Free Curses! by Aaron Elkins Page A

the beginning of their vexation by the devil, for the Lords of Xibalba will come and gouge out their eyes, and cut off their heads, and grind and crumble their nerves and their bones, and torment them until they die and are no more.
    "Only thus will Vucub-Came be satisfied, and Holom-Tucur, who has a head but no body, and Balam-Quitze, and the Lord Hun-Hunahpu, and Gekaquch, and the Lords Zibakihay and Ahquehay, and the Lords..."
    "Do you suppose this goes on much longer?” Julie whispered.
    "I don't think so,” Gideon said. “It's only one page long."
    Balam-Arab, and Mahucatah, and even Ah Puch, who never tires.’”
    "Mayan god of death,” Gideon murmured knowledgeably, impressing Julie with another bit of arcana pulled from who knew where.
    "'And when all this is done and the light turns to darkness for all time, there will be terrible mourning and crying..."
    Dr. Garrison paused, letting the somber words hang on the air. By now the lush, rhythmic Georgia accent seemed to suit them. “Mohh-nin'...and crahh-in'..."
    "'For it will be,'” she concluded mellowly, watching her audience and not the paper, “'the end of the cigar.’”
    "The end of the cigar,” she repeated, cutting off any possible incipient ripple of laughter, “is a Mayan metaphor for closure, for the end of life."
    She removed her pince-nez and with her thumb and forefinger slowly rubbed the indentations in the bridge of her nose. “For the end,” she said, “of everything."
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    Chapter 8
    * * * *
    Humming to himself, beginning to relax, even enjoying the feel of the sweat pooling at the small of his back, Gideon snipped with the pruning shears here, there, tugged gently at a sturdy brown root, and sat back on his heels to study the situation a little more.
    It was good to be working with his hands again, good to have a new skeleton to himself. (He had been guiltily relieved when Harvey somewhat shamefacedly announced his preference for nonskeletal work this time.) He snipped again, tugged again, and with an exclamation of satisfaction freed a gnarled three-inch root segment and tossed it through the doorway behind him. He laid the shears down next to the machete.
    Machetes and pruning shears were hardly tools of the trade, but in the scrubby, stubborn jungles of Yucatan you couldn't get very far without them. Vines and roots were everywhere, flourishing and intrusive, and every archaeologist of the Maya had had the frustrating experience of working for days to free something, then becoming preoccupied with something else for a week or two, and returning to the original stela or carving to find it more deeply embedded in vegetation than before. All the major sites employed teams of machete-wielding workmen to chop back the jungle continually. Without them the long-lost cities would be engulfed again in a few seasons—as indeed many of them had been.
    The lichen-stained skeleton in the entryway of the Priest's House had been there a lot longer than a season or two; longer than a century or two. The dead gray color of the bone, the dry, crumbly edges, the absence of even a dehydrated shred of tendon or ligament all suggested three to four hundred years. The vegetation was a clue to time too. Intrusive as it was, it couldn't have taken less than three centuries to choke the vestibule the way it had. There were fungous gray plants hanging from the roof—where you could see the roof—pulpy mosses oozing from the mortar of the stone walls, tightly packed trunks and roots and vines everywhere, springing from the inch or two of black soil and rotting vegetable matter that had blown in over the centuries, a grain or two at a time, to cling anywhere it could.
    And the skeleton had surely been there longer than the vegetation. That was obvious from the way the roots of some of the oldest plants, gnarled, bulbous, woody monsters with warped and blackened leaves, twined around and through the bones. Sometimes they sprang