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Uh-oh…
‘Can you explain something to me, Mr Linton?’
His voice was deceptively calm.
‘Um…I’ll try to. If I can.’
‘How very kind of you. Well, then, explain this to me: this boy says there is a perfectly good, easy path down the mountain on the other side. So easy to use, in fact, that the people in the neighbourhood often drive their sheep up here to let them graze. He saw us climbing up the rock cliff and was quite surprised we would risk falling to our deaths when it is so perfectly easy to get up here.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh indeed, Mr Linton. And that’s not all. Do you know what he also told me?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘He told me that to the west, in the direction of his village, it is only a few miles to the ocean. Imagine that, Mr Linton. We are only a few miles away from the sea. It makes one wonder why a certain someone would send us hacking through hundreds of miles of jungle, including a deadly warzone.’
I cleared my throat. ‘The directions in the manuscript didn’t say anything about coming from the west coast.’
‘And were these instructions by any chance old enough to have been written before the passage to the west coast of this continent around its southern tip was discovered?’
I cleared my throat again. ‘Err…they might be.’
‘Ah. And you didn’t see fit to mention this fact because…?’
‘I, um…might not have noticed.’
His calm façade vanished. Fiery ice blazed in his eyes. He took a step towards me, a muscle in his jaw twitching.
‘You…you…’ He was trying to come up with a bad enough word to describe me. I was about to help out (after all, I had learned quite a lot of interesting swear words on this journey), but he found one without my help. ‘You…female! You sent us all this way through the jungle for nothing?’
And suddenly, inexplicably, a grin tugged at the corners of my mouth. I probably should have been scared. I mean, he was a big man and pretty near to the edge, apparently. But all I could do was smirk.
‘Really, Sir? Nothing?’
My hand reached out, gently caressing his face, then moving over his chest and down, down, down. He jerked, and stiffened.
‘Well…’ Suddenly, his voice, although still cold, sounded a bit strained. ‘Maybe “nothing” was the wrong word.’
‘That’s what I thought, too. So…how about we start getting the gold off this bloody mountain, now?’
‘Adequate idea.’
‘And then, maybe, we can do a bit more of the “nothing” we did in the jungle.’
‘Indeed. Yes.’
*~*~**~*~*
Getting the gold down the mountain wasn’t difficult at all, it turned out - not once we had got the help of the villagers. They weren’t the least bit interested in the heaps of cursed yellow metal lying around up in the old ghost city. But they were interested in sheep. Very interested indeed. Once Mr Ambrose had promised to double their herds, they were more than willing to help us cart the stuff down the mountain, pack it up, and bring it into the next city, where Mr Ambrose had both an agent and several of his fleet of merchant ships.
At first, when Mr Ambrose stormed into the captain’s cabin and demanded that he throw overboard his cargo of salted fish, the man was less than willing. However, once he had understood that this tall, dark, cold individual in front of him was the man who owned the company that owned the company that owned the company that owned his arse, and if he didn’t do as he was told he was the one who was going to be thrown overboard, he hastened to comply.
From then on, it all went so fast I felt slightly dizzy. The treasure was labelled ‘salt fish’, and snuck onto the ship in the middle of the night. When I suggested to Mr Ambrose that we should perhaps report to the authorities that we were removing historic artifacts from their soil, he gave me a look that shut me up in a flash.
We set sail that very same night. My heart was pounding as we drifted out of the harbour. I thought that any moment a hue and cry would go up, and the Navy would be after us, trying to recapture stolen national treasures. But nothing of the sort happened. We sailed out into the darkness with nothing but the whisper of the wind as company, and soon were out on the open sea, bound for England. Bound for home.
The days passed. I’m not going to waste time describing another sea voyage, because one is pretty much like another. And besides, I’ve been reliably informed that knowledge is power is time is money. I wouldn’t want to waste any of the above, now, would I?
