Gabriel Hunt - Hunt at The Well Of Eternity

“Of Cuchatlán?”

“Of the world, Mr. Hunt.”

“It sounds like the ravings of a madman,” Gabriel said.

Esparza’s mouth tightened into an angry line, but he didn’t say anything else to the prisoners. Instead he turned to Podnemovitch and ordered, “When we get there, have them taken to the palace with the others.”

“The others?” Mariella repeated. “My husband! Where is my husband?”

“Don’t worry about General Fargo,” Esparza said. “He’s alive, merely a prisoner now, like the rest.”

Gabriel wondered how Esparza had managed to conquer the whole valley with only a handful of men, but he got the answer to that question a few minutes later when they entered the village and he saw the machine guns. Previously mounted on the trucks, they had been taken loose from their mounts, hauled all the way here, and set up to rake the village’s wooden huts with deadly .50-caliber fire. Several of the huts had been shot practically to pieces. General Fargo must have ordered his men to surrender rather than have all the people of Cuchatlán slaughtered.

“Didn’t you have any modern weapons to defend yourselves?” Gabriel asked Mariella in an undertone. “Your people must have some money if they travel out of the valley from time to time, like you said. You could have bought some.”

“Granville gave up war when he decided not to leave the valley,” she said. “He said the weapons his men had were enough to protect us from wild animals and for hunting. He said he had had enough of killing.”

That was an admirable attitude, thought Gabriel…but only if everybody else you were likely to encounter shared it. If they didn’t, then sooner or later you were in for a lot of trouble. As General Fargo had discovered today.

Though it had worked for him for a long time. Gabriel had to admit that much. Fargo had had almost a hundred and fifty years in these idyllic surroundings, with a beautiful, intelligent woman at his side. That was way more than any normal man could hope for.

The three pyramids formed a rough triangle, with the palace sitting along one leg of the triangle between two of them. In the center of the triangle was a broad, round plaza made of intricately interlocking flat stones. The stones had been painted subtly differing shades of green and brown and tan, so that from the air they would look like a clearing in the jungle, but not necessarily a man-made one. A large, flat, circular stone sat in the middle of the plaza. It was probably ten feet in diameter, a couple of feet thick, and must have weighed at least a thousand pounds. It wasn’t so heavy that it couldn’t be moved if enough men were pushing it, though. That was obvious from the markings on the flagstones where it had been shoved aside.

The circular stone was a well cover, Gabriel realized as he saw the four-foot-wide hole that had been revealed when the rock was moved. “The Well of Eternity,” Esparza said in a voice that betrayed a touch of awe as he came to a stop beside it.

“The Maya used to sacrifice virgins by throwing them in wells like that,” Cierra said. “They were considered entrances to the realm of the gods.”

Esparza smiled at her. “Don’t worry, my dear. Such a fate won’t befall you. As I’m sure Mr. Hunt can attest, you would hardly qualify anyway.”

Cierra’s eyes narrowed angrily, but she didn’t say anything else. Esparza motioned to his men, and the prisoners were prodded on toward the palace.

Although it was a lot shorter than the nearby pyramids, no more than thirty or forty feet tall rather than a hundred feet or more, its base shared the same sort of construction. A series of terraced steps, only rising to a long, columned building instead of continuing on up to tiny temples.

For no particularly good reason other than raw curiosity, Gabriel counted the steps as they were marched up to the palace. There were thirty of them, each a little more than a foot tall. When they reached the top, they were herded through an arched entrance into a room with more steps, these leading down.

“See that they’re locked up,” Esparza told Podnemovitch. “I’ll decide what to do with them later.” He smiled at Mariella. “We might as well allow Señora Fargo to be reunited with her husband for a short time. We are not brutes, after all.”

Podnemovitch and his men marched the three prisoners down the stone stairs, which were lit by occasional candles guttering in niches set into the walls. The walls were made of large blocks of stone, and as the group went deeper, beads of moisture began to appear on the walls, trickling down them. Gabriel estimated that they had descended far enough to be underground now, and the dampness confirmed that guess.

The stairs finally came to a stop in front of a door that was nothing more than a single massive slab of stone. Several of Esparza’s men occupied the space in front of the door. They were holding automatic weapons.

Podnemovitch motioned for the guards to step back. The big Russian pushed a small lever that protruded from the wall, and with a grating sound the door began to move inward in a slow, ponderous swinging motion. It was a good two feet thick.

“A counterweight and balance mechanism,” Cierra said under her breath. “Fascinating.”

Gabriel found it interesting himself, though it wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a mechanism. Ancient architects in vanished civilizations all over the world had been capable of some amazing things, despite the rather primitive tools with which they had to work. They had some surprising holes in their knowledge, though, he thought, recalling that the Maya, for example, had never mastered the concept of the wheel. If they had, there was no way of knowing how far their empire might have extended.

“Inside,” Podnemovitch ordered. Heavily outnumbered and under the gun, the prisoners had no choice but to obey. Gabriel, Cierra, and Mariella moved into the vast, open space on the other side of the door. Sunlight filtered down through occasional cracks in the ceiling and it was just bright enough for Gabriel to be able to make out shadowy figures spread around the room. As the door scraped shut, those figures began to converge on the newcomers. Gabriel felt a shiver go through him. They were like phantoms flocking around newly lost souls who had just arrived in purgatory.

That sensation went away, though, as the other prisoners came closer and he saw that they were just men and women like himself…well, just like him other than the fact that some of them might be hundreds of years old.

And some of them looked it, too. Many of the faces peering at him were lined and cracked by the ravages of time. He wondered what the hell was going on here. Wasn’t the Well of Eternity supposed to keep these people young and vital?

“Mariella!” a husky voice rasped. “My God, is it really you?”

The crowd of prisoners parted to let a tall man through. As he stepped forward, Mariella cried, “Granville!” and rushed into his arms.

He held her tightly and trembled with emotion. “That..that scoundrel who calls himself Esparza said that you would soon be his captive, but I was praying that it wasn’t so! Oh, my dear, I wish you had never come back to Cuchatlán.”

“I would have come back no matter what,” she whispered. “I could never be away from you for long, my love.”

The man kissed her, hugged her, stroked her hair. Then he looked past her shoulder at the other newcomers and asked in a voice that still held a soft Southern drawl, “Who are these people?”

Gabriel hadn’t gotten a good look at the man yet, but as Mariella turned and led him forward into one of the slender shafts of light, Gabriel saw him clearly. The man was tall and lean, with deep-set eyes and a closely trimmed beard. The beard was completely white, as was the shock of hair on his head. Deep trenches were etched in his cheeks. He looked a lot older than he had in the picture Gabriel had seen in the book at Olustee, but that made sense considering that this man was probably more than a hundred and seventy years old. Gabriel’s heart thudded hard in his chest as that realization sunk in. He didn’t doubt Mariella’s story anymore, not at all.