Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Twenty-One

Adam supposed their introduction to the village could’ve gone worse… though maybe not much worse.

The priest, Kuyoc, led them up the hill past tidy houses lush with growing herbs, and the odd pen of clucking chickens. Adam tried not to huff openly as he followed. The old timer set a hell of a pace for a guy who looked like he could be someone’s great-grandpa. He was unnaturally nimble.

Ellie trudged beside Adam. He could see that she was tired, however much she tried to hide it. It had been a grueling day, especially after that whole business with the javelinas.

Damned pigs.

Kuyoc’s questions about the nature of Adam’s relationship with Ellie had been more awkward than they should’ve been… probably because last night, Adam had come damned close to doing something incredibly stupid.

For an alarming moment by the fire, Adam had been sure Ellie was about to kiss him. He had seen the tell-tale gleam in her eye right before the jaguar cried out—assuming, of course, that he hadn’t just dreamed the whole business up through a rum-soaked haze.

It wasn’t that he wouldn’t have liked it. Heck, Adam had spent the last two days trying to shake the image of Ellie floating in the river in her underwear.

But the woman was trouble. Ellie was exactly the sort of girl who came with all sorts of complications—complications that Adam had studiously avoided for the last twenty-seven years.

He had every intention of continuing to avoid them—no matter how cute she looked with mud smeared over her freckles and her hair all curled with sweat at the back of her neck…

“Are you trying to tell me something?” Ellie whispered conspiratorially as she leaned in a little closer.

“What? No!” Adam returned with a jolt. “What’d you think that for?”

“You keep looking at me,” she returned with obvious confusion.

“Heat. Tired. Chickens.” Adam waved a hand at the fowl who watched them pass with beady-eyed indifference. “Probably hungry.”

“I see.” Ellie flashed him an odd look before quickening her pace to keep up with the priest.

Adam searched for something that would take his mind off of underthings and freckles. He found it in the sight of a low, squat building that sat on an isolated reach of the hillside. While all the rest of the structures in Santa Dolores were clearly part of some household plot, this one stood alone and apart. It was accessed by a narrow path that Adam could just make out skirting the ridge.

“What’s that for?” he called out toward the spry old priest.

“That?” Kuyoc echoed, looking to where Adam pointed. “Ah! That is where we keep the dynamite.”

Adam stiffened.

“Dynamite?” he repeated urgently.

“For removing stumps,” the priest cheerfully explained. He flashed them a grin. “Keep up!”

“Is that normal?” Ellie hissed beside him.

“Sure?” Adam replied awkwardly. “I mean, who doesn’t need a stump removed every now and then?”

Ellie cast another thoughtful glance at the building before it slipped from view.

Adam hauled his weary bones the rest of the way up the slope of the hillside to where a larger plot perched above the rest of the village. As they reached it, he glanced back the way they had come. From this higher vantage, he could see over the break in the trees to a low valley—and beyond that, the misty green contours of rolling, forest-covered hills.

It was a great view. Adam took an extra minute to decide whether it was the sort of great view that might make him want to lie down in the road with his eyes closed.

It was close, but the presence of all those nice, solid houses just below him took the edge off.

The plot that they had climbed to contained a pair of houses. They were framed by a substantial yard stuffed with flowers and plots of herbs.

A young boy squatted on the threshold of the larger of the two buildings. He clutched a hen to his chest like a sleeping cat and watched them approach with wide brown eyes.

“This is Paolo.” Kuyoc waved a hand at the boy, and then the bird. “That is Cruzita. He named it after his mother, who is not pleased that her son chose a good meal as a pet.”

Kuyoc rattled off a line in Mopan that Adam couldn’t hope to keep up with, and the boy dashed around the side of the house with the hen still clutched in his arms. His small bare feet picked out a habitual path through the newly raked vegetable plots and bushy cilantro.

A smell wafted to Adam from across the evening air—the enticing aroma of roasting corn and chili. Somebody was already making dinner.

His mouth started to water.

“You will owe your hospitality tonight to Na’chiin Feliciana. Her husband was the alcalde of the village,” Kuyoc explained.

Na’chiin—Adam recognized the Mopan word for grandmother. It spoke to the woman’s status in the household—and likely the village as well, if her husband had been alcalde.

Adam ducked to enter the doorway behind the priest. Kuyoc and the other men in the village were all a few inches shorter than Adam, and the houses here had been built accordingly. Thankfully, the roof was peaked enough that he could stand back up once inside.

The house was dim, and cooler than the outdoors. A few hammocks were tucked into the corner, flanked by the baskets and hollow gourds that the family used for storage. A handful of wooden stools surrounded a low table.

The family altar stood in a place of obvious importance on a shelf by the far wall. The wood was draped with a beautifully embroidered cloth. The carved figures of a handful of santos flanked the wooden cross at the center. A clay vase stuffed with bright, fresh blooms stood before them.

A woman stepped through a doorway at the back of the room. She was accompanied by Paolo, who had been relieved of his chicken. Her silver-haired head came no higher than Adam’s armpit. Her dark brown face was richly lined around eyes that looked as sharp as glass—and about as friendly.

Kuyoc rattled off a stream of rapid Mopan. Adam managed to pick out a word or two.

The priest seemed to be telling the na’chiin—Feliciana—something that Adam was pretty sure meant ‘lost idiots’ and ‘not married.’

Feliciana arched an eyebrow in response, and then flashed a skeptical look at Adam and Ellie.

She replied to the priest in more Mopan. Kuyoc shrugged, and with a sigh, Feliciana graciously nodded.

“Ustedes son bienvenidos aquí,” she announced in clipped, formal Spanish.

She obviously wasn’t very comfortable using the language. Adam couldn’t blame her. Spanish speakers probably hadn’t treated her and her people very well.

“Venga conmigo, jovencita,” Feliciana finished. She gave Ellie a perfunctory wave and turned for the back door.

Adam shot Ellie an uncomfortable look.

“She—ah—wants you to go with her,” he filled in.

“Yes, of course,” Ellie said quickly. Adam could practically see her mind whirring. “Because Mayan societies largely divide their daily activities by gender.”

“Lemme guess,” Adam offered. “You read a book about it.”

Ellie glared at him. Adam raised his hands defensively.

“Probably a really great book,” he added. “Because books are great.”

“You have books about us?” the priest cut in. His eyes glinted a little wickedly. “How very interesting.”

Ellie’s cheeks flushed. She turned to the older woman, who was still waiting in the doorway.

“Sí, Do?a,” Ellie said, making courteous use of her limited Spanish. “Gracias.”

She flashed Adam a look that distinctly said you had better not do anything stupid and then followed the na’chiin outside.

“How do you feel about javelina?” Kuyoc abruptly asked.

Adam startled.

“You mean in general?” he prompted.

“In a tortilla,” the priest patiently replied.

“Great!” Adam’s thoughts immediately turned to the pleasant prospect of dinner.

Roasted javelina would go very nicely with tortillas. It would probably taste a bit like justice.

“Let’s get you settled in,” the priest concluded neatly.

Two hours later, Adam leaned back from the low table. He was pleasantly and completely stuffed with chili-spiked beans, smoky meat, and a seemingly endless pile of hot corn tortillas. One of the women of the household came to clear his plate. She looked to be aged about thirty. Adam had heard Kuyoc address her as Cruzita, which meant she must have been the one whom the chicken was named after.

“?Habla usted espa?ol?” he asked as she approached.

She shook her head.

Adam nodded to the priest, who sat across the table from him.

“Could you tell her to please extend my thanks to the other ladies for the food?” he asked.

Kuyoc flashed him a thoughtful look, then spoke a little Mopan to Cruzita. There was a distinctly wry tone to it.

Cruzita snorted, but gave Adam a pleasant nod and a half smile before leaving.

“Why’d she laugh?” Adam asked.

“I told her I knew you really liked it because you ate the better half of a pig,” Kuyoc returned blithely.

“I walked a lot today,” Adam grumbled in reply. “And it was good.”

The other men at the table—a collection of Feliciana’s sons and sons-in-law, as best Adam could tell—rose from their stools, chatting together comfortably as they made their way out into the night.

Kuyoc popped up behind them like an unfairly energetic cork.

“We should clear the way for the women to eat. Want to share a little k’uutz?” he asked.

Adam definitely recognized the Mopan word for tobacco.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he replied happily.

Outside, evening had settled in over the village. Kuyoc settled them on a pair of wooden stools in front of the house. The seats were perfectly positioned to take in the expansive view, which was still just gradual enough to be nice instead of nausea-inducing.

Adam extended his legs out comfortably as he leaned against the whitewashed wall and enjoyed his cigar.

The sun drifted toward the line of the mountains that lay to the west. The sky above it was falling into shades of breathtaking orange and purple. Even the mosquitoes weren’t as bad up here—though the cigar smoke also helped with that.

Adam took another puff. The spicy, rich taste of the tobacco pleasantly filled his mouth.

“Hell of a nice place you’ve got here,” he commented.

“Thank you,” the priest replied evenly.

“Have your people been here long?”

“The first settlers came about forty years ago,” Kuyoc said.

“From the Peten or Izabal?” Adam casually asked.

There was a pause the length of a breath before Kuyoc replied.

“You know your history,” the priest noted carefully.

Adam knew enough of it. The Spanish-descended elites in Guatemala had been grabbing lands and enslaving the Maya for generations—whatever nicer terms they might use for the latter. The men and women forced to labor on the coffee plantations were paid abysmal wages and subjected to all manner of abuses, including beatings and starvation. Disease was also a problem, as workers compelled to labor in the lowland areas returned home with malaria, parasites, and other ailments that then spread through their villages.

Things had only worsened in the 1870s, when the government got in on the game as well and began drafting unwilling Mayans into massive—and massively underpaid—public works projects.

Based on what Kuyoc said about the timing of their exodus, the people of Santa Dolores had at least been spared that.

“If you folks got out forty years ago, then whoever was in charge deserves an award,” Adam commented darkly.

“Felciana’s husband.” Kuyoc took another slow drag on his cigar. “Right after the local governor sent him the first mandamiento.”

The word translated as order, but Adam knew what it really meant—a draft for more involuntary workers. Any alcalde who didn’t offer up the right numbers could be jailed, or else fined and forced to work on one of the plantations himself.

There was an awful relief in knowing that the old alcalde of Santa Dolores had been principled and insightful enough to see the writing on the wall before things really got bad. So many of the highland villages in Guatemala had been devastated by the mandamientos, which transformed them from thriving communities to impoverished, ragged ghost towns.

But making the choice to run—to leave behind lands that might have been farmed by your ancestors for generations—wouldn’t have been easy either.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Adam said.

The words felt inadequate, but they were the best he had.

“I didn’t go through it,” the priest replied coolly as the smoke curled up from his cigar. “But the sentiment is appreciated.”

The reply surprised him.

Adam took a better look at the scar on Kuyoc’s face and the curved fang that hung beside the crucifix around the priest’s neck.

“You recognized my Yucatec back at the church,” Adam noted tentatively.

Kuyoc snorted.

“Barely.”

“And there aren’t a hell of a lot of people speaking English in Guatemala,” Adam pointed out.

Kuyoc leaned back against the wall. He gazed out over the quiet sprawl of the village, where candles were beginning to wink to light in the windows against the growing gloom.

“I am not from Guatemala,” the priest finally replied.

“Sorry,” Adam said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

Kuyoc took another draw on his cigar. Adam did the same. He decided to keep whatever other questions he might have to himself.

“I came from San Pedro Siris,” Kuyoc finally offered.

Adam went still as the significance of the name—San Pedro Siris—sank in.

“The San Pedro Siris up by the Mexican border?” he pressed carefully.

“Mmm hmm,” the priest confirmed, still looking out over the sunset.

“I heard some bad things went down around there thirty or so years ago,” Adam continued cautiously.

“You could say that.”

Adam could’ve said more than that.

He’d had the story in pieces from a few different sources over his years in the colony, but as he understood it, the village of San Pedro Siris had been burned to the ground by the British Army’s West India Regiment.

Adam knew a bit of the context. In the 1860s, Mexico, the Republic of Yucatán, and British Honduras had been wrangling over where to draw the borders of their respective lands.

Right in the middle of the areas under dispute were a few Mayan communities… communities that insisted on staking their own claims to some of the territory. Probably because it was territory that their ancestors had been living on for the last few centuries or so.

The big players in the game didn’t really love the idea of ceding any of their land to a bunch of natives. Some of the Maya had been smart enough to figure out how to play the colonists off of each other. They made alliances with Mexico or the Yucatán, who offered to confirm their land rights in exchange for help keeping the British out of it—or vice-versa.

San Pedro Siris had been caught right up in the middle of it. The alcalde there had claimed to be an ally of the British, but rumor had it that the village was secretly supporting the Ichaiche Maya revolutionary leader Marcus Canul.

It had all fully gone to hell in 1867, when some civil servant on his way to San Pedro Siris was attacked by Canul’s men. Nobody really knew for sure whether the village had been complicit in the raid, or whether Canul had simply turned up at an opportune moment.

The colonial authorities didn’t care. Burning the village sent a message… and what was one less Mayan settlement to worry about?

If Kuyoc was from San Pedro Siris, Adam wasn’t surprised that he had run. Most likely, everybody had run when the army was approaching the village… but most of the rest of them had eventually gone back. Adam knew that the town had been rebuilt a couple of years after the burning.

Kuyoc was a priest, which would’ve made him an important part of the community. So why was he still here in Santa Dolores and not back home with the rest of his people?

The question itched, but Adam was pretty sure it wasn’t his place to ask it.

“Sorry you were caught up in that,” he said instead.

“Are you?” Kuyoc returned mildly.

Adam met the priest’s eyes.

“I don’t have much time for people who burn down civilian homes and call it…” He paused and rubbed his face tiredly. “Hell, I don’t even know what they call it. But it ain’t right.”

The priest studied him with narrowed eyes.

“An unusual point of view for a gentleman of your extraction,” he pointed out.

“I’ve never had much time for my extraction,” Adam admitted wryly. “But how’d you end up all the way out here?”

Kuyoc’s expression subtly shuttered.

“That is a longer story,” he replied.

“Well, I appreciate that you took a chance on us,” Adam offered. “The lady and I had a bit of a… complicated time getting here, and I’m glad she has a shot at a decent night’s sleep tonight.”

“Mrs. Nitherscott-Watby is your…?”

Kuyoc let the question hang.

“Uhh…” Adam started awkwardly.

The priest continued to wait, arching an eyebrow.

“Partner?” Adam finally suggested.

“?Compa?era o socia?” Kuyoc returned.

Adam knew the difference between those two possible translations of the word partner. The first implied that Ellie was his sidekick or companion. The other was used for a business associate.

“Er… little of both?” he tried.

The priest shook his head tiredly and took another puff of his cigar.

“So what brings you to our corner of the mountains?” he asked.

“Actually, we’re looking for a set of ruins,” Adam admitted.

Kuyoc stilled.

“Oh?” the priest casually prompted—maybe just a little too casually, Adam thought.

“Maybe you’ve heard about them,” Adam continued. “They’d be about three days’ walk from here. You head north toward the next tributary of the Belize, and then dogleg to the west. There’s something about a… River of Smoke being nearby,” he filled in, pulling up the memory of the final landmark on Ellie’s map.

“So you are on a treasure hunt,” Kuyoc returned.

Adam suppressed a wince as he thought of the looted cave that they had passed through earlier.

“No,” he replied firmly—firmly enough that Kuyoc looked over at him with a little surprise.

“Ellie’s a scholar,” Adam continued purposefully. “She thinks whatever’s there could be important for understanding the history around here.”

He stopped again as he realized how that might sound to a man whose ancestors could very well have been part of the history he and Ellie were looking for.

“She’s not going to take anything,” Adam quickly declared. “She’s… she’s not like that. Whatever she finds there, she’ll want to protect it.”

Kuyoc’s response was uncharacteristically serious.

“Protect it from whom?”

Adam opened his mouth to answer—and realized he didn’t have one. Of course, he was sure that Ellie meant to protect her finds from guys like the ones who had rifled that cave… but what about the colonial authorities, or the academics who wrote all those fancy journal articles? Those were the people who’d end up coming here to excavate everything… and then carry it all back to some storage room under a London museum.

At least in the storage room, any artifacts would be safe from the black market, Adam reminded himself… and yet somehow— as he looked out over a village of actual, living Mayans—that didn’t feel like enough.

Still, finding out if the people here knew anything about the ruins could save him and Ellie a hell of a lot of time wandering around in the bush. It’d also minimize some very real risks.

“You—ah—heard anything about a place like that?” Adam pressed awkwardly.

Smoke bloomed over Kuyoc’s head like a fading ghost.

“I know of the area you are describing,” he said at last.

Adam perked up.

“You do?”

“Sure,” the priest replied easily. “It’s the realm of the k’ak’as ba’alo’ob.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know that one,” Adam admitted.

“It means evil spirits,” Kuyoc said cheerfully.

“Evil… huh?” Adam echoed dumbly.

“The hungry spirits of the restless dead and their monstrous servants,” Kuyoc explained. “They suck the living souls out of anyone foolish enough to trespass on their land.”

Adam was momentarily speechless. He’d pegged the priest for more of a rationalist, but here the guy was casually sharing stories of soul-sucking evil dead as though they were talking about lousy weather.

“Right,” Adam returned carefully.

“We’ve all heard the stories, of course,” the priest continued with a casual wave of his cigar. “How there are great, black beasts that haunt the night, driving their fangs into the skulls of anyone reckless enough to go wandering there.”

“That’s… vivid,” Adam said.

His gaze involuntarily dropped to the finger-length, wickedly pointed tooth that hung from the other cord around the priest’s neck.

“Is that where you got your—er…” he began.

“This?” Kuyoc replied, lifting the pendant. “Naw. This is just a bit of antler.”

It didn’t look like a bit of antler.

“It is all a load of superstition,” the priest continued. He hesitated as he took another puff. “Probably. Of course, none of my people are willing to go there.”

“Yeah. Sure,” Adam replied. “Makes sense.”

“But I am sure you are perfectly qualified to wander into an unknown and potentially dangerous area of the forest with nothing more than a lady scholar, a machete, and a reasonably nice Winchester,” Kuyoc neatly concluded.

Adam bristled a bit.

“It’s a great Winchester,” he retorted. “And I kinda am, actually.”

“Oh?” the priest prompted as his gaze sharpened. “And how is that?”

“I’m the assistant surveyor general for the colony.”

“Ah,” Kuyoc replied. “So you are that Mr. Bates.”

“You’ve heard of me?” Adam blurted in surprise.

Kuyoc shrugged.

“I mean—a little. A very small amount. Mostly just your name in passing,” he noted dismissively.

The priest pushed nimbly to his feet.

“Well, then,” he continued. “If you will excuse me, it is getting late. I should be getting my rest. Old bones, you see.”

Adam thought of how energetically the guy had practically danced up the hill a couple of hours ago.

“Sure.” Adam forced back his skepticism as he rose as well. “Thank you—for all of this. It’s very much appreciated.”

“What is it you Yankees say? Don’t mention it.” Kuyoc flashed him a smile. “Good evening to you, Mr. Bates.”

“K’a’ak’ate, Padre,” Adam replied, using some of his more reliable Mopan words.

Kuyoc gave him a nod, and then was gone.