The Babylon Rite. Tom Knox

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СКАЧАТЬ spoke up. ‘Didn’t you find blood on that club?’

      The door was definitely opening. Larry replied, ‘Yeah, it was covered in this … like … black stuff. Horrible. We did immunoanalysis. It reacted to human blood antiserum only.’

      The door was opening further. Larry added, ‘It had been used so often, to kill people, ritually, that the blood had soaked through the wood. Like jam in a sponge. Yuk.’

      They were seconds from entering Tomb 1, Huaca D.

      Dan interrupted, his voice strained by exertion. ‘Looking back, ah, you know, with what we know from Jessica and Steve Venturi, I reckon – ah—’ He was pushing at the door now, and it was opening easily. ‘I reckon that, ah … the mace must have been used in the sacrifice ritual. When they were done drinking blood, they just lined victims up, hit them with the club, bludgeoned the brains away – so all we need to do is know why: who they did it for, who they, ah … worshipped. OK … ah … I think I think we’re in. I think we’re in the tomb!’

      Even the veteran professional calm of Dan Kossoy was affected by the excitement: he said nothing more. But the beam of his headtorch told the story.

      The door was open.

      Jessica breathed the ancient air exhaling from Tomb 1. It seemed to be respirating, releasing a long ancient sigh of relief, or submission. This was nonsense, of course. It was just some ventilation, air blowing through the entire huaca, now that the door was fully open, the desert wind whistling through, probably from their entrance to some further concealed exit – air sucking from one end to the other.

      The smell was tainted with an old putridity, something ancient, and distant, and incorrigibly dead.

      Jess looked around. Was she the only who had noticed this disgusting odour? No. Jay had a sleeve over his mouth. But Dan Kossoy seemed entirely unfazed.

      ‘It’s an unbroken Moche tomb all right. A big one. I know that singularly lovely perfume. Come on. Let’s go see.’

      One by one they crouched and waited to pass through the portal of Tomb 1, Huaca D. Jess felt, for a fraction of a moment, like a Second World War POW in a movie, waiting to use the secret tunnel to escape from the Nazis. The difference was, they were going further into the imprisoning evil.

      The first thing she noticed was the size of the tomb: it was huge, big enough to stand in, and it stretched deep into hidden darkness. Mud steps led down. So that was how it worked. The Moche must have dug down, to make this vast tomb, then built the adobe pyramid over the pit.

      Her feet crunched on something. What? She shone her headtorch down on the floor.

      A thousand glittering corpses sparkled back at her: the desiccated carapaces of beetles, iridescent, still showing their sinisterly gorgeous colours: purples and lurid greens and deep dark blues.

      ‘Skin beetles! Omorgus suberosus. Flesh-eating Coleoptera. The Moche worshipped them – they worshipped skin beetles and blowflies. We see them on ceramics. Familiars of the unknown god, perhaps? Hmm.’ Dan Kossoy was standing close to Jess as he said this. Very close. The beams of their headtorches crossed like battling swords as they both stared at the floor. She felt his hand reach for her hand and grasp it discreetly, giving a brief, secret, affectionate, reassuring squeeze. Then he pointed. ‘And here, these are fly puparia. Thousands of them. But … my goodness. Look. Here – totally staked out.’

      Jessica gazed. The dead beetles formed a kind of stencil or silhouette: and they surrounded a skeleton of a smallish human figure.

      Protected by the sealed door, the corpse had rotted slowly, free of any covering. The body must have been totally naked for there were no clothes, no adornments, no headdresses or weapons or grave goods: it was stark naked. And it was, as Dan said, staked out.

      Hoops of metal fastened the wrists and ankles to the floor. Worst of all: the skull was screaming, locked in a rasping howl of pain, yellowy teeth grimacing. This person, this adolescent or young woman or man, had died in agony.

      ‘Dan!’ It was Jay, calling. ‘Dan, come and see!’

      They ran over. Another skeleton was staked to the floor along the side of the tomb, near the adobe wall.

      ‘Another girl, it looks like.’ Jay said. ‘No feet. Chopped off. Must be a human sacrifice, right? And here. Birds? Avian skulls. Vultures – must be vultures.’

      Jessica knelt by the skeleton. It was adorned with a necklace of some sort; she shone her flashlight. The necklace was maybe copper, and decorated with small, symbolic commas embossed into the metal. She had seen these before, many times, in Moche art. They were called ulluchus. No one truly knew what they were: stylized drops of blood, maybe; perhaps blood of the primary deity.

      But who was the god who demanded these strange rites? What kind of ancient faith demanded this horror?

      ‘Dan!’ Another shout across the tomb. This time it was Larry.

      The finds were coming fast. The tomb was littered with many skeletons, filled with precious grave goods: it was a rich and wonderful prize. Wooden weapons mouldered in the gloom. Broken vessels, in the shape of naked prisoners, squatted in the dust, next to little copper bottles for coca taking, and endless broken potsherds with the strange comma-shaped blood drops, more ulluchus, and then – quite wonderfully – a spray of tiny pink coral cylinders, still pretty after fifteen hundred years, where a glorious headdress had rotted away. This was a high-status tomb, a tomb of nobles surrounded by sacrificial companions.

      One especially high-status skeleton, possibly a princess, with a great owl headdress, featured another severed ankle, like the skeletons outside. Why? It was inexplicable. This couldn’t be a sacrificial hobbling to prevent a concubine or a slave from fleeing in the afterlife: this was a noble. Why would she have this bizarre amputation? And how did it fit with the puzzling aspects of the other severed limbs?

      The puzzle was too hard. Jess felt the throb of a headache as she walked carefully between the skulls and the ribcages.

      In the gloom of the Tomb 1 she could hear the others enthusing over this grand discovery. The worry of the last hour was gone; Larry and Jay and Dan were chattering excitedly.

      ‘Brilliant, just brilliant, this is excellent …’

      ‘We need to grid this, today – and we need Kubiena boxes.’

      ‘I’ll go back and grab the cameras.’

      Part of her was pleased for them: Jess could understand the excitement. But she just couldn’t share the elation. Because she couldn’t shake the primary image from her mind: that terrible first skeleton staked out in the mud floor, surrounded by the purple and green shells of a million skin beetles.

      The anguished, frozen, terrified howl of the skull told her one thing: the victim had surely been tied to the floor, then fed alive to the insects.

      12

       Morningside, Edinburgh

      ‘You’re sure he didn’t tell you any of this?’

      ‘Absolutely. Nothing. Nada.’ Nina gestured, angrily, chopping СКАЧАТЬ