by Nadia Aguiar
The rest happened quickly. The river narrowed and turned a bend and Rodrigo had to pay attention to steering the barge. Maya saw a flicker of movement in the jungle up ahead and then they rounded the bend and came face-to-face with a group of soldiers standing on the banks of the river, a thorny nest of rifles pointed at the crew of the barge.
CHAPTER TEN
Ambush! *
Rodrigo’s Story * A Change in Plans *
On the River at Night
Don’t shoot!” Rodrigo cried. “I’ll bring her alongside the shore!”
He began turning the wheel and the barge spun slowly around and headed into the soft muddy bank. “You two get down and stay down,” he said under his breath. “Keep the baby quiet. Do what ever I tell you, the instant I tell you, do you understand?”
Maya and Simon flattened themselves on the deck of the barge, shielding Penny. They felt the barge rock as the first of the soldiers boarded, and they heard them shouting at Rodrigo. Maya heard what she was sure was the sound of a rifle butt hitting him. She turned her head and watched the soldiers. They were wearing camouflage uniforms and they had black bands tied around their foreheads and masks of charcoal painted around their eyes. One kept his gun aimed at Rodrigo, who stood there with his hands over his head. Another soldier went down into the cabin and returned a moment later. He shouted to the men on shore, and several more soldiers boarded the barge and began carrying cases of guns and ammunition out of the cabin and passing them up onto the bank.
“Who are they?” Maya heard one of the soldiers ask.
“They’re my nieces and nephew,” Rodrigo said. “They’re just children.”
“What about the boy?” asked the soldier.
“He’s too young!” said Rodrigo. “When he’s older, he’ll be a soldier. But now—please—leave him be for another few years.”
“Do you think we need more mouths to feed?” said the soldier. Maya watched as ten pairs of boots stamped over the deck and jumped from the railing back onto the riverbank.
“Keep moving,” one soldier called. “You never saw us!”
“I never did,” said Rodrigo, stumbling back to the wheel. The whole thing had happened so fast. The soldiers had probably been on board the barge for less than a minute. Maya and Simon stayed where they were until finally Rodrigo said they could get up again. Maya looked behind them. The riverbank where the soldiers had been was deserted now, and receding in the distance. She turned to look at Rodrigo. A trickle of blood ran down from a cut over his eye where the soldiers had struck him. Simon watched him fearfully.
“I’m sorry, children,” said Rodrigo finally.
“Who were those men?” Simon asked. He still felt quite shaky.
“Soldiers,” said Rodrigo. “The jungle around here is full of them.”
Maya and Simon peered nervously around them. The jungle that moments before had been full of amazing animals once again looked menacing.
“When will this terrible war be over?” said Rodrigo, sighing deeply.
The war began over ophalla many years ago, Rodrigo told them. It was a stone, bluish white, as bright as diamond. It was found deep underground in some places in Tamarind. Legend said the earliest people in Tamarind had built their first cities from it, and those people were said to live for hundreds of years. It seemed true that ophalla must have had some sort of miraculous healing power. It had always been considered very precious, but it was thought that the last of it had been discovered and mined long ago. But then a vast new source was found in the jungles in the middle of the western end of Tamarind. There was a mad rush to seize it, and the Council of Old Families that had ruled Tamarind for generations began claiming all land that it thought contained ophalla. The problem was that the Council was in the South and was mainly made up of people from southern Tamarind, but most of the ophalla was found in the North.
“The Council began kicking people in the North off their land—land that had belonged to their families for generations,” Rodrigo said, keeping an eye on the river ahead as he spoke. “The people in the North protested, of course. Many of their men began going into hiding in the jungle, where they lived in camps and staged raids on the South. That only made the southern soldiers behave more brutally. Soon civil war had broken out. In the early days there was violence almost constantly. There were battles in the jungles and in the mountains. All the boats and ships on this side were forced into service, carrying men and supplies for the government. They were frequently attacked by boats from the other side. Even river barges carrying potatoes to a market in town were attacked and sunk. Meanwhile, soldiers were sneaking into the towns and setting off bombs. There was death and hunger everywhere.
“The war raged on long after the new ophalla mines had dried up, though. The same thing happened that happens in every war. With every person killed, more people were inspired to join the soldiers or the rebels to avenge the deaths of their loved ones and the cycle continued and the war grew bigger.
“Eventually the towns and cities had all been so badly ravaged that there was no one left in power anymore and Tamarind fell into anarchy. It’s remained that way ever since. It began to separate into tiny areas, with each little town cut off from every other town, and jungle cut off from coast, and the mountains dividing the island into two. Bands of rebel soldiers roam the jungles and terrorize the towns. The seas are run by men of the old war fleets who have turned into nothing more than pirates. No one is safe. People disappear all the time. They’re kidnapped or killed in revenge attacks. Young men have no choice but to become soldiers. Everyone lives in fear.”
The river narrowed for a stretch and dappled light from the overhanging trees slid over the barge. Then they left the sun altogether and were moving along in shadows. The muddy water swished around the hull of the barge. Maya could smell the damp, mulchy smell of the jungle pressing in on them.
Rodrigo wasn’t looking at them at all now. His hands gripped the wheel, keeping the barge in the middle of the gloomy stretch of the river. His face grew dark. When he spoke again his voice was bitter.
“My wife was killed one day, in an explosion in the town we lived in. She had been a teacher, too. We had always planned to have children, but now, when I see what Tamarind has become, I’m grateful that I didn’t bring new life into it.”
Maya and Simon were silent, not knowing what to do or say. Maya wanted to be off that barge more than she had ever wanted anything. Rodrigo seemed to have forgotten them and was staring with black, angry eyes at the river ahead of them.
But just then Penny woke and began to cry, and with that peculiar and magnificent power that infants have, she made everyone forget everything else but how to make her happy again. Maya picked her up and rocked her, and Simon danced on one foot with his hand on his head making funny faces, and Rodrigo, looking completely surprised for a moment, then began whistling a tune so vigorously that Penny hiccuped once and her tears stopped as quickly as they started.
The river widened and the barge came out of shadows and back into a sunny stretch. Finally Rodrigo cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry, children,” he said. “Life isn’t that bad—you’re here. I shouldn’t have said what I did. But we have a problem now. It would have been fine for you to come all the way to Port Town with me, but I was supposed to deliver that cargo to a rebel camp about half a day upstream. When I get there and they find I don’t have it, there’s going to be trouble. I can’t have you there for that.”
“But what will we do?” asked Simon. He and Maya looked out at the dark jungle on either side of them. They were in the middle of nowhere.
“Don’t worry,” said Rodrigo quickly. “I have a cousin who lives with his wife a few miles downstream. You’ll be safe with them until I come back. I can take you to Port Town then, when things have calmed down.”
“We can’t wait,” said Maya at once. “We have to get to Port Town as soon as possible! We can’t just wait here—”
“
I won’t take you with me any farther,” said Rodrigo firmly, a sharp edge entering his voice. “Not now.”
Maya recoiled, and Simon, too, seemed to shrink as Rodrigo spoke. It was no use arguing. Rodrigo had made up his mind. The sky darkened and Maya could smell rain on the air. The jungle oozed down to the river’s edge, where clotted masses of foul-smelling flowers hung from low branches, trailing in the water. A snake wriggled down the muddy riverbank and swam alongside the boat for a moment. It began to rain, slowly at first. The children stared gloomily out at the river, dimpled beneath the drops. Fretful thoughts circled in Maya’s mind. How long would she and Simon and Penny have to wait for Rodrigo to return?
To try to cheer them up, Rodrigo got a pair of hammocks from the cabin and shook the spiders out over the edge of the barge, then strung the hammocks between the beams under the tarpaulin. Being in a hammock put Simon in a better mood and he sat happily cocooned in it, watching the river slide past, the jungle dissolving in the mist. Maya climbed into hers and Penny fell asleep in her lap. Maya and Simon fell asleep, too, and when they woke it was dusk and the rain had tapered off.
Night fell swiftly and the moon rose above the palms and soon they were gliding along beneath its light. They passed tiny villages of just a few rows of wooden houses on stilts that sat on small crescent beaches, ivory in the moonlight. Music from strange instruments drifted out over the water. Loose seeds rattled in pods and dry grasses brushed together and animal-hide drums beat steadily. All along the shores of the river they could smell the robust odor of cassava and smoke. Sometimes the children could see people dancing around the fires. They left the camps behind, the fires shrinking to glowing orange embers in the distance, and ventured farther down the river, where the only sounds were the symphony of frogs and the occasional splash of fruit falling. They reached a faded wooden house on stilts, standing by itself on the edge of the river, and Rodrigo moored the barge alongside it.
Maya and Simon had no choice. This was where Rodrigo would leave them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Wooden House on Stilts * Sojourn *
Rodrigo’s Gift * Borrowing a Canoe
The first couple of days that the children were with Rodrigo’s cousin, Jose, and Jose’s wife, Maria, it did nothing but rain, which was just as well, since Maya’s and Simon’s feet were blistered badly and needed time to heal. Maria made herbal poultices and wrapped their feet in them. They did a lot of eating and sleeping. Maria took care of Penny, singing to her in the kitchen as she worked in the days and rocking her to sleep each night. Maya had run out of diapers for Penny, but Maria showed her how to use a special type of soft jungle moss inside a diaper. She also showed Maya an abundant, plum-sized red fruit, which she said was what people in the jungle fed infants. It was good to have her sister taken care of by someone competent and kind, and Maya was grateful to have a rest. They were all exhausted.
After the first couple of days, between rain showers she and Simon would help with chores: feeding the pigs that snuffled in a pen down near the river; scything the undergrowth in Jose’s cassava fields, which undulated in a green sea to hills in the distance; peeling ripe fruit to make juice; and raking cooking cassava on the outdoor stove. In the evenings Jose would paddle in one of the canoes to the middle of the river, where the drinking water was purest, and Maya and Simon would wait and help to carry the buckets back up to the house.
“You’re very strong!” Maria told Maya, taking the bucket from her one day. “What a brave girl you are, to take care of your brother and sister like you do. Your mother would be very proud of you.”
When rain kept the children inside the house, Maya’s thoughts would turn worriedly to the question of what they would do if Rodrigo didn’t come back. What if he had gotten into worse trouble than he thought when he had arrived at the rebel camp without the cargo? And even if he was okay, it would take another couple of weeks before he said he would be able to return for them. It seemed like an eternity.
It had become too painful for the children to look at the logbook, so it sat untouched in Simon’s backpack until one afternoon during a break in the rain, when Maya took it down to the riverbank. She sat by herself turning its pages. An idea had occurred to her the evening before and she was looking for something in particular on the map. She turned to the page that Rodrigo had drawn and looked at it in amazement. A whole miraculous world had sprung to life. Simon had only given him a pencil, but somehow he had filled it in with pigments. He must have finished it during the rainstorm, without them knowing—his gift to them.
Mountain peaks shone dazzlingly in a jagged line across the island, and rivers spilled out of their heights and roared through vast green swaths of jungle. Tiny threads of streams wove through shaded valleys, and here and there lakes sat blue and placid. Harbors and inlets were etched precisely, and fleets of ships sailed around the coast. The map was populated with tribal camps, villages, and coastal towns. The capital city, marked by a star, beckoned on the southwest coast. Animals were drawn in miniature here and there, along with mysterious, intricate symbols that Maya could not decipher. Wavy roads followed the coastline and connected towns. A tiny crop of islands— Lesser Tamarind—sat off Greater Tamarind’s western shore. Thick green vines waved from them. The waters around the island—the bays and harbors and reefs and currents and the mouths of rivers—were labeled, too, with strangely beautiful names: Zallalona River, Crooked River, First Hope River. Mermaids frolicked in the waters off the coast, and here and there were what appeared to be giants. An island with giants—it sounded like the island in her father’s story. Could they have found the island of Papi’s tales? But Maya thought all those stories had been made up to entertain them during the long trips between ports. Maya forced her attention back to the map in hopes that it would yield some clue about their predicament. Her eye roved over the page. It was only the western bump of Greater Tamarind that was colored in, the rest stretched out in an arid, tawny desert, without signposts of any kind.
Her eye fell on the Nallanda River and she found the spot where Rodrigo had told them they were. And there, just a little way down the Nallanda River, she saw what she was looking for: fine blue tributaries that branched off the main river and trickled off into the jungle. The tributaries bisected the vast green space and rejoined the Nallanda later, miles closer to Port Town. The barge would have been too big to travel on one of the tributaries, but not a smaller boat. A smaller boat like one of Jose’s canoes. It would be possible, she thought, tracing her finger over the thin blue thread, to take a shortcut to Port Town on a tributary and cut out miles and miles of jungle. They would pass the outskirts of the abandoned ophalla mines and a smoking triangle that Rodrigo had drawn, what ever it was, but they would not have to go near them. Maya closed the book and looked out the window at Jose’s canoes moored on the riverbank nearby. Each thin wooden boat was narrow and lightweight, and curved like an incisor. One of them would do it, she decided. They could take food with them, and she still had Helix’s spear, which the soldiers who had ambushed the barge had not taken. She could use it for protection. They just couldn’t afford to wait for Rodrigo any longer.
She waited until late that evening to tell Simon—she knew they had to leave without Maria or Jose knowing, since they would try to stop them, and she didn’t want him to blurt out their secret.
“But that’s stealing, Maya. . . .” he said.
“It isn’t stealing if you really need it,” Maya said. She was counting on her elder sister authority to convince him. “And, anyway, they have several of them. Don’t be a baby, Simon.”
Calling Simon a baby would always get him. Reluctantly he agreed that they would leave the next morning.
When the first milky light of dawn arrived, Maya was on her feet quickly. She woke Simon and managed to lift Penny up without waking her. Then, grabbing her backpack, which was already packed and ready, she left the note she had written for Maria in the middle of the room, and she and Si
mon crept silently from the house on stilts. They walked on tiptoe down to the river’s edge, the grass still pearly with dew, and untied one of the canoes. They settled gingerly into it, small silver walls of water pouring in over the gunnels, and they pushed out over the river.
Scared that Jose or Maria would stir and discover that they were gone, Maya paddled quickly. But it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Small silver waterfalls rushed in over the gunnels and soon the canoe was sitting low in the water. Simon turned to look behind them and the canoe nearly capsized.
“Simon!” Maya exclaimed. “I need you to concentrate! This thing isn’t exactly seaworthy.”
The canoe righted itself and before long the sun had risen, turning the river from orange to muddy brown, and the little wooden house on stilts was far behind them. Penny sat snugly in the sling on Maya’s back. After a while, Maya saw the first of the tributaries coming up ahead on the left. Which one should they take? Before she could decide, the river had picked up speed and they glided right past the first one. The river was deceptively powerful and Maya realized in alarm that she didn’t know if she was strong enough to get them off it. Sweat breaking out on her forehead, she began to paddle as hard as she could toward the river’s edge, where they were approaching another tributary. The strength of the current was going to carry them straight past it!
“BAIL, Simon!” she shouted.
Maya paddled furiously and Simon bailed with a wooden bowl and at the last moment the tributary current caught them. They left the main river behind and headed into the narrow green gloom. Maya sighed in relief and rested, letting the water carry them along. The tributary felt safer and less exposed than the Nallanda River.