“And he took Emily with him.”
“Willingly,” she pointed out. “He protected her through the entire assault but with her family dead she had no reason to return to Jamaica. Besides, she was quite unlike most white people at the time. She respected her father’s black slaves and treated them with humanity and compassion. And, most scandalous for the age in which she lived, she had fallen for her dashing hero.”
Raine found himself caught up in the narrative but he knew they had to get to the point. Mrs Marley caught the impatience in his eyes without him muttering a word.
“They spent about seven months sailing the waters of the Caribbean. They attacked slave ships and plantations and freed the human cargo. A large uprising was stirring. The legend of the Black Death spread throughout the waters. He gave hope to the slaves, hope of freedom.”
Just like the legends of Zorro and Robin Hood, Raine thought, remembering what King had told him.
“But the rebellion stalled.”
Raine couldn’t help himself. “Why?”
Mrs Marley’s eyes were dark and dreamy. “Obsession,” she stated. “Just like Pryce, now free, Kha’um became obsessed with fulfilling the ancient legend and reuniting the pieces of the Moon Mask.”
“He believed that he could travel back in time and save his family, his entire tribe.”
“That’s right.”
“But how? You said he needed the mask to—”
“He had already used the mask. He believed it had already revealed its location to him. So he spent more and more time meditating in his cabin. He would rub various hallucinogenic ointments into his scalp, cutting the flesh to allow them into his blood.”
Just like King had suspected, the visions given by the Moon Mask were in fact caused not by magic but by drugs.
“He claimed that he kept on seeing three great mountains, covered in gleaming white snow, but they stood in the middle of a vast desert. Emily describes her frustration at trying to convince him that such a thing is impossible but then, one day, they rescue a cargo of slaves. Among them was an Egyptian named Abubakar and, upon hearing about Kha’um’s visions, he said he had seen these mountains. Only, they weren’t mountains—”
“Pyramids,” Raine realised the moment Mrs Marley mentioned the Egyptian connection. “The three pyramids at Giza.”
“And once, long ago, so Abubakar told them, they had been clad in bright white limestone.”
“Which, in Kha’um’s vision, could look like snow,” he said, forgetting for a moment how preposterous the story sounded. “So they went to Egypt, which would explain the sightings of the Black Death off the coast of Malta.”
“That’s right. And once there, so Emily Hamilton’s words say, ‘he seemed to become possessed of another mind. Suddenly, upon seeing those wonderful pyramids, he knew just where to lead us.’ And he did so, leading them slightly away from Giza to a labyrinth of tunnels hidden beneath a step pyramid. And there, they found a tomb, dozens of rooms filled with treasure; gold and precious stones, finely carved statues. Most amazingly of all was an enormous golden coffin covered with picture writing which they could not decipher.” Hieroglyphs, Raine knew. “The body within the coffin wore an elaborate death mask. But it wasn’t made entirely out of gold. Part of it,” she explained, “was constructed out of a peculiar reddish metal, just like the original piece of the Moon Mask Kha’um had seen built into his tribe’s idol. And so we arrive at what you are most interested in.”
“The map,” Raine said.
“They loaded the treasure aboard the Freedom and set sail again—”
“Hang on,” Raine cut her off. “If they took the mask with them, why didn’t any of Kha’um’s crew die?”
She shrugged. “Maybe the curse only struck Pryce because of his ill intentions.”
Somehow, Raine didn’t think tachyon radiation would be so selective. Then again, it hadn’t done him any harm!
“They sailed to an unknown island,” Mrs Marley continued regardless, “and placed most of the treasure, save for a share for the crew — Abubakar kept a golden dagger Emily tells us — inside a cave. But they divided the map between the three of them, Kha’um, Emily and Abubakar who had become a ‘third partner’. I don’t know how it was distributed, only that one of them knew the location of the island, one of them knew the place to put ashore, and one of them knew the route they needed to take to the cave.”
Raine thought about the ‘tactile map’ he and King had found on Kha’um’s remains but said nothing. The contours of it most likely mapped the coastline of this mysterious Treasure Island.
“So where are the three maps now?” he asked.
“Kha’um’s piece I can only assume lies with his body somewhere inside the rainforests of South America,” she said, ignorant to Raine’s knowledge of the man’s fate. “Emily Hamilton’s own piece has always eluded me. The last passage of her journal suggests she passed it to the ‘bearer of her name’.”
“Her descendants,” Raine suggested.
“Of which I am one,” she said, confirming King’s theory that Emily had married an African. In the subsequent generations, the Caucasian traits must have been bred out of her children’s children’s children. “The comment about keeping it in that descendant’s ‘hand’ suggests it is somewhere in this building. But I have never found it and nor did my father. He told me that my family had taken an oath to protect the mask’s location and made me vow to keep that promise.”
Raine wasn’t sure why, but he believed she was telling the truth. She didn’t know where Emily’s map was. “What about Abubby-thing’s piece?” he asked.
“Abubakar,” she corrected. “Well, to discover that, the story must continue,” she said and without permeable dived straight back into her narrative. “Once the treasure was secure, Kha’um placed the Egyptian Death Mask on his head and Emily describes him being assaulted by visions which she could not see. The experience brought him to the point of death, she said, but when he awoke, he knew where the next piece of the mask was.”
Raine didn’t understand how that was possible. And, thinking about it, he couldn’t work out how the drug induced visions had brought him to the exact spot of the Egyptian tomb either. But he didn’t have a chance to voice his doubts now.
“It was on an island, surrounded by an army of statues which had themselves been modelled on the piece of a face which had fallen from the stars years before. We now call the place Easter Island but Kha’um had no name for it as it had not yet been discovered by Europeans and wouldn’t be for another eleven years.”
Raine had visited Easter Island with his grandfather as a boy and remembered staring up in awe at the world famous moai. Had they really come about because of a piece of a broken mask, theoretically scattered across the globe by an ancient culture? And how could Kha’um possibly have known about the island, much less that a piece of the mask was there, simply by wearing another piece of it?
“So they set sail again, heading south and rounding Cape Horn. But in a powerful storm, the Freedom was damaged and they had to beach the ship to repair it. They went ashore in Tierra del Fuego and encountered members of the Selk’nam Indians. After an uncomfortable first encounter, Abubakar developed a ‘friendship’ with the daughter of a Selk’nam chief. He, apparently, was fascinated with what he described as a ‘land of frozen sand’ — snow. He fell in love and actually married the chief’s daughter but nevertheless left with the Freedom when repairs were completed, vowing to return.