The Jaguar Trials Read online

  Rafael gave a little gasp.

  “Lost spirits,” echoed Yara quietly. “The unquiet spirits.” She looked at Ben, her eyes shining. ‘That’s how you will free them.’

  Ben tried to take everything in. He had to find the temple, and place the mask back on the golden king’s statue.

  “And your Dad,” said Yara. “He is lost somewhere inside that same spirit world. By freeing the spirits, you can free him.”

  Ben leafed keenly through the book, but he couldn’t find any more about the golden king or the mask. Instead, another piece of text caught his attention: what was it? A diary entry, a story? It was headed “Amazon basin, 1960”.

  “The small boy watches the compass needle turn,” Ben read – but before he could continue, Yara gripped his arm.

  “Hear that?” she asked in a sharp whisper.

  Ben listened. The noise was muffled at first, then became unmistakable – breaking twigs; footfalls. He sprang up, letting the book fall to the ground in his haste, pulling the others with him as the realization hit.

  Professor Erskine and Luis were coming after them; tracking them down.

  And they were gaining.

  Amazon basin, 1960

  The small boy watches the compass needle turn. He can’t take his eyes off the small red arrow as it makes its slow rotations. He’s fascinated. Confused. It shouldn’t do that, should it? North is always north. South is always south. That’s what Father taught him. Those were facts that you could depend on. Like Father and Mother. Constants. Safe things. Unchangeable things.

  The compass point whirls faster.

  The boy gazes out, at the bright blue sky. He has to screw up his eyes to look at it. Cloud, pulled into thin, tight wisps. He looks down from the small window. Green. Everywhere shadow green. Trees in every direction. Forest stretching as far as he can see.

  The boy sees his father’s hand tighten on the controls; sees him tap a dial and frowns, as he mutters something to Mother. They must have seen it too then, the spinning.

  The plane flies closer to the rocks – rocks that catch the light like crystals. Pretty colours, patterns, holes. The engine growls, as the plane sweeps lower.

  And at first it looks like smoke…

  The boy presses his face hard against the window to see better. Black flows out from the rock crevasses in a flapping flood, each speck a bat.

  “Bank left!” the boy hears Father shout. He feels the plane tip sideways.

  The sky goes dark with bats. They sweep up at them in a growing, spiralling mass. The plane rocks. Soft bodies thud against the glass like bullets. The boy jerks his head away as a bat hits the pane, leaving a web of cracks.

  “More power!” He hears his mother’s voice over the shuddering engine. “They’ll damage the propeller!”

  The plane lurches, drops. Shoulder straps bite the boy’s shoulders as he is wrenched about inside his seat. Instinctively he leans forward, clamping his head between his knees, clenched fists raised round his head like a shield.

  There is the scraping shriek of metal against rock. A grinding tearing. Sprays of sparks…

  The small boy wanders from the crashed plane.

  He knows they are dead. The way Father’s body is twisted up inside the jagged metal of the cockpit. The way Mother’s eyes are staring wide at nothing. The red across the throat.

  He stumbles forward, upwards, not knowing where he’s going, knowing only that he has to get away. Away from the smoke; away from the buckled metal and the blood.

  On he climbs. But the light is too strong here. He has to shield his eyes from the dazzling glint ahead as he steps closer. And suddenly there is an outstretched hand. A face. Mouth open in a grimace. Pointed teeth. The small boy stares.

  In front of him stands a man.

  A man made of gold.

  “we went with fear and trembling into … the houses”

  MANUSCRIPT 512

  No time to rest. The forest pressed in from all sides as Ben cut a way through with the machete. The canopy was thick here, blocking most of the sunlight. He had the compass round his neck, and now and again he stopped to squint at the bearing, listening for their pursuers.

  Ben felt sweat trickle into his eyes and a queasy feeling grip his stomach, but he kept up the punishing pace. He mistimed a machete blow and staggered, falling heavily, landing only centimetres from the blade.

  “Are you all right, Ben?” Yara panted, frowning. “Raffie – you are limping!”

  “Just my blisters,” Rafael wheezed. “Of course, they could easily go septic and I lose the foot – but we can’t slow down! Luis is a trained killer; he tracks live prey for a living.”

  “My turn to carry the bag at least, Raffie,” she said, tugged at the straps of the backpack.

  They slogged on, Ben at the front, hacking into the dense forest, Yara watchful at the back.

  “It’s difficult to breathe,” Raffie hobbled forward, and Ben saw that his friend’s pace was getting slower and slower.

  “It’s the humidity,” Ben said, wiping perspiration from his hot face. A low growl of thunder echoed ahead of them. “It’ll get less when the rain comes,” he said encouragingly.

  Yara nodded, snatching handfuls of leaves and plucking vegetation from the forest floor as she followed. Whatever she was doing had a purpose, but Ben decided not to waste his breath asking unnecessary questions.

  “We have to keep going, Raffie,” he said, striding forward – and then all of a sudden he broke out through the trees into some kind of clearing, open to the dense grey sky. The space took him so much by surprise so that he almost lost his balance.

  In front of them was an overgrown collection of huts, and the children stood close together, taking in the scene.

  The huts’ thatched roofs were half caved-in; vines snaked up bamboo walls with gaping holes. Ben cautiously moved from building to building, but there was no sign of life.

  “Raffie needs to rest, Ben!” Yara insisted, gazing around her with a nervous look. “I want to treat the sores on his feet.”

  “I’m OK,” mumbled Rafael, but Ben could see that his friend could hardly stand up.

  “We’ll stop here for a bit, then,” Ben said. “But we can’t risk staying too long.”

  He cocked his head to listen; the drone of insects was suddenly obliterated by the curtain of rain that fell and drenched them in seconds. Seeing Raffie stumble, Ben grabbed him and with Yara’s help pulled him into the darkness of a long-abandoned hut. They ducked through the low doorway and sank on to the dirt floor.

  Ben wrinkled his nose. The inside of the hut was filled with the smell of earth, decay. It was as if something died in there.

  The three of them sat huddled as they stared round. Stones circled the black ashes of a fire pit; otherwise the room was completely empty.

  “Who lived in this village?” whispered Rafael as rain dripped through holes in the roof. “Why did they abandon this place?”

  Yara was pale. “I do not know, but it feels as if bad things happened here.”

  After a few seconds pause, Ben saw her shake herself into action. She chose a flat stone from the edge of the fire pit, then tore pieces of the leaves she had collected on to it and began to grind them with another of the stones. She cupped her hand to collect water from the leaking roof, then added drops to the mixture, and Ben watched as she worked everything into a thick paste. “Boots and socks off, Rafael!” she ordered.

  Ben offered round the water bottle, then put it under a leak in the roof to refill it. He opened their only packet of biscuits and rationed out one each. His sense of unease was growing. “As soon as the rain stops, we get moving again.”

  He unrolled the map Rafael had taken from the professor. “But first, I want to check where we’re heading.”

  Ben found the bluff where they’d camped, and plotted their course with the compass. “Thermal area. Unstable ground,” he read. “That’s where we’ll be soon; then we’ll be totally off the
map.”

  “Like the brave explorers in the olden days,” said Rafael, wincing as he pulled off his sock. “I’m descended from a conquistador, as you know.”

  “That’s nothing to be proud of!” Yara told him. “Now, let me hold your foot. Stop wiggling your toes!”

  “Are you sure you got the ingredients right?” grimaced Rafael. “There are a lot of deadly poisonous plants that look very similar.”

  “Be quiet, Rafael!” Yara scooped paste from the stone. “This will hurt a lot,” she told him, then smeared it quickly over his blisters.

  Rafael yelped and broke into a stream of Portuguese.

  Yara wasn’t letting up. “Your brave explorers of the olden days stole our country’s precious things!” she said sharply. “And they brought diseases with them that killed thousands of our people.”

  Ben shakily hung the compass back round his neck. He remembered the visions he had seen: the boy with long, dark hair and the melting gold; the little girl with the round face covered in those terrible welts. He looked into the fire pit, suddenly not able to draw his eyes away. His arm throbbed and when he rubbed the skin he felt his four scars, raised up and tender to the touch. Yara’s voice faded into the background as he stared into the dead ashes.

  Without warning, Ben saw the room fill with creeping shadows as little tongues of gold flame sprang from the blackened fire pit. They crackled and spat. From far away came the sound of voices… And suddenly the space was full of figures; people sitting round the fire…

  There are voices.

  Echoes from somewhere far away. Far back.

  They want to take us from our homes, comes a voice that is many voices.

  Men shout from outside the hut; then the walls are alight, flames licking up to the ceiling of the hut. There are people running, gunshots.

  A mother clutches her screaming baby, their wide eyes lit by fire. The baby claws at his mother, and her face is lined with a desperate anguish.

  A strange whisper lingers in the air. A whisper that is many whispers.

  Help us! Find El Dorado.

  Restore the golden king’s power.

  Give us back our home.

  Free us.

  And as soon as it had come, the vision was gone. Ben sat in a daze. “…and they murdered whole families in their homes,” he heard Yara tell Rafael angrily, as she smeared his foot with the ointment. “Those are the kind of conquistador people you are descended from!”

  “I am not!” Rafael bit his bottom lip.

  “The past is our present,” Yara snapped, slapping more ointment on to Rafael’s foot. “Blame is passed on until redemption.”

  There it is again, thought Ben. He swallowed hard as he recovered from the shock of images. That word redemption – the shaman had used it too.

  “You can’t blame me for what my ancestors did. Can she, Ben? Ben?” The anger drained out of Rafael’s voice as he peered at his friend’s face.

  “What is it, Ben?” said Yara, her forehead creased with concern, and she and Rafael listened wide-eyed as Ben told them about his vision.

  “The unquiet spirits really need their new home,” said Rafael quietly, after Ben had finished. “But why El Dorado?” he said. “Why is it the only place they can go to find peace?”

  “It is the only place they can feel safe?” suggested Yara. “Under the protection of the golden king?”

  The rain had stopped. The sun had come out again and felt hot through the broken bamboo slats.

  Ben had a sudden painful longing to see his dad, twisted together with self-doubt. “But will we ever find El Dorado?”

  “Yes,” Yara told him firmly. “My grandfather believes in you and I believe in you as well.”

  “Me too,” said Raffie earnestly, pulling on his socks. He nodded his head so much that his glasses nearly fell off. “If anyone can do it, you can Ben!”

  “Thanks, guys,” said Ben quietly. “I’ll try my best. Now we’ve got to get moving. If we’re lucky, the heavy rain will have covered our tracks. You OK to walk, Raffie?”

  Rafael laced up his boots. “Thanks to Yara.”

  On they went, following the compass. They were climbing now and the forest thinned, giving less shade from the sun as it belted down. They took rests, sipped water, chewed on the last of the biscuits to keep their energy levels up.

  Ben began to worry more and more. They were leaving the forest behind completely. How can that fit with the clue about a forest?

  The compass led them ever upwards and the ground got steeper, the vegetation sparser, until they were walking on mainly rock.

  They hiked on, Ben not daring to slacken the pace. Rock pinnacles towered ahead of them. Underfoot the rocks were sunk into reddish soil, and there were other colours now too: rainbows of mud under their boots.

  Ben stopped. “Smell that?” It was like something rotting. Bad eggs.

  “Hydrogen sulphide,” said Raffie, wrinkling his nose. From somewhere ahead of them came a strange low hiss: an eerie rushing of air. Ben was reminded of waves rushing up a pebble beach.

  Ben felt Rafael press close to his shoulder.

  The noise got louder; increased to a wail, then a howling.

  But as soon as it had come, the noise was gone.

  “Monkeys?” said Ben, though it didn’t sound like monkeys he’d ever heard. “Or another kind of animal?”

  Yara shook her head. “I have never heard animals make a sound like that.”

  They continued more cautiously, and as they reached the top of the section, the valley opened out and they drew to an abrupt stop.

  The space was flanked on both sides by high, sheer cliffs, and between these cliffs was a series of terraces of all colours, like wide, low steps, patterned in places with thin cracks from which wispy white vapour was escaping.

  Rising up from the terraces were pale towers of rock like melted candles, fat at the bottom, tapering to rounded points, and thick creepers trailing over the cliff edges had found their way across the space, latching on to the tops of the towers; a bizarre cat’s cradle strung overhead.

  “Beautiful,” whispered Yara.

  And what was that at the very top of the terraces? Ben shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun. Some kind of stunted tree? It was difficult to make out. Branches stuck out at all angles, with pointed leaves along them.

  “The terraces and towers are all made of minerals,” gasped Rafael. “Crystal deposits. It must be that area marked on the map, remember – the part that was marked unstable ground?”

  “Well, the compass takes us right through it,” said Ben, double-checking the dial. “And I can’t see any way round, can you?” He pressed the tip of his boot cautiously on to the edge of the first terrace: a smooth, pale gold surface with flecks of pink. “I’ll go first.” He let the ground take his weight. He heard the delicate crystals crunch under his sole, but the ground seemed firm enough.

  “Be careful,” said Rafael, as he and Yara followed.

  It was only a small step up on to the next terrace. This time the surface was a shining cream colour, with ribbons of turquoise and goldish specks running through it. Lines of cool shadows criss-crossed the surface from the overhead creepers.

  Ben felt more confident with every step. As he went up on to the third step – a pale red shelf with a surface of shining turquoise crystals – he was even starting to enjoy the sensation of walking on the terraces. His front boot pressed confidently on to the deposit – but then he immediately felt it give. He heard the snapping of crystals as his boot broke the brittle crust. He drew back sharply with a gasp, pivoting himself on to his back foot as the surface ahead of him crumbled – to leave a gaping hole filled with boiling water.

  Ben flung out an arm. “Stop!” And he himself stopped so abruptly that Raffie ran into the back of him, making Ben stagger forward to the very edge.

  They stood staring at the hole, bubbling like a witch’s cauldron: scorching and lethal. Ben’s heart sank as he gaz
ed up the terraces. There was still such a long way to go. How would they know which ground was stable and which wasn’t?

  And then Ben heard it. That same hissing rush of air they’d heard from lower down the valley. He felt the ground tremble. The hiss rose to a sinister wail, then to a howl. It was deafening, terrifying, echoing off the rocks so it seemed to be coming from every direction at once. Ben felt his whole body tense. He was unable to move. But something was coming, he felt it … heading straight for them.

  A howling plume of water shot from the ground, only metres from where they were standing, gushing high into the air.

  Ben lurched back, pulling Yara and Raffie with him, as scalding water rained down. He felt a drop splash on to his hand, burning the skin.

  “Geyser!” Raffie wheezed, once they were out of range.

  Ben hardly had time to catch his breath before a second geyser erupted from a terrace further up, and as that one started to lose height and power, a third hurtled skywards from another spot, each in rapid succession. Faster than high-power fire hoses. Boiling towers of hissing water spat steam in all directions.

  Could it be? Shakily, excited, Ben pulled out the gold bird icon and looked at the clue on the back. It fitted, didn’t it? What if the lines with spiralling tops didn’t represent trees in a forest at all? Instead what if they were a picture of these deadly geysers?

  “Howling heights!” shouted Yara over the wail of the water, as there was a fourth, then a fifth steaming column.

  The geysers died down and the ground was still again. Everything went eerily quiet.

  “So.” Ben wet his lips. A mixture of excitement and fear swept through him. “Looks like we’ve found the next trial.”