Journey to the River Sea

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.’