He was tied down in the prone position, one arm stretched out and bent in front of his head, his wrist bound with what looked to be an animal-skin thong. He tried to raise himself, but he had been secured by similar straps to the bed.
A small girl wearing a crisp white dress embroidered with a bright red flower bent down next to his face. She gazed at him with wide eyes, like a fawn seeing something unusual in the forest. She smiled, then took one of the small gourds from a low table and put it on the floor next to Max. She dipped her fingers into the water and dabbed them onto his dry lips. Then she took a small cotton cloth, soaked it, wrung it out and gently wiped his face. Max nodded, as best he could, by way of thanks. His throat felt raw and parched, probably from swallowing and choking on so much river water. The girl smiled and got to her feet, and he heard her patter out of the hut, calling her father.
“Papa. Papa!”
Max knew someone had undressed him, and he could smell a gentle fragrance from his skin, so someone had washed him as well. He tried again to raise himself against the thongs that bound him, but they gave by only a fraction: he was well and truly secured. Then heavier footsteps came into the room, and the crazy-looking pirate he had seen on the
river squatted down in the corner of the hut. Max could see him clearly in his limited line of sight. He had a long-bladed knife in its scabbard strapped to his calf over the tough cotton trousers he wore. There were two or three chains round his neck, some of them threaded through small pieces of coral and semiprecious stones, and the straw hat with the feathers was old and sweat-stained.
“You’ve been asleep for two days, my friend,” the pirate said.
“Am I a prisoner?” Max asked.
The man smiled. Some of his teeth were missing, but the others were capped in gold. “You were nearly a prisoner of the river god. He would have tied you up, bundled you like a plucked chicken and sucked the marrow from your bones while you rotted on the bottom. I tied you down so that I could treat the wound in your shoulder. Those thorns had festered deep inside the muscle. It took a lot of effort to get them out, and I had to use my sharpest knife. We had to keep you like that so the dressings would not come off your back and shoulder. You want to get up now?”
Max nodded, uncertain how to engage his rescuer in conversation. The man spoke with a slightly unusual inflection—a gentle, clear pronunciation of his words. Max thought it might be an Irish lilt to his voice, though he looked as Latino as Xavier.
The man quickly pulled the knife from the sheath, leaned forward and cut the thongs. Max raised himself to his knees slowly and stretched out his muscles like a cat. He tentatively rolled clear of the bed and sat on the floor facing the man, feeling the pad of a dressing taped to his shoulder.
“Not too fast, my boy. You’re weak. You need rest. Food and rest,” the piratical man cautioned.
“I want to get up,” Max said, forcing himself to combat the giddiness he felt.
“ ‘How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?’ ”
Max stared blankly. What was he on about?
“You are schooled?” the man asked.
“What?”
“You go to school.”
“Of course I do.”
“Aha! An ignorant child.”
“No, I’m not.”
“But you do not recognize a simple quote from Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare? Max’s muddled brain tried to make some sense of the idiocy that seemed to have taken hold of his life. “Not offhand, no.”
“Aha,” the man said again, and settled the feather-stabbed hat more squarely on his head. “You feel strong enough, you come outside. We need to change the dressing.”
“Where’s Xavier? Is he OK?” Max asked.
“The sewer rat? You’re a friend of that scum?”
Max thought about it. Yes, they had forged a kind of friendship over the last few insane days. Max nodded. “Yes, he’s my friend.”
“He’s outside. You Western kids! You come here backpacking. You think you’re on a big adventure because you take time off school; then you start playing around with drugs. Next thing you know, you’re in big trouble. Let me tell
you, boy, these drug runners will slit your throat, no questions asked, if you mess with them. And if the cops catch you, you go inside for a long time. You got bad friends.”
The man leaned forward and handed him the gourd full of water. “Drink slowly—otherwise you get stomach cramps.”
Then he walked toward the door.
Max called after him, “I don’t know your name.”
He stopped in the doorway and looked back hesitantly, as if debating whether to tell Max anything at all. “Your clothes have been washed and dried; they’re on that rack. We can talk later when you’ve had some food.” He went to a shelf and gathered up the photographs he had retrieved from Max’s shirt pocket when he’d been brought ashore.
“The wallet saved them, but they were wet. I dried them out. They’re a bit crinkled, but at least they made it,” he said, handing them to Max. “My name is Orsino Flint. I am a plant thief, but I have nothing to do with drug-running scum. Your mother was my enemy, but she would have been ashamed of you, Max Gordon.”
The shock of hearing Flint mention his mother took some time to wear off. His first instinct was to run after the man and grab his arm, demanding he tell him where he had met his mother and what he knew about her. But, as the man declared that he and Max’s mother had been enemies, Max knew he had to tread very carefully.
He stepped out of the hut into a clearing. Half a dozen thatched huts built on low stilts stood around a central area shaded by low palm trees scattered among them. There were children laughing and playing, and beyond the central area, steps cut into the side of a hill went down to the riverside,
which seemed to be little more than a narrow tributary and much calmer than the place where Max had been rescued. Half a dozen canoes were tethered to the bank, as was a small wooden boat with an outboard engine. The bigger, flat-bottomed boat with its huge fan had a camouflage net over it, which obscured it even more than the trees did. Obviously Mr. Orsino Flint did not want his pride and joy detected by the authorities.
Four men sat under the shade of a tree mending fishing nets while women dressed in white cotton smocks embroidered with hibiscus flowers brought washing up from the river. Others pounded corn in a mortar. Another fed a fire with kindling, stripping off leaves before allowing the flames to spit and flare. Max could smell pine resin—nature’s fuel. What struck him was the abundance of flowers and plants growing everywhere, explosions of color climbing even into the trees. It was a small corner of paradise, accentuated by the shrill calls of red-and-green parakeets as they chased each other through the trees. Birds with white-ringed eyes, making them look as though they were staring directly at him, gave their strange cackling cry. An iguana, no more than thirty centimeters long, popped out of a hole in the ground. The small group of children screamed with delight as they gave chase only to lose sight of it again as it scurried under the bole of a tree.
Max gazed at the women: their rich copper-chocolate skin was smooth, the broad features of their noses identifiable as being Mayan. For the first time he was seeing the descendants of a great civilization whose kings and warriors were recorded on the stone lintels in the British Museum. He
could barely remember when he had last been in London—it seemed a lifetime ago—but here at last, deep in the rain forest, were the very people his mother had worked among, the people he had come to find. If Orsino Flint believed Max’s mother was his enemy, was there any likelihood these villagers might have known her, or even considered her differently? He felt some hope. They had not harmed him—quite the opposite.
Max watched the women working. One of them pounded roasted cacao beans and chili and maize, and he could smell vanilla pods as well as peanuts and honey as she mixed the concoction with boiling water. Ancient Maya drank their chocolate hot and frothy, and it appeared that these people did the same. The woman poured the dark liquid back and forth between two containers, creating a foamy mixture. The pungent smell of hot chocolate teased his senses.
Flint gestured to the woman, who spilled some of the dense liquid into a mug-sized container. He handed it to Max.
“It’s food and medicine. It’ll give you strength,” he said.
Max let the beaten chocolate seep through his teeth. It tasted glorious. To be told that chocolate was good for him was a ticket to heaven, and the rich warmth sank into his stomach. Greedily, he finished the cup.
Flint nodded, satisfied. “Over here.” He sat on a stool next to a small fire where another villager was frying something in a blackened old pan on the top of the low-burning embers.
Max joined him at the fireside. He could feel the sun’s heat on his skin, burning through his shirt, though he could see from its position in the sky that it was still early. A quick
glance at his father’s watch, still clamped on his wrist, confirmed it.
Flint tapped the ground next to him with his long-bladed knife, and Max sat obediently. Despite the man’s declaration of being his mother’s enemy, he felt he wasn’t in immediate danger. After all, this man had saved his life, so he was hardly likely to cut his throat now, especially not in the midst of this domestic setting.
The woman was shredding leaves, removing their stems and veins and then crumbling what was left into the pan.
Flint eased Max’s shirt off his shoulder and slipped the blade beneath the dressing, teasing it from the skin. He could see it was still tender as the boy’s muscles rippled in discomfort, but Max made no sound.
“So you think you’re some kind of tough kid coming out here, do you?”
“No,” Max said. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to my mum.”
“Aha,” Flint said. He nodded to the woman, who shook the pan, letting the seeds and pieces of leaf roast more evenly. “You know about the jungle? You ever been in a rain forest before?”
“I’ve been in the wilderness,” Max said defensively.
“Wilderness is one thing; this place is more dangerous. It’s not just wild animals, snakes, spiders and crocodiles that’ll kill you; there are plants that’ll get into your bloodstream and paralyze you, leaving you suffocating to death on the jungle floor. Then just about everything that crawls or slithers will come for you—that’s if the ants don’t get you first. There’d be nothing left of you after a couple of days. So, more foolhardy
than brave, more dumb than intelligent. You kids have no sense. Like stepping into the lion’s den and not seeing the lion.”
“I told you why I came here. It’s just that I hadn’t planned on doing it this way,” Max said, desperately wanting to find out what Flint knew about his mother but realizing he had to learn patience with this bizarre character.
“Your scumbag friend said you fixed his wound—said you got the infection out of him. You know about traditional healing, how to fix yourself in the jungle when you get sick or hurt?”
Max wondered where in the camp Xavier was being kept. They must have him locked up somewhere in one of these huts.
“No, not really,” Max said. “I just learned a few things from my dad; he was a scientist and explorer as well, like my mum.”
“Aha,” Flint said.
“Please tell me about her. Why were you enemies? Did you hurt her?”
“No. Not me, young fella. But maybe we talk later. First things first. You want to get fixed, don’t you?”
Max’s impatience irritated him more than the sore itching of the wound in his shoulder, but he had to play this man’s game, no matter how long it took.
Be patient, be patient
, he kept telling himself. He nodded, obeying his own instincts.
Flint gestured to the woman at the fire. “Fixing-up stuff. It’s for your wound. Basil, clover, marigold and amaranth leaves. She’s making up a couple of days’ worth for you.”
“She cooks it?” asked Max.
“You shred everything into a dry pan and keep stirring it till the parts of the plant are nearly burning. They’ve got to turn very dark. You cook it, you release the minerals. You unlock the healing ingredients from the leaves’ ash,” Flint said. The woman took the pan off the embers. She turned to a piece of white cotton where cooked leaves were cooling, then crumbled them until only powder was left. Flint reached out, took the cotton and carefully sprinkled the powder on Max’s wound. From one of his side pockets he pulled a small roll of tape that could have been used for anything, from tying off frayed rope to strapping up an injured arm. Max felt the warmth of the cotton on his skin as Flint taped it into place.
Max smiled at the woman. “Thank you,” he said.
She smiled back and carried on preparing more plants. Flint was on his feet, walking away as if uninterested in spending any more time with Max.
Max knew that despite the help he was being given, there might still be an underlying threat from this man. He needed to be careful, but he also needed information, foremost being finding out what had happened to Xavier.
“Where is he?” Max called after Flint, knowing full well he would know what he meant.
Flint turned. “Why do you care what happens to him? If I had known what he was, I’d have let him rot at the bottom of the river, and the crocodiles could have taken him when they smelled his stinking carcass. You have other things to think about, Max Gordon. You should forget him now. He’ll turn his back on you the first chance he gets.”
“I don’t believe that,” Max said. “I told you—he’s my
friend. And he was trying to change. He wanted to get out of all of that. He’s not all bad.”
“ ‘The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with Caesar.’ ”
“Hey, I’ve done Shakespeare at school. I know bits and pieces of it—maybe not as much as you—so you can quote that stuff all you like. It makes no difference to me. Just tell me where he is,” Max said angrily, wanting to show that he was not completely subservient. They had already turned round the corner of one of the buildings, and no sooner had Max spoken than he saw a bamboo cage built in the shade of a huge tree. And inside was Xavier, shackled by his ankle to an iron stake in the ground. There was evidence that he’d been fed, as well as a gourd that held water.