Taught wise and hardy men to till
And oft befriended mutiny,
A safe harbor for the scourge and snaw.
Part the tides to cross the bridge
And ascend up through the stone,
Then navigate the serpent’s tail
To the Garden of Hesperides.
The final labour awaits you there,
A Herculean task of faith:
To find the apple of eternal life
You must first knock on Hades’s door.
The island of Elderfield Hollow looked like the Atlantic had tried to reclaim it many times, but failed.
It sat a quarter mile off a lonely section of coast and rose dramatically out of the harbor. On all sides, erosion had carved sheer cliff faces into the craggy gray rock. Black walnut trees grew right up to the edges, arrogantly standing up to the elements that had done their best to break the island.
I stood on the shoreline across from Elderfield Hollow, leaning against the stolen delivery truck and waiting for my ticket across the harbor. In the half hour since my arrival, not a single car had come around the sharp bend in the road. I’d been treated to the most stunning, interrupted symphony of the waves gently lapping against the shore. This far away from the city lights, the stars seemed to have multiplied one-hundred-fold, and as I gazed up at the vibrant panorama of constellations I’d never before seen, I realized that for the first time in two weeks, I finally felt like everything was going to be okay.
Low tide approached, which meant that my journey to the island would soon begin. There was a trick to getting to the Hollow, according to one of the few websites I could find. They’d never built a bridge from the mainland and the local ferry stopped making trips there fifty years ago after they’d shuttered the college. However, for one hour, twice a day, the tide fell low enough to reveal a narrow sandbar between the two shores.
My patience was soon rewarded. As the harbor waters receded, a beige line cut a direct path to Elderfield Hollow. I jumped the guardrail and sprinted across the thin smile of beach, unable to wait a second longer. Up close, I began to notice some of the island’s more striking features. I had wondered before how visitors were expected to scale the Hollow’s sheer cliff faces. Now I could see that someone had chiseled steps into the stone, which to anyone on mainland would appear flush with the cliffs.
At the top of the neolithic staircase, I passed under a wrought-iron gate that read “Elderfield” and onto the college grounds. The abandoned campus consisted of three white buildings and a greenhouse clustered around a quad. The buildings were modeled after Greek Revival plantations, with robust columns and black shutters. Under the gauzy light of the moon, I felt like I’d been transported back 150 years to the Antebellum South.
Beautiful as it was, something about the quad didn’t sit right with me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. There was a vegetal scent in the air that smelled out of place.
I was suddenly overcome with the futility of what I was trying to do here. I’d found four journal pages so far, but those had all been with Atlas’s help and with the full riddle at my disposal. This time, I was armed with only a few lines that Atlas had repeated to me in a drugged stupor. Without the rest, I could dig up all of Elderfield Hollow and still come away empty-handed.
I had to try. I refused to move from this island until the final journal page was in my possession. By morning, Atlas would have pulled through his detox. He could recite the riddle in its entirety to me then, using the phone I’d left with him.
Partway across the quad, I froze when I heard an unexpected sound: wooden chimes hidden in the trees, clanging dissonantly together. Disturbed by the noise, a cacophony of speckled seabirds erupted into the sky by the hundreds, all cawing in alarm. I watched in awe as they formed a monochrome vortex that circled the island.
I’d stepped on a latticework of nearly invisible wires that crisscrossed the lawn and disappeared into the trees. The chimes were some sort of rustic, cobbled-together “home security” system. No crazy squatter came out to greet me with a shotgun, so I prayed that whoever had rigged the alarm was long gone.
I watched my steps more carefully as I approached the largest of the three plantation houses. I unclipped the flashlight from my knapsack and shined it through the windows. My intention was to start combing through the classrooms and living quarters inside, searching for anything relevant to the myth Atlas had mentioned. I was reaching for the doorknob when the flashlight’s beam illuminated an object lying next to one of the pillars.
It was an apple core. The exposed flesh had turned brown from contact with the air. The bite marks on it clearly belonged to human teeth.
And it had been eaten very recently.
All at once, I noticed the eerie details around the quad that I hadn’t quite been able to digest before. The leafy odor I’d smelled was cut grass, which explained why the quad wasn’t overgrown from years of neglect. The greenhouse’s windows had all been washed. The plantation houses looked as pristine as they did because someone had applied a fresh coat of paint to each of them. In fact, a painter’s ladder still lay in the grass next to the porch.
I suddenly felt like Goldilocks when she realized she’d stumbled into a den of bears.
This island had a human inhabitant after all.
From the skin remaining on the half-eaten apple, I could see that it was a golden varietal. According to the research I’d done on my phone while I waited for low tide, the trees in the mythical Garden of Hesperides all bore golden apples. If that wasn’t a sign that I was on the right path …
I also realized, as I swept my flashlight over the quad, that the freshly cut lawn consisted of two different shades of grass. Most of it was green, but a shade of vibrant blue ringed the quad’s outer edge. It appeared to form a pattern, though it was impossible to say for sure without a higher vantage point.
I lifted the painter’s ladder out of the grass and leaned it against the plantation house. I took the rungs two at a time, up to the roof. It only required a few seconds to recognize what I was staring down at.
The blue grass on the quad formed a serpent. Its reptilian body snaked in and out of the black walnut trees.
The Garden of Hesperides had been guarded by a hundred-headed dragon named Ladon, which Hera had placed there to keep intruders from stealing her immortality-granting apples.
The tail curled around the greenhouse and ended in a sharp tip that pointed due east. But where were the dragon’s numerous heads? I traced the outline of the serpentine body around the edge of the island and found that it eventually disappeared behind the mansion. I scampered up the roof and when I popped up over the A-frame’s summit, I drew in a sharp breath.
Whereas I had thought the island to be perfectly round before, a small peninsula protruded off the back, surrounded on three sides by the same imposing cliffs. It faced east, out to sea, where the earliest whispers of dawn were trickling over the horizon. The dragon’s body ended there.
And where the peninsula began, so did a patch of golden apple trees.
I slid down the ladder and raced toward the grove, where I could hear the ocean swells crashing thunderously against the cliffs.
Only when I got closer did I see the blue glow emanating from the peninsula.
Because the golden apple trees were the least remarkable thing about the orchard.
Because from one end of the peninsula to the other, between the roots of the trees, grew a bed of vibrantly blue flowers that luminesced softly through the night.
The Serengeti Sapphire.
There must have been a hundred of them, all nearly uniform in shape and size. I knelt to examine one of the flowers more closely. The Sapphire was a blend of beauty and danger, seductively curling petals protected by crowns of thorns that spiraled around the husk.
Their unearthly glow illuminated something else as well. On one of the apple trees, a yellowed document had been nailed to the trunk and coated in a protective sh
een—the twelfth journal page. I moved across the peninsula toward it, careful not to step on any of the priceless flowers.
When I reached the final page, I made a startling discovery: except for the number twelve in the corner, it had been left blank.
I shrugged off my knapsack and pressed my hand to the cold plastic laminate. “But where is the final riddle?” I whispered.
A voice behind me replied, “I am the final riddle.”
I spun to find a man in paint-stained overalls leaning against a tree, a half-eaten apple in his hand. He was tall, trim, and black, and though it was hard to guess his age in the dim light, he couldn’t have been much older than thirty. “Do you know who I am?” the caretaker asked.
This was a difficult question. The man standing before me looked too young to have stolen the journal four decades ago. The more I thought about this crazy quest, the more certain I became that whoever penned those riddles had a personal investment in the story of Malaika and his son, in the Serengeti Sapphire. Atlas had destroyed Dr. Warwick’s final entry before I could read it, but what if Jaro or his father had survived the slave quarters’ fateful collapse? What if several generations later, one of his progeny had stolen Warwick’s journal and planted the path of riddles, and to this day, his family watched over the miraculous flower?
If I truly believed in the Serengeti Sapphire, in this wild expedition I’d just risked my life to complete, only one answer made sense. “You’re a descendant of Jaro, aren’t you?”
Looking unimpressed, the man took a final bite out of his apple and pitched the core off the cliff, to be swallowed by the tidal waters below. “Try again. For someone who solved my riddles to find this island, this one should be easy.”
My riddles, he’d said. And when I realized what he was suggesting, I struggled to string a full sentence together. “That’s impossible. You can’t be …”
“You came here looking for the Serengeti Sapphire, yet you dare to use the word impossible?” The man emerged from the shadows beneath the apple tree, and his eyes gleamed an inhuman gold under the light of the moon. “Girl, I am Jaro.”
I had put blind faith in a series of riddles written by a total stranger.
I had followed them to find a mystical plant that could restore my sister’s health, where modern medicine had failed.
But now confronted with a living, breathing miracle, I found belief in short supply. “You’re telling me that you’re the Jaro from Cumberland Warwick’s journal.” I did the math in my head. “That would mean that you’re a hundred and sixty years old.”
“A hundred and sixty-two,” he corrected me. “But I like to think I don’t look a day over a hundred and sixty-one.”
I felt woozy and braced myself against the nearest tree for support. There were only two options: Either the man standing before me was a lunatic and I’d fallen for one of the most elaborate hoaxes in the history of the modern world.
Or this was Jaro, the golden-eyed son of Malaika, who’d been stolen from his home in Africa and endured sickness and slavery. For years he had survived on the magic of the Serengeti Sapphire, calling on its restorative properties to cure whatever ills befell him and to even defy natural aging itself.
If that was true, then I was standing in a bed of flowers that could give my sister her life back. If that was true, then my long and painful journey was at an end.
Just like I had all along, I chose to believe.
That didn’t mean I was without questions. “But why?” I asked. “If it’s kept you in good health for over a century, at the peak of your life, why leave the riddles? Why invite strangers to come and take the flower from you? I don’t know how to break it to you, but some really shitty people were looking for this.”
Jaro chuckled. Despite his many years, I could see a little bit of boyhood left in him. “Immortality is a young man’s dream—a fool’s dream,” he explained. “And for a time, I, too, was a fool. So I rationed the petals from the flower and clung to youth. I wandered the world and observed miracles and tragedies alike. I saw an industrial age rise and horses replaced by carriages that pulled themselves. Man joined the birds in the sky, then flew past them into space. I saw my people’s place in this country evolve, but also watched how some things never changed. The wheel of time relentlessly turned and the friends around me came and went. Yet I remained.”
“What changed, then?” I asked. “I don’t care how much you saw. You don’t just wake up one morning and give up everything because you’re bored.”
Jaro held up his hand. A golden wedding band glinted on his ring finger. “I fell in love. I planned to share the Sapphire with her, to share in eternity with her.” His hand fell limply to his side. “But eternity is only a fragile illusion. Like anything in this world, the Sapphire has limits. It can cure the sick, it can speed up the healing process, but it can’t bring back the dead. One winter’s day, on her way to work at this very college, my wife’s car hit a patch of ice. She lost control. They found her in the water at the base of a cliff not far from here.” Jaro fixed his wistful eyes on the horizon. “One day taught me what one century had not. My father didn’t cross the ocean and move the earth to give me an endless life. He only wanted to give me a better one.”
Jaro wandered gingerly through the flower bed, closer to me, and he pressed a hand to the final journal page. “I stole the journal and created the riddles to ensure that whoever inherited the Sapphire had the same unbreakable resolve as my father. But I also decided to only bequeath the flower to someone who had undertaken a selfless odyssey, just as my father had—to save the life of another, not his or her own. So I ask you: Has your journey been a selfless one?”
I smiled, thinking to myself how disappointed he would have been if Nox had been the one to complete his quest. “My sister, Echo,” I said. “She has cancer.”
Jaro’s stardust eyes, which had seemed to dull as he told the story about his wife, blazed with intensity. “And you swear on your soul you’d do anything for her? Without question, without hesitation?”
“Anything,” I promised him, though his line of questioning was making me uneasy.
“Then there is one last test you must pass before my miracle becomes your sister’s.” He swept his arm out over the flower bed. “Of the hundred flowers here, ninety-nine are impostors. Though they may all look alike, only one is the true Sapphire. See, away from its soil of origin, the flower will not accurately replicate. All attempts to clone the flower yielded only these doppelgängers. Rather than inheriting the Sapphire’s curative properties, they produce a poison from their thorns that will slowly kill a man in twenty-four hours. Even worse, that poison is impervious to the medicinal powers of its parent. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
A hollow cold spread through me. I had a feeling I knew where this conversation was headed.
“In the myth of Hercules,” Jaro continued, “after he’d returned with an apple from the Garden of Hesperides, his twelfth and final test was to journey deep into the realm of Hades to capture Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound. To save Echo, you must make your own brave descent into the underworld.”
“You’re asking me to die,” I said bluntly. After everything this past week had thrown my way, after beating all odds and surviving assassination attempts and outliving Horace Nox, I was doomed to never see my sister grow up after all, all on a technicality. Maybe old age really had driven Jaro mad.
But I knew that there was still no question about what would happen next. I would see this through to the end. “Guess I can’t show you a picture of her from my wallet instead?” I joked. My voice sounded thinner than tissue paper.
“I’m afraid on this I will not budge—no journey ends without sacrifice,” Jaro said solemnly. “But I promise you, once you have willingly taken the poison, then I will show you which of the flowers is the true Sapphire. From there, you will have twenty-four hours to return to your sister.”
The more I studied Jaro, the
more I knew that pleading with him to change his mind was a fool’s errand. And with Echo as sick as she was, to delay at all was to risk her life.
I dropped to my knees, and with only a moment of hesitation, I wrapped my hand around the nearest flower and squeezed until the thorns pricked my flesh.
I wanted to face death bravely, But I couldn’t help but draw in a shuddering breath as the barbs sank into my skin, nor could I stop the tears that welled in my eyes. I imagined the venom from the plant leaching into my bloodstream.
After a small eternity, I withdrew my hand and held it up for Jaro to see. Seven puncture wounds formed a constellation across my palm. Blood trickled out of them, painting the ground between us. Despite the fear that I felt, there was something else there: relief. My odyssey was finally at an end. Maybe it wouldn’t conclude exactly the way I had dreamed, but I would at least get to go home, one last time.
Jaro was smiling at me with tears in his eyes. “The love of family is something to behold, a miracle far greater than any life-giving flower. I am now convinced that the riddles couldn’t have produced a more worthy successor.” His smile broadened into an Anansi grin. “That’s why I feel so elated to tell you that the story about the poison was only a farce.”
“Wait, you’re telling me—”
Jaro put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re going to be fine. While the children of the original Sapphire don’t share its healing qualities, they won’t kill you either.”
I bent over, hands on my knees, and drew in several deep lungfuls of air. My heart galloped in my chest. “I’m so relieved that I might actually throw up. With pranks like that, you must be a real gas to have around on April Fool’s day.”
“I had to be sure of your virtuous heart—and now I am. Come.” He beckoned me. “The Sapphire is yours.”
Jaro led me toward the eastern cliff edge, where a peculiar object protruded from the trunk of an apple tree. It was a sword, plunged halfway to its hilt. I remembered back to the myth of the Garden of Hesperides. “Let me guess,” I said. “A sword that indicates which of the dragon’s hundred heads to slay—or which flower is the true Sapphire.”
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