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Ellie hurried after him, doing her best to skirt around the trail of charcoal fragments without losing the lamplight he carried with him. They wove through the elegant pillars of stone.
One of the stalagmites caught Ellie’s eye.
“Bates—look!” she exclaimed.
The stone pillar was identical to the others that rose from the water around it, save that its surface had been chipped with the form of a vaguely anthropomorphic figure.
“It’s a stela. A very primitive one, but here—arms.” Ellie pointed out the roughly hewn lines. “Feet. Torso. And there’s the face,” she finished, moving her finger up.
“Skull,” Bates automatically corrected her.
“Sorry?” Ellie blinked at the simple assemblage of dots and lines.
“Eyes,” he said. “Jawbone. Teeth. You see this guy all over the place.”
“May I?” Ellie asked as she reached for the lantern.
He released it to her, and she moved closer, shifting the angle of the light to better reveal the rough shapes in the stone.
“Yes,” she agreed thoughtfully. “I suppose it could be Schellhas’s God A. Of course, the god appears in profile in the Mayan codices, and this figure is facing us.” She raised the light to look around the still, haunted atmosphere of the cave. “Perhaps this was used as a ritual entrance to Xibalba, with the Death God serving as guardian.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Bates agreed easily.
“Are you familiar with Mayan mythological literature?” Ellie asked hopefully.
It wasn’t often she found someone with whom she could discuss Mayan mythological literature.
“Nope,” he replied cheerfully.
“Oh,” Ellie said a little sadly.
Bates glanced down at her from where they stood thigh-deep in the still, cool water.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” he prompted.
“I wouldn’t want to bore you,” Ellie returned carefully.
“Think I’m too thick to follow it, huh?” Adam replied, scratching the side of his head.
“What? No—it’s not that at all!”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve actually got some Mayan mythological literature kicking around my room. I try to grab books on local history when I get a chance. I mean—I’m out here stumbling across the stuff all the time. Least I could do is have some idea of what it’s all about. I’ve just never been a great one for reading.”
His tone was casual, but he didn’t look at her as he said it, squinting at the skull of the Death God instead.
“But you went to Cambridge!” Ellie protested.
“Never said I was particularly good at it.” Bates flashed her a deliberately charming grin as he walked away from the pillar. Ellie hurried after him.
“Are you claiming that you made it through Cambridge without reading a book?” she pressed skeptically.
“Didn’t say I didn’t readanyof them,” Bates countered a little defensively. “I read books. I’m not illiterate. I just…” He sighed and looked away over the lake. “My buddy Fairfax—he can sit down for hours just tearing through pages. Doesn’t even need to take a note. It’s just alltherein that weird head of his. I can’t do that. I try to pick up a book, and after maybe five or six minutes, I’m thinking about something else—what they’re gonna serve for dinner, or that my leg itches, or that I left a lamp lit somewhere. And I’m slow,” he added pointedly. “So five minutes of reading doesn’t get me very far.”
“But you speak Latin,” Ellie pressed.
She was having trouble wrapping her mind around it. Books were like breathing for her—an extension of her being. She hardly had to think about the fact that she was reading when she did it. The words melted into a stream of beautiful knowledge pouring into her mind.
“Sure,” Bates agreed, pausing shin-deep in the pool to face her. “Spanish, too, and a fair bit of Kriol—though I don’t usually speak it. My friend Charlie told me to leave the Kriol to the Creoles or I’d be making an ass of myself. But I can understand everything he’s saying when he speaks it. I’ve even picked up a bit of Yucatec Mayan and a little Mopan. I’ve always had an ear for things. But you don’t learn a language from reading books.”
