She hesitated, not even a breath away from him, and switched to English. “We’re being followed?”
“Does your neck itch?”
“No more than usual in the jungle,” she said wryly. “Getting used to the insects takes me a week or two.”
He nodded. “But you know that we’re being watched. Not by the same people, but we’re never alone for more than a few minutes at a time.”
She shrugged. “There are three villages within several kilometers. Cenote de Balam is sacred, and this is a big holy day for the Maya. I’d be surprised if there weren’t people gathering around the area. Plus, I’m a Reyes Balam with a strange male at my side. Naturally they would look out for me.”
For a long moment Hunter weighed what Lina had said. Then he nodded. “So much for my fantasies of jungle sex.”
Lina smiled. “C’mon. Maybe we’ll get lucky in the ruins.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“I’ve never had so much fun in my life,” she admitted.
“Will you enjoy it as much when you figure out it’s not a game?” he asked softly.
Before she could find an answer, Hunter was moving down the trail, away from the cenote.
And Lina.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
HUNTER STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE SMALL CLEARING where Lina had parked the Bronco. The vehicle looked undisturbed, yet they had rarely been without the presence of voices on the wind.
“Wait,” Hunter said as Lina headed for the Bronco.
He circled the vehicle, saw nothing suspicious, and waved her over. After they got in, he watched Lina back the Bronco until she found a place to turn. She hadn’t said a word since the cenote.
“You drive very well,” he said.
“I thought you were mad at me.”
“I’m mad at the situation, not you.”
She got the vehicle straightened out and gave him a long look.
He smiled gently.
After a moment she put the Bronco in gear and headed back toward the main road.
“I’ve been driving estate roads since I was old enough to see over the dashboard,” she said. “Philip liked having someone to run errands for him on the digs. That way he didn’t have to leave a site for months at a time.”
“The villagers don’t drive?”
“Once a dig is set up, Philip doesn’t allow any vehicle but his own in the area.”
Hunter smiled thinly. “That puts the brakes on the size and quantity of what people can steal.”
“We have very little theft here.”
Crutchfeldt’s words about grave robbers at work on Reyes Balam lands echoed in Hunter’s mind, but he didn’t say anything. Whoever or whatever El Maya was, he terrified people to the point that outside artifact poachers apparently didn’t set foot on Reyes Balam lands—or if they did, they died.
“Loyalty is good,” Hunter said, “but not all humans are.”
“If theft occurs, it’s punished the Maya way.”
“Which is?”
“If the thief is from outside the estate lands,” Lina said reluctantly, “the villagers beat him. Savagely. If the thief is from one of our villages, he gets the beating after his right hand is chopped off with a machete.”
“That would limit the thieves,” Hunter said mildly.
“It’s the dark side of a quiet village,” Lina said. “I understand why the customs exist, but I don’t like all of them, any more than I like their preferential treatment of men over women. I don’t like the second-class citizenship of most Maya in Mexico either. Things are changing, but slowly. It’s education that works in the long run.”
“Choices,” Hunter said.
She nodded, then concentrated on a difficult stretch of the miserable “road.” He settled back and kept note of the state of the track, the compass in the dashboard, and any landmarks the jungle permitted. He could mentally retrace every bit of their way, starting at the compound and working outward. It was a skill that had become habit in his childhood, where river marshes and brush formed an enticing maze for a curious boy.
Lina turned onto the main estate road, followed it for a time, then turned off onto a side road that slowly unraveled into a limestone track barely worn through the relentless vegetation. The track dodged around bigger and bigger trees until only trunks and vines and the most shade-hardy shrubs existed at ground level. The effect was almost parklike, but experience told Hunter that walking wouldn’t be easy.
With automatic motions, Lina turned the Bronco and backed down the roughest trail until she finally came to a stop.
“We’re here,” she said, turning off the engine.
He looked around and saw nothing much different than he had been seeing. “If you say so.”
“The foot trail is off to the left.”
She reached for the backpack, only to have him snag it first.
“It’s less than a kilometer,” she said.
“What is?”
“A surprise.”
Hunter compared where they were to the map he had built in his mind of the Reyes Balam estate. Right now they were perhaps two kilometers as the crow—or macaw—flies from the compound itself, and about a quarter of that to the Jaguar Cenote.
Eagerly Lina got out and headed for the trail that experience rather than her eyes told her was waiting. Hunter shut the Bronco door quietly behind him and walked into another aspect of the jungle world.
Copal and ceiba trees dominated the jungle, tall and mighty, their branches lifting to an unseen sky and their roots gripping the earth like a thousand snakes. For a moment Hunter saw the world as the Maya had. A huge ceiba tree was the only thing stitching the world together, the World Tree rooted in hell and holding heaven in its arms.
If the tree released its grip, reality would fly away.
The hair on the back of his arms and neck stood up. The last time he’d sensed anything like this, he had been far out from civilization, alone in the desert, at the edge of lost, in the presence of something that was far bigger than he was, something utterly indifferent to all things human.
The raucous call of a macaw grounded him again. Up above his head, a toucan snapped its bill. The thick, heavy bill looked like a fighting claw without a crab. The green on green of the jungle seethed with hidden life. Even when the jungle looked quiet, it was alive, moving, breathing, as restless in its own way as the sea.
And as relentless.
“Hunter?” Lina called softly.
He turned and walked toward her. She watched him, enjoying the lithe efficiency of his movements. He was the only man she’d ever known who was as comfortable in the wilds of the inhuman jungle as he was in the human jungle of a big city. She could picture him on a dig with an ease that was frightening.
She didn’t know. Part of her—the part that thought of her parents’ marriage—was wary of finding out. The rest of her hummed with anticipation.
“Are we there?” he said.
Lina realized she’d been standing and staring at Hunter. She shook herself.
“Until we reach the path, try not to leave any sign that we were here,” she said.
He gave her a questioning look.
