Bodes well for the local wildlife,” he agreed.

  Candles of varied thicknesses, height, and color were scattered throughout in the room. Thin wisps of smoke still curled from hastily snuffed wicks.

  “This is the smoke you smelled,” she said suddenly. “The candles were put out when we got near. But where is all the smoke going? We should be choking.”

  There was no answer but the sigh of air through the room. Though the grate was at the back, the whole room seemed clear.

  “Whoever was here, it wasn’t looters,” Hunter said. “They would use better light and not worry about fresh flower petals.”

  “Not looters,” Lina breathed, shivering lightly. She moved his hand, guiding the beam of light while she spoke. “Look at the big candles at the four corners of the room, look at their colors. Sak, the north, is white; Kan, to the east, is yellow for the sunrise; Boox, to the west, is black for sunset; and Chak, to the south near the shrine, is red for blood. This is a sacred place.”

  “Or it’s narcos stashing stuff here and trying to freak out any locals,” Hunter said, but he didn’t really believe it.

  “There’s nobody out here to frighten. No water but rainfall. Very little game to eat. No fruit trees to draw even monkeys. If narcos set this up, they’re only scaring themselves. Besides,” she said, releasing his hand, “can’t you feel it? This is a place of power, of worship.”

  Hunter felt it. He just wasn’t happy talking about it.

  Looking for a vent or some way for the smoke to escape, he moved the beam of his light overhead. Lines of blue raced over the ceiling and down the wall, everywhere blue, gleaming and silent, calling across the centuries. Gradually he realized that there was red and white and black, even jade green gleaming in polychrome pictures; but the impact came from the many shades of blue, the voice of a god pouring from images of feathered deities and serpents.

  There was not an inch of walls or ceiling left bare.

  Lina let out a sound that could have been awe or disbelief or both mingling as the serpents did, indistinguishable.

  “Late Post-Classic Mayan glyphs,” she said faintly. “Very refined glyphs, very precise. As elegant in their own way as the Lindisfarne manuscript. The culmination of millennia of culture striving to describe the unknowable.”

  Slowly Hunter played the thin light beam over the walls around the entrance where they stood.

  “That’s not a mass of snakes as I first thought,” Lina said. “It’s a single gigantic serpent, made up of countless others.”

  “I can’t see where one ends and the other begins,” he said.

  “You’re not meant to.”

  A sea of scales and massive wings covered in rainbow feathers arched over the entrance to the room. Each movement of the flashlight revealed more details, more complexity, more colors that seemed to change as they watched.

  “This is impossible,” she said in a whisper.

  “The clean air?” he said, still clearly caught by that unexplained reality.

  “No. The range and subtlety of color is fantastic. Look at these rich greens. You expect to see blues endure, but none of these colors has degraded at all.”

  The coils of the serpent were all around them, above them. Some of the scales were rippling masked faces; some human, some demonic, and some animal, each of them idealized, all of them a great artist’s representation of Maya fears and hopes.

  “The depth…” Lina said. “There’s a strange kind of dimensionality to everything, a depth that most Maya art shuns. This isn’t intentionally flat or linear. It…breathes.”

  Hunter could only stare. Every time his flashlight moved even slightly, he would swear that the coils of the snake twitched. Like all great art, the serpent had a life independent of its maker. It simply was.

  Another light clicked on. He started, then realized Lina had turned on her flashlight while he stared in awe at the slowly writhing snake. Her light was broader, warmer, more gold than blue. Closer to candlelight, but without its grace. The broad beam moved with deliberation over the walls and ceiling, up and down and then up again, a serpentine motion that was hypnotizing.

  He moved his flashlight enough to see her face without distracting her. The gold buried in her dark eyes flashed and sparked, a mystery he would never solve, even more compelling to him than the images covering the walls.

  The beam continued its circuit of walls and ceiling, then began all over again. Silent tears gleamed on Lina’s face as the beauty and meaning of what she was seeing began to sink in.

  “And to think Philip wrote this place off as a pimple on the history of the Maya,” she said after a long silence. “This is one of the biggest complete wall paintings I’ve seen in the Maya style. The technique is incredibly refined. It must have taken years to execute.”

  Hunter could only watch the serpent watching him.

  “You know what this is?” she asked finally, her voice husky with excitement.

  “A snake. A really, really big one.”

  “It’s Kukulcán in his serpent aspect. It has to be.”

  “So you’ve seen something like this before?” Hunter asked, unable to take his eyes off the endless, seething sea of scales and feathers.

  “No, not this big, not this detailed,” she said. “Even the paintings in the Petén don’t compare to this. Petén’s art is shallow and flat. But this…Bonampak might compare, maybe, but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe this.”

  “Is there any way to date the room?” Hunter asked. “I mean the painting, not the site itself.”

  “We can try to find soot for carbon dating, maybe even take some paint samples.” Yet even as she spoke, she was shaking her head. “I couldn’t bear to chip off a single piece of this. You could reach out and touch Kukulcán, feel the wind off its wings, breathe the sacred presence.”

  “That’s the breeze through the hallway,” Hunter said.

  She gave him a glance from gold-shot dark eyes. “You hope it is.” But she smiled, understanding a modern man’s unease with ancient things that had no good explanation. “I’d guess that this temple is between four and five centuries old. I’d have to do some soil analysis and compare construction styles and techniques. Someone—generations of someones—have kept this in beautiful shape.”

  “PFM,” he said absently.

  Hunter was compelled by what his penlight revealed. The snake figure ended or changed before repeating itself. It was hard to tell. The whole painting flowed, seethed at the edges where darkness was.

  The broader beam of Lina’s light joined his, and he saw the serpent’s jaws were gaping, revealing rows of te
eth and a very wide red human tongue. There was an eerie, almost human aspect to the face, but it wasn’t benign or inviting. The artist had captured the raw, primal majesty of a god that was worthy of awe and reverence. Its eyes were open, glowing gold with ruby irises. When the angle of the light changed, the pupils seemed to flicker between the vertical slit of a reptile and the rounder aspect of the human.

  In candlelight, the effect would be terrifying.

  The mouth was big enough for a large man to be swallowed inside. Hunter wondered if the man would emerge again, filled with godlike knowledge, or simply disappear to be digested by darkness. His skin rippled in primal response, making body hair stand on end.

  He had no desire to be the priest-king swallowed by this god.

  Hunter’s pencil beam moved on to another part of the wall. A figure leaped out of time. He was a tall, muscular, idealized man wearing a mask.

  “Lina,” he said, “I need some more light over here.”

  With a reluctance that said more than words, Lina’s light moved slowly to join his.

  The figure was wearing a mask made of obsidian, gleaming and black as midnight water. The mask had aspects of bird and bat, beast and human.

  Her breath came in, stopped. “That’s a painting of the missing mask. It shows how it was meant to be used, in whose honor, in which ceremony.”

  Hunter stared at a representation of the mask that had been stolen from the shipment seized by ICE.

  The figure wearing the mask had a single hand outstretched to the mouth of the serpent, fingers wide in courageous expectation. The other figures around him were very small, barely ankle-high, signifying their relative unimportance.

  “This was a priest-king,” Lina whispered.

  “The marking on his chest.” Hunter’s voice was like hers, hushed.

  “Blood. See the torn edges of the skin around the nipples? The blood dripping from beneath the loincloth? He cut himself beyond the point of pain to reach a different kind of consciousness.”

  Hunter winced. “Glad I was raised in a church where all we did was peel off a little cash for the Communion plate. Damn, it takes huevos or insanity to slice into your own dick.”

  “Look at the pattern of the fallen blood,” Lina said. “There, between his feet.”

  Uneasily Hunter looked. Blood that had dripped and streamed red became transformed into a blue glyph on the floor. “Kawa’il. Again.”

  “That’s who the offering is for, but who is the man performing the ceremony?” she asked. “I don’t see any sigils or historical glyphs indicating house and lineage and battles.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Very. There should be exploits, explanations, genealogies.” She swept the beam around but found only a sea of colored scales, the serpent in its thousand aspects, watching her.

  “Over there,” Hunter said. “The priest or king or whatever is reaching for something.”

  Slowly she turned her flashlight to find the figure of the priest-king and then followed his arm out to the hand, fingers gently splayed.

  There.

  She and Hunter both saw something in the space between the serpent and the man’s outstretched hand.

  “It looks like a small niche cut into the wall,” Lina said.

  Hunter followed her, keeping close.

  Flames or beams of radiance were painted around the niche, but they glowed a faint blue instead of red or orange or gold.

  “Lightning,” she said. “Another manifestation of Kawa’il.”

  Hunter played the thin beam over the niche. “Wonder what was in here. It can’t have been much more than fifteen inches long and maybe ten high, ten deep. Too small for a decent shrine.”

  She thought of the missing artifacts. “The obsidian mask wouldn’t fit there, not with its ceremonial feathers and fastenings. The opening’s not long enough for a scepter. A censer, maybe.”

  He went closer, ran a finger lightly over the ceiling of the niche. “No soot. No matter how magic the ventilation, burning enough copal leaves a residue.”

  “Okay, the niche didn’t hold a small censer. The god bundle would fit, but not its sacred box. A ceremonial knife isn’t compatible with the narrative.”

  “What narrative?”

  “The room is a story of the opening of a conduit between gods and man,” she said. “The giving or taking of knowledge.”

  “Knowledge? You mean like a book? A codex?”

  “Impossible,” she said instantly.

  “So is this room.”

  Shaking her head, Lina held up her hand. “Let me think.”

  Silently Hunter studied the glowing scales and eerie eyes of the massive serpent. No matter how often he told himself otherwise, the damned thing was alive. Not bad, not good, just unnervingly real.

  “Remember the wood piece in the museum?” Lina asked abruptly.

  Hunter thought back to the time before Jase had been shot. It seemed like a year rather than only days.

  “The plaque was a new piece that we had on loan,” she said. “It depicted a Kukulcán figure and another masked figure like this one, reaching to one another. There was something between them, but whatever it was had been broken off.”

  “Empty, like the niche.”

  “I studied the wood. I made sketches and took photos. The sketches are back in Houston. The photos are on my phone. Maybe they can give us an idea of what was in the niche—if the narratives are the same.”

  “Won’t know until we compare them,” Hunter said. “Is your phone in the backpack?”

  “No. It doesn’t work here, so I left it at home. I was expecting a little walk around my favorite ruins, not this. I don’t even have my camera.” The last was said in something close to a wail.

  His penlight clicked off and one of his arms went around her shoulders. “Easy, sweetheart. This has been here for centuries. It will be here when we get back with cameras and measuring tools and the whole dig thing.”

  Her head thumped against his shoulder. “All I was thinking about was getting you alone. I’m an idiot!”

  His other arm came around her and he held her close. “I like the way you’re thinking. And don’t call my favorite woman an idiot. You’re insulting my taste.”

  She banged her forehead against his chest. “You’re softer than a wall. Barely.”

  “Go lower. Things get harder.”

  He heard muffled laughter against his chest. Then, more clearly, she said, “I like you, Hunter Johnston. A lot. Only you could make me feel good about being so stupid as to leave the most basic work tools behind.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  Her arms went around him as she stood on tiptoe and brushed her lips over his. The touch lingered, deepened, became a sensual mating of tongues. After a long time Lina lifted her head and sighed.

  “But I have my sketchbook in the backpack, and you to hold the flashlight,” she said.

  Hunter sensed some long hours ahead. The look on her face kept him from protesting.

  “Good thing you packed lots of food and water,” he said, sighing.

  “UH, SWEETHEART, UNLESS YOU BROUGHT MORE BATTERIES, it’s time to go,” Hunter said.

  Lina looked up, startled. “What time is it?”

  “Time to go.”

  Stretching her cramped fingers, she stood. And groaned. “Sorry. I forgot everything but sketching.”

  “I noticed,” he said, smiling.

  She blinked and looked around, reluctant to leave even though her flashlight was dead and his was losing intensity.

  “You owe me a big favor for standing here like a floor lamp all this time,” he said. “Repayment will likely involve costumes and sexual excess.”

  She looked intrigued, then interested. Very interested.

  He groaned. “I should have thought about that hours ago. C’mon. I don’t want to mess up the religious juju happening here.”

  She nipped at his chin. “Unlike other cultures, the Maya have almost
no artistic tradition of depicting the act of reproduction. Likely, sex wasn’t that important to them as a culture.”

  “Huh. No wonder their civilization fell.”

  Lina laughed. “You are such a man.”

  He smiled slowly. “That’s because you’re such a woman.”

  With a shake of her head, she followed the light beam back to the entrance of the tomb. Most of the candles had burned out, but a few were still waiting for the faithful man or men who had kept the temple clean. Despite the subtle draft from the back of the hall, the remaining flames burned bright and straight, bending only when she passed them.

  It took Hunter a few tries, but the stone slab door opened onto the jungle. He let his eyes adjust to daylight before he drew Lina out of the tomb and into the cover of jumbled limestone blocks.

  There was no unexpected shadow lurking, no sense of being watched.

  “How’s your neck?” he asked.

  “Good.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They covered the distance back to the Bronco quickly. Again, the vehicle was untouched.

  “I know a lot of places that would pay big money to have this neighborhood watch system,” Hunter said.

  Lina smiled. “Want to drive?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “The way your foot kept looking for the brake the whole time I was at the wheel.”

  “Did I say anything?”

  “No. You earned major points for it, too. Almost as many as you earned last night.”

  He gave her a long, sideways look. “Yeah?”

  “Oh yeah.” She tossed him the keys.

  “That’s supposed to help me concentrate on driving?”

  “Concentration equals more points.”

  “Huh. Definitely costumes are on the schedule. Along with a few other things the Hindu culture was clever enough to illuminate in the Kama Sutra.”

  Lina bit back a laugh and climbed into the Bronco. She didn’t have to give any directions as Hunter negotiated the confusing tracks that ultimately would lead to a better road. She relaxed into the seat, realizing that he was as good at backcountry driving as she had guessed.

  “Sometimes I worry that you’re too perfect,” she said.