The Annihilators (20 page)

But Rutterfeld was looking past me. I saw a quick flicker of hope in his narrow eyes; in his position he’d consider any new development hopeful. I sidestepped and turned, gun ready; but the man who stood there had his empty hands outspread in a gesture of peace. He was a young native man, short and brown and stocky as they all are, dressed in loose white like Cortez, with a sisal bag like a large, heavily-reloaded lady-type purse slung over his shoulder. I didn’t like to think that he’d got that close without my hearing him.

“I am Epifanio,” he said. “I have come to attend
El Viejo.”

“How did you know the Old One needed attention?” I asked; a stupid question because I knew damn well how he’d known. Well, it beat carrying around walkie-talkies, I guess. I saw that this one had the same classic Melmec-Maya face, although much younger, with the same bold beaked nose, and slanting forehead, and inward-turning eyes. Epifanio. I’d thought that living in the U.S. Southwest most of my youth I’d heard all the Spanish names, but that was a new one for my collection. I wondered what his real name was. Something full of x’s and ch’s no doubt. Like Ixchal, the God of Death. “I think we should get him to a doctor as soon as possible,” I said. “He got slugged pretty hard. I was a little slow getting down here.”

“It was foreseen,” Epifanio said. “There is no blame.
Con permiso
?”

He moved past me and crouched beside the old man. There was a dreamlike quality to the night that was partly due, of course, to the fact that I had to keep closing my mind to the thought of all that rock above me: Subterranean operations are very hard on my nerves. Also there was the fact that, like Frances, I didn’t really believe some of the things that were happening and would have preferred to dismiss them as a lot of psychic bullshit—and probably would so dismiss them, try to forget them because I found them disturbing, as soon as I got the hell out of this miserable hole in the ground and breathed fresh air again.
It was foreseen
, indeed!

Epifanio had taken a small cloth pouch from his sisal bag. He loosened the drawstring and reached inside for a pinch of some kind of leaves, which he fed to Cortez, who began to chew deliberately. Gradually the grayness faded from his weathered old skin. He spoke softly to Epifanio in a language I didn’t recognize at all; and the young disciple, if that was what he was, nodded and moved over to Marschak and gave him a quick examination and tried to feed him some of the magic leaves, but the blond man spat them out.

Frances said, “Don’t be stupid. He’s just offering you some coca leaves for the pain…”

I didn’t follow the rest of that, because I’d suddenly become aware that there were more people in the cave now: white-clad figures standing silently at the edge of the light, mostly men but some women. When I looked back to Marschak, he was chewing obediently, and his color had also improved. Epifanio approached me.

“El Viejo
wishes to speak with you. And the lady also.”

“Sure.”

We moved over to where Cortez was sitting. A couple of men had come forward carrying between them a large square of canvaslike cloth full of firewood; they were laying a fire in the pit before the jaguar altar with its two snarling heads.

“Gracias, guerrero,”
the old man whispered, looking up at me. “It was well done.”

I wasn’t too sure of that. He still didn’t look very good. It could have been done better, or at least faster. But I said modestly,
“Por nada.”

“And thank you, too, señora.” Cortez started to say more, but changed his mind and gestured to Epifanio to take over instead.

The younger man said, “The Old One finds your language difficult to speak. He asks me to explain to you, señor, why you were chosen to help. He says that the old warrior in your party, the former general, was too old and might not have believed; the elderly do not accept unfamiliar ideas readily. He says that the young warrior, the
capitan
, was troubled in his mind and might not have heard; it is difficult to reach those with heavy troubles. The others…” Epifanio shrugged. “They were not
guerreros.
One
cazador
, perhaps, a hunter, the others,
nada.
So you were chosen.” He smiled faintly. “Besides, only you had a gun, señor.”

I said dryly, “Yes, I can see that might have made a difference. But what about your own people?”

He smiled his thin young smile again. “With all due respect, señor, it was felt better that gringos should fight gringos. Now the Old One would request of you a great favor.”

I said in their formal way, “It is granted.”

“The captives, the prisoners. Your prisoners.”

“They are his,” I said. “He earned them. I was only the weapon in his hands.”

Epifanio looked at me sharply. “I am sorry. I may have spoken badly. I did not realize that you understood…”

But Rutterfeld, who’d been listening to every word, spoke sharply: “What is this? What do they want with us? What will be done to us?”

And Frances had touched my arm. “I don’t get it, Sam. What’s going on?”

I said, “Hell, you’re the archaeologist; you’re supposed to know their customs. What does it look like is going on? They’re lighting the sacred fire. They’re reconsecrating the ancient altar—look at them—and they have here three lousy gringo criminals who’ll never be missed, whom they carefully baited and trapped in their sacred cave beside their sacred underground lake. Well, Cortez did, using himself as bait and me as the trap. If they’d grabbed three respectable American tourists, out of our group, say, they’d have had endless official troubles. Three of their own? I don’t know if their religion permits the use of their own; anyway, prisoners of war were the customary subjects for this kind of ceremony, I think you told us; and here are three very suitable POWs. Armed, they invaded Copalque with hostile intentions, didn’t they? And they were taken in fierce combat by that great warrior ally of the ancient Melmec people, Sam Felton, who has just waived all rights to the warm bodies.” I grimaced. “
That’s
why the old man didn’t want any of them killed. He wasn’t being humanitarian, just practical. You can’t sacrifice a dead man properly.”

“Sacrifice!” Frances gasped; and Rutterfeld was protesting shrilly; and Marschak was cursing rather repetitiously. Frances grasped my arm: “But, Sam, we can’t let them—”

“Let?” I said. “Look around, sweetheart. Count noses. Even if I wanted to shoot down a bunch of nice local citizens for the sake of these three creeps, the pistol’s only got five chambers. Besides, I’m a firm believer in freedom of religion. And I must say I’m a little surprised at your attitude, professor.”

“What do you… Oh.” I saw her face change, and a speculative gleam came into her eyes.

“That’s better, Dr. Dillman,” I said. “How many of your professional colleagues have actually
seen
this ritual performed?”

She licked her lips. “Of course… of course I’ll never dare to publish… And it will be a totally degenerate form of the old ceremony after all these years, but still…”

“That’s my girl.”

Rutterfeld shouted at me wildly, “It is insane! You are a white man, you cannot allow these little brown niggers to—”

“Oh, shut up!” That was Kronbeck, the diminutive gunman, opening his mouth for the first time since his capture. “I told you we had no business in the fucking jungle messing with a bunch of Indians; now shut up about brown niggers. Felton, or whatever your name is…”

“Yes?” I said.

“You did a slick job of sneaking up on me. Okay, no hard feelings. As between one lousy manhunter and another, how about asking that high priest j.g. to pass those painkiller leaves around. Tell him I have a hell of a headache and that’s no lie.”

“Sure.”

But when I started to speak, Epifanio raised his hand. “I heard. It would have been done in any case.
Un momentito.
”

I asked him, “Will we be permitted to remain?”

Epifanio said, “It is the wish of the Old One that you should do so. He thinks the lady will find answers to some of the questions she has been asking. And you, señor, I think you will find it interesting, also.”

Some men were untying the prisoners and leading them away, Rutterfeld and Marschak still protesting loudly. Cortez was moving off, helped by two women in white
huipiles.
Elaborate courtesy was still the order of the day, and I said to Epifanio, “Inform the Old One that we are grateful for the privilege he has accorded us.”

The young man bowed ceremoniously. “You honor us all by your attendance, señor, señora. Over here, if you please.”

Moments later we were seated in the semidarkness on a flat rock some distance from the lighted altar, aware of others in the gloom all around us. I felt Frances search for my hand and grasp it tightly.

“Privilege!” she breathed. “I’m not so sure…”

But the drums were starting now, just a faint, whispering, throbbing sound at first, gradually becoming louder. I’d heard drums before, all kinds of drums, from the full U.S. Naval Academy Band giving Sousa hell as the midshipmen passed in review on the banks of the Severn where I’d been sent for boat training once, to a couple of old gents with tomtoms beating out the rhythm for a harvest dance at one of the smaller pueblos near my boyhood home in Santa Fe, New Mexico; but it was very different hearing them reverberating and reechoing hypnotically in this underground temple. Epifanio had thrown something on the fire that was filling the cave with a strange, thin sweet-smelling smoke.

They didn’t hoke it up. They used the electric lights they had instead of going in for flaming torches. They wore their own clothes instead of cobbling up tawdry imitations of the elaborate costumes of their ancestors. This was not an artificial revival, a nostalgic restoration, of an ancient rite, meaningless today; this was their living religion and their living ceremony—but I couldn’t help wondering how many of them also turned up at the local Catholic Church on Sunday, keeping on the good side of the Christian god as well.

Even the knife Epifanio produced from his sisal bag and unwrapped and presented with deliberate ceremony to Cortez as he appeared in the lighted area was no exercise in nostalgia. Obsidian was out, steel was in. It was a thick, brutal, businesslike blade apparently ground down from a heavy machete. But the grip was lovely, all gold and jade, their one concession to the glorious past.

They took Marschak first, perhaps afraid that he’d die on them if he had to wait. They had stripped him and washed him and disguised his wounds somehow. He looked enormous among all those short people, and soft and white and flabby, as he was led naked to the altar and made to lie down across it, obviously drugged, while the old priest—showing no signs of his recent beating—stood back gripping the great sacrificial knife. The drums were louder now and the scented mist was heavier. Cortez stepped forward and struck skillfully and powerfully. The body on the altar arched itself in blind agony; there was a formless bellow of sound above the rhythmic sound of the drums.

Cortez passed the bloody knife to Epifanio, standing behind him. The old man leaned over and reached with both hands into the gaping incision he’d made. Distantly I was aware of Frances’s nails biting into my skin as she gripped my hand fiercely. I heard her make a small gagging sound as she watched the disposal of the now incomplete body in the sacred
cenote
, which accepted it and caused it to vanish in a manner inconsistent with the normal laws of hydraulics, I thought; but I didn’t seem to be thinking very clearly any longer.

The disembodied heart lay, dripping, in the old priest’s hands. They had another way of dealing with that, we learned, that Frances also found unpleasant. I was a bit annoyed by her queasy reactions, in a vague sort of way. For a tough scientist she was really pretty sensitive; but I reminded myself that after all, while I had encountered a few fresh corpses in the line of business, in her profession the poor girl was accustomed to dealing only with dead people who’d been dead for thousands of years.

Then the young priest was passing among us with the receptacle containing the first blood of the evening’s first offering, making the purifying mark on the face of each worshipper; but the smoke seemed to be getting thicker and the cave was becoming very hazy. Another picture was breaking through; another scene quite near in place but incredibly distant in time, of a great wide sunlit area crowded with people and dominated by three great pyramids…

Achuac was having a good day, I reflected after the second sacrifice as I stood at attention in the hot sunshine before my squadron, Dog Squadron, in the place of honor, the place of greatest danger, at the end of the Great Court, the way to the King’s Road and the jungle, the way they would probably break and flee if panic should strike. Fox Squadron on my left held the open space between the Pyramid of the Priests and the Great Pyramid. Wolf Squadron, on my right, closed the last opening, between the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of the Warriors.

I hoped the people would not break. Not that we could not hold them; the King’s Axes would not be overrun by an unarmed mob, even one as large as this, a whole nation gathered for a final day of worship and sacrifice. Enemy armies had attempted it and had died under the great stone weapons wielded by us, the axemen of the king, somewhat assisted by the darting spearmen, who are useful for harassing the attack and harrying the retreat although the Spears are, of course, never required to endure the full shock of battle.

But I hoped very much that our people would stand firm on this great day, this last day, the Day of Ixchal. There must be no shame today; and Achuac, the High Priest, had started well, although he was no longer young and his wrist did not have its former strength and cunning. He had been known, sometimes of late, to need more than one stroke of the knife to reach the heart, a dreadful portent of disaster—in fact there was often betting in the ranks on the day’s performance, although the penalty for such sacrilege, if discovered, was death, of course.