had been here, performing their strange ceremonies in the depths of the desert night. The local villagers still revered the spiritual power of these huacas, hence the local name for the huaca – the Sorcerer. The descendants of the Moche still came to this horrible place to partake of whatever power the sacred pyramid possessed.
Jess strode close to the largest wall, and knelt to take photos. Here, in red and gold, and white and blue, were the great treasures of El Brujo: long wall murals showing fish and demons and seahorses and manta rays and dancing skeletons, and the sacrifice ceremony.
As they now knew, beyond doubt, this ceremony really happened. And this mural described it: precisely.
Jess scrutinized, and scribbled her notes. How was it enacted? First, it seemed, the Moche warriors performed some kind of ritualized combat. The main object of this brawl was to grab the opponent’s hair. When a man had his hair seized, he fell to the ground: submissive, and willingly doomed. All of these stylized combats took place within the community. DNA analysis showed this. The fights weren’t with enemies, but between friends and relatives, between brothers and uncles. The sole purpose of the fighting was to produce endless victims: for the sacrifice.
She snapped and clicked. And scribbled again in her notebook.
The ritual proceeded from here, with minor variations. The defeated warriors were stripped naked, and bound by ropes at the neck, like slaves being walked to the African coast. After that, as the next murals showed, the prisoners were taken inside the precincts of the temple. That could be here at El Brujo, or in Zana, or Sipan, or Panamarca, or the Temple of the Moon in Trujillo. At the peak of their empire the Moche had many great temples, stretching for hundreds of miles along the coast.
Jess scrawled, and then paused, thinking about Tomb 1 of Huaca D. She remembered the insect shells shining gaudily, like discarded fairground trash, in her flashlight, gathered grotesquely around a staked-out corpse.
What was the link between that discovery and El Brujo? Maybe there wasn’t one. And yet maybe there was.
They now knew the sacrifice ceremony had really happened. They also now had a sense the Moche really fed people to insects: hence their reverence of insects, depicted on the pottery as flies dancing around prisoners and skeletons. What, then, about the severed ankles and wrists of the skeletons they had also unearthed in Huaca D?
A few days ago Jess had sent another sample of these bones to Steve Venturi. Now she waited for his second verdict. If Venturi confirmed that her hunch was right on the amputations, then the clues began to form a narrative. But what narrative, precisely?
Jess pulled out her cellphone, and squinted at the little screen, in the dusty light, wondering idly when Steve would ring, or maybe Dan. But naturally there was no signal, not out here in the wilderness. She wouldn’t be disturbed by good or bad news, by any news at all, for the next few hours.
This was good, maybe. Fewer distractions meant she could concentrate on the task at hand: recording the murals.
Another scramble, up another flight of mud-brick steps, brought Jess to the Second Enclosure, where another large mural showed the concluding rites of the sacrifice ceremony.
Finding an angle to best catch the light, she took her photos of the row of prisoners, painted in vivid red. But the sea-wind was brisk up here on the higher levels and it kicked at her hair, which fluttered over the lens. Irritatedly she pushed her hair back, and considered what she was seeing.
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