Burial Ground

VII

1:32 p.m.

Sam hung back toward the rear of the group. Her thoughts were a blur. She had seen so much, too much. It was sensory overload on a scale she'd never experienced before. She could spend a lifetime cataloguing and studying just what she'd been able to see from the central path leading through the village. What else could be stored inside the buildings? What other surprises lurked just out of sight? All of the answers she had sought during the course of her education and career were somewhere within those city walls, which were now falling rapidly behind her. Not only could she unravel the mystery of the disappearance of an entire culture half a millennium ago, but she could hear it told in the words of the people themselves. How had they managed to stay hidden for so long in an age when technology had shrunk the globe to the size of a pebble and laid bare so many of its secrets? They couldn't be more than forty-five miles from Pomacochas, and yet it might as well be a thousand.

She wished she could turn around and head back to the village, if only to memorize the history told through the carvings on the stone walls. There was so much they didn't know about the Chachapoya. No one was even sure what language they had spoken. Some speculated Aymara like so many Andean tribes, while others believed they spoke Quechua, especially following their defeat at the hands of the Inca. And now she had incontrovertible proof that they did indeed speak a variant of Quechua, but at the moment there wasn't a blasted thing she could do about it.

The Chachapoya were an enigma. Even that name wasn't what the tribe had called itself, but rather what it had been called by others. The name was most likely a corruption of the Quechua words sacha and puya, or "people of the clouds." They were known as ferocious warriors who lived high in the mountains under the cover of cloud forests where they thrived as a sovereign nation until falling to the Inca under the rule of Tupac Inca Yupanqui in roughly 1475. Within a hundred years, the Spanish arrived and began their systematic conquest of the entire continent, bringing with them their Christian God and a host of European diseases. One of the few historical documents that even mentioned the Chachapoya was in the written account of Pedro Ciezo de León, who described them as "the whitest and most handsome" of all of the natives he had encountered.

So who were these people who were markedly taller than the average Peruvian Indians, nearly as pale as Caucasians, and lived in such secrecy? She had spent nearly the last decade trying to figure out just that. The first Chachapoyan ruins had been discovered at Kuelap more than a century and a half ago, and now here she was, a quarter-mile from the answers to all of her questions, and all she had to do was ask. Instead, they were traveling in the opposite direction. She wanted to scream.

Why didn't she just turn around and return to the fortress?

Unfortunately, she already knew why. She needed to earn their trust before they would welcome her and share the mystery of their heritage, and banging on the stone walls and demanding admittance wasn't the way to do it. There would be plenty of time over the coming years to break down the barriers. That is, if they let her. An entire colony didn't survive in isolation for so long without going to great lengths to preserve its anonymity...

She stopped walking abruptly and Merritt bumped into her from behind. Her features crinkled as she followed that line of thought.

There was no doubt in her mind that these people wished to remain concealed from the rest of the world. So why had they allowed her group to walk freely through their village? The tribe had to realize that once they returned to civilization, they would report their discoveries. Unless...

Let them pass. They are dead already.

Unless they were certain that Sam and her companions would never be leaving these mountains.

A chill crawled up her spine. She wrapped her arms around her chest to combat the sudden onset of shivers. What awaited them down the path ahead?

"Look over there," Galen called from around the bend in front of her. "Back behind those trees."

Sam followed the sound of his voice to where the others had gathered around him at the side of the path, where a thinner branch diverged into the dense rainforest. At first she didn't see anything, but after taking several steps deeper into the jungle, the structure resolved from the trees. The stone walls were just like those that surrounded the village, only nowhere near as intimidating. They were only fifteen feet tall, and covered with vines and lianas. Soil had been mounded over the roof of the structure to support a thriving crown of flowering shrubbery.

She wasn't even within twenty feet of the building when a stick snapped underfoot, and the screaming began.

Sam ran toward the front of the construct. From the other side of the wall she heard horrible cries and the sounds of a struggle. They weren't human screams, but she had no idea what kind of animal could make such awful noises. She brushed aside the vines in search of the entrance, and found that the stone cubes weren't fitted snugly together like those that composed the fortifications. Between the sides of each were six-inch-wide gaps, through which she could see only swatches of the dim interior. Columns of light shined down to the inner, straw-lined floor from holes in the earthen roof. They swirled with dust raised by a stampede of dark bodies. She smelled dry grain and manure, but it wasn't until a snuffling snout pressed into the gap in front of her that she understood.

"It's a barn." She tentatively reached through the gap and allowed the alpaca to nuzzle her fingertips with its wet nose.

"Why would they keep them closed up like this?" Galen asked. "Surely an outdoor pen would serve the same purpose. And the animals would be able to graze in the sunlight."

"You've heard of veal, haven't you?" Merritt asked.

"Galen's right," Sam said. "Why wouldn't they just fence off this area? Nearly all of the indigenous ruins in Peru have alpacas grazing everywhere. They actually live there. Why would these animals need to be caged like this?"

The screaming died down and the dust started to settle. She could see dozens of the wooly beasts through the crevice. Most of them were clustered together in the middle of the large room in a maze of support columns. The interior space was reasonably large, perhaps a hundred square yards, but it wasn't nearly large enough to accommodate so many animals. It was inhumane to keep them like this when they could be roaming the jungle with little chance of wandering off. It didn't make sense. Were the Chachapoya worried that the alpacas would escape and return to their native highlands, or were they keeping them in there for their own protection? Why else would they possibly need to enclose them behind the same kind of walls they had used to build their fortress? And by that same logic, why weren't the animals within the fortifications with the village where there were groves of trees and fields of crops?

She thought of the man she had seen with the lone alpaca. Had he taken it out of this very pen in order to allow it to stretch its legs and graze?

And why had the alpacas reacted as they had at the sound of her approach?

She withdrew her arm from the hole, and in doing so noticed that the edges of the stones around it weren't smooth and even. They were carved with notches as though poorly chiseled, or deliberately scraped with sharp objects.

"There's a gate over here," Dahlia said.

Sam walked along the face of the structure to where the blonde woman held back the curtain of vines so Jay could film the interior. A foul gust that reeked of dust and feces passed through an iron grate that was moored by iron rungs to stones set into the earth. Through the slots she could see a short stone corridor that branched at a ninety-degree angle to the right to prohibit visibility directly into the chamber. Was there another gate at the far end of it? Why else wouldn't the alpacas have approached the gate if she was right and the man came here to take them out for exercise?

The rock edges around the gate had been carved as well, and all of the rust had been scraped from the iron rails. Some even appeared to have been scored down to the virgin metal that had only recently been exposed to the elements.

Galen crouched beside her and sifted through the dirt. He pulled out a filthy brown feather. He blew off the dust and spun it between his fingers by the quill. Sam only now noticed that there were feathers all over the ground. They blended perfectly into the mat of dead leaves and sticks. Galen tucked the feather into the breast pocket of his khaki cargo vest, looked up at the sky, and then back to the ground.

He shook his head and furrowed his brow.

"What is it?" Sam asked.

Galen seemed to puzzle over her question before finally speaking.

"The walls make sense, but why would they need to build a roof over the animals?"

"To protect them from above," Jay said, retreating from the bars to capture better footage of the entire building.

"Possibly," Galen said. "But if that were the case, then why wouldn't they have done the same thing for their village?"

"You think it's possible that they're shielding their livestock from some sort of birds?" Sam asked.

Galen just chewed on the inside of his lip as he appraised the structure.

"I'm beginning to wonder...," he finally said.

Sam followed his gaze to the threshold, where the stone edges had been chiseled away.

It almost looked as though the rock had been carved in an effort to pry the iron gate loose.