Eleven
Eleven
T he air raid siren woke Oriana again, but this time she didn’t fall out of the hammock. Swaran was nowhere to be seen, and for a moment, she wondered if it had all been a delicious dream. The dirtiest, most erotic dream she’d ever had. Then she stretched, which awoke all the little aches in places she didn’t know could ache, and knew she hadn’t imagined any of it. Now she looked around, she could even see the empty bottle of coconut oil that had definitely been full when she left the ship.
Come to think of it, she was seriously hungry after all that exercise. She hadn’t eaten since that sandwich at lunchtime yesterday, and the predawn light filtering into the cave told her that was a while ago now. Luckily, the cruise ship had packed plenty, so she grabbed another sandwich and surveyed the cave.
Swaran kept the place pretty neat, There was his hammock bed, of course, and small pool in the back of the cave that he used as his water supply, but she expected to see a backpack, or where he kept his food. A man had to eat, didn’t he? She was certain no man with as many hard muscles as he had could possibly be a ghost, and maintaining a body like that definitely took sustenance of some sort. Unless he truly was a volcano god…a volcano sex god.
Her cheeks burned, think about the things they’d done together last night. God, she wanted to do it all over again. If only he was here now.
She perched on the edge of the hammock to finish her sandwich, and realised the cave wasn’t the straight tunnel she’d thought it was. It had a sort of branch that turned it into more of a curly Y, and her feet led her around the curve to see where the passage went, for she knew the straight one went from the cave entrance to the pool.
Sure enough, as she rounded the bend, she found something: an old wooden chest, exactly the kind you thought of when someone mentioned pirate treasure.
Suspicion clenched her hands into fists. If he’d followed her all yesterday, warning her away from pirate treasure, then seduced her to distract her, when all this time, he’d had Dampier’s treasure hidden here in this cave…
She marched forward and hoisted up the lid.
But instead of gold and jewels or anything that glittered, all she saw were books, and a couple of folded shirts, like the one he’d been wearing yesterday. Most of the books looked battered but recently printed, including A New Voyage Round the World by none other than William Dampier, but wedged between a copy of the Kama Sutra and a torn Dan Brown paperback, was a cracked brown spine that didn’t look like the others.
It had no title on the spine, for a start, though it was as thick as the Kama Sutra , and someone had wrapped a piece of twine around it, presumably to keep the cracked leather from falling apart any further. Oriana was no history buff, but she itched to open this book, if only to see what it contained.
Half expecting it to be his answer to the Kama Sutra, with notes or sketches making up the Volcano God’s Guide to Driving Women Wild in Bed, she was surprised to see it was mostly looped cursive, interspersed with landscape drawings of islands and coastlines, as seen from the sea. And the dates…the earliest entries were dated 1699, with some large gaps, until the final entries in 1701 coincided with sketches of an island that looked very similar to the bay where she’d landed, though without the present-day buildings.
This must be Dampier’s lost journal, the one from the trip where he’d been shipwrecked here. Did that mean it also told where his treasure was buried? For if Swaran had it, he had to be a treasure hunter.
Which meant if he found the treasure, he’d likely hide it away the same way he had with this journal, and perhaps even keep it to himself. When a discovery like that was the property of the whole world, not one man, and loath though she was to agree with Indiana Jones, historical artefacts like pirate treasure definitely belonged in a museum.
She had to get this to the island’s museum, so it could be properly preserved. A bit of string holding the cracked leather together was damn near criminal, when this journal should be lovingly restored and preserved, and scanned for everyone to see, just in case.
Dawn was approaching, and it was almost light enough outside to see. If she headed back down to town now, she’d be able to see her way to the road, and hopefully flag someone down who’d give her a ride the rest of the way back. The short siren that had woken her must have been the all clear, because she couldn’t see any traffic between town and the mountain, so it must be safe now.
Oriana dressed, stuffed her things back in her pack, then wrapped the journal carefully in her jacket and placed it at the top of her backpack, before heading down the mountain.
Outside the cave mouth, a steep, narrow track led into a thicket of scrub, and she was barely halfway to the thicket before her steps turned into a slip, then a slide, and she was barrelling down faster than was safe, right into a stand of bamboo, before the world went from green to black for the second time.