As he neared them, four of the dolphins sped up and ducked deeper into the water, but one turned. Fred trod water: he held out his hand.
He tried to stay as still as he could. The dolphin swam up to him, a shape approaching under the surface. He gasped, and spat out water. It was rose-grey and covered in deep scars along its back. Its snout was lined with fierce-looking teeth, but its eyes were steady and soft.
Fred tried to steady his breathing. It was the most astonishing thing he’d ever seen; it was like a battered river god. He held out his hand again.
‘Hello,’ he whispered. ‘I’m Fred.’
The dolphin dipped its nose to Fred’s hand. He gasped at the surprising roughness of its skin. It butted his hand, then huffed as if disappointed and ducked down deep under the surface.
Fred watched, expecting its shadow to disappear. But as he turned back to the raft the dolphin erupted from the water in front of him. It leapt clean over his head, showering him with spray, dipped down again and disappeared.
The others were shouting and beckoning from the raft. They hauled him up, all three trying to grab him at once.
Fred couldn’t speak, or he didn’t want to. He wanted the memory to be sharp, carbon-copied on to his heart. He imagined his father’s face when he told him. His heart sang and thrummed in his chest. But the others were boiling over with questions and ideas.
‘It was like they trusted you!’ said Con.
‘Or maybe it thought you were going to feed it?’ said Lila.
‘Maybe someone was feeding them those sardines?’ said Fred.
Later that day, just as Fred’s head was beginning to swim with hunger, Lila spotted a fig tree on the shore. Fred climbed up and shook the fruit down on to the raft. They tied the sleeves and neck of his cricket jumper and made it into a sack. Max counted as he put them in. ‘A hundred and twelvety!’ he said, triumphant.
Behind him, Lila mouthed, ‘Fifty-three.’
‘I always hated figs at school,’ said Con. ‘I thought they tasted like eating someone else’s snot – but, actually, they’re the best thing in the world.’
Max fished a handful of figs out of the sack and pushed them into his pocket. ‘These ones are mine. I doesn’t like sharing,’ he said, haughtily.
Lila fed one of the figs to Baca, who ate it hungrily – and half an hour later pooed lavishly over her lap.
She laughed and washed her skirt at the edge of the raft. ‘Sloths only go to the bathroom about once a week,’ she said, ‘so at least it’s done for a few days.’
Baca looked thin and even more wide-eyed than usual. ‘They poo half their bodyweight each time,’ she said.
‘That sounds … stressful,’ said Con.
The surface of the raft was constantly being washed with river water, so Lila draped the clean skirt over her shoulders to dry, travelling down the river like a floating scarecrow. Fred’s shoes and shorts were sodden wet, but his shirt remained bone dry.
The sun was hotter than two days put together. Con’s cheeks and forehead grew bright pink with sunburn. Lila made her a cold compress out of weeds and plaited leaves, which leaked green water down over her eyebrows but eased some of the burning.
That night, as they lay on a bed of fallen leaves, Baca moved across Lila’s shoulder, sniffed at her neck and climbed up Fred’s calf. Sloths were nocturnal, and Baca seemed unusually sprightly by sloth standards. He fastened his arms and legs around Fred’s knee and began to chew at his shorts.
Fred lay still, trying not to move his leg as he looked up at the stars. They broke out in spirals and galloping animals and clustered like hordes of white butterflies ranging across the night.
Lila was watching too. ‘Fred?’ she whispered. ‘Are you awake?’
‘Yes,’ he whispered back.
‘The moon’s so close.’ She sounded half-asleep. ‘You could wear it as a hat.’
Fred nodded in the darkness but didn’t speak.
‘At home,’ she whispered, ‘you only ever get small squares of sky – however much you can fit between buildings and church spires.’
‘Yes,’ whispered Fred. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’
Lila’s voice grew even quieter. ‘Fred? Are we going to be OK?’
He kept staring up at the sky. ‘I don’t know.’
Con stirred and turned to look at them. ‘Are you scared?’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ said Fred. He had never been so frightened in his life. But they were alive. He held that thought in his hand, tight against his skin.
‘Me too,’ Lila said. ‘Don’t tell Max.’
‘Me too,’ whispered Con. She gave a grunt of disgust. ‘But that’s obvious. I can’t work out how to hide it like you do.’
They lay, breathing close to one another. ‘When this is over,’ said Lila, ‘let’s all swear to meet, somewhere.’
‘Where?’ asked Con.
‘Where’s the most famous place to eat in London?’
‘The Ritz?’ said Fred.
‘Then we’ll meet there,’ said Lila, ‘and we’ll have one of every single kind of cake, and this will be like a dream.’
‘And hot chocolate,’ murmured Max. He sounded three-quarters asleep.
‘Max,’ said Lila, twisting to touch his forehead. ‘Go back to sleep.’
Fred stole a look at the other three. Con had closed her eyes. Her brow was furrowed, but her lips had half a smile at the tips.
On the fourth day the river began to change. The trees arched densely overhead and the water was choked with weeds. It no longer smelt fresh. Fish flitted through the reeds.
‘Are they – piranhas?’ said Con. ‘I mean, piranha.’
Lila peered down over the edge of the raft and nodded, her jaw set. She stroked Baca, hanging round her neck, and buried her chin in his fur. Her breath, as she exhaled, was shaky.
It was mid-morning, but it grew dark as the branches thickened above them.
‘Is it just me, or does the river feel suddenly less on our side?’ asked Con.
‘Not just you,’ said Fred shortly. His upper lip and forehead were dripping sweat: the sweat wasn’t only from the work of poling. But he had Con’s bark map in his pocket, and the thought of it warmed his chest, beating back against the cold doubt in his stomach.
The current was in their favour, but travelling through the weeds was arm-aching, back-stretching, skin-shredding work.
‘Watch out!’ called Lila.
Fred flinched, looking around for something about to hit him in the face, then watched in silence as a snake slipped along a branch, spiralled up the trunk of a tree and disappeared into the green over their heads. Even Max didn’t move.
‘It’s almost certainly not deadly!’ said Fred. He winced. He’d intended it to sound reassuring, but instead his voice landed somewhere between ‘desperate lying’ and ‘stern aunt on a deathbed’.
He concentrated on doubling his speed until they were past the weeds, and they sped down the dark-green passageway of overhanging trees.
‘We’re close,’ said Fred. ‘On the map this river goes on until it meets a lake – I think it would be three or four hours, but it’s hard to tell – and then there’s a black square, and then a short line – that might be a path or a river, but could just be a squiggle – and then the X.’
Con reached into the water for a flattish stick as it floated by, and began to paddle. ‘The sooner we get there, the sooner we’ll know the worst.’
The raft followed the river, Fred’s pole splashing in his impatience to see what was around the next corner. He guided the raft around a floating fallen tree, traversed another five minutes of dark water and found, without warning, that they had come to the mouth of a small lake.
The lake was an exquisite blue, shining under a cloudless sky, but Fred did not notice. They all four sat crouched on the raft, looking up, their jaws open and their eyes wide.
There was a long silence.
Then Lila spoke. ‘D
id I ever mention I’m terrified of heights?’
A great cliff rose up from the jungle, covered in vines. It was fifty times as tall as Fred. The rock face would have been grey but it was so covered in foliage that it seemed to rise from the earth like a growing thing, a great green extension of the jungle floor.
‘That’s what the black square meant,’ breathed Fred.
‘Oh, no,’ whispered Con. ‘I don’t want to do this.’
Lila’s hand, clutching Baca on her shoulder, was shaking. ‘Fred? Could you climb that?’
Fred swallowed. ‘Definitely,’ he lied. He stared at the great green expanse. It would be like climbing a green cathedral, he thought. ‘We all could. There’ll be so many handholds it’ll be like climbing a ladder.’
‘Max can’t climb ladders,’ said Lila.
‘Then one of us could strap him to their back with lianas,’ said Fred.
‘I just don’t think –’ began Con.
But Fred had never wanted anything as much as he wanted to know what was at the top of that cliff. ‘Where would we go, if we turn back now?’ he said.
Lila bit down on one of her plaits. Her jaw was rigid with fear, but her gaze was steady. ‘We’ve got to try, haven’t we? There might be someone up there who can get us home.’
They moored the raft and picked their way through the jungle towards the cliff. The trees grew so thickly they had to force their way between them, and even though it was barely two hundred metres it took fully half an hour of hauling Max over tree trunks and navigating under branches lined with vicious thorns. Fred stood at the foot of the cliff and laid a hand on it. The rock was warm to the touch, and uneven – good for finding handholds, he thought. The vines that coated it looked strong. He tugged on a handful of thin lianas; they didn’t tear.
‘See? It’ll just be like climbing the rope at school, in gym lessons,’ he said. ‘It’ll be simple!’
‘I hate climbing the rope,’ said Con. ‘So no, actually, it’s not simple.’
‘I could go up by myself,’ said Fred, ‘and shout down what’s up there?’
Lila shook her head. She looked suddenly much older than the rest of them, and stern.
‘You never split up in unfamiliar territory,’ she said. ‘We’re coming with you.’ She unwound Baca from the crook of her elbow and settled him securely on the back of her neck, looping her plaits around his body to keep him moored. ‘But I can’t carry Max. We’d both die.’
‘I can take him on my back.’ Fred tried to banish any hint of doubt from his voice.
‘Doesn’t Max get to choose? Max says he won’t,’ said Max.
‘No,’ said Lila. The stern look became sterner. ‘You don’t get to choose. I almost never make you do things you don’t want to at home, Max. But you have to do this.’
‘No!’
‘Yes! We’re going to tie you on to Fred with ropes, so you won’t fall. And you can cry if you want to, but it won’t help,’ she said, as Max began to sob.
Max didn’t make the climbing easier. His mutinous weight threw Fred’s normal climbing rhythm off, and it was a very slow ascent. He breathed loudly into Fred’s ear, and got spit in his hair, and he was heavy. Fred was aching before they were halfway up.
He went first, with Con and Lila following his handholds. Twice he went the wrong way, and had to shout down apologies as he retreated and moved sideways, agonisingly slowly, with Max’s feet digging into his ribs.
‘You have to shift backwards – but don’t look down!’ he called to the girls.
‘We already did,’ Con called back. Her voice was strangled with nerves. ‘It wasn’t a good idea.’
Fred shook a beetle off his eye and gripped another handful of vines. He hauled upwards. Slowly, inch by inch, the roots of trees growing down the rock came into clear sight, then the tip of the rock curved and became an incline with bushes, which became flat land. Fred let out a yell of triumph.
Con and Lila followed. Con crawled to the nearest tree and spat a mouthful of bile and saliva and terror and triumph into the roots.
‘I can’t … believe … we just did that,’ she gasped.
Lila untied Max, and gripped him tight in her arms. She was still shaking. ‘We did it!’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Think about how proud Mama and Papa would be.’
‘Can we tell them?’
‘As soon as we get home.’ Their heads were close together, suddenly a pair set apart, and Fred thought for the first time how very similar they looked, how Lila’s eyes were Max’s eyes, and his mouth her mouth.
‘We’re so close now,’ said Fred. ‘This is the squiggle, I think.’
There was something in front of them that looked like it might be a path, or an animal trail, or just an illusion. They hacked through the foliage: an uncomfortable amount of it was knee-high bushes with spikes. Fred’s knees became flecked with blood. The ground grew marshy, and tiny flying insects mobbed them, swarming into Fred’s mouth and up his nose.
Con snorted like a horse, waving both hands in front of her face. ‘Is it far?’ she asked, turning to look at Fred. ‘I don’t know how much of this I can take.’
But even as she spoke, the ground gave way.
It dropped suddenly down, smooth moss on smooth stone. She didn’t have time to stop and cascaded down it on her back, thumping against stones and roots. Fred launched himself after her, scrabbling to stay upright and grabbing at trees. Lila and Max followed, Max on his backside, gasping in shock.
They tumbled into a heap at the bottom. Fred’s chin connected with someone’s ankle. He shoved the ankle away, and brushed leaves out of his eyes. Lila scooped Baca into her arms, and took hold of Max’s elbow.
They stood with their backs to a slope, at the edge of a vast expanse of stone.
It was an enormous stone courtyard, as wide as a hayfield and at least four times as long. The ground was built from white and yellow stone blocks, rough-hewn but smooth at the top, as from the passing of many thousands of feet. It was set in a slight dip in the ground, so the earth rose up from it on all sides, forming a natural wall. Down the middle of the great stone courtyard grew two rows of trees, creating a boulevard. There were heaps of stone in five or six places, as if small houses had lined each side.
‘My God,’ breathed Lila.
Fred took a step forward. Among the trees he could see half-formed stone pillars, some waist-height, some taller than he was. High, high overhead was a thick canopy of green, forming a roof over the courtyard.
‘Look!’ said Fred. ‘Over there!’
At the far end there was a vast stone wall, half crumbling and covered in passion fruit vines. Lining the wall were four immense sculptures, hewn out of wood and stone, and taller than two men. Some of the stone had fallen away, but it was possible to see what they had been: a monkey, a panther, a woman and a man.
‘It’s a city,’ breathed Lila.
The sudden thump of a footstep made Fred spin round, bending down – as he’d done days before – for something to throw.
A man stepped from behind one of the stone pillars. He was pointing a knife at them.
‘Whatever you were thinking of doing,’ he said, ‘I would advise against it.’
The man was tall. His arms and hands were covered in scars and burns; old white scars criss-crossed with new red ones. He held the knife at the level of their necks, casually, as if it were a breadstick.
‘Like the minotaur,’ whispered Con.
At the man’s side, close at his heels, waddled an enormous vulture with a red head and a curved beak. Its head came up higher than the man’s knees.
‘That small person in the dolorous trouser suit.’ The man’s nostrils had a high flare to them, and they twitched as he spoke. His voice was deep. His accent, Fred thought, belonged among good tailoring and fast motor cars. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
There was silence, except for Max’s sobs.
‘Well?’ said the man. He twirled the knife in his fingers
. The tip of his thumb was missing.
‘He’s crying,’ said Fred.
‘Why? He sounds like a dying screech owl. Like a lion blowing on a ship’s whistle.’
Fred’s heart was red-hot and beating double time. He was surprised that his voice sounded so almost calm. ‘He’s five.’
‘That’s not a reason.’
‘You’re pointing a knife at his head,’ said Lila.
‘That’s not a good reason.’ But he lowered the knife.
The man stepped closer, into a patch of green sun, and they could see him more clearly.
His dress was exquisite, but smelt pungent. His trousers, Fred saw, were quite ordinary: green khaki, worn through at the knee and spotlessly clean; but that – along with a white shirt, torn off at the elbow and patched with coconut fibre – was the only thing about him that was normal.
His shoes were made from what looked like alligator skin, with very thin vines for shoelaces. A jacket, sewn neatly from black furs, hung over his shoulders. The buttons were caiman teeth. He wore leather cuffs on each wrist and a signet ring on his little finger.
From a distance, he might have been on his way to a country-house party. Up close, he looked as though he had reconstructed a prime minister from once-living things.
Con swallowed. She spoke in a whisper. ‘Is it just me, or does he look like the kind of person who won’t definitely not kill you?’ Her eyes were stretched open and her skin was taut over the bones in her face.
Fred’s entire body had gone rigid, spine and shoulders and knees frozen, but he managed to nod his head half a centimetre. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Not just you.’
The man took another step towards them; his right leg swung slightly out to the side as he moved. Fred noticed for the first time that his right foot was strapped with three slim, highly polished pieces of wood. Despite the limp and the scars and the stubble, the animal Fred thought of was a panther. Something with strong jaws and sharp manners.
‘Who are you?’ said the man.
None of the children answered. They looked at each other. Nobody wanted to be the first to speak.
The Explorer Page 9
