Burial Ground

VI

3:05 p.m.

Merritt leaned over Sam's shoulder as she studied the mound of bones. She shuffled through the pile and lifted them out one by one, repeating the same phrase like a mantra.

"This can't be right."

"What?" he asked.

She looked up at him and blinked as though seeing him for the first time. She furrowed her brow and seemed to think for a long time before she finally spoke.

"Look at this bone here." She held up the broken shaft of the distal half of a femur. "This broad portion forms the roof of the knee joint. The edges of the condyles should be more clearly defined, and the cortex should show thin striations and grooves. This is too smooth, too perfectly rounded, almost as though it's been ground down and polished." She turned it so the broken end of the shaft faced him. "And the medullary cavity is hollow. Do you see that? There should be a crust of marrow and vessels, not a tunnel that could have been bored by a drill."

"I don't understand the significance."

"In 1964, Anasazi remains were unearthed at Polacca Wash on a Hopi reservation in Arizona. All of the bones exhibited these same kinds of fractures, and were similarly smoothed and hollowed. It's one of the great mysteries of Native American culture. The prevailing theory is that the ends of the bones are so smooth because they were boiled. Bouncing around in the water and bumping against the sides of the pot made them that way, and the shafts are hollow because the marrow was boiled and scraped out. And this puddle right here?" She gestured to the small black pool filled with putrid water. "This used to be a fire pit. You can tell by the carbon scoring on the floor and wall. There are even pots right over there. These people cooked their dead on this very spot."

"Why would they do that when they could have just buried them like all of the others?"

"Don't you get it? They cooked these bones with the meat still on them. They were eating their dead." She drew a deep breath and resumed in a less animated tone. "The Chachapoya weren't cannibalistic. They were primarily an agricultural society. You saw it in practice on the slopes of the fortress by the lake. They built elaborate steppes on the mountainside and filled them with soil to grow everything from agaves to maize, and were very successful doing it. And they revered their dead. You remember that cavern we found? All of the bodies were bundled with great care and placed in chullpas nearly as nice as the homes they lived in. They wouldn't have eaten their dead. Not unless circumstances had become desperate and they were cut off from all other sources of food."

"So what do you think happened here?"

"I don't have enough information to form a hypothesis yet, but at a guess, I'd say they were involved in some sort of lengthy standoff inside this fortress."

"You think it was the Spanish?"

"No. The conquistadors had vastly superior firepower. None of the tribes were able to hold them off for long. Even the Inca, who were known as the most ferocious warriors, were able to muster precious little resistance against the Spanish with their armor and muskets."

"What about the Inca themselves?"

"The design of the building reflects Incan design. They had already assimilated the culture."

"Then if you're right, who could they have possibly been holed up in here against?"

The question hung in the air between them for an interminable moment before Sam abruptly rose and headed for the doorway.

"I don't know, but the answer has to be around here somewhere."

Merritt climbed over the rubble and followed her out into the rain. After so long in the darkness, even the gray day was blinding. Thunder crashed overhead and rumbled down the rocky slope like an avalanche. The rain intensified in response.

His mind flashed back to the theory Galen had put forth earlier. He shook away the images that the birdman's words conjured.

Jay hustled to keep up with them, the camera jouncing in his grip. Mere minutes ago, he had been grinning from ear to ear like a kid on Christmas morning, but now a note of worry had diminished his smile and crept into the corners of his eyes. Dahlia and Galen brought up the rear, while the three remaining armed men abandoned the crate and struck off in the opposite direction toward where Merritt heard Colton calling for Leo.

"That was their palatial structure," Sam said. "Using it to defile the deceased would have been the ultimate sacrilege." She looked from side to side. "But it was also the only building with a stone roof."

"It makes sense. They wouldn't have wanted to ignite those flimsy thatch roofs directly above their heads."

"You don't get it. They could easily have made a bonfire out in the open."

"Unless they'd barricaded themselves inside that chamber."

"Exactly."

"So you're saying the stones piled in front of the entrances weren't the result of the building crumbling over time."

"I'm not saying anything. All I know is that something awful happened here, something so terrible that these people were forced to eat each other to survive."

Merritt could tell they were heading east by the sound of the waterfall to his left, toward the clearing where they had emerged on the trail from the jungle. The stone-tiled path was wider here, and accommodated trees with trunks that had to be as wide as he was tall. Huts lay in ruin to either side, overgrown by vegetation. Saplings erupted from every crack in the stone.

Sam shoved through shrubs covered with ants until she finally stopped dead in her tracks.

"What is it?" Merritt asked. He stepped to her right and followed her gaze to the ground.

A skeleton was sprawled facedown at her feet. One arm was stretched out above it, the other nowhere to be seen. Roots from the bushes had grown through the ribcage. The skull was so dirty and ravaged by age it had turned the color of brass, and the occipital bone was shattered to such an extent that he could see through to the the eye sockets on the underside. Only half of one of the legs remained attached to the cracked ilium. The rest of the parts were absent.

"He was left to rot where he fell," Sam whispered.

"How do you know it's a 'he'?" Jay asked. He rounded the remains to get a better view through the camera.

"The inlet of the pelvis is too narrow for childbirth, and the angle between the pubic bones is less than ninety degrees."

With one final glance down, Sam continued walking. Ten yards farther, she shoved aside the branches of a fern to reveal the skeletal profile of a badly fractured face. It looked like someone had taken a hammer to the temporal bone and collapsed the lateral aspect of the orbit. Both arms were stretched out above its shoulders as though it had been trying to drag itself forward, a task it had been unable to accomplish without the ends of its arms and its hands.

Sam barely paused before continuing onward. They passed what was left of several more bodies before they reached a small clearing at the edge of the fortification. The village had been built on a short, angled plateau in such a way that the outer wall was only four feet tall here, while the ground on the other side was nearly thirty feet below. Lianas and vines crawled all around their feet, scaled the bricks, and descended the face of the fortification. In their midst were a good half-dozen skeletons. These were in far worse shape than the others they had encountered on their way. They were so severely broken and disarticulated that it was impossible to tell which bones belonged to which individual. A snapped spear poked out of the underbrush, and a quiver brimming with arrows rested under a nest of ferns.

Merritt nudged one of the skulls with his toe. It rolled to the side, leaving twin rows of teeth packed into the dirt. Something glinted from the mud. He knelt to inspect it, and after a moment pried a large metal object from the ground. It was a headdress like the one he had found in Hunter's backpack. He smeared the mud away to expose the sculpted gold.

"May I?" Sam asked, relieving him of the mask before he could reply.

He walked over to the edge of the wall and stared down. The fortification was undamaged. Time had taken its toll on the smooth bricks, but none of them had been broken. Only the column that held the torch directly beneath him on the ground had toppled.

It made no sense.

"This is where the invading force breached their fortifications," he said, thinking aloud. Jay raised the camera toward him, but he pushed the lens away. "They took their stand right here, where these men fell, and there was no one left to claim their bodies. But they were so savagely attacked...I mean, their skulls were shattered and they were torn limb from limb."

He turned to face Galen, whose face had gone ashen.

"And the other bodies we found on the path leading here," Sam said, "they were all pointing in the opposite direction as though they'd been overcome as they ran."

"Like the jaguar," Galen whispered.

"They were falling back to that chamber where you discovered the boiled bones," Merritt said.

Silence hung over the clearing, marred only by the rumble of the waterfall and the whistle of the wind along the wall.

"What in the name of God happened here?" Sam whispered. The spark of excitement faded from her eyes.

"I think..." Galen started, but said no more. He closed his mouth, shook his head, and glanced at Merritt from the corner of his eye.

"What?" Sam asked.

Galen looked again at Merritt, then sighed. "Nothing."

He turned away from them and struck off on the trail. After several steps, he paused, plucked a long brown feather from a snarl of ferns, and hurried back in the direction from which they had come.