Blood Sun

17

It felt as though he were tied to the riverbed, deep down in the dark, still pools where the sand was smooth and no turbulence could reach him. Seaweed had somehow wrapped itself across his body so that he could not move. He could breathe, which surprised him, and he forced his eyes open, trying to focus his blurred vision. He was not in an underwater grotto filled with bright colors of coral, fish and seaweed, but in a hut; its palm-thatched roof creaked as the wind rustled through it. The walls were made of thin slats of wood bound together, and the narrow-planked floor was worn smooth by years of bare feet moving across it.

A small, homemade wooden table bore scooped-out gourds, some fan-shaped seashells and an old-fashioned metal grinder clamped to the end. A drop-down bunk held by thin rope was cantilevered from the wall, and two or three lines, covered in skirts of different colors, were stretched across the room in place of wardrobes. Blue-dyed cotton with white stripes, orange-colored children’s dresses, some T-shirts and green and purple homemade burlap bags, scuffed from use, hung on hooks. Max realized he was lying on a homemade bed similar to that on the wall, a soft straw mattress cushioning him from the slatted base.

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.

“Max! You OK? Don’ trust these people! Look what they done to me! This guy is crazy-he should be locked up.”

Flint kicked the cage. “No call haligetta lang mout till you done cross di riva,” he said in a deliberate rolling accent that Max had little chance of understanding.

“Xavier?” Max said.

“He’s Creole, mixed race. It’s patois. He said not to call the alligator long mouth until you get across the river-he’s just telling me that I shouldn’t insult him while he still got me in a cage. Well, I won’t be here forever, and when my people find out, then we see how many teeth he’ll have left in his big mouth.”

“Shut up, Xavier. You’re just making matters worse,” Max said.

Flint had walked away, leaving the two boys together, knowing that Max had no chance of releasing his friend. Xavier spat on the palm of his hand and reached out his arm through the cage. “I told you we were partners,” Xavier said.

Max took his hand. “He saved our lives, Xavier. Don’t forget that. We owe him.”

“You owe him if you want. Me, I just wanna get outta here.”

“Well, if you learn to shut up once in a while and think before you say anything, then you might have a chance.” Max turned to go after Flint. “Leave it to me. I’ll sort something out. Don’t go away.”

“I was gonna go for a walk and pick some flowers. OK, I’ll stay. You talk, I sit, then we run.” Max was already farther away. “And, hey, find a map. We gonna need a map to get outta here. A big map. Yeah? You can do it. You just ask one of your angels.”

The Angel Killer himself swept low across the treetops, shattering the stillness of the jungle in his voracious hunt for Max Gordon. Now that the weather had cleared, the turbulent river had settled to a more docile state, allowing him to put men on the ground. Three helicopters had been deployed with four men in each, and they had rappelled into the jungle in a triangular search pattern with the waterfall as its baseline.

Riga had spent two days scouring the river and decided that Max must have taken one of the forks that splintered away from the main stream. Broken fingers of water clawed into the dense rain forest, and each of those small rivers had offshoots of its own. At first he had been doubtful that Max would have chosen the river that ended in the seventy-meter waterfall, as the thundering gorge could be seen from where the river escaped from the main stream. Then he realized that the storm and the low cloud would have obscured that fatal plunge. He had positioned four of the men at the bottom of the gorge where the water churned through massive boulders and then softened to a more manageable flowing river. It was they who had found splintered wood, a couple of pieces of which were tied together by creepers and a twinelike binding made out of stripped palm leaves. There was no doubt that it was the remains of the raft, especially once a white leather seat cushion was found wedged between two boulders at the base of the falls. He had concentrated all the men, flanking both sides of the falls, to search for any bodies washed up farther inland. So far nothing had been found. He sent another group of men to search every small island and inlet that the broken forest allowed. If by any chance Max had survived, and Riga was beginning to think it highly unlikely, then the boy could not be far from the river.

He knew there were remote settlements deep in the forest, some of them depending on local fishing and hunting to survive, but as he examined the maps, he could see that no one on foot, or swimming for that matter, could have reached them. If by an outside chance fishermen had been in that area, an ordinary boat would not have been able to negotiate the river on the day of the storm. No boat, no rescue. Logically-if he was alive-Max Gordon had to be within no more than a kilometer of any of these river offshoots.

The manpower that was now being employed made little sense to Riga, but Cazamind had insisted that no effort be spared to ensure that Max Gordon was indeed dead. In fact, Cazamind had insisted that if his body was found, it must be brought to him personally. Riga could taste the paranoia that came from the twisted psyche of the Swiss mastermind. He was beginning to think of him as a demented cuckoo-clock maker and imagined that when the small door opened and a cuckoo appeared, it would be a horrendous caricature representing the suppressed demon in the man’s soul. Riga had no such conflict within himself. All he wanted was a clean kill and to be done with this job.

Irritation crawled across his skin like prickly heat. Max Gordon was beginning to represent failure. He hoped the boy was down there beneath the jungle canopy, because then he would be found, and Riga could finish the job himself.

The helicopters had not included Orsino Flint’s hamlet in their search pattern; it was too far north and west, and there was no chance that Max Gordon could have reached there. Had they known about Flint’s fan-powered boat, they would have swooped like vampire bats and savaged everyone.

“They’re still looking for you,” Flint told Max. “They haven’t stopped, so you must have upset somebody in a big way, or you have something they want. Which is it? You know something you shouldn’t?”

“Boats or helicopters?” Max asked.

“Helicopters, three of them, far away from here, but we know about them. You live out here all these years, you know when a bird falls out of a tree. They want you bad. Why?”

Now it was Max’s turn to hold back. As much as he wanted to squeeze information out of Mr. Orsino Flint, he needed to know more about who the man was and why the avowed enemy of his mother had sheltered him.

“Have you seen those helicopters before?” Max asked him. “Are they military or police, something to do with the government?”

“You think the government is chasing you?” He studied Max’s face for a moment. He could see how the boy’s eyes might shine with laughter if the occasion was right, but he also recognized an almost detached, cold determination in them that he had once seen in Helen Gordon’s eyes.

“Over several years, half a dozen ecologists have been murdered in Central America, mostly by people with illegal logging interests. Some of the do-gooders ran into drug smugglers, or so it is thought, and their bodies have never been found. The kind of work your mother and father were doing here attracted some bad people who did not want their activities exposed.”

Max felt that squirming in his stomach, a sign of fear, a sudden anxiety that was a forewarning of bad news. “My father? You knew my dad was here? With my mum?”

“Everyone knew about Tom and Helen Gordon. They were a pain in the ass. Saving the rain forest is one thing; telling people how they should or shouldn’t live is another. What gave them the right to stop people making money as best they could-poor people, people who lived on and farmed the land the best they could? And what do I fish out of the river? Their brat! And bringing trouble with him. Is that some kind of genetic disease in your family? Causing trouble? I’d have left you to drown if I’d known who you were.”

“I don’t think you would have. You’re not like that. You said you weren’t responsible for my mum’s death, and I believe you, but you know something, don’t you? Do you know what happened to her? How she really died?” Max grabbed Flint’s arm unthinkingly and felt the skin tighten on his shoulder wound. Flint easily squeezed and twisted Max’s wrists to release their grip.

“ ‘Do all men kill the things they do not love? Hates any man that thing he would not kill?’ ” Flint made a small dramatic gesture, acting a role that Max was beginning to find very irritating.

“I reckon you need a television out here. What’s the problem? Just one Complete Works of Shakespeare, is that all you’ve got on the shelf? Get a life! No one talks like that. It’s the twenty-first century-or hadn’t you noticed?”

Flint took a step back from the verbal onslaught. Some of the women stopped what they were doing in the background and turned to watch. Max noticed they were smiling. Obviously no one had challenged Orsino Flint, plant thief and pretend pirate, like this before.

Flint seemed duly chastened. He nodded and walked away. Max ground his teeth in frustration and, after a moment, strode after him. “Look, Flint, all I want is to find the truth behind my mother’s death. Help me. Why did you hate my mother? What did she ever do to you?”

Flint stopped at the top of the track that led down to the river and gazed at the flowing water for a few seconds before answering. “My father was Tyrone Hickey Flint. An outcast from Ireland. The greatest exponent of the Bard there ever was. He trod every termite-ridden board from Patagonia to the Mexican border for nearly fifty years. Not once was his name put up in lights. Not once. He craved the fame of recognition, but he ended up going from village to jungle town to share his love of Shakespeare for a meal and a bed. And my mother, a Creole woman, went with him. Never complaining, fetching and carrying, making him feel like a great man. I could never be my father’s son-but I could be my mother’s. He beat the words into me, and she lovingly taught me every flower and plant in the jungle. I’m the greatest plant thief there is, and your mother found out about me and destroyed my life. Now I survive on a fraction of the money I used to get-I’m too notorious to do business with. Your mother and her tree-hugging friends saw to that.”

“Then do you know how she died?”

“No. But I think I know where.”