Journey to the River Sea

Chapter Twenty

For a few hours the bungalow had been beautiful. Orange and crimson and violet flames lit up the night sky; showers of golden sparks flew upwards as the fire danced and played on the dying house.

Then it was over, and there was nothing left — only grey ash and those strange objects which survive disaster. The nozzle of a flit gun, a splintered washbasin… and in what had been Mr Carter’s study, a single eye, cracked by the heat, staring creepily at the heavens.

So when Finn sailed back down the Negro at dawn, he saw no flames and heard no roaring as the house was destroyed. Everything at first seemed as it had always done; the big trees by the river, the huts of the Indians, the Carter’s launch riding at anchor.

Then the dog, standing beside him, threw back his head and howled.

‘What is it?’ asked Finn.

But now he too smelled the choking, lingering smell of smoke.

And as he sailed towards the landing stage, he saw it — the space, the nothingness where the Carters’ house should have been. Not even an empty shell. Nothing.

He had thought that the news of his father’s death was the worst thing that had happened to him, but this was worse because he was to blame. If he had taken Maia as she had begged…

He was shivering so much that it was difficult to steer the Arabella to the jetty and make her fast. There was no point in searching the ruins; it was so obvious that no one could survive such a blaze.

But there was one last hope. The huts of the Indians had been spared. Perhaps they had got Maia out; perhaps he would find her sleeping there.

He pushed open the door of the first hut and went inside… then the second and the third. They were completely empty. Even the parrot on his perch had gone, even the little dog. A broken rope in the run outside showed where the pig, terrified by the flames, had run back into the forest.

There was no doubt now in Finn’s mind. They had let Maia burn and fled in terror and in shame.

What would it be like, Finn wondered, going on living and knowing that he had killed his friend?

The howler monkeys had been right to laugh when he said he wasn’t going back. He had turned down-river again almost at once to fetch Maia, and he had made good time, travelling with the current — but he had come too late.

Finn went outside again and stood on the square of raked gravel that had been the Carters’ garden.

His mind seemed to have stopped working. He had no idea what to do. Should he go in to Manaus and see if he could find anything out — from the hospital perhaps?

After a while he found himself walking back along the river path to where he had left the Arabella.As he came to the fork in the path which led back into the forest, the dog put his head down excitedly into a patch of leaf mould. Finn pushed him aside and saw a smear of blood… and then a little way off, another… and another.

He almost fell over her, she lay so still, hidden in the leaves and creepers, almost as if she had burrowed into the forest to die.

But she was not dead. She lay stunned, still in her nightdress, breathing lightly with closed eyes. The blood came from a gash in her leg. He could see no burns on her skin. She must have fainted from loss of blood.

Then when he said her name, she opened her eyes. One hand went out to his sleeve.

‘Can we go now?’ she whispered.

And he answered, ‘Yes.’

Maia opened her eyes and saw a canopy of trees and, shining through the topmost leaves, a high, white sun.

She could smell the rich, heady smell of orchids and hear a bird whose single piercing cry came clearly over the puttering sound of an engine.

Then the overhanging trees disappeared. She was looking up at a pale, clear sky; and the light was suddenly so dazzling that she closed her eyes because she did not want to wake up or to stop. She wanted what was happening to her to go on and on and on.

She was lying on a groundsheet on the bottom of a boat. They were moving steadily through the water, not fast, not slowly; the perfect speed to lull her back to sleep. She was covered by a grey blanket; she pushed it off and saw that her leg was bandaged. It throbbed but not unpleasantly… it seemed to belong to someone else.

She closed her eyes and slept again.

When she woke once more it was to find that something was resting against her side, snoring gently: a dog the colour of dark sand…

So then she turned her head and saw behind her Finn, sitting quietly in the stern, with his hand on the tiller — and knew she was on the Arabella and safe.

It was the Indian side of Finn that had taken over when he found her in the wood. That managed to carry her to the landing stage and lay her down in the Arabella. That bandaged her leg and made her swallow one of his bark potions, and then cast off, telling her to sleep and sleep and sleep… Sometimes the European side of him protested and told him that he ought to take her to the hospital for proper treatment.

But he took no notice; he knew now what was best for Maia, and he was right — for now, as she woke beside the dog, she was herself again. The fear and exhaustion had gone from her face.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said, and smiled at him.

She had escaped through her high window; the gash on her leg was made by the broken glass as she scrambled through. The doors were already smouldering when she woke.

‘I don’t remember much after that. It was the smoke, I think. I know there wasn’t anyone in the huts.’

‘Why not?’ said Finn fiercely. ‘They promised they’d look after you.’

‘There was a wedding — an important one. They all went. And Minty, she went somewhere too,’ said Maia. ‘She’s left me.’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean, no? She wasn’t there — she didn’t come back from her day off.’

‘Maybe. But she won’t have left you. That isn’t what will have happened. What about the others?’

‘They escaped. I saw the river ambulance take them away, but I hid. I couldn’t bear to be with them any more. They were all quarrelling and screaming. So I hid in the trees. I didn’t notice my leg at first, but then…’ She shook her head. ‘But it doesn’t matter, Finn, none of it matters because you came back.’

They set a course back up the Negro, then turned into a smaller river, the Agarapi, which flowed northwest to the lands where the Xanti had last been seen.

It was a beautiful river. They travelled between small islands where clumps of white egrets roosted, or clouds of tiny pearl-grey bats flew up from fallen logs. What amazed Maia was how varied the landscape was. Sometimes they sailed through dark, silent jungle where all the animals were out of sight in the topmost branches; sometimes the river wound through gentle countryside, almost like England, where swamp deer grazed in grassy clearings. Once they passed into a patch of scrubland and saw a range of bare, brown hills in the distance before they plunged into the rainforest again.

‘If this is the ‘‘Green Hell’’ of the Amazon, then hell is where I belong,’ said Maia.

She was completely happy. When she took the bandage off her leg she found a mulch of some strange green mould, which Finn had put there, and beneath it, a wound which was almost healed.

‘You really ought to be a doctor,’ she said. ‘Or a witch doctor perhaps?’

‘It’s often the same thing.’

She had cut the bottom off a pair of Finn’s trousers and borrowed one of his shirts — and Finn had pilfered a roll of cotton, meant for the Indians, from which she’d made a kind of sarong for when she was in the water. The nightdress she had escaped in had been torn up for cleaning rags.

Everything she owned had been destroyed in the fire, and she missed nothing except her toothbrush. Scrubbing one’s teeth with twigs was not the same.

She trusted Finn completely. If he said a pool was safe to swim in, she dived in without a second thought, and the dreaded piranha fish did not tear at her flesh, nor did a cayman come at her with snapping jaws. If he told her a mushroom was safe to eat, she ate it.

‘My father had this thing he used to say to me,’ she told Finn. ‘It was in Latin. Carpe Diem. ‘‘Seize the day’’. Get the best out of it, take hold of it and live in it as hard as you can.’ She pushed back her hair. ‘After he died, and my mother, I couldn’t do it too well. There never seemed to be a day I wanted to seize all that much. But here…’

‘Yes, some places are right for one. Your mother was a singer, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes. But she never made a fuss about it. I never remember her saving her voice for the performance or gargling with eggs and all that stuff. She’d just sing — in the house, in the garden, anywhere.’

‘Everyone says you ought to get your voice trained,’ he said, and frowned because if she had a future as a singer, perhaps she shouldn’t be taking off into the unknown.

She shook her head. ‘I’m all right like this.’

‘But won’t you miss music?’

‘There’s always music. You just have to open your mouth.’

They’d stopped to make a fire in a little bay and cook the fish they’d caught earlier.

‘You had good parents,’ said Finn.

‘So did you.’ She steadied the pan on the flames and poured in the oil. ‘Do you think there’ll be someone in the Xanti who’ll remember your mother?’

Finn blew on the embers. ‘I don’t know. We may not find the Xanti,’ he warned her.

Maia shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. But if we do, will they accept me? I don’t have any Indian blood.’

‘If they don’t, we won’t stay. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you; I’ve got my gun.’

‘I’m not scared,’ said Maia. And she wasn’t. She’d been scared of the nastiness of the twins and of being shut up in the Carters’ bungalow, but she wasn’t scared of travelling through unknown lands with a boy hardly older than she was herself. She thought perhaps she wouldn’t be scared of anything ever again if she was with Finn.

They did not hurry. Their route led to the west, and the forests of Japura, and each night Finn laid out such maps as he had, and the notes his father had given him. One thing stood out. In a fork of the river was a small island with a jacaranda tree standing between two tall kumu palms. If they found this marker they were in Xanti country — but how far or how near it was they did not know.

All the same, they stopped again and again. Finn wanted to collect the plants he knew he could sell, and he was teaching Maia. He climbed to the top of the leaf canopy and came back with clusters of yellow fruits which could be boiled up to treat skin diseases. He found a tree whose leaves were made into an infusion to help people with kidney complaints, and brought back a silvery fern to rub on aching muscles. Most of these plants had Indian names, but as they sorted their specimens and put them to be dried and stored in labelled cotton bags, Maia learnt quickly.

‘You’d be amazed how much money people give for these in the towns,’ said Finn.

But not everything he collected was for sale. He restocked his own medicine chest also — and every day he bullied Maia about taking her quinine pills.

‘Only idiots get malaria in the dry season,’ he said.

‘I think I ought to cut my hair off,’ said Maia, one morning, as she tore yet another tooth out of Finn’s comb.

‘No. That’s a bad idea.’

Maia looked up, surprised. ‘But you wanted Clovis to cut his hair.’

‘That was different.’

They talked of Clovis often and it was Finn, now, who wondered if they had been fair to him. ‘He’s either shut up in that awful place or he’s confessed and been thrown out.’

‘Well at least he’s in England and that’s what he wanted.’

But she could see that to Finn, who was afraid of nothing else, Westwood was still a dread.

‘And if he’s been thrown out, it will all start again, I suppose,’ he said. ‘More crows. More hiding.’

‘Well, they won’t find us here,’ said Maia.

They were anchored between two islands in a kind of cave made by the overhanging branches of a pono tree. A pair of otters had been diving round the boat; the frogs set up their evening croaking.

It had been a magical day; they had seen a family of terrapins sunning themselves, and a pair of harpy eagles. There’d been a gentle following breeze to help them, and the rain that sometimes came down even in the dry season had held off.

‘You know you said you used to wake up every morning in the lagoon when your father was alive and think, ‘‘Here I am, where I want to be.’’ Well, that’s how I feel when I wake up on the Arabella.’

Maia did not care whether they found the Xanti or not. It was not about arriving for her, it was about the journey. Even the sadness about Minty deserting her had gone.

For Finn, who had almost kidnapped her, there were moments of anxiety. He should have told someone that Maia was safe, instead of taking her away without a word, but gradually he stopped worrying and gave himself up to the journey.

And if Maia knew deep down that she would not be allowed to sail away for ever up the rivers of the Amazon, she managed to forget it. She sang as she worked and when Finn whistled Blow the Wind Southerly, she smiled, because she had been wrong to be cross with the wind. The wind had brought him back, and she was content.

And when Finn complained at the end of a day that they had not come very far, she said, ‘What does it matter? We’ve got all the time in the world.’

Which is not always a clever thing to say.