The Lost Island of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  Maya sat, absorbing all of this. “How did you get here?” she asked after a moment.

  “I had made a promise to Evondra’s father and so I returned,” said Horatio. “I had known the family a very long time. I was Evondra’s mother’s singing tutor, and then Evondra’s. I knew Evondra when she wasn’t even an hour old. When she was a little girl, Evondra was like a daughter to me, you see. I wasn’t treated like an ordinary servant. I was part of the family. Before he died, Evondra’s father asked me to wait for her, to take care of her if she ever returned. In the old days there was no higher post in the Old Families than that of a singing tutor. Although I was his servant, he had been my great friend. I had loved Evondra as if she were my own. So, I suppose you could say that I returned because of love.

  “At first I hoped I could persuade her to come back to the coast with me. The towns were more peaceful then. I thought I could train her again and she could sing there. It was folly. When I arrived she had already taken the first of the children. She made me her slave, too, and I’ve worn these ever since.” Horatio rattled the shackles around his ankles.

  “For a while I thought of escaping. I’d dream about the sea air and the sunshine and the open skies on the coast—but then one day the dreams just went away.”

  Horatio paused and looked at Maya and Simon.

  “Once you have loved a child, no matter what that child grows up and becomes, you will always look at them and remember that love.”

  They listened to the silence in the same dark air that earlier that day had been filled with the sound of hammers and saws and the great crunch of trees falling and crushing the undergrowth.

  “Why doesn’t anyone stop her?” Simon asked finally. “People who live in the jungle, whose children are taken, why don’t they get together and stop her?”

  “Tribes have stories about Evondra,” said Horatio. “They call her the Lady Who Rides the Jaguar, and they frighten their children into staying close to home by telling them stories about her—‘If you stray too far, the Lady Who Rides the Jaguar will steal you!’ But most people think she’s just a story. There are so many things in the jungle that will endanger a child—piganos, paccas, jaguars, and soldiers who force young boys to join their armies—that tribes usually believe that their children are killed by these creatures or that the child strayed off too far and got lost. People don’t want to believe that there is a place like this camp. It’s too horrible to imagine and so they don’t. They do nothing. That’s how evil has always gone on.”

  Maya and Simon sat quietly. Firelight flickered over their faces.

  “Has anyone ever escaped?” Simon asked, not really expecting a reply.

  “Once,” said Horatio slowly. “But it will never happen again.”

  A stick snapped in the fire. Horatio said no more. Maya and Simon sat absorbing all they had heard. Maya remembered Valerie Volcano and how fear had kept her living in the Cloud Forest Village, and she was struck by how it seemed that so many things, more than just bars and chains, could hold people prisoner—fear, and guilt, and even love.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Bad Argument * A Creeping Thought *

  Fingerprints * Sound from the Sky

  The next day the children saw that the top of the opera shell was now visible over the treetops on the opposite hillside. The clanging and hammering went on late into the night. It must be nearly finished, they thought. Since Horatio had told them the story about Evondra he had not returned to light a fire and sit with them at night, and the hours of boredom were unbroken. The heat was unbearable, the insects maddening. Despair was creeping in on them.

  Simon spent hours poring over the logbook, but Maya hated to look at it now. It just reminded her of her parents and made her sad. Any glimmer of hope she’d had that it could help them escape was gone.

  “Simon, we’ve read the book a hundred times,” Maya said, exasperated. “There’s nothing there that can help us.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “I just have to find it.”

  “No, it won’t!” said Maya. “Can’t you see? The whole reason we’re here right now is because we thought Mami and Papi were looking for ophalla—but look what happened! Now we’re prisoners—and we don’t know anything more! Just because ophalla glows doesn’t mean it has anything to do with the sea creatures. We were wrong about everything. I never should have even let us leave the boat.

  “Mami and Papi didn’t really know anything about Tamarind,” she went on. “They studied animals in the ocean and reported what they found back to Marine Stations. That’s what they told us they were doing, that’s all they should have been doing! They were scientists, okay? That’s all! They didn’t know anything about Tamarind, not really, so nothing they wrote in the logbook can help us!” Maya said bitterly.

  Simon stared at the book.

  “You said ‘were,’” he said quietly.

  He would have walked away from Maya, just started walking and walking and left her behind for good, but there was nowhere to go. The Egewa bars glistened dangerously. He went as far away as he could, which was only a few feet, and turned around and stared into the jungle.

  Maya turned around and faced the other way. The jungle, the prison, the sounds of the slave children at work all day—she couldn’t stand it anymore. How long could they stay here like this? Each day blending into the next? It was too horrible to contemplate. She felt more miserable than she had the whole time since the storm, since she’d gone up onto the deck and realized that their parents were gone, since they’d left the Pamela Jane and trekked through the jungle. For the first time, she felt angry at her parents for having left them, and angry at herself for feeling this way, when she knew that the storm wasn’t her parents’ fault, and when she didn’t even know if they were okay or not. She felt so awful that her whole body hurt.

  She stared unhappily through the bars of the prison for a while, not moving. She shouldn’t have been so mean to Simon. He was just a little kid, really. She turned around to talk to him and saw that he had left the logbook open on the ground between them. Drawing a shuddery breath, her eyes fell on the open page. In the margin she noticed a shopping list her mother had written for the next time they were in port.

  LIMES

  TINNED FRUIT

  FRESH STRAWBERRIES

  PEPPER

  BATTERIES

  SOAP

  Maya began to cry.

  It was from a day that summer, before the storm. They were supposed to arrive in port somewhere the following morning and her father had said he would get fresh strawberries for her there. Maya remembered that day as if it were something from a dream. She had been so bored on the Pamela Jane and so eager for her life to change that she felt she could hardly bear it. It felt like a lifetime away now. She had lain in her bunk bed with the curtain drawn over her, but it was too hot in the cabin, so she had come outside and sat on the foredeck, where if she kept her legs in, no one could see her. She was sick of eating food from tins, sick of eating fish, sick of having to flavor warm drinking water with wedges of lime. She hated Simon, she hated her parents, and she hated Penny, because since she had come along, there had been even less space in the boat.

  But right now she would give almost anything to be back on the Pamela Jane that last day, her whole family there. Maya didn’t tell herself that if she could just be back on the boat she would never complain again. She knew it wasn’t true. She was growing up and it had been time for her to leave the boat and go to school on land. But she wouldn’t have been so sullen so often, she wouldn’t have gotten irritated at all of them so easily. Oh, what she would give if she could just return to things as they were before. A thought, a slimy, creeping thought wriggled around deep down in her mind, that if she hadn’t said she hated living on the Pamela Jane, if she had been better and nicer, then perhaps her parents would never have been swept overboard in the storm. Perhaps it all really was her fault. Perhaps, just perhaps, her parents had eve
n wanted to leave. This crazy idea was stuck in her mind, deep down as it was, and it weighed on her, and on this miserable afternoon, in the Egewa prison in the heart of the jungle, it came closer to the surface than it ever had before.

  All the violence of Maya’s emotion was gone and she felt deeply sorry. She wiped her eyes on the grubby hem of her shirt.

  “I’m sorry, Simon,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything but she saw his shoulders stiffen.

  “I shouldn’t have said what I said,” said Maya. “I didn’t mean it. We’re going to get out of here and we’re going to find them.” She shifted closer to the middle of the prison near her brother. “We are.”

  “You don’t believe that,” said Simon, his voice muffled. He ducked his head so she couldn’t look at him, but she could still see the side of his face, grimy with dirt and sweat. His hair, knotted and badly in need of a cut, was pasted to his neck. “I thought it was ophalla,” he mumbled. “I thought it could help us find them.” He buried his head in his knees and refused to look at Maya. Maya tried to touch his shoulder but he pulled away.

  Penny began to fuss then, from the heat, no doubt—they were all greasy with sweat and light-headed. Maya had an idea. She tore a blank page out of the logbook and folded it into a fan and began to fan Penny. Though her face was flushed, the baby began to quiet down as the breeze flowed over her.

  “Is that better?” said Maya. “Poor baby. I should have thought of this before.”

  Maya decided to give Simon a little more time. Then suddenly she stopped fanning and sat stiffly, her gaze locked on the fan. The paper was folded at different angles and in the sunlight she could see that it was covered with shiny ophalla fingerprints—small ones, belonging to Simon. But that wasn’t all. At the top of the fan, on the corner of the page, there was a larger, glowing print. A print belonging to a grown-up. Maya looked closer. It was a thumbprint with a jagged scar across its middle, causing a break in the print that appeared on the page. It was a scar that Maya happened to know had been caused by a fishhook. She had been there the day her father had reeled in the grouper that had fought on the deck as he was taking out the hook, and the hook had sliced his thumb. She had been only about three or four then, and she had cried because his thumb had bled.

  It was her father’s thumbprint here in the logbook, with ophalla on it, the same as hers and Simon’s. Which could only mean . . .

  “Simon!” Maya cried. “It is ophalla!”

  Simon turned around then and Maya showed him the thumbprint on the fan.

  “Papi must have been holding a shell or something that had ophalla on it,” she said. “Look, his print is much lighter than ours, because he probably only touched a little of it, on a shell or something. But it’s proof that he was in contact with it. It must have been what they were looking for.”

  Simon turned and looked at the page.

  “This is important,” Maya said. “We have to let them know.”

  Simon took a shuddery breath. “Do you really think we’ll go home again?” he asked.

  “I do,” said Maya firmly, squeezing his shoulder. “You and Penny and me and Mami and Papi. We’re all going to go home together.”

  That’s how they were, on the brink of exhaustion, nearly despondent, listless and thin and dirty, trying valiantly to raise their courage, when they heard rumbling approaching in the sky. They listened hard. It sounded like . . . could it be . . . a plane? They leaped to their feet and peered frantically through the bars, trying to see. As the droning drew closer, their excitement grew. Could this be rescue? They caught a brief glimpse of a red, single-engine propeller plane as it flew overhead and began its descent over the trees. A moment later the noise stopped.

  “It must be landing in the field outside the mines,” said Simon breathlessly. “Where the earth is bare, remember?”

  The plane seemed to have caused a flurry of activity in the camp. The great monkeys swung from tree to tree to see what was going on and a clamor rose from the slave children. Maya and Simon glimpsed Evondra walking quickly down the path toward the mines, several of the monkeys striding on all fours before her. Then she disappeared down the hill. A moment later the slave children’s babble fell silent.

  “What do you think’s going on?” whispered Simon.

  Maya shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it doesn’t look like they were expecting the plane.”

  Neither of the children could bring themselves to say aloud what they hoped: that help had come. Neither of them took their eyes off the hillside. It was excruciating—waiting and not knowing. Who had been in the plane? What was happening now?

  They didn’t have much longer to wait. As they watched, a few of the monkeys, walking on their knuckles, appeared over the ridge and came toward the children’s prison. Behind them walked a woman. She was wearing brown leather goggles pushed up on her forehead and a long silk scarf that wafted its length as she was marched along the path. Hearts sinking, Maya and Simon realized that, whoever she was, she was a prisoner now, too. Her hands were tied behind her back. A giant monkey led her along the path with a rope, and Evondra followed behind them, an entourage of monkeys surrounding her.

  All hope of rescue draining away, Maya and Simon waited silently while Horatio unlocked the Egewa gate, cut the knots that bound the woman’s wrists, and shoved her inside. Maya and Simon saw Evondra stop while she was still some distance away and stand waiting while Horatio locked the gate behind the captured woman. Evondra’s face was hard as stone and her eyes, those deeply set, slightly slanted eyes, were black. In the heat of the jungle she emanated a coldness that made the sweat on Maya’s skin feel icy. Then she turned and was gone, the odorous monkeys following her on the path.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Kate Shaw, Anthropologist

  The woman wasn’t old but she wasn’t young. She was older than their mother, Maya was sure of that much. Her skin was leathery and creased from the elements, so it was hard to tell. She had bright blue eyes. She looked kind and very strong. Mud was crusted on her calf-high boots and she wore khaki pants and a loose white shirt. Her scarf, even though it was grubby and frayed, was made of pink silk. She saw Maya eyeing it.

  “Friends gave this to me, before I left home,” she said. “It used to be twice as long but I got bitten by a bossa bossa spider some time ago and it was all I had to dress the bite with so I had to cut half of it off.”

  She didn’t seem at all surprised or particularly upset to be taken captive. When Horatio had shut the gate she had sunk down to her heels and now she shifted to a more comfortable posture. She smiled and extended her hand for them to shake.

  “I’m Kate Shaw,” she said. “The anthropologist. I’m with the Geo-Nautical Exploration Society and I’ve spent my life searching for the Mahala, the lost tribe. I believe I’ve come closer than ever to finding them, but now I seem to have gotten myself into some trouble. I saw a giant shell as I was flying over and I landed on some cleared land near what looks like some type of mine. What on earth is this place?”

  Maya and Simon looked at each other—could this woman be from the Outside, too?

  Since she was also a prisoner, they decided they could trust her, so quickly they told Kate about Evondra and how she kidnapped children and made them her slaves, and about the opera house that was nearly finished being built. Kate was horrified.

  “How did you get here?” Simon asked.

  Kate explained that she had been heading due south over the Lahari Stream, 50 miles north of the equator, when she hit a patch of turbulence. Before she knew it she was flying through a great storm that had come out of nowhere. She lost all radio signals and her compass went haywire. Within a few minutes, though, she had flown out of the bad weather, but she discovered that her plane’s control board was broken— every instrument on it shot. Maya and Simon glanced at each other. It sounded like the same thing that had happened to the navigation equipment on the Pamela Jane. With no way
to take her bearings, Kate was lost. She figured out roughly what direction she was going in from the sun, decided to fly due west, and after a couple of hours she spotted land in the distance.

  “But what about you?” Kate asked. “What are you doing here? Even under all that dirt, in the state you’re in, I knew as soon as I saw you that you weren’t from here either.”

  “We’re not from Tamarind and we didn’t mean to come here,” said Maya, sighing. “Our boat was blown off course in a storm and we ended up here—we don’t even know where Tamarind is. Do you know where the island is, on a map?”

  “On a map?” said Kate, looking faintly amused yet sympathetic. “Oh, my dears, this place isn’t on any map. At least not one I’ve ever seen. We’ve wandered right off the map.

  “You see,” said Kate. “I was hired recently by an organization secretly investigating an island that has never appeared on any radar or satellite—it was unclear if it existed at all. Well, it does, and I seem to have found it.”

  A suspicion was occurring to Maya.

  “The organization that hired you,” she asked. “Was it the Red Coral Project?”

  “Red Coral?” asked Kate. “No, that isn’t it.”

  Deflated, Maya sat back. Simon looked at her.

  “It could have different names,” he said. “Especially if it’s so secret. The organization would be harder to track down if it used different names.”

  “Aliases,” said Maya.

  “I don’t understand,” said Kate.

  “Well . . .” began Maya, and she told Kate about their parents’ work and the storm and everything that had happened to them since they had arrived on the island. Here and there Simon interjected when he thought that Maya had left out something important.