Teranesia

After a while a swarm of children surrounded them: not beggars, just curious, exuberant kids, born long after the last tourists had departed. When they asked where the visitors were from, and Prabir said, ‘Canada and Wales,’ they dissolved into fits of laughter; maybe they were too young to have heard of either place and thought these were unlikely-sounding made-up names. When Prabir managed to get a question of his own in, the answer was disappointing but no great surprise: the biologists’ expedition hadn’t stopped here.

One of the older boys told him earnestly, ‘Your wife is very beautiful. Tell her she is very beautiful.’ Prabir translated the compliment but left out the presumption of matrimony. It had occurred to him back in Ambon that it might simplify things if they agreed to let people assume this as a matter of course, but he hadn’t had a chance to discuss it with Grant, and he didn’t want to argue the point in public.

Grant consulted her notepad and they turned down a side road. The children fell away. Prabir said, ‘Do you want to tell me where we’re going?’

‘Up into the nutmeg plantations.’

‘They’re hardly plantations any more. They’ve been abandoned for decades.’

‘Forests, plantations, call them what you like. We haven’t come here to negotiate a shipment of mace.’

Prabir couldn’t imagine what she was hoping to find; centuries of cultivation had left the islands with little in the way of wildlife. He’d assumed that they’d only dropped anchor here to ask the locals for news from travellers passing through from further south, or to scour the market for curiosities that might not have been shipped up to Ambon.

As they left the town behind, the dirt road became increasingly overgrown; they trudged through the heat, encountering no one. Grant had a licence from the government in Ambon to collect specimens for research purposes throughout the RMS, but Prabir suspected that they should still have asked for permission from the Bandanese themselves before heading out into the countryside. Under adat, customary law, all visitors to the island would be seen as guests of the raja – an honour that carried an obligation to inform him of their movements – but short of requesting an audience with His Whateverness, they might at least have checked with the nearest villagers that they wouldn’t be disturbing any ancestral shrines. The trouble was, if they went back into town so Prabir could sound people out about the correct protocol, Grant would soon realise that he was playing it by ear and start asking herself why she couldn’t have done the same without him.

The narrow, unkempt path that the road had become led them into the plantation, then abandoned them completely. They picked their way slowly through the undergrowth. Even at the height of the spice trade the plantations had never been a monoculture, and the tall, white-blossomed kanari almond trees interspersed with the nutmeg – planted to give shade to the saplings – seemed to have retained their share of the light long after the withdrawal of human intervention. It was the space between the trees that had reverted to jungle: rattan and lianas snaked from trunk to trunk, some of them unpleasantly spiked, and there were waist-high ferns everywhere. Prabir was glad he was in boots and jeans; he’d wandered Teranesia barefoot as a child, but his soft city feet wouldn’t have lasted five minutes here. Grant had gone so far as to wear a long-sleeved shirt, and after half an hour his own arms were so scratched that, despite the heat, he envied her.

He stopped to catch his breath. ‘If you tell me what you’re looking for, we might find it a little faster.’

‘Fruit pigeons,’ Grant replied curtly.

Prabir almost responded with an acerbic remark about the difficulty of doing field work with such limited powers of observation, but he stopped himself in time. Fruit pigeons might easily have been classed as vermin and hunted to extinction by the plantation owners, but they’d been spared for the sake of their convenient habit of shitting out the nutmeg seed, sowing it naturally. They weren’t exactly overwhelmed by competition or predators on any of the islands, but here they’d be in paradise.

So why hadn’t he seen one yet?

The pigeons he remembered had all been large, noisy and brightly coloured, but he knew there were smaller species too, some of them quite well camouflaged. They hardly needed to be silent and invisible, though, here of all places. And there had to be thousands of them.

He said, ‘Can we stop here for a while? Maybe we’re scaring them with all the noise.’

Grant nodded. ‘That’s worth a try.’

Prabir stood motionless for ten minutes, staring up into the branches. He could hear other birds in the distance, and a constant hum of insects, but nothing like the discordant clacking he remembered.

Grant couldn’t resist needling him. ‘So where are they, eagle-eyes? You have my advantage in both youth and experience; if you can’t see them, we might as well go back to the boat.’