The Lost Island of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  Standing now in the archway was something that made the children’s eyes widen in fear and their limbs tremble. A giant jaguar, larger than any they had ever seen, stood blocking the exit, ears flattened, body braced to pounce, great claws flashing in the dim light. And astride the cat, her burning gaze fixed on the three children, was the woman Maya had seen that day in the Cloud Forest Village.

  Maya, Simon, and Penny had come face-to-face with the Child Stealer.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In the Courtyard * Monkeys, Skulls, and Lampreys *

  An Unlikely Talisman

  Run!” cried Maya.

  The children turned to run, but they never had a chance. In a silent yellow blur, the jaguar pounced. At the last moment Maya clutched Penny to her and threw her free arm around Simon and closed her eyes. But instead of feeling the animal’s claws rip into her insides, Maya felt a pair of strong arms scoop her up with the others and cocoon them inside a dark cape. Then they were galloping through the maze.

  Finally they came to a halt. The woman opened her cape and the three children spilled out onto the ground. The Child Stealer dismounted and led the jaguar inside a crumbling old temple, where they both disappeared. Maya and Simon, breathless from the wild ride, scrambled to their feet. A brown ball of fur barreled toward them and they realized that it was the little monkey they had seen earlier. He turned in circles, berating them.

  Maya huddled with Simon and Penny and looked around. They were in a courtyard. At the far end was the temple, where the Child Stealer and the jaguar had disappeared. Cracks forked like black lightning along its walls and tough weeds split the stone. Small fires burned on its steps. The firelight made the shadows of spiders loom large and wobbly-legged on the temple walls. Scattered around the bare yard were smoking black pits, and the air was acrid. There was a pond in the center and slippery-looking lampreys swarmed in masses just beneath the surface. There was no escape.

  There was the scrape, scrape, scrape of a stick broom on stone, and Maya noticed that an old man had come around the corner and was sweeping the ground in front of the temple. When he saw the children he lay down his broom and began making his way over to them. Iron shackles bound his ankles and a chain ran between the shackles, preventing him from moving at more than a shuffling gait. Was he a slave? A prisoner? Where on earth are we? Maya thought. Simon nudged her and nodded at the far wall, where a row of large red monkeys sat on their heels, smoking long pipes and exhaling bluish smoke. They were all much bigger than the tiny brown monkey who had greeted the children, and they stared at the children with glassy eyes. One lumbered to his feet for a moment, then slouched back against the wall.

  Maya and Simon saw the woman’s shadow inside the temple and heard her tread on the steps before she actually reappeared. It was the first time they had gotten a good look at her. She was a tall, strapping woman, wearing a black tunic draped over one shoulder. Her long, black hair was sleek as oil and it glowed with a strange luster in the unnaturally faded light. Green-black jewelry glittered around her neck, on her wrists, and in her ears. As she stepped closer, Maya could see that the jewelry was made of beetles. There were hundreds of them— small and large, jointed limbs neatly folded, bodies bulbous— all preserved in shiny lacquer and strung together. When the woman moved, they shimmered in the dull light.

  Her burning gaze still fixed on the children, the Child Stealer snapped her fingers and a tiny boy in ragged clothes appeared from behind what appeared to be a well. He ran forward with an upturned skull, which, bowing, he lifted up to the woman. She sipped from it slowly, never taking her eyes from the children. The child returned to the well, where he stood still as a statue. The woman had not blinked.

  It dawned on Maya then that the skulls weren’t monkey skulls, but the skulls of children. Shock and revulsion rooted her to the ground. Even as she stood there in the middle of the broiling-hot jungle, she felt her whole body turning cold. Just then the small brown monkey ran up to the woman and scampered up her robe, where it sat on her shoulder and scolded the children. It combed the hair back behind her ear with its tiny, human-like hands. Then the woman spoke in a low, level voice.

  “The monkeys can have the little one,” she said. “And the two big ones can go to the mines.”

  The monkeys could have Penny! Maya’s knees turned to rubber. She looked at the monkeys and she noticed that as they sat there they were plucking butterflies from the air and tossing them into a simmering cauldron. The creatures’ colored wings darkened as they absorbed the water and tiny squeals rose from the cauldron, which bubbled over now and then, its liquid hissing when it touched the hot stones. Seeing Maya watching them, the monkeys began to jeer.

  The old man shuffled toward the children and reached out his arms to take Penny. Maya flinched and squeezed Penny tightly in terror. They all took a step backward and Simon’s backpack knocked one of the lamp-skulls off its post. Its jaw came unhinged and the flame was snuffed out. The old man kept walking steadily toward them. The children were being backed up into the monkeys, who drew their lips away from their big yellow teeth and grimaced. Maya shuddered as she felt fur brushing the back of her leg. They could go no farther. As the old man reached to take Penny, Maya could see the Child Stealer watching everything, the beetles glimmering around her neck.

  Then Simon remembered something. Taking a deep breath and flinging one arm over his eyes, he stepped in front of his sisters, dropped to his knees, and with his free hand he held out Sea-grape’s green feathers, still attached to the cord around his neck.

  The old man and the Child Stealer recoiled. Maya watched in disbelief as the color drained from the Child Stealer’s face. The monkeys began to sniff the air and then they lumbered off to another corner of the courtyard, where they sat making mournful keening noises. Simon peeked out from beneath his arm, and Maya stood there in shock. What had just happened? Why were they all afraid of Seagrape’s feathers?

  From a safe distance, the old man watched them with new curiosity. The Child Stealer recovered herself. She was staring at Maya so piercingly that Maya was sure she could read her thoughts. Finally she spoke.

  “Take them to the Egewa prison. Lock them up.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Horrifying Glimpse Underground *

  Ice-White Stone * Child Slaves “No!”

  The old man took a few steps toward Maya and Simon, ankle chains rattling, and before they knew it he had slipped a rope around their wrists and bound them tightly. Maya pulled the rope but it just sawed her skin. There was no use fighting. The old man led them up the steps of the temple. Maya wanted to say something to comfort Simon but she was too terrified herself.

  The air inside the temple was stagnant. Yellow mushrooms clustered in the moist corners and a vile stench rose from them. The angry growl of the unseen jaguar rose and fell threateningly from somewhere in the darkness. The old man opened a trapdoor in the floor and pushed the children ahead of him. Maya and Simon and Penny began to descend a seemingly endless flight of steep damp steps. When they finally reached the bottom, the old man unlocked a gate and led them through and locked it behind them. They were in a narrow tunnel cut into dank, dripping stone. Even though her hands were tied, Maya managed to give Simon’s hand a squeeze.

  There were sounds of banging and hammering and rattling wheels echoing up ahead. They began to walk down the tunnel, drawing closer to the noise. Curiously, the tunnel seemed to be growing brighter the deeper into the earth they went and as they turned a corner, at the end of the next passageway, the children saw an intense white light. They walked toward it, and it grew brighter and brighter and then they were standing in the entrance to a vast underground chamber, with walls and a cavernous ceiling of radiant, white-blue stone. Maya’s mouth dropped open. Could this be . . . ?

  “Ophalla,” Simon whispered.

  Gleaming white walls reached up to the soaring ceiling and cascaded down the other side, like ice that had melted and then frozen again.
Tunnels broke away here and the children could see down into their opaque blue mouths, reaching deep into the earth. In some places the stone was too bright to look at. In others Maya and Simon saw that it was tinged with green, as if algae were trapped inside it, and in other places it was so clear and so deep that it became a piercing, polar blue. It looked as cold and refreshing as ice, though it was only an illusion. It was broiling in the chamber.

  They were inside one of the old ophalla mines.

  But this one wasn’t abandoned.

  It was full of hundreds of children, chiseling away at the dazzling stone with pickaxes. Bigger children worked chunks of the rock free and smaller children scooped them into wheelbarrows and jogged away with them into the tunnels. The stone’s glow was reflected in the sweaty, grimy faces of the children.

  And what children they were! Skin and bone, their eyes were huge and hollow, their clothes in rags. Some of them had limbs that looked as if they had been crippled from malnutrition, or bones that had broken and never been set properly. Long-haired red monkeys—the guards—were stationed here and there. As Maya and Simon watched, one of them suddenly howled and ran on all fours to a child who was so tired that he looked as if he was about to fall asleep standing up. The monkey knocked him down, but the child scrambled to his feet at once and began heaving larger chunks of the white-blue stone into a wheelbarrow, his frail legs quaking under the weight.

  The old man waited while Maya and Simon took in their fill of the scene. The slave children paid no attention to the newcomers. When the old man moved on, Simon stumbled and fell but the old man simply yanked on the rope, and Simon was pulled back up and forced along. They crossed the chamber and turned down another tunnel and passed through another pair of locked gates. Maya realized that until then they had been descending, but now they were climbing back toward the surface of the earth.

  They emerged, blinking in the daylight, out of the side of a hill. There was a large flat field, stripped of trees, and at one end of this stripped area a giant hole yawned in the earth. It appeared to be the main entrance to the mine. Children surfaced from its depths, pushing wheelbarrows gleaming with icy chunks of the strange stone. Sometimes two or three children were needed to force the heavy wheelbarrows up out of the crater. At the top, smaller children took over, and they pushed the wheelbarrows across the flat earth in a line heading into the jungle, where they disappeared from view. Squinting, Maya could make out hulking red monkeys posted at intervals around the hole in the earth to keep the children from escaping. The old man pulled Maya and Simon and Penny along and they entered a path back into the jungle and lost sight of the mine.

  In a tiny clearing on the other side of the hill, he stopped before a strange wooden cage made of branches glistening with resin. The Egewa prison! When Maya realized that they were about to be locked inside it, she began to struggle violently. But the old man reached out and grabbed Penny, so Maya stopped resisting. She may not be able to stop the man from locking them up, but at least he wouldn’t take Penny. She could hardly believe what was happening. The man swiftly sliced the knots that bound their wrists and shoved them inside. It was an awful sensation, looking out through the bars as the old man locked the cage. And now he was just walking away, leaving them there with no word about what was going to happen to them!

  “No!” Maya screamed. She grabbed the bars and began shaking them.

  Suddenly she felt a powerful need to sleep. She heard Simon’s voice as if she were underwater, sinking swiftly, and he were on the surface calling to her. She sat down, hard, and tried to put her hand up to her face to rub her eyes but her arms felt too heavy and sluggish to move. Visions of the wicked red monkeys, the beetle jewelry glinting on the Child Stealer’s neck, the multitudes of children in the mine, swirled in her mind as if they were all going down a great drain together. Maya felt as if there were something very important she must tell Simon, but then the images slipped down the drain, drawing her down into darkness with them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Egewa Prison * The Ark * Element X *

  Horatio the Jailer * “Ask her” * Evondra

  Maya sat up slowly and looked all around the prison. Simon must have untied her shoelaces and taken off her shoes because they were sitting in the corner. He was sitting cross-legged, holding Penny in his lap. The logbook was open on the ground next to him.

  “What happened?” Maya asked blearily

  “You touched the branches,” said Simon. “At first I thought you were dead, but they just put you to sleep. It’s the resin on them that does it. They’re Egewa branches, from the Egewa tree.”

  “Egewa?” said Maya, swallowing. Her throat was so dry.

  “The old man who brought us here told me,” said Simon. “His name is Horatio. He came back this morning to give us breakfast. I saved some bread for you. Here, you should eat something.”

  “This morning?” Maya asked. “How long did I sleep for?”

  “Since yesterday afternoon,” said Simon. “But don’t worry, I took care of Penny.”

  Penny gurgled and waved her fists and Maya picked her up and kissed her. With her free hand she took the stale hunk of bread. Her thoughts were cloudy and confused but as she sat there the events of the day before returned to her and once again, clearly before her, she saw the chamber of gleaming white stone and the hundreds of child slaves with gaunt faces and lifeless eyes and limbs thin and brittle from hunger. This was where all the stolen children were taken. One of the old ophalla mines was in fact the Child Stealer’s lair, and she and Simon and Penny had walked right into it.

  “Netti and Bongo!” she said suddenly. “They could be here.”

  Simon nodded gravely.

  As Maya’s drowsiness wore off it was replaced with a growing sense of claustrophobia. Their prison was about ten feet by ten feet and was just tall enough for her to stand up in. The floor was dirt. The walls were made up of evenly spaced Egewa branches, and the roof was thatched with dried palm leaves blue with mildew. In one corner was a jug of water, and in another, concealed behind a palm leaf, a simple toilet had been dug into the ground. The prison sat alone in a small clearing on a hill. Dense green jungle rose on all sides around them. Maya could hear the sound of construction on the opposite hill, but could not see what was being built. She moved to the other side of the prison and what she saw made her think that she might still be dreaming: Lodged in the undergrowth on the hillside, listing to one side, was a giant wooden boat.

  “It’s an ark,” said Simon, following her gaze. “All those kids we saw working in the mine, it’s where they live. The old man comes and lets them out in the morning, then locks them back up at night.”

  “How did it get there?” Maya asked, trying to shake off the fuzziness.

  “There’s a little stream at the bottom of the hill here—you can just hear it. It probably used to be a proper river, but when the water level dropped the ark was stranded up here.”

  Maya gazed at the ark.

  “I don’t know why we’re in here and the others are all out there,” said Simon. “I think it has something to do with Seagrape’s feathers—the Child Stealer seemed so scared of them—but I don’t know why. And I don’t know how we can get out of here either. We can’t just kick down the bars. I studied the way the cage has been built and if we kick one branch down, the whole thing will fall on us. And if just touching the branches with your hands for a few seconds put you to sleep for nearly a whole day, then I’m afraid that if we had branches falling all over us it might actually put us to sleep. As in, for good.”

  As Maya watched, an insect tried to crawl across one of the branches and fell back in a dead swoon.

  “And we can’t dig under them,” said Simon. “I tried— there’s only a few inches of soil before it hits rock.” He shifted and Maya saw that the contents of his backpack were spread out on the ground around him. “Right now I’ve been trying to see if we have anything here that can help us escape,” he sai
d. “You should always know what all of your tools are.”

  Unappetizing as it was, Maya broke off a piece of the bread and forced herself to eat it. Her brain needed nutrients if it was going to think properly. She had no idea what they were being held for, or for how long the Child Stealer intended to keep them, and she tried hard to quell her rising sense of panic. Simon was very calm as he focused on the objects on the ground. Even though he was her little brother, Maya found this reassuring. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she turned her attention to the objects.

  Quite a number of things that they had started out with when they left the Pamela Jane had been lost. What was left were: a bag of fishhooks; a spool of fishing line; a pocketknife; matches; a magnifying glass; now filthy spare shirts and socks; a small steel pot; a leaky pen and three stubby pencils; and, of course, the logbook, a little worse for wear but its red leather cover still somehow regal, the gold pattern still shimmering faintly. The pocketknife seemed the most promising tool, but even that didn’t present any obvious path to escape without the whole structure collapsing on them. And the short, dull blade was hardly enough to threaten Horatio with when he came to bring them food. Disheartened, she let her eye wander over the objects. She could see no way that they could be of any help.

  “There’s one other thing,” said Simon, looking around quickly to make sure that Horatio wasn’t coming. “In the mine, when I pretended to fall, I picked this up and put it in my pocket.”

  He withdrew a white stone, the size of his palm. Even in the daylight it emitted a soft glow that grew intense, waned, and then grew stronger again.