The Lost Island of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  The red-haired monkeys saw the ark lift in the water and they came lumbering down the hillside to stop it. As the ark slid down the river beneath overhanging tree branches, a few monkeys dropped down, but the children tore off pieces of the railing and beat the creatures back with them, until they were forced overboard into the roaring white water below.

  “My plane is on high ground,” said Kate. “We’ve got to get to it.”

  “How?” asked Maya, tying Penny’s sling more tightly to her waist. The ark was already beginning to pick up speed.

  “We’ll have to catch onto the next branch the ark goes under,” said Kate.

  Up ahead there were several branches overhanging the river. The ark was going so quickly now that timing a jump properly to catch onto a branch would be almost impossible.

  “What about Bongo and Netti?” Maya shouted over the roar of the rain.

  But Netti and Bongo were with other Cloud Forest Children. When they saw what Maya and Simon meant to do, they shook their heads. They would not come.

  “It’s now or never,” shouted Kate as the ark passed beneath a low-hanging branch. “JUMP!”

  But everything was happening too fast and Maya hesitated. Through the torrential rain she watched as Kate caught onto a branch and the river swept the ark away without her.

  “Maya!” Simon shouted through the rain.

  Maya glanced back over her shoulder but Kate was already gone. She looked ahead and saw a high branch coming up. They could grab onto it and still catch up to Kate. They had to.

  “We have to jump,” she shouted. “Together—on the count of three.”

  She turned and, tears in her eyes, embraced Netti and Bongo.

  “Good-bye,” Simon shouted. “Good-bye!”

  Maya shielded her eyes from the blazing rain and could just make out the branch, which was fast approaching.

  “One, two, THREE!” she shouted, and they leaped.

  Maya held on to the branch for dear life, praying that her fingers wouldn’t slip free. Penny was jounced around in the sling on Maya’s side, and Maya was terrified for a moment that she would fall out. The ark slipped away beneath them and they hung onto the end of the branch, suspended in thin air, the white water churning beneath them. They began to move, hand over hand like the monkeys did, toward the trunk of the tree, where they climbed down, grazing their hands and knees in their haste. The soggy earth sucked at their feet as they ran toward the clearing. The ark was already long gone down the fast river, and if they didn’t reach Kate in time they would be stranded.

  “Faster!” Maya cried. “Keep running!”

  They reached the edge of the cleared land around the mine, but Maya couldn’t see the plane. What if Kate had left without them? She scanned the scene and caught sight of the entrance to the ophalla mine, flooded with rainwater and sparkling like an ice-blue pond in the moonlight in the middle of the field. Monkeys congregated near the entrance. They spotted the children and a wild screeching went up through the tumult of the rain. Maya heard footsteps pounding behind them. When she glanced over her shoulder she saw monkeys dropped down on all fours and running pell-mell, their lips pulled back in threatening grimaces as they closed the distance. Maya saw Kate’s plane at the other end of the field. Kate was standing beside it screaming at them to hurry. But Maya couldn’t run any faster. They reached the plane before the monkeys caught them. It was a two-seater, without a roof or windows, and Kate boosted the children into the backseat. Then she clambered into the front. Maya’s heart caught in her throat while they waited for the engine to catch. It was still turning over and wheezing when the first rocks struck the side of the plane. More monkeys were coming into view, throwing ophalla stones at the plane as they ran. The monkeys were only strides away—how could the plane not be starting! Maya ducked down and pulled Simon with her and a stone whizzed directly over their heads. “Please just start, please just start,” Maya repeated in a whisper and then, as if it heard her, finally the engine caught and the propeller began to whir. A moment later they were taxiing down the field, the plane bouncing and hopping on the uneven ground, the mud sucking at its wheels. Maya snuck a look behind them. The plane gathered speed. As the rain pounded down, one giant creature roared and increased his stride, his big burly shoulders rippling as he ran. He was nearly on them. But just then the plane’s nose lifted off the ground and then the wheels left the earth and they were airborne, climbing quickly, nothing between them and the ground but sweet, pure air and rain.

  It wasn’t until they were safely up in the heights of the night sky, above the rain clouds, that Maya felt a sense of relief. She let the others put their heads up, and she looked out herself, gasping when she saw how high they were and she had to close her eyes until the dizziness passed. Then she looked down again.

  The clouds broke and, from high above, in the moonlight they could see the ark floating down the river in the fast current, all the children on the deck jumping up and down and cheering and waving to them. Maya and Simon waved back furiously. On either side of the swollen river they saw Evondra’s monkeys in the highest branches of trees, clinging on for dear life. That made them cheer louder. They caught sight of Evondra, fighting for space with a monkey on a skinny branch that bent precariously toward the rushing water. Then the water rose or the branch tipped too low, and she was suddenly in the violent river on her back, long black hair spread for a moment over the surface of the water as she spun in the current. Then the current pulled her under suddenly and she disappeared from sight. From the air, Maya and Simon could hear a new cheer go up from the ark. They sat there grinning at each other and then the plane began to climb more steeply and they left the boat behind. The children celebrating on the deck became as tiny as dots before a bend in the river concealed them completely from Maya and Simon’s view.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  View from Above * Into the Dawn

  The air up high was cool, and Maya’s and Simon’s clothes dried quickly.

  “I haven’t been cool in ages,” Maya sighed in satisfaction.

  Kate leaned back and shouted over her shoulder to them, “I’m taking us to the coast, to Port Town!”

  “Where Papi was,” Maya whispered to herself. “And where Helix lives.”

  “I wish Bongo and Netti could have come with us,” said Simon, looking sad for a moment.

  Maya considered. “No, this is better. They’re not that far from the Cloud Forest Village. And there were other Cloud Forest Children who were prisoners. They can all go back together. If they had come with us, they would probably never get home. And who knows where we’re going?”

  Maya looked out of the plane. They had left the shining waters of the flood far behind them. The jungle spread out dark green below, so thick that they could only see the tops of the trees. Now and then there was just a twinkle of moonlight on rivers through the trees and then even those were gone. The jungle seemed endless.

  “We could have been in there forever,” said Simon.

  Maya nodded soberly. Without speaking, the two children held hands. The plane roared on over the jungle, echoing off the roof of the trees, and then the river that they had seen from time to time widened and the plane followed it. Penny sat quietly in her lap and Maya held on to her tightly.

  The children dozed off for a while and when they woke, dawn was breaking and the world was turning from gray to apricot and blue. After a while, Simon looked down and shouted.

  “Look!”

  There it was! The sea! Turquoise in the shallows where palms leaned into the water, dark blue out by the horizon. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, just miles of blue sky, the air glassy with light.

  Kate leaned back to say something but Maya and Simon couldn’t hear her over the engine. Her scarf fluttered back in the breeze. She pointed out of the left side of the plane, and Maya and Simon watched as a seaside town came into view. Fishing boats tracked in around the reef line and sailing ships were docked in the harbor. A long
, rickety-looking boardwalk jutted out into the sea, lined on either side with wooden shacks. The people walking on the boardwalk looked as tiny as ants.

  They flew over the town and kept going until a flat, deserted strip of beach appeared. From high above it looked soft and white as a blanket. Kate brought the plane down gently. Maya’s heart pounded as they touched down, the wall of the jungle rushing past on one side and the brilliant blue of the sea rushing past on the other. The plane fishtailed from side to side as the wheels spun in the sand. Maya and Simon grabbed on to each other until the plane slowed and came to a stop, the propellers still pulsing gently. Kate pushed her goggles up over her forehead and turned around in her seat to look at them.

  “The town we flew over was Port Town,” said Kate. “If you keep walking down this beach you’ll get to it.”

  “Where are you going to go?” asked Simon.

  “I have to find fuel,” said Kate. “And I’ll keep exploring. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance, to see a place like this.”

  “Good luck,” said Maya. She held out her hand to shake Kate’s. “Thank you for everything.”

  Kate shook Maya’s hand and then Simon’s and then Penny’s, too.

  “Good luck to you as well,” she said solemnly. “It was my great pleasure to meet you all, and I hope that you find your parents.”

  Penny gurgled and waved her fists. Before Maya hopped out of the plane, Kate spoke to just her. “You be careful,” she said. Maya nodded.

  Simon jumped down onto the sand first and stretched his legs, and Maya passed Penny down to him. Then she jumped down and knelt for a minute, pressing her palms into the sand. It was hot and dry. It felt so good to be out of the damp, moldy jungle. They waved to Kate as the plane began a crooked run down the sand then lifted, propellers droning, the sound bouncing off the wall of the jungle. For a moment Maya watched the pink scarf flying out behind Kate like the tail of a kite. Then the plane shrank to a tiny blot and vanished down the coast.

  The children turned and started walking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Port Town * The Market * A Gang

  of Bullies * Pirates’ Den

  The children were a raggedy company as they reached the the beach and joined a wide dirt road that led into Port Town.

  The town was loud and colorful. Tin shacks alternated with stone houses painted vivid pinks and turquoises and oranges and greens. The stone houses had corrugated tin roofs and deep gloomy porches. In many of the porches, the children saw parrots shackled to railings. Hanging plants spilled out of windows and salted sardines were tied up on poles in dirt yards to dry in the sun. The streets were narrow and made of hard-packed dirt worn smooth under the wheels of carts. Barefoot young children played outside in the lanes. Funny-looking stray dogs of all shapes and sizes trotted in packs along the walls of the buildings, and goats bleated inside pens with chewed wooden fences. Carts carrying goods to a market rattled past the children: shiny purple eggplants, flurries of fluffy white chickens, ripe mangoes, hairy cupuaçu fruit, and plump watermelons. A watermelon fell out of a cart in front of Maya and Simon and Penny and split on the ground, and immediately children ran out from alleyways and fought over it, grabbing icy pink hunks.

  There were dirty children running all over Port Town, and no one seemed to notice the three newcomers. Every now and then they passed a house that was boarded up or a space where it looked as if several houses had been demolished and now sat in ruins. There seemed to be no police station, no central authority, no one they could ask for help. They passed a burbling water fountain and stopped to drink, grateful for the cold, pure water.

  “I don’t know where to start,” said Maya.

  “That looks like a market in the center of town,” said Simon. “Why don’t we start there? We’ll keep going until we find something.”

  Maya nodded and they began walking again. The sun beat down on their heads and the air was greasy with the heat. Music filtered out from porches where old men with sagging jowls sat on porches, playing cards. On the streets approaching the market, the children found people building stalls and stringing colored lights between the rooftops. It looked like preparations were under way for some type of party.

  The market was reopening after siesta and sellers were withdrawing the fine nets covering the wares on tables. Rows of stalls wove around the square and each stall was covered with a roof of colored canvas. Diffused light shone through the roofs, tinting everything jewel colors. Palm weavers sat on their palm mats, weaving baskets and hats. Shell collectors arranged their wares in patterns on their tables—most were exotic shells Maya had never seen, but Simon pointed out shells like the one that Seagrape had brought to them on the boat after the storm, the same one that their father had sketched in the logbook. Flower sellers walked through the market with baskets filled with cut flowers hanging from straps around their necks. It was overwhelming. And then Maya smelled something familiar. A sweet delicate fragrance . . . and then she saw them, bunches of ivory cloud orchids in the flower sellers’ stalls! The scent took them back to the Cloud Forest Village. For a moment, wandering aimlessly in the strange, sweltering town, Maya half regret-ted that they had ever left the cool green heights. They were jostled away from the flower sellers and farther into the market, toward food tables heaped with figs, mangoes, bananas, and damsons, and colorful jugs of tropical juices that sweated in the heat. In the center of the market was a giant barbecue and men in hats kneeled to turn the spits. The heat from it was scorching. Maya and Simon looked longingly at the food, their mouths watering. They hadn’t eaten since the previous night.

  When a pair of soldiers approached, Maya ducked quickly beneath a table stacked with guavas, pulling Simon with her. They watched their shabby boots go by and as they were about to lift the cloth and go back out into the market, Simon noticed something.

  “Look,” he said.

  Maya followed his gaze to an empty wooden crate on the ground near their feet. On its side a word was stamped in bold block letters: HELIX.

  “That’s weird,” said Simon.

  Maya shrugged. It was probably just a strange coincidence. She looked out from beneath the cloth and when she saw that the soldiers were gone, the children stepped back out and began to walk back down the aisle between the stalls.

  They kept going, past buildings that were half blasted away, half boarded up, and at one point they stopped and stood on tiptoe to peek in a broken window of what had been an old school. A powerful explosion had shattered the chalkboards and blown the desks to one corner of the room, where their metal legs sat in an ugly twisted tangle. Old schoolbooks, warped from the humidity, lay beneath thick cobwebs. Maya and Simon both thought of Rodrigo.

  They left the blasted buildings and climbed the hill, stopping halfway up to rest. At the top of the hill was a magnificent, coral-colored villa. On the outskirts of town was a big, flat-topped building with pipes and store houses around it—an old factory, boarded up. A bell was tolling somewhere in the town below. Maya felt quite grave as she gazed down at the harbor. For so long she had just wanted to get to Port Town, but now that they were there, she didn’t really know what to do. Masts of sailboats, sails furled, ticked back and forth in the breeze and the tide, and here and there people moved about on the decks. A few little rowboats brought people to shore from the boats moored farther out in the water. It was just like any port that they used to sail into with their parents. Maya felt a pang. Though they were too far away to see clearly, she saw a few children running down the dock. That could be us, she thought.

  “Let’s go to the port itself,” said Simon. “Boat people always know other boat people. We have to start talking to people. Maybe someone will remember seeing Mami or Papi.”

  What Maya thought was no, there were too many people, too many boats, too many houses on too many streets in the town, and the task of finding their parents suddenly seemed more daunting there in the midst of civilization than it had when the three
of them had been alone, marching through the jungle singing old sailor songs that Papi had taught them.

  But she didn’t say any of that. Instead she said, “I suppose it’s as good a place to start as any.”

  So, lifting Penny back into the sling, they began to make their way to the dock.

  From a distance the bay had looked like any ordinary bay with ordinary boats in it, but as they drew closer the children realized that it wasn’t like any port they had ever been in. Aside from a few grungy fishing vessels wheezing on their faded moorings, the ships all bore the same flag—a black flag with a violent red insignia in its center. The men walking on and off the slippery planks to the ships were great, brawny men with beefy arms and gold teeth flashing in the sun.

  Kitchen slops were being dumped overboard into the already foul soup of fish skeletons, pig hooves, and garbage. Rotten cabbages bobbed like little ghoulish heads between the hulls of the boats. The shadows of sharks circled restlessly, their razor-sharp fins slicing through the debris. While Maya and Simon watched, a kerfuffle erupted on one of the planks leading from the dock to the ship. Live pigs were being carried, struggling, in a thick net onto the ship. But the plank was slick with fish guts, and a man slipped. As he caught his balance, one of the pigs slid squealing from the net and plunged into the water below, where it took only seconds before a frenzied mass of sharks devoured it, leaving behind a bloody cloud in the water.