The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  With a few long strokes, Adam reached the side of the boat, then pulled himself back up onto the deck. He strode over to where Ellie lay plastered to the plank, his sharp blue eyes moving from the top of the sapling to the smokestack.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  Hold on? What was he planning to…

  The thought cut off as Adam leaned out over her body, his machete in hand. She could feel water dripping from his chest onto her back. Grasping the sapling, he lopped off the top of it with the machete as Ellie clung to the shaking plank beneath him, biting back a curse.

  He stepped back.

  “That looks better.”

  He returned to the stern, taking the wheel. Ellie noted that his focus on the task ahead had apparently caused him to forget to replace his shirt.

  This time the curse came out. Adam ignored it.

  “Here goes,” he said, and gently pushed the throttle.

  The Mary Lee moved forward with painstaking slowness. Ellie had to fight the impulse to squeeze the sapling. She needed to feel for vibrations, not hold on to it like a lifeline. The water rippled beneath her, and she was unable to avoid awareness of how vulnerable her position was, hanging off the front of the boat like a piece of bait.

  They approached the mouth of the cave. All was darkness within, the water fading after just a few feet of rippling obscurity into a complete void. She reminded herself that they were bringing at least a little light with them—the lantern was hanging just behind her, casting a comforting if small glow out over the water.

  She could see it would be close. She chanced a glance back. Adam’s face was creased with concentration as he studied the rock overhead, but she noticed that he kept his hands light on the wheel. It was reassuring to see that he had enough discipline not to put a potentially dangerous white-knuckled grip on his only means of control over their situation.

  She felt a quick pang of doubt. What if she had pushed him to the wrong course? If the boat sank, both of them might very possibly die out here in the wilderness. Aunt Florence and Uncle David would wonder why their beloved niece never returned from Bournemouth. She’d simply disappear, leaving them grieving and uncertain.

  Well, they would have been grieving and uncertain if she’d let Adam take her back to Belize City and gotten herself loose-ended, she thought.

  Then the gaping stone was upon them, and after one tense, cringing moment, they were through.

  The sapling—and the smokestack—had cleared the stone by only a few scant inches, but once inside, the cave widened to a degree that almost made the journey feel comfortable. Adam maintained a slow pace regardless, for which Ellie was grateful. Just because things looked clear above them didn’t mean there weren’t dangers concealed beneath the black surface of the water.

  They passed from spaces of complete darkness into regions where rifts in the rock let shafts of light spill down to the water. Vines dangled down thickly from such openings, dripping jungle moisture onto Ellie’s back as they chugged slowly past.

  The walls of the caves were worn smooth almost to the ceiling in places, making it clear just how high the river must rise during the furious rainy season. Sometimes the Mary Lee passed under long pillars of stone, stalactites that dangled down from the roof like teeth in hungry jaws. Occasionally the glow of the lantern revealed the dark, skittering forms of massive cave spiders clinging to the walls. When she wasn’t starting at those sudden, skin-crawling movements, Ellie watched the water carefully for any sign of obstruction, uneasy about what might lie concealed under the black surface.

  Adam piloted the boat in tense silence, his eyes working to penetrate the dark beyond the feeble flicker of the lantern. When she dared, Ellie glanced back at him, a stern and shadowy figure in the gloom.

  They passed briefly into light again, then through another dark mouth. The blackness here seemed even deeper than what they had moved through before.

  “Look up,” Adam ordered.

  Ellie followed the direction of his gaze to see a log jammed against the cave roof. It was huge, obviously the remnant of a very tall and ancient tree that had fallen victim to floodwaters. That it hung suspended above them was a testament to the power of the rains.

  As she stared up at it, the launch shuddered abruptly. Ellie felt a quick burst of panic. Had they hit some sort of obstruction in the water? She hadn’t felt so much as a quiver from the sapling. Then she realized that the engine had stopped. The boat drifted slowly backward with the current.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked nervously.

  “Hold on for a minute,” Adam replied. He steered the drift of the boat toward the wall of the cave. He quickly tied off the wheel, then grabbed a rope and looped it around the rail. He stood, staring mysteriously at the darkness to the right. Then he stepped up onto the rail and, with a leap, vanished into thin air.

  Ellie clung to the deck as the Mary Lee seesawed after the sudden change of weight. As soon as it settled, she hurried to the rail where Adam had disappeared.

  There hadn’t been any splash, which meant he wasn’t in the water. It hadn’t looked like he was falling into the river anyway. He had simply been swallowed up by the darkness.

  “Mr. Bates?” she called tentatively. Her voice echoed eerily.

  The rope beside her went taut, the boat swinging sharply back.

  A chorus of squeals shattered the quiet of the cave. Above her, a swarm of black bodies erupted from the wall. They were bats, hundreds of them, all screeching, flying wildly around the narrow space of the cave. Ellie ducked, pressing herself to the deck of the Mary Lee, feeling the rush of disturbed air moving over her neck.

  Then they were gone.

  “Sorry about that.”

  Ellie climbed to her knees and looked up. Adam was a few feet above her, leaning out of a hole in the wall of the cave. It was just visible in the light of the lantern, now that the boat had been yanked back to rest parallel to it.

  “I must have disturbed a colony. Didn’t notice them until I stood up. Pass me the lantern?”

  He held out his hand. Ellie was tempted to throw the lamp at him but resisted, passing it to him with a glare instead.

  The light began to fade as Adam moved farther away, leaving her in darkness.

  “Bates!” Ellie cried. The light stilled, and a moment later Adam’s shadowy form loomed out of the tunnel above her. He knelt and extended his arm.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Come on where?” Ellie protested, her heart still pounding in her chest.

  “I think I’ve found something.”

  Even in the near-darkness, she could see the glimmer of excitement in his eye.

  “What kind of something?”

  “How about we find out?” he asked, grinning at her.

  The urge to snap at him was overwhelmed by a growing curiosity. Ellie extended her arms. Adam grabbed hold and helped her climb from the rail of the deck up into the cave opening.

  He collected the lantern and lifted it, giving Ellie a look at the strange space he had discovered. They were in the mouth of some sort of tunnel. The ceiling was high above them, almost indiscernible in the weak glow of the lamp. The floor rose smoothly beneath them.

  “This way,” Adam ordered, and set off with the lantern, Ellie close behind him.

  They advanced along the tunnel through twists and turns, narrow gaps and wide openings. Adam moved carefully, making sure of his footing on the cave floor before advancing. Ellie followed nimbly, keeping to his track, though her attention was constantly drawn to the wonders she could see in the flickering light of the lantern. She felt a rush of excitement as they moved forward. This was what she was made for—exploring new territory, discovering its secrets. At last, she was finally doing it, not just dreaming about it while she shuffled papers in a gray London office.

  She suppressed a squeak as a massive spider skittered across the ground in front of her.

  Adam climbed through a high gap in the stone, taking th
e light with him. Then she heard him laugh.

  He put his head back through the gap, grinning down at her.

  “You’re going to love this.”

  He extended a hand and helped her up. She scrambled through, then stood, brushing the dust from her knees. Raising her head, she gasped.

  The space around her was massive. The walls and ceiling soared, cathedral-like, and every surface seemed to glitter, throwing shards of light through the vast, flickering space.

  “The walls are glowing,” she exclaimed, breathless.

  “It’s the crystal,” Adam said. “These hills are limestone. That’s why they’re so easily hollowed out by the river. With the right geological conditions the limestone crystallizes. There are pockets like this all over the mountains.”

  He moved ahead, following some instinct toward the center of the cavern, where he knelt, examining the ground. Ellie picked her way over to where he crouched.

  There, scattered before him in a slight depression, was an assortment of pots, some whole, others cracked or shattered. A short distance away were signs of scorch marks, remnants of old fires edged with bits of ash.

  She knelt beside him.

  “It’s a ritual site,” she said, awed.

  Adam looked over at her, surprised and approving.

  “The Mayans believed caves like this were entrances to Xibalba.”

  “Xibalba?”

  “The land of the dead. Supposedly there were twelve gods there who ruled over every form of fear and destruction. It’s described as a series of caverns like torture chambers—rooms of ice, knives, bloodthirsty jaguars. A regular carnival. This space would have been seen as a gateway. The dead would pass through it on their way to Xibalba, and plague and suffering would come out. The Mayans would have offered sacrifices here to keep the death gods happy.” Adam nodded toward the wall of the cave. “There’s one of them over there.”

  In the flicker of the lantern, the walls, ceiling, and floor of the cave seemed to sparkle with a thousand stars, making it hard at first to see what he pointed to. Stepping closer, she realized that the walls of the cave were decorated with paintings. The images were faint, long faded with time. There were primitive scenes of hunting and dancing, but other scenes were more elaborate. One in particular leaped out at her, seeming darker and more detailed than the rest. It depicted some sort of beast, a massive figure with black wings, claws, and jagged fangs.

  “Is that supposed to be a bat?”

  “They called them Camazotz,” Adam said. “Sort of like bloodthirsty monster bats. They were one of the guardians of Xibalba. Take a look at this.” He drew her attention away from the paintings and down to the little pile of ashes. She crouched beside him as he brushed aside a bit of cinder, revealing a small bunch of half-burned, wilted flowers.

  “Someone’s been here recently.”

  “Who?”

  “Some of the local Maya, I’d imagine.”

  “But I thought they were all Christians now,” she said, surprised.

  He gave her a wry look.

  “Some of them like to cover all their bases.” He stood, raising the lantern and looking around.

  Ellie was still transfixed by the artifacts. She brushed her fingers over the pottery shards, lifting one and examining it.

  “How long do you think this has been here?”

  “Pretty damned long,” Adam said. “Take a look at this.”

  She stood and moved over to where he knelt near a slight hollow in the ground. The lantern light revealed the glittering, icelike form of a human skeleton.

  “My God,” she said quietly, kneeling beside him.

  The figure looked as though it had been half swallowed by the ground. The exposed bones were thickened, bristling with a sort of stone fur that sparkled in the moving light.

  “She’s calcified,” Adam said, gently brushing his fingers along the surface of a shoulder blade.

  “She?”

  “It’s a female. A young female—probably about twelve or thirteen.”

  Ellie could see a broken area at the top of the long-dead girl’s skull.

  “A sacrifice?” she asked.

  “She wouldn’t be down here if she weren’t,” Adam replied.

  She felt a pang of sympathy. The girl had been barely more than a child.

  “She was so young.”

  “You want to appease the gods, you give them something precious.”

  The emotion passed, overwhelmed by her growing curiosity.

  “How long has she been here?”

  “At a guess? About a thousand years or so. That calcification doesn’t happen overnight.”

  “A thousand years,” she said wonderingly, looking down at the skeleton. The crystal made it look as though the girl were built of diamonds, sparkling in the light of the lantern.

  She leaned back, eyes scanning the wide chamber. What else might be hidden here, waiting for centuries to be discovered?

  She turned to Adam. “Will you come back here? Conduct an excavation?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” she asked, surprised.

  “Two reasons. One, there’s no funding for it.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  She found it hard to imagine that something as petty as money would destroy a chance at sharing such a find with the world.

  “It’d take more than a few bones in a cave to get either of our governments to open their pockets.”

  She absorbed this quietly. It was something she had never considered before. But then, she should have. She had heard Neil talk about the constraints funding put on his excavations in Egypt, and that was in a region private patrons loved. Few knew or cared about this obscure corner of the empire.

  “You said there were two reasons. What’s the other?”

  “They’re still using it,” Adam replied. He moved toward the exit and made a gentlemanly sweep of his arm. “After you.”

  With a last look back at the chamber, she moved past him through the gap.

  9

  ELLIE FELT A NEW sense of security. The stretch of river they now navigated was officially off the map, and the Mary Lee had only just managed to make it through the low tunnel into the caves that had led them here. Few other boats would be able to do the same. It seemed impossible to imagine that anyone could follow them here, even if they’d known where to look—and Dawson and Jacobs didn’t, she reminded herself.

  All she had to worry about now were venomous snakes, man-eating jaguars, and the imminent arrival of the rainy season. That, of course, and the tanned, chiseled man behind her steering the boat, the virtual stranger who also happened to be the only one with the knowledge to get them through the jungle to their goal.

  It was practically a walk in the park.

  Nothing like the challenge of finding the next landmark the map marked on their path. It was described as a black pillar, one that drew strangely at the needle of a compass. Something magnetic, like her medallion. The pillar would signal the end of their leisurely boating expedition and the beginning of a long, hard trek through the bush.

  There was nothing simple about finding a black stone in a landscape of gnarled tree trunks, hanging vines, and wild greenery. Her only hope was that Adam’s compass would give the stone’s presence away. She sat in the bow, holding it in her hand in front of her, afraid to do more than blink lest she miss some telltale twitch of the needle.

  By the time Adam brought the launch to the bank and tied it off to the trunk of a fallen oak, she was thoroughly exhausted. The engine rattled to a stop, and she both gratefully and reluctantly put the compass away, stretching her painfully cramped muscles as Adam pulled out the battered tin pan and bowls. He took another tin from his crates and poured out the contents. Ellie winced when she saw them.

  “Is that all you’ve got? Beans?”

  “No idea,” Adam replied. Tiredness crept into his tone as well. It had been a long day. “The cans weren’t labeled when I bought them. Go
t a discount.” He gave the pan a stir, then sat down wearily and stretched out his legs.

  Ellie looked out into the darkening world of thick, veiled foliage. Strange birds called to one another distantly.

  “Should we have found it by now?” she asked quietly.

  Adam shrugged tiredly.

  “It’s hard to say. The map’s not exactly to scale. Of course, it might not matter if you’d let me see the rest of it.”

  Ellie’s eyes narrowed. She was instinctively wary. “The rest doesn’t matter until we find the stone.”

  “Princess, do you know what’s going to happen once it starts raining?”

  The quick twist in the conversation caught her off guard.

  “We get wet?”

  Adam wasn’t amused. “This lazy stream we’re puffing up turns into a torrent. It completely floods that cave we just passed through, blocking off our route home. The ground turns into mud. Cutting overland through the jungle is hard work even at the best of times, but add a torrential downpour and it turns downright treacherous. Mudslides. Sinkholes.” He shook his head. “If we don’t find your pillar in the next day or two, we might need to think seriously about heading back to regroup.”

  The idea sparked a sharp panic.

  “You can’t know the rains are coming that soon.”

  “I can’t know that they aren’t.” He sighed. “Look—if you show me the rest of the map, there’s a chance I might recognize one of the other landmarks. It would save us traveling up and down the same stretch of water looking for something that might have fallen into the river a hundred years ago. Right now we really can’t afford to pass up a shortcut.”

  She could sense his irritation and knew it wasn’t entirely unjustified. But the notion of handing over her last bargaining chip still frightened her.

  “I checked the maps back in London. There was nothing on there. You can take my word on that.”

  “I can, can I?” he drawled, eyebrow raised.