The Falling Woman

In the ruins of an ancient Mayan city, archaeologist Elizabeth Butler confronts the shade of a long-dead priestess. And enters the twilight world of Mayan magic and Mayan blood sacrifice.

~ ~ ~

“Murphy’s sharp behavioral observation, her rich Mayan background and the revolving door of fantasy and reality honorably recall the novels of Margaret Atwood.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Pat Murphy has mixed fantasy, horror and contemporary realism in a literate and absorbing tale.”

—
Chicago Sun Times

“Murphy splendidly captures the atmosphere and spirit of the dig, and adds a well-realized backdrop…Impressive archaeological fantasy in dramatic Yucatán setting.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
PAT MURPHY

THE

Falling Woman

ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are ficitional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

THE FALLING WOMAN Copyright © 1986 by Pat Murphy

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

First printing: November 1986

First mass market printing: September 1987

A TOR Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24 Street New York, N.Y. 10010

Cover art by Peter Scanlon

ISBN: 0-812-54620-2 CAN. ED.: 0-812-54621-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86-50322 Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

For my mother, a remarkable woman who taught me many things,

and

For Richard, who swam with me in the sacred cenote at Dzibilchaltún
This is the true account, when all was vague, all was silence, without motion and the sky was still empty. This is the
first account, the first narrative. There was neither man nor beast, no bird, fish nor crab, no trees, rocks, caves nor
canyons, no plants and no shrubs. Only the sky was there.

—
Popol Vuh
of the Quiché Maya

Notes for
City of Stones

by Elizabeth Butler

T
here are no rivers on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula. The land is flat and dry and dusty. The soil is only a few feet deep, a thin layer of arable land over a shelf of hard limestone. The jungle that covers the land is made up of thin-leafed trees and thorny bushes that turn yellow in the long summer.

There are no rivers, but there is water hidden deep beneath the limestone. Here and there, the stone has cracked and cool water from beneath the earth has reached the surface and formed a pool.

The Maya called such pools
ts'not
—an abrupt, angular sort of a word. The Spanish conquerors who came to the Yucatan softened the word. Cenotes, they called these ancient wells. Whatever the name, the water is cold; the pools are deep.

Hidden beneath the water are fragments of the old Mayan civilization: broken pieces of pottery, figurines, jade ornaments, and bits of bone—sometimes human bone. In the mythos of the Maya, the cenotes were places of power belonging to the Chaacob, the gods who come from the world's four corners to bring the rain.

Dzibilchaltún, the oldest city on the Yucatán peninsula, was built around a cenote known as Xlacah. By Mayan reckoning, people settled in this place in the ninth katun. By the Christian calendar, that is about one thousand years before the death of Christ. But Christian reckoning seems out of place here. Despite the efforts of Spanish friars, Christianity sits very lightly on the land.

The ruins of Dzibilchaltún cover over twenty square miles. Only the central area has been mapped. One structure, a box-shaped building on a high platform, has been rebuilt. Archaeologists call this building the Temple of the Seven Dolls because seven doll-sized ceramic figures were found buried in its floor.

Archaeologists do not know what the ancient Maya called the building, nor what the Maya did in this temple.

The Temple of the Seven Dolls offers the best view of the surrounding area—a monotonous expanse of thirsty trees and scrubby bushes. Near the Temple of the Seven Dolls, the jungle has been cleared away, and mounds of rock rise from the flat land. Fragments of walls and sections of white limestone causeways are barely visible through the grass and soil. The view would be bleak were it not for the enormous sky, an unbroken expanse of relentless blue.

Do not look for revelations in the ancient ruins. You will find here only what you bring: bits of memory, wisps of the past as thin as clouds in the summer, fragments of stone that are carved with symbols that sometimes almost make sense.

Chapter One: Elizabeth Butler

“
I
dig through ancient trash,” I told the elegantly groomed young woman who had been sent by a popular women's magazine to write a short article on my work. "I grub in the dirt, that's what I do. I dig up dead Indians. Archaeologists are really no better than scavengers, sifting through the garbage that people left behind when they died, moved on, built a new house, a new town, a new temple. We're garbage collectors really. Is that clear?" The sleek young woman's smile faltered, but she bravely continued the interview.

That was in Berkeley, just after the publication of my last book, but the memory of the interview lingered with me. I pitied the reporter and the photographer who accompanied her. It was so obvious that they did not know what to do with me.

I am an old woman. My hair is gray and brown—the color of the limestone monuments raised by the Maya one thousand years ago. My face has weathered through the years—the sun has etched wrinkles around the eyes, the wind has carved lines. At age fifty-one, I am a troublesome old woman.

My name is Elizabeth Butler; my friends and students call me Liz. The University of California at Berkeley lists me as a lecturer and field archaeologist, but in actuality I am a mole, a scavenger, a garbage collector. I find it somewhat surprising, though gratifying, that I have managed to make my living in such a strange occupation.

Often, I argue with other people who grub in the dirt. I have a reputation for asking too many embarrassing questions at conferences where everyone presents their findings. I have always enjoyed asking embarrassing questions.

Sometimes, much to the dismay of my fellow academics, I write books about my activities and the activities of my colleagues. In general, I believe that my fellow garbage collectors regard my work as suspect because it has become quite popular. Popularity is not the mark of a properly rigorous academic work. I believe that their distrust of my work reflects a distrust of me. My work smacks of speculation; I tell stories about the people who inhabited the ancient ruins— and my colleagues do not care for my tales.

In academic circles, I linger on the fringes where the warmth of the fire never reaches, an irreverent outsider, a loner who prefers fieldwork to the university and general readership to academic journals.

But then, the popularizers don't like me either. I gave that reporter trouble, I know. I talked about dirt and potsherds when she wanted to hear about romance and adventure. And the photographer—a young man who was more accustomed to fashion-plate beauties than to weatherworn archaeologists— did not know how to picture the crags and fissures of my face. He kept positioning me in one place, then in another. In the end, he took photographs of my hands: pointing out the pattern on a potsherd, holding a jade earring, demonstrating how to use a mano and metate, the mortar and pestle with which the Maya grind corn.

My hands tell more of my history than my face. They are tanned and wrinkled and I can trace the paths of veins along their backs. The nails are short and hard, like the claws of some digging animal, and the wrists are marked with vertical white scars, a permanent record of my attempt to escape my former husband and the world in the most drastic way possible. The magazine photographer was careful to position my hands so that the scars did not show.

I believe that the reporter who interviewed me expected tales of tombs, gold, and glory. I told her about heat, disease, and insect bites. I described the time that my jeep broke an axle fifty miles from anywhere, the time that all my graduate students had diarrhea simultaneously, the time that the local municipality stole half my workmen to work on a local road. "Picture postcards never show the bugs," I told her. "Stinging ants, wasps, fleas, roaches the size of your hand. Postcards never show the heat."

I don't think that I told her what she wanted to hear, but I enjoyed myself. I don't think that she believed all my stories. I think she still believes that archaeologists wear white pith helmets and find treasure each day before breakfast. She asked me why, if conditions were as horrible as I described, why I would ever go on another dig. I remember that she smiled when she asked me, expecting me to talk about the excitement of discovery, the thrill of uncovering lost civilizations. Why do I do it?

"I'm crazy," I said. I don't think she believed me.

It was three weeks into the field season at Dzibilchaltún that Tony, Salvador, and I held a council of war.

We sat at a folding table at one edge of the central plaza, an area of hard-packed dirt surrounded by mud-and-wattle huts. The plaza served as dining hall, classroom, meeting place, and, at that moment, conference room. Dinner was over and we lingered over coffee laced with aguardiente, a potent local brandy.

The situation was this. We had thirty men to do a job that would be difficult with twice that number. Our budget was tight; our time was limited. We had been at work for three weeks out of our allotted eight. So far our luck had been nonexistent. And the municipality had just commandeered ten of our workmen to patch potholes in the road between Mérida and Progreso. In the Yucatan, the season for road building coincides with the season for excavation, a brief period in the spring before the rains come. In five weeks— sooner if our luck was bad—the rains would come and our work would end.

"Shall I go talk to the commissioner of highways?" I said.

"I'll tell him that we need those men. I'm sure I could convince him."

Salvador took a drag on his cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms. Salvador had been working on excavations since he was a teenager in Piste helping with the restoration of Chichén Itzá. He was a good foreman, an intelligent man who was respectful of his employers, and he did not like to tell me I was wrong. He stared past me.

I glanced at Tony. "I think that means no."

Tony grinned. Anthony Baker, my co-director on the excavation, was older than I was by just a few years. We had met nearly thirty years before at a Hopi dig in Arizona. He had been an affable, easygoing young man. He was still easygoing. His eyes were a startling shade of blue. His curly hair—once blond, now white—was sparse where it had been lush. His face was thin, grown thinner over the years, and sunburned as always. Each season he burned and peeled and burned again, despite all his efforts to block the sun. His voice was low and gravelly, a soft rough whiskey voice with a deep rumble in the throat, like the voice of a talking bear in a fairy tale.

"I'd guess you were right," he said to me.

"That's too bad," I said. "I was rather looking forward to barging into the commissioner's office. I can be rude to young men." I sipped my coffee. "It's one of the few compensations for growing old."

Salvador took another long drag on his cigarette. "I will talk to my cousin," he said at last. "My cousin will talk to the commissioner. He will reason with the commissioner." He glanced at me but did not unfold his arms. "It will cost some money."

I nodded. "We budgeted for that."

"Good."

"If it doesn't work, I can always go negotiate with the man," I said.

Salvador dropped the stub of his cigarette to the ground and crushed it out with a sandaled foot. No comment. Tony poured another shot of aguardiente into each cup.

The sun was setting. The hollow wailing of conch shell trumpets blown by Mayan priests rose over the trilling of the crickets and echoed across the plaza. I alone listened to the sweet mournful sound—neither Tony nor Salvador could hear the echoes of the past.

At a folding table on the far side of the plaza, three of the five graduate students who were working the dig this summer were playing cards. Occasionally, their laughter drifted across the plaza.

"The students are a good bunch this year," Tony commented. I shrugged. "They're like every other bunch of students. Every year they seem to get younger. And they want to find a jade mask and a gold bracelet under every rock or else they want to have a mystical experience in the ruins when the full moon rises."

"Or both," Tony said.

"Right. Some hide it better than others, but they're all treasure hunters at heart."

"And we hide it better than any of them," he said. "We've been at it longer."

I glanced at his face, and could not continue pretending to be cynical when he was grinning like that. "I suppose you're right. Do you think this is the year that we'll find a tomb bigger than King Tut's and translate the hieroglyphics?"