Chapter 10
Daniel could feel Saunders staring again, and he got a sinking feeling in his gut. He wondered if he'd have to run again, this time on his own. Daniel had lied to him, and the man knew it. Something had clued Saunders in to his background even before Daniel had made a fool of himself the day Evones had shot the snake. On that morning, after he'd come out of his drop and roll and gotten to his feet, grinning sheepishly the way he thought Jacques might, his heart still beating a mile a minute, Daniel had turned and, of course, seen Saunders looking at him as he holstered his own, real, weapon. The security guard had cocked his head and raised his eyebrow, the question in his eyes communicated as clearly as if he'd spoken aloud: Not military, are you? Uh-huh.
In his time at the SGC Daniel had still liked to pretend, sometimes, that he wasn't "military," and he never felt as if he was when he was shuffling through the subterranean halls with the real military men and women, but he knew, had known for some time, that that was just semantics. He'd been on the front lines of a brutal war for seven years, could handle a half-dozen different kinds of weapons proficiently, had killed more Jaffa than he could comfortably think about. . . . He couldn't pretend that all that hadn't changed who he was.
Daniel shook his head. He'd barely been in Brazil for four weeks, and already he'd blown it. He didn't know why he should be surprised or disgusted with himself, although he was. He'd never been an actor. Teal'c had once told him, before going all-in in some late-night poker game Jack had insisted they play, "I can see through you like a book, Daniel Jackson," causing them all to laugh at his intentional garbling of the Tau'ri cliché. Daniel smiled a little at the memory now, allowing himself the fleeting hope that his friend was out there somewhere, still honing his sense of humor, before he pushed the thought back into that compartment of his mind that now seethed with memories trying to escape, if only he'd let them.
He felt another headache coming on and glanced up at the hot sun. He pulled the front of his tee-shirt up and wiped the sweat and grime from his face, then pulled it over his head and tossed it on the ground above the trench he was working. The Kaipo men around him were already shirtless, a couple with red and yellow bodypaint adorning their backs. Daniel preferred working with the local men. To the Kaipo, they were all foreigners, all intruders, really, and Daniel knew that nothing he did would arouse any special curiosity. And he enjoyed picking up on the nuances of their language as they spoke among themselves. It was a distraction from the painstaking work of excavating layer upon thin layer of dirt, searching for pottery sherds, bone fragments, anything that would give a clue to the past; now Daniel carefully brushed the dirt away from what looked as if it might be the edge of a rim sherd protruding from the wall of the trench.
He waived Riaolha over, and the stocky young man wearing nothing but shorts and flip-flops, marked the location in his log. He asked a question in the Kaipo tongue, and Daniel almost answered before he remembered that linguist was not part of his new identity, and showing any fluency in a language spoken at most by a few thousand people would be a bad idea. Riaolha called Miacuro over and asked his question again. He wondered if the fragment Daniel had uncovered had the same markings as the original pot found by his brother, the one that had brought the archaeologists to this site in the first place. Daniel confirmed that, yes, it looked as if it did, and Riaolha walked off looking pleased with himself. Riaolha, Daniel thought, had the makings of a fine archaeologist. He started again to gently work around the edges of the pottery sherd, his mind turning again, unwillingly, to Saunders.
So Saunders knew that Daniel was not exactly who he claimed to be. Did it really matter? Who was he going to tell? Daniel didn't think he would try to get him fired from the dig. Saunders had as much as admitted that day they had talked over breakfast that he was hiding out in the Amazon himself, escaping bad debts, a bad marriage and, Daniel suspected, some of his own demons. And what else was there for Saunders to do with the information that Daniel may have been in the military? Who would care? No, Daniel thought, "Jacques" was just a puzzle for the bored security man to solve. Nothing more.
Daniel, hoping he wasn't making a decision based more on weariness than intelligence, decided he could stay put for now. There were only a few more months before the rainy season would begin; he'd move on after that. Maybe teach Portuguese or French or English to some of the local people. He'd noticed that several of the children who hung around the camp were fast picking up a polyglot of Portuguese and English, with a smattering of German, Italian and Spanish as well.
Although he and the others had to constantly shoo them away from the dig site, Daniel liked seeing the kids running about. It reminded him of himself, in Egypt, annoying his parents into letting him help at the digs. Daniel felt a twinge in his back and stood up to stretch his sore muscles, taking a moment to look around the camp. He'd found a rhythm in this place, a way to survive, and he realized, with almost a start, that he liked it here. He liked spending hours doing little but sifting through dirt, looking for clues to the past. He liked Miacuro and the other Kaipo men, and he liked the enthusiastic students even if they did seem impossibly young to him now. He liked to wander into the rainforest to see a Toucan flap away or a troop of squirrel monkeys swing across the canopy or a tapir lumber by on its way to the river. He even liked the grumpy Manoel, recognizing a part of himself in the other archaeologist's relentless pursuit of knowledge.
And then there was Elena. Even as he thought her name, Daniel became conscious of another set of eyes on his bare back, and he knew it was her, could feel the electricity where he stood. Elena. Brilliant, no-nonsense Elena with her sharp wit and eyes that saw everything. Deep brown eyes. Daniel shook his head, telling himself not to go there. He took a long drink from his water bottle and then ducked back down into the trench to continue working, studiously avoided turning his head. Yet he could still see her in his mind's eye as she walked across the camp, that intent look on her face, her short dark hair falling out of her scarf, and her baggy khakis and brightly colored tee-shirt that couldn't hide. . . .
Yes, well, he liked Elena too.
They all knew each others' stories, or at least the stories they told, from the talks around the dining tables, when the generator had been hushed and the kerosene lamps cast a flickering light against the shadows of the night. Elena, in what she joked was her last impetuous move, had married even younger than Charles, before she was 20. She'd been 22 and the mother of an infant and a toddler when the idiota, as she called him, had run off with a 16-year-old. Not having the time or personality to mourn, she'd swallowed her pride and asked her parents for help with the babies, taken a job as a secretary to "another idiota" and put herself through university at night. She would dress and feed the babies in the morning and play with them before work, rush home to be with them at lunch, rush home again to give them dinner and kiss them goodnight before she left for her classes, then study after class till she dropped asleep at the kitchen table, then start all over again. She never, she said, considered giving up, eventually following Manoel, one year younger, to graduate school. The kids, a boy and a girl, were at university themselves now. Elena said they probably hated her, but at least she'd made sure they'd grown up strong and independent. Manoel, later when his sister had gone to bed, said that of course his niece and nephew were crazy about their mother, idolized her in fact, but that Elena seemed to think it was some kind of bad luck to admit it, the only superstition she ever allowed herself.
And here she was today, overseeing the dig, somehow managing to laugh at the students and still send them away feeling as if they were on the verge of a brilliant career, alternately joking and browbeating her brother out of his moods, making sure, when her brother forgot, that they had supplies, that the Kaipo men were paid, that everything worked.
And burning a hole in Daniel's back with her eyes.
*******
Elena sighed a little when Jacques ducked back down into the trench. Such a pretty sight he made. Manoel, who was working next to her in the makeshift lab, cataloguing and boxing artifacts, gave her a disapproving look. "Leave him alone, Elena," he said. "He's got enough going on without you complicating his life."
Elena gave him an annoyed look and turned back to their work. Manoel was probably right about that. Jacques was a sad man, and he carried his sorrow with him wherever he went, whether he was helping to dig a new trench or listening in on their evening conversations or even when he was smiling at the antics of the children around camp. Not that he dwelled on his grief; in fact he tried to cover it up—joking with the students as they went off for their evening run, throwing himself into the work, taking on kitchen duty almost cheerfully—but there were times, when he thought no one was looking, that Elena would see such depth of despair in his eyes. . . .
Manoel was right. She should leave the man alone.
But there was just something about him. Yes, Jacques was handsome, heartstoppingly so, but that wasn't it, not really. She'd known a lot of handsome men in her life, and a good number of those were really not worth knowing. And it wasn't that she was attracted to wounded men, the ones with the stories that could break your heart. Quite the opposite, really; the idiota had captured her heart with a sad story and a bunch of roses. No. Simple, cheerful, what-you-see-is-what-you-get, that was Elena's thing.
But Jacques. . . . There was an underlying kindness, a gentleness to the man. She'd seen it when he'd worked so patiently with that fumble-fingered student from Beliz, when he'd listen with a smile to Charles going on about whatever Charles was going on about, when he'd bent and swept up one of the Kaipo girls one-armed to keep her from running headlong into a ditch, then set her down as carefully as he might a priceless artifact.
And though he tried to hide his brilliance, as if it would ruin his reputation as a carefree, ne'er-do-well who had lived a life of ease on his parents' fortune, it was obvious that the man was frighteningly smart. Since he had arrived looking so thin and worn on that rainy day a month before, several times he had, after listening in for a few minutes on a discussion that had lasted for days or even weeks, offered a solution or an alternative so obvious that they were later amazed they hadn't considered it themselves.
Elena liked smart; she always had.
She looked up again from her work and saw that Jacques had climbed out of the trench and was walking slowly toward the lab, probably heading for the kitchen, tee-shirt in hand. He ran his fingers through his hair and squinted up at the sun, then paused for a moment in his walk and pulled the shirt on. He walked past the lab and nodded to Manoel, who gave a distracted wave of his hand. Then he looked at Elena and she felt that jolt of current running between them. "Elena," he said in greeting, his voice sounding a little hoarse, then wandered on toward the kitchen.
She stared after him, open-mouthed, until Manoel finally said, "Jesus, Elena, give it a rest." She snapped her mouth shut and gave her little brother the evil eye that used to send him running when they were kids. The grown-up Manoel, though, just shook his head and rolled his eyes, then uncharacteristically for him, started to laugh.
