by Joan Aiken
“I see,” was all Herodsfoot had to say.
“Doc Tally,” said Dido after a while, “where did you meet Captain Sanderson?”
“He was making for Manati harbour, but he and his guide had been obliged to leave their path because of the landslide.”
“Like us,” said Dido. “Croopus, that time I thought Tylo’d had it for sure. And then—” She remembered the horror of the moment when she saw his head down in the well, and fell silent. Was Yorka really going to be safe in that snaky place, with that noddle-stricken unreliable Ruiz? For that matter, was Captain Sanderson? He was a short-tempered man, Dido had seen him explode with rage on the Siwara when one of the crew did something stupid – suppose he played some board game with Ruiz – and won? Would Ruiz take it badly? Or, if Ruiz won, would Sanderson be annoyed?
Games, thought Dido; they sure cause a lot of trouble.
“Where’s Manoel all this time?” she asked Talisman. “Where do you think he went, after he didn’t catch us at the Ereira place?”
“Sanderson’s guide Trinki told us Manoel went on towards Limbo Lodge. He may be there ahead of us. In which case we shall have to use guile.”
Dido had not the least notion how to use guile. But she had a lot of confidence in Talisman.
“Where did Trinki go?”
“He had a message that his father was dying on the other side of the island,” said Talisman. “So he asked if he might leave us. He knew Yorka would be able to lead us to Ruiz’ house.”
Their path now ran quite steeply downhill and Dido supposed that the sea lay right at the bottom, though the forest was still so thick and the trees so tall that nothing could be seen ahead but leaves and ferns and creepers. There was a change in the fauna though: more crabs and fewer lizards, more seagulls and frigate-birds, not so many parrots.
A distant bellowing could be heard down below them.
“What the blazes can that be?” said Dido. “Sounds like whales.”
Soon they came out into a little bay, steep on the right-hand side, where a massive cliff rose and a river ran out, in swift-flowing sandy runlets across the beach. On the left, or eastward side of the bay, there was a low headland and swampy shallows with palm trees and dangling creepers.
The horses threw up their heads and whinnied at the sudden blaze of light, and the space and fresh salt breeze; their riders were more concerned by the distant sight that met their eyes: the Siwara, half a mile offshore, briskly heading out to sea with all sails set. A feathery white wake curved gracefully behind her, like the flourish after a signature.
“Oh dear me. What a pity,” remarked Lord Herodsfoot. “Really it is just as well that Captain Sanderson was not with us; he might have been very greatly provoked at missing his ship by such a short margin.”
“I don’t get it,” said Dido. “Who fetched the Siwara down here to this nook-shotten spot? And why? And where’s she going now?”
“Back to Regina,” said Talisman. “With the cargo she picked up here. Manoel seized her – or some of his Town Guard did – to grab the opportunity of a load that was waiting here at Manati. The ship that was due to take the load on board here had been wrecked in a storm.”
“How in the world do you know all this?” demanded Herodsfoot.
Talisman looked at him rather apologetically. “You will not like it – my reason for knowing – perhaps you won’t believe me.”
“Oh, spare me any more supernatural doings!” he muttered.
“No, it is not supernatural. It is the drumming. The drum messages,” Talisman explained. “I am beginning to understand them – well, some of them, the simpler ones. For instance the Siwara – according to the drums – is now on her way to Regina to meet a trading schooner who will receive her cargo and carry it to Valparaiso. Of course it is an act of piracy. The cargo properly belongs to John King. Manoel has grabbed the chance of stealing it in order to finance an uprising against King.”
“So? What is this blessed cargo? Djeela nuts?”
“No, even more precious. Look—”
In the little harbour there was not a soul to be seen. The waves washed gently on the sandy beach. To the west side, beyond the river, a rocky platform had been cut out of the cliff so that ships with a fairly deep draught could anchor alongside of it. A sloping ramp led up to this wharf. The horses had splashed through the shallow river and up the ramp. The quay was deserted and bare; a few discarded warps lay tangled about a bollard; they were the only evidence of human activity. No, not quite: Dido, looking down as her feet crunched on grit, noticed that handfuls of small pearls lay all over the rock, in hollows and crannies, like drifts of fallen leaves in a rutted road; most of the tiny gleaming things were no larger than peppercorns, but a few were as big as peas.
“Stone the crows!” Dido picked up a handful and trickled them through her fingers. “Pearls! Where do they come from then, Doc?”
Talisman pointed south. “Coral reefs – about halfway between Aratu and Mount Ximboe, the submerged volcano. Ximboë keeps the water warm and the pearl oysters thrive on it. The pearls are not so handsome as those from the Persian Gulf or the gulf of Manaar. But they have their value . . .”
“Good heavens!” Herodsfoot picked up a fistful of the shining things and studied them. “Pearls! (I understand they are ninety per cent calcium carbonate, and the rest is water and organic matter; possibly caused by parasitic worms . . .) It is queer that humans should be so attracted by them . . .”
“Who fishes ’em up?” asked Dido.
“There is a village on the other side of that point. The villagers go out in their grass dhows two or three times a year and dive for them.”
“Are they Forest People? Or Angrians?”
“Neither. They are a tribe who has always been there. Or at least,” said Talisman, “as long as the memory of the ancestors goes back. They do not want the pearls for themselves, but exchange them for fish-hooks and tea.”
“Kw’ul,” said Tylo nodding. “Forest People rather have nuts. Shaki-misses like kw’ul round neck. No other use. Can’t eat kw’ul.”
“We had better leave this place,” said Talisman. “There is no reason now to remain here. And quite a number of excellent reasons for going.”
She pointed down to the sandy beach. Beyond its curve a number of objects which Dido had taken for logs of driftwood, trunks of trees washed up on the shore, were now in motion. They were making a slow but purposeful way towards the quay. Not so slow, in fact; some of them commanded quite a turn of speed.
“Crocodiles.”
“Estuarian crocodiles!” Herodsfoot’s tone was as fervent as if he had come across a living specimen of some species believed for centuries to be extinct. “And what superb specimens! Look at their size! Why, I believe some of them may be as much as thirty feet long. And only look at their girth! Only hear them bellow!”
The crocodiles were a muddy green-brown in colour, and covered with lumps and wrinkles. Their eyes, red and staring, stood out from their heads like doorknobs.
“Crumbs! Let’s get away from here,” said Dido. “We better nip across the beach smartish, before they come round to this side. There’s some in the sea, too.”
She strode off the quay, leading her horse, who was equally keen to leave.
“If one of them should get close to you,” advised Talisman, “move sideways. Their bodies are not very well articulated; they can go straight ahead, but are not capable of a quick turn to either side.”
The party did not wait to test the truth of this; a hasty retreat was beaten. The horses, sweating and crying out with fright, could only just be kept under control as the nearest crocodile came within fifteen feet of Herodsfoot, who declared wistfully that they were quite the most superior specimens he had ever come across; he would dearly have liked to study them at closer range.
He insisted on stopping for a few minutes when the party was safely established, well above the beach on a shelf of rock which the crocodiles ap
parently did not consider it worth their while to climb.
“Hark at ’em bellow, though!” said Dido, awestruck. “And look at the way they jump out of the water! They beat grasshoppers all to pieces!”
On the far side of the cove, where trees overhung the water, several crocodiles, having lost interest in the humans, were after a group of monkeys who were gobbling fruit from low-growing branches. Dido saw a fifteen-foot monster leap clear out of the water and snatch a monkey from the boughs.
“Blister me! I shan’t half have bad dreams tonight!”
“I believe they may live to an age of twenty years or more,” sighed Herodsfoot. “Yet when they are born they are no bigger than a man’s hand.”
“Too bad they don’t stay that size.”
“Now, here I am going to leave you,” suddenly announced Talisman.
She was greeted by a silence of shock; then cries of protest.
“Leave us? Pray, what can you mean?”
“No, no, Doc; don’t you go for to do that!”
“Much, much good not, Shaki-doc!”
“How do you mean, leave us?” repeated Herodsfoot shakily. “Where will you go? And how are we to go on without you?”
Talisman sighed, and explained. “You will go up that track – you can see it from here, very steep, in the trees – which follows the course of the Kai river on its north side, and in due course reaches the bridge.”
“But I thought – I had understood – did we not hear that the bridge had been destroyed?”
“I now have reason to believe that a temporary bridge may have been thrown across.”
“But Tally – Doc dear – where are you going?”
“I am going up here,” said Talisman. She nodded backwards at the cliff, which rose black and sheer above the quay on the western side of the cove.
“Up there? Have you taken leave of your senses?”
“Up the Cliff of Death?”
“Is that the Cliff of Death?” inquired Dido. “Is that where you got chucked off?”
Talisman nodded. “Seeing the place made me remember. I was snatched out of my cot at night and shut inside a clay pot.” A slight quiver passed over her face. “The lid came off as he threw me down. That is one reason why I am going back the same way. It is a thing I have to do.”
Herodsfoot exploded. “I never heard anything so outrageously nonsensical in the whole of my life. Climb up that? A professional mountaineer couldn’t do it.”
“Could he not?” Talisman smiled. “Well, I think I shall be able to do it.”
“What’s up at the top?” Dido asked.
“King’s house. His palace. Limbo Lodge. They will be surprised to see me there.” Talisman smiled again.
“You just bet they will!” Dido could see that the plan had its advantages. “So what should we do?”
“Go up the river. Cross the bridge – if there is one. If not . . . you will have to improvise. Then, ask to see King. Tell him – if I have not been able to reach him already – about the theft of the Siwara . . . Ask for compensation for Sanderson’s cargo of tea and sugar.”
“Suppose they throw us into jail for killing that guard?”
“Suppose no bridge?”
“You will have to do what seems best. But if I get to Limbo Lodge before you I may be able to take care of that.”
Herodsfoot had paid no heed to any of this. “I never heard such an idiotic, hare-brained scheme! You must be out of your mind.”
“No. I am not. And I am going.” She turned calmly away from them, then turned back to say, “Tylo, will you lead my mule up, please. We don’t want the poor beast eaten by crocodiles.”
“Yes, Shaki-missie.”
“Talisman, you cannot, really, seriously, entertain the notion of climbing up that rockface – suppose you fall?”
“Then I shall make a fine tasty meal for the crocodiles.”
“I beg you – I entreat you—”
“Now, Francis, please do not demean yourself and embarrass me and these children by such folly. Just go, now.”
She walked briskly away, back along the rock jetty, and past a buttress of the cliff, out of sight. Dido looked up at the rockface respectfully. It was breathtakingly high, three or four times at least the height of the Ereiras’ tower, and sheer, smooth black rock, like a wall. But still, if Talisman thought she had the skill to climb it, Dido presumed that her confidence was justified.
There’s more to her than meets the eye, Dido thought, and she said to Herodsfoot, who was in a terrible state, white as a fish, his face crumpled, beads of sweat rolling down his brow – “Honest, Frankie, you shouldn’t put yourself in such a pelter about her. Doc Tally knows what she’s about. She’s a real dab at climbing. And I’m a climber too – I know! Just you come along with us and you’ll see – it’ll all work out.”
She put a bit more confidence into her voice than she really felt, and tugged at the poor man’s hand to get him away from the cove, since the crocodiles had not entirely given up hope of a meal of human flesh and were scrabbling eagerly at the base of the rock shelf, while bellowing in a dismal and deafening chorus.
“Come along – let’s get away from those brutes.”
The track up from Manati cove towards King’s residence was wider and had a better surface than the one on which they had come down to the harbour; evidently it was used more; but it was so extremely steep that they made no attempt to ride the horses, for it would have been almost impossible not to slide backwards over their tails. The path zigzagged upwards in a series of short, sharp bends, and seemed to climb up and up for ever. To their left, beyond a bank and a hedge of thorns, the ground dropped away sharply. At first they could see the Kai river, trickling over the beach in its network of shallow tea-coloured rivulets, and the disappointed crocodiles snapping their huge jaws; then, as they mounted higher, the river was lost from view, but they could hear its voice: first a brisk chatter as it splashed among small rocks, then a loud roar as the gorge narrowed and a large mass of water had to force its way through a narrow passage.
On their right, thick forest rose almost vertically to form what must have been the flank of Mount Fura before the southern tip of the island of Aratu split off in some prehistoric upheaval. Here the rock showed through the trees in strange columns, arches, and folds, created over centuries by falling water from the hillside above. Sometimes there were cave entrances, half hidden by trailing creepers.
Poor Herodsfoot was sunk in a silence of misery. Dido felt truly sorry for him. She could follow his thoughts tolerably well: if Talisman fell from the cliff and was killed, he had lost her for ever; if she managed to climb it, he had lost her just as finally, for that would make plainer still the huge mysterious gulf that divided them.
To distract her own mind, and, she hoped, Herodsfoot’s too, she talked to Tylo. “Tylo, don’t the Forest People want those pearls at all?”
“Kw’ul? No, Shaki-Dido. What use? Can’t eat. No good for medicine. If Outros people want, let them have.”
“But the Forest People can sell them for money.”
“Who want money?”
Thinking it over, Dido could see that there was really nothing that the Forest People could do with money. They had all they needed – food, clothes, medicine, shelter; for entertainment, the long creation-songs that the men, the Hamahi, sang each day; for news, the drum messages, echoing softly through the forest; for company, each other.
“You could travel to other lands . . .”
“Who want that? When forest so kaetik?”
Kaetik, Dido knew, meant both beautiful and satisfactory. There seemed no answer to that.
“But sometimes people must be lonely in the forest?”
“No, why? Forest is enough.”
And if, Tylo explained, a Forest Person wished for the company of another Forest Person, there was always likely to be one, within a couple of miles – “one culoh-flower’s walk”. A culoh flower, Dido knew, lasted exactl
y an hour from blooming to dropping; they were quite useful, in the rare event that some process needed to be timed.
And, when they met each other, what a pleasure! They gossiped, they laughed, they had jokes. Forest People, Dido had already noticed, from observing Tylo and Yorka, simply adored jokes, and could generally find something to chuckle over, even in the direst situation.
“Do you think the Angrians will ever go away and leave Aratu for good?”
It did seem a shame, Dido thought, that this glum race had ever come to inhabit the happy island. No doubt they had been made yet gloomier by the curse of homesickness and dissatisfaction that the Forest People had laid on them – that was unfortunate – but you’d think that would make them even more anxious to leave. But then, where could they go? It was hundreds of years since their forefathers came here from Angria – and who else in the world would welcome such a dismal tribe? They would probably not be welcome even in Angria. She said something of this to Tylo. He was more optimistic. “They maybe not so sad in other land.”
“But other lands already have their own people living there. No room for a new lot. Specially such dismal ones.”
“Maybe they all drown in sea. Maybe ship get wreck,” Tylo said hopefully.
Dido did not feel this was a practical solution.
Tylo’s other idea seemed likelier, though no more cheerful.
“Maybe all Outros people kill each, other.”
She asked him about the dispute between the Angrians. It was simply, he said, that Manoel wanted to take over from his brother as ruler of the island. “He always jealous of old Sovran John.”
Long ago Manoel too, Dido learned, had loved Erato, the woman John King had brought up and then married. “He angry about that. Deep angry.”
“I see. So when Erato died, he threw her kid off the cliff. Thinking he’d inherit from his brother by and by. But that time was long in coming. And when he found the kid was still alive, he fixed to bring her back. But why do that? Seems crazy.”
No, not crazy, Tylo said, because either he could get rid of her, once and for all, or, if she turned out to be useful, being half a Forest Person, he could use her on his side.