Journey to the River Sea

‘Do you see him sometimes?’ Maia asked – and he turned sharply because she seemed to have read his thoughts. ‘I see mine. My father. Not a ghost or an apparition... just him.’

‘Yes. It’s exactly like that. Often he’s showing me something. A new insect or a plant.’

‘Mine shows me things too. Little bits of pottery... shards. He was an archaeologist.’

‘Mine was a naturalist. He collected over a hundred new species.’

‘I know – I saw some of the things in the museum. You must be proud of him.’

‘Yes. Maybe that’s the point of fathers. They’re people that show you things.’

The hut was just as Bernard Taverner had left it when he went out with an Indian friend to look for the blue water-lily whose leaves were used as a painkiller. His collecting boxes and specimen jars, his plant press and dissecting kit and microscope, were all stacked neatly on his work table. His carpentry tools were hung carefully on the wooden wall; on the other side of the hut was the tackle for the boat. The khaki sheet still lay folded on his hammock as though he expected to return to sleep that night.

And in shelves made from palmwood planks were rows of old books – books on natural history, books on exploration and all the well-known classics. But the book that lay open on the table with a marker was Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin, and as he looked at it Finn sighed.

‘He made me promise to go on with Latin whatever happened. He said there was nothing like it for sharpening the mind. But it’s difficult on one’s own.’

‘Yes.’ Maia nodded. ‘Everything’s difficult on one’s own.’

But she thought she had never seen a place she liked more. The hut was spotlessly clean with a slight smell of woodsmoke and the watery scent of the reeds coming in through the window. There was a small oil stove and a sink, but she could see that mostly the boy cooked outside on the stone fireplace built on a spit of land that ran between the hut and the sandbank.

‘You must have been very happy here – you and your father.’

‘Yes, we were. I used to wake up every morning and think, ‘‘Here I am, exactly where I want to be,’’ and there aren’t many boys who can say that. I thought of waking up in those awful English boarding schools with a bell shrilling.’

He took her outside and showed her his oven, the place where the turtles laid their eggs, the bottle full of sugar water that he filled each day for the humming birds, just as his father had done. ‘We’ve had twenty different kinds on that one tree,’ he said. His bow and arrow were hung on a branch, but she had seen a rifle too, propped under the windowsill.

‘Do you see that?’ he said, pointing to some marks in the sand. ‘That’s an anteater – he comes down at night to drink.’

His father had planted a simple garden – manioc and maize and a few sweet potatoes, protected by a wire fence. ‘It’s difficult, keeping the animals out – and keeping it weeded.’

‘It looks fine. All of it.’ She waved her hand over the hut, the boat, the lagoon. ‘It looks like a place where one would want to stay for ever and ever.’

He gave her a startled glance. ‘Yes. But I can’t stay. I’m going on a journey.’

‘Oh!’ For a moment she was devastated. She had only just met him and now he was going away.

‘I’m going to find the Xanti.’

She waited.

‘They’re my mother’s tribe. She was Indian. My father brought her here and she died when I was born. I promised him that if anything happened to him, I’d go there. He said they’d keep me safe till I was of age and then no one could make me go back to Westwood. I thought he was making a fuss, but now that the crows have come...’

‘How will you go?’

‘In the Arabella. As soon as the dry season starts properly. The rivers in the north are still flooded now, but it won’t be long.’

They clambered over the boat together and it was clear that she was the apple of his eye. She was a steam launch, rakish and sturdy, with a tall copper funnel and an awning running the length of her deck.

‘My father got her cheap from a rubber baron who’d gone bankrupt. She can do five knots when she’s in a good mood.’

‘Can you manage her on your own?’

‘Just about. You have to have a lot of wood chopped at the beginning of the day and then you go on pretty steadily. It’ll be difficult because there aren’t any reliable maps for the last part of the journey. I’ll have to go by what my father remembered.’

Maia put her hand on the tiller. Five minutes ago she had wanted to stay in the lagoon for ever. Now, just as much, she wanted to make this journey with Finn – to go on and on up the unknown rivers... not getting there, just going.

But now the dog, who had been following them silently, jumped back ashore and made his way to the door of the hut which he pushed open with his snout.

‘He’s telling us it’s time for afternoon tea.’