The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  Ellie realized that Adam had neglected to introduce her as well—then remembered that the name he would have given to their newfound host was Constance Tyrrell.

  He still didn’t know who she really was. The reminder left her feeling distinctly guilty.

  Kuyoc turned and said a few words to the group of men. They dispersed. The thick tension had broken with the old man’s laugh, and the scene before her looked more like a slice of ordinary life than a ripening threat. Their host briefly shooed away the band of children, who scattered, shrieking joyfully.

  Kuyoc led them down a well-worn path through the village until the bulk of the houses were behind them. As they walked, Ellie caught sight of a small shack set in a hollow in the hillside, some distance from the path. While the rest of the huts had either a curtain for a doorway or nothing at all, this one had a sturdy wooden door with a padlock.

  “What’s in there?” she asked.

  “That is where we keep the dynamite,” Kuyoc replied easily.

  “Dynamite?” Ellie echoed.

  The old man’s bright eyes moved from her to Adam, whose face had creased into a puzzled frown.

  “Good for removing stumps,” he said, punctuating it with a slightly toothless grin. He turned and continued walking, calling back to them, “This way. Just a little farther.”

  The path led to a house set beyond and above the outskirts of the rest of the village. A small boy sat on the threshold, clutching a hen to his chest like a sleeping cat. He watched them approach with wide, wondering eyes.

  “My grandson, Paolo,” Kuyoc said. He pointed to the hen. “And that is Cruzita. He named it after his mother, who is not happy that her son chose a good meal as a pet.”

  The boy got up as they approached and dashed around the side of the house, feet nimbly moving around the bunches of greens in the garden.

  “Shy,” their host explained, and motioned them inside.

  The doorway was low. Ellie could barely enter it standing up, and Adam had to duck. Inside, the air was noticeably and welcomingly cooler. A row of hammocks hung from the roof. The furnishings otherwise were sparse—a battered tin lamp, a collection of baskets. A door at the far end led to what looked like a kitchen.

  “You must both be tired. Why don’t you nap until supper?” Kuyoc waved toward the hammocks, which looked heavenly to Ellie.

  “If you’re sure you don’t mind,” Adam said.

  Kuyoc smiled. “Rest. I will tell Cruzita that you are here.”

  Ellie was too tired to pretend politeness. She dropped her pack and climbed into the hammock. A moment later she felt a tugging at her ankles. She cracked open one of her eyes to see Adam pulling off her right boot.

  “Your feet need a rest, too,” he explained.

  “I’m perfectly capable—” she began, but cut herself off with a yawn.

  “Sure you are.” He smiled wryly, tugging off the other shoe. She gave up, lay back, and in a moment had slipped away from consciousness.

  Ellie woke to a clatter of pans from the kitchen to see a pair of large, dark eyes gazing at her with rapt attention. Amilcar Kuyoc’s grandson, Paolo, sat on a stool he had pulled up near her hammock and was staring at her. The stare got bigger as he realized she was looking back at him.

  “Hello, there,” she said.

  “Hello,” the boy replied.

  She smiled, surprised.

  “Grandfather teach me English.”

  “I guess he does!”

  “Little English.” He held his fingers up in a pinch to illustrate. “Where you from?”

  “London.”

  “Near Belize City?”

  “No—it’s very far from there.”

  “Near San Pedro Siris?”

  “I don’t know that place. London is in England, on the other side of the sea. Mr. Bates is from San Francisco, in America.”

  “How do you know San Pedro Siris?”

  Ellie turned, surprised to see Adam standing in the doorway. She saw that he was frowning, and the smile that had instinctively leaped to her lips faded in confusion.

  Paolo stared at him as though not understanding.

  “Who is from San Pedro Siris?” Adam repeated.

  A crash sounded from the kitchen, and a female voice called, quick and irritated. Paolo’s hen scurried, squawking, from the doorway. The boy snatched her up and then ran out the front of the house.

  Ellie looked to Adam.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. Everything’s fine,” he assured her evenly.

  But the uneasiness she had felt before, under the watchful and suspicious eyes of the village men, had returned.

  Ellie sat between Adam and their host at a low wooden table eating what tasted like the best meal she’d ever had in her life. The food was simple but mouthwateringly good, a richly spiced chicken stew with soft corn tortillas and a heaping crock of rice and beans. Ellie ate enough for two, not even realizing how hungry she was until the smell of the food met her nose.

  “Where’s Cruzita? She can’t still be cooking.” She wanted to thank the woman, whom she had yet to see, for the miracle in her mouth.

  “She eats later, with the women.”

  “The women eat separately?”

  “Yes,” Adam answered her with a warning look, which of course only deepened her irritation. She glanced around the table and realized it was true. Besides the three of them, there were only Kuyoc’s two stoically quiet sons, returned from their day at work in the milpa. She looked at the now near-empty pot, thought of her own outrageous appetite, and felt a wave of guilt.

  “What will they eat?”

  “They’ll have saved some for themselves,” Adam said around a mouthful of tortilla.

  “They don’t want to eat with the men. If they do, they couldn’t gossip.” Kuyoc smiled, eyes twinkling.

  Ellie forced aside her unease at the notion that the women of the family weren’t present at the table, but it was replaced by an odd epiphany—that to the people of this place, she was considered a man. The thought stopped a piece of chicken halfway to her mouth. It was something she’d fought for all her life: to be let into that exclusive fraternity, treated as equal with them. And she’d found it in stolen trousers in an obscure place thousands of miles from home.

  There was another crash, and a clamor of shouting and squawking from the kitchen. Kuyoc chuckled.

  “One of these days, that bird is going to end up in a stew pot.”

  Ellie could hear the bright voices of the women at their meal as she and Adam sat on a pair of stools in the garden, watching the last rays of sun disappear over the horizon. The sky was moonless, and the stars beginning to emerge were brighter and more numerous than she had seen since her childhood trips to her parents’ cottage by the lake.

  Amilcar Kuyoc emerged from the doorway carrying two cups in his hands. He passed one to each of them.

  “Careful. It’s hot.”

  She took hers and inhaled. The scent was rich and warm, exotic yet familiar.

  “Chocolate, the Mayan way,” Kuyoc explained.

  “Thank you,” Adam said, and sipped.

  Ellie did the same, and nearly melted. The taste was divine, bittersweet and chili-spiked.

  Kuyoc settled down beside them, looking as though he had done the same every night in this place for decades.

  Their seats were perfectly positioned to take in the view, a gentle slope of cleared land leading down to the clustered houses of the village and the wide, dark expanse of the wilderness beyond.

  “Nice place,” Adam said.

  “It is,” their host agreed.

  “And quiet. I didn’t know it was here.”

  “You know where the other villages are.” It was a statement.

  “Most of them, I’d expect. I’m the assistant surveyor general for the colony. It’s my job to know where things are.”

  “Ah. A mapmaker,” Kuyoc said. “And is that why you are here? To make maps?”

/>   There was something strange in his tone, but when Ellie looked, his expression betrayed nothing but a benign calm.

  “Not this time,” Adam said. He nodded toward the fang-spiked necklace revealed by the open throat of the old Mayan’s shirt. “Those don’t look like jaguar teeth.”

  “They’re not,” Kuyoc replied.

  There was an awkward pause where the rest of the story should have been. Kuyoc rolled a cigarette with a pinch of tobacco he took from a pouch at his waist.

  “Tell me, mapmaker. If you are not here to map, then what does bring you to this place?”

  “Something you might be able to help us with, as a matter of fact. We’re looking for a ruined city I’d estimate should be about four or five days’ walk from here to the northwest. Can you read a map?” Adam asked.

  Ellie jolted at his words. Was he really about to share their secret so casually, with a man they hardly knew? She wanted to protest, snatch the document away from him as he pulled it from the tin in his pack and spread it out across his knees. But how could she? The damage was already done.

  Her hand moved instinctively to her shirt. She could feel the medallion, safely hidden there against her skin.

  She felt Kuyoc’s sharp eyes on her. They flickered from her face to her hand. She forced it down to her knee, and after another moment the old man turned his attention to the parchment in Adam’s lap.

  “We’re just about here, you see?” He looked up for confirmation, then moved his finger. “These ruins should be somewhere right around here. You ever heard of anything like that?”

  Kuyoc stared silently down at the map for so long that Ellie began to wonder if he’d lied about being able to read one. When he stopped staring, it was not to answer Adam’s question. Instead he stood, stepping away from them into the garden. His gaze was directed past the sloping hillside and the village to the dark, misty shapes of the surrounding mountains.

  “No,” he said at last. “No one from this village has gone there. And none of them would, not if you paid them to.”

  “Why not?” Ellie asked.

  The old man turned, his gaze cold and unblinking.

  “Because Death lives there. Death and the rest of the old gods. And he and his servants feast on the flesh of those who trespass in their realm.”

  Ellie felt a chill at his words and wondered for a moment whether their host was mad. Then his face cracked into a smile.

  “That is what they say, at any rate. There are stories of those who have gone into that region of the jungle, never to be seen again. Or who come back raving about angels with the teeth of jaguars and a thirst for blood. Perhaps there is some truth to it. The jungle has many dangers, does it not? The one that lives in that place may be real, even if the stories told about it are fanciful.”

  Ellie thought of their close call that afternoon. When she had tried to anticipate some of the trials she might face on her journey, she had never dreamed of “pig attack.”

  “I’m afraid you will find no guide here. Nor anywhere else for that matter. Only a madman would venture into unknown land during the rains. And they are coming. You can smell them in the wind.” He lifted his face as though searching for the scent, and Ellie found herself following suit. It seemed she could almost detect what he was describing—a sort of freshness in the cool evening breeze.

  She shook it off. The sky overheard was perfectly clear. They still had plenty of time before the rains set in. The old man was simply a good storyteller.

  “If it is ruins you are after, there are those we can show you. Spectacular ruins only a short way from here.”

  “Thanks, but I think we’ll stick to our plan,” Adam said, folding up the map and returning it to the cylinder.

  “What treasure is it that you hope to find in this city?”

  Kuyoc’s tone was casual, almost joking, but when Ellie looked, she could see a hardness in his gaze that belied his words.

  “We’re not looking for treasure,” Adam said.

  “No? Then what are you looking for?”

  “Knowledge. We want to know who these people were. What happened to them.”

  “You want to know what happened to the people of the dead cities?” He swept an arm expansively over the vista before them—the twinkling lights of the village. “They are right here.”

  They absorbed this in silence as Kuyoc took a long draw on his cigarette, exhaling in a dragonlike stream of smoke.

  “That’s a nasty scar you’ve got there,” Adam commented. “Must have come from a hell of a fight.”

  “You could say that.”

  Ellie thought she detected the ghost of a smile crossing the old man’s face.

  “Was it in San Pedro Siris?” Adam asked, his tone careful.

  “No,” the old man replied.

  “But you were there.”

  “I was.” He took another draw, calm and slow, his gaze still cast out over the peaceful landscape before them.

  “And the rest of these people?”

  “They were here, working the land their ancestors have worked for a thousand years.”

  Ellie looked from Adam to the Mayan and felt a wave of irritation. There was a conversation happening here that she did not understand and was being left out of. But even as she thought it, she felt it shift, Adam leaning back on his stool and extending his legs out before him.

  “I didn’t come here to draw any maps. But I can. If I put this village on one, it would bring trade, connection to the rest of the colony. Or I can pretend I never saw it. What do you think the people here would want?”

  Kuyoc was quiet, his eyes focused but distant, as though he looked at some far thing none of the rest of them could see. Ellie sensed a tension in him, a sort of fierce determination that seemed to break as she watched, shattering into resignation. He shook his head, suddenly looking older.

  “Tell me, Mr. Bates. Do you really think it would matter? Where one foot has tread, others will follow. It is foolishness to think it can be stopped. The whole world will be laid bare eventually, all its secrets dragged out of their hiding places and set down on your maps.” He stopped, catching himself. “You must excuse me. I am old and tired. Very tired.”

  He crushed the remnant of the cigarette under his sandal.

  “Cruzita made up your beds in the guesthouse.” He gestured to a shack nearby, then turned abruptly and left them.

  “Come on,” Adam said, and led her to the building. Inside they found a pair of bunks built on elevated platforms of wooden boards. They looked less comfortable than the hammocks in the main house, but instinct told her that in this place, these would be considered privileged accommodations. Adam dropped down easily onto one of them and started tugging at his laces.

  “What happened out there?”

  “Ghost stories.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ghosts of the past. Ghosts of the future.”

  “What’s San Pedro Siris?” She felt snappish, impatient about being left out of the conversation.

  He sighed, leaning forward with elbows on his knees. He looked weary.

  “About fifty years ago there was some trouble with the logging camps in the north part of the colony. Conflict between natives who figured these were their ancestral lands and loggers who didn’t give a damn. There were rumors of abuses.”

  “What kind of abuses?”

  “Forced labor, mainly.”

  “You mean slavery? But that’s illegal.”

  His only answer was a raised eyebrow. Ellie felt the quick heat of outrage but said nothing, letting him continue.

  “There was an uprising. One of the leaders—guy by the name of Marcus Canul—based himself in the village of San Pedro Siris, a little way from Orange Walk. About a hundred miles to the north of here, as the crow flies. His raids got a bit too successful and the local troops decided to retaliate. So they burned the village. It’s not a pretty piece of history.”

  “And Kuyoc?”

  “M
ust have been involved somehow. Maybe a follower of Canul’s. He’s old enough. And when it all went to hell, the survivors scattered to who-knows-where. This is as likely a place as any for one of them to end up.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “About what?” He lay down on the pallet, stretching himself out comfortably.

  “Will you put it on your map or not?”

  “Princess, how would you describe the welcome we received when we got here? Personally, I’d call it tense.”

  She didn’t disagree, recalling the faces of the men gathered in the center of the village.

  “Mapping this village would bring trade. Modern amenities, medicine. Maybe a mission school. But there’s a cost. Her Majesty’s government doesn’t recognize native land rights. I saw mahogany in the bush outside the village. Once the loggers figured that out, they’d claim the whole place for themselves. Maybe the villagers and the logging company could come to an agreement, share the land. But somebody who’s seen what Amilcar Kuyoc has seen would have a hard time looking on that particular bright side.”

  There was a silence as Ellie absorbed this.

  “We didn’t come here for mapmaking,” Adam finally finished. He rolled over. “Get some sleep. We’ve got another long day tomorrow.”

  The wooden bed was only marginally less uncomfortable than she had anticipated. She shifted on it and thought longingly of the comfort of her hammock. But at least here she wouldn’t have to worry about a jaguar sneaking up on her in the middle of the night. This was probably her best chance at a decent rest for a long time.

  She thought of what Kuyoc had said—that he could smell the rains. She hoped he was wrong.

  Just a few more days, she prayed as she drifted off to sleep.

  12

  ELLIE WOKE FEELING ODDLY rested. For the first time in what felt like ages, her night had been dreamless. It was a relief, though why she should feel relieved to escape from dreams of fortune and glory was beyond her. But by the time the village faded behind them, the benefit of a decent night’s sleep was overcome by the rising heat of afternoon.