And in cave diving there was rarely a second chance, no going back on a wrong move.
“Jack, I’ve found something.” Costas was a little farther upslope, but his upper body was wedged in a fissure. Jack sank down beside him, keeping a wary eye on the current a few metres away. Costas emerged in a cloud of silt and pressed an object at Jack. “Get a hold of that.”
It was a human jawbone. A small one, a child’s. It was brown with age, but perfectly preserved. Costas held the rest of the skull towards him, and Jack could see the eye sockets, the lines where the bones of the cranium had not yet fused. “They’re everywhere,” Costas said. “Hundreds of them.” Jack looked around. Lying in the silt, piled at the base of stalagmites, grimacing out from under overhangs: skulls, limb bones, ribs. He reached into the silt and pulled out a small jade pendant, shaped like the gaping jaw of some mythical beast, like the image of the underworld on the wall painting in the temple. He glanced through the translucent waters at the dark hole where the river disappeared, and felt a sudden chill of certainty.
“Human sacrifice,” he said. “The Toltecs must have lowered themselves and their victims through the hole in the ceiling just as we were, then paddled through into this chamber. This was the edge of their underworld, the closest they could get. When the current was strong, after a storm, they could have thrown their victims into the very maw of the underworld, watched them sucked into that black hole and out of earthly existence. This must have been the ultimate place of sacrifice.”
“We don’t seem to be able to get away from that,” Costas muttered. “I’m beginning to yearn for Vikings again.”
“You may just be in luck.”
“What do you mean?”
“Upslope, about three metres. At the edge of the island.”
It was another skull, larger than the others, with different wear on the teeth. It had been badly crushed, as if the victim had suffered a terrific blow to the face.
But it was not the skull that had excited Jack’s interest. It was what it was wearing.
A gilded metal helmet, cone-shaped, with a long nose-guard.
Jack’s heart began to race. He wafted the bottom, raising clouds of silt. Maya pots, intact. More human bones. A shining disc, gold, covered with glyphs. A handle protruding from a gully, covered in gilt wire. A sword handle. Beside it a long wooden haft, a glint of metal at the end.
With mounting excitement Jack drew himself out of the water, Costas beside him. Both men quickly doffed their rebreathers and fins and stashed them on the edge. With their helmets removed they could hear the noise of the cavern, water dripping on the pool, the whoosh of bat wings, eerie sounds magnified and distorted by echo. They clambered up on to a level platform and surveyed the underground island. It was about ten metres in diameter, rising to a cone in the middle, covered in slick accretion. The centre was a gigantic single stalagmite, growing from the cavern floor beneath the ceiling where the fall of leached calcium had been greatest. Around it were stalagmites that had formed more recently as the shape of the ceiling had changed, some of them beneath the calcified tree roots which hung over them in a fantastic shroud.
Jack was carrying a torch, and he swept the beam over the island before placing his hand on the stalagmite nearest to them. It was a peculiar shape, almost seeming to curve above them, on the face of it no more extraordinary than anything else they were seeing around them.
“My God.” Jack’s voice was resonant, echoing.
“What is it?”
Jack stumbled back a few steps, then shone his torch up the stalagmite. He remembered what Jeremy had suggested when they had last spoken. His voice was taut with amazement. “Remember our longship in the ice?”
Costas followed his gaze, puzzled, and then gasped. The top of the stalagmite was a bulbous shape that extended out from the curve. They were looking at the prow of a Viking ship, the details of its surface lost under a millennium of accretion but the shape unmistakable. It was an astonishing sight.
“They must have carried it with them from the longship,” Jack murmured.
“Erected it here, a last battle standard.” He shone the torch at the bulbous form on top. “The Eagle.”
“Look on either side,” Costas exclaimed. “I could be wrong, but I think it’s a shield wall.”
Jack saw a line of concretion about a metre high extended in an arc, facing the entrance to the cavern. Costas was right. The ridge was undulating with striking regularity, made up of identical semi-circles each about the width of a man.
Three on one side of the stem-post, four on the other. They looked as if they had been iced over. Below them were long, square shapes that could have been timbers, perhaps crossbeams salvaged from the ship. Jack remembered Jeremy telling him about Viking defences built from ship’s timbers. He looked over the wall, to the space behind where the defenders would have made their stand. It was the most astonishing sight of all. Against the rampart was the spectral shape of a man, propped up on his back, limbs spread out. It had been a skeleton, but was covered with such a thick layer of accretion that it seemed to be fleshed out again, like one of the plaster shapes of Roman bodies from Pompeii.
It was wearing a helmet. The conical shape, the nose-guard, just discernible in the accretion. There was a shield, emerging at an angle as if it had been mauled. He had been tall, at least Jack’s height.
Jack stared, transfixed.
Could it be him?
Jack leaned back on the fossilised shield wall, his voice hoarse with emotion. “On the wall-painting, that river below the jungle battle. I think that’s where we are now. And I think this was where the final drama was played out. Harald Hardrada’s last stand.”
“You think the enemy in the painting really were Vikings?”
“The image of the menorah clinches it.”
“So this was as far as Harald got from the sea.”
“Let’s imagine a dozen of them, not many more,” Jack said. “The size of the vanquished army on the painting was probably an exaggeration, a way of making the victory seem greater.” He paused, marshalling his thoughts. “They make their way inland with everything they can bring, their weapons and armour, their treasure, what they can easily salvage and carry from the ship to build a shelter. Much like Cortés and his tiny band of conquistadors hundreds of years later, only with no intention of ever returning.”
“Then they bump into the locals.”
“The Maya are dazzled, think they’re gods, saviours arrived to rescue them from the Toltecs. But word inevitably spreads to the Toltecs, to the overlord in Chichén Itzá. He dispatches an army, there’s a desperate battle in the jungle.
The few survivors seek a refuge, a final stronghold. The Alamo, Rorke’s Drift in the British Zulu War. In the Yucatán, if that’s what you want, you go underground. They discover the jungle temple, maybe they’re directed here by the Maya. They make their way down the sacrificial route. They light their way with burning torches, maybe burn their timbers on the island. Viking warriors fully girded for battle, ready to defend their shield wall at the edge of the world, wreathed in fire. But I doubt whether the Toltecs would have been daunted.
Once the Toltecs find out and follow them, it’s only a matter of time before they’re overwhelmed.”
“I hope for their sake none of them was taken prisoner.”
“The only one we know about is your friend from L’Anse aux Meadows. Probably a retainer, a servant.
Jeremy told me the Toltecs sometimes took enemy servants as their own slaves, a way of stamping their dominance on the vanquished. You saw it on the wall-painting. Maybe he was a turncoat. Some of the Vikings would have been half crazed, starving. Maybe he told the Toltecs about this place. Maybe his escape years later and voyage back to L’Anse aux Meadows was some kind of atonement. We’ll never know. But he wasn’t the only one to survive. Judging by the painting, several of Harald’s warriors suffered the ultimate horror, taken to Chichén Itzá for sacrifice.”
“With the menorah.”
Jack suddenly remembered the breathtaking image they had seen on the painting, the fiery radiance. “Reksnys is wrong. I’m convinced the menorah isn’t here. The Toltecs may have left the Viking weapons here as some kind of offering, but I think they took the menorah with them from the battle site. We know the Toltecs didn’t offer all of Harald’s treasure to the gods, because we have those two coins incorporated in the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows.”
“Which leaves us with a problem.”
“Reksnys is going to be disappointed.”
“We can’t go back empty-handed,” Costas said. “At best we’d be buying time, but probably not much of it. Chances are we’d be back down that hole again, dead before we hit the water. As Reksnys himself said, Maria was only saved on a whim. As soon as he finds out we don’t have the menorah, he’ll get bored.
These people are always like that.” He looked at Jack. “He’ll let his son’s temper run its course.”
“They might try to follow us down here.”
“Loki might. There were a couple of old scuba rigs, gear Reksnys brought along before the chance came to use us, and Loki could easily follow the trail of lightsticks through the tunnel. But if he reaches the stage of going after us like that, he’ll be in a rage. That’d be curtains for Maria.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We don’t have any choice.”
“These underground river systems always come up somewhere,” Costas said ruefully. “But it could be miles.”
“Could be less.”
Five minutes later they sat fully kitted up in the shallows, their helmet lights switched back on. Their voices sounded tinny and distant throught the intercom after the resonance of the chamber. Costas finished a final check on Jack’s rebreather, then looked at him intently through his visor. “You up for this?”
“All other options are closed. There’s no other exit from the cavern.”
“Okay. We’re looking for natural light, any hint. It’s just after five a.m., so should be dawn pretty soon. We’ll let the current take us. At least we can be sure that’ll come out somewhere. Good to go?”
“Good to go.”
They slipped into the water and dropped down towards the darkness. Once they had made the decision, Jack had not allowed himself to think beyond the practicalities of what they were doing. A few minutes earlier this had seemed like certain death, a one-way express that had nearly finished Costas. Now they were choosing to take it. He stared at the gaping blackness of the tunnel ahead.
His mind was blank to the possibility of failure. This place had all the ingredients of his worst nightmare, and the only way to fight the fear was to keep focused.
He thought of Maria.
Suddenly they were dragged into the current. Jack was flipped over and struggled to right himself, fleetingly aware of huge speed, of luminous stalagmites appearing and disappearing like giant white sentinels on either side.
Then they were in the tunnel, twisting round a bend, blackness all around. The tunnel seemed to meander and turn like a living beast, seeking out a route among the calcite obstructions. They were completely at the mercy of the current, trusting the flow to keep them from crashing into the limestone walls on either side. Jack forced his head forward until his body was in line with the tunnel, Costas to his left, and they both extended their arms in a desperate attempt to use their hands as foils. Bulbous shapes appeared out of nowhere, caught in the beam of their headlamps, then vanished behind them with only inches to spare. Suddenly Jack was aware of a fork ahead, a widening in the tunnel divided by a column, a white pillar they were hurtling towards at terrifying speed.
“The right-hand tunnel!” Costas yelled. “I can see light!”
Jack swerved his hands to the right, craning his body to follow the main flow of the current. It was no use. At the last second he pulled his hands in violently to avoid smashing into the column and they tumbled into the left-hand tunnel, a narrowing pit of darkness with smooth walls like an ice chute. Jack bounced off Costas and felt an excruciating jolt in his thigh, from his injury in the ice. For a terrifying moment he was back inside the berg. “Wrong turn,” Costas yelled.
Jack clutched him, could see his face behind his visor, frantic. “This is a side channel. “The main channel was flowing up towards the surface. I saw light.”
The current in the channel began to eddy, then slowed down. Even so it was impossible to swim against, and they were being pulled down inexorably. They clawed at the walls, to no avail. Suddenly everything was distorted, hazy, something Jack had last seen in the icefjord where the freshwater runoff from the glacier had formed a layer above the seawater. The water was shimmering, oily, the change in refraction caused by salinity throwing his senses into disarray.
He began to feel disorientated.
“Shit,” Costas exclaimed. “That was the halocline. We’re below sea level.”
It was as if they had passed through into another dimension, into some darker world. The calcium formations were gone now, and the view ahead was bleak, forbidding. The intense, directional beam of light seemed to narrow the shaft, increasing Jack’s unease. The tunnel was elliptical, about five metres across, but the ceiling had lowered and a deep bed of gravel rose up from the floor. They were still going down, their lights boring a hole into the darkness. “Forty metres depth,” Costas said. “The Yucatán cave systems bottom out at about fifty metres, maximum. We’ve got to be going back up soon.” Jack looked at his depth gauge. Forty-six metres. Fifty-two metres. The ceiling and the floor had almost converged, and they were wedged in now, burrowing in the gravel to make space. Then they came to a standstill in a cloud of silt. Jack aimed his headlamp into the slit ahead, a crack only inches above the gravel. It was a dead end. They were trapped.
Costas heaved himself back beside Jack, his rebreather clunking against the ceiling and his body grinding through the gravel. “Something’s not right,” he said. “We were being pulled down by a current, and that’s got to go somewhere.
And this gravel pile curves down at the sides, shaped by water movement. There has to be an outlet.”