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The Aztec cities to the north still stood at the start of the colonial period—but those had been well-known to the conquistadors. They would hardly have warranted being described aslegends.
Ellie gingerly unfolded the parchment. Something slipped loose from it and fell heavily into her lap. Surprised, she picked it up.
The object was a thin disk of stone perhaps three inches in diameter. The glossy black surface caught and reflected glints of the gray light from the window behind her.
The carved image of a single figure dominated the center, surrounded by rows of neat, square hieroglyphs. With their dots, bars, and stylized animal heads, the characters reminded Ellie of the illustrations she had seen in the books on Mayan and Aztec archaeology that she had pored over at the university library. There had not been very many such volumes, of course. The Mesoamerican region was not a part of the world that received nearly as much academic interest as Egypt, Rome, or Ancient Greece.
The figure engraved in the center of the stone obviously represented a deity. Aspects of the iconography were familiar to Ellie from her reading, though the carving combined elements of a few different Mesoamerican gods. Its face was marred by slashing horizontal lines. One of its legs had been replaced by a writhing snake. Angular, batlike wings protruded from its shoulders, with a round disk—a pectoral decoration, perhaps?—dominating its chest.
She turned the medallion over. The back of the object was blank save for a single hieroglyph made up of a circle of swirling lines.
Ellie puzzled over what they might represent. Wind, perhaps? Or smoke?
Smoke, she thought distantly.Smoke feels right.
She shook off the fog of shock as her fingers tightened reflexively on the stone.
Logically, she knew it was possible—perhaps even likely—that the disc was a hoax or a forgery… but if it wasn’t, then Ellie could be holding a fragment of an ancient world.
The notion filled her with a sense of awe.
With some effort, Ellie forced herself to set the artifact aside and focus on the parchment. As promised, it was indeed a map, hand drawn in spidery strokes of aged ink. The undulating line of a coast dominated the right hand side of the page. She identified other lines as hills and mountains. Much of the map’s expanse was blank, but that was unsurprising. Early seventeenth-century knowledge of Central America would have been largely limited to the areas bordering the sea.
A handful of landmarks had been carefully marked across the interior, written in the same Ecclesiastical Latin. Ellie delicately traced them with her finger—the curving course of a river leading to aBlack Pillar that Draws the Compass, then a meandering line to anArch Hollowed by the Hand of God.
Beyond that lay theRiver of Smoke—and finally, a stepped pyramid marked with a thin, fadedX.
Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ellie thought as she looked down at the symbol, her mind whirling.
She forced herself to assess the parchment as she would any other historical document. It was impossible to be certain of its age. The degree to which the material became yellow or brittle over time could vary based on a range of environmental factors, and Ellie had no idea where the psalter had been stored prior to finding its way to Mr. Henbury’s desk. Certainly, the faded color of the ink indicated that the page was at least a couple of centuries old, and the style of the script was appropriate to the seventeenth century. The use of Ecclesiastical Latin supported the theory that the piece had originated in one of the Catholic missions that peppered the American coast during that period.
Now that Ellie thought about it, there was something vaguely familiar about the shape of the sketched coastline.
CO 700, her brain suggested automatically.Box 8. Room 306.
Ellie neatly folded the map back up into its original form, plucking both it and the medallion up from the desk. She hurried out of the room, barely hearing the new rush of whispers that followed her.
She rounded the corner and climbed the familiar flight of stairs to the third floor of the building, steering unerringly to the room she sought.
Like all the other records rooms in the PRO, Room 306 was packed with metal shelves that lined the walls and divided the floor into narrow aisles. Ellie hurried along the rows containing the records of the Commonwealth Office.
She plucked Box 8 from its shelf.
There were no tables in Room 306. The documents were meant to be carried down to one of the reading rooms where those querying the records waited patiently for their papers to be delivered.
Ellie plopped herself down on the floor instead, her tweed skirt pooling around her as she lifted the cardboard lid from the box.
She shuffled carefully through the documents stuffed inside until she found a hand drawn map of New Spain, dated 1688.
The provenance documents for the map were thankfully complete and up-to-date. The piece had been seized along with other papers from a Spanish privateer who had ended up on the losing side of a conflict with the Royal Navy. Ellie had always liked this particular record because the parchment featured marginal annotations in three different hands—likely from a succession of captains who had made use of it.
Ellie swept the dust from the floor with the sleeve of her white blouse, leaving a gray smudge along her arm, and then laid the parchment from the psalter and the confiscated map side by side on the ground before her.
The maps covered slightly different areas, but Ellie could make out the distinctive shape of the Yucatan’s Bay of Chetumal on both, and used it to orient herself. The coastlines did not precisely match, nor were they to scale—but that was to be expected, given the limits of seventeenth-century survey methods.
The note on the parchment had spoken of aninhabited city. The geography in front of her was nowhere near any of the regions known to have had thriving urban areas at the time of the Spanish conquest. The map depicted the region where the Mayan ruins had been found—the Mayan ruins that had been abandoned for centuries by the time her secret map had purportedly been drawn.
Then again, her map did not claim to show the location of a Mayan ruin. It spoke of a legend.
