The Lost Island of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  “That’s far enough,” said a low voice.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  No Way Out

  Maya froze. Whoever was standing over her stepped to one side and a beam of light fell through the porthole. From across the room she heard a familiar cry.

  “Penny!” Maya shouted.

  Penny started crying properly then, just as the figure standing over Maya stepped out of the shadows. Maya clenched her teeth and prepared to kick whoever it was, when she saw a face in the weak light from the porthole.

  “Simon?”

  “Maya?”

  “I didn’t recognize your voice!”

  “I was trying to sound bigger!”

  Simon knelt and swiftly untied the knots on the fishnet, disentangling it from his sister. The two of them stared at each other in shock for a moment. Then they threw their arms around each other, talking so happily and excitedly that neither of them could understand what the other was saying. Simon stood up and did a dance and Maya ran over and found Penny sitting up in a sugarcane box. She picked the baby up and squashed her tightly, overwhelmed with joy to feel the familiar warm weight in her arms again and to smell her sweet baby smell even through the foul stench of the gallows. Penny stopped crying and began to babble away to Maya.

  “Simon, are you okay?” Maya asked. She kissed Penny’s face and hugged her close again. “Are you both okay? You weren’t hurt or anything, were you?”

  “No,” said Simon. “They give us food and water every day. I tried to bathe Penny as often as I could with the leftover water. ”

  Maya held Penny away from her so she could take a good look at her. Simon had done a good job—Penny was relatively clean and looked plump and healthy. Simon, on the other hand, she noted, was filthy dirty. She guessed he hadn’t minded sparing any of the water for himself.

  “They want me to tell them where the Pamela Jane is, but I haven’t,” said Simon. “I told them we got washed overboard in a storm and we don’t know where the boat is. Helix was with us, too, but then they took him away after the first night. I don’t know what they did to him. . . .”

  Helix! Maya felt another pang of remorse at having run off without telling him where she was going.

  “It’s okay,” she told Simon. “Helix is fine, I was just with him.”

  She took a deep breath and began to tell Simon everything that had happened since the pirates had kidnapped him and Penny and Helix.

  Simon listened in awe.

  “No fair!” he said. “You got to do all of that and I’ve been stuck down here with Penny this whole time!”

  He almost cried when he saw the logbook again. He ran a hand over its gleaming red cover and then he opened it to the pages with the First Mate’s journal that the moon oranges had revealed. Though Maya had told him what it said, he read it all himself, dumbstruck.

  “The Pamela Jane is a pirate ship,” he breathed, eyes wide as this new knowledge sank in. “For our entire lives we’ve lived on a pirate ship and we never even knew it.”

  Maya nodded gravely.

  Simon looked down at the pages wonderingly. “And Dr. Izquierdo, the strange man we saw in St. Alban’s, who was so interested in the Pamela Jane. He’s the First Mate from the journal. He was out there on the Outside, in our world, looking for his ship. Our ship.” Simon frowned. “Whose ship is it, Maya?”

  “Ours,” said Maya firmly.

  “So Mami and Papi must have known about Tamarind—or they knew something about it, at least,” said Simon. “It’s too big a coincidence. . . .”

  Maya agreed—there had to be some link. They were missing information. Again she remembered the last day in St. Alban’s, when she had been sitting with Penny outside the Marine Station and she had overheard their parents arguing with Dr. Fitzsimmons through the laboratory window. What had been said after Dr. Fitzsimmons had come and shut the window?

  “We aren’t going to figure this out now,” she said. “I don’t know everything that Isabella and Gloria have planned, but I know that the Peace March is going to start tomorrow, during the battle at sea. There are fleets coming from all over Tamarind. I overheard the pirates talking when I was in the rowboat and this fleet will sail in the morning. We have to get out of here before then.”

  “There’s no way out,” said Simon. “I’ve checked every inch of the hold, there’s just no way out.”

  Maya thought. “They must bring you food,” she said. “When do they come?”

  “In the mornings,” said Simon. “Early.”

  “Well, tomorrow we’ll be on the other side of the hatch and when the pirate opens it we’ll attack him and knock him out. We can take him by surprise. Then . . . then we’ll just have to see what happens when we get out. We’ll have to steal one of the rowboats and row to shore. We have to be off this ship before the cannons start firing.”

  The afternoon sun was beginning to sink in the sky, and the light through the grimy portholes was growing weaker.

  “Well,” Simon said. “One good thing—at least Helix is still out there. Maybe he’ll save us.”

  Maya said nothing. But she didn’t think it was likely. After she had just left him on the pier, he may have had enough of helping them, and they would never see him again. The thought of never seeing him again seemed too sad to bear, so Maya tried to push it from her mind. Penny looked up at Maya searchingly with her big dark eyes. It was all left up to Maya to save her brother and baby sister now, and more than ever before, she really didn’t know if she could do it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  On Board the GRETCHEN ELLA

  After an uncomfortable night spent sleeping on a pile of ropes, it took Maya a few moments the next morning to realize that the squeaking sound in her dream was actually the sound of the trapdoor to the cargo hold opening, and the thudding sound was the footsteps of a huge pirate who was now just feet away from them. They were too late—there would be no surprising him now. Maya realized with a chill that it was the man with the sapphire tooth again.

  “Up you get,” the pirate said. “Captain Ademovar wants you on his ship.”

  The children looked at each other. Captain Ademovar!

  But according to the logbook he was as good as dead!

  There was no more time to wonder about this before the pirate had looped a rope around Maya’s and Simon’s wrists. Luckily Simon had slept with his backpack on. Maya had time only to slip the baby sling over her head, and put Penny into it. The pirate led them onto the main deck, where bleary-eyed men were moving about. The milky dawn was just lighting the sky and the town of Bembao was barely visible through the fog. Battle preparations were under way. The Meggie Vic was already under sail and through the fog, Maya saw that they were approaching the biggest battleship of them all—a majestic tallship called the Gretchen Ella. Even the name sounded terrifying. When they pulled up alongside her, the pirate pushed the children to jump from the bulwark of one ship to the other.

  Fog sat heavy on the Gretchen Ella, and the top of her mast and the black pirate flag were invisible. The rigging creaked ominously as she swayed on a slow-rolling swell. The sapphire-toothed pirate jumped on board after the children and led them down into the cabin, where they proceeded down a narrow passageway to a closed door.

  “In you go,” he said, opening the door.

  The door was closed and locked behind them and the children found themselves alone in a room with a figure kneeling on the floor in the shadows. Penny began to wriggle furiously in Maya’s arms. The figure turned around.

  “Mami!” bleated Penny.

  At first Maya and Simon were too stunned to speak. Penny was right. It was their mother. Thin, pale, in clothes that weren’t hers, her hair cut raggedly—but it was her.

  “Mami!” Simon cried, breaking the spell. Then their mother was on her feet, rushing to them and throwing her arms around them.

  Maya felt numb. She let her mother take Penny, and her mother hugged the baby tightly, tears slipping soundl
essly down her cheeks. She kissed Penny’s head and cradled her. After her one word—the only word she had ever spoken—Penny was curiously silent, staring up at her mother with her large, serious eyes. Simon burrowed his head against their mother’s side. Maya just stared. Her mother lifted the arm that was wrapped around Simon and drew Maya to her. Maya closed her eyes and smelled her mother’s scent, the powdery, sweet fragrance she always had, whether the day was broiling hot or damp and cold, whether they had been at sea for a day or a month. Nobody else in the world smelled like that. It was the smell Maya had known her whole life, since her earliest days, from a time before she could even remember, and when she leaned her head on her mother’s chest and smelled that fragrance, her shoulders began to shake slightly and at last she began to weep.

  “Mami,” she sobbed. “I missed you so much.”

  “My loves,” said her mother. It was all she could say, and she kept repeating it, squeezing the children close to her as she cried.

  Simon and Maya did not look at each other. After all they had been through together, each was lost for a time in his and her own emotion. Maya felt her mother’s hand stroking her hair. When she felt she could, she lifted her face and wiped her eyes. Simon was sitting up, too, his eyes puffy and his face red and blotchy. Only Penny had not cried, and was still gazing up at their mother as if she were memorizing her face.

  Their mother looked at them as if she could not believe it was really them.

  “Are you alright?” she asked, her voice trembling. “You haven’t been hurt, have you?”

  “We’re okay,” said Maya. “Mami, are you all right?”

  The children’s mother managed to nod. “Have you seen your father?” she asked.

  “No,” said Maya quietly. Maya stared at her mother, at the familiar curve of her cheek, her hair, still the same soft, dark hair, even though it had been cut. She looked the same and yet different somehow, too, in a way that Maya could not put her finger on. Worry had left shadows in the hollows of her face. Maya looked at Simon and without speaking they both knew that they wouldn’t tell their mother everything that the old man had told Maya about the Ravaged Straits. Or everything that had happened to them either. Not the worst parts, anyway, not now. Their mother looked too fragile.

  “But we met people who saw him, and we know where he was headed,” said Simon.

  “Yes,” said Maya, making her voice sound more cheerful than she felt. “So the good thing is that once we get out of here we know where to find him! But Mami, tell us what happened, after the storm—we have to know.”

  “We were together,” said their mother. “During the storm we went on deck to fix the forestay and we were just on our way back down to the cabin when a wave washed over the deck and knocked us off our feet. We had safety harnesses on, of course, and the harnesses were tied together, but the rope holding us to the deck snapped. We went overboard. We were still tied together and through sheer luck we managed to get to the rowboat that we were towing behind the Pamela Jane. But that came free from the boat, too. By the time we were both safely on the rowboat, the Pamela Jane was already far away. We were being carried one way and you were being carried another. For a while, whenever there was a flash of lightning, we could see the Pamela Jane getting farther and farther away.

  “We spent the night on the rowboat, hanging on until the storm had passed. In the morning we hoped that help would come soon—we knew that you would have radioed land to tell them what had happened.”

  “But we couldn’t,” said Simon. “Everything was broken.”

  “Keep going,” said Maya.

  “We sighted land the next afternoon,” their mother said. “The current brought us in here. We hoped that you had made it to land—to proper land—by then, but we were afraid that the same current that brought us to this island would bring you, too. We realized very quickly that we weren’t anywhere ordinary. We were desperate to find you and to figure out how to get off of this island, so we decided to split up to look for you and find out what we could in towns along the coast. We were going to meet back in the place where we started in one week. That was the last time I saw your father. In one of the towns I went to, I made the mistake of mentioning the Pamela Jane to some strangers, and the next thing I knew, pirates had kidnapped me. I’ve been on this ship ever since. The pirates think that the Pamela Jane is their ship. That’s why they’ve been keeping me here. The captain—Captain Ademovar—is one of the worst pirates in Tamarind. He’s the one who wants me to take him to the Pamela Jane, but of course I can’t. . . .”

  So somehow Captain Ademovar had survived after Hábil Izquierdo had tossed him into the sea, Maya thought. He had made it back to Tamarind, and now he was more powerful than ever. And he wanted his ship back. She looked at her mother, frightened.

  “But if he has all of the ships in the fleet, why does he still want the Pamela Jane?” Simon asked. “She’s just a little boat compared with all the others.”

  “I just don’t know,” said their mother.

  So many questions were bubbling inside her that Maya didn’t know where to start. She wanted to tell her mother about the journal in the logbook and what they knew about Hábil Izquierdo and Captain Ademovar and how they were linked to the Pamela Jane, but first she had to know something.

  “Mami,” she asked urgently. “What were we really doing out in the ocean? What is the Red Coral Project, really?”

  Their mother looked at them. “Your father should be here to explain this all to you, too,” she said, sighing.

  Maya suddenly felt sick.

  “The thing that I promise you,” their mother said, pausing to look directly at both of them. “Is that your father and I never expected to be separated from you and your brother and sister. We would never, never have put you in danger if we had known the extent of what we were involved in.”

  Somewhere deep inside, Maya breathed a sigh of relief. Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. The horrible thought that her parents had abandoned them on purpose was just that: a horrible thought, with no weight or truth to it. It was so despicable and so far-fetched that she could hardly believe it had even crossed her mind. She decided that she would never, ever tell another soul about it.

  “Mami,” said Simon. “We read the logbook. We know what you and Papi were looking for. We know what made the sea creatures glow. It’s this. . . .” Simon reached into his backpack and withdrew the ophalla stone. It glowed like a torch in the dim cabin. “Ophalla.”

  Their mother looked at the rock in amazement, turning it over in one hand.

  “Element X,” she whispered. “You found this? How?”

  Before Simon could answer, she handed it back to him. “No,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Wait. When we get out of here we’re going to sit down and you’re going to tell me every little detail of what happened to you. But put this away for now. We have to figure out how we’re going to escape.”

  Maya became aware then that the ship had set sail and was rolling as it rode the broad swells. There was a lot of noise overhead, as footsteps pounded on the deck and orders were shouted among the crew. Then there was a loud shout that was not part of the ordinary noise, and a wild scrambling began on the deck. It sounded as if all the pirates were thundering to one end of the ship together. Maya and Simon and their mother looked up at the overhead as it shook. Feet hammered on the stairs and down the passageway toward their cabin and they were all watching the door as it flew open and someone was shoved inside.

  “Helix!” Maya and Simon cried.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Captain Ademovar * Sailing to Battle * Friends

  from the Jungle * The Peace March * The Conch Is

  Sounded * Into the Maelstrom

  Helix’s hands were bound behind his back, and Simon immediately ran to untie the knots.

  “I knew you’d come!” said Simon.

  “I nearly didn’t make it. I stowed away in a rowboat taking the pirates back out to
the fleet. Early this morning—they just found me,” said Helix. He looked at Maya. “When I came back out of the tavern and couldn’t find you anywhere, I thought the pirates must have kidnapped you.”

  “They didn’t, though. I’m so sorry, Helix,” said Maya wretchedly. “I didn’t think about it—really. I just saw the row-boats there and the next thing I knew I was in one of them, hiding under a tarp, and we were on our way out to the fleet.”

  “It’s all right,” said Helix. “It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that this minute we’re sailing to battle against the North and we need to get off this ship right away.”

  There was a rumble of cannon fire in the distance and they all froze.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Simon.

  Just then the door swung open again and the pirate with the sapphire tooth stood in the doorway.

  “Captain Ademovar wants you all on deck,” he said. “Where you’ll have front-row seats while the cannons come at us! Maybe that will loosen your tongues.”

  “Ademovar!” said Helix, looking in astonishment at Maya and Simon.

  Things happened very fast. The children’s mother took the sling from Maya and slotted Penny into it. The pirate knotted their hands behind their backs and led them up to the deck, where he tied them to the bulwark. The fearsome drumming of cannons was approaching—the children could see the outline of the enemy fleet. Simon estimated that they were about forty minutes away. Pirates were shouting and cursing and running back and forth across the deck as they sailed out to open waters to meet the enemy.

  And there, walking from the foredeck, was Captain Ademovar. The man who, years before, was so obsessed with his lost ship that he would’ve killed Hábil Izquierdo to get her back. The man who had survived being left for dead to the sharks. The man who had held their mother hostage almost since she had arrived on the island. Who had kept Simon and Penny locked up in the dark bowels of the ship for days until Maya had reached them. And now he strode toward them.