The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  “That’s what you get a husband for,” Henbury snapped.

  “I don’t want a husband,” Ellie said, clearly and firmly.

  Henbury pulled a paper from his briefcase, uncapped his pen, and scrawled a signature across the page. He stood, Ellie echoing his movement instinctively. He handed the page to her.

  “Your notice of dismissal. Effective immediately. You will not receive a reference. You will collect your belongings and remove yourself from the premises.”

  Ellie, back straight, reached out and snatched the page from Henbury’s hand.

  “Good day, Miss Mallory,” he said as she turned to go.

  “You mean good riddance, Mr. Henbury,” she corrected him, then spun on her heel and marched out of the room.

  She continued, head high, down the hall to her desk, which sat under a window in the archivists’ office. Everything on it was neatly organized, from the ink, blotters, and catalog forms, to the documents she had left that Friday evening.

  As she sat down, she heard a quick rush of whispers from across the room. They came, she knew, from Langer and Johnson, whose desks were closest to the door. The pair had never liked the idea of working alongside a woman—particularly not one who was just as well qualified as they were. Better, in fact. Johnson had graduated tenth in his class at Nottingham. Ellie had been first in hers at the University of London, which was a more reputable institution.

  What on earth am I going to do?

  The thought came unbidden, and she quickly shunted it aside. It had brought with it a sudden trembling in her hands, and she could not afford to show uncertainty, not while hostile eyes were studying her every move from across the room.

  She took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm. Then, her movements even and crisp, she lifted her valise and began to remove her belongings from her desk. They were meager enough. The process took only a few minutes. All that remained were her works in progress, which, as always, had been meticulously notated as she went along. Any of the other clerks would be able to pick up where she left off—even Johnson.

  That left only one thing. She pulled the psalter from her skirt pocket and allowed herself a little smile of satisfaction at the notion that Henbury would have to do some hunting once he realized he had lost it.

  Let him be inconvenienced, she thought.

  It was too soon to go. It would look like she was running away, and she didn’t want to give Johnson, Langer, Henbury—any of the lot of them—the satisfaction of thinking they had made her scamper off like a scared kitten.

  She would take a few more minutes and indulge her curiosity. She carefully removed the black ribbon binding the book and opened it.

  Inside she found not a collection of psalms but a mutilation. The center of the holy book had been carved out, leaving a compartment in the now-hollow pages. Within it lay something impossible.

  The disk-shaped medallion was made of dark, gleaming stone, heavy and almost metallic-looking. An odd pattern of notches was carved into its circumference, and a hole was drilled into a peak at the top, as though it was meant to be worn as a necklace or an amulet. But it was the engravings on the surface that riveted Ellie’s attention, making her forget the rustling papers across the room and the clatter of traffic outside the window.

  A grinning idol was carved onto the surface, its face decorated with slashing horizontal lines. It held a knife in one hand, the other having been replaced by a writhing snake, and angular, batlike wings protruded from its shoulders. A round disk covered its chest, and the whole figure was surrounded by whirling lines, like streams of smoke.

  Ellie risked a glance around the room. The rest of the archivists worked quietly at their desks, either oblivious to her presence or purposefully ignoring it. She quickly turned her chair to face the window, which provided better light than the electric lamp and also allowed her to put her body between the artifact and any surreptitiously prying eyes. Then she delicately plucked the strange object from the book.

  She stared down at the artifact wonderingly. The reverse side was carved, like its circumference, with deep, deliberately shaped notches. The remaining flat surfaces were inscribed with blocky glyphs. Ellie recognized the style. It resembled the Mayan icons and characters she had studied at the university.

  A Mayan artifact…

  If it was true, then the object she held must be ancient. Though her education at the university had leaned more toward the classical, there had been a series of lectures on Copán and the other Mayan cities. All of them had been abandoned centuries before the first European explorers had set foot in Central America. It meant that what she had in her hand was almost certainly more than a thousand years old. How on earth had it ended up inside a psalter in the archives of the Public Record Office?

  Ellie ran her fingers over the cool surface, filled with wonder. She had read about the relics of past civilizations, studied them in books and drawings until she knew the names of the pharaohs and the caesars as well as, if not better than, those of her classmates. For all of that, this was the first time she had held a piece of ancient history in her hands. They almost tingled with the sheer awe of coming into physical contact with the forgotten past.

  But what was it doing in a hollowed-out book of psalms?

  Looking for answers, she forced herself to shift her attention to the rest of what lay concealed in the book. She lifted out a piece of parchment, yellowed with age. She unfolded it, her eyes falling to a few lines of text scrawled elegantly along the back of the page. They were written in Latin, which she translated with ease.

  Map indicating the location of the inhabited city discovered by Fr. Salavert of San Pedro de Flores, which may be supposed to lie behind the various legends of the land of El Dorado.

  El Dorado?

  She knew the story as well as anyone—a legendary city of unthinkable riches, supposedly hidden in the unexplored wilds of Central or South America. The dream of its wealth had led countless explorers and adventurers to their deaths, including Sir Walter Raleigh, whose imprisonment and eventual execution resulted from his failed mission to find the place.

  Unfolding the document the rest of the way, Ellie saw that she was, indeed, holding a map, drawn by hand in painstaking detail. Rivers, marshes, and mountains were carefully indicated. In the center, marked by a small drawing of a stepped pyramid, was a place labeled, in the same flowing hand, “The White City.”

  It had to be a hoax. El Dorado, after all, was a fairy tale.

  But that wasn’t what the author of the map was claiming. A city that lay behind the legends… was it so impossible a notion? Many myths and stories had their roots in fact, however distantly.

  If it wasn’t a hoax…

  The clock over the doorway chimed. Ellie glanced up and was shocked to see how much time had passed. If she remained at her desk much longer, she’d risk Henbury coming in and ordering her out in front of everyone like a recalcitrant schoolchild. She should return the map and artifact to the psalter and leave it for Henbury to furiously seek out when he eventually discovered it was missing.

  She lifted the medallion again, preparing to place it back into the compartment, but as her fingers came into contact with that cool, shining surface, she hesitated, overwhelmed by a sense of possessiveness.

  It was not an entirely illogical sensation. She must be the first one in centuries to have found it. If Henbury had opened the book and seen what lay inside, he would hardly have left it lying around on his desk. He would have had it couriered over to the museum. That he hadn’t meant it was almost certainly another item that Langer or Johnson couldn’t be bothered to properly catalog and that Henbury hadn’t so much as glanced at yet.

  The notion of leaving the map to that miserable little man filled her with abhorrence. The piece of paper before her could very well be the key to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in decades.

  Henbury was not qualified to investigate such a potential find. But she was. It was exactly
the sort of thing she had prepared for through all her years of study—what the world had denied her thanks to her gender. It was as though someone had finally heard her dream and decided to answer it, right here in the gloom and drudgery of the Public Record Office.

  Ellie was startled by the sound of a chair scraping. She looked up to see Mr. Barker—Mr. Henbury’s generously tolerated socialist—rising from his desk. He was about her age, pale and slightly overweight. And he was walking toward her.

  She quickly closed the psalter, shuffling some folders over the map and medallion.

  “Miss Mallory,” Mr. Barker said, bowing to her slightly. “I—ah—heard about what happened. I just… that is…”

  Ellie waited with barely concealed impatience, forcing herself to smile.

  “I wanted you to know that you’ll be missed. Here. At the office,” he finally managed.

  “Thank you, Mr. Barker,” she said graciously.

  Glancing around himself furtively, Barker quickly leaned toward Ellie’s ear. She experienced a sudden terror that he was going to try to kiss her.

  “Votes for women!” he excitedly whispered instead. He leaned back, glanced around, then triumphantly pumped his fist in the air.

  He grinned, proud of his small rebellion, then returned to his desk.

  As soon as he had gone, she unburied her discovery and looked down at the map and medallion.

  If she left this with Henbury, it might be lost forever under a mountain of unfiled meeting minutes. The discovery it promised would never be explored, never realized. But if she took it…

  The thought sparked a quick burst of adrenaline. Steal it?

  No, she couldn’t possibly.

  Borrowing it, on the other hand…

  She would take it only long enough to determine whether the thing was just a centuries-old hoax. A few days at most. Then she could drop it in the mail, and it would find its way right back to Henbury’s desk.

  And if it was genuine?

  Well, that would be another matter entirely—a bridge she would cross when, and if, she came to it.

  The medallion gleamed up at her from the desk, darkly compelling and full of promise. Without further hesitation, she plucked it up, dropping it back into the psalter along with the map. She secured it with the black ribbon and slipped it into her valise.

  She stood, taking a final look around the room in which she had spent so many laborious hours for the past five years.

  She wouldn’t miss it.

  Jailbird on Saturday, thief on Monday, she thought to herself. If nothing else, at least things were getting interesting.

  The Reading Room of the British Library had always struck Ellie as one of the most wonderful places on earth. The great domed ceiling rose impossibly high overhead, sparkling with light even on a gloomy day like today. The many tables were always eloquently quiet, the silence broken only by the soft shuffling of pages and scratching of pens.

  But most important, there were the books. The shelves that lined the circular walls of that marvelously vast space were packed with volumes, but that only began to scratch the surface of the possibilities. The collection was massive, a universe of knowledge needing only a circulation number on a slip of paper to be unlocked.

  Ellie left her sodden overcoat and umbrella gratefully at the cloakroom and presented her pass to the door attendant. She knew that she was one of the few women in the city to have one, and it had taken no small degree of wrangling to acquire. But every ounce of effort had been worth it.

  Once inside, she took a moment to breathe in the intellectually rarified atmosphere. It smelled like home. It was relatively quiet, the rain having kept away all but the most devoted scholars. Ellie made her way directly to the catalogs surrounding the grand circulation desk. She knew precisely what she was looking for, rapidly flipping through the cards and jotting numbers onto her request slip. She handed the paper to the clerk, who accepted it after treating her to the same skeptical glance she got every time she put in a request, despite the fact that she had been coming to the library for years. At this point, it was practically a tradition.

  It would take some time before the books arrived, and Ellie used it to more thoroughly examine the papers hidden within the psalter.

  The map itself had obviously been drawn with painstaking care. Rivers, marshes, and mountains were carefully indicated. A series of landmarks was meant to show those who followed that they were on the right path. These, on the other hand, were sometimes painfully vague. One was described in Latin as “a black pillar which draws the compass.” Another was a “great stone, hollowed into an arch by the hand of God.”

  It didn’t matter. She’d do the research, see whether anything marked by contemporary explorers seemed to correlate.

  Putting the map aside, she turned her attention to the rest of the papers. The two remaining pages constituted a letter addressed to the master of the Dominican order in Rome from the abbot of the mission at San Pedro de Flores.

  The contents were astonishing.

  The letter told of the arrival at their mission of a brother who had been sent into the wilderness to spread the Word of Christ, along with two of his brethren and a company of native bearers. He had returned alone nearly two years later, starving and half-mad. He claimed to have come from a native city hidden deep within the mountains—a city thriving and heavily populated in a region where all such places were supposed to have been ruins long before the arrival of the first Spanish explorers.

  At least, it used to be heavily populated. According to the friar’s story, which he shared shortly before he died of something the abbot described as “exhausted nerves,” he had escaped the place in the midst of disaster. The abbot argued that this would have left the abandoned city ripe for the taking, and he was certain there was fruit there well worth harvesting. Even if short on potential souls, the city would almost certainly be well stocked with gold that could contribute much to the Church’s coffers.

  The abbot had sent the medallion as evidence, hiding it and the map in the dead friar’s psalter, urging that the order fund and equip an expedition to follow the long and dangerous route the friar had described.

  But the abbot’s message had never made it to Rome. Something must have happened to his emissary—perhaps capture by the English pirates who roved the waters between Europe and the Americas during the seventeenth century, looking for Spanish galleons loaded with treasure. That would certainly be one way in which the psalter might have found its way to her hands, lumped in with other documents from trials involving the privateers.

  The implications of the letter made Ellie’s head spin. The Mayan cities were all supposed to have been abandoned a thousand years ago, devastated by plague or war or famine. But what if one, isolated in the far reaches of the mountains, had managed to survive?

  It would be the find of the century, the sort that would make an archaeologist’s career. No scholar worth his salt would be able to ignore it—not even if it had been made by a woman.

  It would mean her career. Not the one she’d settled for, but the one she had dreamed of. That impossible hope, the one she’d long since given up on, could be hers. No one would be able to deny her right to work as a field archaeologist after making a discovery like this.

  It was a thrilling possibility, one that set her heart leaping.

  Of course, all of this depended on the map being genuine, she reminded herself. And there was also the chance that someone else had already stumbled across her big discovery.

  A rattle and creak alerted her to the arrival of the circulation cart. Acting on quick instinct, Ellie shuffled the psalter and its contents under a volume of Cicero a previous reader had abandoned on the table.

  The clerk deposited the books she’d requested with a deliberate thud, giving her a disapproving look for good measure, then pushed his squeaking trolley to the next table.

  Ellie eyed the mountain of volumes with determination. Somewhere in those pages, sh
e would find some answers.

  Ellie had been bent over her reading table for three hours when she made her most significant discovery. Her hands trembling with excitement, she looked down at the page in front of her, which gave a brief history of a small mission in a remote corner of the Spanish New World.

  San Pedro de Flores.

  The purported source of the map and its history had been a real place.

  It was another piece of the puzzle that was rapidly coming together as she scoured the library’s collection. She had also determined that the abbot’s map most closely resembled a stretch of coastline located about a hundred and fifty miles north of the monastery, in territory that was now part of the colony of British Honduras.

  She even knew the name of the river that constituted the starting point for the journey.

  The only sour note so far was the medallion itself. She had compared the glyphs and the iconography of its gruesome carving to the illustrations in the latest works on Mayan archaeology and was forced to admit that it wasn’t exactly a perfect match. There seemed to be something just a little off about her artifact, though what, exactly, was hard to pinpoint.

  Did that mean the medallion was a forgery? She resisted the conclusion. After all, it was supposed to have come from a Mayan city that survived for centuries after the fall of the rest of their civilization. Surely there would have been changes and developments in their language and artistry over such a period of time. If anything, the discrepancy might actually lend more credence to the mapmaker’s tale.

  She glanced up at the clock. The library would be closing in fifteen minutes. She would have to leave the rest of the mysteries for another day. She had just enough time for one final bit of research, a task she had intentionally left for the last moment. After all, if it provided the wrong answer, it would shatter the dream she had already begun to build up.

  She placed the books she had been studying onto the return cart, then moved to a massive tome that rested on its own pedestal directly beneath the library’s elegant dome. It was the atlas.