Empire of shadows, p.51
Empire of Shadows, page 51
She was.
So Adam kissed her.
He tugged her close, molding her to his body as he devoured her lips, tasting the warm heat of her through the cave dirt and pond water. Relief washed through him like a tide… until he realized that they were sinking.
He released her, spluttering, and loosened an arm to help keep them afloat as he tried to figure out where the hell they had landed.
It was Ellie’s reservoir, the green pond that she’d been so excited about when they had arrived at the city—except it wasn’t a pond anymore. It was a rising, frothing whirlpool, fed by the water flying out of the mouth of the feathered serpent. As Adam watched, Lessard shot out of the opening like an ugly, slippery missile. He fell into the water with an epic splash. Charlie followed, with Flowers and Pacheco a breath behind.
Kuyoc was already there. The priest laughed wildly as he splashed at the water and shouted a prayer up to the storm-clouded heavens.
Adam’s face split into a grin.
They had made it. It was crazy as hell, but they’d made it.
A thunderous crack resounded through the darkness.
“Was that thunder?” Adam demanded with a burst of alarm.
Ellie blinked at him. Her face paled slightly.
“I don’t think so,” she admitted.
“Out of the water!” Kuyoc shouted, and then echoed the order in Spanish. “¡Sal, rápido!”
They swam for the wall. The water had already risen enough to bring it into reach. Adam hauled himself onto the ledge and tugged Ellie up after him.
He enjoyed the feeling of holding onto her for a heartbeat before a chorus of shouts rose up from the direction of the plaza, along with a crash of a falling stone—and then more of them, booms like a giant’s firecrackers echoing off the mountainside.
“Mada raass!” Charlie cursed as he whirled back in the direction of the sound.
“High ground!” Kuyoc called over the racket. He waved his arm wildly. “Now!”
The priest bolted.
Adam raced after him with Ellie at his side. He was vaguely aware of Lessard pulling even. The stocky Quebecois flashed a grin as he managed to outpace them. Charlie stumbled over a rock in the dark and bit out a curse as Kuyoc led them around a skidding turn into an overgrown road between the houses. The old man lost zero ground on them in his sandals.
They skirted the edge of the plaza, where the shouts grew louder. Bones came into sight. The foreman was waving the rest of the expedition on as Velegas shouted out orders from his perch on a boulder.
Aurelio Fajardo slapped a stream of mules into motion. The animals clomped and raced to join them on the road.
Nigel Reneau slid down a short flight of steps. He landed near Adam’s side and took off after the priest. Ram and his Bhojpuri companions raced after the cook. Even a pair of Jacobs’ remaining guards took about two seconds to decide to desert their posts. They hauled after the remainder of the camp as it raced through the trees and ruined stones.
The road twisted higher as it approached the looming black ridge of the mountains. The trees thinned, and another terrible, rending roar sounded from behind them.
Adam risked a glance back. The pyramid was falling.
The tiers of white stone collapsed inward as the temple sank into a fall of crumbling rubble. Adam spotted a cluster of figures stumbling to the bottom of the staircase. They raced across the plaza even as it fractured under their feet.
Dark shapes swooped overhead and screeched into the night. The monstrous bats from the cave veered from the cacophony of the collapse. Disoriented and chaotic, they fled into the west.
Adam took hold of Ellie’s arm and pushed them faster.
The roaring and crumbling noises behind them intensified. The ground trembled beneath Adam’s boots as Kuyoc veered them off the ancient road and onto a game track that wended up a sloping ledge of the mountain. He waved them onto it as he shouted, quickly swapping languages.
“Go, go! Kwika! ¡Apúrate!”
The entire camp scrambled up the winding, narrow ledge. The climb was steep. Aurelio’s mules, clearly comprehending the urgency of the situation, hopped nimbly over the stones and easily passed Adam and Ellie. Aurelio shouted in the midst of them, grabbed the stragglers by their halters, and hauled them up.
Rain pounded down, making the track slippery and soaking them to the bone as they climbed. The priest picked his way with practiced assurance up the mountainside, taking them higher as more buildings collapsed below them. Trees rustled strangely as they tore from the ground.
At last, the mad caravan spilled out onto a high, broad ledge. Kuyoc stopped as the group collected itself.
Still holding Ellie’s hand, Adam made a quick inventory.
Charlie was half collapsed onto one of the stones, where he panted and grumbled more curses. Lessard hocked out a lump of spit and laughed.
Flowers helped pull the last few stragglers up the steep ground to the ledge.
Based on the satisfied look on Aurelio’s face, all of the mules had made it out intact.
Pacheco, Lopez, Ram, and the others—everyone else from the camp was there.
And Ellie, of course.
The relief of that made Adam want to fall over a bit—or maybe that was the altitude.
The rain began to slacken. To the east, the underside of the clouds was softly gilded by the rising light of dawn. The tentative glow of it illuminated what was happening below, even as great, rending rumbles continued to resound across the valley.
Adam forced himself to look out over it.
The place where the temple had stood was already gone, along with the ball court where Ellie and Adam fled earlier that night. The reservoir had cracked. The water spilled out in a quick, frothing current.
Farther away, towers crumbled. Sections of trees rustled wildly and then sank from view.
Adam took it in with gaping shock and sudden comprehension.
“The whole cave system is collapsing,” he said, voice numb. “This entire place is turning into one giant sinkhole.”
“I… Oh dear,” Ellie said as she swayed slightly beside him. “I think I might need to…”
Adam caught her and held her upright. She stared past him, eyes wide, as he gently pushed a fall of messy hair from her face.
“Hey,” he said gently, summoning her attention. “We’re okay. Everyone’s okay.”
Movement caught his eye from beyond her shoulder where the ragged slope of the mountain curved away. In the rising light, Adam picked out a small cluster of figures clinging to the face of the stone above the catastrophic destruction.
It had to be Dawson and Jacobs. Adam supposed it was too much to hope that a temple might’ve fallen on them.
He had a feeling they weren’t the sort to brush off having a prize snatched from under their fingers. There’d be consequences for all of this.
But he could worry about that later.
“Tulan,” Ellie said weakly as she looked out over the falling city. “Adam, what have I done? I…”
She was cut off by the sound of a piercing whistle from behind them. Kuyoc had hopped up onto a rock at the far end of the ledge.
“You,” he said, pointing at Bones, whose lanky form was mostly collapsed against a boulder. The foreman’s clothes were streaked with dirt. “You manage to save any of your supplies?”
Bones let out a short, harsh chuckle. “No.”
“Except the mules,” Aurelio pointed out defensively. Two of the animals nudged at him with their noses, snuffing for comfort.
“Right,” Kuyoc replied with a sigh. “You had all better come with me, then.”
He turned and trudged toward another winding path up the mountainside.
“Come on, Princess,” Adam said. He took Ellie’s hand and tugged her gently from the collapsing remnants of a lost world.
꩜
Forty-Five
Kuyoc knew a shortcut. He led them across the mountains along an obscure sequence of game trails, ridges, and the short tunnel of another cave. They followed the rushing tracks of newly rainfed streams until the thick, green lushness of the forest opened onto the neatly organized expanses of newly planted milpas.
Shortly afterwards, two girls of perhaps eight and twelve slipped from the trees and legged it up the path, undoubtedly to give Feliciana and the others word of the ragged horde heading for Santa Dolores Xenacoj at the heels of their iconoclastic priest.
The light over the tidy little cluster of houses was golden and warm as Ellie walked up the path to the village. Kuyoc led the way along with a small army of children who had slipped from doors and fences as they approached. They danced around the priest and peppered him with questions.
She could smell roasting meat and the warm aromas of chili and beans.
Feliciana emerged with the other women, who descended on them like a flock of noisy doves. They fussed over Ellie’s ruined shirt until Feliciana’s granddaughter, Itza, spotted the wound on Ellie’s arm and shouted the news of it.
The mass of busy Mayan grandmothers separated her from Adam. A pounded mess of plants was slapped onto her wound, which was then wrapped in a clean bandage.
A wrinkled, fairy-sized woman whom Ellie didn’t yet know dabbed the rest of the mud from Ellie’s face with a damp cloth. She rattled on in Mopan the entire time, which Héctor helpfully translated.
“She says you need a bath because you smell like rotten plantains,” he declared.
At last, Ellie was deposited on one of the stools in front of Feliciana’s tidy home, and a plate of food was set in her hands. She tore into it with a sigh of relief and satisfaction, stuffing herself with warmly spiced beans, roasted game, fresh herbs, eggs, and a mass of tortillas.
When she was done, she leaned back against the house and considered all the places where her body ached.
Adam dropped down beside her a moment later. His hand and arm both sported fresh bandages with a greenish tinge, which told Ellie that he had also been poulticed.
He still didn’t have a shirt. It clearly wasn’t de rigueur to go around Santa Dolores without one, though at least he wasn’t breaking any actual indecency laws.
Ellie found that she had a greater respect for indecency laws as her eyes dropped involuntarily to Adam’s chest. Even when still slightly filthy and moderately bruised, that torso could cause a riot.
He grinned down at her.
“You look terrible,” he said.
Ellie glared at him as he reached over and gave a tangled lock of her hair a little tug.
“Itza offered to comb it, but it would have meant delaying dinner,” Ellie retorted. “Which was not going to happen. Paolo!” she called, flagging the boy down as he scurried past. His pet chicken followed at his heels.
“¿Quieres más?” Paolo guessed.
“Yes,” Ellie replied with relief. “Sí!”
Paolo grinned at her and dashed into the house, where he called out a quick line of Mopan to those inside.
Adam chuckled.
“What did he say?” she demanded.
“Something along the lines of the foreign lady is hungry as a boar,” Adam replied.
“I don’t care what he calls me as long as he brings me more tortillas,” she returned.
“That’s my girl.”
Ellie startled a bit at Adam’s easy, comfortable words. A tumult of unsettling questions sparked to life inside her.
Before she had a chance to ask them, they were joined by Padre Kuyoc. The priest had fully washed up and changed into clean clothes.
“Nice sunset,” he commented as he plopped down beside them.
He had a cup in his hand. The contents smelled lightly of booze. He raised it.
“To accidentally wiping out every vestige of a lost world,” he said.
Ellie’s stomach dropped. She had been ruminating uncomfortably over the disaster for their entire walk to the village. She was a scholar, for goodness’ sake! She was supposed to learn, document, and preserve—not drop the relics of an entire culture into a giant hole in the ground.
She slowly lowered her face into her hands, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disaster that she had created. It felt particularly awful as she sat in the middle of a village full of people who could very likely have claimed Tulan as part of their own heritage… had Ellie not blown it up.
“I’m supposed to honor the past,” she said without looking up. “I’m supposed to protect it.”
Beside her, Kuyoc took another sip of his drink.
“Did you want to destroy Tulan?” he asked easily.
Ellie’s head snapped up.
“Of course not,” she retorted.
His sharp eyes met her steadily from under a fringe of white hair.
“You followed the path the mirror set for you,” he said.
Ellie was painfully conscious of Adam beside her. They hadn’t talked about any of that yet.
She had just dropped Kuyoc’s potential ancestral legacy into a sinkhole. She could hardly do that and then fail to tell him the truth about it.
“Yes,” she confessed.
Kuyoc shrugged. His shoulders relaxed as he took another sip of his drink.
“Well, there you are, then,” he concluded.
“That’s it?” Ellie demanded with a flash of temper.
“You didn’t want to destroy Tulan,” the priest replied. “But you wanted something else. What was it? Fame? Wealth? The admiration of your peers—the men who do not think you are capable of doing this work? Did blowing up the cave with my terrible old dynamite bring you any of those things? No.” He shot her another careful, penetrating look. “You destroyed the Smoking Mirror. You buried it with the bones of all its dead. If Tulan went with it, perhaps that was the only way to be sure no one would come and try to dig it out again.” He chuckled as he looked away again. “You must have wanted that very much.”
Ellie absorbed it all with shock. Beside her, Adam was quiet, but she could feel him carefully listening.
She was still a little afraid to find out what he thought of it all.
The things she had seen inside the mirror had blurred in her mind like a dream that she only remembered after she had already staggered from bed for a cup of tea. She recalled the scarred woman’s face and a shocking sense of intimacy—of shared purpose. A mind-blasting flood of information that had slammed into her brain, overwhelming her with its sheer volume.
There was no way she could hold it all inside her mind—yet even as she looked around Santa Dolores, small things winked out at her, glowing with a spark of added significance.
The way the stream had been shored up and shaped as it tumbled down to the lake. The layout of the village houses with their tidy front gardens. The flashes of bright jewelry on the arms of the women. How the air mingled with tobacco smoke and the smell of roasting maize.
Ellie was suffused by a sense of the past threading itself through the present, even as so much had very obviously changed.
She should be writing it down, she thought with a jolt of panic. She needed to scribble as much of it as she could on paper before it slipped away from her—but even as she reached for it, the knowledge fled back into the depths of her mind.
Cruzita’s voice rang out over the village. A moment later Paolo darted by, clutching his pet hen to his chest. Relieved laughter rang out from where Ram, Pacheco, and several of the other fellows from the expedition sat with a few of the men from the village, rattling off stories in a shifting kaleidoscope of languages.
Charlie leaned against a cashew tree a little further on, quietly smoking a cigarette with a Mayan old timer, as Lessard trimmed his beard with his machete.
Nigel Reneau bent over a soup pot and quizzed one of the older women there about the spice she was adding to the warming chocolate.
Between and around it all ran the children. Aurelio scolded them when they wheeled too close to where the mules grazed in their quickly rigged corral.
It felt right—like everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be. There was a surprising comfort in it.
Adam leaned back against the house with his eyes closed. He was obviously exhausted, but he looked peaceful.
He felt like he belonged there too—dozing beside her with his conspicuous lack of a shirt.
Kuyoc took another sip of his drink as he gazed out over the sunset.
“I think perhaps we are all lucky that you wanted it so badly,” he said. He cast his eyes over the warm noise of the village as he set down his cup. “I couldn’t do it myself. For me, the mirror was…” He shook his head. and his eyes were tiredly drawn with all the things he couldn’t say. “And it would have been too much to ask of the people here. They fought hard for the peace and quiet of this life.”
The priest stood up. Adam cracked open his eyes as the older man looked down at them.
“But you two are not looking for a quiet life,” Kuyoc noted significantly. “Are you?”
He ambled away from them then, raising a hand to the comfortable greetings of the people of his adopted home.
Adam slipped an arm over Ellie’s shoulders, pulling her a bit closer.
“Well, Princess,” he said. “You sure know how to conduct an excavation.”
Ellie groaned miserably. Her shoulders slumped.
Adam’s blue eyes brightened with a laugh, and then sobered a bit as he looked at her.
“What’ve you got in your pocket?” he asked.
“Magnifying lens,” Ellie recited automatically. “A needle. An empty flask.”
Adam raised a waiting eyebrow.
“And this,” she added awkwardly. She took out Dawson’s bone.
It looked like an ordinary humerus from the wing of a largish bird. A few characters had been roughly scraped into the surface. Ellie recognized the language as Glagolitic, an old Slavic script.
She didn’t know what they said—yet. She was a little rusty with her Glagolitic.
“How many more things like that do you think are lying around out there?” Adam asked.
“Speaking in terms of pure logic, if we have already encountered two of them, I think we must assume there are a fair quantity of others,” Ellie rambled, and then caught herself. “Though of course, there is nothing logical about any of this.”
So Adam kissed her.
He tugged her close, molding her to his body as he devoured her lips, tasting the warm heat of her through the cave dirt and pond water. Relief washed through him like a tide… until he realized that they were sinking.
He released her, spluttering, and loosened an arm to help keep them afloat as he tried to figure out where the hell they had landed.
It was Ellie’s reservoir, the green pond that she’d been so excited about when they had arrived at the city—except it wasn’t a pond anymore. It was a rising, frothing whirlpool, fed by the water flying out of the mouth of the feathered serpent. As Adam watched, Lessard shot out of the opening like an ugly, slippery missile. He fell into the water with an epic splash. Charlie followed, with Flowers and Pacheco a breath behind.
Kuyoc was already there. The priest laughed wildly as he splashed at the water and shouted a prayer up to the storm-clouded heavens.
Adam’s face split into a grin.
They had made it. It was crazy as hell, but they’d made it.
A thunderous crack resounded through the darkness.
“Was that thunder?” Adam demanded with a burst of alarm.
Ellie blinked at him. Her face paled slightly.
“I don’t think so,” she admitted.
“Out of the water!” Kuyoc shouted, and then echoed the order in Spanish. “¡Sal, rápido!”
They swam for the wall. The water had already risen enough to bring it into reach. Adam hauled himself onto the ledge and tugged Ellie up after him.
He enjoyed the feeling of holding onto her for a heartbeat before a chorus of shouts rose up from the direction of the plaza, along with a crash of a falling stone—and then more of them, booms like a giant’s firecrackers echoing off the mountainside.
“Mada raass!” Charlie cursed as he whirled back in the direction of the sound.
“High ground!” Kuyoc called over the racket. He waved his arm wildly. “Now!”
The priest bolted.
Adam raced after him with Ellie at his side. He was vaguely aware of Lessard pulling even. The stocky Quebecois flashed a grin as he managed to outpace them. Charlie stumbled over a rock in the dark and bit out a curse as Kuyoc led them around a skidding turn into an overgrown road between the houses. The old man lost zero ground on them in his sandals.
They skirted the edge of the plaza, where the shouts grew louder. Bones came into sight. The foreman was waving the rest of the expedition on as Velegas shouted out orders from his perch on a boulder.
Aurelio Fajardo slapped a stream of mules into motion. The animals clomped and raced to join them on the road.
Nigel Reneau slid down a short flight of steps. He landed near Adam’s side and took off after the priest. Ram and his Bhojpuri companions raced after the cook. Even a pair of Jacobs’ remaining guards took about two seconds to decide to desert their posts. They hauled after the remainder of the camp as it raced through the trees and ruined stones.
The road twisted higher as it approached the looming black ridge of the mountains. The trees thinned, and another terrible, rending roar sounded from behind them.
Adam risked a glance back. The pyramid was falling.
The tiers of white stone collapsed inward as the temple sank into a fall of crumbling rubble. Adam spotted a cluster of figures stumbling to the bottom of the staircase. They raced across the plaza even as it fractured under their feet.
Dark shapes swooped overhead and screeched into the night. The monstrous bats from the cave veered from the cacophony of the collapse. Disoriented and chaotic, they fled into the west.
Adam took hold of Ellie’s arm and pushed them faster.
The roaring and crumbling noises behind them intensified. The ground trembled beneath Adam’s boots as Kuyoc veered them off the ancient road and onto a game track that wended up a sloping ledge of the mountain. He waved them onto it as he shouted, quickly swapping languages.
“Go, go! Kwika! ¡Apúrate!”
The entire camp scrambled up the winding, narrow ledge. The climb was steep. Aurelio’s mules, clearly comprehending the urgency of the situation, hopped nimbly over the stones and easily passed Adam and Ellie. Aurelio shouted in the midst of them, grabbed the stragglers by their halters, and hauled them up.
Rain pounded down, making the track slippery and soaking them to the bone as they climbed. The priest picked his way with practiced assurance up the mountainside, taking them higher as more buildings collapsed below them. Trees rustled strangely as they tore from the ground.
At last, the mad caravan spilled out onto a high, broad ledge. Kuyoc stopped as the group collected itself.
Still holding Ellie’s hand, Adam made a quick inventory.
Charlie was half collapsed onto one of the stones, where he panted and grumbled more curses. Lessard hocked out a lump of spit and laughed.
Flowers helped pull the last few stragglers up the steep ground to the ledge.
Based on the satisfied look on Aurelio’s face, all of the mules had made it out intact.
Pacheco, Lopez, Ram, and the others—everyone else from the camp was there.
And Ellie, of course.
The relief of that made Adam want to fall over a bit—or maybe that was the altitude.
The rain began to slacken. To the east, the underside of the clouds was softly gilded by the rising light of dawn. The tentative glow of it illuminated what was happening below, even as great, rending rumbles continued to resound across the valley.
Adam forced himself to look out over it.
The place where the temple had stood was already gone, along with the ball court where Ellie and Adam fled earlier that night. The reservoir had cracked. The water spilled out in a quick, frothing current.
Farther away, towers crumbled. Sections of trees rustled wildly and then sank from view.
Adam took it in with gaping shock and sudden comprehension.
“The whole cave system is collapsing,” he said, voice numb. “This entire place is turning into one giant sinkhole.”
“I… Oh dear,” Ellie said as she swayed slightly beside him. “I think I might need to…”
Adam caught her and held her upright. She stared past him, eyes wide, as he gently pushed a fall of messy hair from her face.
“Hey,” he said gently, summoning her attention. “We’re okay. Everyone’s okay.”
Movement caught his eye from beyond her shoulder where the ragged slope of the mountain curved away. In the rising light, Adam picked out a small cluster of figures clinging to the face of the stone above the catastrophic destruction.
It had to be Dawson and Jacobs. Adam supposed it was too much to hope that a temple might’ve fallen on them.
He had a feeling they weren’t the sort to brush off having a prize snatched from under their fingers. There’d be consequences for all of this.
But he could worry about that later.
“Tulan,” Ellie said weakly as she looked out over the falling city. “Adam, what have I done? I…”
She was cut off by the sound of a piercing whistle from behind them. Kuyoc had hopped up onto a rock at the far end of the ledge.
“You,” he said, pointing at Bones, whose lanky form was mostly collapsed against a boulder. The foreman’s clothes were streaked with dirt. “You manage to save any of your supplies?”
Bones let out a short, harsh chuckle. “No.”
“Except the mules,” Aurelio pointed out defensively. Two of the animals nudged at him with their noses, snuffing for comfort.
“Right,” Kuyoc replied with a sigh. “You had all better come with me, then.”
He turned and trudged toward another winding path up the mountainside.
“Come on, Princess,” Adam said. He took Ellie’s hand and tugged her gently from the collapsing remnants of a lost world.
꩜
Forty-Five
Kuyoc knew a shortcut. He led them across the mountains along an obscure sequence of game trails, ridges, and the short tunnel of another cave. They followed the rushing tracks of newly rainfed streams until the thick, green lushness of the forest opened onto the neatly organized expanses of newly planted milpas.
Shortly afterwards, two girls of perhaps eight and twelve slipped from the trees and legged it up the path, undoubtedly to give Feliciana and the others word of the ragged horde heading for Santa Dolores Xenacoj at the heels of their iconoclastic priest.
The light over the tidy little cluster of houses was golden and warm as Ellie walked up the path to the village. Kuyoc led the way along with a small army of children who had slipped from doors and fences as they approached. They danced around the priest and peppered him with questions.
She could smell roasting meat and the warm aromas of chili and beans.
Feliciana emerged with the other women, who descended on them like a flock of noisy doves. They fussed over Ellie’s ruined shirt until Feliciana’s granddaughter, Itza, spotted the wound on Ellie’s arm and shouted the news of it.
The mass of busy Mayan grandmothers separated her from Adam. A pounded mess of plants was slapped onto her wound, which was then wrapped in a clean bandage.
A wrinkled, fairy-sized woman whom Ellie didn’t yet know dabbed the rest of the mud from Ellie’s face with a damp cloth. She rattled on in Mopan the entire time, which Héctor helpfully translated.
“She says you need a bath because you smell like rotten plantains,” he declared.
At last, Ellie was deposited on one of the stools in front of Feliciana’s tidy home, and a plate of food was set in her hands. She tore into it with a sigh of relief and satisfaction, stuffing herself with warmly spiced beans, roasted game, fresh herbs, eggs, and a mass of tortillas.
When she was done, she leaned back against the house and considered all the places where her body ached.
Adam dropped down beside her a moment later. His hand and arm both sported fresh bandages with a greenish tinge, which told Ellie that he had also been poulticed.
He still didn’t have a shirt. It clearly wasn’t de rigueur to go around Santa Dolores without one, though at least he wasn’t breaking any actual indecency laws.
Ellie found that she had a greater respect for indecency laws as her eyes dropped involuntarily to Adam’s chest. Even when still slightly filthy and moderately bruised, that torso could cause a riot.
He grinned down at her.
“You look terrible,” he said.
Ellie glared at him as he reached over and gave a tangled lock of her hair a little tug.
“Itza offered to comb it, but it would have meant delaying dinner,” Ellie retorted. “Which was not going to happen. Paolo!” she called, flagging the boy down as he scurried past. His pet chicken followed at his heels.
“¿Quieres más?” Paolo guessed.
“Yes,” Ellie replied with relief. “Sí!”
Paolo grinned at her and dashed into the house, where he called out a quick line of Mopan to those inside.
Adam chuckled.
“What did he say?” she demanded.
“Something along the lines of the foreign lady is hungry as a boar,” Adam replied.
“I don’t care what he calls me as long as he brings me more tortillas,” she returned.
“That’s my girl.”
Ellie startled a bit at Adam’s easy, comfortable words. A tumult of unsettling questions sparked to life inside her.
Before she had a chance to ask them, they were joined by Padre Kuyoc. The priest had fully washed up and changed into clean clothes.
“Nice sunset,” he commented as he plopped down beside them.
He had a cup in his hand. The contents smelled lightly of booze. He raised it.
“To accidentally wiping out every vestige of a lost world,” he said.
Ellie’s stomach dropped. She had been ruminating uncomfortably over the disaster for their entire walk to the village. She was a scholar, for goodness’ sake! She was supposed to learn, document, and preserve—not drop the relics of an entire culture into a giant hole in the ground.
She slowly lowered her face into her hands, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disaster that she had created. It felt particularly awful as she sat in the middle of a village full of people who could very likely have claimed Tulan as part of their own heritage… had Ellie not blown it up.
“I’m supposed to honor the past,” she said without looking up. “I’m supposed to protect it.”
Beside her, Kuyoc took another sip of his drink.
“Did you want to destroy Tulan?” he asked easily.
Ellie’s head snapped up.
“Of course not,” she retorted.
His sharp eyes met her steadily from under a fringe of white hair.
“You followed the path the mirror set for you,” he said.
Ellie was painfully conscious of Adam beside her. They hadn’t talked about any of that yet.
She had just dropped Kuyoc’s potential ancestral legacy into a sinkhole. She could hardly do that and then fail to tell him the truth about it.
“Yes,” she confessed.
Kuyoc shrugged. His shoulders relaxed as he took another sip of his drink.
“Well, there you are, then,” he concluded.
“That’s it?” Ellie demanded with a flash of temper.
“You didn’t want to destroy Tulan,” the priest replied. “But you wanted something else. What was it? Fame? Wealth? The admiration of your peers—the men who do not think you are capable of doing this work? Did blowing up the cave with my terrible old dynamite bring you any of those things? No.” He shot her another careful, penetrating look. “You destroyed the Smoking Mirror. You buried it with the bones of all its dead. If Tulan went with it, perhaps that was the only way to be sure no one would come and try to dig it out again.” He chuckled as he looked away again. “You must have wanted that very much.”
Ellie absorbed it all with shock. Beside her, Adam was quiet, but she could feel him carefully listening.
She was still a little afraid to find out what he thought of it all.
The things she had seen inside the mirror had blurred in her mind like a dream that she only remembered after she had already staggered from bed for a cup of tea. She recalled the scarred woman’s face and a shocking sense of intimacy—of shared purpose. A mind-blasting flood of information that had slammed into her brain, overwhelming her with its sheer volume.
There was no way she could hold it all inside her mind—yet even as she looked around Santa Dolores, small things winked out at her, glowing with a spark of added significance.
The way the stream had been shored up and shaped as it tumbled down to the lake. The layout of the village houses with their tidy front gardens. The flashes of bright jewelry on the arms of the women. How the air mingled with tobacco smoke and the smell of roasting maize.
Ellie was suffused by a sense of the past threading itself through the present, even as so much had very obviously changed.
She should be writing it down, she thought with a jolt of panic. She needed to scribble as much of it as she could on paper before it slipped away from her—but even as she reached for it, the knowledge fled back into the depths of her mind.
Cruzita’s voice rang out over the village. A moment later Paolo darted by, clutching his pet hen to his chest. Relieved laughter rang out from where Ram, Pacheco, and several of the other fellows from the expedition sat with a few of the men from the village, rattling off stories in a shifting kaleidoscope of languages.
Charlie leaned against a cashew tree a little further on, quietly smoking a cigarette with a Mayan old timer, as Lessard trimmed his beard with his machete.
Nigel Reneau bent over a soup pot and quizzed one of the older women there about the spice she was adding to the warming chocolate.
Between and around it all ran the children. Aurelio scolded them when they wheeled too close to where the mules grazed in their quickly rigged corral.
It felt right—like everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be. There was a surprising comfort in it.
Adam leaned back against the house with his eyes closed. He was obviously exhausted, but he looked peaceful.
He felt like he belonged there too—dozing beside her with his conspicuous lack of a shirt.
Kuyoc took another sip of his drink as he gazed out over the sunset.
“I think perhaps we are all lucky that you wanted it so badly,” he said. He cast his eyes over the warm noise of the village as he set down his cup. “I couldn’t do it myself. For me, the mirror was…” He shook his head. and his eyes were tiredly drawn with all the things he couldn’t say. “And it would have been too much to ask of the people here. They fought hard for the peace and quiet of this life.”
The priest stood up. Adam cracked open his eyes as the older man looked down at them.
“But you two are not looking for a quiet life,” Kuyoc noted significantly. “Are you?”
He ambled away from them then, raising a hand to the comfortable greetings of the people of his adopted home.
Adam slipped an arm over Ellie’s shoulders, pulling her a bit closer.
“Well, Princess,” he said. “You sure know how to conduct an excavation.”
Ellie groaned miserably. Her shoulders slumped.
Adam’s blue eyes brightened with a laugh, and then sobered a bit as he looked at her.
“What’ve you got in your pocket?” he asked.
“Magnifying lens,” Ellie recited automatically. “A needle. An empty flask.”
Adam raised a waiting eyebrow.
“And this,” she added awkwardly. She took out Dawson’s bone.
It looked like an ordinary humerus from the wing of a largish bird. A few characters had been roughly scraped into the surface. Ellie recognized the language as Glagolitic, an old Slavic script.
She didn’t know what they said—yet. She was a little rusty with her Glagolitic.
“How many more things like that do you think are lying around out there?” Adam asked.
“Speaking in terms of pure logic, if we have already encountered two of them, I think we must assume there are a fair quantity of others,” Ellie rambled, and then caught herself. “Though of course, there is nothing logical about any of this.”
