She nodded. “Owls, vultures, spiders, centipedes, scorpions, and more hang out withAh Puch,” she told him. “Which creatures were included depended on the artist’s take on the god.”
Angélica sheathed her machete and returned to thesacbenext to the platform. Pulling out her satellite map, she tried to locate the junction where the oldsacbethey’d followed along from northwest to southeast passed this platform. Now that they’d cleared away some of the vegetation, she could definitely see the platform structure better, picturing what it might have looked like in its pre-crumbled lifetime. Unfortunately, that didn’t help her find where she stood at the moment on the map. Damn it, she should have brought her tablet with the map along. Although what she had wasn’t nearly as good as what Dr. Fernel promised to provide if she’d just let him join her.
She looked at the platform again, then at the surrounding terrain, and then back at the map. Hmm. She’d drawn a few small squares where she thought there might be a structure of some kind based off the small map her mom had hand-drawn in her notebook, but if this platform was where she thought it was on this particular map, then there was no mention of it in her mom’s notes. Which wasn’t exactly surprising, considering how little her mother had garnered about this site.
Quint joined her on what was left of the old limestone-covered road. “Is it just me or is the jungle thicker here than back by Calakmul?”
“I doubt it’s been disturbed by humans in a long time.”
He grimaced slightly. “That’s too bad for our shoulders and back muscles.”
“I’ll give you a rubdown later to make up for it.”
He harrumphed. “I fell for that last night, and look where it landed me—sweating like a pig under a layer of hot pepper grease.”
“Yeah, but you know how much I like snuggling with Rover.”
Rover was her petjavelina, which officially wasn’t a pig but rather a peccary, as she had to keep reminding her father whenever he complained about her tent being a messy sty with the pig to prove it.
“I miss that big boy,” Quint said, smiling. “His appetite for María’s handmade tortillas almost matches mine.”
“I think he’d win an eating contest.”
“Maybe.” He pointed up at the sky. “So, a vulture accompanies the Lord of Death.”
She nodded. “Yes, but how the vulture is shown on whatever vessel or glyph it adorns determines if it is a positive or negative reference.”
“Meaning you have to look at it in its current place along with its surrounding glyphs or drawings,” he said.
“In situ, right. But that isn’t always possible if looters haveinterfered.”
“That sort of reminds me of ground truthing. You know, looking at the contents of a dig site in situ to understand the context rather than simply staring at a LIDAR map.”
“Exactly.” She frowned at the rubble, imagining what the platform used to look like. “I wish we could find astelahinting at the purpose of this structure. There’s nothing about it in the few notes my mom had collected about this site. Dad told me it was one of the places she kept wanting to explore further, but paying jobs kept her from it.”
“What did your mom write about this place?”
“I told you most of it already.”
“Yeah, well, give me the highlights again. I think I was awake listening for passing snakes and hungry jaguars for half of last night, feeling a bit like a big hunk of freshly peppered meat inside mesh packaging, so my memory is sketchy.”
“You’re a big hunk, all right,” she said, winking at him.
“Don’t be trying to sway me with your feminine wiles, Dr. García. What’s the story on this site?”
“From what Mom gleaned via other archaeologists and the few mentions in texts and papers about this place, which she called Site 5, she hypothesized it was a highly religious sanctuary of sorts.”
“Site 5? That’s not the sexiest of names.”
“Most sites start out as letters or numbers.”
“What happened to Sites 1 through 4?”
“There are no others. Five was her lucky number.”
Quint stared at the platform for a few seconds before turning back to her. “Highly religious, huh? Rather than just a plain old Maya city full of working-class citizens?”
Angélica lowered her voice. “There’s a rough sketch of a Maya glyph supposedly found at the site that showed a Maya shaman being sacrificed. Shamans were usually the ones doing the sacrificing, not the other way around.”
