Free Ruins by Kevin Anderson

something moved unseen across the treetops ... a snake, a monkey, a jaguar.
    Pepe splashed across a narrow stream, placing it in his mental map of the area, knowing indisputably where he was, how close he had come to his destination. Xitaclan lay just up ahead.
    In a thicket of fragrant hibiscus shrubs on the bank of the stream, the underbrush rustled. Something heavy splashed into the water. He recognized the reptilian eyes, the sleek form of a night-hunting cayman—large, and hungry, judging from the ripples that arrowed through the water toward him. Pepe quickly slogged through the mud, climbing the bank and rushing into the underbrush to get safely away from the crocodile-like creature.
    Above, he heard more movement, crashing branches, falling leaves. He hoped it wasn't a night-prowling cat, ready to drop down on him to rip him apart with curved claws and powerful feline muscles—then he heard the scolding of a group of awakened monkeys, disturbed by his flight from the cayman. He sighed, feeling a shiver tingle through him. The old religion had revered jaguars, but he would not have felt blessed to encounter one of the jungle panthers alone in the night.
    For centuries, the Catholic priests had done their best to squash continued practice of the old beliefs. In the village Father Ronald railed with stories of hellfire and eternal damnation whenever he found evidence of ritually shed blood, of scars from self-scourging, even missing fingers or toes cut off with razor-sharp obsidian knives in personal mutilation.
    The villagers apologized, did their penance, behaved with meek shame in front of the priests ... but altered none of their thinking. Their hearts had not changed since the coming of the Spaniards five hundred years ear-lier.
    Sometimes pure sacrificial blood washed away stains the frequent jungle rains could never obliterate.
    Pepe remembered quite vividly, while his father lay dying of the scorpion sting, his mother kneeling outside the door of their hut. She drew a thorny vine through her mouth, ripping her tongue open so that she could spit bright, fresh lifeblood onto the earth in her own sacrifice.
    The sacrifice had not worked, though. Pepe won-dered if the old gods had demanded more blood than she was willing to give.
    In the golden past, the Maya gods had feasted on blood, on hearts torn out of willing victims, on sacrificed prisoners hurled to their deaths into the sacred limestone wells beside the great temples.
    Now only ruins and artifacts remained of all that glory. Perhaps the gods had tired of blood after all.. ..
    Finally, after another hour of trying to slip like a thief through the jungle's night, Pepe arrived at the forgotten metropolis of Xitaclan.
    Parting the wide, slick leaves of a banana tree, he gazed into the moonlit clearing, the rough hummocks of fallen temples, the sculpture-laden walls showing the hook-nosed masks of the rain god Chac, the numerous feathered serpent motifs now defaced by moss and vines, the impressive Pyramid of Kukulkan tall in the night, but smothered with vegetation.
    Some of the thick trees had been chopped down and hauled away as the archaeological team had worked on their initial excavations, clearing the site of the densest foliage to remove the blanket of undergrowth deposited by undisturbed time. The trenches and shorn tree stumps stood like raw wounds in the earth.
    The American team had been gone for only days, but the jungle had already begun to reclaim its territory.
    In the center of Xitaclan's plaza, the stepped pyramid dominated the scene.
    The regularly spaced platforms had partially crumbled on one side, huge blocks tugged free by the strength of roots and vines. But at the ziggu-rat's apex the temple to Kukulkan, the god of wisdom, flanked by his feathered serpent guardians, remained intact.
    Pepe would have to go inside the pyramid, rummage around the narrow passages until he found a few more alcoves containing jade artifacts, intact pots,