Empire of shadows, p.14
Empire of Shadows, page 14
To say that Adam didn’t have much patience for the kind of guy who’d do that to a woman was something of an understatement. Adam had only refrained from beating the daylights out of that lizard-eyed creep because doing so would probably have landed the woman in even more trouble.
He told himself those were the only reasons he’d agreed to her crazy offer as he stepped up onto the overturned wheelbarrow by Diego’s shed.
“We can’t just steal somebody’s clothes,” the woman hissed at him.
“Diego’ll put it on my tab,” Adam assured her as he hopped easily onto the shed roof.
“But how will Mr. Linares know you were the one who took them?” she demanded.
“He’s known me for a while now. He’ll figure it out. You coming?”
Adam could tell she didn’t love his answer by the stubborn set of her mouth, but she kept whatever she was thinking to herself. Lifting up her skirts, she stepped onto the wheelbarrow, climbing from there to join him on the roof.
She slipped a bit on the tiles. Adam caught her. She fit against him nicely.
He set that thought firmly aside and jumped down to the far side of the fence.
“Hold on and I’ll—” he began.
He cut himself off as she pushed from the roof and landed neatly beside him, brushing off her skirt.
“Never mind,” he finished lamely as he adjusted the weight of his Winchester. “This way.”
Adam led her through a familiar maze of garden gates and alleys to the docks that lined the mouth of the river. He kept his eyes carefully peeled for her competition. There was no sign of the guy, who must still be looking for her somewhere else.
Adam didn’t plan on testing his luck in that department. He kept them to the shadows of his personal shortcuts until they emerged by the water.
The Mary Lee was tied up to the sea wall between a pair of larger fishing sloops. The steamboat looked small in comparison. Small was good. The Mary Lee had an exceptionally shallow draft, which meant that Adam could navigate further upriver before he had to disembark and continue on foot. The boat couldn’t carry much cargo, but that was okay. Adam mostly traveled with what he could carry on his back and acquired the rest of what he needed along the way.
The low, gray deck was begging for a new coat of paint, as were the waist height rails that bordered it. The boat had no cabin—only a canopy, tattered at the edges, which hung in front of the pipe for the steam engine. The coal box in the stern was nearly full, and a quick peek under a pair of loose boards on the deck revealed that nobody had raided Adam’s storage hold while the boat was docked.
Most importantly, his lucky rock was just where he’d left it on the shelf by the boiler. Adam gave the lumpy gray stone—which looked a bit like a squatting hedgehog—a ritual pat as he hopped on board.
“Are you quite certain it won’t sink?” the woman asked, eyeing the boat skeptically as she hovered on the bank.
Ellie, Adam decided silently—that was how he’d think of her. It was easier than Mrs. Nitherscott-Watby.
Or he could simply call her ‘Princess.’ She obviously loved that.
“The Mary Lee has seen a lot more of the bush than you have,” he replied as he extended his hand to where Ellie hovered on the bank.
She ignored it and hopped down onto the deck unassisted. The boards echoed hollowly under her sturdy boots.
Adam glanced at his lingering hand and then tucked it into his pocket.
“Welcome aboard,” he grumbled and set to work firing the engine.
⸻
Adam drove the Mary Lee a few miles down the coast from Belize Town before stopping for the night, tying the steamboat up against some of the mangroves that lined the water. He strung a pair of hammocks from the iron poles that supported the canopy, and then draped the frame with mosquito netting, pausing to swat at one of the bugs that whined past his ear.
The woman gave the arrangement a wary look with her hands poised on the hips of Óscar’s canvas trousers. The pants seemed to fit her well enough with the ankles rolled up.
She refrained from protesting as she climbed into the hammock, looking only a little awkward as she did so. When Adam peeked at her a few minutes later, she was already asleep, the lines of her face relaxed into an unfamiliar openness.
That black trinket of hers hung around her neck, tucked into the front of her shirt. She had tied the ribbon back together as Adam steamed them south, slipping it over the messy bundle of her hair.
Stretched out in the hammock beside her, Adam took a little longer to find his own oblivion. He wasn’t used to sharing the Mary Lee with a woman. The canopy wasn’t all that big, leaving the other hammock close enough that if he’d reached out a hand, he might’ve given it a little push.
Or something else.
No pushing, he thought as turned down the lantern and rolled over to face the other way. No something elsing, either.
⸻
Dawn arrived sooner than Adam would’ve liked. He packed up the hammocks and mosquito netting, and set the well-tuned boiler to steaming again. Soon, the mangroves were gliding past once more—a sea of vibrant green that bordered waters of a pure cerulean blue.
Ellie sat on the bench in the bow, holding up her face to the bright golden sun. The light of it fell across the spray of freckles that dotted her nose.
“Here,” Adam said. He reached under his seat by the rudder, pulled out a battered khaki scout hat, and tossed it at her. “You’ll get a sunburn.”
She gave the hat a surreptitious sniff before popping it onto her head.
Adam couldn’t really blame her for that. It had probably been a good idea.
The wide brim cast a shadow over her face.
“What about you?” she demanded.
“I’m kinda past the point of sunburns,” Adam admitted, leaning back against the rail with his arm resting on the handle of the rudder.
A pair of pelicans rose from a rickety abandoned dock that emerged from the thick mangroves on the shore. The birds sailed over the Mary Lee’s wake, obviously hoping that the steam launch was a fishing boat likely to throw out some extra bait.
“Are we going to the mouth of the Sibun River, then?” Ellie asked.
“Yeah,” Adam confirmed, a bit surprised. “How’d you figure that out?”
She shot him an arch look.
“Based on the shape of the coast and the positioning of the marked cays, the Sibun is the most likely candidate for the waterway on the map that leads to the first landmark, the Black Pillar that Draws the Compass. That’s how I knew to come to British Honduras in the first place. I corroborated the mouth of the river and the position of the mission against the historical documentation.”
“Course you did,” Adam muttered as he adjusted their angle to avoid a sandbar. “Mind my asking how old these historical documentations were?”
Her mouth thinned a bit.
“I can assure you, I took the time to check my calculations against the current map Mr. Linares has mounted on the wall in the lounge.”
“That map’s not current,” Adam replied flatly.
“It was printed less than a decade ago,” she returned shortly.
“Things change fast around here.”
“Then where does one find the most up-to-date map?” she demanded.
“At the surveyor general’s office.” Adam flashed her a grin. “Or on my bedroom wall.”
That earned him a scowl.
“If you showed me that whole parchment of yours, I might know a shortcut,” he offered cheerfully.
“We shall start with the Sibun, Mr. Bates,” she sang out in reply as she turned away from him. “The rest will come in good time.”
The green-gold line of the mangroves drifted past. Below the Mary Lee, the pale sand was clearly visible through the crystalline waters, punctuated by little shells and stones. The woman let her hand fall over the rail of the bow, trailing her fingertips in the water in a way that sent a line of ripples back toward the stern.
Adam watched as a wide shadow flickered across the seabed, the drift of it slightly outpacing the chug of the Mary Lee. A moment later, an enormous, whiskered head broke through the surface of the water next to the woman’s hand. The gray expanse was punctuated by a pair of small, liquid black eyes.
Ellie let out a strangled squeak of alarm as she lurched back and promptly fell from the bench onto the deck.
“It ain’t going to bite,” Adam called back lazily. “It’s a sea cow. She’s just hoping you have food.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Ellie scrambled up to peer curiously over the side of the boat at the animal, which continued to swim alongside.
“Sailors used to think they were mermaids,” Adam continued. “Though that’d be one ugly mermaid.”
The woman didn’t seem to be listening to him.
“Manatee,” Ellie whispered wonderingly as she gazed down at the gracefully moving creature. It wheeled away from them, slipping off toward deeper waters.
Adam felt a smile tug at the corner of his lips as he roped off the tiller and crossed to the boiler to add another load of coal to the box. He set down the shovel and leaned against one of the supports for the canopy as he looked down at her.
“You can put your hands back in the water. I’ll let you know when to take them out,” he said.
“And when will that be?” she demanded as he dropped back onto his seat in the stern.
“When we get to the crocodiles,” Adam replied and flashed her a wicked grin.
꩜
Thirteen
Shortly after the Mary Lee turned from the stunning expanse of blue ocean into the mouth of the Sibun River, Ellie glimpsed the reality behind Bates’s warning. She had already returned her limbs to the boat when a rotting log suddenly raised a pair of beady yellow eyes out of the water. The crocodile watched her passively as the steamer chugged past.
Though the creature was significantly smaller than the one in Bates’s closet, Ellie still fought the urge to move closer to the middle of the boat.
The world around them had narrowed to a band of muddy brown water framed by a seemingly endless expanse of mangrove swamps. Ellie didn’t mind the change. Everything she had seen—from the shocking blue clarity of the sea to the manatee that had startled her that morning—was profoundly, delightfully different from the gray monotony of the world that she had known for the last twenty-four years.
Beyond the coast, the landscape quickly descended into wilderness. There were no farms or villages situated on the banks of the Sibun—only low palms, mangroves, and sea grapes tangled into a wall of brush that extended for miles to either side. Long-legged birds perched in the water along the banks, dipping their beaks into the mud for fish. Insects hopped along the surface of the water, and the sun beat down relentlessly overhead.
As Ellie moved to the shade of the canopy, Bates pulled another hat from the shallow hold under the floorboards of the deck. This one was a battered straw Stetson that had clearly seen better days. He plopped it onto his messy, sun-gilded hair, leaning back against the rail at the stern with the handle of the rudder braced comfortably under his arm.
His eyes were an even more startling shade of blue out here in the wild. The color rivaled the hue of the clear, open waters that they had left behind.
Ellie brushed the thought aside. She hardly needed to waste any of her attention on that particular aspect of the scenery.
She wished she’d had a bit more time during her escape to examine the notes that Dawson had made on the map—or perhaps to simply steal them. She couldn’t know for certain how much of the route the professor had deciphered before she had stolen the parchment back. Ellie comforted herself with the notion that he and Jacobs would need to acquire a boat and likely other supplies before they could hope to come after her. Dawson didn’t strike her as the sort to travel light. So long as she and Bates kept making good time, they should be able to stay ahead of any pursuit.
⸻
By mid-afternoon, the unrelenting monotony of the palms and mangroves began to give way to the ripple of low foothills. The trees lining the banks grew taller, sometimes reaching out to form a leafy green canopy over the muddy width of the water.
The river was low. The Mary Lee handled the sluggish current with ease. By the time the sun began to drift toward the horizon ahead of them, Ellie had not seen so much as a rickety dock for hours. Fat lizards draped across the branches of the trees overhead, accented by the bright flicker of the birds. Thick walls of green served as the boundaries of Ellie’s world.
As the sky began to change its blue for purple, Bates rounded another bend in the river and drew the Mary Lee closer to the bank. With an echoing rattle, the launch’s engine slowed to a stop. The sound raised a cacophonous cry from a flock of birds that startled out of the branches of a massive overhanging oak. They rose up—dark, fluttering shapes calling in irritation to one another against the richly colored dusk.
“Are we stopping already?” Ellie asked, feeling a little jolt of alarm at the prospect.
“Can’t pilot a boat in the dark,” Bates replied. “Not unless you wanna risk putting a hole in your hull on some stray rock. Don’t worry. If your friend is trailing us, he’ll have to stop too.”
Reassured, Ellie rose and stretched her limbs. Her muscles protested against the long day of inactivity.
As Bates set about banking the fire in the boiler, Ellie moved to the bow.
A break in the foliage ahead of them offered her a glimpse of the mountains. The peaks rose, low and hazy, over the rich green of the trees… and looked far closer than they had from the veranda of the Hotel Rio Nuevo.
Ellie traced the shape of the medallion through the fabric of her shirt. She was so much nearer to the place where it had come from.
If that place is even real, she reminded herself.
Bates hopped up onto the rail and neatly jumped from there to the river bank, carrying a line from the boat with him. He tied it to one of the thick-trunked ceiba trees.
Pulled taut by the current, the rope gracefully swung the Mary Lee into a little hollow in the curve of the river, which put them out of the way of any debris that might float past in the night.
“How far have we come?” Ellie asked as he came back on board.
Bates sat down on the deck and pulled his rucksack into his lap. He rifled through it and tugged out a tin cylinder. Unscrewing the top, he shook loose an oilskin.
The waterproof bundle held another map. Unlike Ellie’s parchment, this one was obviously modern. It was covered in notations and markings. Ellie studied them over Bates’s shoulder as he unrolled it across the deck.
“We’ve come about fifty miles,” he replied. “Which puts us right… about… here.”
He dropped his finger to a point on the curve of the river that was not far from the dotted line that marked the edge of the Cayo District.
Ellie knelt down for a closer look as Bates rose to light the lantern using an ember from the box of the boiler.
He pulled a pair of unlabeled cans out of the hold and set about opening them.
“Looks like beans tonight,” he concluded as he peered inside.
Bates plucked a tin pan from a hook on the frame of the canopy and set it on the flat top of the boiler. He dumped the beans inside.
Ellie’s gaze drifted to the fist-sized gray rock on the shelf beside him. It was shaped roughly like a sleepy hedgehog. She wondered what possible function it could serve.
Before she could ask, Bates plopped down beside her, sitting a bit closer than was strictly polite.
He took his half of the seventeenth-century parchment from the oilskin and laid it beside the modern map. The fine lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled with focus.
“Tomorrow, we’ll follow the river up here…” He traced a curve of blue ink. “And then we go off my map.”
Bates tapped his finger on a line that broke off from the right side of a fork in the river—and simply stopped.
“Does the water end there?” Ellie asked, confused.
“Nah,” he replied as he hopped to his feet to stir the beans. “It just goes through a mountain.”
“Through a mountain?” she echoed, alarmed.
“Maybe not a mountain,” Bates hedged. “More like a big hill.”
“How does the river go through a hill?” she demanded. “How do we go through a hill?”
“There’s a cave.” Bates poked his finger into the beans and immediately yanked it out, shaking it off. “Ow!,” he muttered. “The river runs through it. The water was always too high for the Mary Lee to get inside when I’ve been here before, but right now, the level is as low as I’ve seen it. Getting through the tunnel might be tight, and it’s probably a terrible idea. Boating through a cave is all kinds of risky. You might hit rock formations under the water and put a hole in your hull. Or get in, only to have it narrow on you so you have to back out again. It’ll be chock full of creepy-crawly things. Of course… we might not need to go that way at all if you showed me the other half of your map,” he finished casually as he dumped the beans into a pair of bowls and carried them over.
They had only been on the Mary Lee for a day. A day didn’t feel like quite enough distance from the boat back to England that he might happily stick her on once he knew how to get where they were going. Ellie would show Bates her half of the map after they were safely away from town.
“Why should we go off-track when it might be entirely possible to press forward along the map’s course?” she offered.
“You,” Bates replied, pointing at her with a spoon full of beans, “are stalling.”
He ate the beans.
“So what if I am?” Ellie retorted defensively. “You will recall we had an agreement.”
“You actually afraid I’m going to drop you in the swamp and go on without you?” Bates challenged. “I told you, if I was out to take advantage of you, your corset isn’t about to stop me.”
He froze.
“From—uh—stealing your map,” he continued. “If I wanted to. Which I don’t,” he finished firmly and shoved more beans into his mouth.
