squatted beside the face and laid my hand on the elaborately carved headdress. It was cool to the touch. With one finger, I traced the crack that ran through the face. For no particular reason, I shivered.
"They brought her down from the site today," my mother said from behind me. "I'm a little surprised she survived the trip with that crack."
"Was it part of a sculpture?"
"More likely part of a building facade. It's made of limestone stucco," my mother said.
I nodded and sat back on my heels. "Who was she?"
My mother shrugged. "Hard to say. There has been evidence, here and there, of a few women rulers.
But I think more likely she was a priestess. Out on the Caribbean coast—on Cozumel and Isla Mujeres—there were shrines for a goddess named Ix Chebel Yax, goddess of the moon. I would like to think that the structure we're excavating was a temple for the goddess. If it is, it's the first evidence of such a cult on this coast." She squatted on her heels beside me and ran a finger along the spiral on the cheek.
"Ritual tattooing," she said softly. "Very common among priests and nobility." She touched a long barbed needle that was woven with the shells into the woman's hair. "Stingray spine," she said. "Usually used in bloodletting ceremonies. The devout would run spines or needles through their earlobes or tongues and offer the blood to the gods."
"Seems like a cruel way to live. Human sacrifice, offering blood to the gods."
She sat back on her heels. "Ah, now you are starting to sound as provincial as Robin. Don't tell me that you're afraid of the bones in the cenote too?"
I shrugged. "I didn't say that. It just seems like a cruel way to live."
"People always talk about human sacrifice as if it were an unusual and aberrant activity," she said thoughtfully. "Over the centuries, it's really been fairly common in a number of societies. Think about it.
There're a number of religions in the United States whose worship centers on a particular human sacrifice."
She glanced at me.
"Jesus Christ on the cross," I said slowly.
"Certainly. Thousands of people consume Christ's body and blood each Sunday."
"That's different."
She shrugged. "Not really. Christ died long ago in a faraway place, and that might make it seem different. His worshipers claimed he was God incarnate, but the Aztecs claimed the same for the god-king they sacrificed. It happened only once, and that speaks for moderation on the part of the Christians, but that's not a fundamental difference, just one of degree." She smiled at me, obviously enjoying herself.
"Besides, I suspect that people overestimate the number of human sacrifices made by the Maya. One sometimes gets the impression that Mayan priests spent most of their time beating their fellows over the head and tossing them willy-nilly into the nearest well. And that's not so. It was a rare and important occasion. And you must be careful about applying your standards to another culture. They have rules of their own. This woman may have participated in human sacrifices— but by her standards, that was good.
The sacrificial victims went to a sort of paradise, and all was well."
She stood up and went to her desk for a cigarette. She tapped it out of the pack and held it without lighting it, still looking at me. "The fundamental bloodiness of the act is the same—whether it's the Roman soldiers hammering the nails into Christ's hands or the h'menob slicing out the heart of a captive soldier.
Blood has a power to it, a strength and a magic." She had rolled up the long sleeves of her shirt and I could see the scars on the pale skin of her wrists. She lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew out a cloud of smoke.
Then she grinned at me. "Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. Occupational hazard of being a professor."
"You sound almost like you prefer the Maya to the Christians."
She laughed. "Understand them better, anyway." She put her cigarette in a jar top that served as an ashtray and walked over to the first-aid kit. "Maybe you should let me bandage those cuts," she said, and I heard no more about the ancient Maya that afternoon.
The daily rigors of survey left me tired, but the restlessness that had kept me pacing to and fro in my father's house had not deserted me. Here, I had more room to pace. When I woke in the morning before the blast of the truck horn