There was a lot of water in his ears-perhaps that was why he couldn’t hear anything anymore. He tried to float on his back, arms outstretched, gazing at the cotton-wool-like mist and hoping his spread-eagled position would snag something, anything, to halt the unstoppable course toward the cliff edge. Was it a ten-meter drop or a hundred?
He bounced and bobbed; then a wave overtook him, washed across his face and forced his body down. With no time to take a breath, he simply closed his eyes and mouth and let the water spin him round.
It was not his father that he yearned for in these final moments. This vein of river was the route to his mother’s heart, and he called for her, crying out desperately in the darkness of his mind.
His face broke the surface, and he lurched upward, forcing his painful shoulder to raise him high enough so that he could see and breathe. It would take only a second for the water to tumble again, pushing him back down beneath the surface. He couldn’t survive another thrashing. He was going to drown this time-better that way-before the drop.
For a moment he thought the helicopter had returned as a whirring hum of blades thrashed the air. The current spun him round; at least now he would not see the drop into the cauldron when it came, but the crazy image he saw took time to penetrate his mind. It was a big, flat-bottomed boat, and a man sitting on a high seat in front of a massive fan was pointing the boat directly at him. These killers just wouldn’t give up!
A grizzled, bewhiskered man with a gold tooth, tattooed face and arms, an earring and a battered old straw hat with colored feathers shoved into it was mouthing something at him. This apparition stood at the front of the fan-propelled boat as it surged toward him.
Max almost laughed aloud: it seemed there were pirates of the Caribbean after all.
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.
