The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  His expression was unreadable as he stared at the pulverized masterpieces that surrounded him.

  Dawson searched for words. What was he supposed to say? You can’t be here. This is a closed excavation.

  This wasn’t an excavation. This was a crime against history.

  But would some ignorant native peasant really understand that? He was being ridiculous. He was in charge here, not this withered Mayan. The man was a prisoner.

  Dawson opened his mouth to give the order that would see him dragged back out of here to someplace where he could become Jacobs’s problem again, but the Mayan spoke first.

  “Looking for something?”

  His tone was calm, his English surprisingly clear. Dawson sputtered for a response.

  “We’re archaeologists. We’re—”

  “Perhaps I could help you,” the native cut in smoothly.

  Dawson gaped like a fish for a moment, then clamped his mouth shut.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “So that you will pay, of course.”

  Dawson felt a moment of ambiguity. Pay? Then the implication clicked into place.

  Money. The man wanted money. He was a mercenary, like the others who surrounded them, willing to desecrate the graves of their ancestors in return for a generous salary.

  No, not like the others. There was more in this old man’s eyes, something deeper. A comprehension Dawson didn’t see in the dust-clad figures that surrounded him. But it was more than just intelligence. This man knew something.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “I am Amilcar Kuyoc,” the man replied.

  The camp was quiet. Only a few scattered fires broke the darkness, flickering in the quick gusts of wind. Small groups of figures gathered around them. Flowers knew that many men were still working in the great temple, and that others were with Velegas and the jefe, Jacobs, securing the site. But those did not account for all the absences, and he wondered how many had been drawn by the lure of treasure to explore the ruins under cover of darkness, and how many others, feeling the same foreboding that tossed like quicksilver in his stomach, had slipped away into the bush to find the narrow ravine and the road back home.

  They were fools. Flowers knew what waited in that jungle. He had seen what it could do. It was a vision he would never forget.

  The words of the man dying in the jungle came back to him.

  It came out of the night.

  Flowers did not run. But he had nothing else to do. No one gave him any orders. The bosses seemed to have forgotten that there wasn’t anyone to guard anymore.

  He thought of the sounds the gunshots had made, echoing among the trees and stones. The first two had put a vise grip on his insides. The volleys that followed had loosened it again. But eventually a rough group of men had come back into camp with rifles slung, and Flowers had known by the laughing, proud tone of their jokes what the outcome had been.

  Guard the woman, he had been told.

  He had failed. He had not guarded her, and now she was lost.

  He wanted to run, but he was afraid. And he had someone to answer to first.

  He skirted the edges of the camp, avoiding the glow of the fires, looking for the one he sought. He was so focused on the search, he nearly ran into the man who stepped from the dark brush to his right, buttoning the fly of his trousers.

  He was short but strongly built, his face bruised around the dark growth of his beard. Seeing Flowers, he flashed him a grin that was half grimace, accented by a pair of missing teeth.

  “You look like someone pissed in your lemonade.”

  Flowers hung his head, ashamed. Martin Lavec released a stream of tobacco-stained expectorant toward the ground, then nodded toward a fire on the far edge of the camp.

  “Your cousin is over there.”

  Resigned, Flowers walked to the place Lavec had indicated. The fire was set apart from the others, surrounded on every side by the rustling darkness of the jungle. It glowed cheerily for the moment but would not last for long. The sky overhead flickered with lightning, and the distant rumble of thunder punctuated the stillness of the night.

  Charles Goodwin sat by the blaze, his head resting in his hands. He looked more tired than Flowers had ever seen him, his sadness a palpable thing.

  The guilt was a stone in his chest.

  Charlie was his hero. He always had been, since Flowers was a boy who had to look up to see his face, instead of towering over him. Failing him, especially in something so important, was a pain like a knife.

  He hung his head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Wasn’t anything you could have done,” Charlie replied. “Bates got in over his head.”

  Lavec ambled up behind him, collapsing onto a tumbled stone and pulling a packet of snuff from his pocket.

  “Going to miss that bastard.” He put a pinch into his cheek and sneezed. “So what now?”

  Charlie stood. He looked weary. The night seemed to have grown heavier, and the wind rippled the fabric of his shirt.

  “Now we go home.”

  “We haven’t been paid yet,” the Québécois pointed out.

  Charlie’s gaze darkened.

  “Would you take their money?”

  Lavec sniffed in reply, but Charlie had made his point.

  He kicked dirt over the little fire, dampening the flames.

  Lavec frowned at him.

  “Shouldn’t we wait till it’s light out? Start moving in the dark and we might never find our way out of this hole.”

  “We’re not going into the bush,” Charlie replied.

  “Then how do you propose we get home, eh?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The elaborate painting covered a circular area of ground in the center of the vast chamber. Ellie knelt beside Adam as he studied it in the red light of their torches.

  The wild rush of fire that had raced around the room when Adam ignited the dark pitch by the doorway had expired as quickly as it burned. The outer reaches of the chamber were lost in shadows once more.

  The air was cool here, more so thanks to her soaked shirt and trousers. But that wasn’t what made her shiver. It was all that dark, open space at her back, the sense that anything could be hiding there, watching them.

  She shook the notion off, focusing instead on the images before her.

  The mural was divided into sections, each depicting a different scene. All of them were dark and violent. In one, a pair of figures wrestled with a great spotted cat. In another, a severed head, dripping blood, hung from the branches of a tree.

  “What do you think it means?” She nodded toward the medallion of color on the ground.

  “Looks like something from the Popol Vuh.”

  “Tulan Zuyua again?”

  The notion had been tickling at the back of her mind since she’d arrived in the city. The words on Dawson’s telegram came back to her. Candidate for Tulan Zuyua.

  The city above her wasn’t Mayan or Aztec. It was something else, something different. A place with its own history and culture.

  If their circumstances were different, she would dig trenches, some under the central courtyard and others farther into the outskirts of the settlement pattern. She would carefully unearth each layer of remains, looking for ways to date what she found. If she could establish that this city had been inhabited in the centuries before the rise of the Mayan world…

  She could bring the archaeological world to its knees.

  Even if she couldn’t find that evidence, the city was still a discovery of shattering importance. It would change everything scholars thought they knew about Central American history.

  “This could be it. Couldn’t it?”

  Adam glanced over at her, his face deeply shadowed in the flickering light.

  “Possibly.”

  Ellie forced her attention away from what that revelation might mean, focusing instead on the puzzle before them.

  “What are we looking at?�
�

  “In the Popol Vuh, there’s a tale of a pair of twin brothers who venture into the land of the dead—Xibalba—to try to rescue their murdered father.”

  “Like Orpheus and Eurydice?”

  “Not quite so pretty,” Adam countered, frowning down at the image of the severed head. “All Orpheus had to do was sing a song and keep his eyes front. The tests the twins were subjected to were a lot nastier.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, before they even got to the gates of Xibalba, they had to cross a river of scorpions.”

  Ellie looked up, surprised.

  Adam met her eyes evenly. “Then a river of blood. Our acidic Amazon back there was a bit on the ruddy side, as I recall.”

  Her skepticism flared up in protest.

  “You can’t possibly think that this is some sort of mythical realm.”

  “No. But I think it might be someone’s attempt to replicate it. It could have been used as a sort of initiation, part of the ascension into kingship or the priesthood.”

  The path of kings.

  The dream came back to her in all its vivid strangeness—the city, the scarred woman, and her words. Words that were now beginning to make a terrifying sense.

  Ellie had already been compelled to acknowledge that the images haunting her brain for the past few weeks carried in them some semblance of truth. The city itself had forced that upon her. It was a reality that her waking mind couldn’t possibly have guessed at, but that appeared in her sleep with all the clarity of a vision.

  But to think that she had known, somehow, that she would end up here, in this ritual nightmare buried beneath the ground…

  The road through hell.

  Ellie didn’t know what to make of it. She didn’t want to.

  She looked from the mural to the elaborately carved doorways that lay around them, beyond the reach of their feeble torchlight.

  A rite of passage. A test to prove a leader’s worth before his ascent to power.

  “What happened to the twins?” she asked. At her feet, the pair of youthful figures clung together as dark shadows surrounded them.

  “Once they got into Xibalba, they had to pass through a series of rooms. Each one housed an ordeal they had to survive in order to reach their goal.”

  “Did they make it?”

  “Not exactly,” Adam replied from where he crouched by a particularly gruesome panel. He looked up at her from across the painting. “You see what I’m getting at?”

  She looked down at the scenes of blood and darkness below them. “If this is an initiation, then they’ll have built those rooms down here somewhere. Like booby traps.”

  “Tests,” Adam confirmed. “We want to follow this route, we’ll have to get through them.” He met her eyes. “You want to do this?”

  “What’s the alternative?” she countered.

  “Not sure we’ve got one.”

  “I thought as much.” She stood, holding up her torch and surveying the room. The four doorways were mouths of deeper darkness, barely visible in the gloom. “So one of these is our ticket to hell. And the others?”

  “Could go anywhere,” he replied. “Most likely they lead deeper into the caves. There’s no telling how big this system is. It might be fairly self-contained, or it could be immense.”

  “You mean that we could get lost down there.”

  “It’s a possibility,” he admitted frankly. She thought of the chill currently goose-pimpling her skin. It would only get worse farther underground, and then there would be hunger to contend with, and the need for water. Safe water, she added mentally, thinking of the deadly stream at their backs.

  “Well, then,” she said forcefully. “We’d best choose the right door.”

  He grinned at her proudly, then sobered. “If this is an initiation, there will be a goal at the end.”

  “Our way out.”

  He nodded. “We just have to pass the tests. You ready?”

  “Certainly,” she asserted curtly.

  “Then let’s go.” He started toward one of the doors. It was framed with dark smears of black paint, its frame of carvings crowned with a particularly fearsome-looking god.

  “Hold on,” she called. “How do you know this is the right one?”

  “You want to visit the land of the dead, you follow the sunset. West.” He pointed.

  “But we’re underground. How do you know this is west?”

  “Come on, princess. Haven’t you learned to trust my instincts by now?”

  Ellie was unmoved. She crossed her arms, planting her feet.

  “You want me to trust both of our lives to your instinct?”

  “How about this, then?” He held up a compass, then answered her muttered curse with a grin.

  The temple’s inner chamber was a hot cloud of fine white dust. Amilcar Kuyoc could make out bodies moving in the haze, coated white with pulverized stone and sweat. The atmosphere was so dense, so obscure, he could catch only the slightest glimpse of the walls through the thick of it. Only fragments of the magnificence the room had once contained were visible, the rest being pulverized, inch by inch, by the servants of the Englishmen.

  The destruction hurt him all the more because Amilcar Kuyoc remembered well what the murals had looked like whole and intact, as they had been the first time he had seen them.

  He had stumbled through the ravine half-starved, on the run for his life. It had been after San Pedro Siris, after he had seen the village he had come to call home obliterated by the army of the overlords. He remembered the children clinging to the bodies of their mothers, who had collapsed from smoke inhalation or burns. He had seen the crops smoldering and had known the hunger that would result. A lesson, they had called it. Punishment for the hospitality and support San Pedro Siris had shown for Kuyoc and the man he followed, Marcus Canul, the one with the temerity to demand that the men and women who had called this land their own for millennia be given a fair stake in it. The notion was beyond the pale for the Englishmen. For Canul’s “arrogance,” San Pedro Siris burned.

  And Amilcar Kuyoc ran, the breath of his would-be executioners hot on his neck. Alone, devoured by guilt and terror, he had plunged deeper and deeper into the bush.

  The jungle could be generous, but he was a single man with no more than a knife to hunt with. Hunger had deviled him, so when a hare crossed his path, there had been no question as to whether he would follow it.

  He stalked the creature for miles. Always it remained just beyond his reach, then lingered as though waiting for him to catch up. The animal had turned into a torment, until at last it led him out of the jungle to the base of a sheer cliff marked with a sinuous vein of night-black stone.

  The hare vanished into the ravine at its base, and Kuyoc, half-mad with grief and hunger, followed it into the city.

  He wandered the ruins for weeks. The land had once been cultivated, and he found remnants of orchards, heavy with fruit. Some of the crops had survived, slowly returning to the wild but still edible. And the small animals here had not seen man in centuries, making them easier prey for the traps he set.

  When he was not seeking food, he explored the city’s dark chambers and corridors. He found its caches of corpses, its abandoned weapons, collapsed storehouses, and deserted plazas.

  And other secrets.

  When he first descended into this room, he had only a single light, a primitive lamp he found in the city, fueled by lizard fat. In the feeble, sooty flame, he saw the stunning beauty of the paintings, the powerful expressions of the men and women frozen there, preserved so much more eloquently here than in mere bones and rotted cloth.

  He had seen the artifacts, golden mysteries, and that great, silent machine.

  He had passed through all of it to the door that led him to the city’s true heart, its animus—the object he now knew with certainty these Englishmen hoped to acquire.

  The mirror.

  When he fled San Pedro Siris, he left behind his clarity. Once he
had been so full of purpose, so certain in his course. But the sight of the suffering of the innocent, punished for his banner, had cast him into irreparable doubt.

  The mirror changed that.

  At first it seemed like a blessing from the gods. The power that it offered… Absolute knowledge. The past, the present, and the future, laid out like maps on a table. He needed only desire, and the path to its fulfillment would be made his.

  Desire, and offer sacrifice.

  With such power at his fingertips, who could stand against him? Everything his people fought for could be theirs, their enemies toppled like palms in the fierce winds of a storm.

  Then he remembered San Pedro Siris. He remembered the flames and the silence and in a moment of wisdom understood what the power he contemplated was in truth: a great mouth, hungry and merciless, that would devour the world if it could.

  Because no cause stood in absolute justice, and every victory came with a price paid in blood.

  He left the city, and he worked to keep any other from stumbling across the dark secret it hid.

  Kuyoc had always been a storyteller. But where once he had seeded stories of hope and insurrection, now he sowed rumors of death and horror. He quietly, carefully draped a pall of fear over that corner of the mountains, so that even his own people would avoid the place.

  It had not been hard. Long before his arrival, rumors of horrors hidden in the mountains kept all but the most intrepid at bay. Nor were those rumors baseless. There were monsters here, things out of a nightmare. Kuyoc had met them, getting close enough to win the scar that jagged across his forehead and the teeth he wore around his neck.

  He had been lucky.

  But white men didn’t hear such stories. Like mosquitos, they were without boundaries, went everywhere and took what they desired. When the surveyor and his woman came, Kuyoc knew that the day had arrived, the moment for him to take up a cause again and all that it would cost him.

  Those two, perhaps, would have left it as he had, recognized its threat. But these others, the men he had seen capture them, whom he had followed, silent and subtle, along their crashing way through the jungle—they would have no such sensitivity. He had known that before he descended into the chamber and saw how they had rampantly destroyed beauty in their search for power.