“It was,” he admitted. “My father and I began to focus our attentions elsewhere. If we couldn’t find the mask, we would have to find the city itself.”
“But the fact that an entire city has remained hidden for centuries,” Raine said, “implies that finding it isn’t going to be easy.”
King felt a pang of loss stab at him. His father had died searching for that elusive city. “That’s right,” he admitted, trying to focus his thoughts. “But then I got a lucky break. A construction crew working on a new tourist complex outside of Kingston in Jamaica stumbled upon an underground chamber they didn’t know was there. Turns out there had once been a sugar plantation on the site, with a large house attached to it. Records showed that it burned down in 1707—”
“The same year that the reports of the Black Death began,” Raine pointed out. King felt a pang of annoyance that he had picked up on that fact so quickly.
“Yes,” he agreed tightly. “But I don’t think he was responsible for the house’s destruction.”
“Oh?”
King began to rummage through his satchel while he continued. “The archaeologists who examined the site — the house's wine cellar they believed — found, among the racks of bottles, the remains of three humans and… this.” He pulled another book out of his bag, this one even more battered and obviously far older than his notebook.
“This,” he explained, “is the diary of Emily Hamilton, the daughter of the plantation’s owner.” He handed the book to Raine to look at, although it was wrapped in a sealed, acid-free plastic bag so he could not open it.
“In it, she talks about a slave who saved her when she had an accident during the annual burning of the sugar crop. She convinced her father to make him her manservant and over the course of the next year, she mentions him a number of times, always referring to him as ‘My Hero’.”
“Sweet,” Raine rolled his eyes sickeningly.
“Most of it is just the prittle-prattle of a young English girl living on a Caribbean island during the eighteenth century, attending dinners and parties, making eyes with Mr Darcy-wannabes, that sort of thing. It’s got more emotional ups and downs than Eastenders—”
“Than what?”
King ignored him. “The book itself is historically unimportant. To raise funding, the local museum auctioned it off.”
“Historically unimportant to everyone except to you,” Raine realised.
King nodded. “She became very close to her ‘Hero,’ closer than would be expected for that period in fact. But she does write down, somewhat fancifully, about some of the adventures he had in his homeland. She writes about her ‘Hero’s’ great city, about some of his battles and, most importantly, she mentions a ‘magical mask.’ But,” he added before Raine could interject, “what is really interesting is where the dairy ends.”
“Ends?”
“The last entry is made on the 14th May, 1707. It’s a perfectly normal account of a perfectly normal day, just like any that came before it. Except for the fact that, only two thirds of her way through the book, she makes no further entries. It is also the day that the Hamilton estate on Jamaica was burned to the ground, tragically along with every member of the Hamilton family, and every one of their slaves and servants. There are no records of what caused the fire, only that nothing was left.”
King sat up and shivered, hugging his knees. A thin layer of condensation had settled onto them both and, with no more whisky, the cold was beginning to settle in. “A month later,” he concluded, “the first mention of the Black Death appears. To the slaves of the Caribbean islands, he becomes a bit of a folk hero, a Robin Hood of the New World if you like.”
“So, you think the Oni of the Bouda was captured by slavers and taken to Jamaica where he became the manservant of this Emily chick. Then somehow he escaped and became the ‘Black Death’, attacking ships and colonies across the Caribbean before setting sail on a quest to find all the pieces of a magical mask so that he could travel back in time and save his tribe from annihilation?” Raine laughed a little. “Are you insane?”
King looked at him indignantly, a swell of anger resurfacing. “Yeah,” he replied sharply. “A little.”
Raine raised his hands in conciliatory surrender. “Hey, I’m not criticising your theory, Benny. In fact, to someone who knows jack-shit about this stuff, it all makes a certain amount of sense to me.” He frowned though, troubled. “Two things though. If this Kha’um and the Black Death are the same man, how could the Black Death be seen wielding a golden sword and dagger? I mean, surely they would have been confiscated from Kha’um when he was captured?”
It was King’s turn to frown. “That’s something I’ve never been able to reconcile,” he admitted.
“Also, why would Emily Hamilton be hiding in a basement when her house was on fire?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you said the archaeologists found her remains in—”
“No, they weren’t hers,” King corrected. “The remains they found were all from males. And they didn’t die because of the fire. They all had indications of blunt force trauma. They were killed before the fire had a chance to finish them off.”
“But, to have dropped her diary means she was in the basement?”
“Cellar,” King muttered. “And yes, I presume she must have been. But she made it out and whoever those remains belong to, didn’t.”
Raine narrowed his eyes at King. “Let me guess. You know who those remains belong to?”
King looked out across the black expanse of the Amazon far below. “That very same night,” he said, “a lookout post on Jamaica spotted a ship off the coast. They logged and reported its presence but it apparently vanished. The report was never investigated further.”
Raine eyed the archaeologist. “So. ?”
“So… the ship flew the Jolly Roger.”
“The Jolly Roger?” Raine asked, frowning, the magic of the story broken. “Like the Skull and Crossbones?”
“Yeah,” King said, perplexed.
Raine laughed. “I thought that was just fictional, something invented for Captain Hook stories!”
“What?!” King choked. “No, it was—”
“In fact,” a new, far lovelier sounding and much less slurred voice joined the conversation. “The skull and crossbones image on the Jolly Roger was first recorded in 1687 and has been used by pirates the world over until the present day.”
“Sid!” Raine and King both jumped to their feet.
“Glad to see you two boys have made friends,” she said, only half joking. She smiled at Raine, her features distorted by the flash of her head-torch. “Now, if you don’t mind, at two o’clock in the morning, I’d like to steal my, now drunken,” she observed, “boyfriend away to bed.”
King suddenly looked sheepish. “Sid, I—”
“Now, say goodnight to your friend, Ben,” she said, mock-motheringly. “It’s time for bed.”
He looked at Raine and shrugged. “Night.”
Raine nodded, “Night,” he said.
Watching their silhouettes fade into the darkness, fingers tentatively touching until firmly holding one another’s hands, Raine felt a pang of emotion, a flash of painful memory of his own fingers tentatively touching and then holding the hand of his own love, in another jungle on a distant continent.
He blinked the image of her face out of his eyes and took a final swig from the dregs of the bourbon bottle before heading back to the mess tent to find another.
Sid led King through the maze of tents, wincing as, aided by the bourbon, he tripped on several of the guy-ropes and caused a stir of mumblings from within.