“He said ‘un montón’of teeth, Parker,” Angélica clarified. “That means ‘a lot,’ not a mountain.”
KuTu pointed at the tooth and rattled off something in whatQuint guessed was his native language.
“My Mayan is not good enough to understand what he’s telling Dr. Angélica now,” Raul confirmed. “But I think he’s explaining about the teeth.”
KuTu stopped suddenly, pain tightening his expression.
Angélica turned to her father, her brow covered in lines. “Did you understand that, Dad?”
Juan shook his head. “You know my grasp of Mayan is weak, especially when it is spoken at lightning speed.”
“What did he say?” Quint asked her, not sure he wanted to hear the answer based on her troubled expression.
Angélica looked around the group of them, her gaze settling on Quint at the end. “KuTu says that he didn’t find a stack of teeth.” She held up the tooth with the jade bead. “He found a pile of skulls with many teeth like this one in them.”
Raul gasped.
Quint couldn’t tell if Angélica was excited or horrified going off her face alone, but he definitely tended toward the latter, along with Raul, judging from the ranger’s cringe.
“Are you sure he means realcalaveras,or just carvings?” Juan asked, making the motion of cutting into stone.
KuTu pointed at the tooth again. “More.”
A grunt came from Bronko. “This reminds me of a display of trophy heads that I came across back in Colombia.” He pretended to slice his own neck. “Thathombrewas scaryloco. He said he liked to keep an eye on his enemies at all times, especially after they were dead.”
“Jesus,” Quint muttered, trying to stop his imagination in its tracks before it followed Bronko’s story train any further out of the station.
“Isn’t there a wall of skulls somewhere?” Raul asked. “At an archaeological site?”
“There’s theTzompantliplatform at Chichen Itza,” Angélica said. “It has skull carvings on its walls.”
“The Aztec had the skull-rack, too,” Juan added. “It’s at the Great Temple in Tenochtitlan. They supposedly represent their many sacrificed victims.”
Quint nodded, remembering pictures he’d seen of the GreatTemple and of the platform at Chichen Itza. “Yeah, but those are both skull carvings in the stone. What about real human skulls?” He looked to Angélica and then Juan.
“There is the tower of human skulls in Tenochtitlan, as well,” Juan said, beating Angélica to the answer. “Those are real.”
Bronko crossed his arms. “You mean Mexico City?”
“Yes,” Angélica said, extracting a small plastic sample bag from her pack. “The tower is calledHuey Tzompantli. Archaeologists have found more than 600 skulls there now.”
Her father nodded. “And last I read, that tower is believed to be just one of seven.”
Quint focused on Juan, who knew a lot about the Olmec civilization that had been centered somewhat near that area long before the Aztec. “Could this pile of skulls here be Olmec-related, like some of the pieces we found at the last site? Or do you think the Aztecs were hanging out down here at some point, chopping off heads for sport?”
“Could have been either.” Juan dabbed his neck with his handkerchief. “But this site we’re at could be older than the Olmec, too.”
“True.” Angélica dropped the tooth in the bag and sealed it shut. “The Aztecs weren’t the first civilization by far to display the skulls of sacrificial victims or enemies from the battlefield.”
Her father nodded. “Some scholars believe the Aztec’s brutal forms of sacrifice were a learned behavior from previous civilizations. Who knows? It could’ve been done to their own people initially by their enemies.”
“And they then adopted the practice,” Quint finished for him.
“I’m going to ask KuTu how many skulls there are.” She spoke to KuTu in Mayan.
He shook his head solemnly, answering in Spanish. “Muchas calaveras.”
Bronko stepped around them and started up the road, heading deeper into the jungle with his machete leading the way.
