Alien's Concubine, The (25 page)

It had been wrapped, but unlike the
mummified remains of their god, the preservation process had been
haphazard. Whoever had done it had soaked the wrapping in whatever
they used to preserve the dead, or at least the more important
dead, but it looked like the job had been a hasty one, designed
more to hide what had been done to the body than to actually
preserve it. Then, it seemed obvious, they’d decided that wouldn’t
hide the crime and instead of seeing that it was encased in a
sarcophagus, they’d simply dug a hole in the middle of the fire
pit, shoved the body in and covered it up.

There was no charring of the wraps
that she could see, though, which seemed to indicate their crime
had been discovered. Otherwise, a fire would’ve been built over it
and most, if not all, of the body would have been
burned.

She thought.

Because, clearly, the pit had been
used as a fire pit at some point. There’d been a layer of ashy
debris and partially burned timbers at the bottom indicating as
much.

The body was buried beneath maybe a
foot of dirt, though. The dirt would have kept it from catching
fire, but then the body would have slow baked and that would’ve
eliminated even the minimal benefits of the preservatives they’d
used. The preservatives themselves might have caught fire, for that
matter. They still hadn’t determined exactly what the natives had
used in the process except that it wasn’t what the Egyptians had
used.

When she’d summoned the men to remove
it to the ‘morgue’ tent, Gaby followed them to examine the body.
She knew from the size, even before she’d unwrapped it, that it
must be another female, around the same age as the
others.

There was some tissue left, not much,
but enough to yield up the gruesome secret. This woman, unlike the
others who’d been bludgeoned to death, had been strangled and
stabbed repeatedly.

Serious overkill, and the assault was
very personal.

Gaby thought for several moments that
she would throw up. Women who died like this were usually murdered
by their husbands or lovers.

She was still struggling to come to
grips with that when she examined the woman’s abdomen in an attempt
to pinpoint her age and discovered the tiny bones of her unborn
infant.

Fighting for breath, she abandoned the
tent.

She couldn’t fall to pieces, she told
herself fiercely, struggling to take deep, calming breaths.
Everyone would think she’d gone off the deep end to get so
emotional about a corpse thousands of years old.

It wasn’t Anka who’d killed her, she
told herself fiercely. She knew it couldn’t have been him. She knew
him. She knew he’d never do anything like this.

She didn’t even know that the woman
had any kind of connection with him beyond her presence in the
temple!

Why then? And who?

When she’d calmed down a little, she
began to wonder if the death of this woman was connected to the
deaths of the others. She could carbon date, but that wasn’t going
to be precise enough to prove or disprove a connection.

She’d gotten so wrapped up in trying
to learn about Anka, she realized, that she’d completely forgotten
her original purpose in trying to decipher the story on the walls.
She’d been looking for answers to the deaths of the other
women.

They weren’t sacrifices. She knew
that, felt it in her bones. The act itself had been too brutal, not
ritualistic. And the woman she’d just found certainly didn’t follow
any previously known ritual sacrifice.

It took all she could do to make it
through the remainder of the day with even an appearance of
normalcy. The answers she was looking for had to be recorded in the
history on the walls. If not in the main chamber, then it would be
recorded somewhere else.

She was convinced it must.

She prayed it was, because she had to
know the truth.

She hadn’t examined the whole frieze,
though.

Deciding she would, that night, if she
had to stay up all night to do it, she tried to focus on what an
examination of the woman’s body would tell her. It told her a lot,
but it didn’t really answer the questions pinging back and forth
through her mind.

Swatches of long, black hair that had
once flowed nearly hip length on the woman were evidence she’d been
young—there were no silver threads among the black. The infant had
been near to term. It was too large to have been far from birth,
and it was a male child.

There were enough stab wounds to have
killed her and the baby several times over, but she couldn’t tell
if the woman had been strangled to death and then stabbed over and
over, or if she’d merely been subdued by the garrote while she was
stabbed to death. There wasn’t enough tissue left to determine
that, but the baby didn’t seem to be the target. Rather his death
seemed incidental. Most of the stab wounds were in the woman’s
chest and back.

As revolting and thoroughly unsettling
as those discoveries were, they paled beside the shock the entire
archeology team received that afternoon.

After considerable thought and debate
over just how to best utilize the treasure of the newly discovered
city, the government had finally decided that turning it into a
tourist attraction would bring in the most money. An entourage of
specialists arrived that evening with the mummified remains of the
god Anka encased in a clear acrylic coffin which they intended to
display in its original crypt. The specialists who arrived with it
were to begin right away to set up an electronic security system to
protect the ‘living museum’.

Dr. Sheffield was livid. “My god!” he
roared furiously when he’d recovered enough from his shock to feel
his anger. “Do those fools think we’ve uncovered a pre-historic Diz
Land? Next they’ll be setting up rides! It’s … it’s
obscene!”

Gaby couldn’t have agreed more.
Setting aside the value of the find on a scientific level, this
city had been the setting for a blood bath. Either they didn’t know
that part yet, because they hadn’t been informed, or they thought
that the gruesome aspects would make the place all the more popular
as a tourist attraction.

And they might be right, she
reflected.

The plans threw the entire dig team
into an uproar. They were to be allowed only a few more weeks to
conclude their studies and then they’d been invited to leave.
They’d barely begun to unearth the city itself. Most of their focus
had been on the temple.

Dr. Sheffield and Dr. Ramiro made
plans to leave the following morning to try to argue their case.
The remainder of the team would stay and work like crazy to get
what they could done while they could since no one really thought
Dr. Sheffield’s efforts would make a difference.

The government’s plans seemed half
baked at best, as far as Gaby was concerned. It also seemed stupid
and precipitate to return the mummy to the temple when they
couldn’t possibly ready the place to open it for months, but they
had the military in place already.

And, maybe, they hadn’t really been
comfortable keeping the remains from its final resting
place?

Who knew what thoughts had run through
their minds, but Gaby wasn’t happy knowing it occupied the temple
once more.

Not that she had any intention of
returning to that particular chamber. The statue was there, and the
presence of the effigy of Anka was far more disturbing even than
the mummified remains, serving as a painful reminder of her
experience there.

She more than half expected to be
turned away from the temple when she returned to it that evening,
but apparently the guards had been ordered to allow the scientists
free reign until they departed. She knew the pictorial history
began near the door and wound to the right. She’d studied those
depictions fairly thoroughly. But she also knew the chronological
order would be critical to understanding what she was seeing, and
she really had no idea when the ‘event’ had taken place. She
thought it seemed likely that it had been the last act before the
temple and maybe even the city had been abandoned, but she couldn’t
be sure. And if she was right, there might be nothing about the
deaths at all, which made it all the more important to understand
the events that had led up to the massacre because that might be
the only clues she got.

Bypassing the first segments, she only
devoted enough time to the following segments to get the general
idea of the story it was meant to convey. They seemed fairly
straightforward in any event. Dozens were devoted to the ‘feats’ of
their patron god and the rise of their civilization. She’d been
cursorily examining one after another for hours when something on
one finally caught her attention. It was a ritual of worship, the
first depicting priestesses. She’d dismissed it at first, but the
design on the garments finally clicked in her mind and she studied
the mosaic more closely.

Priestesses, she decided, just as
she’d suspected. With the completion of the temple, which housed
the god they thought of as both protector and the god of
fruitfulness. Their perception of him seemed to have shifted at
some point from a more all encompassing god of wealth and
prosperity to primarily the god of fertility. She couldn’t really
pinpoint what had caused that shift, but it was immaterial to her.
The important thing was that the priestesses had appeared on the
scene and the count matched the bodies she’d found … if she
included the one that seemed to have been murdered before the
others.

The next mosaic gave her a jolt. It
depicted Anka with one of the priestesses at his side, set apart
from the others, obviously favored above the others. It was hard to
say what her role was for certain—she was garbed like the others,
but her positioning above them seemed significant.

Jealously and resentment instantly
washed over her. She did her best to ignore the sick/angry feeling
when she finally identified it, but she couldn’t deny that that was
exactly what it was when she moved to the next mosaic and saw that
the woman had clearly been chosen to mate with the ‘god’. That
mosaic showed them entwined like lovers.

She’d expected the possibility that
she would see something she might not want to know, but this wasn’t
expected at all. She couldn’t decide whether her own feelings had
colored her perceptions or if her instincts were to be trusted, but
it seemed to her that in each mosaic that followed, resentment was
building toward this woman who had been favored by Anka, obviously
taken as his concubine—the chosen one to bear his child.

The bastard!

He’d allowed her to think she was his
chosen, as if he hadn’t done it god only knew how many times
before!

Superior being, my ass! She thought
furiously. If that wasn’t just like every other lying, cheating man
she’d ever met in her life!

She wasn’t certain how long she stood
glaring at the happy couple, feeling resentment boil inside of her
before she finally managed to get a grip. She was tempted, though,
to simply leave the damned temple and to hell with the mystery!
What difference did it make anyway? All of it had happened forever
ago, and the damned government was booting them out. They were
never going to finish studying the city and get any clear idea of
the people and culture in the little bit of time allotted to
them.

It was as she stood glaring at the
superior attitude of the ‘chosen’ that something finally clicked in
her mind.

Jealousy!

Tamping her own with an effort, she
studied the figures around the god and his ‘bride’ with as much
detachment as she could manage. Either her imagination and her
emotions were ruling her logical mind, or she wasn’t the only one
jealous! The more she studied the mosaics, the more certain she
was, though, that she’d stumbled upon the motive behind the woman’s
death.

It didn’t even come as much of a shock
to her when she came at last to the one that told the sordid tale.
The other priestesses, enraged by her superior attitude, jealous
and resentful that she’d been favored above them, had slain
her.

The god, Anka, was inconsolable at the
loss, and then enraged.

His worshippers, either fearful of his
wrath, or furious because the women had ruined everything with
their jealousy, slew the women. But that didn’t appease their god.
He withdrew from them, turned his face from them. And when he did,
the civilization that he had helped to build began to
crumble.

The great Anka had departed the body
and left them to fend for themselves. Three entire mosaics were
devoted to their efforts to preserve the body and summon him back,
but despite their efforts, he’d ignored them.

A great plague descended upon the
land, brought about, they believed, from the god’s wrath or his
desertion. Crops failed, their animals died—drought, famine, and
pestilence completed the fall of their civilization and the people
who survived fled.

Gaby felt—empty when she’d deciphered
the last of the tale. Even the jealousy had abandoned
her.

High drama aside, it seemed
inescapable that Anka had been completely devastated when his woman
and child were murdered. He’d withdrawn from the world of man, from
man himself, into the temple that had been built in his honor and
stayed there until she’d stumbled upon his sanctuary.