Khuatupec was hungry.
He stirred within the stone. As solid and impermeable as it was beautifully carved, it stood upright alongside its unformed and uninhabited basaltic kin. No light penetrated the ancient temple where the stones reposed. None had entered for hundreds of years. The absence of illumination did not matter to Khuatupec. Light meant nothing to him. He and his kind utilized means and methods of perception that did not require its presence.
Within him boiled The Hunger; a sere, seething whirlpool of dissatisfaction and emptiness. Considering how long it had been since last he had fed, it was surprising the discomfort was not worse. Yet he contented himself. For the first time in living memory, food was at hand. Something to eat. Something to suck at.
He divined its presence nearby, had been aware of it for some time now. Some days would see it draw tantalizingly close, others would find it moving maddeningly away. There was nothing Khuatupec could do but wait. In order for him to be able to feed, physical contact with the food was necessary. Because of his nature, his situ, that contact had to be initiated by the food itself. He envied others of his kind who could move about more freely in search of sustenance. Most of them were much smaller than he, however, and needed less feeding. His kin were multitudinous and diverse, but there was only one Khuatupec. He. Him.
Having been patient for so many centuries, he would perforce have to be patient a while longer. But it was frustrating to have so much fresh food so close at hand yet be unable to taste any of it.
Khuatupec waited within the carved stone, and brooded, and contemplated the ecstasy that was eating. Soon, he persuaded himself. Soon enough the taste, the pleasure, the exhilaration of feeding would once more be his. He wondered which of the food would be the first to make contact.
The condor descended in a lazy spiral, great hooked beak and immense black wings inclining in the direction of something unseen and dead. It reminded Cody of the much smaller turkey vultures that haunted the skies above the family ranch back home. Wiping perspiration from his forehead, he crouched down and resumed gently blowing dust from the punctured skull in the center of square N-23.
The hole in the hoary cranium was large enough to admit his little finger. Working carefully within the delimitating grid of white cord that was suspended above the soil, he finished cleaning the skull before gently depositing it in a waiting box padded with bubble paper. Unlike the Incas, for whom considerable evidence of the primitive surgical procedure existed, there was no record of the Chachapoyans practicing trepanning. If detailed study of the skull turned out to prove that they had employed the procedure, the results might serve as the basis for a formal paper. “Evidence of cranial medical practices among the Chachapoyans circa A.D. 1100-1400—Apachetarimac site, Amazonas Province, northern Peru.” An effort suitable for Archaeological Review, certainly, with a slightly more sensationalized version made available for Discover magazine or Popular Science.
Pictures—he needed pictures. Straightening, he turned and reached for the rucksack that was lying on the higher level nearby. On the far side of the excavation, Langois and Kovia were working on their knees on opposite sides of a cracked monochrome pot. It displayed several of the same designs that decorated the tawny limestone walls that formed the ancient citadel. Unlike the Incas, whose dark stonework tended to be smooth and featureless, the Chachapoyans had incorporated an assortment of patterns into the foundations of their round stone houses and rectangular temples. So far, diamonds, waves, and undulating figures that suggested serpents had been discovered.
Pots were rare. Apachetarimac was not Tucume or Pacatnamu, ancient cities that had hardly been touched by archaeologists or tourists. Around their weathering adobe pyramids lay millions upon millions of potsherds, relics of a thousand years of pottery-making by cultures with magical names: Chimu, Moche, Lambayeque. The Chachapoyans had not left behind nearly as many clay vessels depicting their lives and beliefs. Nor were the Calla Calla Mountains as conducive to the preservation of pottery as was the dry coastal desert. The cracked pot was a fine discovery. Even so, Cody did not envy Langois and Kovia. He was content with his punctured skull.
After taking several close-ups of the skull as it rested in its box, he removed it and set it on the chest-high dirt ledge nearby. Checking the position of the sun, he tried to establish what he thought was the most dramatic angle for another photo. He could shoot up against the sky, but finally decided to use the distant mountains as background. Wearing their blankets of green and soaring to heights of fourteen thousand feet and more, they would make a colorful backdrop for the dark brown bone.
Apachetarimac, he mused as he clicked off shots on the digital camera and then checked them in the view-screen. Having conquered and absorbed the Chachapoyans as they had the majority of cultures in western South America, the Incas had rechristened many of the cities inhabited by their new subjects. They had left behind few clues as to the reasons for some of their choices. Some, like Machu Picchu and Ollyantaytambo, were obvious. Apachetarimac, which translated from the Quechua as “sacred talking spot,” was not. If his skull were capable of speech, it probably could have provided some answers. But the brain that had once inhabited the weathered, dark brown ovoid had long since become food for worms.
Where it might have made another person queasy to think of it in such a setting, the prospect of the evening meal set off a mild chain reaction in Cody’s stomach. Though tall and lanky of build, he was no more immune to the pangs of hunger than were his smaller colleagues. A steady diet of physical labor in the thin air at nearly ten thousand feet worked up ravenous appetites. Frowning slightly, he placed the skull back in its padded box and wondered if today dinner might be any different from what was expected. He doubted it. Vizcaria, the camp cook, was nothing if not predictable. Cody would gladly have handed over ten bucks for a decent chicken-fried steak.
He would have to be satisfied with the thought and the memory. Here in the heights of the Calla Calla Mountains there were no roads and no restaurants. Choctamal, the nearest town, was three days’ hard ride to the north on the back of a plodding, crotch-splitting mule. The nearest real restaurant was in the provincial capital of Chachapoyas, another four hours’ frightening ride down a narrow, single-lane road boasting some of the longest, steepest drop-offs Cody had ever seen. Coming as he did from the relatively flat hill country of south-central Texas, he had a harder time than some of his friends with the thousand-foot precipices that seemed to lie beneath every bend in the lonely dirt track. Frankly, he preferred the mules to the brake-pad-deprived minibuses and pickups.
“Looking good, Mr. Westcott!” a voice boomed from above. Langois and Kovia glanced up briefly before returning to their own work. Dr. Harbos would query them in due time.
Martin Harbos, Ph.D., was director of the excavations at Apachetarimac. Five-ten or so, he was half a foot shorter than the senior graduate student laboring beneath him. A candle or two shy of sixty, he still had more hair than anyone else on the project, though every strand had long ago turned a startling silvery-white, the blatant hue of a cheap Santa Claus wig. Rather than being a consequence of normal aging, the network of deep lines that crevassed his face was inherited from his ancestors. His skin was burned brown from years of field work, and beneath his shirt and shorts small, corded muscles exploded like caramel popcorn. He had the bluest eyes Cody had ever seen, a ready sense of humor, and the ability to flay a student naked with a casual, sometimes off-hand comment.
Today he chose to be complimentary. “Trepanning?” He was crouching at the edge of the excavation, peering down at the skull in the box.
“I’d like to think so, Dr. Harbos.” Though friendly, even jovial, the professor insisted on the honorific. Fraternizing between officers and enlisted men was limited on Harbos’s shift, Cody thought with a hidden smile. “It’ll take lab studies to confirm or deny.” He indicated the packaged skull. “The edges of the cavity are pretty regular, but it could have been made by a weapon.”
Harbos nodded. “Or something else.” His expression was sympathetic. “It’s always frustrating when you find something potentially exciting in the field and know that it won’t be properly identified for months.” Straightening, he moved on, keeping clear of the rim of the straight-sided excavation so as not to knock dirt or pebbles into the hole.
Pleased with this mildest of compliments, Cody carefully began to fold the lid of the box closed, bending the corners of the cardboard so the top would stay shut until it could be reopened in the field lab. Somewhere, a bird chirped. The paucity of birds in the semi-cloud forest was striking. Unlike elsewhere in the Andes, here they kept to themselves, as if their boisterous warbling might disturb the sleeping mountains.
Except for the condors and the buzzards, of course. Ever on the lookout for harbingers of death, they had a job to do that required constant patrolling of the translucent blue sky. Their occasional appearances provoked admiring comment from those of his fellow students who hailed from the city, which he ignored. Back home, such aerial visions were common as dirt.
He wondered how many other intact skulls might lie buried and waiting to be found nearby. By the standards of the remarkable but little-known Chachapoyan culture, Apachetarimac was not a big site, no more than four hundred meters long by ninety wide. Gran Vilaya, for one, boasted far more individual structures, and Cuelap was more physically imposing. But Apachetarimac remained one of the most impressive, occupying the top of a forest-clad mountain whose sides fell away sheer on three sides. Walls of cut limestone over a hundred and twenty feet high formed the basis of the citadel, with the interior structures rising higher still. Combined with dense overgrowth, its inaccessibility had kept it hidden from the outside world for the last five hundred years.
Locals whose farms clung with the tenacity of dirty spider webs to the sides of nearby mountains knew of its existence but had no reason to speak of it to the outside world. While they had made it plain they didn’t care for the busy visitors who delighted in digging in the dirt, neither did they attempt to interfere with the excavation. The presence of a pair of Peruvian federal policemen, camped on site to prevent looting and ward off any wandering narcotráficos, also served to keep the superstitious locals from causing any trouble.
“Well, does inspiration strike, have you been bitten by a fer-de-lance, or is this paralysis due to an inability to decide whether to go forward, back, or simply wait for instructions?”
He turned sharply. The only time Alwydd could look down on him was when he was standing in a hole. Not that she was particularly short, but he was the tallest person in camp. For that matter, he was the tallest person in this immediate region of Peru, height not being a notable characteristic of the local indios and mestizos.
Embarrassed, he fumbled for a witty response and, as always, came up with nothing. She was much too quick for him. Harbos could keep up with her, giving as good as he got, but no one else in camp had her lightning wit. She was also brilliant, and beautiful, about a year away from her doctorate, and convinced that she and not Cody ought to be Harbos’s first assistant in the field. If not wit, however, Coschocton Westcott possessed endless reservoirs of patience. In an archaeologist, that was the far more valued commodity. Brilliance was cheap.
He had never met so attractive a girl so indifferent to her appearance. From the dirt-streaked baggy bush pants to the equally frumpy beige-toned field shirt, she looked every inch a bad copy of a silent screen clown after a particularly rough car chase. The limp-brimmed hat that slumped down around her ears sat atop her head like broccoli on a stalk, rising to unnatural heights in order to accommodate the long hair wound up beneath. A mussed pixie drifting through a khaki wilderness, he mused. For all that, a most erotic pixie.
Forget it, he told himself firmly. Though he had never asked, and she had not volunteered the information, he would bet that she wrote regularly to several captivated males back in the States. Dazzling young doctors or up-and-coming investment bankers, no doubt. Gangly half-breed dirt-grubbers from West Hicksville were not likely to fit neatly into her definition of potential mate material.
Everyone had tried, he knew. He’d even seen the temptation in Harbos’s face. You had to give the good doctor credit, though. He might brush up against his students every now and then, but he was quick to voice apologies—even if he didn’t feel apologetic. It struck Cody abruptly that she was still standing there, looking down and waiting for some kind of response.
“I’m just packing Curly here for the trip to the lab.” He indicated the skull.
With the agility of a gymnast she hopped down to the mid-level shelf, careful not to kick any dirt into the excavation. Kneeling while pushing back the brim of her rumpled hat, she scrutinized the vacant-eyed skull thoughtfully.
“Not exactly the second coming of the Lord of Sipán,” she quipped tartly.
“What is?” The great, unlooted tomb of the Moche chieftain that had been discovered near the coast was unparalleled in the history of South American archaeology. Its gold, silver, and lapidary treasures were the stuff of every field worker’s dreams.
“Nothing, I suppose. If this is Curly, where are Manny and Moe?”
“Show a little respect for the dead.” He nodded toward the silent skull. “That’s a cousin of mine. Distant, but still a relation.”
Straightening, she grinned down at him, enjoying the temporary and entirely artificial adjustment to their respective height. “Don’t try that politically correct guilt crap on me, Cody Westcott.” She tapped the box with a booted foot. “This dude’s about as much your relative as Mary Queen of Scots is mine. It is a dude?”
“I believe so. Kimiko will make the final determination.” Kimiko Samms was the group’s forensic anthropologist, a specialty that required her to live in even closer proximity to the long dead than her colleagues. “I can feel a kinship across the centuries to whoever this person was.”
“Funny.” Reaching back, she scratched the arch of her behind through the soft bush poplin of her pants. “All I can feel are chigger bites.”
“Salar should have something for that. If he doesn’t, I do.” Turning away, Cody started toward the steps that had been cut into the dirt above a nonsensitive corner of the site. Sweat poured down his face, mixing with accumulated dirt and dust—archaeologist’s rouge. Time was passing and he wanted to get the skull to the field lab and return in time to do some more digging before the daylight shrank too far below the undulating green horizon. The sweat did not bother him. At Apachetarimac’s altitude the air began to cool rapidly once the sun had passed its zenith.
“What’s that?”
He almost didn’t turn. In addition to her beauty, wit, and intelligence, Kelli Alwydd was renowned in camp for her jokes, not all of them practical. At least, he mused, she hadn’t shouted “snake!” or something equally juvenile. As he paused, he wondered why he was reacting at all, giving her what she wanted. Maybe, he decided, he was a sucker for clever women. Or maybe he was just a sucker. Irrespective of the reason, he turned.
She was in the pit, having jumped down from mid-level so softly that he hadn’t heard her land. Crouching, she squinted in the receding light at a portion of grid square V-9. Only slightly uncomfortable at finding the pose as pretty as it was professional, he ambled over to join her, affecting an air of studied disinterest.
“Let me guess.” He fought to keep a lid on his trademark sarcasm. “A solid gold peanut, like those in the necklace from Sipán? Or is it just silver? Silver-and-turquoise ear ornaments, with articulated figures?”
She did not look up. “No. I think it’s another skull.” Reaching into one of her many shirt pockets, she brought out a pair of brushes: one bold, the other fine-haired sable, and began methodically flicking at the dirt in front of her feet.
He could have knelt to peer over her shoulder, stealing a small pleasure from the proximity. Instead, he walked around to crouch down in front of her, careful to step cleanly over the white cord that sliced the excavation into neat, easily labeled squares. Her brushwork was rapid and precise, like the rest of her.
Reminiscent of scorched polystyrene, the smooth curve of a human cranium began to emerge from the soil of ages in which it lay entombed. It was large, but not outrageously so. Like the rest of their South American brethren, the Chachapoyans were a people of modest stature.
With a sigh, Cody straightened. The sun was going down fast now. It would be dark soon, no time to be bumbling around in the area of active excavation. Aside from the danger of stumbling into an open pit, a misplaced foot could do irreparable damage to half-seen, half-exposed relics. Dr. Harbos was an easygoing individual, but not where the work of serious archeology was concerned. One of his rules required everyone to be back in camp by the scheduled dinnertime. In addition to preventing damage to the sites by overzealous diggers, this was also a safety measure. Snakes and uncomfortably large spiders emerged soon after sundown, and in a land of precipitous cliffs and hillsides, wandering about after dark was not a good idea anyway.
“It’s another skull, all right,” she murmured. Busy appraising the sunset, he did not look down. “But this one’s weird.”
That drew his attention back to his companion. With the sun setting, it was already dark in the bottom of the pit. “What do you mean, ‘weird’? That’s not acceptable scientific terminology.”
Bending over the spot, she blocked his view of the emerging bone. “It’s got a hole in it, like the one you’re taking to the lab—but not like the one you’re taking to the lab.”
“Is that anything like the sense you’re not making?” He knelt to have a look for himself, frowning slightly. His flashlights reposed on the compact field desk back in his tent. At the same time, repressed excitement surged through him. A second trepanned skull lying close to the first would be a good indication that they had stumbled on an important ceremonial or medicinal center, perhaps the nearest thing that existed to a Chachapoyan infirmary.
Sitting back, she continued to work with the two brushes, using the larger to sweep away clumps of earth and the smaller for cleaning the depressions in the skull. Immediately, he saw what had inspired her comment. There was indeed a cavity in the new skull, but it was considerably larger than the one marring the specimen he was going to deliver to the field lab. No only was it larger, but irregularly shaped, with ragged edges. Even the clumsiest shaman-surgeon could not possibly have expected to cure any patient by opening such a grievous lesion. Furthermore, it was—weird.
Without waiting for her to finish exposing the base of the skull, he reached down and cupped his long fingers around it, ignoring her protests as he pulled it from the earth. For the first time in centuries, it was fully exposed to the air.
“Hey!” she objected, “I haven’t finished cleaning that!”
“Look at this,” he said, holding the osseous discovery out to her, his right index finger tracing paths across the bone as he spoke. “This isn’t weird—it’s impossible.”
Around the rim of the opening in the roof of the skull, a jagged ridge of bone the diameter of a silver dollar rose upward, like water rising around a pebble dropped in still water. It stood frozen in time, testament to some unimaginable cerebral convulsion.
Kelli stared. “That’s pretty extreme. It looks like the inside of his head blew up. Some kind of pressure buildup in the cerebral fluid?” Her tone had turned serious.
“I don’t know. I didn’t have that much physiology.” Straightening, he held the second skull up to the rapidly fading light. “It sure doesn’t look like the result of some intentional medical procedure, no matter how primitive. What could cause the bone to rise up and solidify in this kind of position?” Carefully, he ran one finger along the thin, sharp edge of the cranial crater.
She shook her head. “You got me. It’s ugly. Samms is going to go crazy when she sees this.”
Gently, he knelt once more to replace the skull in the slight depression from which it had been removed. “I haven’t got another suitable box or any more bubble wrap here, and it’s getting dark. We’ll come back for it tomorrow.”
Her eyebrows rose slightly. “We? This is your dig.” She nodded briskly to her left. “Mine’s over there, with Marie-Therese, at the base of the serpent wall.”
He protested. “You found this. It’s unusual, and you’re entitled to the credit.”
Her head turned slightly to one side as she gazed up at him, carefully placing her brushes back in her shirt pocket. “Okay, then. ‘We’ it is. I’ll come over early and we can pack it up together.”
“Good. That’s fair.” Her acquiescence pleased him for reasons that he did not elucidate to himself. “Walk back to camp?”
“We’d better.” She scanned the darkening sky speculatively. “Harbos won’t wait five minutes before sending someone to look for us if we’re late. Then we’ll get chewed out for wasting camp resources, et cetera.”
“Give him credit.” Cody’s long legs made easy work of earthen steps his companion had to negotiate with care. “We haven’t lost anybody on this dig yet.”
“Sometimes I’d like to get lost.”
Joining him on the surface, she studied the surrounding mountains. In the distance, smoke rose from the cooking fires of small, vertically challenged farms. No contrails marred the pristine purpling sky. Northern Peru did not lie at the intersection of any major transcontinental jet routes, and there was virtually no local air traffic. A silence that was largely extinct elsewhere in the world stalked the immense mountain valleys like some vast, nebulous, prehistoric visitant.
“Me too.” Together they followed the trail through the grass that led toward camp, dodging around the huge trees that grew out of the citadel’s soil-cloaked foundation. Around them, the circular walls of empty buildings turned single doorways to the sun, and the rectangular pyramid of the recently identified royal quarters cast its long, broad shadow on their progress.
The narrow defile, barely wide enough for one person at a time to squeeze through, cut steeply downward through the hundred-foot-high wall. Where it opened onto the rocky, grass-covered slope it was still just wide enough for two men to enter abreast. Eminently defensible against an attacking enemy, it made the immense stone walls that flanked the opening seem even higher and more impressive than they were.
Turning to their right, they followed the trail that had been etched into the slope along the base of the wall, careful to keep it close at hand. Wander too far away and a thousand-foot drop waited to greet the indifferent. Ahead, the flicker of lanterns coming to life began to dance within the intensifying darkness. There were more than twenty tents for the field team, plus additional lean-tos and makeshift shelters for the native help. By far the largest canopy, a substantial, well-anchored sweep of tough jungle-resistant weave, served as dining room, lecture hall, library, and recreation area. Another, slightly smaller, housed the field lab.
“Hungry?” he asked her.
“I’m always hungry, Cody.”
He tripped over the compliment before he realized it. “I’ve seen you eat, and I wonder where you put it.”
“Up here.” She tapped the side of her head. “Mental exertion burns a lot of calories.” In the twilight, her smile shimmered like one of the approaching lanterns. “You don’t exactly starve yourself.”
“When you grow up always hungry, you get in the habit of eating anything and everything that’s offered to you.” Espying a long, twisting shape on the trail ahead of them, he hesitated only an instant before resuming his stride. In this part of the world, a smart hiker was wary even of fallen branches. Anything with multiple curves demanded a second look.
Her smile faded away and her eyes locked on his as best they could in the gathering darkness. “I don’t know much about you, Cody. You’re friendly, you’ll stop work to chat with anyone, but you never talk about yourself.” In the creeping shadows her slight shrug was barely perceptible. “This is only my second dig. Maybe that’s the normal condition for more advanced field associates like yourself. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just this place.” A casual sweep of one hand encompassed mountains, valleys, and the citadel wall that towered skyward on their right. “Up here, everyone tends to focus on dead people.”
“There’s not much to know,” he began, and for the next hour proceeded to give the lie to his own claim of conciseness. Considering how fast her mind and mouth worked, he was astonished in retrospect at how intently she listened.
Khuatupec was beside himself, literally as well as figuratively. The food was moving away! There was nothing he could do but fume silently, exactly as he had for hundreds of years.
Nor was he alone. Amnu writhed inside her tree as the food almost, but not quite, brushed against one of its branches. Tsemak twitched below the ground, inexorably wedded to his slice of subsurface stratum. Chakasx hummed within the stream that served as both home and prison. Throughout the citadel, the mountain, and the fortresslike slopes that had protected the Chachapoyans of Apachetarimac for centuries, They stirred. Moved about and were active as they had not been for more than five hundred years.
In that time, other food had come close, though none had been so tasty as this promised to be. Its sheer virgin delectability was unprecedented in Khuatupec’s long experience. To have it pass so close, on so many occasions, was maddening. There was nothing he or any of the others could do. In order to eat, it was the food that would have to make proper contact with them. They could not leave their situs to initiate feeding. It was an infuriating, horrific existence, mitigated only by the fact that Khuatupec’s kind were almost impossible to kill. Yet, he thought furiously, to suffer near immortality in a state of perpetual craving was as much curse as good fortune.
Even worse than not being able to feed on such delectables was the thought that contact might be made with another of his kind instead of him. Watching another feed in his place would be almost as intolerable as not being able to feed himself. Should that occur, there would remain only the hope of snatching up some carelessly discarded leftovers from the main feeding.
It might not come to that. He could still be the first. Thus far, none had managed to feed on the newly arrived food, although a week ago Sachuetet had come close. She had been too quick, however, from an eagerness to eat born of hundreds of years of abstinence. Sensing that something was not right, the food had freed itself before Sachuetet had been able to begin feeding fully. Her agonized cry of frustration and loss had resounded throughout the mountain.
From the others she drew no solace. Khuatupec and his kind knew nothing of compassion. They knew only how to wait, and to eat. The light was vanishing from the mountain as if sucked up by the ground. Light or dark, day or night, it was all the same to Khuatupec and the others. They never slept, not in the thousands of years of their existence. As a concept, sleep was known to them. Food, for example, slept. Trees and rocks and water did not. Khuatupec and Anmu and Tsemak and the others did not. Even if they had known how to go about initiating the process, it was something they would have avoided assiduously. Self-evidently, sleeping was dangerous. Sleeping was risky.
Sleep, and you might miss a feeding.