The Great Wave of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  But it wasn’t just Beetlers who were there.

  ‘It’s crawling with Bloom Players,’ said Tabba, aghast.

  Penny’s spirits plunged. Everyone else seemed to have had the same idea as the children. Teams of Bloom Players were everywhere, running off into the jungle, or returning, empty-handed. Others were scavenging through bugs laid out on the tables or sieving through overturned sacks of beetles, shining like beans in the dirt. Hopper was like an archaeological site that had been raided, a carcass picked over. Demoralized, the children walked the bicycle and cart into the town. They searched among the insects on the tables in the market. There were no Zamzee beetles among them that Penny could see, though it was hard to tell because many were in brittle pieces: a jointed leg, a shell, a wing. If there had been any Zamzees, they had been snapped up by faster competitors long ago. There was no sign of Kal anywhere.

  A lively trade of ‘guides’ had established itself, youthful middlemen offering to escort Bloom Players to groups of Beetlers collecting insects in the surrounding jungle. Seeing the newcomers, two young boys raced over to them. The boys scuffled and the winner quickly offered to take them to a group of Beetlers working nearby. Disappointed, the loser scowled and wandered off. The children had to trade the last of the food Ma Silverling had packed for them before the boy would agree to take them.

  ‘What choice do we have?’ asked Jebby, shrugging.

  The boy tucked the food into his bag and headed off quickly. The children followed, falling into single file down a narrow, empty track into the jungle, wheeling the bike alongside them. It was hotter than it had been anywhere else in Kana and Penny’s clothes were soaked with sweat. Each breath felt like steam in her lungs. Barely a breeze stirred, and the air was thick as soup.

  ‘They’re in there,’ said the boy, stopping abruptly on the path and pointing into the jungle. He turned round and started back the way they’d come.

  ‘Hey, wait!’ called Jebby. ‘You’re supposed to take us right to them!’

  But the boy kept going, breaking into a loping jog.

  ‘Where are we supposed to go?’ asked Penny. ‘There’s no path anywhere.’ She squinted into the thick gloom.

  ‘Listen,’ said Tabba. ‘I think I can hear people.’

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Jebby. ‘We can’t take the bike with us. It’s too overgrown.’ He scanned the jungle suspiciously. ‘What if Kal …’

  ‘Kal isn’t here,’ said Tabba impatiently. ‘We didn’t see him. He probably had a better idea and didn’t even come to Hopper.’

  The road was empty, the boy already gone. Eerie light drifted hazily through the trees. A cloudy thrum of insects filled the humid air. Seagrape perched on the back of the cart, grumbling softly. A dull thud came from somewhere deep in the trees.

  ‘Stop dawdling,’ Tabba scolded her brother. ‘What if the Beetlers move on? We can hide the bicycle in the trees. No one’s around.’

  Jebby relented and the children left the road. They concealed the bike and cart in the dense greenery and set off towards where Tabba thought she had heard voices.

  It was a buggy, boggy mess of a jungle. Damp, mulchy earth sucked at the children’s feet. The air seethed with ticking and warbling, chirping and slithering. Strange noises came from up ahead: dull thumps followed by frenzied scraping and tapping. The children kept silent.

  They arrived in a clearing as a group of people – Beetlers – rolled over a boulder. The men held it while the women, crouching, walked on the balls of their feet to gather blind wriggling worms, hard beetles and smooth-backed roaches into fine nets, which were then emptied into larger woven sacks. Creatures clinging to the underside of the stone were knocked free with a small mallet and scooped briskly off the ground. The Beetlers spoke among themselves, in whispers no louder than the scratching murmur of tiny wings and legs. A large winged beetle escaped, zigzagging in a final desperate, headlong flight to freedom until a hand, pale as an earthworm, reached out and snared it.

  When the Beetlers noticed the children, they let the boulder fall with a soft thump and stood in a blinking huddle to observe the newcomers. They looked as though they seldom saw sunlight: their skin was wan and even their irises were pale. Mud streaked their drab clothes and hair. Their fingernails were packed with thick half moons of grime. They had long, tapered fingers, made for plucking unsuspecting grubs out of mushroom stems or needling behind damp bark where stitch-worms burrowed.

  Penny was relieved when Jebby was the one who worked up the nerve to speak first.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘We’re Bloom Players, trying to find a Zamzee beetle. We were hoping you could tell us where we can find one.’

  The Beetlers muttered among themselves, never raising their voices above a whisper.

  ‘Zamzee?’ asked a man, stepping forward, his voice raspy and low. ‘They’re sleeping. Deep underground. Very deep. You won’t find them now.’ He indicated a young boy standing behind him. ‘He’ll be a man before they come out again.’

  ‘What does he mean, before they come out again?’ Tabba asked the others under her breath.

  ‘Maybe they’re like cicadas on the Outside,’ Penny whispered. ‘They live underground for most of their lives and only emerge for a little while to mate.’ She thought for a moment. ‘If we know where they like to burrow, we can dig for them.’

  ‘Can you tell us where they are underground?’ she asked the Beetler. ‘Where do they like to go?’

  ‘Never together, and never to the same place,’ said the man. ‘They could be anywhere when they’re underground, then one day you see them at dawn. They crawl and fly around, but by the time the sun is fully up they’ve gone again. Even we only see them a few times in our lives.’

  To demonstrate, he turned to the group to ask how many among them had seen a Zamzee. Only a few people nodded.

  ‘See,’ said the man. ‘Very rare.’

  Penny swatted impatiently at a pair of flies buzzing around her face.

  ‘There must be some way to find where they are …’ she said.

  The Head Beetler shook his head. ‘If there is, we don’t know it,’ he said.

  The jungle was oppressively hot, and the humid air was feeling harder and harder to breathe. Penny’s eye fell on one of the Beetler children, who leaned his head back and tossed a wriggling silkworm into the air, then caught it in his mouth. Crunch – his teeth came down on the creature and a little of the juice trickled down his chin. Penny cringed and looked away. An open sack of beetles tipped over and a herd of tiny armoured creatures rolled across the jungle floor like beads of water skating across a hot frying pan. Women scrambled to gather them.

  The man reached into the sack and withdrew a few mealy albino grubs and handed them to the children.

  ‘For you,’ he said gravely. ‘Finer than the finest oysters.’

  Penny suppressed a shiver of revulsion, but Jebby accepted the creatures without blinking.

  There was nothing else the Beetlers could tell the children. Penny, Tabba and Jebby watched helplessly as the Beetlers hoisted the sacks on to their backs and prepared to move on. They seemed to disappear gradually, the way that light fades. Soon the children heard the crackling of the undergrowth in the distance as another boulder was heaved over.

  ‘Gross – Jebby, let those things go,’ said Tabba, making a face.

  Jebby tipped his hand and the grubs writhed in the mud, burrowing back down to its cool, dark depths.

  ‘Now what?’ asked Penny in frustration. They were back to square one. Finding the Beetlers had been their only plan. ‘What are we supposed to do now?’

  Tabba and Jebby didn’t have an answer.

  When Penny had heard the Zamzees were underground, she had been prepared to dig to find one – with her bare hands if she had to. She’d been sure the Beetlers could tell them where to start looking, at least. Now she had no idea what to do. She felt claustrophobic. She lifted her shirt tail to wipe the sweat off her face, but more ju
st poured after it. She felt like her whole body was turning to steam, as if she was about to drift off in a Penny-shaped vapour.

  ‘Ugh – it’s BOILING in here!’ she cried, stamping her feet to get the flies off her legs. More buzzed maddeningly around her head. Even Helix’s necklace was irritating her, tickling her neck. ‘Let’s get back to the road.’

  Shoving branches out of her path, she returned the way they had come, recklessly ignoring the thorns nipping her legs. She just wanted to get out of there, to be in the open where there might be even the faintest tickle of breeze. Maybe then she could think of what to do next.

  As she neared the place where they had left the bicycle, Penny sensed that something was wrong seconds before she knew what it was. Tiny branches snapped, dead leaves rustled. Something was moving through the foliage. Seagrape growled. Tabba sucked in her breath. Penny stopped where she was and stared, unable to believe what she was seeing.

  The bicycle was upright, gliding slowly across the jungle floor, dragging the cart along after it.

  No one was riding it; it was moving of its own volition. Something was oddly stiff about the way it moved, and it took Penny a moment to realize that none of the wheels were turning. They were locked solidly in place, and instead of rolling they were sliding over the ground. Too stunned to react, the three children froze in their tracks.

  ‘It’s the tyres,’ Tabba whispered. ‘The sapsoo vines – they’re growing!’

  Tabba was right. All six tyres – two on the bike and four on the cart – had taken root in the mud and were growing at remarkable speed, pushing the bike and cart ahead of them. Without warning, the vines from the cart tyres veered off and began to coil round the trunk of a nearby tree. The vines from the bicycle tyres kept barrelling ahead. Bike and cart were pulled in opposite directions. For a moment they strained against each other before, with a sharp pop, they broke apart. Freed, the cart vines lunged forward, looping round each other in a mad scramble up the trunk, hauling the cart up with them. The cart was crushed almost instantly. Scraps of wood dropped to the ground.

  At the same time, the bicycle vines reached another, thicker tree and began to wrap round its trunk. The heavy bicycle was slower to leave the earth than the cart, but, as the children watched, the vines hoisted it up. The sight of it lifting off the ground snapped them out of their shock. They rushed to save it, but by the time they got there the frame had just slipped beyond their grasp.

  In horror they watched as the bicycle crashed relentlessly up through the foliage, higher and higher into the branches. A storm of broken twigs and torn leaves floated down in its wake. Then the two vines parted ways, the rear tyre vine shooting down a branch, the front tyre vine continuing up the trunk. For several agonizing seconds the bike hung suspended in mid-air. Then, with a dreadful, grinding screech, the frame began to twist like foil, and finally with a groan it split apart. The handlebars broke free, swinging wildly. A rim spun, whistling against the leaves. The seat vanished into the canopy. The bell croaked desperately before a stray tendril strangled it. Each part was winched higher and higher as the vines charged upward, spurring each other on in a dead heat towards the canopy.

  Then, as abruptly and explosively as it had begun, the growth ceased. The vines’ mad rush ended as they reached the top of the canopy, where they curled in the sunlight, sated. The fragments of the bicycle came to rest where they were. The trees swallowed, burped, and chips of paint and a stray spoke shook down.

  ‘Bellamy’s bike,’ said Jebby slowly. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  A lump lodged in Penny’s throat as she looked up into the tree. Even if they went after the pieces and chopped them down, each was warped and mangled beyond repair. The bicycle was finished.

  ‘I don’t understand how it happened,’ she said. Her voice sounded small and hollow.

  They were silent for a few moments, then Tabba spoke, numbly.

  ‘That puddle when we left Jaipa this morning,’ she said. ‘That odour – I know what it was.’

  ‘What?’ asked Jebby.

  ‘Ballawa seeds,’ said Tabba. ‘They’re a fertilizer. Ma used them in the garden once, a long time ago; that’s why I didn’t remember it right away. They smelled so bad she never used them again. They were in that puddle, I’m sure of it. That’s why we kept having problems with the bike all day – the vines had started growing, getting bigger and messing up the brakes. They couldn’t grow too much while we were moving, but as soon as we stopped and left the bike in the mud there was nothing to stop them. It all makes sense now. I’m sorry,’ she said miserably. ‘I should have realized it before; I don’t know how I didn’t.’

  Bellamy’s words came back to Penny, and she saw him holding the vine between forefinger and thumb. It would grow almost before your eyes. Even this may have some life in it, believe it or not, if it had a little water …

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Penny told her. ‘None of us knew.’

  ‘Would those seeds have just been there?’ asked Jebby quietly.

  Tabba shook her head. ‘They have to be ground into a powder, and that has to be mixed with water. It had to be deliberate. And we didn’t notice it when we got there last night because it wasn’t there. Someone put it there in the night.’

  ‘Kal,’ said Jebby. ‘He knew where we were – maybe he followed us after we saw him in the town.’

  Penny remembered how a funny expression had come over Kal’s face when his gaze had fallen on the sapsoo vine tyres, and she remembered Seagrape’s warning screech in the early hours of the morning. But Kal hadn’t even had to come very near their camp – all he’d had to do was sprinkle the powder in the puddle and slip away unseen. He didn’t have to be anywhere near when the tyres started to grow. He was probably already in Santori at this very moment, Zamzee beetle given safely to the Council, and was resting with his feet up, the lumphur groomed and fed.

  ‘There’s no chance of being the Bloom Catcher now,’ she said, a choke in her voice. ‘It’s over – we’re out.’

  The bicycle’s bell was caught in an offshoot of one of the vines, a curling tendril that bounced gently as it settled. Seagrape flew up and clipped the tendril with her beak, and with an exhausted wheeze the bell dropped. Jebby caught it before it hit the ground.

  ‘This is all we have left to take back to Bellamy,’ he said hoarsely.

  The children walked back to the road, still hardly able to believe what had happened. Not knowing what else to do, they consulted the map and decided to begin the slow hike to Santori. For a long time as they walked away they could hear the lonely metallic echo of parts of the bike jangling together in the breeze high in the treetops.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Bad Fight ✵ The End of Everything ✵ A Brilliant Idea ✵ ‘It’s a palace!’

  ‘What are we going to tell Bellamy?’ asked Tabba as the children walked along an empty, red dirt track.

  ‘The truth – that Kal destroyed the bike,’ said Jebby.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ said Tabba morosely. ‘I should have known what that odour was this morning – I’m the one who helps Ma in the garden. If I’d known then the vines would never have started growing.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Jebby. ‘I knew Kal looked like he was up to something when we ran into him in Jaipa last night. I should have been more careful. Anyway, even if we had the bike, we wouldn’t have a Zamzee right now. Elder said it should be simple – we messed up, OK? We didn’t stop and think about it for long enough; we just ran off to Hopper. We should have known right away that it was too hard.’

  Penny felt like Jebby was blaming her. ‘We had to do something,’ she said defensively. No one had a better idea, after all. ‘We couldn’t just sit around waiting. At least, I didn’t think we could. Maybe it would have been better if we had.’

  ‘It’s not anyone’s fault,’ said Tabba.

  Jebby nodded.

  Penny felt better for a moment, then a surge of anger swept over her.
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br />   ‘But it is,’ she said. ‘It’s Kal’s fault.’ As Penny’s shock wore off, anger was seeping in and taking over. Very soon the mere thought of Kal made her so searing mad she felt like she was going to explode.

  ‘When I see him, I’m going to …’ she said, clenching her fists, but the sudden lump in her throat stopped her from saying more.

  It was impossible to believe that it could all be over like this. No Bloom for Granny Pearl – she could hardly bear to think about it.

  ‘He’ll get in trouble in the next town,’ said Tabba. ‘He won’t be able to get away with something like this – he might even be disqualified.’

  ‘It’s his word against ours,’ said Jebby bitterly. ‘He’ll deny he had anything to do with it. It was perfect – he was nowhere near when the vines started growing. He never even touched the bike or the cart.’

  No one said anything. They all knew that Jebby was right.

  It didn’t take long for everything to fall apart as surely as the bicycle had.

  The bike and cart had allowed them to cover ground swiftly. When one of them was pedalling, the other two could rest. Speeding along created a breeze that kept them cool and the insects at bay. Walking was slow and tiring. They were hot and sweaty, their backpacks chafed their shoulders, and they were at the mercy of rafts of greedy insects that drifted out from the nearby Gorgonne. They were on an empty side road that it seemed no one had been on in a long time, and they felt very far away from all the life and busyness of the past days, as well as the chance to be part of it in the days ahead.

  As Penny wracked her mind for some way to miraculously come up with a Zamzee, she lifted Helix’s shark’s tooth necklace and absently began to tap the tooth with her fingernail, making a soft clicking sound.

  ‘Would you stop that?’ Jebby snapped irritably.