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“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.
