The Explorer

by Katherine Rundell

  ‘Are you all right?’ called Lila.

  ‘He’s obviously not,’ said Con. ‘I’m not going to stand here and watch him die.’

  She stomped to the base of the tree, her shoulders hunched around her ears, and began to haul herself up, her jaw locked like a boxer’s. She moved stiffly but steadily, despite the shaking in her hands and knees.

  Fred watched as she came to rest a few branches below him, staring up, hugging the trunk to her chest. Her ankles were wobbling with fear.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked through gritted teeth.

  ‘Telling you to come down.’

  ‘No,’ said Fred. ‘I’m going up.’

  ‘Then I’m coming too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You look stuck.’

  ‘I’m not!’ But he knew it wasn’t true: he had no feeling in his arms. He looked down at Con; her face was bloodless, so white it was almost blue, but full of determination. He tried to arrange his expression into easy curiosity. ‘Even if I were, how would you be able to help?’

  ‘I’ll go ahead,’ she said, ‘and test the branches. If you have another scare like that, I bet you’d just fall and die.’

  ‘I wasn’t scared,’ said Fred. The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.

  ‘Yes you were,’ said Con, facing up the tree. ‘And so am I. So there.’

  She moved ahead. She went far more slowly than he would have, and her face was set with an expression that looked like fury, but she climbed steadily, testing each branch with her feet and wiping her hands on her skirt at every move.

  Fred unpeeled one hand from the branch. He pushed back at the angry opera of fear. He followed Con.

  Gradually, as Fred climbed, the sway and rhythm of it took over, and his breathing returned to normal. The hive came into sight. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of buzzing insects.

  ‘Bees don’t have encouraging faces, do they?’ said Con. Her voice was much higher than usual. ‘Do it quickly, so we can go down.’

  ‘Just a second.’ Fred crouched on the branch, his legs shaking a little, and stuffed leaves into his nostrils so the bees couldn’t sting up his nose. ‘Don’t come too close, or you’ll get stung.’

  From far down below, he heard Lila call encouragingly, ‘You can do it!’

  Max, unencouragingly, shouted, ‘But also, if you both fall, would you be angry if we ate you?’

  Fred stood, wrapping one arm around a thick branch to the right of him. With the other he reached up and left, out over the vast drop, and pushed his hand into the fist-sized hole in the beehive that the monkey had made.

  The buzzing grew louder and more furious. Fred braced himself. The bees swarmed angrily around him, and a few rebounded off his shorts, but not a single bee touched his skin. Triumphantly, he broke off a fistful of honeycomb, and then another.

  ‘It works!’ Fred said. A bee buzzed into his mouth. He swore and spat it out, jerking his head, and felt the tree sway under him.

  ‘Where do we put it?’ asked Con.

  ‘We could drop the chunks of honeycomb down to Lila,’ Fred said, ‘but they might get stuck in the leaves.’

  ‘If all of this was for nothing –’ Con began.

  ‘No, I’ve got an idea.’

  He braced himself and looped one arm around a branch. With his free hand, he tucked his shirt into his shorts, then dropped the honey inside his shirt front. He licked his fingers.

  ‘Agh!’ he said. He’d forgotten that they were covered in dust from the bark, and the remnants of the ants, but even so the honey was spectacular. It made his skin buzz.

  ‘Can I have some?’ asked Con.

  ‘I thought you wanted to get down.’

  She was shaking so hard her knees were jumping, but she lifted her chin defiantly. ‘If you can, I can.’

  It was just as Fred edged around the great trunk of the tree towards her that he saw it: something red, the size of an apple, tied tightly with vines to the branch.

  His breath stopped. He leant backwards to see better.

  ‘Fred!’ said Con. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘I’m fine.’ He grabbed a handful of tree branch. ‘Look above your head.’

  The red thing wasn’t a plant. It didn’t have the tinge of life to it.

  ‘What is it?’ She squinted upwards. ‘The leaves are in the way!’

  ‘I think it’s leather.’

  ‘Like, a handbag?’

  ‘No. Something else.’

  He edged round her and upwards. He unwound the thing from the tree as quickly as he could, his hands shaking. The branch he was on was broad and he sat down on it, his legs hanging on either side.

  Con approached and sat facing him, hugging the trunk with one shaking arm. ‘Don’t open it now!’ she said. ‘Wait until we’re on the ground, you idiot!’

  ‘Just quickly,’ said Fred. It was a red leather pouch with a leather drawstring and the remnants of gold embossed writing on the base. It was heavy. His hands were shaking as he opened it and pulled out a lump of metal.

  ‘A tobacco tin,’ he said. It was rusty, but less rusty than the sardine can.

  ‘Let me see?’ said Con. There were words on the side. She whispered them aloud, as if they were a spell. ‘Collier’s Finest Tobacco. London, Piccadilly.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ he said. The tree rocked suddenly in the wind and the thing slipped through his fingers. He caught it just in time; it was also rusty, and rough in his fingers. ‘A penknife!’ he said.

  ‘Is that everything?’

  ‘I think so.’

  He brushed away a stray bee and upturned the pouch over his palm. A piece of paper fell out.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Con. ‘A letter?’

  It was a sheet of paper from the blank end-pages of a book, marked in ink and labelled with neat block capitals. In the corner was a sketch of the points of a compass.

  ‘It’s a map,’ he said.

  Goosebumps rose on his arms. Fred knew the power of maps. They gestured to hidden things. They were line drawings of the world’s secrets.

  He studied it. It was sketched in ink, which had faded in the creases of the paper. There were thin lines for tributaries, and a thick one for what he assumed must be the Amazon. In the far right-hand corner there was an X. It had been scratched so fiercely the pen had pierced the paper.

  ‘What do you think it’s of? What’s the X stand for?’ Con’s eyes were wide: she seemed to have forgotten they were thirty metres up in the sky.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Fred looked upwards. The tree they were sitting in was taller than the others surrounding it. Near the top, where it thinned to a spike, it stood high above most of the rest of the canopy. ‘I’m going further up,’ he said. ‘If I can get above the canopy, I might be able to see.’

  ‘No you’re not! That would be insane – you’re just showing off, because you’re embarrassed you got scared before.’

  Fred felt his ears grow red. ‘I’m going. Do you want to go back down, or come with me?’

  Con pulled the corners of her mouth towards her chin. ‘I’m coming too, obviously!’

  They went slowly, testing each branch as they got thinner and thinner. The branches became springy and fork-handle thin.

  Suddenly, Fred’s head broke out from under a leafy branch and he found himself head and shoulders above the canopy. Below him the river stretched purple and silver. Fred tried to keep his breathing steady. It was exactly as he’d dreamt it, from his seat on the floor in a corner of the library.

  ‘Look!’ he said.

  ‘I am looking!’ said Con. She was just below him. Her eyes were screwed shut.

  The river wound for miles around bends and swoops, disappearing into the horizon near the foot of a mountain. As he watched, a monkey skittered down from a tree and leapt away, curling its tail around branches as it swung past him.

  ‘Open your eyes, Con!’ said Fred. ‘You have to see!’

  C
on opened her eyes, and then opened them further, as wide as the sky. ‘I didn’t know. It’s … bite-your-fist beautiful.’

  It looked, Fred thought, like someone had designed it with a purpose in mind: someone who wanted the world to be as wild and green and alive as possible.

  Very slowly, he let go of the tree with one hand. Fear rose up in his mouth, but he reached into his pocket. He unfolded the paper.

  It felt like a small, green miracle. The map matched exactly what he saw. It might almost have been drawn from precisely this position, or one very close.

  He peered down at the map. ‘That’s us,’ he whispered.

  ‘And that bend – that’s the place where we moored,’ said Con. There were ink curves, intricately sketched, that matched exactly – or almost exactly – the world below them.

  ‘Where’s the X?’ asked Con.

  Fred shielded his eyes. ‘That way. But I can’t see anything.’ The horizon was a green smudge; he couldn’t see where the river wound.

  ‘We should mark where we are, on the map,’ said Con. ‘A you-are-here.’

  Fred looked down at his hands. The cuts on his knuckles from the crash were just beginning to heal; he bit the scab off one of them, squeezed out a drop of blood and put a spot of red on the map to mark where they were.

  ‘That’s disgusting!’ said Con. ‘Good idea!’

  Fred grinned. ‘Let’s go down,’ he said. ‘There’s honey for lunch.’

  He swung down from the tree faster than he should have. A lot of skin got left on a knot of bark halfway, and he got poked in the eye by a branch. Con followed more slowly, whispering instructions to herself.

  Honey was seeping through his shirt as he thumped the last two feet to the forest floor, but his heart was spinning.

  ‘You’re alive!’ said Max. He threw his arms around Fred’s legs and tried to bite his knee in celebration. ‘We were just thinking we were going to get to eat you.’

  ‘Try not to sound so disappointed,’ said Fred, grinning.

  Con reached the lowest branch of the tree. She hesitated, readying for the jump. Lila held out a hand, but Con ignored it and thumped to the forest floor.

  ‘We made a discovery,’ she said grandly.

  ‘Really? What is it? Food?’ asked Lila.

  ‘Wait and see. Let’s get to the clearing first,’ said Con. Then, as if a valve had been released inside her, she let out a cough that was half laughter and half triumph. ‘I’d never actually climbed a tree before!’

  ‘Never?’ said Lila. ‘Then, that was actually quite amazing.’

  ‘I know,’ said Con. ‘I think so too.’

  As soon as they reached the den Fred pulled off his shirt and scraped off the honey in piles on wide leaves.

  He crossed to the pool and splashed water on his chest and shirt: bark and dust had stuck to the honey, and made a surprisingly tenacious paste.

  ‘Hurry up, Fred!’ called Max.

  Fred gave up and pulled his sticky shirt back on, then ran back to the den. Lila was turning the tobacco pouch over with careful hands. Baca was hanging around her throat like a necklace, sniffing her collarbone.

  ‘It’s red,’ said Lila. ‘Tobacco pouches are usually brown.’

  ‘So?’ asked Con.

  Lila leant forward, her eyes shining. ‘Bees can’t see the colour red: they see it as black. What if someone wanted the bees to protect the pouch from other animals? The bees can’t see it’s not just part of the tree, so they wouldn’t have been suspicious.’

  ‘Do bees feel suspicious?’ said Con sceptically.

  Lila flushed. ‘It’s just an idea. But Mama says, in the jungle you should avoid red; it’s a poison colour. Whoever owned this would have counted on that. They must have been planning to come back for it.’

  Fred felt an electric shiver pass over his skin. ‘There’s more. Keep looking.’

  ‘A map?’ Lila unfolded the paper on a wide flat stone. ‘What’s the X?’

  ‘We couldn’t see,’ said Con. ‘It was too far.’

  ‘Maybe treasure?’ said Lila. ‘Maybe a secret tribe?’

  ‘Cannonballs!’ said Max.

  ‘Don’t!’ said Con.

  ‘Or maybe he didn’t know what it was; maybe it’s just where he was going,’ said Fred. ‘I wonder if he knew –’

  Max laid one small hand over Fred’s mouth. ‘I’m hungry! Are we going to eat the honey?’

  The honey worked on them like medicine. Lila sat up straighter. Colour came into Con’s cheeks. The taste of the honey was absolutely astonishing: sweet and earthy and wild. It made Fred want to turn backflips across the jungle floor. It was a taste rich enough and deep enough to make them forget, just for half an hour, about the map.

  The next day was a Wednesday. Wednesday at school began with double geography; the most exciting thing that happened on Wednesday was biology with old Mr Martin, who was liable to fart at unexpected intervals.

  This Wednesday, Fred woke to a rainforest thunderstorm, and rain dripping through the roof of the den into his ear.

  Lila and Con were already awake, poring over the map, their heads almost touching. Max was snoring in a rain puddle, mud in his fringe and eyebrows. Baca’s fur was soaked, slicked down against his bones. He looked as furious as it is possible for a sloth to look.

  Lila laid her thumb on the X on the map. ‘It’s got to be much closer than Manaus,’ she said as she turned and saw Fred was awake. ‘Fred! Do you think the raft could get us there?’

  He moved to look, feeling his muscles creak under his skin. Both girls were shivering. It wasn’t cold, but the damp of the day had got into their skin.

  ‘We’d have to get through all those weeds here,’ he said, ‘and there’s that sign there.’

  ‘That thing that looks like a snake?’

  ‘Exactly.’ He looked out towards the river and the filing-cabinet-grey sky. ‘But, yes – I’d say we could.’

  ‘But you don’t think we should?’ asked Con. It was, very clearly, a question that begged the answer no. ‘We saw from the tree! It was miles!’

  ‘We can’t stay here forever,’ said Fred. He had never wanted anything as much as he wanted to launch the raft down the river to find the X. He needed to know what it was to be an explorer. There was another kind of hunger in his gut that had nothing to do with food: it was terror and possibility, fused together with hope.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking?’ Con looked from Lila to Fred.

  ‘But we have a map,’ said Lila softly. ‘We would actually know where we’re going this time.’

  ‘But you don’t know what’s at the end of it!’ Con’s skin was white and red in patches.

  ‘But it’s got to be something, or there wouldn’t be a map,’ said Fred.

  ‘But what if the X is supposed to mean: never go here because there are things that will come for you in the dark!’

  ‘But if the other option is to stay here, I thought you’d want to leave?’ said Fred.

  ‘I do want to leave! I hate it here!’ she spat. ‘I hate the mosquitos and the ants and the bites and the endless, endless hunger all the time! But I don’t want to follow a map to nowhere – I just want to go home.’

  Max jerked awake and began to whine, tugging at Lila’s sleeve. She shook him off.

  ‘I want to go home too!’ said Lila. Her eyebrows were a tight angry line across her forehead. ‘But it’s no worse for you than for anyone else.’

  ‘Yes it is.’ Con’s face was contorted beyond recognition. ‘You don’t understand. It’s easier for you because you’re used to it! You’re from here!’

  Lila’s eyes widened. ‘I live in a city.’ Her voice was thin with shock. ‘We have a dining room! With silver candlesticks! I do not live in the jungle!’

  ‘But you’re not feeling sick all the time.’ Con’s jaw was clenched. ‘I wake up every morning feeling like I’m going to vomit!’ She thumped the wet ground, and flecks of mud sprang up around her fist.


  ‘But so do I! I want –’

  ‘I hate it so much here I can’t breathe.’

  ‘Do you think any of us like it?’

  ‘But you’re not alone!’ Con burst out. ‘You’ve got Max!’

  ‘Exactly! Exactly, and he cries all the time, and if he dies it’ll be my fault!’

  Max heard and let out a roar. Sobs shook his whole body. Fred caught his wrist and held it, to stop him from running.

  ‘At least you know if you die there’ll be someone who’s bothered to care!’ Con yelled over the noise.

  ‘It’s not my fault if nobody cares about you,’ spat Lila. ‘You don’t know –’

  ‘Stop it!’ shouted Max. He ran at the two girls and kicked out at both of them, his shoes smacking mud against their skin. ‘Stop it, right now!’

  Lila’s mouth shut with a snap. She turned to her brother and allowed him to climb into her arms. She rubbed his back, her eyes utterly exhausted. ‘Don’t cry. It just makes it worse.’

  A tear was running down Con’s cheek. Fred pulled a leaf from the wall of the shelter and handed it to her. She mopped her face with it. It didn’t do much good. ‘I’m just so tired,’ she said. ‘And I’m so hungry. And I ache.’

  Lila looked down at her hands. ‘I didn’t mean it, what I just said.’

  There was a silence. The rain thumped against the leaves over their heads.

  ‘I have nightmares, about my mama,’ said Lila. ‘I dream that she’s looking for me, and I’m caught in a tree and I can’t shout and I can’t make her look up and see me.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you dream about your parents?’

  Fred dreamt of nothing else; his father just out of earshot, just out of reach, while he struggled in the dark to touch him with his fingertips. He half-nodded, carefully non-committal.

  Con’s mouth shaped a word, then fell still. ‘It’s not like that for me,’ she said at last. ‘I live with my great-aunt.’

  ‘What happened to your parents?’ asked Lila.

  ‘They’re dead.’ Con’s mouth hardened again and she set her jaw, as if daring them to sympathise. ‘My mother died when I was three, and my father was killed in the war. And then a family fostered me.’

  ‘But you just said –’

  ‘They had a baby of their own, and they threw me out. So I was sent to live with my great-aunt.’ Con gave a carefully nonchalant shrug. ‘She didn’t really want me, but there were no other options.’