The Lost Island of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  The young girl’s face fell and she took a step back. “Uncle Pedro, it’s me. It’s Isabella, your niece! I’m a day early. I know it’s been a long time—I suppose I’ve changed a lot, haven’t I? But you look exactly how I remember you!”

  “My niece,” Senor Tecumbo said. “Young lady,” he laughed nervously. “My niece Isabella is here.” He looked around for Maya, who felt as if her feet had grown roots, fixing her to the spot. “I’m not sure who you are, but I’m afraid there’s been a mistake.”

  The girl hesitated, then smiled charmingly. “You’re teasing me,” she said.

  Senor Tecumbo was no longer laughing. The first hints of storm clouds had begun to gather in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said firmly. “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake.”

  “There has been a mistake,” said a voice from the car, and a tall, elegant woman in high heels and a cream-colored blazer and a red hat tilted to one side stepped out. “Only it looks like you’re the one who’s made it, little brother.”

  “Margarette?”

  Senor Tecumbo looked like you could knock him over with a feather.

  “Don’t look so shocked,” said the woman in the tilted hat. “We decided to come a day early to surprise you. Apparently we were successful.”

  Senor Tecumbo looked from Isabella to Maya and back again. The crowd had fallen silent and had turned to watch what was unfolding. The band petered out.

  Just then Lorco came running up the hill.

  “Senor, Senor!” he cried. He ran up to them, struggling to catch his breath. “The girl,” he gasped. “The girl who’s been staying here—she’s not your niece.”

  “I can see that,” Senor Tecumbo said in a low, hard voice. He turned to Maya. “Then who are you?”

  “She’s the child of the missing couple in the posters,” panted Lorco.

  Maya, her mouth dropped open in horror, stood still as a statue. Senor Tecumbo turned and took a long hard look at her.

  “You deceived me!” he thundered finally, his face turning dark. “Who are you?”

  Behind Maya, the figure in the dragon mask had been making his way through the crowd and now he grabbed her arm. Maya unfroze and they fled, shoving their way through the guests, who were so surprised that they opened a path to let them pass. Helix ran right into a waiter and a tray of shrimp went flying through the air into Senor Tecumbo and Lorco, who were right on their heels. An anxious murmur traveled through the crowd.

  “We’ll never make it,” gasped Maya, who was having trouble running in her long dress.

  “Yes, we will!” Helix shouted. He pulled in front of her, leaping over a low hedge. Maya followed, her dress tearing on the thorns and flying out in ribbons around her. There was a little cart on the side of the road, the kind that children wheeled their parents’ produce to market in. Helix had hidden it there in case they had had to escape quickly.

  “Get in,” Helix hissed.

  Maya scrambled into the cart, gathering her skirts around her knees. She held on to Helix’s shoulders and he kicked the cart forward and down the hill. Behind her she saw one of the black-uniformed guards jump out of the bushes and begin running after them.

  The wheels rumbled slowly at first and then the cart picked up speed. Soon they were careening recklessly down the dark hill so fast that the foliage on either side of the road blurred and Maya’s hair streamed out behind her.

  “It’s too fast!” she wailed.

  Whoosh! The wagon tilted on two wheels, making a sharp turn just in time to miss flying right off a steep ledge. Maya closed her eyes.

  Just before the bottom of the hill, the wagon hit a rut and toppled over. Maya and Helix tumbled out of it and, without stopping to look behind them, dashed through the streets. The streets were filled with people in glittering masks and costumes, and Maya and Helix were swiftly lost in the crowd. They burst into Mathilde’s little house, and Helix slammed the door behind them.

  Maya embraced Simon and Penny and as quickly as she could, she told Simon and Helix about what the old fisherman had told her about the Ravaged Straits. The boys had gotten her message in the logbook, and Helix had chosen a route to get to the Black Cross that, once out of Port Town, would keep them off the main roads where Senor Tecumbo’s men could find them. He would accompany them partway there.

  “Come on,” he said. “We have to hurry.”

  Maya took a shuddery breath and went behind the curtain to change into her old clothes. She picked up Penny and kissed the baby’s soft downy head and felt better for a moment. Even though she was so tiny and helpless, there was something very comforting about Penny.

  Helix and Mathilde had made stunning masks for the children. Simon’s was a jaguar. Penny’s was a rainbow fish, made from a mosaic of tiny shimmering stones. For Maya they had made a dancer’s mask. It was made of pinkish-purple silk, with glitter on the cheeks, white swaths of eye shadow, long black eyelashes, and a perfectly curved red mouth.

  “This is what all women wear to the Festival,” Helix told her as he handed it to her.

  Maya blushed and quickly put on the mask. She caught sight of the beautiful yellow dress lying in a heap on Mathilde’s floor, filthy and shredded by thorns. Then she remembered that the dress she had borrowed from Mathilde was still hanging in the closet at the villa. For some reason it was the thought of the poor abandoned dress that made her feel despondent.

  Mathilde seemed to know what she was thinking.

  “Never mind, little petalfish,” she said, lifting Maya’s mask and wiping her face with her apron. “A girl like you has plenty of beautiful dresses in her future.”

  Then it was time for the rainbow fish, jungle cat, and dancer to say good-bye to Mathilde. Simon threw his arms around her great soft middle, and Mathilde hugged the three of them to her tightly.

  “Oh, I will miss you little seashells!” Mathilde said, wringing her apron in her hands.

  Simon growled from inside his mask to give himself courage. Helix snapped on his own mask—a ferocious tribal warrior— and then they were off, out the door, and being carried down the street in a sea of monkeys, pirates, sailors, dancers, sloths, witch doctors, and many other creatures and denizens of Port Town who were making their way down the streets.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Escaping

  Maya and Simon and Helix held on to one another so that they wouldn’t be separated in the crowd. The drums were intoxicating. When the parade reached the town square a great cheer went up through the crowd and the pro cession dissolved into a shining, variegated sea of dancing masks. Music pulsed through the streets. On the stages in the town square the children glimpsed fire-eaters and tribal dancers and contortionists. They wove through the crowd and finally arrived on the outskirts of town, where the crowd thinned. Maya looked back over her shoulder at Port Town and felt her heart quicken with happiness—they were on their way! The plan had worked!

  They had to walk along a road through steep hillside fields before they reached the trees. Then Helix would lead them secretly through the jungle on the long trek to the Black Cross. It was this first little part, when they were close to Port Town and out in the open, that was most dangerous. The noise of the Festival fading away, they walked quickly, not speaking. Maya was nervous.

  “Shouldn’t we stay off the road?” she whispered.

  “No,” said Helix. “This is much quicker. We’ll be hidden in a minute, don’t worry.” They hurried on. The sea was on their left and up ahead was the dark fringe of the jungle. They were getting closer and closer to their father, and hopefully to their mother, too.

  Just then Maya heard a sound behind her and turned to see men wearing black capes and black masks leap out from behind a boulder at the side of the road. Penny was seized from her arms. She was too stunned to scream. The moon slid behind a cloud and there was wild shuffling in the darkness. Senor Tecumbo’s men—they had found them! Maya fought gamely with her bare hands. For a moment she felt Simon next to he
r, then a figure with hairy arms who stank of tobacco came between them. The clouds cleared and moonlight lit the road and with surprise Maya caught a glimpse of her captor. At the same time a hand struck her jaw, hard, and she tumbled backward. She started rolling down the steep embankment and couldn’t stop. Her arms and legs were getting cut and scratched on sharp rocks. Then there was a sickening thud as she struck something solid and pain radiated from her head through her whole body.

  Everything went black.

  But as she lost consciousness, she remembered the last thing she had seen before she tumbled down the hill: in the place where a tooth should have been, a single sapphire, shining for a moment in the moonlight.

  The men who had ambushed them were not Senor Tecumbo’s men.

  They were the pirates.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Maya Is Alone * A Sign

  Maya awoke in a hollow in the hillside, where the mist had hidden her all night. As soon as she opened her eyes a sick feeling of dread filled the pit of her stomach. Penny’s sling, long empty now, hung over her shoulder. Her head was throbbing. She crawled to the edge of the hollow and peered out. Helix and Simon and Penny were nowhere in sight. Her eyes filled with tears and the landscape blurred into a wash of green vegetation and blue sky. The rocky hillside was a far cry from her soft, fluffy bed at Senor Tecumbo’s. Her body was stiff and her throat felt sore from sleeping on the damp earth.

  The ambush had happened too fast for her to really think, but now, in the daylight, the first thought that flashed into Maya’s mind was Helix. He had sold them out—he had told the pirates where they would be and he had led her and Simon and Penny right into their clutches. How else would the pirates have known who they were? They had been wearing masks— masks that Helix had gotten for them. He could have easily tipped off the pirates. And that was why he had insisted that they take the open road, even when Maya hadn’t thought it was wise. The pang of betrayal hurt worse than she thought it could.

  Why did the pirates want them? Maya remembered how they had come to Senor Tecumbo’s villa, asking about the Pamela Jane. But why? She was just a tiny ship, and they had a whole fleet. Maya wracked her brain to remember any detail of when the pirates had come to the gates of the villa that might be useful. But nothing about the encounter shed any light on her problem now: how to find her brother and sister. Maya sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  She began climbing back up the hill. It took a while and she had broken out in a sweat by the time she reached the road. She must have rolled for ages last night—the pirates probably couldn’t find her in the darkness. But where had they taken the others? She could see the scuff marks from their shoes on the dirt road in the place where they had fought. She looked around to get her bearings. She was in farm fields just outside Port Town. Above her, terraced hills rose steeply and cassava leaves and unripe jungle fruits shone bright green. Though it was still early, the sky at the top of the hill was a deep, brilliant blue. All around her in the hollows of the earth, mist rose like steam, burning away in the sun, and butterflies began to appear above the ribbon of the road. Below her, the hill descended sharply to the dark blue sea, the surf white where it broke around the reefs. Maya looked both ways up and down the road but no one was in sight.

  She leaned down to brush the rich black soil of the hills off her knees, and took a few deep breaths. Again she remembered Helix’s deceit and bitter tears stung her cheeks. She wiped them away furiously and talked sternly to herself. You have to find the others, she told herself. You have to stay calm and figure out what to do.

  Maya began walking back toward Port Town but before she had gone a few steps her legs began to feel leaden and a vague bad feeling came over her. Closer to the town she could hear the buzzing of flies feasting on the leftover food in the stalls, and she smelled the faint odor from the flowers trampled in the streets. It felt like a sign. She saw that down in the harbor the fleet was gone—and Simon and Penny surely with it. Her heart sank. Maya suddenly felt certain that she wasn’t going in the right direction. Simon and Penny weren’t in Port Town. She took a few steps backward, then turned around and began running as fast as she could away from the town, her feet pounding on the dirt road.

  When she couldn’t breathe anymore she dropped to a walk, holding the stitch in her side. Sweat drenched her face and clothes, and rolled down her neck and the backs of her knees. She closed her eyes gratefully when a breeze lifted, rippling the foliage on the hillsides and bringing on it the first stirrings in Port Town, the sound of rakes scraping the dead flowers into piles and the smell of coffee brewing in the tin shacks. But when she turned at a bend in the road, Port Town slipped from view and she was alone, entirely alone, walking on a road that led who knew where?

  Maya had been walking for about half an hour when she caught sight of something lying on the road in front of her.

  She squinted.

  Could it be?

  A red book. And on its cover a faint gold glitter that had been nearly worn away.

  The logbook from the Pamela Jane!

  Maya ran forward on the road toward it, not even caring if it was a trap.

  “Simon!” she shouted. “Penny!”

  She kept calling their names but the only answer was the echo of her own voice from the steep hillsides and the sizzle of the waves on the rocks in a cove far below. When she reached the book she dropped on her knees and picked it up and squeezed it to her chest.

  “Everything will be all right now,” she whispered to herself. “Everything will be all right now, I’ve found the logbook. They were here. I’m going the right way.”

  Maya looked down the steep hillsides to where the little cove shone bright blue. The pirates who had kidnapped the others must have brought them along this road to meet the fleet, who would have left Port Town and come around the coast. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to drag struggling children all the way back through the town. The whole thing must have been planned with Helix’s help.

  She opened the logbook and looked quickly through it, desperately hoping to find a message from Simon. But there was nothing. Still, at least she had Rodrigo’s map—that was something. She turned to study it. She was heading toward Maracairol. She wondered for a moment if instead she should try to make her way to the Black Cross and her father. No, she had to find Simon and Penny first. She put the logbook in her backpack and stood up. The best thing to do was to get to Maracairol. If the fleet had come by this way, that’s probably where they were headed. She couldn’t go back to Port Town, anyway. Maya began walking again, with new purpose in her step.

  But as the morning went on, she grew thirsty and fatigued. She sang under her breath to keep her spirits up, the same songs she had sung in the jungle with Simon. She couldn’t believe it, but she would give anything to be back in the swampy heat of the jungle with the ferocious insects and the threat of piganos, if she could just be with Simon and Penny again. That Helix! Maya’s heart hurt so much that she had to push all thoughts of him from her mind.

  She came to an abrupt stop as she heard a noise on the road ahead. Soldiers. They had come down out of the jungle and were walking around the corner on the next bend. They had not seen her yet. The hill was steep and there was no way that Maya could hide in the trees at the edge of the jungle before they reached her. She looked around desperately. On the hillside below her there were several empty huts. Quickly, she darted down the hillside and into the first of them, praying that the soldiers weren’t headed there. She crouched, holding her breath. Between a break in the palm thatch she could see them as they passed. Their bare feet were silent on the road and their uniforms were tattered and old. What would they do if they caught her? They had armed scouts in the front and the rear. One gunner pointed his rifle down toward the palm huts. But they didn’t see her and they kept walking.

  Maya stayed where she was, too afraid to go back to the road. She looked through the open doorway at the neighboring huts. Most of them ha
d been knocked down in the wind. The few that remained were sun-bleached and abandoned. Sand had blown in over the floorboards and bits of seaweed eddied in corners. The grass beds were dusty and the driftwood furniture sat motionless, as if waiting for people to return and begin using them again. Seashells had been left behind on tables and the breeze whistled through them, a hollow, lonely music. It was a sad place.

  Maya found a freshwater tap around the back of the huts and drank the drizzle of rusty water from it. She picked an avocado from a tree. She looked back up at the road, but her knees still felt wobbly from fear. It had been pure luck that the soldiers hadn’t spotted her.

  Maya turned away from the road and looked down the hillside to see if she could make her way along the shore, and it was then that she saw the turquoise lagoon, sheltered from the ocean by a rocky ledge, sparkling prettily at the foot of the hill. It couldn’t be seen from the road. Huge volcanic boulders jutted out of the water and sand around it. Maya’s eye caught movement on the rocks and she saw a flash of light reflecting off the scales of what looked like a great green fish. She squinted and shaded her eyes and saw that the tail of the fish turned into the upper body of a woman. Maya was gazing at a mermaid.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Desmond & the Seashells * Maya Hears

  of the Sisters * A Spectacular

  Performance * “People need music”

  The mermaid lay lounging on the rocks, fiddling with shells and arranging them in patterns. Maya realized that she wasn’t alone. Another mermaid was sitting nearby on the rocky ledge, fanning her tail slowly through the water. And at the far end of the lagoon, cavorting in the blue-green shallows, was a third.

  Unable to resist seeing them up closer, Maya began to walk silently along a narrow, overgrown footpath down the hill to the lagoon. At the bottom of the hill, she crouched in the grasses and peered through. Two of the mermaids basked in the sun on the ledge bordering the lagoon. Their tails were supple and their scales as perfect and bright as polished emeralds. Starfish were knotted in their long hair. Scattered around them were odd bits of treasure—seashells, sand dollars, colored glass worn smooth by the waves, frayed ends of ship’s rope, and a sign, the wood worn and the paint cracked and fading from the sun, which read DESMOND & THE SEASHELLS. Behind them the ocean beat dark blue and brilliant against the rocks, but the lagoon was light green and calm, its surface only ruffled by an occasional breeze that skidded in off the sea. The third mermaid lolled in the lagoon, floating on her back. With a lazy turn of her tail, she rolled over to her stomach. As she did so she caught sight of Maya. She gasped and slipped under the water. Then the other two mermaids turned and saw her, too. One slid off the ledge and beneath the surface of the lagoon and the other leaped over the ledge and disappeared into the ocean on the opposite side with a breathtaking flip of her great green tail.