by Nadia Aguiar
Simon finished his soup. He shifted, knocking his blistered heel on the ground, which reminded him of the harsh terrain he had come from.
Eusebio looked at Simon’s feet. “Can you walk?” he asked.
“I think so,” said Simon, standing up. Whatever the monks had put on his feet was healing them quickly, but they still hurt.
“Good,” said Eusebio, tucking the ophallagraph under his arm. “Because from what we’ve been able to tell, you don’t have much time. Come with me. We’ll join Nicodemus and Frascuelo in the library. It’s a rather interesting triptych you have.”
“A what?” asked Simon, starting to follow Eusebio.
“A triptych,” Eusebio repeated over his shoulder. “This is quite a significant quest you’re on.”
“You mean the ophallagraphs?” Simon asked. “I don’t really know what they mean, or what I’m supposed to do with them…” he said, hurrying to keep up with Eusebio.
“I didn’t expect that you did,” said Eusebio, going through the doorway into a long bright tunnel. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have come here. Don’t worry, they weren’t meant to be decoded easily. We’ll help you if we can. Come on.”
Simon followed Eusebio through a labyrinth of tunnels cut out of the bedrock of ophalla. The cave had no need of gas lamps or sulfur lights—ophalla provided all the illumination they could need. At times it would begin to glow an aqueous blue-green and Simon felt as if he were underwater in a sea lit from the surface by the sun. As in the room where he’d awoken, the walls of some rooms they passed were painted with mud to allow respite from the perpetual glare. Every now and then they walked beneath vents to the surface and Simon smelled fresh air. Simon heard muffled mechanical banging sounds somewhere far ahead in the tunnels.
“The Red Coral are just beyond where we are,” said Eusebio. “This is one of the few veins of ophalla remaining in the Neglected Provinces—they found it with their machines.”
Simon felt instantly afraid. He was too weak to run from the Red Coral now.
“Can they get in here?” he asked.
“No,” said Eusbio. “Not yet, anyway. There’s a natural split in the vein that creates a barrier between where we are and where they are. They’re getting to the end of that part of the vein now. We are much deeper underground—too deep for even their machines to detect. We know they’re planning to move on to a new mine site very soon—a much bigger site, with far more frightening consequences for Tamarind.”
Simon had no time to ask further questions because at that moment they turned a corner and entered the biggest and most marvelous library he had ever seen. Shelves carved out of gleaming ophalla stretched all the way across the cavernous room, where they disappeared in a luminous white blur. They were lined with thousands of books. The glow from the ophalla illuminated the titles on the spines: Ophalla: Secrets of the Stone; Lore of the Lesser Islands; Book of Magic Vegetables; The Story of the Lost Islands of Tamarind: An Outsider’s Account; Official Record of Dark Women; The Great Age of Ophalla; they went on and on. Hope tingled all the way down to Simon’s blistered toes: what better place was there to come to for answers than a library with three scholarly librarians on hand to help him.
He beamed at the other two Mole Monks, who were sitting at a long table. Each had one of the remaining ophallagraphs beside him and was poring over several huge open books. Simon also saw his backpack with the umbrella and mineral-fruits beside it.
“Nicodemus, Frascuelo, this is Simon Nelson,” said Eusebio.
“Thank you for helping me,” said Simon. “You saved my life.”
“No time to waste thanking us,” admonished Nicodemus, the nervous-looking one. “We’ve studied this triptych and we believe your quest is a critical one for Tamarind. We have to work quickly—what was hidden must be found before it’s too late!”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what a triptych is…” said Simon.
Nicodemus looked exasperated, his thin face twitching.
“Simon, please sit down,” said Eusebio calmly. “Brothers, I think we should start by explaining to our young visitor what a triptych is.”
Simon sat on a rough-hewn bench at the table. Eusebio settled across from him.
“Of course, of course,” said Frascuelo. “You see, Simon, since ancient times, triptychs have been used as a device to hide important secrets in Tamarind. A triptych is comprised of three different images.”
“Three!” cried Simon. “Does that mean I have them all?”
“Yes,” said Frascuelo. “But don’t get too excited yet—we have all the images, but now we have to interpret them.”
“Oh,” said Simon, feeling silly. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy.
“Usually triptychs are painted or drawn,” Frascuelo continued. “But this one—it’s clever, we’ve never seen anything like it before. The images seem to be doctored photographs enhanced with ophalla. We suspect it’s the work of an inventor named Davies Maroner.”
“That’s right,” said Simon. “He’s the one who made them.”
“Now,” said Frascuelo. “The images are often made up of parts of many different pictures put together. Meaning is concealed in the details. Each detail has significance.”
“Each and every detail!” interjected Nicodemus. “You can’t miss a single one!”
“Nicodemus is right,” said Frascuelo. “All the details are important. What you’re looking for are tools—there are always three tools hidden somewhere in a triptych. Now, we think that you have two of them already—the mineral-fruits and the umbrella—which we found in your bag and identified in the ophallagraphs. We haven’t yet found the third.”
“What about our boat, the Pamela Jane?” asked Simon, pointing to it in the ophallagraph. A froth of light broke around her hull. “Could she be the third tool? We know that she has ophalla in her frame that enables her to cross the Blue Line. That’s how we were able to sail here.”
“We think the Pamela Jane is important,” said Frascuelo. “And that she’s the one that must be chosen for a journey. But a tool will be smaller, something that you can hold and use.”
“But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” said Eusebio. “You’re searching for Faustina’s Gate.”
“Yes,” said Simon curiously. “But how did you know?”
“Symbol interpretation,” said Eusebio. He held out the ophallagraph of the tree. “You see this here,” he said, “carved into the trunk, right near the bottom?”
Simon squinted, for the first time seeing the funny squiggle that he had mistaken for a knot in the trunk.
“It’s an old symbol for Faustina’s Gate, inscribed in a square,” said Eusebio. “There are others marked in the other two ophallagraphs, which show that they’re a set—see, here’s one on the hull of one of the boats. And here’s another—you can only see it with a magnifying glass—on the door of one of the cottages.”
“Hey, cool,” said Simon, “I never noticed them before. How did you know it was the symbol for Faustina’s Gate?”
“I had to look it up in the Encyclopedia of Symbols to be sure,” said Eusebio, nodding to the book on the table next to him. “Don’t worry that you didn’t see it yourself—unless you know the encyclopedia by heart, you wouldn’t have much chance.”
“What is Faustina’s Gate?” asked Simon. “I still don’t understand how it can be so important.”
Eusebio thought for a moment and the ophalla light reflected off his gray whiskers. “To explain that we have to go back in time,” he said. “The Neglected Provinces weren’t always neglected, you see. There used to be more life here than in all of Tamarind. When the Dark Woman Faustina was alive the region was covered in a jungle more magnificent than any in Tamarind—it was a lush, bountiful place with the strangest and most wondrous plants and animals, great and small.
“Ophalla has always been precious in Tamarind,” he went on. “Because of the mining frenzy before the last war, the ophalla in the
Neglected Provinces was depleted from the earth in all but a few tiny oases, where the ophalla was too deep to mine. But what people soon found out was that nothing could live here without ophalla—once the earth was stripped of it, everything else perished. You see…” Eusebio leaned forward, lowering his voice, “all the plants and animals unique to Tamarind need ophalla to live. In their lust for ophalla, Tamarinders destroyed their greatest jungle and wiped out most of the life that lived there—many things that had thrived there were never seen again. People abandoned their homes and moved out. Almost overnight it became a wasteland and has remained that way until today.
“All of Tamarind might have been destroyed like the Neglected Provinces were, except for the fact that the rest of the ophalla in Tamarind was buried too deeply for people to find. Milagros knew that if people ever discovered how to reach that ophalla in the future, the destruction of Tamarind would begin again. But … she knew of a miraculous gate that existed deep within Tamarind. She knew that closing it would restore the balance of ophalla lost from the mining. To save Tamarind in the future, she dispersed the tools to close the gate to a handful of Tamarinders, and divided the secret among them.”
It was as the señoras had said, but Simon was no clearer. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How does closing Faustina’s Gate restore the balance? How does it work?”
The Mole Monks hesitated and looked at one another.
“Even we don’t know,” said Frascuelo ruefully. “It’s one of Tamarind’s greatest secrets. Only the person who finds the tools and figures out how to use them can learn how the gate works. It’s extraordinarily powerful and closing it can’t be undertaken lightly.”
“Do you know where the gate is?” asked Simon.
“It’s in a cave,” said Eusebio. “That much at least is well-known.”
“Where is the cave?” asked Simon excitedly. “I’m sure if I could get there I could find the gate!”
The expression on the monks’ faces made Simon’s hopes fade.
“Herein lies the problem,” said Eusebio.
Frascuelo retrieved another book—this one huge—three feet high and two feet wide, its binding turning to dust. He turned the pages slowly and Simon saw thousands of different maps of Tamarind, depicting topography, patterns of settlement, detailed sketches of rivers, and precise renderings of ragged bits of coastline. When Frascuelo reached a page showing the entire island, he stopped.
“Aha,” he said. “Here we are.”
In a box on the lower right-hand side of the page, in florid script, was written, Possible Locations of Faustina’s Gate. Then, across the map, dozens of those sites were marked.
Simon frowned and rubbed his eyebrow. “How am I supposed to find it then?”
“The answer is in the triptych,” said Frascuelo. “We just haven’t seen it yet.”
“Let’s start with what we do have,” said Eusebio. He picked up the umbrella and rolled a mineral-fruit across the table.
Over the next hour they pored over more dusty books. They discovered that the mineral-fruit was called “citrus fertil,” from the ancient Citrus Fertilanza tree. It used to be grown in plantations across Tamarind, but was now very rare. Only a dozen of them were growing in oases in the Neglected Provinces over very deep ophalla deposits. The books confirmed what Simon already knew, that the fruit had a very hard rind that turned metallic silver during the full moon. No explanation was known for the mysterious phenomenon. The umbrella, however, left the Mole Monks stumped. To their chagrin, they could find no explanation at all for it in any of their books. They were excited to see the Little Blue Door in the image—“home,” Frascuelo called it—and impressed by how Simon had found them.
When they had exhausted everything they could figure out about the tools, they lined the ophallagraphs up side by side and wracked their brains for anything else important about triptychs.
“Some things have a double use in an image,” said Frascuelo finally. “For instance, close your eyes a bit and look at the ophallagraph of the tree—see the fruit on the branches? It occurred to me that the fruit is clustered in patterns, perhaps like constellations of stars.”
Simon frowned dubiously. It was no constellation he knew, and he had learned them all at a young age. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I know all the constellations in the northern and the southern hemispheres, from when we lived at sea.” He remembered how when he was a small child his mother and father had held him close and traced patterns in the stars in the warm tropical nights. For a moment he could again hear his mother’s voice: Aquila, Capricorn, Aquarius, Cassiopeia, Scorpio, Perseus, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and look—one of my favorites, Simon—Andromeda …
“Well, I’m sure you’re right,” said Frascuelo. “We don’t see the stars much down here.”
“Well,” said Simon, scratching his head, “maybe it’s not a constellation, but it’s some kind of pattern.” He half closed his eyes to look at the image. If there were a pattern there, what was its purpose?
“Usually triptychs have something in common,” said Nicodemus at last. “The things they share are clues.”
Simon had already spent ages studying the images and no connections had leaped out at him. But he’d never been looking for something they all had in common before. He decided to start in one corner of each and make his way across every tiny detail. Halfway through looking at each image for the second time, he suddenly saw what he had failed to notice before. Tiny, mostly in the background, often in the distance, but there unmistakably in all three ophallagraphs:
“BIRDS!” he said triumphantly. “All three of them have birds!” Did they have something to do with Milagros, he wondered. They must! But what were they trying to show him? Now that Simon had seen the connection he couldn’t unsee it. There were birds everywhere! He studied each ophallagraph carefully.
In the ophallagraph of the boats in the harbor a flock of birds flew in a line alongside one of the waterfalls up to a tiny black triangle in the mountain.
In the one of the two men standing under the umbrella, a crooked line of birds flew across the big cloud in the background.
In the ophallagraph of the tree (which Simon now knew was a Citrus Fertilanza tree), a single hummingbird hovered in the air beside one of the fruits. Simon would have thought it was picking at it with its beak except that he knew the fruit would be too hard.
“They seem meant to draw your attention to where they’re pointing,” said Frascuelo. “Maybe they’re supposed to lead you somewhere.”
“But in the ophallagraph of the two men under the umbrella the birds are flying in the clouds,” said Simon. “It can’t mean that we’re supposed to be there…”
“I suppose not,” said Frascuelo.
They studied the images in silence.
“Some clues, of course, are just to lead you to other clues,” said Eusebio. “The image of the Blue Door, for example, which led you here.”
“Wait,” said Nicodemus, peering through the magnifying glass at the ophallagraph of the fleet. “I’ve just noticed something else. The last boat, the one farthest away, see? Right here, almost off the edge of the ophallagraph.” He let the others peer through his magnifying glass.
“It doesn’t look like the others,” said Simon. “It looks more like a raft. Yeah, it’s a raft with a mast and a single, square-rig sail.”
“I may be wrong,” said Nicodemus, “but I believe it’s the symbol for the Last Ferry.”
As Nicodemus went to a shelf and returned with yet another book, Simon again heard the distant clanging and banging reverberating through the tunnels.
“There’s a moraine—a mountain lake—where people in Tamarind used to take their dead,” Nicodemus told Simon, flipping through the brittle pages until he found what he was looking for. He turned the book around so that Simon could see a small drawing—it was almost identical to the one in the ophallagraph.
“The Moraine of Lost Loved Ones is a sacred lake in t
he Grandfather Mountains,” continued Nicodemus. “Long ago people in Tamarind used to carry their dead up the mountain to the moraine. They’d wait for a raft—the Last Ferry—and halfway across the lake they would release the dead into the water. Something special in the water preserved the bodies. Tamarinders believed that it was a place where they could go to remember and feel close to people they had lost, and to know that they were with them still.”
The monks were solemn-faced. Nicodemus’s description was haunting and Simon felt a chill.
“Where are the Grandfather Mountains?” he asked.
“The Grandfather Mountains are between Hetty’s Pass and Prince’s Town,” said Frascuelo. “But I’m afraid we don’t know precisely where in the mountains the moraine is.”
“Prince’s Town,” said Simon. “That’s where my sisters are. I was supposed to be there four days ago—I know they’ll be worried. I need to find them before I do anything else. Can you tell me how to get there?”
“We can show you the way through the tunnels,” said Eusebio. “You don’t have to cross the desert again. You’ll have to walk for the better part of a day, but you’ll surface in the countryside in the North, and from there it won’t take you long to walk to Prince’s Town.”
They had told Simon all they knew, but he still needed to collect the final tool and learn where Faustina’s mysterious gate was hidden.
* * *
Armed with his new knowledge about the ophallagraphs, Simon allowed the monks to blindfold him. They insisted on this as a precaution so that if he fell into the Red Coral’s hands he would not be able to betray their location. They led him uphill through the vast system of tunnels that stretched like a rabbit warren through the earth deep below the Neglected Provinces.
Simon heard stone doorways being opened every now and then and shut quickly behind them, and twice he had to climb huge staircases that seemed to go on forever. He heard a dull roar rumbling through the earth from overhead and realized they must be passing beneath a river. The tunnel walls became slick and he found himself tramping through puddles and breathing damp air. They stopped. Simon heard a giant stone being rolled back. His blindfold was removed.