Secrets of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  “They said you could help us,” said Simon, embarrassed by how shaken he had been, and eager to appear confident once again.

  “Not as much as they think, I’m sure,” the old woman said. “They always expected miracles, those two,” she muttered. The birds suddenly shifted along her arms, disgruntled cooing spreading up and down their ranks. They fought for space before they settled down again. “I only hear from anyone when they want something!”

  “Isabella Obrado is looking for you, too,” said Simon. “Everyone thinks you can help Tamarind.”

  “Oh,” said Milagros. “I’m popular again, I see.”

  “But the señoras sent us,” said Simon. “Their nephew is our friend. They’re trying to find him. You sent a bird—a green parrot—to protect him, a long time ago, and they thought you could help to find him now.”

  Simon was startled to see Penny withdraw one of Seagrape’s emerald feathers from her pocket and hold it out to the old woman.

  Milagros was quiet. She seemed stirred for the first time since they had arrived. For a moment her face looked more human than it had.

  “I remember, yes, I remember well,” she said. “The child and his mother both.” Outside the window the scales of the water tree gleamed in the moonlight. The children waited.

  “I know the señoras,” Milagros said finally. “They haven’t sent you empty-handed. I know already what you’ve brought with you. Let me see it.”

  Simon opened his backpack and took out the ophallagraph. Light at once flooded the filthy, feathered corners of the shack. The ophalla’s glow was reflected in the eyes of the birds as they tilted forward on spindly legs to peer into the image of the boat, quivering with light. “They’re starting this up again,” Milagros said wearily, closing her eyes. Again, the children waited for her to speak. “You don’t know what you’re here to do, do you?” she asked finally. “You don’t even know what you’re looking for.”

  Simon and Maya looked at each other. “We’re looking for the rest of the ophallagraphs,” ventured Simon.

  “The ophallagraphs are just clues,” said Milagros impatiently.

  Simon and Maya looked at each other helplessly. Everyone had counted on Milagros being the one who would know what to do: Isabella, the señoras, Dr. Bellagio. What were they going to do if she couldn’t advise them?

  Simon frowned, thinking, then a sudden stroke of intuition made him bold. What if there were a connection between the place hidden in the ophallagraphs that the señoras believed would save Tamarind and …

  “Faustina’s Gate,” he said. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

  Milagros looked sharply at him. Suddenly the birds roosting on the rafters began dipping their heads and weaving their necks back and forth. A bird squawked loudly from its nest in the eaves. “Where did you hear that name?” she asked.

  Simon swallowed. Faustina’s Gate was important. “We know that the Red Coral are looking for it.”

  “This is very bad,” said Milagros, settling back into herself. “I hadn’t realized they knew so much. Things are worse than I thought.”

  “We asked the señoras about the gate and they didn’t know what it was,” said Maya.

  Milagros took a deep, whistling breath and leaned forward. “Listen closely,” she said. “You are looking for Faustina’s Gate. That’s the purpose of the ophallagraphs—that’s what they’re helping you do. The gate is a sacred place, hidden in caves deep in Tamarind. It isn’t enough just to defeat the Red Man by force. Too much ophalla has been mined already. In order to save Tamarind you have to close Faustina’s Gate and to close the gate you’ll need certain tools—the clues inside the ophallagraphs will help you find them. The tools were scattered long ago—I have no idea where they are now, so don’t ask me.” She eased back then and again looked immovable.

  “I don’t understand,” said Simon. “How will closing this—gate—stop the Red Coral Project?”

  “I’ve already said all that I can,” wheezed Milagros. “The señoras thought I could help, but I can only add to your puzzle. There are things you need for this journey—both tools and understanding—and until you have them, the gate, even if you could find it, would be meaningless to you.

  “As for the Red Man … I don’t know what his ideas about Faustina’s Gate are,” Milagros went on, “or what he wishes to use it for.” She paused. “But it will be nothing good. You have to find it before he does.”

  “But … what do we do next?” Maya asked.

  “As always, we must start with what we have already,” said Milagros.

  “All we have is this ophallagraph,” said Simon.

  “And now another,” said Milagros.

  She went then—slow, heavy-limbed, rustling as she moved—to a slim-barred golden birdcage in the corner. It was empty, its door open. A sweetgale bird watched silently from the window as she pushed to one side soiled papers from the floor of the cage. From beneath them she slid out a fresh sheet of paper. As she turned around the children saw it—another copy of the Gazette Extraordinario! And in the lower corner of the page, an ophallagraph, this one glowing, too, not brilliantly, but like embers still holding heat in a fire that had gone out. They stepped closer and peered into the image.

  Two men stood side by side; the one on the right had his arm around the other, and with his free hand he held an umbrella over both their heads. They stood in the foreground of the image, and behind them were three stone cottages thatched with palm leaves and set at angles to one another. A tall palm swayed in the background and a lush kitchen garden flourished between the cottages. Flowers spilled from window boxes. A crop of low, eroded hills stood in the distance and set in one—Simon leaned in to get a better look at it—was a tiny blue square that glowed dimly. Clouds banked the background and across them were tiny black etchings of birds flying in formation. Simon thought that he saw something glinting, a thick thread, around the neck of the man on the left. The image was not in as good shape as the one of the Pamela Jane, as if things in it were unclear about whether they planned to reveal themselves fully or not. Suddenly Simon looked back at the umbrella.

  “Wait!” he said. He took the umbrella that Dr. Bellagio had given him out of his backpack and held it up. “It’s the same one as in the ophallagraph,” he said joyfully. Maybe things were starting to come together after all!

  “You’re right,” said Milagros, inspecting it. “It appears you have one of the tools already.”

  Simon looked up at her, his eyes shining. He wanted to hear more about the ophallagraphs.

  “I wouldn’t have this ophallagraph at all, except that the person who had it died,” said Milagros. “It was passed from person to person all the way from the far north, crossing the island and eventually arriving here for safekeeping—I don’t know what they thought I could do with it. Don’t expect me to explain it,” she said before Simon could ask. “I told you—I don’t know where the tools are anymore, and without them anything else I could tell you would be useless. Now, what else have the señoras given you?”

  “A map,” said Simon, taking it out and smoothing it so that Milagros could see.

  The old hag began to chuckle deeply. “One of General Alvaro’s old battle maps,” she said.

  “You knew him?” asked Maya. “You knew the general?”

  “I knew them all,” said Milagros. “Long ago. So this is what they gave you, is it? People always know more than they think they do—it never ceases to amaze me.” She reached a long, filthy, curved fingernail to the map. She ran it from Maracairol up through the mountains, over blue knots of rivers and across the baked yellow desert of the Neglected Provinces. Then she stopped in the middle, on the border of the West and the Neglected Provinces, where there were arrows drawn to mark some military maneuver.

  Her fingernail, curved like a talon, trembled as it roved over the symbols and drawings.

  “This is the site of the Battle of Hetty’s Pass,” she said, tapping a spot on the
map. “General Alvaro’s greatest victory. Now, there’s a person I’d like to have on my side in future battles.”

  Milagros paused, about to say something, then decided against it. Instead she stretched her arm out and pointed to the window, where sweetgale birds perched like blue tongues of fire on the boughs of the water-tree.

  “In the morning I advise you to go to Hetty’s Pass, in the Borderlands. I promise nothing, but I suspect that you may have some luck there. You’re going to need all the help you can get to defeat the other Outsiders. You can borrow a gondola. Stay in the same current you’re in until you see a single yellow harpy eagle circling in the sky. There will be a toro tree there with an almost spherical trunk and a large nest in it. As soon as you can, get onto dry land and let the gondola go—it will return here in a loop on the same current at nightfall. From the toro tree, walk northeast and keep the mountains in front of you.” She traced a shaky line on the señora’s map with her finger.

  “You’ll come to a plateau facing a mountain in the distance that casts a triangular shadow. You’ll be in the Borderlands between the West and the Neglected Provinces. It’s very important that you stick to the map. I warn you, the Neglected Provinces are a strange and inhospitable place. No child who enters there will leave with his youth.”

  “What will we find there?” Simon asked.

  “That’s for you to discover,” said Milagros. “However, if you find all the tools—and your friend and the bird you call Seagrape—if you ever need my help again, put a piece of zala root in the parrot’s talons and she’ll find me.

  “There’s a room across the way where you can sleep,” she went on. “It belongs to a man and his wife. Tell them I sent you. You’ll find it more comfortable there than here.”

  The children shifted from foot to foot, reluctant to leave when they felt more confused than ever.

  Milagros was silent for a minute. “I will caution you, that which appears alive is dead and what appears dead is alive,” she said. “Things elude understanding until they are understood.”

  Simon’s head swam, but Milagros brushed further questions away.

  “But, please,” insisted Maya, her eyes luminous in the dark, “what about Helix? How can we find him?”

  Milagros regarded the girl and after a moment she smiled, a surprisingly gentle, knowing smile. “The green parrot is there to watch over and protect your friend,” she said. “Right now he has his own things to discover, as you have yours. If he’s to be found, it will be when the time is right, not before. Go now, I’ve told you all I can.”

  * * *

  The room across the way belonged to a tiny, wrinkled old couple who swept the floor and laid down grass mats for the children to sleep on. The wife brought them a jug of water and a plate of steaming fried fish and boiled shoots of reed grasses and star fruit, which the children thanked them for profusely. The boat turned on its hinges and the village swung into view.

  “It’s amazing,” said Maya. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I suppose not many people ever have,” said Simon. He had studied the umbrella from handle to rod to the sturdy brown fabric between its spokes without figuring out what made it special, and now he put it carefully aside.

  While they ate they listened to the lap of the water and watched neon life zigzagging beneath the water out across the lake. Strange currents distorted the surface. Cooking grease was splashed out to bait the fish and a fatty gleam ventured out across the water. In the darkness they heard the sssssswack-swshhh, sssssswack-swshhh of nets being cast. Penny was afraid of scaly wooden dragons carved into the bridges that grimaced down at the people passing beneath them. “They’re just pretend,” said Maya, but Penny had to sit so she wasn’t facing them. Deeper inside the village women came to bathe and wash their hair in a canal, and when they were finished the canal was opened to men. The murmur of human voices and activity reached the children as the invisible citizens of Tamarind went about doing all the things they could not do by day.

  Whooo? Whooo?

  Simon jumped, startled. It was an owl in the window, his face as round and yellow as the full moon behind him. He sat there only an instant before he took flight again, a single of his feathers drifting to the floor beside Simon.

  He picked it up and examined it. Its quill glowed dully in the dim room. “It’s got ophalla in it,” he said. “The birds must absorb it somehow. Just like the glowing sea life. Sorella said there was ophalla in everything here.” He paused, looking around at the faintly shimmering bark of the water-trees and at the glowing fish in the lake, glimmering like stars reflected on the surface.

  He frowned, thinking.

  Maya looked across the lake to where the Red Coral boats still spun in futile circles. “I wish they’d go away,” she said. “They’re too close for comfort. I wonder how long they were following us.”

  “I don’t know,” said Simon. “Anyway, we’ll do what Milagros said and leave through the reeds tomorrow to reach Hetty’s Pass. They won’t be able to follow us.”

  “What do you think we’ll find there?” asked Maya. “Why wouldn’t Milagros just tell us?”

  “She knew a lot more than she told us,” said Simon thoughtfully. “But at least now we know what the ophallagraphs are for—we need to find those tools. And we know that Faustina’s Gate is important. The Red Coral were on to something, unfortunately.”

  “What I’d like to know is how closing a gate is supposed to save Tamarind,” said Maya. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  A cool breeze flowed over the lake.

  Maya sighed. “I wonder if Helix is still with the Pamela Jane,” she said. “I hope he’s okay. Wherever he is.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” said Simon. “Helix can take care of himself.” He looked out over the dark water. Their friend was somewhere in Tamarind, maybe quite far away from where they were right now.

  “He doesn’t even know we found his family yet,” said Maya quietly.

  “When are we going to see Helix again?” Penny asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Simon. “Soon, I hope.”

  “I wish he was with us,” said Penny.

  “So do we, Pennymouse,” said Maya.

  Simon studied the two ophallagraphs, side by side, but he couldn’t for the life of him see anything in them that might be the tools Milagros had spoken about. Finally his eyes grew heavy and he put away the ophallagraphs and lay back, hands under his head and his elbows sticking out. Usually if he didn’t understand something, he would ask Papi. Now he had to figure things out on his own. It was harder than he thought.

  What kind of gate was Faustina’s Gate? How had Dr. Fitzsimmons known about it, and why had he been so sure the children’s parents could help him?

  Simon’s questions circled restlessly, like the Red Coral boats on the fringes of the village, never getting anywhere, until eventually sleep took over.

  Chapter Eleven

  WHUMP! WHUMP! SSSAAAA! • A Face in the Mountains • Hetty’s Pass • A Surprising Discovery • Cadet! • Ostrillos

  “Wake up,” said a voice in Simon’s ear. He opened his eyes to see the old woman from the night before, whose room they had slept in. “Hurry now, you don’t have much time!”

  Simon woke Maya and Penny, and still half-asleep, they clambered into the wide gondola that Milagros had left for them. Milagros’s raft was already gone. The woman untied the gondola and gave it a shove into a current. The lake was still dark but the village was disbanding. Whole streets floated off together for a moment before splitting up, each houseboat carried swiftly off on its own current back into the reeds. The breeze was cool and the air smelled marshy.

  The children lay down flat so they couldn’t be seen, but after a few minutes Simon peeked over the gunwale of the gondola and saw the lights of the Red Coral boats out on the far fringes, still spinning in futile circles. Soon the currents would release them and they would be able to penetrate the lake and the
vast marshland that surrounded it. All around the children the town was melting away as dawn was breaking. Boathouses disappeared into the rushes, their inhabitants already settling down to sleep. Birdcages hung on poles at bows of gondolas; the children could hear the birds’ sweet song from somewhere inside the rushes before that, too, was gone. The next time Simon looked back the lake was empty—with a mysterious whisper of grasses, the village had effaced itself. The birds had vanished, too, all but a black kestrel that wheeled silently high above the lake, now glowing pewter in the low-lying fog. Only the Red Coral boats remained, starting to make their way toward the middle of the lake. But the current the children were on had already brought them to the far side. Soft, tall reeds parted and then Simon, Maya, and Penny headed deep into a green and gold world.

  When the current had borne them a great distance without any sign of the men following them, Simon took out General Alvaro’s old map and the two ophallagraphs. On the map he found Hetty’s Pass, the sandy plateau on the edge of the Neglected Provinces where they were headed. He examined the ophallagraphs once again but discouragingly they yielded nothing new. He wondered how many they would need before they made sense. To pass the time, Maya played games with Penny, counting the tiny silver fish that whizzed past the gondola and pointing out things they saw in the clouds.

  A couple of hours later they saw the toro tree with the bulbous trunk and great snaggle of nest that Milagros had promised. The yellow harpy eagle wheeled in the air above it. Kneeling, Simon grabbed on to a root that grew out of the muddy bank and held the boat steady so his sisters could disembark. He followed them up, and when the current wrestled him for the gondola he released it and it continued on its track and within seconds it was gone among the reeds.