Even so, she snatched up the remaining Reversal Potion as quickly as she could and carefully poured it into one of Medea’s flasks. Then, stoppering it tightly, she stepped back from the writhing edge of the table to scan the hut for the bangle.
The place looked just the same as when she’d walked out of it. The spell book lay open at the same page, surrounded by a few spilled grains of sand and the crumpled phoenix feathers. The map had been rolled up neatly and left on top of the steamer trunk. Over in the corner, the brass pot gleamed in the sunlight, although Rose noticed that the peacock feather, which had earlier leaned against the wall, was now laid across its rim and there was a faint crackling sound from the coals beneath it, as if they’d been doused recently.
For the next few minutes, Rose searched the hut from top to bottom, rummaging through the sorceress’s trunk, checking each tangle of clothes in case the bangle lay hidden inside, smoothed out the folds of her hammock and peeped under the pillow at the top.
Nothing.
She dragged a stool out from under the table, gingerly brushed off a few termites and, setting it down under the shelves, quickly climbed up. Then she scoured each shelf in turn, inspecting pots and jars, squinting beneath the lids of clay jars and flipping open carved boxes. She found jags of old hoplite spears and obols with pictures of owls, dried black plants, beetle wings, three desiccated bats and a swatch of glittering twig that reminded her of Christmas decorations.
But no bangle.
Finally she snatched up the stuffed toad to check underneath it, fleetingly glad that it felt cool and dead, and sent the sloping row of books it’d been wedging on the shelf clattering to the floor.
Still nothing.
Shaking her head in dismay, Rose realised that the sorceress must have taken the bangle with her. Frustration welled up in her like steam in a geyser as she stepped down from the stool and stared at the mess of books. She reached for her locket and dragged it to and fro along its chain, thinking hard. What good was the potion without the bangle she needed to make it work? It was stupid, as useless and raw as cake mixture when you wanted a slice of Victoria sponge. She bit her lip, feeling the heat of her anger rising inside her. After all this effort, screwing up her courage to do something so daring and un-Rose-like as steal into someone’s house, she couldn’t believe she’d ended up with a big fat nothing. She slid the locket again, listening to it ratchet over the chain, and glared down at the books, doubtless filled with even more spells to answer any heart’s desire, unless it was for the gold that would make any of them work.
The thought was almost funny, except that she absolutely did not feel like laughing. Which was when she looked down her nose at the locket twinkling between her fingers. It was gold, wasn’t it? Hardly on a par with Medea’s bangle, of course, it certainly wasn’t Ancient Egyptian and Rose was pretty certain it hadn’t inspired anything so grand as a nation. But it had been special to the chief who’d given it to Rose’s mother, hadn’t it? Not made for a king like El Dorado, perhaps, but passed down as a lucky talisman through the tribe for generations. Didn’t that count for something? Make it a teensy bit beloved? More importantly, mightn’t it have just a gasp of power to use on the potion? Rose had absolutely no idea, but then, she had no other gold either.
Galvanised, she dropped to her knees and quickly scooped up the books, grunting as she hefted them back on to the shelf. Quickly jamming the stuffed toad against them, she was about to leave when she noticed a small, rolled-up scroll lying beneath the table. Intrigued, she snatched it up and unwound it a little way, expecting to see more spells and diagrams. Instead, she was surprised to see a sketch of a Greek ship and columns of writing crammed across the pages. Water stains blurred some of the words and the parchment felt almost crusty, but now as she watched, underlined words melted into English: ‘Wednesday’, ‘Thursday’. Her curiosity prickled.
Clearly it must be somebody’s diary, she decided.
But whose?
The writing was haphazard and squashed in tightly winding lines, as though written quickly and in secret. Halfway down the third column, the word ‘Jason’ swirled into English, making the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. She watched, mesmerized, as more English words bobbed out of the tangle of Greek – ‘love’, ‘handsome’, ‘besotted’ – as inviting as shimmering flies on a fishing line, drawing her in despite her anxiety to leave the hut. Could it be Medea’s diary? Of course, the old Rose, the one who’d stepped into the jungle a few days before, would already have put the scroll back on the shelf, red-faced for even sneaking a peek. But then, that Rose wouldn’t have crept into someone’s empty house in the first place. Now, as she watched, more words twisted into English, teasing her: ‘to lovingly protect him with sorcery’ … Rose’s eyes widened, and she positively itched to read on. Except that, obviously, as she scolded herself, she absolutely shouldn’t. It was, as her mother might have told her, out of the question.
But her mother wasn’t there.
And besides, the scroll was sucking her in like quicksand.
Suddenly somewhere nearby a parrot shrieked madly, making Rose jump, and snapped from her indecision, she flipped up the scroll and stuffed it into her shorts pocket. Then, telling her flabbergasted conscience that of course she could return it without reading it properly, she snatched up the Reversal Potion and ran out of the hut.
In the middle of the Amazon day, everything feels hot and sleepy and now even the frenetic buzz of insects skittering over the river sounded little more than a murmur in Rose’s ears. Stepping into the dappled green light beneath her father’s tree, she briefly laid her hand on his shoulder, steeling herself as he flinched beneath her touch.
‘It’ll be all right, Dad,’ she whispered, curbing the unwelcome sensation that she was talking to herself.
Quickly checking that she couldn’t be seen by the women chatting under the shade of the mango trees on the far side of the village, she dipped her locket into the potion and shivered as a lick of blue smoke, spangled with tiny grey stars, twisted from the neck of the flask. Spurred on, she drizzled a few drops of the liquid on to his head and jammed her eyes closed, forcing her mind away from the suffocating heat and the trickle of sweat running down her neck, willing herself to imagine what she wanted the spell to achieve. She cast her mind back, picturing him when he was well, the way he’d looked that day in April when he walked away from her and her mother towards the plane, turning back, waving, calling their names one last time. She scrunched her eyes tighter and tighter, conjuring up his face, hearing his laugh echo back as he boarded the plane with the others, and felt her whole body tremble as she compelled the magic to turn him back into the man he’d been before. Love curdled by desperation coursed through her, making her feel light-headed, almost as though she were floating, and when she heard his voice, for a moment she felt sure she was still creating it in her mind.
‘Rose?’
She flicked open her eyes, and started, astonished to see her father looking up at her. Bright and curious, he pawed at the liquid that now dribbled down his face.
‘Are you all right?’ He glanced at his purple-stained hands and grinned up at her, bemused. ‘What on Earth are you doing out here? Where’s your sunhat?’
‘Oh, Dad!’ Rose threw her arms around him and buried her face against his bony chest, hugging him so tightly that she could barely breathe. Tears of delight coursed down her cheeks, soaking his filthy shirt until finally, reluctantly, she pulled back from him to look into his puzzled face.
‘What’s the matter, Rosy?’ he muttered, his eyes clouded with confusion. ‘How did you get here? Is your mother with you? James and the others will be so pleased to see you both. Do you know, we were only talking the other night at camp about the farewell meal we had at our house just before we flew out. That rubbery goose your mother cooked. Do you remember?’
Rose stifled a giggle, wiping her eyes.
‘It was as tough as a football.’
H
e smiled broadly, and chuckled.
‘Jeff said that we should have packed the peas for blow-gun pellets!’ He paused and held out his arm in front of his face, frowning at his tattered shirtsleeve, the bony hand sticking out of the filthy cuff for the first time. He looked back at Rose in dismay. ‘What’s happened to me? I don’t understand.’
‘You will, Dad. Soon, I promise. When we leave for London.’
‘London? But we’re not finished here yet. There’s so much more to do. We’ve only mapped a tenth of this region and we’ve already found traces of black soil, potshards, tools made from animal bones, Rose! You know what that means?’
‘Evidence of that old tribe, Dad?’
He nodded, his face animated and filled with enthusiasm, the way it always was when he talked about archaeology. And for once, Rose was delighted to hear it too. In fact, she’d never been so happy to hear about a bunch of old bones and bashed-up crockery in all her life.
She smiled, urging him to go on.
‘James thinks that the Royal Geographical Society will want us to come out here a second time.’ He smiled, looking around at the river, and quickly squinted back over his shoulder towards the village. His face grew serious.
‘What is it?’ said Rose.
‘The others?’ said her father. Paler now, he turned back to her, his skin glimmering beneath a shimmer of sweat. ‘Have you seen them?’
Rose felt her heart skip a beat. She shook her head.
‘They were out on the water,’ he muttered. He frowned and rubbed his temples with his fingers. ‘That water was so dark, Rose, as black as oil. They went out to take readings and I stayed on the shore, collecting soil samples on the bank … and ––’
‘Dad?’
Noticing that his hands were trembling, Rose leaned over and took hold of one as he hunched lower, almost cowering. When he looked up at her again, his eyes were wild and shining with a sudden fear. ‘Teeth …’
‘Dad?’ Rose stared, bewildered. ‘What are you talking about?’
He drew his hand away, and together with the other, ran both through his hair, staring hard into the dust. ‘Like shards of rock,’ he said slowly. ‘James and the others, they were in the dinghy, that’s right, they were in the dinghy and, and …’ His face crumpled with horror. Lurching towards her, he seized hold of her shoulders in alarm. ‘I tried to warn them, but …’
‘But what?’ urged Rose. ‘Dad?’
His brow lowered, as he searched for the rest of the memory. He looked up at her, panic-stricken.
‘They’re all … gone.’
Rose felt a ripple of horror flash over her skin. ‘What are you talking about? What happened to them?’
But it was too late.
She watched helplessly as his face returned to its calm, blank mask. Then, sagging back against the tree trunk, he pursed his lips and stared into the flowing water once more, as if she hadn’t spoken. Worse, as if she wasn’t even there.
‘Dad?’
But there was no response.
Hearing her own breath, short and stabbing, rasping in her throat, she wondered what on earth could have induced such terror. Teeth like shards of rock? It hardly made any sense. A cold prickling crept up her spine. Just what had happened to those men out on the water? What water? She shuddered, knowing that she must accidentally have stumbled on the memory of whatever terrible event had left him in such a wretched state in the first place, the dreadful thing that had shut down his mind, as Medea put it.
Shivering, she snatched the flask out of the dust and buttoned it back into her cargo shorts. For a few long moments she sat back, listening to the chatter and shrills of the jungle, letting it calm her with its familiar, hypnotic lull.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ she whispered, as much to herself as her father.
And slowly, slowly, despite the sick feeling squirming in the pit of her stomach at seeing his terror, she knew in her heart that it would be. Obviously, she reasoned, her rookie potion hadn’t been strong enough to last more than a few minutes. But it had worked, hadn’t it?
And, with the right gold, Medea’s special gold from the lagoon, she would be able to make it permanent. The thought filled her mind, as big and bold and brash as an advert slapped up on a billboard, and she felt her earlier fear slipping away.
Things would be all right.
In fact, her mind now ran on, they were going to be very much more than simply all right. With Medea’s help, they were going to be dizzyingly, life-changingly, unbelievably marvellous.
Above her, the afternoon rainstorm began pattering against the canopy of waxy leaves and she leaned back beside her father, listening to his breathing. She lifted her face to the sky and felt the cool water run over her sun-burnished skin.
She could do it.
She could actually be a sorceress.
As the rain soaked through her thin clothes and plastered her hair to her head, she began to feel giddily happier than she had since leaving England and, leaning over, she kissed her father’s filthy cheek.
Medea was right: magic really did change everything.
And, with the sorceress’s help, just what couldn’t she do?
Well, unfortunately, one of the things that she couldn’t do was see what Medea was up to at that precise moment.
A few miles south of the village, the sorceress was turning rapid circles in front of a waterfall. The same waterfall, in fact, that had appeared in Persephone’s magazine, and in case you’re wondering, it was much more spectacular in real life, what with all those thousands of gallons of water gushing over its rim of grey rock and plummeting in a deafening whoosh into the eddies below. Yes, ringed with rainbows in the late-afternoon sunshine and twinkling with kingfishers’ wings, it’d certainly be a much pleasanter thing for me to write about and maybe even draw a picture to go with it, instead of telling you about madam, who’d now stopped twirling round and was busily rummaging through the sack of old jaguar bones she’d brought with her. Trophies from the big cats the tribesmen had killed, these bones had adorned the wall of the chief’s hut, and had been childishly easy to steal earlier that day with all the men out in the jungle, hunting. And now, picking out a long yellowed thighbone, she reflected that much as she hated being stuck out here in the festering jungle, the place did have its advantages. Rather like a Do-It-Yourself store for sorceresses low on power, the place was full of its own sort of labour-saving devices. Not power drills, electric saws and paint guns or anything like that, but brimful of animals, plants and insects that were already so supercharged with the desire to bite, sting, throttle, squeeze and savage anything in their path to a mush of tapioca that it only took a small blast of magic from her to turn them into the most ghastly of weapons. Which was just as well, she reflected sourly, as she could hardly ask for Rose’s help with what she intended to do now.
Sinking to her hands and knees, she began piecing together a skeleton in the dust: a cage of ribs, a column of vertebrae, a curve of tail, leg bones, toe bones, a butterfly of shoulder blades and lots and lots of teeth. Setting down each piece as carefully as a museum curator preparing a display for a glass case, she laid out the shape of a big cat in front of her.
Except that this one had three skulls at the top of its spine.
Yes, I know.
Things are not looking good.
This is because they aren’t.
Next, she took the bangle from her pocket, aware of its coarser surface since the girl had used it in her magic that morning and, muttering dark curses, began dragging it down the ribcage and spine, the chinky-chink of dry bones easing her sour mood.
You see, since Rose’s lesson that morning, the sorceress’s day had gone rapidly downhill. Having packed the girl off to make earrings, Medea had settled to her daily scry only to be rocked back on her jungle boots when she discovered how close Alex, Aries and Jason were getting to the village. She could hardly believe her eyes when the scrying waters had cleared to reveal Ale
x guiding Aries over the slick, flat stones crossing the Trombetas rapids, a few miles to the west. Soundlessly shouting instructions over the raging water, he’d kept the ram safe – wet, miserable and scowling after Jason who leaped the stones as gracefully as a gazelle – but safe. And, keen though she was to see each one of them for her own exquisitely poisonous reasons, it wouldn’t do to have them clomp-hoofing in unannounced and totally ruining her plans with Rose. To be honest, the speed at which they’d coursed through the jungle thanks to that whingeing, wet sock Hazel made her want to spit lizards.39 But, tempting though a vile sulk would be, she knew that a piece of unspeakably dreadful magic would do a lot more good.
Or rather, bad.
It had taken her hours of sweat and blisters to walk here, but now, as the earth beneath the bones began to judder, jiggling the bones where they lay, she felt her spirits lift a little. A whisper of low voices twisted around her as the bones began sliding jerkily together, as though yanked by invisible threads. The spine stacked like building bricks, the rib cage closed like a bony hand and the skulls rumbled like grisly bowling balls to line up along the creature’s neck.
Clunk,
clunk,
clunk.
And if you’re squeamish, I’d suggest closing your eyes and running your finger halfway down the next page before you open them again, because this next bit is positively stomach-churning.
The rest of you, who’re a little bit tougher, brace yourselves.
Pink flesh now knitted itself rapidly on to the bones. A heart bloomed like a red orchid behind the creature’s ribs and began to throb; a stomach bulged and gurgled, two lungs puffed up like bellows. All over the creature’s body veins spun out like cables, battening down the slabs of growing rubbery yellow muscle that stretched over the creature’s broad shoulders, plaited over its back and pelvis, unfurling down its legs and wrapping about its toes. Teeth slotted into the hollows of jawbones and twinkled as the creature lay thickening and rounding, as wobbly as a jaguar-shaped jelly, and about as unappetizingly pink.40 Its tail twitched. Muscles jumped and rippled along its back, fired by nerves, making its hips and shoulders jiggle, its legs shiver into life. Finally a tide of gold fur, dotted with black, surged up from the tip of its tail over its body and heads, making Medea squeal with glee.
Rampage! Page 17