Authors: Donald Hamilton
“You’re not wrong. Anything else?”
I said, “Again, you’re the expert, but the military business was nonsense, in my opinion. Regiments of soldiers standing rigidly at attention three thousand years B.C.? Opening and closing their formations smartly? One unit trained to let another pass through, and then reform on command? I’m not even sure an experienced Roman legion could have pulled off that evolution successfully; and the disciplined legions came a good many dozen centuries later. I’m just guessing, but I’m willing to bet a small sum that the Melmecs never even thought in terms of that kind of rigid military discipline. Judging by what I’ve seen and read on this trip, they dressed their wars up with very fancy costumes, and maybe even with their own ideas of martial music, and certainly with a lot of religious ceremonies; but basically their battles were just one disorganized bunch of guys clubbing and knifing and spearing another bunch until somebody’d had enough and ran away. Or somebody saw an omen in the sky saying his side had lost and it was time to quit. As jungle fighters go, they may have been terrific with sneak attacks and ambushes; but when it came to close-order drill, forget it.” I looked at her for a moment. “Your turn,” I said.
Frances drew a long breath. “The priestesses,” she said. “We’ve found evidence indicating that women did take some part in their ceremonies; but that chorus line of lovely bare-breasted maidens gliding seductively down the pyramid steps!” She shook her head quickly. “Do you know what it reminded me of? Not when I was dreaming it, of course; like you I believed in it completely at the time; but now that I think back on it, well, you remember the Ballet Folklorica in Mexico City that I advised you not to see; and we found… something else to do that night instead.” There was color in her face again, but she went on steadily: “Well, I saw the performance the previous time I was there, and they had a supposedly, authentic Aztec dance that looked just like that, about as genuinely ancient and ethnic as Radio City Music Hall.”
“Yes, I agree that the death dance of the virgins was a bit much,” I said when she paused. “And then there was that business of the axes. I’m kind of weapons-oriented, and I’ve been looking carefully at the stuff you’ve been showing us. I haven’t seen a single war axe of any kind, either as an artifact or carved on a wall. Up in what is now the U.S. they used the tomahawk, sure, but that was a little one-hand job for throwing and close-quarters hacking. What my Melmec warriors and I were armed with, in my dream, was a king-sized battle-chopper such as the Vikings sometimes used, except that the head was stone instead of steel.”
There was a little silence in the room; and no sound came from outside. There were no cars driving on the single road leading into this hotel; there were no birds or animals communicating in the surrounding jungle. Frances gave an abrupt laugh, looking down at herself.
“Do you realize that we’re indulging in this scholarly discussion without a stitch on? You’d better toss me my shirt; and make me another drink, please. And you put something on, please, and don’t sit quite so close, and look straight ahead, because I’m going to tell you something that embarrasses me dreadfully and I don’t want you looking at me.”
I followed her instructions, pulling on my shorts and refilling our glasses. When I was seated at the indicated distance, facing in the indicated direction, I said, “Carry on.”
“You must bear with me, Sam,” she said. “This is all going to be very personal, but it connects… I was a tall, shy child, darling, and I grew up to be a tall, shy schoolgirl. And bright, dammit, bright enough that I could hide my shyness by acting very snooty and superior. I was the smartest kid in class, wasn’t I? A totally unpleasant little monster, well, big monster. Taller than practically all the boys. And being so smart and so superior, being so tall, how could I learn about… about certain things like the pretty little dumb girls around me? I mean, how could I let a boy much smaller than I, and stupider, smear my lipstick and muss my dress and… and fumble with my undies? I’d have been, making myself totally ridiculous; or I thought I would. So I stuck with my snooty act, and I became terribly afraid that somebody would learn what a fraud. I was; that some night I’d find myself wrestling with a boy all sweaty and untidy and half-undressed and suddenly he would realize that the tall, self-possessed young lady who’d condescended to… to cooperate graciously out of the kindness of her heart was really a very frightened and inexperienced girl who didn’t know a damn thing about anything. And he would laugh and laugh and laugh and tell all his friends, and I would simply die of shame and humiliation.”
She took a swallow from her glass and stared down into it for a moment. I did not speak or look at her directly.
Presently she went on: “So I rationalized it. I told myself that sex was really a very undignified and disgusting business and to hell with it. But in secret I read endless mushy novels about unrequited love, and Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat, and Lancelot and Guinevere—well, I guess their love wasn’t exactly unrequited—and I waited for the handsome, understanding prince who would liberate me from my dark prison tower and appreciate my unblemished purity.” She made a face. “I don’t suppose this is very interesting to anybody but me.”
“I’m not bored,” I said.
She glanced at me warily and went on: “It’s funny how one can be very tough and smart and hardheaded on one level—I got my degrees in record time with all kinds of honors—and still be a totally mixed-up mess on another. Of course, around the universities I attended, I was known as the original ice maiden. And by this time I’d really painted myself into a corner, to scramble a metaphor. I mean, I was twenty-six years old, apparently a very sophisticated and competent and successful young woman; how the hell could I tell a man who took me out that I’d never done it and the very idea frightened me silly, even made me a little sick, but… but that I was perfectly willing to try it, well, reluctantly willing to try it, because I was beginning to realize that the way I was just wasn’t any good. But please, Mister, be gentle, be kind and understanding. How could I bare my soul and my fears, not to mention my body, to a stray male character who’d bargained only for a pleasant evening with the lady, not a session of psychiatric therapy?”
She was silent again, and I said, “But your prince came along.”
She nodded. “Yes, Archie came along. We met professionally on an expedition into… Well, it doesn’t matter where. There were other people, of course, the men sleeping in one tent and the women, in another, so there was no question of… Anyway, we just talked. And talked. And talked. Whenever we had a chance to be together. I don’t know what we talked about. Everything. And when we got back he asked me to marry him.” She paused to clear her throat. “I said… I said that I was perfectly willing, but he should know he’d be getting a frozen twenty-six-year-old female freak who’d hardly been kissed, let alone… bedded. It was as easy as that, telling
him.
He said, well, we could take care of the kissing right now; and the rest would undoubtedly take care of itself. Of course it didn’t. It was… rather difficult for a while, I was
really
a mess, but he was endlessly gentle, endlessly patient, and in the end it worked very well indeed. I was very lucky, Sam. If it had been another man, just a little overeager and impatient, just a little rough and demanding, I’d probably have spent the rest of my life as an emotional cripple. I owe my husband a great deal. He’s a wonderful person. I really… really love him very much in spite of the way I…”
Her voice trailed off. We were getting pretty far from the subject originally under discussion; but I sensed that she had motives for telling me this quite apart from the problems of the night. I sensed also that I wouldn’t like those motives very much when I understood them. In the meantime I wasn’t all that impressed with Professor Archibald Dillman’s shining nobility. Being granted the privilege of introducing a woman like this one belatedly to the joys of love shouldn’t really, I reflected sourly, qualify a man for hardship pay, or a saint’s halo. But it didn’t seem advisable for me to say it; anyway, I was probably a bit jealous of Bonnie Prince Archie.
Frances laughed sharply, with sudden self-contempt. “And owing him a great deal, loving him very much, I’m sitting on another man’s bed without any pants on! I guess perhaps he overdid the treatment a little; or maybe I’m just compulsively making up for all the lost, loveless years. But the point is, Sam, don’t you recognize the basic elements of our dream scenario? The awakened virgin scientist-lady—read priestess. The romantic notion of star-crossed love, out of all those mushy books I read. The pretty ballet on the pyramids, from the show I saw. Dammit, Sam, that lousy old man just picked my brains—our brains—and fed us back our own sentimental TV notions in that so-called dream he sent us! I’ll bet if you scrounge around in your mind, you’ll find an axe in there somewhere. Obviously he did. What about those Vikings you mentioned?”
I nodded slowly. “You may be right. My parents were Scandinavian, you know; and I was a red-hot Viking aficionado as a kid. I read every gory old Norse saga I could get my hands on. And the battle-axe was certainly one of their weapons, but… Wait a minute! I’ve got it. H. Rider Haggard.”
“Who?”
“Not your type of escape literature, doll. African adventure was his bag. His best-known book is probably
King Solomon’s Mines
, but I read them all; and the one I remember best was called
Allan Quartermain.
Allan was the wise white hunter, and his native sidekick was the great Zulu warrior Umslopogaas, one of my favorite fictional characters at that youthful time. Umslopogaas carried an outsized battle-axe and died nobly, shattered axe in hand, holding a palace stairway against overwhelming odds. And the inhabitants of Umslopogaas’s home village were known as the People of the Axe.”
Frances drained her glass and set it carefully on the bedside table; then she drew the thin red shirt around her and shivered slightly.
“The idea of people rummaging around in my mind gives me the creeps,” she said. “But I guess I’ve got to accept the fact that there are things that can’t be explained scientifically, at least not yet.” She looked at me sideways and spoke in a different tone. “Well, Sam?”
“Well, what?” She waited without speaking, and I said, “Oh, you mean about the dream?”
“Yes. We’ve pretty well picked it apart, haven’t we? All except…”
“That’s right, except,” I said when she hesitated. I grimaced. “What you want to know is, do we assume that because the frosting is phony, the whole damn cake is a fake?”
She smiled briefly. “You put it so picturesquely. But we do have to decide if, just because we know it didn’t happen the way Cortez showed it to us in our dream, it didn’t happen at all.”
“And what is your considered decision, Dr. Dillman?”
“I can’t possibly come to a firm conclusion without checking back through all our findings and studying the temple decorations and that terrible mural with this possibility in mind. But I don’t think the fact that the old priest dressed it up with a lot of colorful trappings for our benefit necessarily means…” She stopped, frowning thoughtfully. “There are obviously limits to Cortez’s knowledge, Sam. I mean, he doesn’t really seem to know much about archaeology, or the day-by-day customs of the ancient people from whom he came. Not as much as we know from studying the materials we’ve found in the ruins—and remember, those ruins weren’t uncovered until quite recently. He probably has only an incomplete idea of what they reveal. His knowledge comes from a totally different source. What he knows isn’t what’s carved on the stones out there, it’s what’s been handed down from high priest to high priest over uncounted generations: the meaning of the calendar wheel, for instance, and the ritual of the sacrifice.” She glanced at me. “I wonder how often, how many…”
“Probably not often and not many,” I said. “If people started disappearing weekly into the sacred
cenote
with their hearts missing, three at a time, somebody would notice. It could be, even, that the ceremony was revived tonight for the first time in years, maybe even centuries, because the three sacred calendars are approaching that major conjunction we know about, and the people have to start getting ready for it in the old ways, with the old offerings to the gods.”
She was watching me oddly. “You seem to be… totally unconcerned about having been present at three murders, even if they were ritual murders.”
I said, “For God’s sake! I’m supposed to weep for Rutterfeld and his creeps, after watching them beat up on that old man?”
“They were human beings, Sam.”
“That’s debatable,” I said. “And even if you’re right, we have a recognized oversupply of those; we can spare a few of the less desirable specimens.”
She said, “Isn’t that a rather dangerous philosophy? What if somebody should decide that you’re one of the undesirables?”
“Lots of people have,” I said. “But somehow they never quite managed to do anything effective about it.”
She sighed. “Well, at least you’re a consistent monster. What were we talking about when I got all moral? Oh.” She drew a long breath. “The fact is that these priests, regardless of the psychological or psychic tricks they can play, don’t really have a direct pipeline to the past. What Cortez has is a large body of Melmec tradition, passed on from generation to generation by word of mouth. And in that tradition is the answer to a question he knows concerns us deeply: the question of how his ancestors came to vanish from their great city of Copalque, of how their elaborate civilization came to die. So tonight, in gratitude for the help we’d given him, he passed us that answer; but the old gentleman is a showman accustomed to catering to the tastes of his audience. Not knowing all the details of life back in those far-off days, he just gave us the package in the kind of Hollywood wrappings he thought we were accustomed to. But I think the answer was still there.” She paused and licked her lips and went on: “And the answer isn’t death rays from outer space, or lethal plagues, or violent earthquakes, or secret weapons that the hopeful Russians might be able to adapt to modern use. That’s not what killed off the Melmecs, and presumably the Olmecs and Mayas after them. The answer is… Jonestown.”