Lila nodded. ‘I know.’ She reached into the pith helmet. ‘I can feel it, when he moves; they’re so light, like seagull bones.’
‘Make sure you check under the armpits for parasites. There.’
Baca’s head reared up over the edge of the pith helmet and he let out a wail of protest.
The explorer gave something approaching a smile. ‘He’s being unnecessarily dramatic; the water’s good for him. Now, hold him by his forearms.’
‘Like this?’ Lila lifted Baca from his bath, dripping, his legs dangling.
‘Yes. Check his stomach for ticks.’
Lila checked, brushing her fingers over the sloth’s belly, her eyes squinting with care. ‘There’s nothing.’ Baca’s fur was plastered against his skull, and his eyes were wide with the affront of it; he gave a squawk as he hung from Lila’s hands.
‘Now you need to dry him.’
Swiftly, Lila unplaited her hair. It fell in an uneven wave to her waist. She lifted the sloth into it, and rubbed him gently. Baca snuffled among the deep brown curls. Fred saw Con, inside the stone room, give the ghost of a smile. Max was half-asleep, his head on Con’s lap.
The explorer raised his eyebrows. The corners of his mouth lifted half an inch. ‘I doubt that particular strategy would be suggested in veterinary college. But, good.’
The sun was dipping over the top of the statue of the panther. The explorer looked up and saw Fred watching. He sprang to his feet, as if embarrassed to be caught mid-kindness, his bad leg catching on his good one, suddenly brisk again.
‘Right! Are you ready to go? You each need to take some fire with you – the fish eyes shine red in the light. Find slow-burning wood: something dense, or it’ll burn down too quickly.’
They set off in single file through the dark trees, each carrying a burning branch. Baca rode, still slightly damp, inside Lila’s shirt.
The explorer moved without a single rustle; the rest stumbled behind him, stubbing their toes on unseen roots. A branch whipped in Fred’s face and the leaves blackened in the flame of his torch, but the wood was too green to catch fire.
‘Don’t burn down the jungle, please,’ said the explorer, without turning round.
Fred found to his surprise that the dark no longer seemed threatening. It still made his skin tingle, but the pitch-black shadows under the trees no longer bit at his stomach in the same way. The change had been so slow he hadn’t felt it come.
‘There are ant mounds everywhere here,’ said the explorer. ‘Nothing too bad – the only dangerous ants are the bullet ants – but you don’t want to disturb them if you can help it. I was attacked by a colony once, when I was asleep. It looked like my whole body was covered in warts.’
‘Oh,’ said Lila. ‘Wow.’
‘Quite. Not good for the morale.’
They went in a new direction, north-west, down a steep incline. Every time their branches burned down to their hands, they pulled new ones from the trees and lit them. Twice, Fred lost his footing and slid until he came up against a tree. Max tripped, ate a mouthful of mud, and they had to pause until his screaming died down enough for him to walk on. Lila tried to comfort him. The explorer turned away and studied a dung beetle with angry intensity.
The lake, when they came upon it, was larger than Fred had expected. The trees that grew all around it had spread their roots under the water. The explorer took off his shoes and waded in, knee-deep.
‘Come on, quickly,’ he said. ‘What are you waiting for?’
Fred followed him into the water, feeling it soak his shorts and praying there was nothing in it with teeth. The lake was pure black, except where his burning torch cast a yellow light down through the water to the mud and stones of the lakebed.
In the glow of the flames, pairs of red lights flitted and flashed under the surface of the water. Max laughed, delighted.
‘The bigger the eyes,’ said the explorer, ‘the bigger the fish. Move slowly towards them. Hold your torch close to the surface. You lower your spear as slowly as you can into the water, and then, at the last moment, you jab. Jab fast. Don’t jab your own feet. Now split up.’
Lila and Con exchanged sceptical glances. They moved off across the lake, but they didn’t split up. Their breath was audible. It was hard to tell in the dark, but Fred thought they might have been holding hands.
Max reached out and took Fred’s hand. His palm was warm, and sticky.
‘Let’s fish!’ Max said.
Fred fumbled, trying to arrange his spear properly while keeping the flame away from his face. ‘If I give you the torch to hold,’ he said to Max, ‘will you try not to burn my hair off with it?’
Max took the burning branch. ‘Maybe,’ he said.
The spearing was harder than Fred had expected. The spear was thin and supple in his hand, but every time he brought it down over a fish, the fish had gone.
A swarm of mosquitos passed over them – Max sneezed, and waved his burning branch over-emphatically.
‘Max! I think I’d better take the branch.’
‘No!’ cried Max. ‘No, no, no! It’s mine! I’ll be careful!’
A spear flew suddenly past them, inches from Fred’s chest, and landed in the mud of the lake, its tip vibrating out of the water.
Fred jumped. Max gave a yell, rocked backwards, grabbed at Fred’s knees, and the two of them toppled backwards into the shallows. The branch extinguished. Fred sat up, spitting water, and looked around for Max.
The explorer strode past, picked Max up with one hand, flipped him upright and set him down on his feet.
‘Are you all right?’ Fred asked Max.
‘I’m wet!’ he wailed. ‘I don’t want to be wet.’
‘But otherwise?’
Max’s face rippled as he debated whether or not to cry. He hesitated, then: ‘My underpants are soggy. But I’m all right.’
The explorer picked the spear out of the mud from where he’d thrown it. ‘Good boy,’ he said to Max. On the end of the spear was a fish as big as a man’s thigh.
‘Breakfast,’ said the explorer. ‘Come here, Fred, and learn how it works. Max, stay on the shore and guard the fish. Here, I’ll give you a torch.’ The explorer strode through the water to the nearest tree, pulled down a branch, lit it with his own and handed it to Max. ‘Beautiful, no?’
‘Should Max be left with fire?’ asked Fred. ‘He tends to eat things.’
The explorer turned to Max. ‘Boy, do not eat the fire, or any other part of the world surrounding you, do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ said Max. He was sniffing the fish.
‘You see? He understands,’ said the explorer. ‘Come on.’
Fred wrung the water out of his shirt, and waded into the lake to stand near the explorer. The man seemed to be in a good mood. Fred risked a question.
‘When you go out into the trees –’
‘Yes?’ The explorer waded further in, the water lapping up to his thighs. Fred followed. The black water closed over his waist.
‘– what are you doing there? You’re gone all day, but you don’t come back with food. Are you hunting?’
For a long time the explorer didn’t answer. Instead, he stared down into the lake. He was so still that Fred wasn’t sure if he was breathing.
‘There. See?’ He pointed down at the murky water and the submerged roots.
Fred could see nothing, only floating leaves, and the moon.
The explorer’s arm moved so fast Fred didn’t see it start or stop, but suddenly there was a long thin fish flapping on the end of the spear.
‘Acestrorhynchus,’ he said. ‘Needle jaw. Tastes like pike. Lots of bones, but delicious.’
He took a length of twine from his pocket; it had a thin flint, sharp as a needle, tied to the end. He threaded the fish on to the twine.
‘You asked what I do during the days,’ he said. ‘I’m fixing the thing I broke.’ Then he pivoted on his heel, and swept the subject away with a gesture. ‘Look, see how I grip it? Get th
e spear less than a thumb’s height above the fish before you stab down.’
Fred stood hunched over the water. Red eyes glinted in the dark. He stabbed many rocks, some leaves and his own ankle. Then, astonishingly, he felt the tip hit a fish. The first stab hit only the tail fin, but the fish was slowed and Fred stabbed again, frantically, until he felt the flint meet flesh.
‘I think I caught something!’ He held his spear up to the light. On the end something wriggled; it wasn’t large, but it was indisputably a fish.
‘Wolf fish. They call it a traíra in these parts. Put it in your pocket,’ said the explorer.
Fred checked to see if he was serious; but he didn’t seem to be in a particularly jocular mood, so Fred put the fish in the pocket of his shorts. Its eyes stared up at him like a gym mistress.
He waited for a moment, rinsing the fish blood off his hands, before he dared try again. ‘What are you fixing?’
The explorer waded deeper into the lake, up to his waist. He seemed to find it easier to speak here, in the dark. ‘I was on a reconnaissance mission; I was flying, looking for any sign of life below. I was circling the city, trying to work out whether there was anything to see, and my wretched engine failed. I crashed through the canopy. There was a fire, and it killed a lot of the foliage.’
‘What happened to the plane? Could you salvage it?’
The man’s eyes flicked down to the water, and he stirred his spear in the weeds.
Fred tried again. ‘Is that what made the hole in the trees?’
‘In the canopy, yes. But the canopy was there for a reason. Whoever built this city had planted the trees so that their leaves interlock; you can’t see the city from above. You could stand on the mountaintop and look down and all you would see is uninterrupted green.’
‘How long ago was it made?’
‘I don’t know. With a city so entwined with the jungle around it, it’s hard to be certain about a date. A hundred years, probably several hundred more. It will take at least fifty to a hundred years for those trees to grow again. I’ve cut down the burnt trees where I can, and tried to replant in the same place.’
‘I saw! There are new shoots down the middle of the square.’
‘Precisely – but as you can imagine, cutting down a tree without a saw is not a relaxing pastime. It has taken time. Until the trees grow, I need to fix the canopy. I’m building a dustsheet, of sorts – of palm leaves and vines to cover the gaps I made. An invisibility cloak.’
‘Is that what you do, when you leave during the day?’
‘Exactly. It’s slowish work.’ He stabbed, brought up a fish and threaded it on the twine. The firelight cast the cuts and scars on his hands into sharp relief. ‘I’m erecting new portions every month or so. I’ve fallen out of the trees more often than is ideal. But it will be a complete green roof, a living protection for the ruins.’
‘But a protection from what?’
‘From people surveying the land from the air,’ he said shortly. ‘From people looking for El Dorado. From people looking to pack places like this into parcels of stone and sell them to curious ladies and gentlemen in Chelsea for the price of a bus driver’s yearly wages. From people exactly like me.’
‘Like you? But you’re saving it!’
‘No. I am undoing my own harm. But God knows what I might have done when I was younger. I was hungry to have my name in black capitals on the front page of The Times.’
He glanced sideways at Fred. Fred shifted uncomfortably, and looked very hard at the water.
The explorer stabbed again. This fish was still writhing hard, and he had to smack it against the sole of his shoe to kill it; perhaps it was this that made him flush red in the fire’s light.
‘Europeans have said cities like this were impossible. Europeans never believed in a place like this – they believed the jungle could never have supported such numbers. They said it was too infertile, and called it a counterfeit paradise.’
He paused, staring unseeingly at the fish on the string. ‘The tribes the Europeans met were so small that people believed there could never have been great sweeping cities. They didn’t realise the tribes they met on the river were small precisely because they were more readily found by men like me – because European diseases were killing so many of them. Measles, influenza. God knows, I have seen enough of that. This place does not need more people like me.’ A deep red anger spread down his neck to his arms.
Fred didn’t move, he only listened, harder than he had ever listened to anything in his life.
‘My wife was born in a village in the jungle. We were young – barely twenty. She breathed the jungle, wore the jungle. She died, from measles, soon after our boy was born.’ His voice was flat. ‘She caught it from a troop of Englishmen. Amateur explorers.’
‘And your son? What happened to your son?’
‘He would have turned four the week after he died. Cholera.’ The explorer stared at the dark. ‘This land could once have supported millions of lives. And one day, the world will know that. The time will come, I hope, when the world values people as much as it values land. But for now, we do not need more men in pith helmets marching through the jungle towards us.’
He looked back down the path they had walked. ‘Neither the people who pass through the city nor the city itself would be safe.’
Fred’s blood was moving faster than usual through his body. He wanted to speak – to say something that would stop the explorer from looking so fierce and so lost – but his voice wouldn’t come.
‘Which is why,’ the man stabbed again at the opaque water, but this time he missed, and there was a shake of passion in his hand, ‘I ask again that you swear not to tell anyone about this place. I ask it with every ounce of my heart.’
Fred was glad it was dark, glad that he couldn’t see the explorer’s face, nor the explorer his. ‘I swear I won’t.’ He thought, How can you make someone see that you’re not lying, that you mean it? ‘I’ll never tell,’ he said, louder. ‘I swear!’
The explorer bowed his head. ‘Thank you, Fred.’
‘I didn’t understand, before! I hadn’t thought – I mean, I thought it was simple.’
‘Extraordinary things are rarely simple.’
‘But, if you’re right about what would happen – if you’re sure –’
‘I would never dare say I was sure. But I believe I am right. I believe it enough to swear by it.’
‘Then I swear too.’
The explorer gave a sigh; it sounded of things that Fred could not untangle. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll die before I tell,’ said Fred. ‘I’ll explain it to the others. And I’ll never say a single thing about you.’
‘Me neither,’ said a voice. ‘You’re my explorer! I don’t like to share.’ Fred jumped. Max had paddled back into the lake, still holding the torch, and was standing directly behind the explorer, rib-deep in water, preparing to hug his knee from behind.
The explorer reared away, startled by the boy’s hands.
‘Good God! It’s best not to show affection when you’re holding a naked flame, child,’ he said gruffly. He ruffled Max’s hair.
Max giggled, and waded through the shallows towards Lila and Con, singing a song whose lyrics seemed to be comprised entirely of the word ‘fish’.
The explorer handed Fred his spear. ‘Here. Try with mine. It’s lighter.’
‘But what will you use?’
‘I don’t, technically, need a spear.’ He crouched low, chest-deep in the water, and lowered his hands up to his elbows. One hand flashed out through the water. There was a certain amount of thrashing, then the explorer held up a fish the size of his forearm, clasped in both hands. Its scales shone in the moonlight. ‘The only downside of doing it like this,’ he said, ‘is sometimes they turn out to be piranha, and that can be awkward.’
Fred thought of his father, back home, wrapped tightly in his pinstripe days.
‘I wish you were my father,’ he
muttered, so quietly that the explorer could choose not to hear.
The explorer turned, his eyebrows high. ‘I would not wish that. I did not excel at the job,’ he said sharply. ‘And Fred, it is possible your father will surprise you. It’s in the nature of fathers; they’re not as predictable as they seem.’
‘He is,’ said Fred. ‘I wanted –’ he stopped, but the darkness made it easier to speak – ‘I wanted to tell him about this place. I thought he’d be proud.’
‘I’m sure your father is very proud of you already,’ said the explorer. He was looking down at the water, half-listening.
‘No he isn’t!’ Fred glared at the man’s back. ‘It’s simple – he’d rather my mother had never had me, then she wouldn’t –’
‘It is not simple, Fred.’ The explorer turned and looked him full in the face. ‘You must stop saying that word. Cut it out of your vocabulary. The complexity of it all is endless. Almost nothing in life is simple.’
Fred sighed. He was disappointed in the explorer. ‘Adults always say that.’
‘It remains true. The world is larger than any human imagination; how could it ever be simple?’ He ducked underwater, his body disappearing under the black surface, and came up holding in his fist something resembling an eel, which thrashed against his chest. He went on as if nothing had happened. ‘A man can love and fear the responsibility that comes with love. A secret can be at once selfish and necessary. For God’s sake, boy, truth is as thorny and various as the jungle itself.’
He turned to crouch in the water again. Then, suddenly, he froze.
He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t need to. ‘Max. Fred. Quick. Out of the water. Con. Lila. Get out of the water.’
Fred twisted to look round. ‘Why?’
‘Out!’ His voice grew louder.
Con and Lila started wading towards them. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Move faster!’
The explorer sprinted through the shallows, his bad leg dragging behind him. He grabbed Max around the waist, knocked Max’s torch into the water, and strode in vast uneven steps towards the bank. Fred ran after them, tripping over submerged roots. Lila pulled Con along through the mud.
The Explorer Page 15
