He assumed it was some sort of test, but he was not in the mood. “You do it. We’ll get there faster.”
“You tell me all the time that you’re Maroon. That you’re part of us. Time to start acting like one.”
He resented the implications.
“They call you B’rer Anansi,” Frank said to him.
“Who does?”
He hated the mythical reference. Anansi was often depicted as a short, small man or, worse, a spider with human qualities whose most notable characteristic was greed. He survived by cunning and a glibness of speech. Bene’s mother used to tell him how the slaves told tales of Anansi.
“I don’t think they mean to insult you,” Frank said. “It’s just their way of describing you. Anansi, for all his faults, is loved. We’ve told his stories ever since being brought here.”
He wasn’t interested in what others thought. Not anymore. He was here, finally, in the lost mine. “Which tunnel?”
“I know,” Tre said.
He faced his friend.
“I read in the journal we found in Cuba, the one from Luis de Torres, how this place was chosen as the
“A vault?”
Tre nodded. “A hiding place. Columbus himself came, inspected, and chose it. They hid something away here. Something of great value, or at least that’s what de Torres wrote.”
“Like crates of gold from Panama?” he asked.
Tre shook his head. “I don’t know. He talked of this mine and three paths. He wrote that to know where to go is to know where you are from. Then he rattled off a list of things.
None of which meant anything to him.
“You have to be Jewish to know the answers,” Tre said. “I looked them up. There were three vessels for each altar. Three times the word
Clarke nodded.
“What’s down there?” Bene asked.
“Something that is not Maroon or Taino.” Frank approached the doorway and shone his light inside. “Maroons discovered this cave long after the last Taino died. We respected them. So we protected this.”
Bene wondered who Clarke was speaking to. Him? Or the ancestors? If duppies did in fact exist, this would be their home.
Frank led the way into the cavern, its walls the same coarse stone. He wondered about gold veins since he’d seen little evidence of any mining. He asked Clarke about them.
“In the other tunnels there are offshoots that lead to crevices. In some the Tainos found gold. Not much ore, but enough to attract the Spanish.”
The duct meandered in a straight line, the air becoming progressively more stale. Bene felt light-headed. “Why is it hard to breathe?”
“That sound you heard when we entered from the pool, like the earth sucking lungfuls of air, then exhaling? It creates a suction. More bad air here than good, which was why the Tainos chose this place to die.”
Not comforting, and he saw Tre was likewise concerned. But with his eyes he said to his friend,
His head began to hurt.
But he said nothing.
“The Tainos knew religion,” Frank said, “in every way the Spanish did. They just didn’t think themselves superior to everyone. They respected their world and one another. Their mistake was thinking white men felt the same way.”
They’d walked maybe fifty meters, as best he could estimate. And they’d risen slightly. Their three lights revealed only a few meters ahead, the darkness around them absolute. No moisture anywhere, which was unusual for Jamaica’s caves, which were generally saturated from underground lakes and rivers.
Then he saw something.
In the first wash of Frank’s light.
Ten meters before them.
A wooden door, the planks warped and misshapen, blackened from time. No hinges lined any side. Instead the rectangle simply fit into an opening carved from the stone. Chunks of rock and boulders lay scattered on the tunnel floor, nearly blocking the way.
Bene stepped forward, intent on climbing over the debris and seeing what was there.
Frank grabbed his sweaty arm. “You sure you want to go in there?”
