There is no one left here alive, no one. Even the animals are not spared, but are also succumbing to the curse. Our horses are dying as we are, bleeding through their muzzles until they grow too weak to carry us.
As he writes, Díaz’s nose and eyes begin to drip blood on the parchment pages of his journal, partially obscuring some of his words. He is too ill to care. He glances down the tunnel leading to the inner tomb. At least, he thinks, the workers had managed to seal off the grave before they became too weakened by illness to move heavy stones blocking the entrance. He writes, again with a trembling hand:
Montezuma was correct in his prophecy. He foretold that all who desecrated the honor and sacred places of the Aztecs would face the wrath of his gods and die in horrible pain.
Díaz looks up from his writing. A large jaguar is dragging a villager’s body into the jungle, while a smaller animal, a panther, is eating another corpse where it lies. Soon there will be little evidence this plague ever existed.
He grows dizzy for a moment, darkness invading his vision, pulling him into unconsciousness. When he awakens, blood has caked on his eyelids and he must pry them open with his fingers, causing fresh tears to flow.
He knows his time is at hand and manages to scribble a few last words:
Montezuma has had his vengeance. Heed this warning and leave this land of strange gods to the jungle, lest all who come here are doomed….
The charcoal falls from his fingers as his muscles contract and his back arches. With a mighty spasm, he coughs out his life onto the dusty floor of the tunnel.
The ground begins to tremble. Trees sway back and forth, while jungle animals screech and howl across a tropical forest. Dead bodies in the clearing move as if they had been resurrected for one last mad dance. A small earthquake ripples through the region. In a final frenzy of geologic activity, as if nature is not yet through with Cortés and his Spanish soldiers, the earth heaves and tilts. Large cracks appear in the ground, swallowing corpses the scavengers have not yet carried off, a quake filling the air with dustlike smoke from hell’s fires.
Blocks of stone in the small temple collapse, tumbling down to cover the lifeless body of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and seal the tunnel leading to the emperor’s tomb.
It will not see the light of day again for almost five hundred years.
Chapter 1
Charles Adams groaned, his patrician features drawn into a grimace, his teeth bared against pain, as he squinted into a boiling tropical sun. His wavy, silver hair lay plastered against his skull; his safari shirt was wrinkled, stained with blood and vomit, clinging to him like a second skin.
Adams clutched his chest, doubling over as pain blazed between his shoulder blades like a hot knife. A cough started deep in his thorax and exploded from his mouth, wracking his body with spasms. Blood, mucus, and bits of lung tissue sprayed onto the cracked leather cover of an ancient journal lying in his lap.
His colleagues and all his associates were dead. Some were lying in a tunnel leading to a deep inner chamber beneath the ancient Aztec village known as Tlateloco, struck down where they stood by a mysterious illness. Others died more slowly, suffering in makeshift tent hospitals his staff erected or in campsites near the dig. Many died so suddenly there hadn’t been time to summon medical help, literally bleeding to death in a matter of hours — hemorrhaging through their noses and mouths and ears, bleeding internally, dying so quickly they rarely uttered a coherent word before a vacant stare dulled their eyes.
A number were graduate students whose young lives had just begun, an elite group of the best candidates in the University of Texas’s archaeological doctoral program. And now they were dead, all dead, and he knew in a short while he would join them.
Sweat poured off his face, soaking his khaki shirt as he was shaken by an almost continuous chill, his teeth chattering and muscles twitching beyond his control. He leaned back against the cool, rough stones of the tomb and shut red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. He knew he was dying and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Strangely, thoughts of his death did not terrify him as they once would have. In spite of his physical agony he felt an inner peace, an almost mystical rightness about his dying here in this place where the body of the chief of the Aztecs lay.
He chuckled around a wrenching, hacking cough. It was true, he thought. Nothing focuses the mind like the knowledge of imminent death.
He used his sweat-drenched sleeve to wipe blood and gore off the journal and opened it with weakened, trembling hands.
It was all here in the diary, he thought, resting against a tunnel wall near the outer door to the tomb. Warnings had been given, yet he and the others ignored them in their haste to solve an historical mystery. It read like sixteenth-century superstition, those writings by Díaz. Rambling notes in archaic Spanish about ancient curses and what Díaz called the Black Plague. Cortés’s men and the Aztecs were dying from unknown causes, their skin turning black as they bled out, choking on their own blood. A curse, Díaz wrote, cast by Aztec gods who were angry over the looting by Hernán Cortés and by his disrespectful treatment of Emperor Montezuma.
But that was in the year 1521, when no one understood infectious diseases or how germs were spread. It would have been nonsense to heed some vague warning written more than four centuries ago and overlook the possibility of making a discovery like this, the burial chamber of fabled Aztec Chief Montezuma — a tomb that was filled with priceless artifacts and implements and perhaps much more that could reveal so many of the Aztecs’ undecipherable secrets.
Now, as Dr. Charles Adams lay dying at the door of a cleared passageway into Montezuma’s tomb, he knew he should have heeded Díaz’s warning. Some ancient disease, some fungus or a germ of unknown origin, had lain dormant in this burial chamber for hundreds of years only to awaken and kill all of the interlopers to this sacred tomb.
He chuckled again, delirious, thinking an ancient curse could not have been more deadly than whatever hellish disease had felled him and his students.
Adams’s head lolled to the side, peering in the semidarkness down a long passage to the dig outside the emperor’s tomb. Through an opening in the tunnel, he could see several of his friends’ and colleagues’ bodies lying where they fell, baking in a blistering tropical sun. A small jungle cat of some sort was pulling on a bloated corpse’s leg, attempting to drag the body into the forest where it could be consumed in safety.
He glanced down at Díaz’s tattered diary, remarkably preserved in its leather bindings, protected from time and the elements in a sealed tunnel. An incredible find in itself, a record of Cortés’s expedition to the New World and its first contacts with the Aztec Empire. Scribbled notations near the end of his diary had seemed out of character for a meticulous chronicler like Díaz was known to be.
His rambling, almost senseless descriptions of curses and Black Death and his repeated warnings not to enter Montezuma’s tomb almost read like the ravings of a madman. Then the written record ended suddenly, a few final pages spattered with faded bloodstains. Too late, Adams now believed he understood the significance of the blood. He glanced down and saw similar blood spatter on his trousers and shirt.