The Lost Island of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  CHAPTER NINE

  Good-bye * More from the Logbook * The

  Ghostly Barge * A Map for the Children * Frightening Cargo

  The following morning Maya woke in the early breeze coming off the sea, gently rattling the palms. Over the rocks on the next beach, the Limmermor turtles were trundling down from the dunes toward the shore. All around them the sand was smooth and cool and white and the ocean was calm. Maya woke Simon as Helix was returning from the edge of the jungle with fruit for their breakfast. The logbook had been returned to Simon’s backpack, and Maya wondered if perhaps she had only dreamed she had seen Helix reading it the night before. She bathed and changed Penny, noting with some alarm that the diaper supply was dwindling and would likely not last the day.

  The children ate breakfast and tossed the fruit peels to an inquisitive turtle who had come and was waiting a few feet away and then they were off, leaving the beach behind and heading back into the jungle. They were headed farther down the river, to where Helix said there was a dock. Maya’s shoes were damp. They chafed her feet and she winced with each step. The children walked even slower than they had the day before. Only Penny, riding in the sling and babbling away, seemed cheerful. Maya told Simon about the creatures they had seen in the tide pools the night before and he listened with interest, frowning slightly as he thought. The sun climbed and in a short while it was brutally hot. Maya tried not to think about how much her feet hurt. She was having a hard time putting the memory of the evening before at the tide pools with Helix out of her mind, though she couldn’t say why it was making her feel so strange. She was still cross at him, and worried about what he had said. She would be happy when he was gone and they were on their own again.

  In an hour they had reached a dilapidated wooden dock on the river’s edge. The dock and the stretch of the river were deserted.

  “This is as far as I go,” Helix said. “A boat should be by here sometime today.”

  Maya and Simon looked down the brown curve of the river, rippling over deadheads and stones here and there.

  “Are you sure you won’t come with me?” Helix asked.

  Maya nodded.

  Helix looked worried. He sighed, then he whistled for Sea-grape and the bird coasted down out of the trees and landed on his shoulder. In one swift motion, Helix yanked out several of her long green tail feathers. The parrot squawked in protest and nipped Helix’s cheek. She flew up and perched on a branch, where she grumbled and ruffled her feathers.

  “Sorry,” Helix called up to her. Then he cut a thin string of animal hide from his bag of arrows and he quickly tied the feathers to the string and then knotted the two ends together. He handed the necklace to Simon.

  “Keep this on all the time,” he said. “It will help protect you. And you take this,” he said to Maya, passing her his spear. “Don’t be afraid to use it.”

  Maya took it in surprise. It was heavy and a sharp steel blade was fitted to its end. She propped it on the ground, blade in the air, and tried holding it as a walking stick, like Helix did. Simon slipped the leather necklace over his neck and touched the smooth green feathers.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But protected from what?”

  “From some things, not others,” said Helix. He looked like he was about to say something else, but then he didn’t.

  “Well, good-bye,” he said finally. “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  Maya smiled stiffly. “Thank you for your help,” she said. “Good-bye.”

  Helix turned and vanished into the soft blackness of the jungle. Seagrape circled the river a few times and then swooped, screeching as she flew over the children’s heads, and then disappeared after Helix. The children were alone again.

  Simon was quite dashed by Helix’s departure.

  “I liked him,” he said morosely. “He was fun.”

  Maya shrugged. “It’s better now, just the three of us again. Now we’ll find Mami and Papi. Helix was only going to get us into trouble.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Wait, I guess. He said a boat would be by sometime later on.”

  Simon wandered down the edge of the river a little and dug for worms on the muddy banks. Occasionally he tossed pebbles into the river. Penny fell asleep in the shade of a banana plant. Maya made herself comfortable on the grass and tried to stop her thoughts from turning to Helix. She tried to make herself think about her usual daydream, of living at Granny Pearl’s and going to school. But it was hard to hold the daydream in her mind this time. When she was sure that Simon was too far down the riverbank and too absorbed in what ever was living in the mud there to see her, she reached for his backpack and took out the logbook from the Pamela Jane.

  She turned its pages slowly. The first few were blank, except for the very first, at the bottom of which was a red wax seal. She’d never noticed it before. She couldn’t make out what the insignia was. She ran her finger over the raised edges of the seal and turned the page. Her parents had made all sorts of notes, most of them in shorthand. The cryptic words, scrawled hastily, yielded no wisdom. But in her current predicament, the possibility of any slight glimmer of communication with her parents took on special, secretive weight. She looked again at the complicated mathematical equations, notations of water temperature and salinity, measurements of fish, diagrams of unusual shells, charts showing the progress of peculiar weather systems, and illustrations of extraordinary marine life.

  She noticed that on almost every page he had written things about something called Element X. High density of Element X present in crouching oysters found at 13 degrees south, location surprising, contradicts earlier findings . . . Element X, still unidentifiable . . . Structure of Element X determined unstable . . . High concentrations of bioluminescence in creatures found in the Tropical Kala Stream . . . Origin of Element X??? What were her parents pursuing? Was this part of their work for the Red Coral Project? Maya wondered if it had something to do with their argument with Dr. Fitzsimmons.

  Maya’s eye stopped on a page with sketches of the three children. They were drawn in her father’s hand—she would know it anywhere—and a lump rose in her throat.

  The first was of her, Maya. Look at how his pencil had lifted her hair as though a breeze had caught it! She was sitting there, chin in one hand, gazing broodingly out to sea. She looked so glum! Was that how she looked to them all? Who would want to be around such a misery? He had drawn in the tiny white scar on her temple and her ear where it showed through her hair. Such loving attention to detail. Maya studied the picture closely. The only mirror on the Pamela Jane had a jagged diagonal crack through the middle of it, and the tin on the back was peeling off and the glass was fogged with scratches. So try as she might, craning her neck and peering sideways, she had never been able to see herself clearly. But she was pretty, how he had drawn her.

  She turned the page and found a sketch of Simon. It was Simon, but not just Simon, it was Simon the way her father saw him. He was squinting and looking up from where he was crouched on the deck, examining what looked to be a spiny lobster. It was so exactly Simon that Maya laughed a little bit. Her father was quite a good artist—he had not only drawn their physical likenesses, but had captured their personalities, too, which only someone who loved them as much as he did could have done.

  And then, on the next page, a pencil sketch of Penny, sleeping in the crib her father had carved for her from driftwood. Penny was barely visible beneath a light blanket. There was the fat curve of her cheek, her sweetly closed eyes, and the angelic ruff of curls on the top of her otherwise bald head. But a shell on the deck beside her crib was drawn with more detail, more intricacy. Penny’s face was still too young, changing too quickly, to be captured in something as still as a drawing.

  A shiver went through Maya. If she didn’t find their father, Penny would never know him and he would never know Penny.

  Simon was plodding slowly down the riverbank toward her, so Maya closed the logbook and slipped it
back into his backpack. She lay back and closed her eyes and pretended to be sleeping so that he wouldn’t talk to her. She felt too strange and emotional right then—filled with so much love for her family she thought she might weep—but if he spoke to her she was afraid she would snap at him. Why was it like that with family?

  She heard him sit down near her on the grass. In a little while, when the weepy feeling had passed, Maya sat up. Simon was idly flipping the pages of the logbook.

  Simon stopped reading.

  “What is it about?” he asked. “And what’s it all doing in our ship’s log?” Perplexed, he turned back to start at the beginning again. “Hey,” he said after a while. “There’s something funny. Look at this—see?”

  He tilted the book so that the light caught it at different angles.

  “The first few pages of Papi’s notes have funny shiny squiggles on them—on the paper. I didn’t notice them before.”

  “Maybe something spilled on the pages,” Maya said. She wandered to the jungle’s edge and climbed a guava tree and began tossing the fruit to the ground below.

  When Simon looked up again he saw a wooden barge appearing around the bend in the river, traveling slowly toward them on the current. Maya caught sight of it then, too, and she jumped down from the tree to join Simon. She had to blink several times to be sure she was really seeing it. Its wood was bleached ghostly by the elements, and except for a few coils of rotting rope, its deck was bare. It looked as if it was a wreck dredged up from the deep—it seemed remarkable that it was even afloat. A faded blue tarpaulin was stretched over the mid-deck to provide shade. It was empty except for its captain, a sunburned older man with dark skin and a blue cap pulled down over his shiny black hair.

  “Hello!” Simon called, waving.

  The man seemed surprised to see three children there and he stared at them as he cut the engine and the barge glided alongside them. They had gathered up Penny and their belongings and were waiting for him. Maya smiled politely as the barge came to rest against the dock.

  “Hello, sir,” she said. “Would you please be able to give us a ride down the river?”

  “You’re all alone?” the bargeman asked, baffled. He looked past them into the jungle, but of course there was no one there.

  “Yes,” said Maya. “We’re trying to get to Port Town.”

  “To Port Town?” the bargeman repeated. He lifted his cap for a moment to scratch his forehead. “That’s miles and miles away. And this river goes deep into the jungle—very deep into the jungle—before it gets to Port Town. It isn’t safe for children.”

  “That’s okay,” said Simon cheerfully. “We aren’t scared.”

  “If you’ll take us, we can explain,” said Maya. She didn’t want to lose any more time standing on the edge of the river when they could already be on their way to Port Town. She had studied the bargeman quickly and decided that she could trust him. He had kind eyes.

  “Please,” she said. “It’s urgent that we get there as soon as possible.”

  A branch cracked loudly in the jungle behind the children and they jumped, startled. The bargeman’s eyes flew quickly to the wall of trees, and Maya was alarmed to see fear in them. She suddenly felt very vulnerable standing there exposed on the riverbank and she badly wanted to be on the barge and moving.

  “Well,” said the bargeman. He seemed to be agonizing about what to do. “I can’t just leave you here like this. . . .”

  Something rustled in the trees and the bargeman made his decision. He reached out a hand for the children to grab.

  “Come on,” he said. “Hop on.”

  Simon jumped onto the barge first and turned to smile at Maya. Maya hesitated for a moment—was this the right thing to be doing? But when the bargeman reached out his hand to her she grabbed it and, holding Penny tightly, leaped onto the barge. The captain started the engine again and the barge left the dock, a fan of surf in its wake, and they were off. Maya looked behind her and saw that the sound had come from a gentle, snub-nosed agouti that had come down to the river to drink. She leaned back against the railing and breathed a sigh of relief. The bargeman retrieved a small wooden box from the cabin and put a blanket in it, and Maya rested Penny down gratefully.

  “Who are you?” the bargeman asked. “And what are you doing out here on your own?”

  “I’m Maya, this is Simon, and this is our little sister, Penny,” said Maya.

  “We’re looking for our parents,” said Simon, quickly describing them for him. “Have you seen them?”

  The bargeman shook his head, frowning. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t.”

  The children had been hopeful for a second, but at his answer they sighed. They explained their story to the bargeman, who told them his name was Rodrigo. He listened in amazement and when they had finished, he looked at them from beneath his blue cap, his eyes dark and serious.

  “I’ve seen strange things out here,” he said. “But nothing that looked quite so out of place as the three of you. You gave me a real shock when I came around the bend and saw you. You’re very lucky, you know. Children don’t usually survive long in the jungle.”

  Rodrigo was calm and gentle and Maya felt safe with him. He told them that Helix had been right and Port Town was the best place for them to go. Maya began to relax and believe that in a short time they would reach help. Everything would be fine after all. The children listened as Rodrigo talked to them about Tamarind. He told them that they were in the South, on the Nallanda River. The river began in the mountains in the North and looped around until it finally emptied out into the sea near Port Town. He explained that he was a trader and brought goods back and forth from Port Town to the people in the jungle.

  Simon had an idea. “Would you draw us a map of the island?” he asked. He withdrew a stubby pencil from his pocket and handed the logbook to Rodrigo.

  Rodrigo glanced ahead of them but the river was calm and wide, so he let Simon take the wheel. Balancing the logbook in one hand, with the other he drew the island. It was shaped like a fat oval, and was longest from east to west. Then he drew a wavy line—the river they were on, presumably—which began in the middle of the island and struck out boldly across the interior before making a loop and again heading south, where it emptied into the sea. At its point of origin, Rodrigo scribbled a huddle of triangles, a range of mountains that divided the island in half. In the waters off the west of the main island he drew a few small blotches.

  “These are the Lesser Islands,” he said, “where it sounds like you landed. And all this here on the main island—” The pencil made scratching noises against the paper. “Is jungle.” Rodrigo drew in more rivers and then began putting points along the southern coast of the map, drawing in one point on the southwest coast more heavily than the others.

  “Maracairol,” he said. “The capital of Greater Tamarind.”

  “How do you know the island so well?” Simon asked, impressed. He loved maps.

  “I used to be a schoolteacher,” Rodrigo said, smiling. “A long time ago.” He began to sketch a few other features, but the river they were on, the real river, had narrowed and he handed the logbook back to Simon and took the wheel again. Maya looked at him with new interest. Unlike most people her age, Maya had never had a real schoolteacher before and so she was eager to know everything she could about school. But she felt shy suddenly and didn’t know what to ask.

  “Maya wants to go to school on land,” said Simon.

  “There aren’t any schools left on Greater Tamarind,” said Rodrigo. “Now, you’ll have to let me concentrate for a moment, the currents are tricky here and this barge has seen better days.”

  Rodrigo kept his eyes on the river ahead of them, and the barge took the tiny series of rapids smoothly and then they were out of the white water. Simon studied the map and then put the logbook back into his backpack and watched as the green walls of the jungle slid by.

  Though a barge on a river is not the same thing as
a sailboat on the open sea, there was something comforting about being on the water again. They glided along, bright blue parrots flying overhead and hummingbirds coming out over the boat, their tiny wings whirring. Animals came to the river to drink water, and the children saw all sorts of wildlife: a mother ocelot and her cubs; hairy-toed sloths clinging to branches on the fringes of the jungle (Simon counted seven of them in total); enormous yellow butterflies (each of them was bigger than Penny); and hundreds of birds—toucans, parakeets, scarlet macaws, and snowy-white egrets, who stood in the shallows on their stilt legs and watched as the barge slipped past. As Rodrigo had promised, Simon saw monkeys coming down to drink and the barge even nosed through a family of alligators floating in the middle of the river, basking in the sun.

  Simon sighed happily. The world made sense to him at that moment. They were on their way to the place where they would be able to find help for their parents, and at some point soon they would all be reunited and everything would be fine. Better than fine, in fact. Their lives would actually be better than they had been before, because now they had survived the evil Lesser Islands with their man-eating vines, they had made two new friends (Rodrigo and Helix, even though Helix was gone now), and they were on a thrillingly creaky old boat on a river in the middle of a jungle and they had seen monkeys and alligators.

  “May I explore the deck?” he asked Rodrigo.

  Rodrigo nodded and Simon ran off to the bow. He stayed up there for a while, looking out for wild animals up ahead on the riverbanks before he returned to the main deck, pausing to crouch down and peer inside the cabin.

  Rodrigo came to life then.

  “Don’t go in there!” he shouted, but it was too late.

  Simon stepped back up onto the deck, his face pale.

  “You have guns,” he said. He stared at Rodrigo, betrayed.

  Maya could just see into the grimy windows of the cabin, where there were crates stacked with all sorts of guns, black and vicious, sticking out at all angles. There must have been hundreds of them. And around them were crates of grenades and wires and explosives. What kind of man would be carrying guns down a river? She looked at Rodrigo fearfully.