by Nadia Aguiar
‘We just need to get a shell and then we’ll get out as fast as we can,’ said Tabba. ‘We’re hoping we don’t find the mandrill at all.’
The man laughed, a hoarse, startling whoop, as loud and unexpected as a seagull.
‘Never mind about finding him,’ he said. ‘He’ll find you!’ He kicked the mule and it lurched forward. As it trotted madly away, the man shouted over his shoulder, ‘Good luck! Good luck! Good luck! You’ll need it!’
The savage brevity of these ventures into the third trial shocked the children. If the news was true, it meant they were closer to winning the competition than they’d been even a few short hours ago, but instead of feeling excited, doubt settled over them. Penny remembered the other teams in the softly falling dust in the garden in Santori just the evening before. The Lamlo Diver had always seemed so fearless and capable! And Grasshopper Boy – the favourite! They had believed, with all of Kana, that he was the finest competitor, in a class of his own. While all the other Players had boasted and bragged, and while Kal had been devious and underhanded – guilty of sabotage, even – Grasshopper Boy had seemed above it all. It was hardest to accept that he was out.
The fact that the man had heard nothing about Kal made Penny deeply suspicious. Kal was the only one who really knew anything about the whorls or the creature who made them. Surely that would give him a big advantage in the Gorgonne, as Grasshopper Boy had suggested. Perhaps – perhaps he was even colluding with the mandrill. Penny had to concede it was possible. All at once the things that she, Tabba and Jebby had brought with them – a net, plums, arrows – seemed flimsy and feeble, and she felt ill-equipped to face either Kal or the mandrill. As she was thinking this, the dirt track opened on to a scrubby, razed field, and suddenly, across the field, there it was.
The Gorgonne loomed like a swelling green cumulonimbus cloud, stretching from the ground so high into the sky that the children were blinded by the sun if they looked for the top. On either side it bent towards the horizon, as curved and vaporous as a rainbow dissolving from view. It was dense yet insubstantial, masking what lay behind it and revealing only rough outlines. Blurred colours soaked through its filmy layers. As the children watched, it roiled, slowly puffing itself up, as if, Penny thought irrationally, it were turning round to see them better.
‘The green – are those trees?’ whispered Tabba. ‘They can’t be, though – they’d be so tall …’
Like prisoners being marched to the gallows, the children walked slowly towards it through drifts of insects that hovered in the bleached-out light. The earth around the cloud was barren. As they drew closer, Penny’s skin began to tingle.
The Gorgonne’s edge was marked by a silver stream that slipped in and out of the mist. Clear, cold water conveyed bits and pieces from inside the Gorgonne: jagged leaves, a drowned dragonfly, delicate-limbed insects pinwheeling silently on the surface, all of them mute messengers unable to describe what lay within. A draught sucked at the children’s heels. A dull, unsettled growl emanated from deep within the mass’s murky depths, then came a crackling, as if something were sagging under a great weight. The cloud’s ominous bulk swelled, almost seemed to breathe.
‘It feels alive,’ whispered Tabba.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Jebby. But they could all feel it.
A sudden storm of hopping clams made a din on the rocks at the edge of the stream, startling the children, before clapping shut and settling beneath the surface. Penny felt like she had stepped out of time. The rest of the world seemed very far away – home, family, the pleasant and familiar commotion of other people in the midst of ordinary life in a world both deeply absorbed in and oblivious to its workings.
A path of stones led across the stream into the green cloud. Here and there a stray clam caught in the rocks clapped forlornly.
‘Well,’ said Penny, hoisting her pack higher on her back. She felt an unnatural emptiness on her shoulder where Seagrape should have been. ‘This is it.’
Tabba reached out and squeezed Penny and Jebby’s hands. They squeezed back. Jebby checked the map a final time, then, close on each other’s heels, they crossed the stream and went in.
After just a few steps, they had passed through the cloud and found themselves inside a jungle. Inside, it was instantly darker. The leaves grew bigger, the trees taller, the trunks wider, and the children felt that they grew smaller with each step they took.
‘The trees are getting bigger,’ said Tabba.
‘They can’t be,’ said Jebby.
‘But Tabba’s right. They are – look,’ said Penny.
Tabba shivered. ‘It’s giving me the creeps.’
‘We’re barely even in,’ said Penny, peering up at the bold patterns of spores striping the backs of giant ferns that crossed above their heads.
The trees stretched up endlessly, growing so tall that their tops merged into a dark arboreal sky, and the floor of the jungle abided in a state of permanent twilight. Vines draped from trees like the rigging of a storm-battered fleet. Flowers, fleshy as molluscs, sprang from the crooks of branches. Spiders hung from single threads, revolving slowly, not in the breeze but from the looming of their softly furred legs. Every now and then there was the sound of something unseen falling in the foliage – ripe fruit, Penny assumed, or else a small creature jumping between branches. A bat as large as a seagull took shuddering flight past them, wings squeaking like an unoiled hinge.
Tabba called out the names of plants as they went along. She ticked off fewer and fewer the further they ventured.
‘There’s not a single plant here that I recognize,’ she said at last, stopping in her tracks to gaze round.
But it wasn’t the unfamiliar flora that was so disorientating. Sometimes, when the children looked behind them, what they looked back on did not seem like where they had just been. Like a shift of kaleidoscope glass, the scene was a few degrees different, as if each passing moment brought a slightly new jungle into focus.
They saw creatures, usually dimly in the distance: the flutter of a bird or bat, or a rodent running low to the ground into the shadows. They found clear, narrow paths, which confused them until they realized that they were hunting trails trampled by small animals. It was a relief to have decoded something in a strange, new place, and their discovery cheered them. The paths allowed them to move more quickly. They kept their eyes peeled for signs of the mandrill – a footprint, droppings, shrubs stripped of the sweet lantanno leaves they had heard he loved to eat, a tuft of his yellow mane caught on a thorn. Even, they feared, his colourful face itself peering through the foliage.
‘It’s not as bad in here as I thought it would be,’ said Tabba.
‘We’ve just got here,’ said Jebby. ‘Let’s wait and see.’
‘You’d think there’d be whorls all over the place,’ said Penny. ‘But we haven’t seen a single one.’
‘How are we going to find the place with the shells?’ asked Tabba.
‘We keep walking and hope we find some sign of them somewhere,’ said Jebby.
‘What do we do if we see the mandrill?’ Tabba asked in a low voice.
‘What we talked about,’ said Jebby. ‘We get the natal plums and the net and we build a trap.’
No one said anything. The plan was shaky at best, and they knew it.
The path they were on became overgrown and the children fell quiet and concentrated on ducking beneath mossy branches and swiping away small, feathered vines that tickled their necks. Their feet crushed silent dents into the rubbery mats of mushrooms that hugged the ground.
The laws of nature seemed disrupted and jumbled in the Gorgonne. Leaves drifted down that didn’t match the trees they came from. Odd pebbles pinged down on the path in front of the children, and sometimes they would stumble upon shafts of light that appeared mysteriously, not from the top of the canopy but in mid-air below it. From time to time, out of sight in the distance, they heard what sounded like the wet thud of fruit falling. It was as if the
jungle was a drawer for random cast-offs with no home, thrown in there and left to rattle around.
Tabba and Jebby had been Penny’s guides; she had relied on them for knowledge about Kana. Now they were as lost as she was. Jebby squinted at the map, trying to keep track of where they were, though there were no landmarks, either on the map or in the dense jungle itself. Simon’s compass was no help either; its needle drifted aimlessly inside its case.
Penny lifted her backpack a few inches off her back to let the air reach her skin as she walked. After just a few days of sweat and humidity, already its fabric was starting to rot. She took out her canteen and took a few unsatisfying sips of warm water.
‘There’s been no sign of the Dorado brothers or Kal yet,’ she said. It was obvious, of course, but it felt reassuring to say something, to voice some concrete fact about the strange place they were in.
‘The Gorgonne is big,’ said Jebby. ‘They could be in a totally different part.’
‘I don’t know why you keep looking at it,’ said Tabba, glancing over his shoulder at the map. ‘It’s no good in here. You may as well put it away.’
Jebby ignored her.
Annoyed that his stubborn insistence on walking with his nose in the map was slowing them down, Tabba took the lead, but she hadn’t gone far along the narrow, leafy trail when abruptly she stopped.
‘You guys, come here,’ she called excitedly. ‘Stand exactly where I’m standing. Do you feel that? This spot is definitely colder than anywhere around it.’
Penny stopped next to Tabba. A moment ago she had been sweltering, but now the sweat was drying on her brow and a chill crept over her shoulders.
‘We passed through something like this earlier, too,’ she said to Tabba. ‘I noticed it, but I thought it was just me.’
Jebby put out his hand, testing the air. ‘It’s weird,’ he admitted. ‘It’s definitely colder.’
‘But it’s only right here,’ said Tabba, stepping in and out of the spot. ‘Like a draught is coming in through a window.’
A normal breeze would have stirred everything over a wide area; what the children felt was confined to just a small area, as if a steady stream of cold air was sneaking in through a window or under a door. One step backward or forward and they could no longer feel it. Penny remembered the sensation of coolness that had spread through Elder’s yard on her first day here, and of Grasshopper Boy describing the heat when he had put his hand through a whorl.
She scanned the foliage slowly until she found it.
‘Look’ she said. ‘It’s coming from there.’
She pointed up at a whorl, not much bigger than the children, that hung like a small, rogue cloud in the verdant gloom between two low branches of a nearby tree. It glimmered with a low, whispery light. The foliage around it eddied gently.
The others gazed up at it.
‘What are whorls, really?’ Penny asked, more intrigued than afraid. ‘Why do you think they look like that, all blurred?’
‘Heat, light, shadows, who knows?’ asked Jebby, never eager to dwell on things he didn’t understand.
‘Kal makes them,’ said Penny. ‘I came through one. Even Grasshopper Boy put his hand through one.’ She took a step closer. ‘Maybe we should try to look into it.’
‘That would be stupid,’ said Jebby. ‘We don’t know what would happen.’
‘We would find out,’ said Penny. ‘Where do you think it goes?’ She took another step. Close up, the whorl was frustratingly opaque, like a light burning from deep inside fog.
‘Stop,’ said Tabba. ‘Come on, Penny. It’s not a good idea.’
‘What if we’re supposed to go through one?’ asked Penny.
‘Just because the mandrill can go through them doesn’t mean we can,’ said Jebby. ‘Or should. What if it does take us somewhere – somewhere without the shells and we never make it to Palmos or the Bloom? What if we get lost? Or can’t get back?’
‘Remember the dust storm yesterday?’ said Tabba. ‘Maybe there are only bad things on the other side.’
Penny hesitated.
There was a small popping sound and the whorl vanished. The children waited, but nothing else happened. The place where the whorl had nestled was now just an ordinary patch of leaves.
‘See?’ said Jebby. ‘What if you had been in there when that happened? Maybe you wouldn’t have been able to get out.’
‘Or would have been squashed,’ said Tabba.
Penny had to admit the way the whorl had shut without warning was alarming enough that it had dampened her desire to investigate further.
‘Let’s stick to our plan,’ said Jebby. ‘It’s only a matter of time before we find the shells. The mandrill will have left some sign – fur, a footprint, something that will lead us to them.’
‘He left that whorl,’ muttered Penny, but after a final glance at where the whorl had been she followed after Tabba and Jebby.
A little while later, there had still been no sign of the lake with the shells, and Penny was beginning to wonder if they were in the right part of the jungle at all. The path they were on unspooled without purpose through a tangle of leaves and vines and trunks that repeated endlessly in all directions.
She was at the rear of the group when she began to have the sensation they were being watched. The feeling amplified with each step she took. Her heart quickened. She caught up to the others.
‘Something’s out there,’ she whispered. ‘We’re being followed.’
‘Is it him?’ asked Tabba.
‘I don’t know,’ said Penny.
The children stopped and stood completely still. Penny’s whole body was tensed. Without a word, Jebby took out the net and held it at the ready – as if, should they see the mandrill, he could simply cast it over him.
From the corner of her eye, Penny noticed a small, pale whorl open; a tiny, furry hand emerged and dived into Tabba’s backpack. It seized a natal plum, then both plum and fist disappeared. From other whorls, more of the tiny, sharp-clawed hands appeared, delving deftly into the children’s backpacks. Penny saw a face fleetingly in the trees, then another and another. A tribe of small grey monkeys, emboldened by their success, settled above the children in the canopy to enjoy their plunder out of reach. Their eyes were like pats of melting butter, their faces fringed with ruffs of knotted fur. Their long silky tails curled under them, keeping their balance on the narrow branches.
‘It’s just monkeys,’ said Jebby in disgust. ‘Thieves.’
The monkeys’ chortles reverberated through the swimmy green depths of the jungle.
‘They’re laughing at us,’ said Tabba.
‘Just ignore them,’ said Jebby. ‘They won’t hurt us. There’s nothing left for them to take, anyway.’ He lifted the net out of his backpack. ‘They tore it,’ he said angrily.
Tabba examined the tear. ‘I think I can mend it,’ she said. ‘It will take a little while, though.’
Penny’s heart was slowly returning to a normal rate. The monkeys had given them a fright, but she was relieved they had been only some pesky bandits, not the mandrill. She stood and turned in a slow circle, studying the choked, chaotic vegetation all around them. She could see small, almost imperceptible whorls hiding everywhere – hanging out like a shirt tail from behind leaves, peeking out from beneath the curve of a vine, tucked in the crook of a branch. These were where the monkeys had hidden.
‘They can make whorls, too,’ she murmured. ‘The mandrill, Kal, now the monkeys …’
‘Look,’ said Tabba. ‘There are whorls all over the place up ahead.’ Her eyes were big and fearful as she gazed at the hazy spheres encroaching on the path.
Jebby observed the whorls grimly. He took a thin rope out of his pack. ‘Let’s tie this round our waists,’ he said. ‘Just to be safe – so we don’t get separated.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Tabba in a wobbly voice as she took the end of the rope from her brother, ‘is that except for the Dorado brothers and
Kal, who we don’t know about, all the other teams came in here and the mandrill immediately chased them and kicked them out. So why not us? Why hasn’t he got us yet?’
Penny gazed all around into the dim reaches of the jungle that flickered patchily wherever there was a whorl. She tied the rope round herself, but, unlike the others, she was beginning to have that feeling of being keenly alive, like she did in the tank at the aquarium at home. She felt close to understanding something, as though some new, exhilarating knowledge was coming within reach.
‘Maybe he doesn’t see us as a threat,’ she said. ‘Or … maybe it’s the opposite – animals will only attack other animals if they think they’re stronger. Maybe he doesn’t think he can get rid of us so easily.’
‘But we aren’t stronger than him,’ argued Tabba.
‘Unless we are and we don’t know it,’ said Penny.
‘Well, that doesn’t help us, does it?’ said Tabba in frustration. ‘I don’t want to be here any more,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to see Ma and Da and be back in Tontap.’
Muted beams of grey light slanted through the trees. The monkeys jibbered in the branches, cackling and taunting. Suddenly a warning cry went up between the creatures, and the next instant they disappeared, whorls popping shut behind them.
‘Something’s scared them off,’ whispered Jebby.
The whole jungle fell silent. Leaves were frozen in the breezeless air. No paw stirred or tail flickered or wing opened. The children reached out and grasped each other’s hands.
The excitement Penny had felt moments before evaporated. She had the same feeling she’d had the first day at Elder’s, and again in the alley in Santori: that they were not alone, that some malevolent presence had infringed. The ancient, creeping awareness came over her that another animal had her in his sights, that she had become part of the age-old struggle between hunter and prey. She knew it was already too late to escape.