Jeremy opened the cooler and laid out the food and drink on the table as Jack came up. Costas was grumbling to himself but gave up at the sight of food and rolled up his blueprint. They sat down, with Maria leaning on the rock behind them.
“What have you got for me this time?” Costas said. “Some Toltec delicacy?
Pickled human heart perhaps?”
Jeremy spoke between mouthfuls. “Nope. Just good old Mexican.” He turned to Jack. “Tourists back this afternoon.” He swallowed, and took a swig of water.
“The tremor that hit us in the jungle barely even registered here, so they think it’s safe. Too damn hot to work here anyway.” He tore off another chunk of bread and gestured at the deep pit of the Well of Sacrifice, below the platform where Jack and Costas had been standing. “We really going to do this?”
“Later this year,” Jack said. “I’m sure there’s some fabulous stuff still down there.”
“I’ve got it all worked out.” Costas was gleaming with sweat under his panama hat, his mouth full of food. “Come over when you’ve finished and I’ll show you.”
“I’d love to see Harald’s last stand, the stuff you guys found,” Jeremy said. “Back in the other cenote.”
“I don’t think so,” Jack murmured. “The entrance is blocked by hundreds of tons of stone, and in the other direction you’d be fighting an impossible current.
We’ve found Harald’s last battle, his Ragnarøk, and that’s enough. Something tells me I’d be pushing my battle-luck to go back there again.”
“It’s a dark place.” Maria shivered. “You don’t want to go there.”
“It’s just a bunch of stalagmites anyway,” Costas said.
Jeremy peered dubiously at the green surface of the sinkhole in front of them.
“If you’re thinking of sending me down into this one as an alternative, count me out. This place spooks me enough as it is.”
“You can at least come along on the expedition as food-bearer.”
“Maria?” Jeremy craned his neck over the table to look at her. “The Hereford library, I mean. Can I have leaves of absence in my contract?”
Maria put down her water bottle and gave a tired smile. Jack had been watching her carefully from the other side of the table. She had been asleep or resting almost the entire time since Reksnys’ death. The medical team on Seaquest II had treated the abrasion on her face, which was now covered in white gauze.
There would be no scar, which would have been an appalling legacy.
Psychologically was another matter. Jack knew from his own experience that the loss of O’Connor would hit her hardest when she was back on home turf, with time to reflect. And two days before, Maria had stood with a gun aimed at the head of the man who had ordered that murder and who had traumatised her long before she had met O’Connor. Jack had seen her in a new light since she had revealed the terrible truth of her family’s past. He had met her mother years ago, when he and Maria were students together, had assumed she was Sephardic like Maria’s father, had never guessed. Like many Holocaust survivors, her mother had found some way of locking the horror away in her memory, had only let it overwhelm her when she knew she was dying. It explained Maria’s strength, but also her restlessness, her reluctance to commit herself to anyone.
Exposing a trauma she had internalised all her life would change her. The showdown with Reksnys had brought some measure of closure, bringing her own blood feud to an end, but it had been a shocking experience and had taken its toll on her. Fortunately the Mexican police had been all too happy to change sides when they saw who was winning, and Maria had been hailed a hero for saving the little boy’s life. Only Jack and Costas and Jeremy had witnessed the final scene.
Maria gazed at Jeremy. “The job’s got your name on it, but any more time with these IMU guys and you’ll be hooked for good.” She gave him another tired smile and then looked across at Jack. “What’s the latest on the menorah?”
“I’ve been thinking about the symmetry of history,” Jack replied.
Costas gave an alarmed look and straightened himself. “Oh no. Philosophy. Time I got back to my blueprints.”
“No. Wait. It’s important, maybe the key to the whole story.” Costas sat down heavily while Jack marshalled his thoughts. “It came to me when I saw that painting of the Toltec procession to the Well of Sacrifice, so incredibly similar to the Roman procession a thousand years before on the Arch of Titus. Think of all the different places we know the menorah has been, all the different cultures.
The supreme symbol of the Jewish people, second only to the Ark of the Covenant. Then it’s snatched by the Roman emperors and becomes a prestige item for them as well. Then the Byzantines. Then Harald Hardrada and the Vikings. Each time it could have been melted down, but it wasn’t. For the Romans it was a symbol of conquest, of superiority. For the Byzantines it was one of the hoarded treasures that linked them back to the old Rome, to the old virtues. For Harald Hardrada it was a symbol of his personal prowess and then became something more mystical, almost a talisman. By then its original Jewish significance was lost, but it still had almost supernatural meaning, the power to shape men’s destinies.”
Costas had been listening intently. “The Fourth Crusade, the sack of Constantinople,” he said. “That’s it. All that stuff we were looking for, the ancient works of art. Some of it had prestige value like you said, transformed into a different culture. The Horses of St. Mark’s in Venice, originally an ancient sculpture but then the symbol of a medieval city-state, something its makers could never have dreamed possible.”
“You get my drift.”
“And the other stuff, the works of art ditched in the Golden Horn. No prestige value.”
“Or symbolism that was dangerous, unwanted. For the Crusaders, like the Vatican, the symbolic power of the menorah had come full circle, back to its Jewish origins. That’s why we thought there was a chance of finding it in the Golden Horn.”
“So after the Vikings we move on to the Toltecs,” Costas said. “I see what you’re driving at.”
“The Toltecs were big on symbols of victory, symbols of prowess and dominance,” Jack said. “Really big. Just look at the architecture of this place, the sculpture. And they loved their gold. Maybe they didn’t offer the menorah to the gods at the end of that procession but stashed it away, something to be brought out only for the most sacred ceremonies. Think about the emperor Vespasian a thousand years before, the triumphal procession in the Roman Forum. Like the Toltecs he sacrificed his prisoners of war, the Jewish captives. He could have sacrificed their treasure too, melted it down to make a king’s ransom in coin.
Instead he locked it away in the Temple of Peace.”
“The Temple of the Warriors,” Jeremy murmured. “That was the most sacred place of the Toltecs, but it sure wasn’t a temple of peace. It was more like Wewelsburg Castle in Bavaria, the headquarters of the SS.”
“Not exactly what Vespasian had in mind,” Maria said.
Costas was nodding enthusiastically. “Thinking outside the box. I like it.”
“See?” Jack grinned. “Not much different from engineering. You have your plodders, and you have your geniuses.”
“I take it you’re referring to Jeremy.”
Maria was still deep in thought. “So when the Toltecs die out, the menorah vanishes from history, just as we used to think it did at the end of the Roman Empire,” she said.
“The trail goes cold,” Jack agreed.
“Any leads?”
Jack looked at Jeremy, who gazed back blankly and then suddenly looked distracted. He delved with his free hand into a satchel on the table and pulled out a book. “What you were saying. I’ve just had a brainstorm. It’s something else I found when I was looking for clues in the Maya texts. I couldn’t think of a link when I read it, but it’s suddenly dawned on me. It’s possible, just possible.”
“Not again.” Costas looked at Jeremy with mock horror. “You’re not going to spring another secret society on us.”
“Have no fear.” Jeremy finished his bread and wiped his mouth, then took a gulp of water. “Remember how it took the Spanish years to conquer the Yucatán, a lot longer than central Mexico? The Yucatán was the first place Cortés landed, but he didn’t stick around long.”
“No gold,” Costas offered.
“Right. But he may have missed his cue there, maybe missed the biggest treasure of them all.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
“You won’t believe this, but the last of the Maya kings wasn’t conquered until 1697. That’s 1697,” Jeremy emphasised. “And he was a direct descendant of the kings of this place, of Chichén Itzá.”
Jack looked stunned. “That’s almost two centuries after Cortés!”
“I thought Chichén Itzá was already destroyed, abandoned before the Spanish arrived,” Costas interjected.
“Several decades before Cortés, in the fifteenth century.” Jeremy nodded. “The Toltecs were already long gone, imploded in some awful bloodbath two centuries before. They were replaced by a more civilized Maya dynasty called the Itzá, the people who gave their name to the place. What happened here in the final days is shrouded in mystery, but when the Maya finally abandoned the temples, they left here forever, disappeared into the jungle and wandered around for years like the lost tribes of Israel.”
“Maybe they had a collective breakdown,” Costas mused. “Centuries living in a horrifying vortex of violence, all that terror and sacrifice taking its toll. They finally cracked.”
Jeremy laughed. “Well, whatever happened, they eventually made their way to Lake Petén, more than four hundred kilometres south in what’s now Guatemala.
Impenetrable jungle, as far away from the Spanish as you could get. They paddled across to a remote island and established a new city, Tah Itzá. They lasted there for generations, undisturbed and unknown except to a few missionaries. Tah Itzá came to have a mystical reputation among the Spanish.
To some it was a terrifying jungle stronghold, a bastion of fierce warriors who practised satanic rituals, a hell on earth. To others it was a place of untold riches that could only be reached after great hardship, a kind of Maya Shangri-La, or Avalon.”
“Back to King Arthur again,” Costas murmured. “I doubt whether Tennyson would have ever dreamt of putting his Avalon in the Mexican jungle.”
“They could have had their treasure with them,” Jack murmured. “They may have been a vanquished people, a shadow of their former glory, but they would have salvaged what they could from Chichén Itzá. Like the Israelites, they would have kept with them their most sacred possessions, their greatest wealth.”
“Maybe they associated the menorah with the eagle-god, with the return of the king,” Maria said. “That reference Jeremy found in the Book of Chilam Balam suggests the Maya had some memory of Harald and the Vikings. Remember what Reksnys said about the local Maya today, their reluctance to go down into the cenote below the temple. Maybe Harald was transformed into a kind of mythical saviour god, fighting for the Maya against their Toltec oppressors.
Maybe two hundred years after Harald met his end some intrepid Maya salvaged the menorah from the Toltec inferno, and it passed into yet another culture.”
“If they hadn’t already sacrificed it,” Jack said.
“Or melted it down.”
“What we know comes from a manuscript revealed in Mexico only recently, in the late 1980s,” Jeremy continued. “It’s an incredible story, the account of a Franciscan friar, Fray Andrés de Avendaño y Loyola, who reached Tah Itzá in 1695. Avendaño was a man of exceptional intellect and physical stamina, with great moral strength and sense of purpose. He became fascinated by the people he was sent to convert, as concerned with their livelihood as with proselytising.
The early missionaries get a bad press out here, but without scholars like Avendaño we’d know virtually nothing of these people, and whole populations would have become extinct. Father O’Connor was part of that tradition.”
“I wonder if Patrick knew anything about this,” Maria murmured.
Jeremy opened the book. “According to his own account, Avendaño arrived that year on the shore of Lake Petén accompanied by two Franciscans and ten converted Maya. From the east, across the lake, they saw a spectacular sight.”
Jeremy read out a passage. “A great wedge-shaped flotilla of canoes, all of them adorned with many flowers and playing much music with sticks and drums and wooden flutes. And seated in one larger than all was the king of the Itzá, who was the Lord Kanek, which means the star twenty serpent.”
“Sounds awesome,” Costas murmured. “Any gold?”
“What Avendaño saw was every Spaniard’s fantasy about the New World, the kind of thing the conquistadors sold their souls for two centuries before but rarely ever saw. You can tell Avendaño was overwhelmed. His instincts as a Jesuit were clouded by that lust that drove the Spaniards to conquest, like a shark smelling blood.”
Jack smiled. “Go on.”
“The last of the Maya kings came before them. Listen to this. He wore a crown of gold, and gold discs in his ears from which golden pendants hung down to his shoulders. He had bands of pure gold on his arms and golden finger-rings, and his blue sandals were covered with golden bells.”
Costas whistled. “He was weighed down with gold.”
Jeremy shut the book. “Avendaño failed to convert the Itzá. Two years later the city fell to Spanish arms.”
“You say they brought their treasure with them from Chichén Itzá?” Costas said.
“That’s the story.”
“That’s an awful lot of gold, for a vanquished people.”
“Just a thought.”
Jack was nodding slowly. “If the Maya were so secretive about their sacred texts, those books of Chilam Balam that prophesised the arrival of bearded men from the east, then they could have concealed untold other treasures. With the Spanish hunting everywhere for gold, an island stronghold on a lake set deep in the jungle sounds about right.”
“And maybe it was just gold, pure and simple,” Costas said. “All that prestige value, all the meaning the menorah had for the hated Toltecs, had fallen away.
Once the Maya reached their hideaway, maybe they melted it down.”
“And then it comes full circle,” Maria said softly.