Eva Ibbotson - Journey to the River Sea

‘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.

Miss Minton was staying at the Keminskys’. She had lost everything in the fire except her trunk of books, but with her butterfly money she bought the few things she needed. Because the Keminskys had been kind to her, she was determined to do her duty, so each morning she taught Olga and helped the countess with her letters.

The rest of the day she searched for Maia.

It was now a week since Maia had vanished. Miss Minton had always been thin, but now she looked like a walking skeleton. When she passed through the streets people turned to look at her anguished face.

The Carters’ servants — Tapi, Furo and the others — had not returned. When they had news of the fire, Old Lila had fallen ill with a raging fever, certain that they had killed Maia by leaving her, and they had gone further into the forest to search for a medicine man who could cure her.

But Miss Minton went to talk to the Indians living along the river bank and by the docks; she searched the ruins of the bungalow again and again. She questioned the river patrols, and the people who came in on the ships, in case Maia had lost her memory and wandered off.