Chapter 16

Monday

We were taken to the site of the cave this frigid morning. Like Dave had described, construction crews widening a road had cut into a hillside and found the cave. A truck hauled our gear since we didn’t want to pull it out of thin air in front of everyone. Instead, we waited until we were in our hotel room and then carried everything out to the waiting truck.

Archaeology students from Cusco had already explored and searched the cave. Since the GPR scans hadn’t noted any artifacts or anomalies, they hadn’t done any digging. Professor Ruiz was there leading the search and shook my hand, exclaiming how honored he was to meet me.

They had installed two electric heaters inside the cave which ran off a generator placed outside. That generator also powered four banks of lights the archaeology crew used. They had even placed a curtain of sorts made from heavy plastic across the cave’s entrance to help keep the warm air from escaping.

We were ready to dive by 9:00. We had worn swimsuits beneath our warm clothing since it was barely 40°F (4°C) outside. I was pleased to note that the heaters had the interior of the cave at a balmy 75°F (24°C).

While the male students ogled Kiana and Mele, we stripped down to our swimsuits and put on our wetsuits. After donning and testing our diving gear, we finally entered the water. The water was cold, but, at 66°F (19°C), it was warmer than the air outside the cave or the water in the cenote in Ecuador had been.

As soon as we were in the water, I felt something attracting me to the bottom. I surfaced and warned the girls that I intended to check it out. I wanted them to begin documenting the walls of the cenote. With my helmet camera rolling, I began my descent. While worried, I’d felt a calm reassurance that I associated with the Tribunal as I approached the area of the attraction.

Buried in the sandy bottom was what first appeared to be the side of a skull, complete with the jawbone. Reaching into my special pocket, I removed a wooden tool and used it to carefully dig around the skull. I didn’t want to damage the skull. If I’d been above water, unearthing the skull might have taken me a day or two. Since I didn’t have that much air in my tanks, I cut corners, although as carefully as I could.

I heaved a sigh of relief when the skull came out of the sand intact, and immediately used the wooden tool to ease it into a collection bag. Then I headed for the surface, making a decompression stop on the way up. Even though it wasn’t called for, I WAS three kilometers above sea level and wanted to be cautious. During the stop, I looked at the skull and changed my opinion. It wasn’t a real skull, but gold crafted to look like a skull, complete with two green, emerald eyes.

Whatever it was, I could feel it enticing me, although it was different than the acute craving I’d felt after touching the jaguar statue. I heaved a sigh of relief when I finally surfaced. Swimming to the edge of the lake, I hollered for Professor Ruiz. He hurried over and eagerly took the bag from me.

He exclaimed excitedly upon seeing the gold skull and started to stand. That was when a green spark shot out from the skull across the several cm gap between the skull and my face, my only bare skin not covered by my wetsuit.

Reacting instinctively, I expected a sharp sting like a large spark would cause, especially since I was in the water. Instead, I felt a warm infusion throughout my body, beginning with my face. Worried, I clung to the side of the lake, and I closed my eyes as I reached out to the Tribunal.

“You are fine. The energy was absorbed by and now powers your newest necklace,” they told me.

“Are you okay?” Professor Ruiz asked, his voice conveying his concern.

Despite the Tribunal’s reassurance, I decided that I was finished diving for the day. “Yeah,” I replied, hauling myself out of the water, I stripped off my tanks and other gear. Standing, I stripped off the wetsuit and dried off before redressing.

The girls surfaced just then, having finished their video survey of the walls of the cenote. I helped each of them out of the water and out of their gear before they, too, dried off and dressed. I almost laughed when the students were so engrossed with the skull that they missed the girls stripping down to wet swimsuits.

“There is a branch cave like the one we explored at Dos Ojos, but not as wide. No telling how long it is,” Mele told me.

“Another exclamation caused us to look at the Professor. He’d gotten most of the way to the cave’s exit but seemed to be fighting something. Turns out that the skull didn’t want to leave the cave and was pulling him back towards the lake. Two students grabbed him to help, and the skull slipped out of his hands, flying nearly five meters across the cave to me. I held up my hands defensively to protect myself from the impact of the fifteen-to twenty-kilogram skull. While the skull striking my hand hurt, it was much less painful than I had expected. When I looked at it, I saw that the skull was now only two centimeters high and weighed only half a kilogram or so. ONLY!

When I looked at my bruised hand, I could see the telltale bluish glow from healing.

“What did you do?” the professor exclaimed, looking at me.

“Me? All I did was protect myself from the flying skull. What did you do?” I protested, even though I doubted that either of us had anything to do with the phenomenon.

As he stomped towards me, I held out the hand with the skull. “What happened to it?” he nearly wailed.

“I’d say that it shrank,” I replied acerbically.

“Where did you hide the other one?” he asked accusingly.

Holding my arms out to my sides, I said, “Tell me, where could I hide something that heavy. If I’d managed to hide it in a pocket, surely that pocket would be sagging under the weight.”

Instead of answering, he frisked me and then reached for the skull, trying to grab it from my hand. I say trying because when he grabbed it, he couldn’t remove it from my open hand.

“Let go!” he insisted.

“Since it’s sitting in the open palm of my hand, how am I holding it?” I asked. Each of the students tried to pick it up from the palm of my hand, as did Señor Mendez. It was odd that, even with each of them trying to take the little skull, the skin of my hand beneath it never moved like I would have expected if the skull had been glued to me.

Finally, one of the students stepped forward again. “I could feel power in the skull when I touched it and I think the skull is a sacred object that wishes to remain with Doctor Campbell.”

“Is that true?” Señor Mendez asked me.

“Possibly. I could feel its presence as soon as I was underwater, long before I saw it.”

Turning to Kiana, I tried to dump the skull into her hand. To my surprise, it easily rolled off my hand. Professor Ruiz grabbed for it immediately, only to find that it was now firmly affixed to Kiana’s hand. She tried to pour it into his hand, but it wouldn’t budge. She tried to put it in Mele’s hand, and it went easily. After the professor again tried unsuccessfully to grab it, Mele gave it back to me.

“Since Dr. Campbell won’t be leaving for a few days, why don’t we allow him to retain custody of the object for now,” Señor Mendez suggested.

“Fine,” the professor huffed, although they insisted on a complete photographic record of it.

We loaded our gear into the waiting truck and headed back to our hotel. Once there, we dried our gear and hung the wetsuits in the shower stall to dry. Then we filled our tanks with the compressor I always take, although I had to find the correct adapter and transformer to use with their electrical outlets. I had a propane-powered generator and propane for it in the pocket, too, but preferred to use the hotel’s electricity.

“What happened today?” Kiana asked as we worked.

“Like I told them, I felt the presence of the object as soon as my head was underwater. It was similar to the jaguar idol in Ecuador, but different. The jaguar tried to draw me to it. The skull just let me know where it was. Aside from my curiosity, I could have worked in the water all day and not felt the need to find it.

“With the jaguar, even a split-second touch left me craving it once it was gone. I didn’t feel that way when I gave the skull to the professor. As for the rest, I’m not sure what’s happening. Once we’re done with this, I intend to take a short nap and check with the tribunal.”

The girls insisted that I take the nap right away and let them finish, so I did.

“We are intrigued,” a member of the Tribunal told me. “At first, we thought the skull had been created by Viracocha. He agreed that it looked and felt like he’d made it, but he didn’t.

“We’re not sure where it came from, but it shouldn’t be dangerous. Still, Viracocha gave us another that will protect you if it does something dangerous,” the voice said as a duplicate of the small gold skull floated towards me.

“Both items are very powerful,” the speaker warned.

“You should finish searching the bottom of the cenote and recover the items there before searching the side branch,” he said, and then I was back in the hotel room.

“Well?” both girls asked simultaneously, so I told them what I’d been told.

Both of them touched the new idol in my hand. “I feel a warmth spreading throughout me, just like I did from the first one,” Kiana commented. Mele agreed.

I suggested that we walk to the marketplace again. We could get a late lunch and I wanted to look for the blind woman, wondering if she could tell us anything.

We took Señor Mendez with us so it wouldn’t look like we were trying to sell the idol. We didn’t find the woman and settled for buying lunch. Señor Mendez was surprised that we chose a restaurant in the marketplace instead of one that catered to tourists.

“All three of us speak both Western Hemisphere Spanish and Inca, as well as a few other native languages like Maya. We like to learn more about the indigenous races of the western hemisphere and eating the same food they eat is one way to do it.”

I even told him about making my own self-bow and the three arrows for it, as well as learning how to use an atlatl.

When he asked about what happened this morning, I told him what the Tribunal told me, even showing him the second skull.

Tuesday/Wednesday

We spent two days exploring the sandy floor of the cenote, starting by laying out a search grid for the GPR unit. Since we now had two, the search went quicker. I searched rows and Kiana searched columns. Then we combined both scans. Fortunately, the sand was less than twenty centimeters deep, so we wouldn’t have to dredge it out.

Thursday-Monday

It took the three of us four more days to recover all the artifacts, although we took Sunday off because everyone else did. We searched the market for the blind woman on Wednesday and Sunday, to no avail.

Tuesday

With the floor of the cenote fully explored and the last of the artifacts retrieved yesterday, we set up what we needed to safely search the side branch today. All week, the side branch had seemed ominous. This morning, it seemed to welcome us as we swam into it, carefully unreeling a tethered guide rope as we went. About fifty meters in, the branch made a dogleg to the right. No sooner had we made the turn than it dead-ended about five meters in front of us. We saw flickering lights above us and surfaced.

Day 1

What we found looked like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. We surfaced inside a chamber where burning torches provided the light. There was a stone table about two meters from the water with a naked teenage girl tied atop it.

Two men, one dressed in the garb of Inca royalty and the other an Inca priest, stood near her watching blood dribble from her wrist into a bowl on the floor of the cave.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted as I clumsily pulled myself from the water and rushed, as best I could in my diving gear, to her side. My fins had been abandoned in the water before I pulled myself out. My dive gloves quickly followed suit. Both men quickly backed away from me and I realized that they must have been terrified of the black figure with the mask, snorkel, and scuba tanks. I immediately gripped the girl’s wrist and began healing her. Something told me to touch the blood, so I stuck the thumb of the hand I was using to heal her into the bowl. As the healing continued, I noticed the level of the blood in the bowl dropping until only a few drops remained in the bottom.

It was only then that it struck me.

An Inca ruler and a priest?

A naked young female sacrifice?

Even as my mind reeled, trying to digest the information, and come up with a rational explanation, the blind woman’s words came to mind.

“The dimensions are different,” and, “You will be back when it’s appropriate.”

Were we in a different dimension? What dimension? How did we get here, aside from the obvious? Where would we “be back” from, and more appropriately, when?

Kiana and Mele had exited the water by then and removed their diving gear except for the wetsuits. My mind was still in overdrive when Kiana handed me two of the energy bars we keep in our dimensional pockets. “Thanks,” I said as my mind continued to grind through the available data.

“Where are we?” Mele asked me.

“Quispiguanca, my estate,” the one I had pegged as an Incan leader replied nervously.

“Then you are Sapa Inca Huayna Capac,” Kiana exclaimed.

“I am,” he replied, drawing himself up to a regal posture. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice still trembling slightly.

“I am Kiana Campbell, Princess of Hawaii and Priestess and this is my sister, Mele Campbell, Princess of Hawaii and Priestess. We are both wives of Doctor and Priest Johnny Campbell,” she explained proudly as she motioned to each of us as she named us.

“A very powerful priest,” the priest hiding behind Huayna Capac commented as he bowed to us.

Kiana told me later that I had healed the girl for about five minutes before she stirred. To me, it seemed like hours before her eyes opened and she smiled weakly. “I knew that you’d come,” she almost whispered.

It was another five minutes before she was able to sit up. Mele brought over what looked like the young woman’s clothing and wrapped a robe around her shoulders.

“I told Father that you would come to save me and to save our people,” she said once she was feeling better.

“This was your idea?” I gasped.

“Yes, I saw you in a vision and that you’d come and save me,” she explained.

“Another Itzel,” I commented to nobody in particular. Fortunately, Kiana and Mele knew the story by now and got the reference.

It took a while before making sense of what had happened. She had insisted on being the sacrifice, having seen a vision of me arriving and saving her, just like I did. She had the vision while praying for a way to stop the foreigners who were conquering lands far to the north and exploring and settling lands belonging to tribes just to the north of Inca territory. In addition, the foreigners were spreading diseases that killed many, sometimes wiping out entire villages. Those that didn’t die were usually enslaved.

I started to respond, hoping to explain that the only way to stop the spread of the disease was to prohibit any contact with the groups to the north when I found myself in front of ... well, the place looked the same as where I usually met the Tribunal, but the room was empty.

A disembodied voice spoke, “You will be able to stop the spread of the diseases carried by the Conquistadors. You must provide a drop of your blood to five hundred warriors. After thirty days, each will begin providing a drop of blood for many others. After another thirty days, those others can provide a drop of blood for additional people until everyone in Inca territory is immune.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I protested.

“It doesn’t work that way in your world. This is my world, and it will work here,” the voice replied, sounding slightly irritated.

“However, you have been brought here without your permission, so I need your permission to keep you here long enough to accomplish this and to help defeat the Conquistadors.”

“And if we refuse?” I asked.

“Then you will be immediately returned to your world.”

“How long will this take?” I asked.

“Two to three years before the Spanish here are defeated and the local cultures learn to fight them effectively enough to dissuade them from further attempts.”

At that news, I had to sit down, or I would have fallen down. While I’d seen and experienced some weird stuff, this was by far the eeriest. Shit, we were in an alternate dimension and five hundred years in the past, to boot! Having already experienced a multi-year visit while becoming a koa warrior, I wasn’t too worried about that ... for me.

“I need to discuss this with my wives,” I warned.

“I anticipated that request. Discuss it with them and I’ll visit again tonight while you sleep, or I will know if you decide before then.”

“If we decide to return tonight, what happens in our world?”

“Regardless of when you return, you will arrive at the same moment that you left. The short underwater branch that you entered will simply end as soon as you exit it. Furthermore, while you are here, you and your wives won’t age, so nobody in your world will notice a difference.”