The explorer dropped Max on the ground; he landed head first, but Lila scooped him into her arms before he could start screaming. The explorer turned, spear raised, to face the lake.
‘What’s wrong? What did we do?’ asked Con.
‘Nothing.’ Now that the children were out of the lake he sounded entirely placid. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘What is it, though?’
‘See those eyes? They shine red, like the fish – there, at the far side of the lake.’
Lila swallowed. ‘Is that … what I think it is?’
Her eyes must have been sharp; Fred could see only a flash of red and a grey shape.
‘Caiman,’ said the explorer. ‘It’s an old one. Maybe eight foot long. Probably not interested in any of you. But.’ He didn’t finish the sentence.
‘Have you ever been bitten?’ asked Con.
‘A few times. Come. We might as well leave rather fast.’ He tossed Max into the air, grabbed hold of one of his ankles and threw him over his shoulder.
‘Follow me, you three. Put your feet where I put mine.’ Max, hanging over the man’s back, foraged in his pocket.
‘Fred,’ whispered Max, from upside down. ‘I have to tell you something.’
‘What is it?’
‘I ate a tiny bite of the explorer’s fish. While I was waiting. I was hungry.’ He held out the fish, which had his fingermarks pressed into it. ‘Is that all right?’
Fred looked at the creases in Max’s anxious face. ‘Yes,’ he said. He tried to sound as serious as he could. ‘I wouldn’t do it again. But people do eat raw fish. I don’t think you need to panic.’
‘I won’t die?’
‘No. In fact, I think maybe, in a very peculiar kind of way, we’re all safe. For now.’
The explorer twisted round to look at Fred, almost smacking Max’s head against a tree.
‘Yes, you’re safe,’ he said. ‘Or, rather,’ he clarified, ‘you could still die out here. But if you pay attention, you will be safe from a lot of things.’ He stopped, turning back to look at the file of children behind him, moonlit, sweat-smeared. He shook his head. ‘There is no way to say such things as need to be said without sounding like a cheerleader.’
He did not, Fred thought, look very much like a cheerleader. Cheerleaders, he believed, wore fewer animal teeth.
‘Do you see all this?’ The explorer held his torch high, casting light on the trees and the sleeping birds. ‘You don’t have to be in a jungle to be an explorer,’ he said. ‘Every human on this earth is an explorer. Exploring is nothing more than the paying of attention, writ large. Attention. That’s what the world asks of you. If you pay ferocious attention to the world, you will be as safe as it is possible to be.’ He glared at them, each in turn. For once, Fred didn’t flinch under the ferocity of his gaze.
‘Speaking of attention, Lila,’ the explorer said, ‘your sloth is trying to eat your hair. It will give it indigestion, if it succeeds.’
He walked on, Max’s thin ribs bouncing against his spine, carrying him home.
Nobody wanted to sleep that night. They sat over the fire, cooking the fish until it spat and sizzled. Fred explained to Lila and Con about the canopy, and the man working every day to protect the great green secret at the heart of the jungle.
‘We should do something,’ said Con, ‘to prove to him that we won’t tell.’
‘Do you think he doesn’t believe us?’ asked Lila. Baca lay snoring in her lap, with Max curled up on her foot, his eyes closed.
‘It’s not that, exactly, but I think he’s not the easily believing kind,’ said Con.
‘I like that idea,’ said Fred. ‘What would we do?’
‘We could swear,’ said Lila. ‘We could make a blood vow, like they do in books.’
‘I want something more permanent than that,’ said Con. She looked up at the roof, through which the stars shone, silver woven through green. ‘I want something bigger. Something that will make all this last forever.’
‘I know!’ Lila sat up straighter, jerking Baca awake. ‘We could make a mark – like a tattoo!’
‘We don’t have any ink,’ said Fred.
‘But the explorer does!’ said Con. ‘I saw it, when I was collecting wood – he said, he keeps his most precious things he doesn’t want stolen under his hammock while he sleeps.’
There was a pause. Then Fred said, ‘If he doesn’t want them stolen, I don’t know if I’d want to try stealing them. He sleeps with a knife.’
Excitement seemed to have made Con bold. ‘I’ll do it!’
Even Baca looked surprised.
‘Con!’ said Lila. ‘Are you crazy?’
But she was already up and running across the square, on her tiptoes, half bent over and muttering warnings to herself as she went. Fred and Lila exchanged startled glances.
Con returned five minutes later, bearing the ink aloft.
‘I did it!’ she said.
‘You stole it?’ asked Lila, her voice full of admiration.
‘Yes!’ said Con, flushed with victory in the light of the fire. Then: ‘Sort of.’
‘Sort of?’ said Fred.
‘He was sort of awake. He sort of said, we could borrow it; he said it’s precious, and if we spill it he’ll put snakes in my hair. But I would have stolen it, if I’d had to.’
Fred grinned. ‘What shall we tattoo, then?’
‘We could write, “I swear”?’ said Lila.
‘Too complicated. It would give us too many chances to go wrong,’ said Con.
‘Or an X,’ said Fred. ‘Like the one on the map.’
‘I like that,’ said Lila. Con nodded. She sharpened the tip of the penknife with a flint, and Lila burnt the tip in the flames of the fire to sterilise it.
‘Who wants to go first?’ Lila asked.
There was a silence; a silence sharpened by the knife in Lila’s hand. ‘I’ll do it,’ said Fred.
He tried not to let his hands shake. It was harder than he’d expected, to cut his own skin; he dug down, wincing sharply, and cut a thin line into the base of his thumb where it met his palm.
‘Does it hurt?’ asked Con anxiously.
‘A bit,’ said Fred, his voice coming out tight. ‘But not compared to everything else.’ He added a second line, and dabbed away the blood. ‘How do you think they put in the ink?’
‘I think they just drip it on,’ said Lila.
The ink stung, and Fred bit his teeth together, but Con and Lila were both tactfully looking away.
‘There!’ he said. He held it up to the firelight: a small X, marked in ink and blood.
Lila went next. She winced when the ink was added, but said nothing. Con took longer over hers, making sure the lines of the X were perfectly straight. ‘If it’s going to be forever,’ she said, as she rubbed in the ink, ‘I don’t want it to be wonky.’
Max suddenly jerked upright. ‘I want one!’ he said.
‘Max! I thought you were asleep,’ said Lila.
‘I was pretending.’
‘Shh, Maxie. Go to sleep.’
‘I want one too! I want to do the secret swear!’
‘No,’ said Lila. ‘Absolutely not. It hurts, and you’ll cry, and the explorer will wake up. And anyway, Mama and Papa would kill me.’
‘I won’t cry!’
‘You would,’ said Con.
‘But it’s my secret too!’ said Max. ‘If you want me to keep it a secret you have to let me!’
The others looked at each other. Lila sighed.
Max did cry, but he tried very hard not to. Lila took the knife and Max screwed up his eyes and bit his lips together and drummed his feet on the ground, and though the tears trickled down his face as Lila added the ink to his hand, he didn’t yell.
‘Shall we swear?’ said Con. ‘What shall we say?’
‘You do it, Fred,’ said Lila. ‘You’re oldest.’
Fred grinned, half-embarrassed. ‘We swear –’ he began.
‘Just a second!’ Con thr
ew an armful of kindling on the fire, and it roared upwards towards the sky. ‘OK, go.’
‘We swear to keep this place a secret,’ said Fred. ‘Until it’s safe to tell the world about it, or until we die – whichever comes first.’
‘I swear,’ said Con solemnly. Then: ‘Though, statistically, we’re more likely to die before we get a chance to tell anyone, you know’ – but she was smiling.
‘I swear,’ said Lila. ‘Always.’
‘Swear,’ echoed Max. ‘It’s my city.’ He looked proudly down at his X. ‘Nobody gets to share it with us.’
Con looked at Lila and Lila looked at Fred. The three of them grinned at one another over Max’s head.
The next day was Thursday, a full twelve days since the crash. Fred was woken from a nightmare about a burning aeroplane by the vulture pecking at the back of his head. He sat up.
‘Hey!’ he said.
The vulture looked at him, an irate glare of disdain for the slack of a world that had failed it.
‘Heel!’ came a voice from outside, followed by a whistle. The vulture waddled out of the stone room. Fred followed.
‘Good boy,’ said the explorer to the vulture, tussling its naked red head as if it were a dog. The fire outside the stone room had already been lit.
‘Wake the others,’ said the explorer.
‘It’s only just sunrise,’ said Fred dubiously. ‘Max sometimes threatens to pee on you if you wake him up early.’
‘Wake him anyway. If he chooses to weaponise his urine, so be it. I’ve been watching you all, and there are some basic techniques for survival that you don’t yet know. I’ll be working late today, so you need to listen now.’ He glanced down at Fred’s palm and saw the mark. He said nothing, but it was possible, Fred thought, that the left side of his face smiled half an inch.
‘Come, hurry! Explorer school is in session.’
The others emerged, rubbing their eyes. The explorer handed out pieces of meat from a gourd cut into a serving bowl.
‘To get home, you need to know both the river and the land. Tell me what you know.’
It was hard to say what the meat was – a bird, Fred thought, though it might have been fish. He ate as slowly as he could, chewing each piece until it turned to pulp in his mouth.
‘We already know the river quite well,’ said Con proudly. ‘We came on a raft.’
‘Describe it.’
‘Fred made it,’ said Con. She grinned at him. Her cheek was covered in mosquito bites, but her smile was broad. ‘He was fanatical about it.’
‘What did you use?’ the explorer asked Fred.
Fred described it as best he could. He tried not to sound too proud of it.
‘It sounds a good design,’ said the explorer, and Fred felt his face burn hot with pleasure. ‘I came along the Negre, by raft from Manaus, on one of my first expeditions. I used a similar model. Not as good as a dugout canoe, but quicker to make.’
‘What was the expedition looking for?’ asked Fred.
‘Various things. Some of the men were looking for a city, others for plants for a new medicine. I was just hungry to see the world. We were naive, and clumsy. Two men died. But I loved it.’
The explorer began sketching a map in the dust. ‘You come this way, around the edge of the rapids by Dead Man’s Point, and north. Water leaping up into your face, the raft trying to ride the waves the way you would a horse, and me trying to make sure that the bamboo rod I used to steer didn’t jerk and impale me through the ribs. Some of the happiest days of my life.’
He handed out more meat. Max widened his eyes in appeal, and was given double. Con opened her mouth to object, and then closed it again.
‘You’ll have to do part of the same journey I made, before you reach the city. It will be choppy. Foam, and rocks – you can get thrown up several feet in the air, so you’ll have to tie the little one on. If anyone falls overboard, they can’t grab on to the raft in those waters without capsizing it.’
‘Really?’ said Lila. ‘But couldn’t you –’
‘No,’ he said sternly. ‘The only honourable thing to do is drown.’
‘Oh,’ said Lila.
‘Oh,’ said Fred.
‘Fine,’ said Con. ‘What else?’
‘And then there are certain preparations you must make. Have you got a pen?’
They didn’t, of course, but Lila took a flint and began to scratch into a piece of grey stone.
‘In the forest, fifty miles down from here,’ said the explorer, adding to the dust map, ‘you’ll come across a kind of bee; it’s absolutely minuscule, and rather beautiful. It’s drawn to sweat, and to moisture, and it’s happiest when nesting on the centre of the pupil of your eye. The people there call them eye lickers. Write that down.’
‘Eye lickers,’ said Lila, scratching hard. There was no fear in her face, only concentration. Baca climbed on top of her head and sat there, an inquisitive hat.
‘The best thing to do is wear a bit of net over your eyes.’
‘Could we make netting?’ asked Fred.
‘That’s a good question. It’s one of the very few things that is almost impossible to make.’
‘Could I –’ Fred closed his eyes and tried to picture what the net would need to look like – ‘punch holes in a bit of snakeskin?’
‘Well, you could.’ The explorer looked at Fred, nodding slowly. ‘That’s not a bad idea, in fact. But finding snakeskin is difficult in these parts; the vultures eat them. I have one mosquito net. It’s the most valuable thing I own, I think.’
They waited.
‘I suppose I can cut off four pieces, and you can tie them round the back of your heads with vines.’
‘Thank you!’ said Fred and Lila together.
‘That’s kind,’ said Con solemnly.
The explorer waved it away, frowning, unexpectedly awkward in the face of gratitude. ‘And then, the vampire bats.’ He added further lines to the map, and some spikes to show hills. ‘You need to find a way to deal with them.’
Con looked up. ‘Please, please tell me that’s a joke.’
‘Not at all! They come in swarms – not around here, but on the other side of the mountain. You must have heard of them?’
‘No!’ said Con.
Fred hadn’t either. ‘But Lila will have,’ he said.
‘I’ve never seen one,’ said Lila. ‘But their front teeth are sharper than razors, and their tongues give off a chemical that stops your blood from clotting.’
‘Quite,’ said the explorer. ‘It’s all very impressive, from an evolutionary point of view, but very frustrating from a personal one.’
‘Frustrating?’ said Con. ‘Bats that eat you are frustrating?’
‘They don’t eat you, dear child. They drink you. I assure you there’s a difference. When you strike round the mountain, you need to be wary of maggots.’
‘Maggots,’ said Con. The skin on her face was lurid white.
‘Yes. It’s unpleasant to think of yourself as the kind of person maggots choose to associate with, but there you are. There was a disconcerting moment, many years ago, when a maggot worked its way out of my skin; it poked its head up out of my body like a meerkat rising from a hole. It was extremely surprising. I’ll teach you how to extract them with a thorn and some fire. Remind me.’
Lila wrote ‘Maggots’ on the list, and added a question mark.
The explorer looked at them appraisingly. ‘You should go soon. You’re nearly ready.’
Fred stared at him. Somehow the news did not fill him with the relief it should have.
‘You should go before the rains. You can fish now. Fred knows how to set a trap. With that and the tarantulas and some berries, you should survive. The maggots get worse during the rains, and the going is much slower when the ground is boggy. And there’s yellow fever, of course.’
‘Oh, of course!’ said Con. She sounded a little hysterical. ‘Maggots aren’t enough, without a fever turning you yellow. It s
ounds like a proper holiday.’
The explorer ignored her. ‘And when you get back to the city, when they ask you how you found your way, you must lie.’
‘We’ll say whatever you want,’ said Con.
‘And no matter how many people ask, you don’t mention my name. Do you understand?’
‘We don’t know your name,’ Con pointed out. ‘What is it, so we know what not to say?’
The man gave a rumble, half anger, half amusement, deep in his throat. He rose, and hefted the vulture into his arms. ‘I’ll be working today. If you try to come behind the vine wall again, I’ll feed your little toes to –’
‘– to the vulture, yes. We know,’ said Con.
‘What was the meat?’ asked Fred, as the explorer turned to go. ‘It was good.’
‘What? Oh, caiman,’ he said. ‘The one in the lake.’
That night, Max came and tugged at Fred’s foot.
‘Fred!’ he hissed. His whisper was extremely damp. ‘Fred! I have bad news. I have bad feelings.’
‘What?’ Fred jerked awake, searching for Max’s face in the dark.
‘I have a bad feeling,’ said Max. ‘A lot of bad feelings.’
‘Shh, Max. What are you scared of?’
Max’s voice was whiny, but there was real fear in it. ‘There’s something coming.’
‘There’s nothing coming,’ said Fred. ‘You’re probably dreaming about the caiman.’
He listened. The forest was never still – it rustled and insects called and monkeys bellowed all night long – but it didn’t sound any louder or quieter than usual.
‘What kind of thing?’
‘An animal. It’s watching us. Or a monster. I know it.’
‘There’s no monsters, Max.’
‘They’re watching! I heard them!’
‘The animals are just living their own lives, Max. I promise. They’re not interested in us.’
‘I can hear them breathing!’
‘You don’t need to worry. The only thing you need to do is go to sleep.’
It was dark under the vine roof, but Fred could see that Max’s eyes were wide and unconvinced, and his hair was wet with sweat. ‘Can I come and sleep next to you?’
Fred hesitated. Max was not a quiet sleeper. He thrashed a lot, and bit things, and farted in his sleep.
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