Secrets of Tamarind
Page 29
“Come on, Maya. We have to do what he says,” said Simon.
Maya pressed her lips together. She didn’t say anything, but she began following Helix, keeping one eye on the path in front of her so that she didn’t step on anything that might make a noise. She hoped that Penny wouldn’t wake up. When they got to the banyan trees, Maya and Simon stopped in their tracks and stared.
They were looking into a vast, magnificent, and spooky grove of gigantic trunks, covered in a shaggy hide of mottled green lichen. Their roots stood above the ground, forming dark, cathedral-like hollows large enough for the children to have hidden inside. Ropy vines with hairy tassels of roots stretched down from the branches to burrow into the earth and form new trunks, until over time the whole grove had become interconnected, and the canopy of leaves was so dense that little sunshine could get through, and the light beneath the canopy was just a murky green gloom. But it was not the banyans themselves that Maya and Simon could not take their eyes off of, it was what lay beneath them.
Lying beneath the majestic trees napping were forty or so jaguars.
The jaguars had thick, soft, honey-colored fur with black spots. Beneath the green glow of the trees, each animal looked like a pool of light with tiny blots of black shadow. Vines swept soothingly back and forth over their backs in a fine breeze, and a rumbling purring rose from the creatures.
“Don’t worry,” said Helix in a very soft whisper. “These vines aren’t like the others. They’re just sweeper vines—they put the cats to sleep. They’ll only nab you if you move too quickly. Just don’t make a sound and we’ll be fine.”
He put his finger to his lips and motioned them to follow him as he began tiptoeing lightly through the grove. Simon went after him, and a moment later, Maya took a deep breath and followed them. She watched where she put her feet, stepping gingerly so that not a single leaf would rustle, nor twig would snap, and disturb the cats’ slumber. Though it would have been difficult for the creatures to hear them over the roar of feline snoring. By the time the children got to the middle of the grove, the sound was almost deafening. A tiny branch broke against Maya’s arm when she brushed past it, and she froze in her tracks and waited, not daring to breathe, but the cats lay perfectly still, the vines sweeping in long, even strokes over their backs. The children crossed the halfway mark. Up ahead, Maya could see water shimmering through the trees. They would get to the raft and then they’d be safe. Cats hated water, after all. The water got brighter and brighter with each step toward it. Maya tried to clear her mind of anything but where to put her feet. The right foot on a patch of soft ferns, the left foot balancing on a root sticking out of the earth, right foot in the quiet, muddy place right there, left foot down just between those two rotting sticks …
Then the worst thing happened.
Penny woke.
And began to wail.
It was unlike Penny to wake from a nap crying, but perhaps she had sensed the danger around them in her sleep. Horrified, Maya stiffened. Helix and Simon stopped, too, and looked over their shoulders at her. She looked back at them helplessly. Around them, the cats began to wake. Whatever spell the vines had put them under couldn’t withstand the cries of an eight-month-old infant.
A fat yellow paw slapped down on the ground in front of Maya’s feet. Her breath caught in her throat and she looked into the furry, spotted face of a sleepy jaguar. The cat was stretching and yawning, its muscular jaw stretching out nearly in a straight line, its eyes rolling back in their sockets. When it opened its eyes again, it leaped up, startled. Its lips and whiskers drew back in a snarl, and it lifted one of its great yellow paws to strike. Maya looked at the enormous, dirty claws and imagined what they were about to do to her, but could not seem to make herself move. Her feet felt rooted to the earth. And even though she was petrified, she was able to think quite calmly that even if she did begin to run, the giant cat would catch up with her in a heartbeat.
She took a deep breath, preparing for the strike, but just as the jaguar’s paw descended in a deathblow, from the corner of her eye, she saw Helix swing his bow down from over his shoulder and withdraw an arrow from his belt.
But Helix’s arrow sailed through the air without striking its target, because suddenly a long dark vine came swinging across and flew right under the jaguar’s ribs and lifted it up in the air. It hung, swinging slightly to and fro, twenty feet off the ground. The creature let out a surprised and outraged yowl that woke any cats that had still been sleeping. Suddenly, all the jaguars were on their feet, snarling, ears flattened, tails dancing like flames. Several cats leaped for the children at the same time, and as they did, other vines dropped down and looped around their middles and hauled them into the air, where they swung back and forth, howling in fury.
“Don’t move suddenly!” Helix shouted to Maya and Simon. “Or the vines will grab you, too!”
Maya had been about to make a mad dash for the water, but she stopped and stood absolutely still.
“Very slowly,” Helix said. “Very slowly, we’re going to keep walking until we get to the raft, okay?”
“Okay,” said Simon. He and Maya began following Helix again, and they walked through the rest of the grove, looking up in amazement at the jaguars swinging slowly back and forth overhead.
They only started running when they left the grove and neared the shore. Maya breathed a sigh of relief to be back out in the sunshine again. But they stopped short when they realized that Helix’s raft couldn’t fit all of them. Growling noises still coming menacingly from inside the jungle, Maya hurried to collect driftwood, and Helix sliced a few thin, rubbery vines from the edge of the forest and began tying the driftwood to the raft to make it bigger.
“I can do that better,” said Simon.
“It’s true,” said Maya. “He’s the knot expert.”
Working quickly, Simon tied a series of knots that bound the driftwood to the raft.
“Impressive,” said Helix.
As Helix pushed the raft into the water and they clambered onto it, Maya looked nervously over the water. The channel separating the tiny island they were on from the bigger island was narrow, but the current flowed treacherously.
“Are you sure this is safe?” she asked.
“You can stay here if you like,” Helix said. “The vines will let the jaguars back down in a few minutes, and I’m sure there’ll be a big fight over who gets to have you for lunch.”
That was it; Maya did not like Helix. She gritted her teeth and crawled onto the raft.
“Fine,” she said. “I’d rather drown than be eaten.”
A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK
An Imprint of Macmillan
SECRETS OF TAMARIND. Copyright © 2011 by Nadia Aguiar LLC. All rights reserved. For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aguiar, Nadia.
Secrets of Tamarind / Nadia Aguiar. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Four years after leaving the lost island of Tamarind, Maya, Simon, and Penny Nelson return to stop the Red Coral Project, a sinister group mining the magical mineral ophalla there and, in the process, ruining the magnificent island.
ISBN: 978-0-312-38030-4
[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Islands—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction. 4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. Mines and mineral resources—Fiction. 6. Environmental degradation—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.A26876Sec 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010050898
Map illustration copyright © 2010 by Jeffery L. Ward
Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
First Edition: 2011
mackids.com
eISBN 978-1-4299-9548-1
First Feiwel and Friends eBook Edition: July 2011