The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  Dawson shrugged out of the coat gratefully and hung it on the back of the chair. His shirt was stained with sweat.

  “I must apologize for the awkwardness of your reception here this afternoon. I’m afraid Miss Mallory took all of us rather off guard. For whatever it might be worth, let me assure you that she is both comfortable and secure, and will remain so.”

  Adam nodded an ambiguous acknowledgment.

  Dawson moved to another of the trunks and pulled out a bottle.

  “May I offer you a little refreshment? A donation from our foreman. I’m assured it’s quite good.”

  Adam’s thoughts flew back to the liquid gold he had rescued from the Mary Lee and the memory of sitting by the fire, the warm heat of it in his throat and the woman at his side.

  Eleanora. Eleanora Mallory.

  “You go ahead. I’ll pass.”

  “I’m not actually much of a drinker,” Dawson replied. He gave an awkward, nervous smile, then returned the bottle to its place. “I realize all of this must seem highly irregular. I can only beg your excuse based on the knowledge that what we seek, if it exists, is entirely extraordinary. However much I might wish that Miss Mallory herself had chosen a safer course, I must admit that I find your arrival here quite fortuitous. There is much I would love to discuss with a fellow scholar, and they have been in rather short supply, as you can imagine.” He paused. “What I am saying, Mr. Bates, is that I hope you can put this afternoon’s events behind you and let us start tonight with a clean slate. Is that too much to hope for?”

  Adam took a moment to reply, occupied in concealing his bewilderment. As far as he was aware, the red-faced, uncomfortable man in front of him held all the cards. So why did he feel like he was being courted?

  Maybe there was an ace he didn’t know he was holding. If that was the case, he might as well see what the game was.

  He gave a nod toward the trunk where Dawson had stashed the bottle.

  “Maybe I’ll have a glass after all.”

  Dawson flashed him a smile that looked distinctly relieved and produced a tin mug.

  “Will this do?”

  Through the walls of the tent, Ellie saw lights beginning to flicker to life around the camp, sparks of yellow against the darkening canvas. They were her signal. Night was falling, and it was time to make her move.

  She put her eye to the crack in the canvas again and saw that Mendez and Flowers were still at their posts. It didn’t matter. The way she planned on going, they weren’t going to see her.

  She stepped quietly to the back of the tent, holding the spring she had managed to work loose from the mattress of the cot. The end was sharp, ragged from where she had broken it off of the frame. It easily pierced through the stitching that held the floor of the tent to the back wall. She muttered a prayer against any noise she was making and began working loose the thread, using the spring when she came up against a place that wouldn’t give way under her fingers. Before long, she had created a gap roughly three feet wide. It was more than enough. She tossed the spring aside and flattened herself out on the ground. Lifting the canvas, she peered outside.

  It was just as she had hoped. Jacobs had assigned guards to watch only the front of the tent. The back opened up onto a stack of crates—tins of ham, from the look of it.

  She had never been quite so grateful for tinned ham.

  She wriggled through the gap, climbing silently to her feet on the far side. She waited in the shadow of the crates for a moment, getting her bearings. Most of what surrounded her were piles of supplies. The bearers were camped farther up the bank of the river, nearer to the jungle where the trees stood thickly, providing plenty of places to hang their hammocks. She could hear the sounds of their evening filtering down to where she hid—chatting men, crackling campfires, and braying mules. Underlying all of it was the rush of the nearby rapids and the clamor of the nighttime jungle, with its birdcalls and hooting monkeys.

  She waited until a pair of men had strolled past before dashing across the open space on the far side of the crates, nearly tripping over the handle of a shovel as she tucked herself into the shadows of a stand of palm trees. She kept to the dark, watching for obstacles as she worked her way toward her goal.

  Ellie slipped past a stand of ferns and found herself staring at the stack of hydrogen tanks she had seen earlier that afternoon. She took hold of one of the cylinders and lifted it.

  She promptly dropped it on her foot and bit back a curse. It was heavier than she’d anticipated. She was momentarily grateful for the sturdy quality of Mr. Galle’s boots.

  She eyed the distance to the river, taking in the dark, silent forms of the steamboats. Then she grabbed the handles at the top of the tank and started to drag it, keeping carefully to the shadows of the stacked crates and scattered trees. As awkward as it was to maneuver on land, she knew the tank would be buoyant once she was in the water—easy enough to swim with.

  Adam cleared the last bite from his plate. The fare hadn’t held a candle to Cruzita’s meal the night before, but even canned beef and beans was appreciated on a day’s empty stomach. He would have welcomed anything even vaguely approximating food.

  One of the bearers came in to clear their plates. He was a rough-looking sort to be playing waiter, but from what Adam had seen of the camp, there wasn’t much else on offer.

  The man vanished through the tent flap, leaving him alone with Dawson, who offered him the bottle of rum again.

  “Another sip?”

  Adam saw that his mug was empty. The stuff might be a far cry from the bottle he’d left by the river, but it seemed to be going down easily enough. He would need to be careful—but not look as though he were. He held out his mug for a pour.

  “You sure you won’t have any?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t agree with me,” Dawson said, his tone oddly stiff. He countered it with a quick smile. “So tell me, Mr. Bates, what do you make of the chimera we’re pursuing?”

  “If it’s not a hoax?” Adam shrugged noncommittally. “Hard to say.”

  “You haven’t any theories?”

  None he felt like sharing, he thought to himself. “I usually like to see a thing before I start trying to figure it out.”

  “An entirely rational position,” Dawson acknowledged. “I’m afraid I am somewhat less disciplined. I find it hard to resist making guesses, particularly when the subject is as intriguing as this.” He leaned back, a gleam in his eye. Adam thought he caught a glimpse of a far less sweltering Dawson holding court over a roomful of students. “What do you know of La Ciudad Blanca?”

  “The White City was another El Dorado—a rich and powerful kingdom supposedly hidden in the jungle. Cortés wrote to King Charles promising him the place would prove to be richer than Mexico when he found it. Which he never did. Just another gold-fever dream.”

  “And yet here we are, in the deep bush, chasing a rumor of a city thriving at the time of the conquest. A city described as being built of gleaming white stone.”

  “I had an opening in my calendar,” Adam replied dryly.

  Dawson smiled but did not give way.

  “The White City, El Dorado, Cibola—as far south as Patagonia, we hear of the City of the Caesars, a rich country inhabited by a people of immense wisdom. All these tales of a singular place, sacred and hidden, full of both riches and power.”

  “When men are treasure-hungry, they’ll see gold anywhere they can,” Adam countered.

  “Perhaps. And yet there were rich and thriving cities here during the time of the conquest. Aztec cities. Why make it sound so much like myth when there is a plausible reality on offer?”

  Adam paused. It was a strange idea, one that had never occurred to him before. The feeling it evoked was unsettling. He shrugged it off.

  “They saw ruins. It’s natural enough to imagine someplace similar still intact.”

  “A viable explanation,” Dawson allowed. “What about the City of the Seven Caves? Tulan Zuyua—
that’s the native name, I believe.”

  Adam bit back a curse, thinking of the telegram that had slipped out of Eleanora Mallory’s pocket with the other half of the map. He should have figured that story, too, would turn out to have been something less than the whole truth.

  Just a few notes to look up later, she’d said.

  The telegram must have belonged to the man who sat before him. He tried to remember what it had looked like and recalled a bunch of gibberish with those unexpected words scribbled over the top.

  Tulan Zuyua. The Smoking Mirror.

  It must have been some kind of coded message sent from London to Belize City. But from who? Who the hell in London would be wiring coded telegrams about a wildly obscure piece of Mayan mythology?

  Adam kept his expression cool.

  “Your pronunciation is off.”

  Dawson smiled. “Well, Mr. Bates, my knowledge comes entirely from books. I must make do with my own feeble ear. If I remember my reading, the City of Seven Caves was the place where the first tribes of the Maya gained knowledge of fire, agriculture, and magic. It was the birthplace of their civilization, an ancient city of powerful men advanced far beyond those around them. Now tell me—were you a gold-hungry conquistador, how would you remember hearing such a story, were it told to you? As an account of a city full of precious metals and jewels, perhaps?”

  Adam felt a wave of irritation. He was being led, but in spite of himself, something in the tale Dawson was spinning was damnably intriguing.

  “You’re saying that the tales of El Dorado and Cibola were European interpretations of the Mayan and Aztec origin myths.”

  “I am suggesting that it is a possibility.” He paused.

  In the silence, Adam could feel that night had fully descended outside the walls of the tent. The jungle around them was coming alive with chirps and buzzings.

  “Let me change the subject for a moment. In your opinion, as one who has had his hands in many of their ruins and settlements, what is the oldest civilization in Central and South America?”

  Adam considered the question.

  “Well, the Maya predate both the Inca and the Aztecs.”

  “And predating the Maya?” Dawson prompted.

  “There’s no concrete evidence that anything did.”

  “But there are suggestions that would support it, are there not? Indications that there may have been cities here before the Maya. A people with a distinct artistic and architectural style—a very ancient people who may have influenced the development of the Mayan culture.”

  “That’s conjecture,” Adam countered flatly.

  “But is it ludicrous? Or do you recognize a plausibility? Could the Mayan stories of an origin city not refer to the metropolis of an earlier and more powerful culture?”

  “It’s a nice theory with very little evidence to back it up.”

  “Perhaps that is precisely what we are on the trail of, Mr. Bates. The evidence.”

  Adam thought of the medallion, the strange carvings that were both recognizable and foreign, incorporating elements of Mayan and Aztec styles but seeming something else entirely—something simpler and more essential. It had been the same with the stela—a sense of an artifact both familiar and exotic.

  “There is no account of Tulan Zuyua falling,” Dawson pressed on. “Nowhere in the myth does it say that it has ceased to be. And then we have native accounts of someplace that bears an uncanny resemblance to it, right up through the start of the seventeenth century.” He leaned forward, his expression fiercely earnest in the lamplight. “What if this city we’re chasing survived the Mayan collapse because it wasn’t Mayan at all, but something else? The last relic of a more ancient people.”

  The room went silent. A moth had managed to slip into the tent. It fluttered dully around the lamp on the table, wings beating hypnotically as it was drawn toward the light.

  “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  “Because I wish to intrigue you,” Dawson replied. “My knowledge of Central American civilizations comes entirely from books and journals, most of which I read only on the voyage here. You have spent years on the ground, discovered and surveyed these ruins, spent time with the remnants of their people. Your knowledge would be an invaluable addition.”

  “You want me to be a part of this?” The notion was so startling, Adam nearly choked.

  “I do not believe our interests are necessarily incompatible. This expedition is of a rather unconventional nature.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “My employer is very focused in his interests.”

  Adam suppressed a sigh. “So he’s a collector.”

  Collectors were the bane of his existence. They were men of passion or madness, feverish for artifacts that fit their particular fetish. For some it was Egyptian relics. Others lusted for Damascene swords, Ming dynasty porcelain, or plump goddess figurines. Adam wasn’t sure what drove such men to want to possess pieces of history when others were content to study, observe, or—like himself—discover. But it was collectors who fueled the black market in antiquities, a trade that incentivized the poor of the colony to ravage the graves of their ancestors. Collectors were the ones responsible for the devastation Adam encountered every time he stumbled across a new site, only to find that thieves had already been there before him.

  While most collectors cared about the legitimate provenance of the artifacts they acquired, there were plenty of others who were willing to overlook a little dubious legality to get their hands on the objects they craved. Adam had run into the type before, but this was something else.

  An entire expedition, better equipped than any he’d ever seen, mounted at an instant’s notice. Adam was intimately familiar with the colony’s permitting process for such endeavors. It moved slower than a glacier. There were certainly plenty of men who avoided that particular tangle, but they weren’t renting three massive steam launches right under the eyes of the government offices. An expedition this size wasn’t something that could be put together quietly.

  That meant whoever was behind this was capable of pulling some serious government strings—or of paying obscene bribes to a whole lot of colonial authorities.

  And it had all been done just to fulfill the whims of an obsessive.

  “What’s his flavor, then? Gold? Weaponry?”

  “No,” Dawson replied shortly. “Not gold. My employer’s interest in this matter is focused on a single artifact.”

  A single artifact.

  All of this—all the equipment, the men, the supplies that surrounded him—had been mustered on the chance of acquiring one artifact?

  Adam was familiar with the mania of collectors. This was something else.

  He didn’t have to ask what artifact lay behind Dawson’s employer’s particular madness. The answer had already been spelled out for him, in Eleanora Mallory’s penciled handwriting.

  The Smoking Mirror.

  But he had always thought of the mirror as an allegory. It was the name of a god, a mythic personality, not a real, physical object.

  Apparently whoever had employed Gilbert Dawson had a different idea.

  “How do you even know this artifact of yours will be there?”

  “We don’t,” Dawson replied shortly.

  Adam sat back.

  All of this, the whole effort, had been made just on the chance that the artifact they sought would turn out to be in the city—if it was even real to begin with.

  “What about the rest of it?”

  “I suppose that is what we are discussing.”

  He could hear the significance in Dawson’s tone. It took him back to the days he was forced to sit in his father’s office, listening to threats levied and deals being struck.

  “I’m listening.”

  “If this city is as important as it might be—if it truly is a surviving relic of a lost civilization that lies behind all of what is known to date about Central American prehistory—it will need to be s
urveyed and excavated. Promptly, if scientists are to acquire the site before looters move in and clear it out. I am not in a position to conduct that excavation. Besides, I’m an old man, and fieldwork seems far more exhausting than exciting a proposition. But for someone like you…” He leaned forward across the table. “For a young archaeologist with a promising career ahead of him, the chance to discover and interpret a city out of myth would be an unparalleled opportunity. Would it not?”

  Adam’s head was spinning. First there had been the revelation that the entire expedition was aimed at retrieving a single, possibly mythological artifact. Now it sounded distinctly like Dawson was trying to bribe him.

  What the hell is going on?

  “Are you making an offer, Professor?”

  “I believe I am, Mr. Bates. A generous one.”

  It certainly was, Adam thought. If Dawson was right about the city, then it very easily represented the most important archaeological find in the hemisphere. That was a lot to simply hand over to another scholar.

  Time for the catch.

  “So what do you get out of the deal?”

  “Your assistance locating the artifact we are here to acquire. Your familiarity with the layout of Central American ruins far surpasses my own. Having your expertise at our disposal would save us significant time and effort. And as I said, I’m not a young man anymore. If your involvement would speed my return to the comforts of home, I welcome it.”

  That’s it?

  Adam couldn’t believe it.

  He shouldn’t believe it, he realized. Dawson’s story was so outrageous, Adam had stumbled into taking it for the truth—a mistake he’d been making far too often lately.

  He was being lied to. The problem was, he had no idea how.

  There was only one way for him to find out: He had to keep Dawson talking.

  “That’s a lot to offer for help finding just one artifact,” he said skeptically.

  “It’s nothing I have any desire to keep. The task of excavating Tulan Zuyua is not for me, Mr. Bates. But it could be yours.”