Maroon Rising (12 page)

The cold made the minutes drag, but as the sun rose above the gray band on the horizon, the clouds to the north parted to reveal a valley with other peaks rising in all directions. Nanny pressed against me and I felt her shivering.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Since you’ve come here before and not seen any flash on the mountain, let’s each focus on different sections of the valley,” I said. “Increase the odds that one of us will spot a flash, if there is one.”

The sun rose slowly. Long shadows reached out and gradually shrank back toward the northern slope of the Blue Mountain peak. The scenery and height, or maybe the altitude, took my breath away. Nanny’s teeth gradually stopped chattering. And then—just when I thought the sun was high enough that we’d either missed whatever we were supposed to see or there wasn’t anything to see—her hand shot forward.

“There!”

Stephen and I turned to see her arm was outstretched downward toward a sparkle of pearly light.

“I see it!”

If you weren’t searching for it, you might never notice the flash—or was it a reflection? Didn’t look like one—more of a radiance than a reflection. And whatever it was, based on the distance from here, it had to be about the size of a Frisbee.

“Must be over near the crossroads,” Stephen said.

“Crossroads? Like we could drive the truck down there?” I said.

His long glance made me feel foolish.

“No, where many trails intersect. It looks to be close to that place.”

“Didn’t Tarrah mention some cross of evil” I said. Nanny and Stephen looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

“Then let’s go down from here,” she said.

The descent was easier than the climb had been, especially once we picked up a hidden trail a third of the way down the peak. ”We’re in the heart of the Maroon region from the time before the peace treaty had been signed,” Nanny said.

I studied the shadows and imagined how the Maroon warriors had moved through the hills like silent sentinels, dispatching any Spaniard or Brit foolish enough to come hunting them.

Stephen stopped suddenly and held his hand up. His gaze was fixed further east, and he squinted as he studied the ridgeline to our right.

“I thought I heard something.”

“Like what?” I said.

He didn’t answer, just stood there a few minutes before continuing down the trail. Nanny and I shrugged and followed after him.

The Blue Mountain range was lush. I’d once heard the country was 98 percent green, which right now felt 100 percent accurate. There was no sign of civilization anywhere in sight. Only countless hills, many green and rounded so they looked like rows of broccoli with their heads all standing up straight. The environment literally hadn’t changed for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The light churning mist and old growth landscape made me half expect an ancient Maroon to pounce on us.

The angle of descent eased. I could see nothing but the trees and shrubs pressing in on us, yet the narrow trail continued. I bit off the urge to ask if Stephen knew where, exactly, we were going.

After another twenty minutes, I had my answer.

T
he crossroads consisted of two trails intersecting at rough right angles. Otherwise unmarked, the trails themselves had narrowed to dirt lines that looked as if they were now used only by animals, with vegetation encroaching from the sides.

“The crossroads were once a location where Windward and Leeward Maroons met to share information on their strategies, their numbers, their victories and losses,” Nanny said.

“You’ve been here?”

“It’s a sacred spot, Buck. Once prohibited to all but the leaders, scouts, and warriors who had killed the most enemies.”

I liked the sound of “prohibited.” That could easily mean a place with low traffic, exactly the kind of location you’d want to hide items of value. Could it be the cross of evil that Tarrah had mentioned?

“Can you tell where the reflection was coming from?” I said.

Stephen glanced from Nanny to me.

“I have an idea.” He again turned his eyes toward her and waited until she gave a discreet nod. “Come.”

He stepped forward into the wedge of land between the two far trails. He pushed through some thick brush until he stopped at a flat rock wall that led straight up.

Dead end.

The gray rock surface was coated in moss, lichen, vines, roots. It was impenetrable, an impasse.

“Now what?” I said.

Stephen again looked at Nanny, who looked sullen. After a five-count, I stepped forward.

“Let me see the archive material again.”

Nanny swung the pack off her shoulder and took her time removing the plastic case that held the old documents—which the shade of the woods would have made it impossible to read without the flashlight. I shuffled through them until I found the one that had led us here, alluding to the
flash at dawn
. The next page had what appeared to be water or age stains, and under the glare of the LED light I saw the faint, mysterious illustrations—only a few lines: curved, angled and parallel. The next page was much cleaner and had ancient writing on it that Nanny had previously deciphered as someone’s biography.

I held the drawing up for both of them to see, a sense of frustration blooming inside me.

“These sketches mean anything to you?”

Stephen immediately turned to Nanny, whose eyes revealed nothing. Then she looked at my face.

“My guess is Taino petroglyphs,” she said.

“Taino Indians were here long before the Spanish—and certainly the British, or Maroons,” I said. “What would they have to do with …”

I turned to face the rock wall, turned back to look at them. Stephen nodded. I glanced at the wall again, then bent over and started searching the forest floor until I found a flat, sharp rock.

I began to scrape moss off the face of the wall. Irritated that they just watched me, I continued scraping until the edge of the rock caught in a groove.

Nanny stepped closer.

Now, more gently, I peeled away the loose green material until I had uncovered an image. An ancient petroglyph of what looked like a telephone pole with three crossbars on top. What the heck?

I had researched many a Taino site, but since they hadn’t been much for hoarding precious metals or stones, they’d been of minimal interest. They had inhabited much of the Caribbean at one time but had pretty much died out—slaughtered by more aggressive tribes or done in by the diseases Europeans brought to the islands.

“This mean anything to you?”

Nanny leaned closer and after a quick look shook her head.

“And that flash we saw? The woods would cover this petroglyph, and any others on here. Something higher up must have caused the flash.”

Stephen pointed up the sheer rock wall. I tilted my head back—there! I could see a narrow natural shelf bathed in morning light but also coated in fauna of the moist woodland. Leaves, vines, and lichen hung off the shelf.

“So?”

“There’s a natural chunk of quartz above that shelf that has attracted people for eons,” Nanny said. “More petroglyphs, too. But we never connected the quartz to the flash from Blue Mountain.”

“
Eons
?” If the area was that well trampled, the odds of us finding anything here seemed slim. And if they already knew about the quartz and the petroglyphs, why had Nanny and Stephen waited until we were here to mention them, even if they didn’t get the connection? Maybe it was all the silent, significant glances they kept giving each other, but I was getting more than a little agitated.

I glanced straight up—there was no direct climbing route to the ledge—then walked forward around the corner of the wall. There were crevices and enough exposed jagged edges for a climb, so I started up.

“Be careful, Buck,” Nanny said. “No way to get you out of here if you fall and break something.”

Her voice already had a distant sound as curiosity drove me up the wall like a spider monkey. I zigged and zagged my way toward the southeastern-facing shelf. The final several feet required me to grab hold of the rock outcropping and pull myself up. The rocks dug into my fingers—my arms shook, my face scraped against the damp wall—

“Buck?”

With my arms still shaking, I finally hauled myself onto the shelf and pushed my back against the wall, taking a moment to catch my breath. My feet dangled some twenty-five feet above Nanny and Stephen. She looked frightened, and even Stephen was staring up at me with his mouth open.

A big exhale nearly caused me to slip off the front of what was not that big a ledge. I edged sideways—carefully—and spotted a dinner-plate-sized chunk of rose quartz embedded in the wall and surrounded by matte-black rock, which accounted for the beacon that had caught the sunlight. So much for its being Morgan’s stash site.

“What do you see?” Nanny called up.

“You mean you haven’t been up here before?”

“No …”

“You didn’t seem very excited about the petroglyphs.”

“Of course I was. Why else would we have come down here?”

Stephen said nothing.

I pulled the sharp flat rock from my pocket and started scraping at the moss, which peeled off like dried wallpaper. I could make out what looked like a curved edge. I scraped at it—then another, and another. After several minutes I’d uncovered a carving—several carvings–of symbols. They were circular and oval and all connected.

“What have you found?” Stephen said.

“I don’t know.”

My voice must not have carried, because Nanny called up with the same question. From my breast pocket I removed a pencil and piece of paper and tried to copy the symbols as accurately as I could. I dug at the moss around them in a wide radius but uncovered nothing else.

Satisfied I’d found everything there was to find, I reversed course and dropped below the shelf. My fingers caught the edge and I hung until my right foot caught a toehold on the edge that allowed me to reach around, grab an indentation in the wall, and swing over until I could shimmy my way down.

Ideas ricocheted around my mind, drawing on past experiences with Mayan and other wall carvings.

“Buck!”

BOOM!

Gunshot
?

My ass slipped, everything spun, my shoulder bounced off rock—sharp pain, then a branch cracked, pine needles brushed past my face, my shirt ripped—

THUD!

I hit the ground and saw stars through the pain.

I lay there a moment, taking a quick inventory. Nothing felt broken, but blood flowed from multiple gashes. The sketch of the wall carving was clutched in my hand. Looking straight up at the massive pine tree I’d careened through, I saw broken branches that had softened my fall.

“What you got there, Reilly?”

No way!

I turned to face the only man on Jamaica likely to be shooting at me.

“W
hat the hell are you doing here?” My voice sounded like I’d just reached puberty. “You shot at me
again
, you son of a bitch.”

Gunner stood over me. There were two men behind him—big men—and both of them were holding shotguns.

He laughed that hyena-pitched cackle I’d learned to loathe, his small square teeth and his blue mirrored sunglasses catching the light.

“Not yet we haven’t.”

“Are you following us?”

“We’re just hunting, Reilly.” He paused, his double entendre floating in the air. “Hogs. You seen any?”

He reached down and yanked the sketch out of my hand.

“Hey!” I rolled onto my knee and stood up.

“You okay, Buck?” Nanny’s voice came from behind them.

“What the hell kind of drawing’s this?”

“How come you’re not out in Port Royal, Gunner? You run out of brewer’s vats?”

He ignored me, the sketch still held up to his face. Then he lowered it.

“The question is, Reilly, what are
you
doing out here—with her?”

Nanny had walked around them and now stood next to me. Her face was hard. Stephen was nowhere in sight. I focused on one of Gunner’s associates—Cuffee, the enraged Maroon from Moore Town.

“You!” I said. “Did you beat up Colonel Stanley?”

Gunner cackled again. “You know Cuffee? Small island, ain’t it?”