David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

“Delightful.” Costas grunted. “But I thought all that kind of stuff was exaggerated by the Spanish.”

“Nope.” Jeremy led them to the north side of the precinct, past a structure where Jack saw a carved stone glyph that looked strikingly familiar. Jeremy saw him hesitate and called back. “The eagle-god. It’s exactly the same as the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows. I’m sure it came from here.” He stopped beside the next building, a wide stone platform about his height, and waited for the other two to catch up. “You asked about sacrifice. This one’s my favourite. It’s called the Tzompantli, the platform of the Skulls. The rotting heads of enemies were exhibited here, and just in case you needed reminding they were carved round the platform edge.” They saw that the sides of the platform were covered with hundreds of leering skulls, their jaws gaping and eyes wide open in terror and anguish. “To cap it all, you have to imagine that all the buildings here, the pyramid and the Temple of the Warriors, this platform, were painted red.”

“With human blood, I assume.” Costas traced his finger over one of the skulls and grimaced. “I know we had our bad episodes-the Roman Colosseum, the Spanish Inquisition and all that-but genocide and mass murder were never institutionalised, never part of our way of life. For these people it was normal. You’re born here, you get sacrificed. There was something deeply dysfunctional about this society.”

“The Maya had quite a lot going for them,” Jeremy replied cautiously. “Amazing architecture and art, phenomenal economic organisation. States that would easily have vied with the early city-states of the Near East.”

“Four thousand years before the Maya,” Jack said.

“And the Maya had no bronze,” Costas added.

“Or iron, or wheels.”

“Right.” Jeremy smiled wryly. “This society was the pinnacle of what was going on in the Americas before the Spanish conquest. But everything went apeshit when the Toltecs showed up. They were the horror warriors of ancient Mesoamerica, the SS of their day. Everything you’ve heard about the Aztecs, those accounts of mass human sacrifice recorded by the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, magnify that several times and put it back five hundred years. Imagine the heart of darkness, apocalypse now, this is the place. The Maya themselves weren’t exactly averse to human sacrifice, but when the Toltecs arrived they turned this place into a death camp.”

“No wonder Reksnys settled here,” Costas murmured. “He would have felt right at home.”

“The fact is, for medieval Europeans this place would have been their vision of hell,” Jack said. “For the Vikings it would have exceeded their worst nightmares about the end of the world, about Ragnarok. For any prisoner brought here it would have been a one-way ticket to Dante’s Inferno.”

“There’s something else I want you to see,” Jeremy said, walking briskly on. “Follow me.” They passed the Platform of the Skulls and out of the central precinct, and then followed Jeremy along a wide processional way that led down a shallow gradient and through the jungle to the north. After about two hundred metres they scrambled down an irregular rocky slope and stood on the edge of an eroded platform. In front of them was a vast sinkhole, some fifty metres across and twenty metres deep, its rim overhung with lush greenery and the limestone walls receding inwards through a series of striated ledges. The pool at the bottom was a putrid green, covered with a dense layer of algae and fallen vegetation. There was no access point to the water, and they could see that for anyone unfortunate enough to slip off the platform there would be no escape.

“The Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza,” Jack murmured. “I’ve always wanted to see this.”

“Cenote?” Costas said.

“A Spanish word, from the Mayan dzonot, meaning ‘sacred well, well of sacrifice,’” Jeremy explained. “I was telling you about it on the beach. The whole of the Yucatan was once a coral reef, then it became a limestone plateau during the Ice Age when the sea level lowered. Over millions of years rainwater percolated into the limestone and created a huge labyrinth of caves and tunnels, filled with stalagtites and stalagmites. Then at the end of the Ice Age, eight thousand years ago, the sea level rose again and the system flooded. Caves with ceilings that remained above water eventually collapsed, creating sinkholes like this one.”

“What about the earth tremors?”

“We’re just south of a huge meteorite impact site, the Chicxulub crater, which underlies much of the north Yucatan.”

“The one that wiped out the dinosaurs?” Costas said, looking around him with mock alarm. “Anything bad that didn’t happen here?”

Jeremy grinned. “The dinosaur disaster’s true. The rim is marked by a ring of cenotes, many of them collapsed into sinkholes. Nobody really knows why, but the crater underneath has some kind of de-stabilising effect on the limestone.”

“A cave-diver’s paradise.”

“It’s incredible,” Jeremy enthused. “Divers have explored systems fifty, a hundred kilometres long. Some of them are underwater rivers that run out into the sea. Below the slime it’s crystal clear, like swimming in an aquarium filled with spectacular calcite formations. But it’s also lethal. It put me off learning to dive when I was here as a student. More divers have died here than almost anywhere else in the world.”

“The Toltecs would have approved,” Jack said.

“Let me guess,” Costas said. “They sacrificed humans here as well.”

“The Well of Sacrifice was first dredged for artefacts in the 1930s, but then in the 1950s it was one of the first archaeological sites to be explored using scuba equipment,” Jack replied. “There have been other expeditions. Cousteau came here. The deepest deposits are still unexplored, but masses of artefacts have come up-pottery vessels, gold, jade. Almost all of it was thrown into the well intact, ritually deposited. And they found human skeletons. Hundreds of them.”

“It’s the same story all over the Yucatan,” Jeremy added. “Cenotes were the source of fresh water for the Maya, but also entrances to the underworld. They sacrificed warriors, maidens, children. That little building over there is the temazcal, a kind of sauna where victims were ritually purified. The stone ledges we’ve just come down were spectator seating, where the Toltec elite could sit and watch.”

“I guess variety is the spice of life,” Costas murmured distastefully. “Once you’ve seen a few thousand hearts ripped out back there at the temple, you might want a change of scene.”

An official appeared sweating and panting behind them on the processional way, waving a cellphone and beckoning for Jeremy to take it. Jeremy hesitated, knowing that he had been mistaken for the leader. He looked towards Jack, who smiled and gestured for him to go. As Jeremy clambered up with the official to find higher ground for better reception, Jack turned back and peered over the edge of the platform. The pool looked strangely benign, but for a moment his breath tightened as he felt the terror of the victims a thousand years ago poised at the edge of the underworld.

“You say there’s still stuff down there.” Costas wiped the sheen of sweat from his face, then looked questioningly at Jack.

“Most of the artefacts and bones higher up have been lifted, but there are still deeply buried deposits where you might find heavier objects.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Your sub-bottom borer,” Jack replied with a grin. “Maybe if things work out in the Golden Horn, we could approach the Mexican authorities and suggest a shift to operations here.”