Hunt at the Well of Eternity (13 page)

He threw up his hands to block the other man’s swing, but as he did so, Gabriel heard a whistling sound in the air. Something wrapped around the would-be killer’s hand before the machete could fall, jerking the man’s arm backward as he grunted in surprise. A rustle of leaves, the flicker of sunlight on a blade…

And Gabriel saw the man’s head topple from his shoulders to bounce once and roll a couple of feet away. His expression was still surprised, not pained. There hadn’t been time for that.

The headless corpse swayed on top of him. Gabriel shoved it away. As the body thudded to the ground beside him, Gabriel looked up into the craggy, grinning face of Paco Escalante. The machete in the bandit leader’s hand had cut through the man’s neck so cleanly and swiftly there was hardly a smear of blood on the blade.

“It appears we found you just in time, Gabriel,” Escalante said as he reached down to take Gabriel’s hand and help him to his feet. “Heads must roll, eh?”

Gabriel wiped the back of a hand across his mouth and then nodded. That was about as close a call as he could remember. “Yeah. I appreciate it, Paco. You, too, Tomás,” he added with another nod to the burly bandit who was unwrapping his bullwhip from the wrist of the dead man.

Gabriel looked around. Escalante and Tomás appeared to be alone.

“Is Cierra…?” he asked.

“I’m up here, Gabriel,” she called from the top of the bluff. Relief flooded through him at the sound of her voice. He looked up and saw Cierra standing next to Mariella.

Gabriel turned his attention back to Escalante. “And the rest of your men?”

The bandit leader’s face became grim. “Perhaps some of them on the other side of the river got away. I do not know. But of the ones on this side, we are all that is left.”

“I’m sorry, Paco,” Gabriel said, and meant it. The men had been bandits, had probably been responsible for a great deal of death and suffering over the years. But he wouldn’t be here without their help, and neither would Cierra or Mariella.

“When you live a life such as ours,” Escalante said, “you don’t expect to die in bed with your great-grandchildren around you. At least we accounted for quite a few of them, too. Unfortunately, there were just too many. And they had those devil guns.”

“They have more than one machine gun?”

Escalante nodded. “There was one mounted on each of the three trucks.”

“Podnemovitch came armed for bear.”

“Podnemovitch?” Escalante repeated with a frown.

“The big, broken-nosed son of a bitch who’s in charge of that bunch. Tell me he was one of the ones you took down.”

Escalante shook his head as Cierra and Mariella began climbing down the vines from the top of the bluff. “He lives,” Escalante said. “But he is not the man in charge. I saw him taking orders from another man. Tall, lean, gray hair.”

“Esparza’s with him,” Cierra said as she reached the ground beside them. “I saw him, too, Gabriel.”

“Really? Esparza himself?” Gabriel said. “I wouldn’t have expected him to come down here. It’s pretty far from the world of mansions and cocktail parties.”

“That tells us how important this is to him,” Cierra said.

“Of course it’s important,” Mariella said. “I assure you it’s the most important secret in the world. Any man would come in person to see it. Any man.”

Gabriel ached to find out more about this important secret, starting with just what it was, but with Podnemovitch and the rest of Esparza’s men searching both sides of the river for them, there was no time to stand around and talk. Instead the five of them began working their way through the jungle away from the stream. When they reached a jutting shoulder of the mountain that formed the eastern side of the canyon, Mariella took the lead.

“I know every trail and hiding place in these mountains,” she said. “We must reach Cuchatlán before Esparza and his men, so that we can warn my people.”

It took what was left of the morning to reach a safe place where they could briefly rest. Mariella led them to a pass high on the mountain and then down the far side into an even narrower canyon. Empty stomachs began to remind them that it had been a long time since any of them had eaten. They had taken the two rifles carried by Podnemovitch’s men with them and had several weapons of their own, but they couldn’t risk any shots to bring down game because of the noise. A swift throw of Tomás’s machete caught a brightly plumaged bird in mid flight, though. In a matter of minutes he had dressed out the bird and had it roasting on a sharpened stick over a small fire.

There wasn’t much meat to the bird and it didn’t taste particularly good, but Gabriel ate hungrily anyway as he hunkered on his heels along with the others. In this wild setting, they might well have been members of some prehistoric tribe…except for the rifles and pistols, of course. He and Cierra had cell phones, too, for all the good they did. No signal reached into these remote mountains, and Gabriel’s phone probably hadn’t survived its dunking in the Black River. He didn’t bother digging it out to check.

And though they couldn’t pause long enough for an indepth discussion, they were able to speak briefly, in a hushed undertone in case their pursuers were in earshot.

Mariella said, “Esparza and his men won’t be able to travel much farther by road. They’ll have to abandon their trucks and go ahead on foot, like us. But we’re a smaller group. We can move faster and reach Cuchatlán before they do.”

“That’s the third time you’ve mentioned this place,” Gabriel said. “What is it?”

“The birthplace of the Mayan Empire,” Mariella said.

Cierra frowned at her. “Mayan?” She shook her head. “That’s impossible. There are no signs of Mayan civilization in this area.”

Mariella just smiled, as if she knew better. She got to her feet and said, “We must go.”

Cierra gave Gabriel an exasperated look. He shrugged. It was doubtful that they could force Mariella to talk until she was ready, and anyway, they had to keep moving if they wanted to get where they were going before Esparza and his men.

It took the rest of the day to reach the next pass through the mountains. Mariella led them along a narrow ledge that twisted along the heights. They came to an overhang that formed a cave like recess in the face, and she said, “We can camp here tonight. No one will be able to see a fire if we build one here.”

“What will we do for food and water?” Cierra asked.

Mariella gave her a slightly superior look. “Why do you think I chose this place? My people use it sometimes when they’re hunting.”

She went to the back of the cave and returned with a couple of canteens and something wrapped in a piece of hide. She unwrapped the bundle to reveal strips of jerked meat that she passed around. Gabriel wasn’t sure what sort of meat it was—monkey, he suspected—but under the circumstances he wasn’t complaining. It tasted all right when he washed it down with the water from one of the canteens.

In the fading light, he studied the canteen and frowned. The letters CSA were stamped into it. He looked up at Mariella and asked, “Confederate States Army?”

“That’s right.”

“This is a museum piece. A century old. It might even be valuable.”

“It
is
valuable. It holds water when you are thirsty. How much more valuable can a thing be?” She moved off to tend the fire. The altitude wasn’t high enough here for the temperature to get very cold at night, but there would be a definite chill in the air before morning.

“Now,” Gabriel said as the five of them sat at last, resting their aching legs, “I think it’s time that you tell us what this is all about, Señorita Montez.”

Mariella hesitated a moment before answering but finally nodded and said, “You deserve to know, Señor Hunt. All of you do. As I mentioned earlier, Esparza is after the greatest secret ever discovered.”

“Which is…?” Gabriel said.

“The secret of eternal life,” she said simply.

Gabriel thought of the Ponce de Leon signs in St. Augustine. “You mean like the Fountain of Youth?”

“Exactly,” Mariella said with a smile. “Only in our language we call it the Well of Eternity.”

After a couple of seconds of looming silence, Cierra said, “Oh, come on! You can’t be serious.”

Mariella’s face flushed with anger. Gabriel said, “Let’s hear her out.”

“Thank you, Señor Hunt,” Mariella said with a frosty glance toward Cierra. “I knew I could trust you to keep an open mind, considering some of the expeditions the Hunt Foundation has been involved in.”

“I’m not saying I believe you,” Gabriel said. “Not yet. But I want to hear what you have to say.”

“Very well. Not far from here, in our valley, lie the ruins of the Mayan city Cuchatlán. It was from here that the Maya began to spread out three thousand years ago and establish their empire.”

“The Mayan empire,” Cierra said, “was located in Chiapas and the Yucatan. I spent a year conductingresearch in the ruins of Chichén Itzá. The jungle swallowed it up after it was abandoned, and it was lost until about a hundred and eighty years ago, but in its time it was the center of the Mayan empire.”

Mariella nodded. “It was—in its time. But Cuchatlán was the center of the empire long before Chichén Itzá. And the jungle swallowed it as well. But even covered by the jungle, its great secret was still there, a well fed by an underground stream that rises from springs in the mountains. Whoever drinks the water from the Well of Eternity…lives forever.”

“You’re going to have to give us more of an explanation than that,” Gabriel said.

Mariella smiled and nodded. “Many centuries ago, Mayan explorers left this land to venture out into the Gulf of Mexico, taking barrels of the water from the Well of Eternity with them to sustain them as they started a colony in what is now Florida. They had a wanderlust, a desire to explore; some say it was inspired by visitors who had traveled across the seas and stayed to make their home with the Maya.

“Only a small amount of the water is needed to reap its benefits. Once a year the Maya of Cuchatlán would hold a ritual, a religious ceremony, passing around a cup from which each adult drank, from the oldest to the youngest. A few sips are enough to restore youth and vigor for the coming year. The explorers were able to take enough of the water with them to keep them young and healthy for centuries.”

Cierra looked like she wanted to call the story hogwash, but Gabriel made a patting-the-air gesture in her direction and she remained quiet.

“To store the water they brought with them,” Mariella went on, “when they reached Florida and found a place where they wanted to settle, they built a rock-lined pool, and before filling it they etched a map to their home on the pool’s bottom.”

“The Fountain of Youth,” Gabriel said.

“Some called it that, when rumors spread. The Maya never did.”

“And what happened to this…pool?” Cierra said, unable to hold her tongue any longer. “Or are you saying there are still ancient Maya living in Florida today? Perhaps in one of that state’s famous retirement communities?”

“No,” Mariella said. “There are no Maya living there any longer. The water was enough for centuries—but not forever, and eventually it ran out. That’s what they’d put the map there for, to remind them how to return and get more. But none of the expeditions they sent ever came back—perhaps because there was no longer a city here for them to return to. And without a new supply of the water, the Mayan colonists resumed aging normally. In time they died. But their bloodlines continued, in the local Indians with whom they had intermarried. And the rumors continued, of the Fountain of Youth, even after there was no more fountain and no more youth to be had. Ponce de Leon heard of it and came to the New World seeking it, only to find it gone. But the legend remained, and some people have sought the truth of it ever since.”

“Like General Fargo?” Gabriel said.

“Yes. Perhaps you know that he was a professor of natural science before the war. He discovered the pool built by the Mayan colonists while he and his cavalry regiment were serving in Florida. He heard the legends from an old, old Indian living near the site, who’d heard them from his own grandfather, who’d heard them from his. He explained that the markings on the rocks were supposed to be a map—a map leading to the true Fountain of Youth, though of course he called it the Well of Eternity. Granville made a rough copy of the map, hiding it within the drawing on the flag, and made plans to find Cuchatlán after the war.”

Mariella sounded a little sorrowful as she went on, “As it happens, artillery fire during the battle of Olustee destroyed the pool, so the map copied onto the flag was the only one still in existence. That flag is the one I brought to New York. We wanted to give it and a sample of the water from the Well to the Hunt Foundation.”

“Why us?” Gabriel asked.

“We are not so isolated as you might think—we make a point of gathering news of the outside world. And we thought your foundation would understand what he had discovered and would be able to convey the secret responsibly to the outside world.”

Cierra looked like someone who had finally taken all she could stand. “ ‘We thought’!” she burst out. “ ‘We wanted’! You and ‘Granville’! You speak of General Fargo as if he were still alive!”

“But he is,” Mariella said. “He is my husband.”

Silence descended on the group.

“I knew it,” Gabriel said. “You’re the woman in the picture.”

“Picture?”

“A photograph of your wedding party that your great-great-great nephew—hell, there’d be more greats than that, but you get the idea…a photo he showed us in Villahermosa. You were standing on the steps of your father’s plantation house with the general, and all your family and his men were gathered around you.”

A wistful smile curved Mariella’s lips. “I remember that day so well. It was a good day, a happy day, even though I knew I would be leaving my family forever. I’m glad the photograph has survived for all these years and my family has not forgotten me. It will sound foolish to you, I’m sure,” she continued, “but it feels like it could have been yesterday, or last year. Rather than a century or more.”