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The Four Stones of Vicksburg: Book Two of The Island of Bones
Paperback
Series: The Island of Bones, Book 2
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 274
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A bearing twelve hundred miles long. A river that was a map before anyone living was born. A slab waiting four hundred and thirty-two years for the disc that would come down the brown spine of the continent to find it.
Five months after Salt River, the line points north. In the spring of fifteen ninety-five, on a ridge above Vicksburg, a Yagua carver named Higuamota - granddaughter of Guarionex, of the line at Mary Point - cut four cradles into the limestone to a measurement no European had yet taught a New World hand. Three filled in the centuries that followed: a Brethren oath token from Port Royal in sixteen ninety-two, a Bridgetown disc buried under the chapel floor at Jamestown on the evening of the twenty-first of March sixteen twenty-two, a Cayo Hueso fragment carried up the river by a Truman Avenue keeper. The fourth has been waiting.
Dr. Iris Lettsome steps off the train at Memphis Central Station at twelve minutes past nine on the morning of the twenty-second of December with two discs in the inner pocket of her jacket and a Brunton compass beside them. Esperanza Salgado is on the bench at the southeast exit at twenty past nine, with a canvas tote and a fólkbók. Calvin Boudreaux runs them south on a Delta two-lane to the porch of the Anchuca Mansion on Cherry Street, where Atticus Rowe has been the line's quiet host for forty-three years and a streetlamp at the corner of Cherry and Klein runs six minutes off the rest of the eastern side of town.
Ruth Tatum is seventy-one. She has been keeper at Vicksburg since nineteen seventy-nine. On Old Highway sixty-one, forty-two miles north, at the unnamed creek crossing south of Anguilla, the front-right axle of her grandson Daniel's truck has been cut on a Memphis maintenance lot on small unmarked instruction. By the small dark hours of the twenty-second the line has paid a price it did not consent to pay, and the regional superintendent of the National Park Service for the Southeast Region - Casa Verde-aligned for the full twenty-eight years of his federal career - has, by his own careful estimate, three weeks before the wire trips.
The Court of Honor at the Vicksburg National Military Park is oriented to true north rather than magnetic by the small private instruction of a junior surveyor's grandfather in eighteen ninety-nine. The cameras are not being checked between eleven and four. The fourth flagstone carries a spiral cut by Anacaona's father's grandson in nineteen seventeen on a design three hundred and ninety-eight years and eight months and three weeks older than the disc it is waiting to receive.
In Sintra an uncle's correspondence has been read for eighteen months by his niece, LucÃa Mendez, principal-elect of the Madrid Trust that succeeded Casa Verde in November, who has come west to decide whose side she has been on her whole career. In Conil de la Frontera, Rafael Ribero sits at a kitchen table with a Norse-English Dictionary a Lisbon bookseller delivered on Monday, preparing to translate any passage Iris asks about. In Kingston, a diver named Devon Bartlett runs the Mary Stuart into the inner reach of Port Royal on the morning of the fourth of January. Under Iyana Cudjoe's kitchen at Coral Bay, a small leather wallet has waited since nineteen forty-one.
And on the front step of the Anchuca Mansion at seven forty-three on the evening of the fifth of January, with two FBI officers behind a Park Service liaison named Charles Henley, a federal warrant gets read out loud.
The Four Stones of Vicksburg is Book Two of The Island of Bones - the chain of keepers carrying a single bearing across five hundred years, and the river that was the map before any of them were born.
Four cradles. Four discs. The river reads. The map is older than the country that owns the river.Also in
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