The Falling Woman

19 Elizabeth

Sunday was Etz’nab, a day of pain and sacrifice. I woke up feeling dizzy and aching, with no appetite for breakfast. I lingered in my hut, avoiding Tony, until late morning, when I went for a walk to the tomb site. En route, I saw an old man stirring a ceramic pot that was warming over a small fire. The resinous scent of sap filled the air. The woven cloth bag that lay on the ground beside him was dusted with dark blue clay; the carved wooden stick with which he stirred the pot was tinted a vivid blue.

Blue is the color that the ancient Maya painted the cakes of incense that they burned in ceremonies. Blue is the color they paint the victims that are sacrificed to honor the gods.

I did not like the look of the old man and his pot of paint. I walked past quickly and did not look back.

The students dragged into camp that evening, battered by civilization. On every dig there are times like this. People are weary from the rigors of field camp and dissatisfied with the limited civilization within reach. Relationships grow strained. Maggie and Carlos were squabbling because a casual fling had gone on too long; Robin and John were clinging together because departure and separation were approaching too fast. Field school had only three weeks to run.

Diane and Barbara came in late. I was sitting in the plaza when they returned, drinking still another pot of hot tea. Diane said hello, then headed for the hut. She seemed quiet, dispirited, but I did not pursue her. I did not know what to say to her.

Monday was Cauac, governed by the celestial dragon who brings tempests, thunder, and wild rains. I woke before breakfast and went walking. On the way to the cenote I saw a stoneworker chipping thin blades of obsidian, ceremonial blades of amazing sharpness. He smiled as he worked and I did not stop to watch him.

At breakfast on Monday there was little talk, but that little was stormy. Barbara had misplaced the rope she used for site mapping on survey and there was no peace until she found it, coiled in a corner of Tony’s hut where she had dropped it on Friday. The survey crew stumbled out of camp half an hour late.

John and Robin had apparently disagreed over something – I could not guess what – and they ate in silence. John left early for the tomb site; Robin strode off to the lab. Tempers were short and people were itchy and restless.

I went to the tomb site at nine and found John shaking the sifter. He wore a red bandanna tied over his nose and mouth to block the clouds of dust that rose as he shook the rectangular screen, sifting potsherds and stone chips from the dirt. When I hailed him, he laid the sifter down, waited a moment for the dust to clear, then pulled down the bandanna, exposing clean skin. ‘We’re finding chips of flint,’ he said. ‘And a few large potsherds. And we have something that looks a hell of a lot like a wall.’

The flint was a good sign. Generally, the fill that led to Mayan burials and tombs contained flint chips.

The workman who was carrying a bucket of dirt up the eight stone steps from the lower level grinned when he saw me, recognizing the opportunity for a break. He asked if I wanted to take a look at the work so far. His grin widened when I said yes, and he called down to the other two workmen. Their jeans were stiff with dirt; their bare chests were powdered with white limestone dust. I offered each one a cigarette and they retired to the shade to smoke.

I stepped down into the tunnel and blinked for a moment in the sudden darkness. The air was humid and smelled of sweat. The passageway ran about six feet beyond the last step, dark and narrow enough to be oppressive. A pickax, a trowel, a whisk broom, and a bucket lay on the stone floor where the men had abandoned them.

John was right: the stones at the end of the passageway did look like a hastily constructed wall. The stones were not as neatly aligned as the stones of the side walls, but they were not as jumbled as the ones that the workmen had extracted from the passageway.

‘What do you think?’ John asked. He had stopped on the bottommost step. ‘A dead end?’

‘Have them clean it up a bit,’ I said, pointing to the side walls. The corner where the walls met the floor was filled with dirt. ‘They’re getting careless. Document this, then go on through.’

I took the larger sherds back to Tony for analysis. I left the sherds, described briefly the situation at the tomb site, and retreated to my hut to rest. The fever made me weary, lightheaded.

That evening, I sat in the plaza after dinner, drinking gin and listening to Robin and Tony discuss the sherds. Tony had dated a large gray sherd to the late Pure Florescent Period, at about the time that construction of new buildings at Dzibilchaltún had ceased. He speculated that the largest sherd was a piece of water jar. The clay was coarse-grained and tempered with calcite sand; the jar had been burnished slightly when leather-dry and coated with a layer of wet clay, the slip that gave the jar its gray finish. I did not care about the particulars as much as I did about the conclusion. ‘No earlier than AD 900,’ Tony said. That fit with my estimates and with the date we had deciphered on the capstone of the tomb. Whatever was beyond the wall dated from about the time that the Mayan cities had been abandoned, sometime after the Toltecs had invaded this region.

Tony and Robin went on about the sherd for a long time, but I stopped listening. Maggie sat at a nearby table, writing a letter. Probably a note to a boyfriend back home. Diane shared her lantern light, reading a paperback novel. I watched her, but she never turned a page. Occasionally, she looked up, stared out into the darkness beyond the lantern light, then returned to the same page. She started when I sat down beside her.

‘How was survey?’ I asked her.

‘OK.’

‘The book any good?’

She shrugged and showed me the cover. A romance novel by the look of it. ‘Not much choice in Mérida,’ she said. ‘It was this or a western.’

‘Are you finding archaeology a little dull?’

She shook her head with a quick jerk. ‘Not really.’ She sat with her hands in her lap, clutching the book. She did not look at me. The darkness was all around us. Tony and Robin were absorbed in their discussion; Maggie had left for her hut.

‘What did you and Barbara do this weekend?’ I asked.

‘We visited Chichén Itzá on Saturday.’

‘What did you think of it?’

She bit her lip, staring out into the darkness. ‘I don’t know. I thought… I didn’t like some of the carvings. Skulls. Jaguars holding human hearts. It seemed pretty harsh.’

‘That’s the influence of the Toltecs,’ I said. ‘A group from the Valley of Mexico that invaded this area and took Chichén Itzá as their capital city. Most of the Mayan sites show the Toltec influence in later years. The warrior on the stela you found is a Toltec. The woman at his feet is a Mayan goddess. The original Mayan work is buried beneath the work of their conquerors.’

‘What happened to the Maya?’

I shrugged uncomfortably. ‘They worked the fields and went on living their lives, I suppose. Added the new gods to their pantheon. People who were unwilling to accept the new ways kept quiet or died, I would guess.’ I stopped talking. ‘You must be getting bored with all this.’

‘Not bored.’

I waited, but she did not continue. She gazed off into the shadows, and I could not read the expression on her face. The muscles in her neck were tense. ‘What, then?’ I asked.

She glanced at me. One hand tapped the book restlessly into the palm of her other hand. ‘I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen. Sometimes I’m afraid.’

‘Afraid of what?’ My voice was low.

She shrugged, a quick jerk of the shoulders, as if she were shaking off an insect. ‘I don’t know. If I knew, maybe I could do something.’ She shook her head. ‘Or maybe not.’

‘You could go to Cancún,’ I said urgently. ‘I will meet you there after the dig is over. The Caribbean coast is—’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay.’

She went to bed shortly after that. I returned to the table with Tony and Barbara and listened to them talk. Tony, I noticed, was not drinking. After a time, I went to bed myself.

The week passed. We were short on workers. The incident with the stela had frightened a number of the older men away. But our luck improved.

I did not see Zuhuy-kak. I looked for her, but I did not see her. When I went walking in the morning to look for her, I met Diane by the cenote. When I went walking in the evening, I met Diane by the Temple of the Dolls. When we met, we returned to camp together in silence. I had little to say to her. I felt I had already said too much, drawn her in too close.

Wednesday was Ahau, the day of the sun, a favorable day. No equipment broke down; no men fell sick. I could not quite shake the fever, and it made me restless and irritable. I was content only when I was sitting at the tomb site, watching the men work. But even there I was plagued by chills and shivering.

I dreamed that night, strange vivid feverish dreams. I remember dancing in the rain, holding an obsidian blade. The moon shone down, almost full, and I was young again. My robes swirled about me. A feeling of power that surged through me, a great ancient power that stemmed from the moon.

Thursday was Imix, the day of the earth monster, a dragon-like creature with a protuberant nose. A good day for digging, for taking things to their roots. Late in the afternoon, Pich finally worked one stone of the wall free, pulling it from the place where it had rested for a thousand years.

I was on site – I spent most of the working day on site – and I went down into the tunnel. Cool moist air blew through the gap in the wall. With a flashlight, I peered through the opening, trying with little success to see what lay beyond the wall. A large open space, a low platform, vague pale shapes that could be pots or skulls – I could see little. The wall was about a yard thick.

The workmen stayed late on Thursday, but at five o’clock it was clear that we would not remove another stone that day. We stopped then, covered the opening with a tarp, and reluctantly left the site.

I went to the cenote that night after dinner and I sat by the pool, listening to the sound of the crickets and watching the shadows of peasant women come to fetch water. Zuhuy-kak did not come to join me. My daughter did not come. I was alone, and when the moon rose, I went to bed.

Friday was Akbal, a day of darkness. It is governed by the jaguar in its night aspect, lord of the underworld.

On Friday, Tony went with me to the site. By noon, the workmen had loosened and removed another stone, making an opening large enough for me to slide through on my belly, pushing my flashlight before me.

The skeleton lay on a stone slab, flat on her back with her legs stretched out. Her rib cage had collapsed; the flashlight beam shone on a jumble of pale crescent-shaped bones and glinted from the smooth jade beads scattered among the ribs and vertebrae. One arm lay over her ribs and across the pelvic girdle; the small bones of her hand were strewn between her thighbones. The other arm was crossed over her chest and the finger bones were lost in the confusion of ribs and vertebrae. The bones of her feet and toes had been scattered, perhaps by mice scavenging for food. Not far from the arm that was crossed over her chest, an obsidian blade lay on the stone platform. Nearby, the stone was stained by a splash of red: cinnabar spilled from the scallop shell that lay beside her.

Her skull was deformed, flattened at a steep angle to make an elongated expanse of forehead. Her mouth had fallen open and the teeth were intact. I recognized Zuhuy-kak by the jade inlays in her front teeth. A white shape lay by her pelvis and I played the light on it: the conch shell that had dangled from her belt. One thighbone had a knot in its center: a break that had not healed properly.

I heard Tony slide through the narrow gap behind me. His flashlight beam played over the pots that surrounded the skeleton: a jug in the shape of a turkey, a cream-colored three-legged bowl painted with glyphs, a squat vase in the shape of a spiraling shell, an incense burner in the shape of a jaguar, an assortment of bowls, jars, jugs, and vessels.

Tony’s flashlight stopped, spotlighting a large bowl at the skeleton’s feet, a vessel as big around as the circle I could make with my arms. It was elaborately decorated with glyphs and pictures. The ceramic lid had been knocked askew. Tony stepped closer, peering into the bowl, then gently lifted the lid aside.

A skull the size of a large grapefruit smiled out at us – a dark-eyed child whose teeth had long since left the jaws. Smooth and pale, the skull nestled among the curving ribs and long bones like an egg among twigs. Here and there, the bones were touched with cinnabar. By the look of things, the skeleton of the child had been disinterred, cleaned, dusted with cinnabar, packed neatly in the bowl, and buried again. I stepped closer, and the dark sockets of the eyes, set low beneath the flattened forehead, followed me. So frail: I could easily snap these ancient ribs in my hands. So young. The bones had been arranged with care, gently placed in the bowl, and I wondered who had tended to them.

In the end, the grand movements of civilizations matter little. What matters is the skull of a child beside the skeleton of its mother. I glanced up at Zuhuy-kak’s skeleton and the obsidian blade beside her. What mattered was how this child had died. A cool damp breeze touched me and I shivered.

‘It goes on,’ Tony said, and for a moment I did not understand. Then I followed his flashlight beam with my gaze and realized that the darkness was a sloping passage, the beginning of a limestone cavern extending down beneath the earth. The limestone walls were studded with fossil seashells. The hairs on my arms prickled and my skin rose in goose bumps. I could smell water somewhere far away. No sound but Tony’s breathing and mine. He stepped toward the opening.

‘No,’ I said sharply. ‘Don’t go in there.’

It was not until he looked back at me that I realized I had spoken too loudly.

‘Is something wrong?’ he said, stepping toward me.

‘No,’ I said, ‘nothing.’

‘We have our work cut out for us,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t counted on spelunking.’

‘We aren’t equipped for it,’ I said. I played my flashlight over the walls and knew that there were shadows just beyond the reach of the beam. I did not want Tony to go into the cave. I did not want anyone to go into the cave.

‘That’s never stopped us from doing anything before,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if John wants to organize an expedition tomorrow.’

We began excavation of the burial that day, setting John and Robin to work with trowels and whisks while the men continued bringing down the wall. When the survey crew returned, they all trooped down to the site and exclaimed over the skeleton. We finally quit working when the sun went down.