Burial Ground

Three

My Son Ruins

69 km Southwest of Da Nang

Quang Nam Province, Vietnam

March 12^th

9:46 a.m. ICT

Seven Years Ago

Dr. Brendan Reaves shoved through the overgrowth of fan-leafed dipterocarps, palm trees, and conifers and stepped out into a small clearing, if it indeed qualified as such. The blazing sun reached the moldering detritus in slanted columns that stained the early morning mist like penlights shined through the dense canopy. Before him stood a knoll upon which a stone linga, a symbol of the worship of Bhadresvara, the local variant of the Hindu god Shiva, had been erected. The sculpted red stone was furry with moss and shrouded by a proliferation of vines and grasses, most of which had been ripped away and lay in brown tangles at its foot. Four identical life-size faces of Shiva had been sculpted to mark the cardinal directions of the compass on the three-foot-tall pedestal. The diety's slender face tapered to a point at his chin, where a garland of snakes encircled his neck. A crescent moon framed his braided hair, which was coiled into a conch shape on top of his head. His flat eyes, of which there were three, stared indifferently into the jungle. Excavated dirt and stones ringed a dark opening in the base of the hill.

He wiped the sheen of sweat from his brow and tried not to think about whatever was crawling on his skin beneath his damp khakis. The assault of the insects had begun the moment he stepped out of the rental Jeep at the Mỹ Sơn ruins, arguably the crown jewel of the Champa Empire, which ruled Central Vietnam from the fourth through fourteenth centuries. Phuong Dinh, a former student who had been with him on the Chaco dig, had been waiting at the A1 temple as she had said she would be, leaning against what little remained after it was shelled during the war, the first rays of dawn caressing her tan skin and making her rich ebon hair glimmer with reddish highlights. She had smiled so broadly when she saw him that he couldn't help but reciprocate. She was no longer the shy and unassuming girl she had once been, but a confident woman, now a colleague, whose dark eyes lit up when she bounded down the slope and gave him a hug. He remembered the splay of freckles dotting the bridge of her nose.

"Look at you," Reaves had said. "All grown up."

"I can tie my own shoes now and everything." She smirked. "You haven't aged a day, Dr. Reaves."

He tried not to blush.

"It's Brendan to you now, Dr. Dinh." His relationship with Phuong had always been somewhat unique. She'd been closer to his age than that of her classmates, and had been driven by an inner fire that often eclipsed his own. As the daughter of an American soldier who had quite possibly died somewhere in these very hills, she had been raised in poverty by a single mother who spoke only Vietnamese, yet she had risen above her circumstances thanks to the desire to better understand the two dichotomous worlds that she felt both a part of and alienated from at the same time. It gave Reaves no small pleasure to see that she was now totally in her element. "I can't tell you how proud I am that you're doing exactly what you set out to do."

It was Phuong's turn to blush.

"We're burning daylight," she said. "We have a long hike ahead of us."

He donned his backpack and followed her into the jungle on a path the trees seemed desperate to reclaim even as they traversed it. During the three-hour hike in the dim twilight provided by the dense canopy, they had caught up with each others' lives and the accomplishments of the intervening years, while swarms of insects hummed and buzzed around them, finches and wrens chirped, and snub-nosed monkeys screeched. He'd been somewhat embarrassed to explain why he had left his post at Washington State to work exclusively for GeNext. It still felt like a betrayal of the anthropological tenets he had preached to his students, but Phuong understood. After all, she was one of the select few who'd seen the remains beneath Casa Rinconada, a sight that no one who witnessed it would ever forget. GeNext had given him the opportunity of a lifetime. He had carte blanche to travel anywhere in the world, to dig wherever he wanted, without having to beg for grants or even give a second thought to the financial side, and rather than focus on the evolution of a single society, he had the unprecedented chance to broaden his scope to encompass the entirety of the human species.

He approached the hole in the ground slowly, taking in even the most seemingly insignificant sights and sounds with each step. This was the part that he loved the most, those first eager steps toward a discovery held captive by the earth for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, as if patiently waiting for the perfect moment to reveal her secrets. Or perhaps for the perfect person to whom to reveal them. So what if he hadn't instigated the dig or troweled out the loam one scoop at a time? It still belonged to him. Of that there was no doubt. It called to him like a mother's song only remembered subconsciously through the memory of a child.

His hands trembled as he shed his backpack and withdrew his digital camera.

"We discovered it almost by accident," Phuong said. "A monsoon swept through here just over a month ago. The rain exposed the hint of a brick wall built into the hill. It took a while to clear the dirt from around it, but after that, the bricks were easy enough to unstack."

"What am I looking at?"

Reaves walked a slow circle around the clearing, taking pictures of the linga from every possible angle.

"It's a Sivalinga, which symbolically represents the god Shiva himself. The Champa built these all across the countryside before they abandoned the region in the early fifteenth century to the Viet. This one's similar to those back at the ruins where you met me, only much more elaborate. The chamber beneath it, however, is completely unique."

"The photographs you sent me...they were taken down there?"

Phuong nodded and gestured toward the shadowed orifice. Reaves couldn't quite read the expression on her face.

He leaned over the hole and took several quick pictures. The flash limned decomposing brick walls crawling with roots and spider webs, and a decrepit stone staircase leading downward into the pitch black. He removed his flashlight from his pack and followed the beam underground. Dust swirled in the column of light, which spread across the brick-tiled floor riddled with moss and fungal growth a dozen steps down. He smelled damp earth and mildew; the faintly organic scent of the tomb. His rapid breathing echoed back at him from the hollow chamber.

When he reached the bottom, he snapped several more shots. The brief strobes highlighted stone walls sculpted with ornate friezes, a scattering of bones on the ground, and a central altar of some kind, upon which rested what he had traveled all this way to see in person. He walked slowly toward it, taking pictures with each step. The carvings on the wall were savage. Each depicted a malevolent Shiva lording over a scene of carnage with his adversaries lifeless at his feet or suspended from one of his many arms. The bones on the floor were broken and disarticulated and heaped into mounds, aged to the color of rust, and woven together by webs that housed the carcasses of countless generations of insects.

His heart rate accelerated. This chamber was similar in so many ways to the one back in Chaco Canyon, which had dominated all of his thoughts during the last five years.

He finally brought the flashlight to bear on the altar.

"It gives me the chills every time I see it," Phuong said.

Reaves felt it too, almost as though the object seated on the rounded platform radiated a coldness that was released by the exposure to light.

"Carbon dating confirms that it was sealed in here more than five hundred years ago, about the time that the Champa vacated the area." She wrapped her arms around her chest and shivered. "It's just like the others, isn't it?"

Reaves could only nod as he approached. His beam focused on the skull seated on the dusty platform and threw its shadow onto the far wall, which made the hellish designs waver as though the many Shivas were laughing with a sound his mind interpreted as the crackle of flames.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered.

Fissures transected the frontal bone, the orbital sockets given sentience by the reflected light from the spider webs inside. A large stone had been thrust between its jaws with such force that the mandibular rami to either side had cracked.

And then, of course, there were its teeth.