The Secret Path

by Karen Swan

  ‘Twig? Are you there?’ Miles asked as she looked up to find William watching her. He had stopped whittling now. It was so quiet she could actually hear the forest breathe.

  ‘It’s not me who’s cursed,’ she said quietly, staring into the Awa’s deep brown eyes. ‘It’s Alex.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘William, you need to lift it,’ she said to his back. They were walking again, heading for her freedom, the direction of home. But she wasn’t interested in that now. She would stay in these trees forever if she had to.

  It was heavy going. The rain was still falling, the ground underfoot sodden and making their feet sink, water running like tributaries down the narrow paths and animal tracks.

  ‘It is not so simple,’ he said, reaching for a plant as he passed and picking a leaf. He rubbed it between his fingers and sniffed it. Then he picked a few more and slipped them into his bag.

  ‘William!’

  He turned to face her, the embodiment of calm.

  ‘You cannot let Alex be living under a curse.’

  He regarded her with one of his ancient stares. ‘I thought you did not believe in such things as curses and plant medicines.’

  She was taken aback. ‘I never told you I don’t believe in them.’

  ‘You did not have to say it.’

  ‘But . . .’ She stammered. She didn’t believe in curses, of course she didn’t. She didn’t believe in ghosts or fairies or the Easter Bunny either. She was a scientist and she went where the evidence took her – but she couldn’t deny things had happened out here that science alone couldn’t explain. Headaches dispelled, auras read . . . and she had felt the relentless power surging against the canoe. Even in her terror and panic, she had sensed, she thought, something more than just a river current at play. It had felt not like it had drifted away, but been spirited away.

  She swallowed. ‘The whole point of me being out here was to help Jed’s son by bringing back plants the Awa thinks can help him.’

  William gave a small smile and walked again. He wasn’t fooled by her elastic words, the illusion of action over belief. ‘Do you know how long it takes to train as an Awa?’

  She sighed, not interested in the slightest, but knowing he wouldn’t be deterred from telling her. He had a gentle manner that was paradoxically forceful. Somehow, he seemed to get his way without appearing to try.

  ‘Fifteen years,’ he continued. ‘I began learning when I was eight. Our clan has always been awapa; it was my uncle who taught me the suwoh.’ He strained for a moment, trying to find the right English words. ‘Knowledge that is told, not written?’

  She nodded impatiently.

  ‘He taught me the songs to help connect with the spirits. He showed me how to find medicine in these forests by accessing the spirit trinity – the spirit of the plant, of the disease, and of the patient. He gave me the knowledge and the wisdom and the power to help my people; I do not do harm.’

  Tara was jolted by the echo of her own Hippocratic creed.

  ‘The curse was placed in defence of my tribe, not in contempt of Alex. But he is the body through which this project lives. His intentions are good, but they will involve our sacrifice and I cannot allow that. He must do his work, and I must do mine. The curse, once it is set, cannot be lifted until it is fulfilled.’

  She ran ahead of him in the rain, blocking his way, stopping him. ‘And by fulfilled, you mean . . .?’ She dared him to say it, silently begged him not to.

  ‘Until he is stopped.’

  Did that mean dead? She stared at him, remembering her terror as the boat had spirited her away down a rushing river, sending her over a waterfall that even now made her knees weak when she thought of it.

  ‘But you’ve got what you wanted,’ she cried. ‘The clause is going into the agreement and the handover will be delayed until it’s sorted. My father has given you his word. I’ll introduce you! He can personally pledge to you your protection. I guarantee it.’

  ‘I believe you, Tara. But nature will run,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘It cannot be stopped.’

  She saw that he wasn’t lying to her. An unstoppable chain of events had simply been set into motion. It was as out of his hands now, as hers. ‘So what, we just have to wait?’ Her voice split, rain running down her hair and into her shirt. She didn’t notice or care. She could see only his expression confirming her worst fears. ‘. . . How will it happen? What’s going to happen to him?’

  ‘I do not know. It is sent out to the spirits. I am only the medium.’

  She felt a well of despair open up in her as he led the way once more, but his walk, she saw, had become a trudge. He was saddened by this – not devastated, not feeling like the world was beginning to split apart, the ground trembling beneath his feet as it was hers – but he was unhappy about what had to happen.

  Her blood rushed with a speed that felt dizzying. She could hear it blasting through her head as a feeling of impotence flooded her limbs. So that was it? They just waited for something terrible to happen to him? Alex’s ambition was going to get the better of him after all. The revenge she had dreamed of in those early years after his betrayal was now going to find a form and hurt him in ways she could not. She didn’t doubt that it would. She wouldn’t have believed in such a thing before this week. A curse? She wouldn’t have given it a moment’s credence. But she had been in that boat, in that river. She had felt it for herself.

  She closed her eyes, trying to control her raging emotions, but she was weakened by exhaustion, pain and now fear. Her mind was in torment, going around in circles. How could he fight a curse? Should he even be told? She staggered through the mud, struggling to keep her footing and her mind straight. He would laugh at her if she told him. He was a scientist, like her.

  William, ten or so steps ahead, was partly obscured from her view by the reaching branches of ferns, vines dangling down like gym ropes, so that she had to negotiate her way through a slack weave of foliage. She saw that he had stopped walking, his back as erect as a twenty-year-old’s as he stared at something ahead. Instinctively she faltered, approaching carefully from behind. William was still and clearly hyper-alert. He seemed woven into the fabric of the cloud forest, an intrinsic part of its daily rhythms.

  ‘Stay back,’ he said in a low voice as she reached him.

  ‘What’s . . .?’ But her voice faded into silence as she saw what he was looking at.

  The sight was shocking. Horrific. A vast expanse of nothingness, stretched out before them – no colour, no life, no sound. Just acres of desolation, an unsightly scar upon the most pristine landscape, an open wound left to fester. No pictures, no amount of foreknowledge could have prepared her for the reality of the sight. She knew ranchers and farmers and loggers illegally cleared land in protected areas – of course she did – but to be faced with the merciless violence of it, the sheer scale of the destruction . . . She had spent the best part of the last week living 24/7 in these jungle and rainforest habitats; it was so all-encompassing that at times she had felt claustrophobic. There was no let-up, ever, in the sounds and noise and humidity; nothing was ever easy out here and she had felt trapped in a giant green biosphere with no way out. She had longed to be clear of their shaded embrace, to have a view that stretched for miles, to see any colour so long as it wasn’t green . . .

  Or, she thought she had.

  But to be suddenly faced with this brutal, wanton reality prompted a reaction that was visceral and completely primal. She understood now that what she had seen in William’s body language was in hers, too; his wasn’t a tribesman’s response, just a human one. This wasn’t the middle of nowhere – it was the middle of Everywhere. This wasn’t just the beating heart of the planet but its pumping lungs too, and for something so immaculate and ancient to be pillaged like this . . . It somehow seemed worse that one or two toppled trees remained on the ground: abandoned, unnecessary, surplus to requirements but felled anyway. The mud that remained was a bright, bilious
red-yellow, like guts had been pulled up. Great sheets of water were running unimpeded over the face of it, not even tree roots remaining to catch, break up and redirect flow. The scene felt apocalyptic, like the end of time. A desecration.

  ‘No.’ His voice was a whisper and she looked to see what he was seeing, for it wasn’t just the carnage. His keen eyes read detail far more astutely than she and he had seen – barely visible, several hundred metres away down the steep slope – emerging from the tree cover lower down . . . a man.

  Tara’s brain processed the sight with a slow-dawning disbelief. He was still wearing the same torn, filthy, ragged clothes she had last seen him in. Even from here, she could see he now had a beard. Behind him was the microlight.

  ‘Alex?’ The cry burst from her, a sob that contained her sorrow and fury at this desolate site, her relief at seeing him, her amazement that he had found her here.

  She saw his face turn up and search for her in the trees. Find her. ‘Tara?!’

  There was a moment in which they stared at one another in amazement. Could it really be? Then he began running up the wall of clag; she saw how he slipped, his hands planting straight down into the mud as he sank to his ankles. He got up again but could find no traction, his feet sliding away from him at every step.

  ‘Alex, wait! I’m coming down!’ she shouted.

  ‘Tara—!’ William spoke again, his arm reaching out towards her, too late. She was already running along the side of the treeline but it scooped away from her, away from Alex, and she began to cut across the wasteland instead to get to him faster. Suddenly every minute mattered. The years they had lost together, the decade of their lives gone forever, bore down upon her with an urgent realization that nothing else could be delayed. Not for a moment.

  ‘No!’

  William’s voice was like a flare in the sky, interrupting the instincts that were propelling her over the scarred earth towards the man she loved to hate. She stopped and looked back. The expression on his face brought an arrow of sheer terror to her heart, for it was more than fear she saw there. It was doom.

  She looked back to find Alex still on his knees, but his arms were above his head, as if he was trying to flag down a helicopter on a desert island. He was waving at her.

  ‘No! Tara, no!’ His voice was ragged, hoarse in his determination to be heard, to stop her too.

  Why were they both . . .?

  And then it came to her ear: the background rumble – which her subconscious mind hadn’t considered relevant a few seconds earlier – was now a roar. The ground shaking beneath her feet wasn’t a hallucination. She saw a flurry of birds of all sizes, all colours, pitch into the sky. She heard the monkeys scream as they swung branch to branch, tree to tree on the borders, trying to escape.

  Her mouth open, her eyes wide, she looked down to see the ground coming unstuck from beneath her feet. Not just there. The vast bank of mud – turned over, despoiled, denuded and now left unprotected against the full battery of tropical elements – was cleaving from Mother Earth, Iriria. From higher up, above where they stood, it was already beginning to slide down the mountain, an unstoppable tide gathering speed at a rate that she couldn’t believe.

  Even before William yelled at her to get back, back into the trees, she had begun running, managing two, three, four paces before her feet were swept from under her and she fell backwards. She heard the men’s shouts as she felt the ground pulling away beneath her body, trying to take her downhill with it. Her hands grabbed automatically for anything within reach, finding only a sinewy vine that trailed down from a surviving tree at the edge of the clearance site. She was lucky – it was sappy and strong enough to slow her speed, and she was still close enough to the edges that the breakaway was shallow here. For a moment, all she could see was sky – grey, heavy and low – as the mud spun her around and she clung to the vine, but then she felt the force lessen and she could push herself up just enough to sit; the ground still rumbled and shook beneath her splayed palms but she was no longer at risk of being dragged along; the main body of the slide had broken free and was now heading . . .

  Heading for Alex. He had been at the very base of the clearing, bottom and centre. He was still there.

  ‘Alex!’ she screamed. She couldn’t understand why he was continuing to stand there. The mudslide was heading straight for him.

  ‘Tara?’ She saw his head turn and for the briefest moment, there was eye contact and she realized he had been looking for her. He had been waiting to see her, to know she was okay.

  ‘Run!!’ she screamed, with a force that she thought might turn her inside out.

  He began moving, scrabbling, sliding, back towards the trees. But it was impossible to escape – the sheer speed, the terrifying velocity . . . Nature will run, William had said, and she screamed again as in the next instant, the mudslide picked him up and whisked him from sight. The wave slammed into the trees and the forest screamed as if in pain, giant timbers creaking and cracking from the force, their roots being lifted like weeds in a dahlia bed.

  Tara couldn’t stop screaming. She couldn’t accept what she was seeing. Nature roiling and frothing, breaking and destroying itself. The frightening power, the noise, the putrid smell of the ripped-up earth . . .

  And then, almost as quickly as it had come, the thunder subdued, the fury spent. The mud tide was dispersed and broken up, its speed slowed, its force lessened by the tangle of trees, stopped by the forest . . . until there was only a haunting silence. No birds crowed; not even the monkeys shrieked. All life felt wiped out. Eradicated.

  A sob wracked her as she stared at the vacuum that remained, the space where Alex had been now glaringly empty. As if he’d never been there. Her body folded as though she was going to be sick. She felt convulsed by pain, racked by horror as the image of him being snatched and thrown repeated itself in her mind. It was unsurvivable, she knew that. As her own feet had been swept from under her, she had experienced the same feeling she’d had in the canoe – of a great unstoppable force working against her.

  William ran, sure-footed and agile, across her field of vision, down the mud with a speed she never would have anticipated. He was silent and focused. She knew what he was trying to do. But it was pointless. He knew as well as she that the curse had been fulfilled.

  She sank back, unable to support herself. Even to breathe felt hard. Her heart didn’t want to beat. It couldn’t support the pain that was spreading through her like a poison. Alex was gone and whatever pain she had thought she’d known before, it was nothing compared to this. She was oblivious to the cold, wet mud oozing around her, through her hair, into her ears, down her shirt. She was aware of nothing but a searing pain. She felt consumed by a white light that was burning her from the inside. To have found him, only to have lost him . . .

  No!

  Her heart wouldn’t accept it. Her brain was numb, the self-recriminations jabbing at her as she remembered how she had refused to show him the slightest mercy, telling him secrets that she knew would haunt him as they had her, guarding her heart with a grim and ruthless determination until she had been able to escape him again, just as she had ten years ago in London. She had got exactly what she wanted: Alex Carter out of her life.

  He was the man she had loved to hate, and she had loved hating him! He had put the fire in her belly to succeed and thrive, to show him she had gone on to a better and happier life than anything he could have given her. She was the woman she was because of his betrayal. She ought to have thanked him for it. She had everything.

  She closed her eyes, remembering the longing that had shone – unbidden, unwanted – in his eyes as Rory called for her over the radio waves. She remembered his smile like a sunbeam when he’d found her in that tiny office, a room in the jungle, the contrariness of it all seeming to him a sign that they were destined – when all along they were fated. Ambition, curses, either or both, the universe always conspired to keep them apart.

  She remembered how she ha
d stood on the grass in the moonlight, knowing she had to make a decision – and she had nearly, so nearly, gone to his hut. She had almost succumbed to the hunger for him that she’d told herself was purely a chemical reaction, the strange alchemy that sparkled between them. They could have had one night together, she had told herself. Just one. Old time’s sake. Revenge sex.

  But she had known one night wouldn’t be enough. That she could never have enough of him, and therefore it was better to have nothing. She had gone to William’s hut and paid him to get her out of there, because she had known that once she took one brick from the wall the entire fortress would crumble and she would be exposed again to the man she loved to hate – and hated to love.

  She didn’t know how long she lay there. She couldn’t feel her arms or her legs. Her body felt as if it was sinking into the earth, as though she was being reclaimed by Iriria. Strangely, the thought didn’t alarm her. She thought she could happily never move from here again. Let the cloud forest claim her. She could no longer picture herself in her old life now anyway – sitting in the canteen with Holly, tepid orange food eaten off trays; the smell of antiseptic, the glare of the surgical theatre lights and the snap of rubber gloves, the sight of a tiny body on the table before her . . .

  Little Lucy. It was a week since she had died. How much living had that poor child been denied? How much had Tara herself lived, even in that short time?

  Distantly she remembered the call she had never made back to the hospital’s clinical director – the investigation that would be going on in her absence and the eyebrows that would be raised on hearing she was ‘on holiday’. She knew she ought to care, but she felt nothing. No one would ever understand what she had been through out here, chasing hope for another child on the other side of the world and failing at that too.

  She closed her eyes, feeling heavier with every breath. She didn’t think she could move if she tried. Her body felt set in the mud and she was dimly aware the rain had stopped, that shafts of sunlight were winking past the clouds sporadically and beaming them onto the forest like blasts of grace. The birds were flying again, criss-crossing overhead in the gap created by the hundreds of fallen trees. She felt insects burrow and wriggle beneath her splayed palms. Life had resumed, as though the momentary horror of the mudslide was already forgotten, if not forgiven.