by David Gilman
There were other carvings: young children, bound together like slaves. “Was this a war party? Were these the children of the people being sacrificed?” Max asked, remembering Danny’s message.
“You’re beginning to get pretty good at this, son.”
“It had to be a dangerous place for one reason or another. Someone I knew sent me a coded message. I don’t understand why she is there, or why she is touching this particular stone carving.”
Flint pointed at an area on the map. “Twenty years ago a vast biosphere reserve was created to help save the rain forest and the animals and plants, but that’s always under threat because of oil pipelines and the need for slash-and-burn farmland. That’s where environmentalists have been killed. Illegal logging and oil both bring wealth to a poor country and power to a few.” Flint began rolling another cigarette, busying himself, spilling tobacco into the paper, but he had one eye on the boy. Waiting.
Max studied the map and saw a dotted area colored light green, the small word biosphere barely visible.
“My mother was involved in trying to protect the rain forest and plants for medicines—I know that. She was really brave, my mum. Could she have got into trouble there?”
Flint stayed silent and laid the last photograph on a dark, shaded area. The picture had a plume of smoke curling upward in the background. Max already believed this to be near a volcano. His eyes sought out the contour lines on the map. The dark mass was nowhere near the biosphere. He pointed at an area. “Is that where this photograph was taken? There’s another reserve, isn’t there?” Max asked.
Flint smiled. The boy had a brain, and he knew how to read a map. Maybe there was hope for him after all.
“Aha.” Flint licked the edge of paper, smoothing the wonky roll-up. Max plucked it from his fingers and put it behind his ear.
Flint was surprised. “Bad habits stay with you a long time.”
“I don’t want a lecture, Flint; I want answers. My mother went here, didn’t she?” he insisted, touching the dark mass that spread like a virus across the paper, its edges creeping into the forests. “What is it?”
Flint gave up cigarette making and circled the darkened area with his hand, as if drawing out mute information from the creased paper. “No one really knows, but it was established as a place of special scientific interest, whatever that might mean. It was the same company that set up the biosphere reserve, so their intentions were good.”
“Who are they?”
“Zaragon.”
Max knew that name! It resounded in his memory—but from where? He could not place it. It would come, in time, and that might give him another clue to the mystery surrounding his mother’s death.
“The area is prone to earthquakes,” Flint continued. “An active volcano sits in the middle of the reserve, and every now and again it bursts through the lower cracks in the mountain. Lava spills down through the ravines but then gets swallowed up by the huge underground caves. There are old, hidden ruins, but no one’s been in that jungle for thirty years, maybe more. It’s a place where the Maya are allowed to live as they have always lived, without outside interference. No one else is allowed in. It’s a forbidden zone,” Flint said.
Max felt the shiver of anticipation. He was sure this was where his mother had gone. He almost whispered, Why?
“They say it is the place of the jaguar god of the underworld,” Flint said.
Max looked at Flint, who averted his eyes. What was he thinking? What was he unable to say to Max’s face? If his mother had gone into this forbidden zone, was Flint telling him that she may have been sacrificed? The thought sickened him, images too appalling to even think about flashing through his mind. He shook his head. “You can’t be sure she went in there.”
“No. It just seems she was heading that way. People die out here. Snakebite, injury, disease, it doesn’t have to be anything more suspicious than that. Maybe that’s what happened to your mother,” Flint said a little more kindly.
Max tried to remember everything he knew of his mother’s disappearance. Why had his father run away? Was it because he had been frightened of something? As far as he knew, his mother had died and been buried somewhere in the jungle. What was it that was so terrifying it had made his father run away?
“Have you ever been in there?” Max asked.
“Not me. There are stories of people who tried—they never made it. In or out. They were destroyed by the hummingbird god. There are so few ways to get inside there. I’ve been close, maybe a couple of Ks, and on a calm day you can hear him. Those mountains are like an island—I’m talking thousands of square kilometers—and I tell you something else. There’s a logging strip round half of it, and there are armed guards. Private. That place is bad news.”
“I bet there are some amazing rare plants in there,” Max said.
“You’re crazy. You’re not going to get me anywhere near the place. Nowhere near.”
“Then can you get me close? I have to find out what happened. I have to, Flint, don’t you see? It’s why I’m here. How long do you think it’ll take those men chasing me to finally come to this place? If they’re that determined, they are going to check in an ever-wider circle. As you said, I could bring you big trouble.”
Flint stayed silent for a few seconds, shaking his head as if discounting his thoughts, but then he sighed, giving in to the inevitable. “There is one way in, maybe. The Cave of the Stone Serpent. None of the locals would ever go near it.” Flint got up and took down a carved figure from the wall, a skeleton draped in ornaments of bone and skin covered in black spots.
Max pointed to the necklace on the carving. “What are those?”
Flint handed it to him. “Eye sockets, a symbol of the underworld. The cave is where Ah Puch lives.”
“Who is Ah Puch?” Max asked.
“The Mayan god of death.”
Max sat with Xavier, who was still in the cage. He handed the cigarette through the bars, and Xavier took it like a thirsty man grabbing a bottle of water. He smelled it and muttered something in Spanish, then said, “You’re a good friend, Max Gordon. But you would be like my family if I could light it.”
Max held up a match. He struck it against a rough piece of bamboo and held it for the boy, who sucked the smoke into his lungs, then coughed until finally he eased himself back against the bars. “You can be my cousin,” he said, smiling. “My first cousin.”
Max sat with his back to the cage, upwind of the smoke that funneled out of Xavier’s nose, as if he were a baby dragon. “Flint is going to get me out of here. He knows that whoever was searching for me will come looking sooner or later. But I don’t know how far you want to go along with me.”
“I go with you as long as you want me to go. Maybe I can help you when we get to a town. People know me. I know people. We can get away and never be seen again.”
Max could see Flint and another man talking. Flint was pointing to the fan-driven powerboat; the man was shaking his head, obviously not wanting to go to the notorious cave.
“Listen, Xavier. I’m not going into any towns or villages. I’m going into the mountains. I still want to find out what happened to my mum.”
Xavier nodded. “OK. Then I go with you and I help you.”
“Maybe you’d better think about it.”
“I no need to think, chico.”
“I’m going to the Cave of the Stone Serpent.”
Xavier choked. He leaned forward, grabbing Max’s arm through the bars. “Max, amigo, don’ go there. I heard about that place, man. They been telling stories about that cave since forever. There’s a snake in there bigger than a river. It takes you and it swallows you, and that is not a nice way to die.”
Max could see that Xavier was really frightened. “That’s just a legend. It’s a story to keep people away,” he said, trying to convince himself without much success.
“Then it works. Maybe I’d better think about it.”
Max knew he would be going
in alone. It was probably better that way. There were fragments being drawn together in his mind. He had remembered the name Zaragon. When he had once visited the London office of Angelo Farentino, the man who had betrayed his father, there was a sign on the building next door—ZARAGON. Was there a connection even way back then? Farentino, once an influential supporter of the frontline eco-scientists, had sold his soul to a mysterious organization that wielded enormous influence. It now seemed likely that on other adventures, Max, without realizing it, had faced their terrifying power. Somewhere in the background, like a spreading stain of evil across the face of the earth, greater forces than Max could imagine were wielding power, manipulating governments and multinational corporations.
A small cog shifted in his mind. When Farentino had told Max that his father had run from his mother, how could he have known that? Max’s dad would never have confessed such guilt to anyone. So, Angelo Farentino had information from someone involved in this area. Max did not believe in coincidences. Zaragon, those faceless men and women, must be the power behind many of the international eco-disasters his mother and father had fought so hard against in the past.
Were these the people Max’s dad had run from, leaving his mother to die?
There was never any question in Max’s mind of turning back, of going home to the safety of school and friends. He was getting closer to finding the real reason behind his mother’s death and his father’s cowardice.
He shuddered, his own fear of going through the Cave of the Stone Serpent tormenting him like a small devil on his shoulder, whispering its terrifying warnings, embedding them like fishhooks in his mind.
He stood up and called to Flint. “I’m ready!”
Charlie Morgan’s 250cc motocross scrambler bike, which she’d bought in a broken-down garage, had taken her a few hundred kilometers north of the city, over red clay tracks, through villages that were little more than shacks on stilts, where scattered banana trees were the main source of income. And then she had reached the City of Lost Souls, which was little more than a frontier town with dirt streets, a couple of bars, some rough accommodation and a small marketplace where worn-out diesel buses choked the air as they brought people in from the surrounding countryside to sell what little produce they had grown. It was a bleak, forbidding place and aptly named.
What she wanted was a cold beer, and what she did was go into the roughest-looking place in town. She never gave a thought to the fact that she was a woman traveling on her own. She had always been able to look after herself, no matter what the circumstances. The tattooed men with bandannas pulled across their heads could barely believe their eyes when she pushed into the dimness of their bar. She ordered a beer and drank straight from the bottle without pausing for breath. The heat prickled her skin and sweat ran down her back, but the sharp point of a knife at the base of her neck felt like a small wasp sting. Everyone was looking at her. And then the man with the knife moved round to the front of her, holding it under her chin. He was shorter than she was and had stained teeth, bad breath and pockmarked skin. He pouted his lips—he wanted a kiss.
Charlie did not flinch. “You understand English?” she asked.
He had not taken the knife from under her chin. “I speak it. I understand it. I went to school. You think we are savages here?”
Everyone in the room laughed.
“Then tell me why a handsome man like you would need a knife to get a kiss? All you have to do is ask politely,” she said.
The man smirked at his friends in the bar, then lowered the knife and looked at Charlie. “OK. I would like to have a kiss, please, pretty lady.”
Charlie smiled at him and lowered her face slightly. “This is called a Liverpool kiss,” she whispered quickly, before snapping her head forward and breaking his nose with her forehead. The man went flying backward, smashing into a table and chairs, where men scattered. Charlie stood her ground, tapped the bar counter with the bottle, gaining the attention of the barman, who, like everyone else, was watching the stricken man staggering to his feet, pushing away helping hands.
“Another beer,” she said, “to go.”
She would ask questions later. Right now she had what she needed.
Respect.
Max was ready. Flint would help him get to the cave through the back streams and rivers of the mountains where the shallow water could take no boat other than his own.
He now had a spear, food and water and a leather satchel made by one of the women. A curved panga-type knife for cutting through foliage, better than any machete, Flint had told him, sat firmly in a scabbard on his belt. But what Max really needed, Flint said, was a specialized weapon to take into the hostile environment. In particular, a frog. A small blue frog.
Orsino Flint tiptoed quietly, barely disturbing the ground beneath his feet. As fast as a striking snake, his arm whipped out and caught the small creature. He gestured for Max to join him and eased a slim wooden dart along the frog’s skin. He did this with another four darts. “You use these in the blowpipe; it’s a neurotoxin. It’ll kill an animal and put a man down in a couple of minutes. You won’t kill him, but it will disable him for a couple of hours. Be careful how you handle them.”
He gave them to Max, who put them into a thin wooden tube used for carrying the blowpipe darts. He knew about indigenous people’s poisons from the time he spent in Africa with a Bushman boy. He tucked the tube into his waistband; the meter-long blowpipe was already nestled across his back on a thin cord. Flint handed him four small bunches of herbs wrapped in cotton.
“This is jackass bitters,” Flint told him, opening one of the packets. “You sprinkle the powder on any sores you get. You already know how bad an infection can get. And this”—he opened another small square of cloth—“this is if you get a wound.”
Max had put his nose to the crushed leaves. It was a mixture of subdued smells. “What is it?” he asked.
“Red clover and marigold with basil and amaranth. It’s what we put into your shoulder, remember?”
Max nodded. Everything you needed to survive in the jungle was there if you knew where to look, but there were plenty of things ready to cause you harm if you did not.
“OK. Time to go,” Flint said.
It was a wild boat ride. The propeller chopped the air and whirred them along at breakneck speed. Xavier had had no choice other than to accompany Max—Flint did not want him in the village. The boy had yelped with excitement for the first couple of minutes as Flint bent them round blind corners and skimmed vast flatbeds of green weed. And then Flint had opened the throttle and shown them what real speed was on a narrow, curving river that grew narrower with every kilometer that flashed by. Xavier fell silent, gripped the handrail and at times closed his eyes.
Max’s attention stayed glued to the blurring river. He was spotting exactly where Flint was taking them. Figuring out in his head, in split-second bursts, where the boat could founder and his quest could suddenly end. But Flint knew every river and its tributaries. He was as much at home in the jungle as the jaguar.
The river turned into smaller side streams, then into what were little more than shallow creeks. The tree canopy created a tunnel of cool, gloomy shade. The engine slowed and then the huge fan whirred gradually to a stop. They had been traveling for almost five hours, and now, as their hearing returned, they could hear the birdcalls again.
Flint let the boat’s momentum carry it onto a mud bank. “There are no crocs here. It’s too far upriver. Watch out for snakes and spiders.” The boat stopped. Xavier’s legs were shaky from the ride, and Max helped steady him as he climbed out of the boat.
Flint tied the boat’s mooring line to a tree and pushed on through the jungle, finding natural breaks, and the boys followed. It was hard going on the steep, muddy bank, but Max reckoned this would probably turn out to be the easy bit.
After twenty minutes, drenched in sweat, lungs heaving from the exertion, Flint stopped and sank down onto his haunches. Xavier, w
ho Max had had to pull up the last few meters, guzzled the water Flint offered him, spilling a lot of it down his chest. Max reached out and steadied his shaking hand. When they had all drunk and their breathing had settled, Flint crawled on another few meters and then pulled back a low branch.
Beyond this fringe of trees lay a wasteland, half a kilometer of cleared land, a deep red scar across the landscape.
“Armed men patrol this area. They have tree-cutting machinery; it chews the jungle, keeping it back, so they can see anyone who shouldn’t be here. No one is gonna get in there unless they are lucky, or unlucky.”
“Why? Just what is it that they don’t want people to see?”
Flint wiped the sweat from his face and shook his head. “I don’t know. But it ain’t worth dying for, that’s for sure.”
Max’s eyes scanned quickly across this devastated area to the soaring cliffs. Beyond the slashed land, dense forest blanketed the approach to the low foothills and stretched up to the higher peaks, which were almost bare of vegetation. The mountain range, two or three thousand meters high, swept beyond Max’s vision, but its curve told him that on the other side of those peaks was an amphitheater. A hidden place—forbidden, as Flint said.
“That’s it, isn’t it?”
Flint nodded. “You can’t see the volcano today. There are often clouds sitting up there. Lot of waterfalls make the rock wall impossible to climb.”
“You really gonna do this, chico? Goin’ up there? Man, I don’ think even your angels are gonna like that,” Xavier said.