“To control them. To use them.” Lonetree’s voice was distant, as if lost in a daydream, here but gone.
“Used them for what?”
Lonetree held up a notebook, bound in thick brown leather. “These are my father’s notes, added on to by my brother. When he came to me in the cave he told me where he would hide them. Made me repeat it over and over so I wouldn’t forget.” He slid his hand over the cover. “It tells what happened here. I think it explains what’s happening to your family. The contents of this book were the reason my father and brother were killed. Knowing that, are you sure you want the answer to your question?”
Jack reached out for the book and Lonetree allowed him to take it. He flipped through the pages, thick with writing, illustrations and charts. “Tell me,” he finally said, closing the notebook. “Tell me what happened here.”
FIFTY-FOUR
Lonetree threaded his way through the maze of stone cages. Jack knew instinctively where they were headed. He had noticed a low circular building near the center of the cave when they first entered the chamber and used the parachute flare. His guess was confirmed as he turned the corner around a cage, careful to avoid the bony hand that extended out toward him. Lonetree stood in front of the strange structure waiting for him to catch up.
Lonetree removed a tube from his back pack. A foot long, it had black rubber nubs at each end with the center made of plastic that shone a pale yellow in the beam from the helmet light. Lonetree twisted the stick with a loud crack and shook it. The stick glowed a brilliant yellow, creating a round ball of light for them in the center of the cave.
“Turn off your helmet light to conserve the battery,” Lonetree said, turning his own light off. “This is a high-intensity stick so it’s only going to last fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Jack did as he was asked and walked up to the structure. The edge of the roof was right at eye level, but it rose at a steady slope to create a dome over a large circular wall. It looked like an overturned shallow bowl. Jack estimated that the center of the dome reached only ten or twelve feet.
The building was carved out of a solid mound of white limestone, but whatever craftsmen had created it used technique that left no sign of their work. The surface of the roof glistened, flawlessly smooth and perfectly proportioned. The curved wall of the structure, however, was covered with detailed engravings that stretched around the bend and out from the reach of Lonetree’s light.
Jack looked closely at the carvings directly in front of him. He recognized the scene. Tall pillars arranged in circles formed cages, the same cages arrayed behind him in the dark. But in the carving, ladders rested against the side of the cages and prisoners were being put into their cells. Off to the side, rows of women and girls stood attached to each other by chains. Waiting their turn. The faces of the women were carved in high detail, their wailing and crying so real that Jack felt he could almost hear them.
“These carvings are the story of what happened here,” Lonetree said. “I wouldn’t have been able to understand it all without my brother’s notes. Wouldn’t have believed it without seeing this place.” He pointed to an area on the rock wall in front of them. Bodies were stacked, one on top of another, next to a pyre with flames consuming bodies, the smoke rising to cover the roof of the cave. “Some of it doesn’t need an explanation. Mass murderers always get rid of the evidence. Maybe even the most evil men feel shame of what they do,” Lonetree said, his voice distant.
“It’s so savage. So primitive.”
“Modern man isn’t far behind. Think of the Nazi’s in WWII. The Serbs in Bosnia. Khmer Rouge. Taliban. Chechnya. The list goes on. It’s all the same. Mass murder followed by cover up. Nothing changes.”
Jack heard the bitterness in Lonetree’s voice and he knew it was more than a history lesson. It was personal. He guessed Lonetree had seen atrocities like the ones depicted in the carvings, not frozen in rock, but live with real blood and real screams. The images were bad enough. Jack could hardly imagine what it meant to see it as it happened. He wondered what an experience like that did to a man. “Where does the story start?” Jack asked.
“Over here.” Lonetree pointed to a panel to their left. The scene was like one from a children’s history book. It was an Indian village; simple tee-pee structures, a few domestic animals, people at work tending crops, tanning hides, dancing. “This is before what my father called the Visitation. Here, in this next panel, is when everything changed.”
Jack crouched down and ran his fingers over the carving. It was the same village but now a giant man stood in the center of it. The entire village gathered around this visitor, kneeling before him. Jack leaned in and examined the figure. He ran his hands over the spot where the man’s face ought to have been. Instead of a face, there were deep gouges chiseled into the rock.
“Why is the face gone?”
“It’s that way on every panel. Removed after the fact.”
“Why?”
“It’s common when a ruler falls out of favor for his image to be eradicated. The Romans did it. Egyptians. Try to find a statue of Lenin in East Germany after the Soviet Union collapsed.”
“So who was he?”
Lonetree raised his finger in the air like a parent hushing a child who keeps asking how a movie is going to end while they are watching it. Jack followed the narrative in pictures as Lonetree kept on with the story.
“The stranger is shown here wearing the skin of a mountain lion, the sign of a shaman, a magic man. In my father’s notes he named this person by his title, Shaman. There is no other record to indicate his name. But the way he is depicted, he doesn’t appear to be one of their tribe.”
“What were these? Cherokee or something?”
Lonetree smiled. “Cherokee were about a thousand miles from here. It’s amazing how little you people know about the indigenous people here. No, these weren’t Cherokee. No one knows for sure but my father thought they were the Sumac.”
“Sumac? Never heard of them.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. They’re more myth than anything else. A warrior people found in the legends and folklore.”
“These don’t look like warriors to me. Looks like a peaceful little village.”
“The tribe changed after Shaman arrived. He made them change.”
He pointed to the next panel, holding the glo-stick close to the wall. The shadows skirted away to reveal a massacre. Bodies lay strewn across a field. Arrows filled the sky. In the center of it all was Shaman, hand outstretched with a severed head in each hand.
“This guy wasn’t messing around,” Jack breathed.
“Again, going by my father’s theory, after Shaman took control of the village the Sumac became brutal warriors and attacked the other tribes in the area. Indian warfare, in North America in particular, was typically not the kind of massacre you see here. Life was too precious to destroy like this.”
“So what was the deal?”
“Shaman was not one of them. For some reason they followed his instructions with religious frenzy. Look here, you can see what happened next.”
They moved on to the next panel. It showed Shaman leading his warriors back from the battlefield walking over the bodies of their enemies. Behind them was a line of women chained together. The next panel showed Shaman leading then tribe in a ritual sacrifice of their prisoners. The chained women were being led to a stone table where blood poured off. Body parts were heaped in a pile. Around the table the tribe danced and drank the blood of the murdered women.”
“Jesus, they killed them all.”
Lonetree nodded. “Ritual sacrifice. Happened all over the world. There are scenes just like this from the Aztecs down in the Yucatan. I mean, just like it. But until this discovery, archeologists had not every found anything like this so far north.”