by Nadia Aguiar
Elder strode to the front of the platform.
‘You can all see that the mandrill made an appearance last night,’ he said, and the crowd whispered and craned their necks to look at the whorl perched on the rooftop. ‘From now on expect to see more whorls, appearing suddenly, in unexpected places. Beware – not all will be as harmless as this one. The time the Bloom competitors have to prove themselves grows briefer with each passing day, and the consequences of failure grow ever more perilous for Kana.
‘Now!’ he said. ‘The first challenge was to determine speed and strategy and, of course, to select capable and fearless swimmers – all necessary skills for the Bloom Catcher. This next challenge, however, allows Players the opportunity – if they are clever enough – to use their minds and conserve their energy for the third and unavoidably arduous challenge.’ He smiled. ‘This is a problem with a variety of simple and elegant solutions.’
He held up a gleaming bullet, pinched between his finger and thumb.
‘A Zamzee beetle,’ he said, projecting his voice over the snorting and braying of animals as their riders jockeyed for a closer view of the insect. ‘Your next task will be to find one of these and return with it to Santori. These creatures are highly venomous. I urge you to use the utmost caution when attempting to capture one of them. Anyone who gets bitten should return to the next town for the serum at once. Consider yourselves warned.’
‘Do we have to bring it back alive?’ called one of the competitors.
‘It would be safer for you to find one that was not alive,’ said Elder. He paused. ‘This will be the final trial for most of today’s Players. Only the first five teams to reach Santori with a Zamzee will advance to the next and final round. When I blow the triton, you’ll be free to go.’
A moment later, the deep bellow of the triton once more reverberated through the hot morning air. But, unlike the last time, the competitors did not rush out of the square. Everyone crowded to get a good look at the rare beetle, sitting on top of a box on the platform, guarded by a councilman. Penny, Tabba and Jebby found themselves shoved to the back, where they waited impatiently.
‘Where can we find one?’ Penny whispered to Tabba and Jebby.
‘I don’t know,’ whispered Tabba. ‘I’ve never seen one before. Have you, Jebby?’
He shook his head.
Slowly the other Players eddied off to confer in hushed groups around the square, and the children were able to get up close to the beetle.
‘Wow,’ said Penny. ‘It’s beautiful.’
The Zamzee was dead. It appeared to be a variety of scarab. It was about the size of a mussel, its body a sleek, hard shell, its turquoise lacquer as sumptuous and opaque as oil. It had two black eyes, two jointed pincers and rows of powerful legs that had once carried it over rotting logs, up looping vines and high into jungle canopies. Sworled horns prodded out of its head like miniature antlers. Penny was used to her family taking field notes, so she folded the map into a square and dug around in her backpack to find a pencil.
‘I’ll sketch it,’ she said. ‘So we’re sure we get the right kind.’
Deftly she drew the creature and scribbled a few details about it:
The size of a cowrie shell
V-shaped horns
Deep turquoise wings make a hard, polished case
Two fake orange eye spots
When she was done, the councilman placed the beetle in a cloth pouch and took it away.
‘Let’s look at the map,’ said Jebby. ‘Maybe there’s something on it that will give us an idea of where to go.’
The children wheeled the bike and cart to a quiet lane just off the square, where they stopped in the shade of a bougainvillea vine. They spread out the map on the ground between them and pored over it, but nothing on it sparked any epiphanies about where to find a Zamzee. Minutes passed.
‘Bugs are usually under rocks,’ Tabba offered at last.
‘We can’t just go around the jungle overturning rocks,’ said Penny. ‘That can’t be it.’
After being ready to dash off as fast as they could, everything had come to a stop. They were stuck. Ideas seemed to be flying out of rather than into Penny’s head. This time they had no parents, no friends, no one like Bellamy with expertise or provisions, no one at all to guide them. They had to figure out what to do on their own, and suddenly each of them felt at a loss.
Seagrape flew off Penny’s shoulder and settled in the bougainvillea. The light through the brilliant petals glowed pinkly on the map, deepening as the seconds ticked by. The sun was fully up now, the sky blue, and Penny felt like the morning was slipping through their fingers. Fragments of conversation drifted over from the square. Everyone else in Jaipa seemed to be loudly sharing their opinions about where to find a Zamzee beetle: beneath rocks, beside streams, in the crooks of cool, mossy branches, in the sunny heights of the canopy. Some said under the bark of wameda trees. Some said they were always just outside the Gorgonne; some said, no, they were never that far south. Some were convinced they lived only in deep jungle; others insisted they could be found close to the coast.
Think, Penny willed herself, trying to shut out all the outside noise. There must be some places that it would be more likely to find a Zamzee beetle than others. But, if even Tabba and Jebby didn’t know, how would she? She picked up a twig and traced anxious lines on the earth with it.
‘Everyone’s starting to leave,’ said Tabba, looking towards the square.
One by one, the teams were deciding on a plan and departing. Often they started out in one direction then, once out of sight, veered off in another to throw off anyone who might think of following them. Kal had disappeared without the children noticing. Even the people who had been there for the celebration were packing up and starting to stream out along the main road to Santori, or to the towns of the family they would stop to see along the way. The townspeople were cleaning up the square, dismantling the platform and clearing leftover food from the stalls. The party was moving on.
How hard could it be to find a Zamzee? Penny thought in frustration. There were bugs everywhere in Kana! Giant ones, miniscule ones, bright ones, dull ones, bugs that clicked and groaned and squeaked like rusty gears, others that whistled and sang from dawn to dusk, still others that only left their damp, mulchy homes under cover of night. She and Tabba and Jebby had to sleep under mosquito nets or be bitten alive. If they stopped to refill their canteens at a slow stream, its surface was rippled from dragonflies taking off and landing. When they ate, industrious little beetles arrived at once to cart away the crumbs. With a slight grimace, Penny remembered crunching on the fried bugs in Tontap on her first night. There were so many bugs that people even ate them.
She stopped tracing lines on the ground and dropped the twig. That was it.
‘The Beetlers!’ she whispered triumphantly, leaning in to Tabba and Jebby. ‘Those people we saw in Tontap, selling bags of insects! I bet they’d know where to find a Zamzee beetle!’
‘Of course,’ cried Jebby. ‘I can’t believe we didn’t think of that right away. Tabba – the Beetler who comes at the full moon, the guy Ma always buys from? Where does he come from exactly?’
‘From Mud-Dales,’ said Tabba, suddenly excited. Kneeling, she smoothed out the map and the children crouched round it. ‘All the bug sellers do.’
‘Here,’ said Jebby, circling a mulchy-looking green-and-brown area far to the south of Jaipa. ‘This is Mud-Dales.’
‘Hopper is the main trading town there,’ said Tabba. ‘That’s right here. And right now we’re here. It’s far …’
It was far. Penny swallowed. Between Jaipa and Hopper spread miles of jungle, interspersed with farms and tiny towns, before the brown humps and valleys of the dales. The only town in Mud-Dales was Hopper, marked by an unpromising dot, and the only road there, a narrow dirt track for most of the way, wound along a frustratingly arduous route through what appeared to be steep hillocks.
‘It would take us u
ntil late this afternoon to even get there,’ said Jebby. ‘And see these little squiggles? I think that means the terrain is all little hills. Crossing it would hardly be conserving energy.’
Penny agreed that it hardly seemed the simple, elegant solution that Elder had described. But she didn’t know what else to do, and time was wasting. All the other teams were already on their way to get the beetles.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t rush off,’ said Jebby. ‘We might save time in the end if we spend a little longer thinking.’
But Penny’s impatience won out. She couldn’t sit there any longer. Already they were at the rear of the pack. She found Santori on the map. It wasn’t too far from Hopper, at least.
‘We could sit here all day trying to come up with something clever,’ she said briskly, getting to her feet. ‘We can think just as well when we’re on the road.’
Hesitantly, Tabba and Jebby followed her and climbed into the cart and they set out. But, unlike the day before, none of them felt quite right.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Second Trial ✵ In Search of a Zamzee ✵ Mysterious Presences ✵ Eyes Out for Helix ✵ ‘Something’s not right with the bike’ ✵ Mud-Dales ✵ Hopper ✵ ‘He’ll be a man before they come out again’ ✵ An Unbelievable Sight
The children were barely any distance from Jaipa when they began to see whorls everywhere, just as Elder had predicted. Every now and then, their conversation would be interrupted by the sight of one: leaning against the trunk of a tree, hanging like a shiny bauble from the end of a branch, even one that wobbled on the shoulder of the road, as if at any moment it might roll across the bicycle’s path.
The ordinary world had been breached by these mysterious presences, but, despite their deep strangeness and their growing numbers, the whorls remained benign. Some even sparkled a little if the sunlight hit them the right way. Nothing came out of them, let alone anything nefarious. Rather than being frightening, they seemed to Penny to be a hopeful sign: the life-giving Bloom was almost here, and she was getting closer and closer to being able to bring it to Granny Pearl. As for the mandrill who had left them so carelessly all over the place, he seemed to Penny to embody a creative, haphazard energy, a spirit of joyful freedom – and she felt herself almost liking him when she passed whorls that shone like rainbowed bubbles in the sun.
She wondered if Helix was here somewhere, seeing all the whorls, too. There were ten times as many people out on the roads as there had been the day before. Children sat with their legs dangling over the backs of wooden carts. Other people travelled on foot, singing or keeping time on the road with sticks taken from the jungle near their homes. They cheered as the children sped past on the bicycle. Many were gathering up relatives and friends on the way to Palmos, and Penny witnessed joyful reunions – people tumbling out of carts into the exuberant embrace of loved ones.
She kept a sharp lookout for Helix whenever there were other people around. She knew that she could be very close and still miss him – he could be hidden behind a cart trundling past, or the bicycle could turn a corner seconds too late. One moment deep down she felt unaccountably confident that their paths would cross sooner or later; the next it seemed impossible.
‘I’m looking, too,’ said Tabba, who was in the cart with Penny. ‘If I see anyone by himself who might look like him I’ll tell you.’
‘Thanks, Tabba,’ said Penny. It had been a long time since she’d had a friend who understood her so well, who knew what she was thinking without her even having to say. She and Tabba had talked about Helix for a long time the day before. Tabba, ever optimistic and encouraging, always said the same thing: if Helix was there, he had to see at least one of the flags and, if he did, it was only a matter of time before he found Penny.
‘I don’t know, Penny,’ Tabba said thoughtfully as they sped out of a small town on to a road between farm fields. ‘Sometimes it sounds like Helix is the one who needs your help.’
‘What would I help him with?’ asked Penny.
Tabba shrugged. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘It’s just the feeling I get. He sounds like he was on his own for a long time before he met you guys.’
Penny gazed out over the lush fields. She had never thought about Helix this way. To her he had always been the strongest and most capable person that she knew. He’d seemed more grown-up than her siblings, despite being only a year older than Maya.
Though Penny and Tabba’s capacity to discuss Helix was inexhaustible, Jebby could only sustain interest for so long in something for which there was no new and concrete information, just the same vague, wishful thoughts being constantly remilled. This morning he welcomed taking more than his fair share of time riding the bicycle, when he could tune out the chatter in the cart. He was preoccupied by the bicycle, anyway. Its wheels squeaked and the cart had a new and unexplained wobble that worsened with each new mile they covered. The handlebars were gradually becoming harder to steer. The children stopped repeatedly to check but couldn’t find anything wrong. They decided it was their own legs, weary from the previous day’s journey, which made each revolution of the tyres seem like such an effort.
They were travelling along a wide road through some scrubby jungle when Jebby pulled abruptly over to the shoulder. Penny looked around in irritation. The children knew that they were on the right road, but with no obvious landmarks in sight they couldn’t tell how far they were from Hopper, and Penny was getting frustrated by how long it was taking to get there.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Why are we stopping?’
‘Something’s not right with the bike,’ said Jebby. He came to a stop in a dusty tuft of frog grass and hopped off to examine it. The girls climbed out of the cart.
‘The vines are twisting a bit; that’s all I can see,’ said Penny. ‘Bellamy hadn’t put new tyres on in a long time; maybe he didn’t do it quite right. Or maybe they aren’t exactly the right size vines.’
‘They were fine yesterday,’ said Jebby.
‘Do you want me to ride it?’ asked Penny.
‘No, it’s not me; the bike is different,’ said Jebby.
Penny didn’t say what she actually thought, which was that Jebby just wasn’t used to riding a bike.
‘Well, it’s old,’ said Tabba reasonably. ‘We can’t expect it to work perfectly. Anyway, take a break for a bit, Jebby. It’s time for someone else to have a turn.’
Jebby sighed. He looked tired. But before he climbed into the cart he turned his ear to the jungle, listening.
‘Hear that?’ he said. ‘That’s a bowerbird.’ He took out his whistle and made a few short bleats. From deep in the foliage, the bird responded. Jebby smiled. ‘They’re really rare, you know,’ he said.
‘Come on!’ said Tabba impatiently. ‘Like we have time for birds right now!’
They set out again. After consulting the map, they turned off the main road on to the bumpy dirt track and entered Mud-Dales. The track crossed a gruelling series of moguls too steep to pedal up easily and too short to get much of a rest coasting down. The terrain was laborious, but the thought that Kal’s lumphur would have loped over the hillocks like they were nothing spurred Penny on, and whenever it was her turn she stood up to pedal, her calves burning. The further they went, the deeper the mud in the troughs grew, and soon they all had to get out and together push the bike up the hills.
At last the lumpy moguls began to ease, and the road shrank to a dirt track that ran over a series of longer hills. Jebby was on the bike, the girls in the cart, and they were coasting downhill when he suddenly started shouting.
‘I can’t slow down!’ he yelled.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Penny. ‘Use the brakes!’
‘I’m trying! They won’t work!’ Jebby cried desperately.
He pumped the brakes frantically, but nothing happened. The grade steepened and soon the bike was going at full tilt, the cart rattling from side to side behind it. The bottom of the hill was coming up fast.
Ever
yone shouted as the front tyre hit the deep mud at the base. The bike stopped abruptly and the cart swung violently round. Penny and Tabba were flung out on to the side of the road.
‘Are you OK?’ Jebby cried, leaving the bike and rushing to help them up.
Penny’s left wrist hurt where she had landed on it and a stone had grazed her knee. Blood seeped from a cut on Tabba’s forehead. They scrambled to their feet and stood there, getting their balance back. The soft mud had spared them any broken bones, but they were bruised and filthy.
‘What did you do?’ Penny asked angrily.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ said Jebby. ‘The brakes stopped working!’
The bike was so covered in mud that Penny had to scoop off clumps of it with her hand before she could see the frame clearly.
‘The front axle’s bent,’ she said finally. ‘And the brake wire’s twisted; that’s why the brakes didn’t work. I don’t know how that happened. It couldn’t be your fault, though,’ she added. ‘Sorry.’
She untwisted the brake wire and, with a stone from the edge of the road, she hammered the axle back into place. Miraculously, the shafts attaching the cart to the bicycle hadn’t snapped.
‘That’s the best I can do,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure how long it’s going to last. Maybe from now on don’t slam on the brakes too fast.’
‘I didn’t,’ muttered Jebby, frowning at the bike.
Tabba had walked ahead, to where the trees broke, and now she called excitedly back to the others.
‘Look!’ she shouted. ‘We’re here! This has to be Hopper! We almost crashed right into it!’
The children hastily brushed themselves off and hurried the squeaking bicycle and cart round the bend into Hopper. The village was even smaller than they expected and it was all brown – just a few dirt streets and huts thatched with dried and faded palm leaves, built haphazardly around a muddy central market square. There were Beetlers everywhere, buying and selling insects on rough wooden tables, boiling them in vats to makes insect jams and pastes, scooping them into sacks for stubby tan mules to haul to sell in other towns.