The Moche Warrior (20 page)

“We can’t let him get away with this,” I heard Hilda say. Then, “Get Montero. Get him to talk to his brother.”

More murmuring. “I’ll go to Lima if I have to,” Steve said.

Then, something apparently settled, the man of the arches slipped back out into the darkness, the candle was extinguished, and Hilda and Steve headed for the stairs. I quickly pulled back into my room and pushed the door almost shut. I heard Hilda’s footsteps a minute or two later, limping slightly.

Very early the next morning, well before dawn, I wakened to a quiet but persistent tapping at my door. “Rebecca, it’s Hilda,” she whispered. “Get dressed quickly and come downstairs.”

I staggered out of bed—all this wandering around in the night was robbing me of my rest—threw water on my face, pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, and headed downstairs. Steve, Hilda, and Ralph were already downstairs, and even Carlos Montero was there. Only Tracey was nowhere to be seen.

“Ralph, you come with me,” Hilda barked. “Carlos has brought us another van, and we’ll use that. Rebecca, you go with Steve. Carlos, have you got the letter?” Carlos nodded and handed an envelope to Steve.

“Okay, let’s get cracking,” Hilda ordered. “Steve, you and Rebecca can get something to eat on the way.”

I looked at Steve, more than one question forming in my sleep-drugged mind. “I’ll explain as we go,” he said as we headed for the truck.

Within minutes we were heading south on the Panamericana. Steve was driving at a good clip, but fortunately the road was relatively clear this early. “We’re going to Trujillo,” he said. “I need to be at the INC offices when they open.”

The INC. The
Instituto Nacional de Cultura.
All this to call on a government office?

“We’re moving,” he said.   “The site, I mean.

We’re closing up shop where we are and moving to another site about a mile away. At least I hope we are. I need to get a
credencial,
a license, for the new dig. Carlos got a letter from his brother, the mayor, supporting us, and the mayor and Carlos have called ahead, so the people at the INC will be expecting us.

“I may have to fly to Lima, though, to the head office, so that’s why you’re with me. You can drive the truck back today if need be.”

“I thought you were pleased with the way the project is going,” I said. “And why the big rush all of a sudden?”‘ Steve slowed only slightly as we pulled into Campina Vieja. Local farmers were beginning to bring their products to market, and Steve had to dodge a few carts and motorcycles as we blasted through town.

“I have a,” he hesitated for a second, “an informant, shall we say, a
huaquero
by the name of Arturo—I won’t give you his last name, it’s not important—who…”

“Huaquero?”
I interrupted. “Is that what I think it is? A tomb robber?”

“Right. The Incas didn’t have a word for god, just a word for sacred—
huaca,
hence
huaqueros,
robbers of sacred places. Long tradition in these parts. Could be the Incas themselves engaged in it, plundering the tombs of earlier cultures. Whole families around here are involved in it, and have been for generations. They’re really good at it too, I’d have to say. Know what to look for, maybe better than we do, and are experts at the techniques for recovering the stuff. Pablo, our foreman, used to be a
huaquero par excellence
as a matter of fact. We’ve won him over, and now he’s a real asset to us. A couple of his men were
huaqueros
as well. We hope by giving them a job and teaching them about their culture, we’ll keep them on the straight and narrow.”

That seemed to be a somewhat risky assumption, I thought.

“So what do they—the
huaqueros,
I mean—do with what they find? Sell it on the black market?”

“Yes, in some cases; in others it’s considered legit, in a manner of speaking. What I mean to say is that there are ways to own artifacts in this country quite openly, and
huaqueros
profit from it.”

“But doesn’t letting people own antiquities here just encourage looting?”‘ I asked.

“It does. Drives me crazy. But you have to understand looting a little, don’t you? You’ve seen how poor this area is. If you’re lucky, you can make a lot more money at looting than you can fishing or farming, that’s for sure. It’s easy for us, coming from nice rich nations, to tell people they should donate whatever they find to a museum. The people I really blame are the buyers, especially the dealers. They’re the ones who encourage this kind of thing, the ones who make the big money on the finds too, I might add. Scum, in my opinion. At least some of them, Laforet first among them. But don’t get me going on this subject,” he said, looking as if he was in serious danger of diving into a depression again.

“You were telling me about Arturo,” I prodded.

“Right,” he said. “Arturo first came to me last season with some artifacts he’d found. I’d seen him hanging around watching, and eventually he showed up at the hacienda and asked me to assess some stuff for him, give him some idea of what it was worth.

“He had a couple of really nice ceramic pieces: Moche, a stirrup-spout vessel in the shape of a sea lion, complete with shell eyes, and another beaker with fine-line drawings. Most certainly genuine. They were looted, of course. There was no other way he could have got them. But he offered to tell me where he’d found them in exchange for my assessment of them. So I made a deal to get to study the fine-line vase for a day or two, before giving him my assessment.”

I said nothing. “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “But looting goes on all the time, and I’m powerless to stop it. I figure this way at least I get a chance to study the stuff before it disappears into the black market.”

I thought that one over for a minute. There were pros and cons to this argument, and the ethics seemed a little murky to me, but what did I know? After all, I was misrepresenting myself to these people, and had all along. I was also the proud possessor of a genuine Moche artifact that I had not yet got around to donating to a museum.

“Anyway, Arturo’s back again this season, and brought me another couple of pieces to look at. This time he’s got a real find: a little copper figure of a warrior, judging from the attire, and a really beautiful ceramic in the shape of a duck.

“Last night Arturo came to tell me that one of the local farmers, guy by the name of Rolando Guerra, is building a wall around a piece of property on the edge of the
algarrobal,
the carob tree forest. He’s told the locals that he’s just protecting his land from
invasores,
but Arturo tells me he’s almost certain the fellow has found something, and that he’s building a wall around it so that no one will see him looting it. The fact that the Guerra family are known
huaqueros,
have been forever, would be proof enough, but add to that the fact that Arturo’s ceramic and warrior come from that same area, and that pretty well clinches it. The
campesino
may indeed have found the big one.”

“And the big one is?”

“A tomb. An undisturbed tomb of an upper-class person, someone important. That’s the most exciting find of all in our field, and down here, it could be really spectacular. For years people studied the scenes on Moche pottery, not realizing that the scenes depicted real occurrences or rituals. For example, a lot of Moche pottery shows a scene in which captives are brought before a god, or a warrior king or priest of some kind, who often sits on a litter. In front of him there is another warrior who is half man, half bird. Behind him there is a woman, a priestess, holding a cup. Behind her there is often another figure with an animal face, usually feline.

“What’s interesting is that no matter how often this scene is depicted and no matter the artist, the figures in it are similar. It’s been compared to the Crucifixion or the Nativity in our culture, something that’s been depicted by many people over the centuries, but always with common elements that we all recognize. In the same way, the scene I’ve described is obviously a ritual of some importance to the Moche, and although they had no written language, and we therefore have to surmise what’s happening, it’s usually referred to as the Sacrifice theme. It’s a little gory. Captives have their throats slit, and it is probably their blood in the cup.”

For a second or two an unbidden image of Edmund Edwards, blood streaming all over his desk, and Lizard, Ramon Cervantes, garroted, leapt into my mind, but I resolutely stuffed the images back down into my subconscious and concentrated on what Steve was saying.

“The first warrior, for example, always wears a cone-shaped headdress with a crescent on it and rays coming out of his headdress and shoulders, a crescent-shaped nose ornament, and large round ear ornaments. He almost always has a dog at his feet.

“The priestess always wears a headdress with two large plumes, and her hair is in long plaits that end with serpent heads. The fourth warrior wears a headdress with long flares that have serrated edges. You get the idea.

“The extraordinary thing is that these people have been found,”‘ he enthused. “Walter Alva came across the tomb of the warrior priest and the bird priest at a place called Sipan. Christopher Donnan and Luis Jaime Castillo found the priestess at San Jose de Moro. They’d been buried in exactly the same regalia as that depicted on the ceramics!”

“I’m not sure I understand this,” I said. “Do I understand you to say that the people depicted on the pots were real people? And if so, you’re telling me they’ve been found. So why keep looking?”

“Good question. For certain the rituals on the ceramics were carried out in real life, and yes, real people held the positions. But the rituals were probably repeated over a very long period of time. Think of them as the British monarchy, the king or queen with the ermine cape, scepter, orb, the crown jewels. If you Were new to this planet, it wouldn’t take you long to figure out that these people whose picture you saw in Post offices and government offices were something special. You might even realize, if you looked at historical photos, or if you stuck around awhile, that more than one person held this position, because they all wore the same regalia. In other words, the crown goes with the position. Now imagine that when one of these monarchs died, all that stuff, the crowns, the scepter, everything, was buried with them. Then—”

“Then you’d have to make all these things over for the next one!” I exclaimed.

“Exactly.”

“Good heavens,” I said. “That would mean a lot of gold and silver over five centuries or so.”

“It would indeed.” Steve smiled. “And I just want to find a little of it. Not to keep, of course, but Hilda’s and my reputations would be secure, there’d be years of research to be done on what we found, and we’d not have nearly as much trouble finding the money for our research.”

“Are there many undisturbed tombs left to be found?” I asked. “You’ve told me about the
huaqueros,
the tomb robbers, and it sounds as if they’re not only good at it, but have been at it forever.”

“That’s true. Thousands of Moche tombs have probably been looted since the Europeans arrived on the scene, and relatively few, maybe in the low hundreds, have been professionally excavated. So much has been lost to us permanently. But there is some good news on that front. The Inca have a story about their origins that says that before the Inca, the world was populated by savages essentially, people who lived in caves, clothed themselves in animal skins, had no religion, no villages, and so on. The Sun God is supposed to have been pretty disgusted by this, and sent one of his sons and one of his daughters to earth—they arrived in Lake Titicaca. They’re told to put a rod in the ground and wherever it sinks right in they are to settle. This they do, and they eventually arrive in the area of Cuzco, build the city, and teach the people how to farm and weave and so on—civilize them, in other words.

“Now, whether or not they believed that story, the Inca were somewhat successful in persuading the Spanish that the Inca empire was the first, and that before it there were only these primitive, unorganized people. This was patently untrue, of course, as we now know. There were lots of very sophisticated cultures long before the Inca were even heard of. But what that meant was that the Spanish were not out there looking for gold beyond what could be found in the Inca cities. Not that they needed to, either. There was plenty of gold there to keep them occupied. So that helped a little.

“As for now, it’s just a battle against time, which we—the good guys, I mean—are losing, in my opinion, despite the fact that the Peruvian government has made it illegal to export any Moche artifacts, and a number of countries, including the U.S., have signed agreements supporting this. So we keep on looking, and sometimes we find what the
huaqueros
have missed, or we get a chance like this one.

“So I’m going to the INC to try to get a
credencial,
or extend the one I’ve got, for that site, and start digging before the wall goes up. I figure this may explain why Laforet’s in town. Guerra must have some way of contacting him, and told him he’d found a tomb. And I’m just not prepared to lose another one to pond scum!”

“Didn’t you tell me that it takes a year or two to get a license?” I asked.

“It usually does, hence the letter from the mayor to support the application. I’m stopping off in town to pick up a friend of mine, a Peruvian archaeologist by the name of Ricardo Ramos, who I hope will come with me and help me plead my case. Hilda is heading to Carlos’s place to use his telephone to try to get in touch with Ramos. Hopefully he’s in town, and we’ll be able to find him.

“God, I’d like to find one for Hilda,” he said a moment later. “You aren’t seeing her at her best, you know. She can be a lot of fun. But she had a terrible accident last year; she fell off a ladder into a pit we were digging. Hurt her back very badly. This will be her last season. I’m not sure she should be here at all, she’s in such pain. That’s why she drinks. I assume you can’t have helped notice how much she drinks.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said. “She and Tracey don’t seem to get along too well,” I added. If Steve was feeling this talkative, I figured I’d keep going.