The Jaguar Trials Read online

  But soon things got more difficult. Even with the extra light, it was increasingly hard to find places to get a hold, and these were spaced further apart. The surface was more slippery as well, with slimy water running down.

  Ben’s tongue was clamped between his lips as he concentrated on finding the next grip point. Sweat stung his eyes, but he didn’t have a free hand to wipe it away. He felt the extra weight of his sodden clothes, dragging on each move. His leg muscles cramped as they took the strain; his arms felt stiff and heavy.

  Don’t think too much, he told himself, fingers trembling. Don’t look down. Just focus on the next move.

  But he felt his chest tighten. His breath came out in gasps. He was scarily high up now, but he still seemed such a long way from the fern. He’d totally misjudged the distance. Ben stopped, pressing himself against the cliff, struggling to get his panic under control. But when he tried to get going again his body didn’t respond; it just stayed there, clamped to the rock, pinned in the torch’s beam like an escaped prisoner caught in a searchlight.

  The seconds ticked by, turning into minutes.

  “Ben?” Yara called up.

  “I’m fine,” he shouted back through gritted teeth.

  And as his body trembled, Ben felt a weird sensation. The jaguar marks. Little pulses of pain ran like electric shocks up his arm.

  His fingers started to loosen and he was able to shift his legs a little. It was as if some invisible dial had turned all his senses up higher. He seemed to hear more tones in the sound of the water as it slicked past. When he looked up, he saw the bumps and grooves of the rock surface with clarity, his mind quickly drawing a mental map of the route he should take.

  He could move again. His hands felt extra-sensitive to every little nodule of rock, the texture of every small indentation. He made small gripping movements with his fingertips, and they felt more like claws than fingers. His shadow stretched up ahead of him, his shape distorted by the torch beam as if he had wings.

  A strange small laugh bubbled from Ben’s lips as he made a series of jerky movements upwards. Euphoria swept over him. He felt the pump of adrenaline. He was going to make it! He was going to find something in that alcove that would take him to the next trial. He was going to get to El Dorado; he was going to find his dad!

  Lights from glow-worms on the surrounding walls flared brighter. Above him he saw the shelf of rock that marked the alcove where the fern was growing … alluringly close.

  And that’s when it happened.

  He heard Yara give a yell. One second he was reaching up for the next handhold, the next he was clutching at air, his left leg kicking into nothing. Screams rang out. Yara? Rafael? His body swung sideways like a door slamming open, and there was a blur of images: the shroud of waterfall, the hollow space of the cavern, the dizzying drop.

  With a cry of effort Ben wrenched himself back one-armed towards the rock and clung there, his hands inside a slender crevice, his heart hammering so hard it felt as if the force of it would push him off again. He stayed there gasping, face pressed against the wet rock. There were no weird supernatural sensations now, only the dark fall below him and the cold soaking through his clothes.

  Ben had no idea how long he stayed cemented to the rock. You idiot, he told himself. Don’t fool around. These trials are for real, and they’re not called the death trials for nothing.

  Ben took a small step up, fighting to get back his nerve, wedging the toe of his boot into a narrow cleft. He inched higher, fingers clambering to find a hold, each careful movement sending shooting pains along the muscles of his legs and arms.

  He felt something brush the top of his head – the thick leaf tips of the bat’s wing fern, leathery, like damp pieces of skin. The rock sparkled in the torchlight as he reached up to grip the ledge. He pulled himself up with a shout – and found himself surrounded by green leaves with dusty pores like staring yellow eyes.

  He heard Yara yelp from below.

  “Well done, Ben!” Rafael shouted up. “What can you see? Tell us!”

  Ben clambered on to the ledge and took a few seconds to compose himself. “Shine the torch on the leaves, Raffie!” Head buzzing, he parted the damp foliage and searched around inside.

  “What have you found?” called Rafael. The torch beam bounced around crazily.

  “Keep the light still!” Ben scanned inside the fern, lifting each leaf, feeling right down to root level. Then he felt around the back of the plant, a fingertip search of every square centimetre. He bit his lip and searched a second time. There had to be something – something that would lead him to the next trial.

  Ben chewed the inside of his cheek. What if this wasn’t the right place? Might the shaman be wrong?

  “Look again!” urged Yara.

  On the surrounding cliffs, the glow-worm lights dimmed and disappeared. He heard the flames below splutter. Some went out. The shadows deepened round him.

  No matter how many times Ben searched the alcove, and the leathery folds of the fern, he just kept drawing one big blank.

  Dad.

  Ben shivered as a cold wind sighed through the cave. He looked down over the ledge and shook his head at Yara and Rafael, seeing even from that height the disappointment on their faces. Ben stared back down the cliff to the cave floor and gripped the ledge more tightly. Climbing up would be nothing compared with the descent.

  “You wait there!” Yara cried. She must have been thinking the same thing. “I will go and get help. Bring ropes.”

  The chief was going to have a field day over this one, thought Ben. The trial’s over, isn’t it? Before he’d hardly even started. He flexed his numb fingers and gave a small nod to Yara.

  “Shine the torch!” Yara told Rafael. “Help me relight the lamps.”

  The beam swung away from Ben’s alcove, leaving him in an inky darkness, making the rock seem to press towards him on all sides, trapping him.

  And that’s when something caught his eye.

  He craned to see.

  There was a line of light, coming through the waterfall. Like a faint vein of gold in a sheet of white. Somehow light was getting through from the other side. Ben stared, disorientated. How can there be light through there? All the way through the maze of caves, they’d been descending steadily – so where could it be coming from?

  And that wasn’t all. The fissure of light stretched the entire way down to the bottom of the waterfall. If he hadn’t been in the alcove, at the precise angle he was at, Ben realized, there was no chance he would have ever seen it.

  There was something else as well. As Ben’s eyes adjusted, the eerie glow from behind the waterfall picked out a ledge, precariously narrow, running from one edge of the alcove straight towards the slit of light.

  He scrambled to his feet with a renewed burst of hope. It isn’t over. “There’s a gap in the rock!” he cried. “Behind the water! The crack goes all the way down to where you are! See, there.” The torch beam zigzagged about before settling on the place he was pointing at. “You can get through without climbing. You see it?”

  He saw Yara peer into the base of the falls, then turn to him, giving a wild thumbs-up.

  Ben moved to the far side of the alcove and put a foot on the ledge. “See you on the other side!” And then he was sidestepping along it, easing closer to the pearly surface.

  Soon he was just centimetres from the tumbling sheet of water. He had a sudden flashback to the rapids, to himself caught under the water, drowning, and he had to stop and hold on to a lump of rock to steady himself.

  Ben wiped at his mouth. He stretched out a hand and pressed his fingers through the moving screen of water, feeling the shock of cold, the force pushing down on his palm. He took another tiny step, paused, then went forward – straight into the heart of the falls.

  “The bats were so numerous that they fluttered in swarms round the faces of our people.”

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  Water slammed the top of Ben’s head, a
nd he felt his knees buckle as he struggled through the falls. In an instant he was drenched, too cold to breathe. For a moment he nearly lost his balance. Keep to the ledge, he told himself, forcing his eyes to stay open. Reach for the light.

  With shuffling steps he got to the fissure, gripped its edges and pulled himself in. He felt the rock grate against his chest and back as he edged through sideways…

  Ben broke out into air and light. He let out a long shuddering gasp. Water ran down his face, and his clothes clung to him.

  Coughing, he looked about him and found that he was in a bigger, even more spectacular cavern. He tipped his dripping head back to take in the scale of the place. They were well below ground, but the soaring roof was punched through with murky shafts of sunlight that looked like solid columns holding it up. Tangled vegetation trailed from the holes. His clothes steamed in the warm air.

  Ben saw that the ledge he was on widened into a rock track, which made a series of switchbacks to the floor of the cave. And the best part of all was seeing Yara and Rafael, already at ground level, waving up at him!

  “Awesome!” Yara shook the water from her hair as Ben reached them, spraying him with drops.

  Rafael handed Ben the torch while he tried to dry his glasses on the saturated edge of his shirt. He wrinkled his nose. “What’s that funny smell?”

  Ben could smell it now too. A moist, earthy kind of smell he couldn’t place. He shrugged and walked forward, feeling his wet boots sinking a little into the ash-like ground, coating them in a grey powder. It reminded Ben of walking on a sand dune. He felt crunchy flecks go inside his shoes and collect around his ankles, chafing the skin.

  He shone the torch down and gave a shout.

  The ground was alive! It was teeming with insects. Millipedes, earwigs and cockroaches, the biggest he’d ever seen, scuttled over its surface. He immediately went up on tiptoe, balancing on the caps of his boots.

  Rafael was squealing, arms flailing.

  “It’s just guano,” said Yara, holding Rafael’s arm to calm him down. She didn’t look in the least bit bothered by the massive insects scuttling across her thin shoes; she just flicked them away with a deft kick. “Animal droppings.” She took the torch from Ben and shone it on to a wall of the cave. “Look!”

  Nothing could have prepared Ben for what he now saw. The wall was alive as well – but not with insects. Every part of it was a squirming mass of creatures; Ben couldn’t see a single patch of bare rock. Leathery wings. Soft furry bodies. The wall was absolutely thick with bats.

  Bats!

  Rafael was writhing nearly as much as the bats were. “Think of the bacteria and viruses we’ve been stepping in!” he moaned. “And what about rabies? One bite and it’s agonizing death!”

  Ben couldn’t take his eyes off the moving wall, the creatures jostling, clambering over one another for space. There must be thousands of them! It was interesting to think about, he admitted to himself – but certainly not something he wanted to think about too much. Scads of bat excrement fallen from above: food for insects who got to mega proportions.

  What now? he thought. What was there to find here, apart from a load of poo and creepy animals? What they needed was a breakthrough.

  And it was Rafael who made it.

  One minute he was moving about in what looked like a cross between hip-hop and ballet dancing, the next he’d stopped stock still, feet deep in guano, his eyes alight.

  “The hanging shroud!” he exclaimed. His cheeks flushed pink. “What if the waterfall isn’t the shroud at all? Surely they are!” He waved a hand over the bat colony.

  Ben eyed the dense mass of bodies. It wasn’t the kind of shroud he’d have imagined in a thousand years – but the bats were certainly hanging, there was no doubt about that. Maybe Rafael was on to something. You could imagine there having been a colony in here for centuries, stretching back to when the Ancients first set the trials. “Good one, Raffie. So the question is what are those little guys shrouding?”

  “I guess we need to scare them off the rock,” said Yara. “It is not so nice, but necessary.”

  Ben nodded. “OK, then, here goes.” He began to shout and clap and wave his arms, Yara joining in, then Rafael. The bats crawled about in a frenzy, their clicking squeaks intensifying.

  And then at a certain point it was as if they had set off a tripwire. The bats began to lift from the wall, peeling themselves off like flakes of dark skin, turning into a massed chaos of movement.

  Ben heard Rafael’s piercing scream, saw Yara raise her arms to screen her face – and he barely had enough time to lower his own head and shield his eyes before they came at him.

  They filled the air like smoke. He felt rough wings brush his body. Still they came, in a flapping black flood, growing outwards and upwards, spiralling through the holes in the roof of the cave.

  Ben took his hands away from his face and let the bats sweep past, suddenly enjoying their closeness and the rush of air. The wound on his arm tingled, and he felt a strange exhilaration: a sense of connection with the delicate creatures.

  The air calmed and Ben opened his eyes, then felt them widen. The wall was now empty of bats … but it was far from bare.

  “Awesome!” breathed Yara.

  “Raffie!” Ben whispered, grinning. “You – are – a – genius!”

  There were patterns on the rock. Some kind of ancient-looking lettering.

  “Hieroglyphs,” said Rafael, flushing as Yara gave him a hug.

  “If only we could read them,” she muttered in wonder.

  “Professor Erskine will be able to!” said Rafael, pulling out his notebook and copying the symbols carefully into it.

  Ben ran his fingers over the hieroglyphs. He noticed that they were carved in a descending spiralling pattern, leading to a shoulder-wide, exactly square opening at the base of the rock face.

  “Clever Raffie!” exclaimed Yara, crouching to look inside. “Very dark in there. It drops straight down; I can’t see the bottom. But there’s something!” Yara’s excited voice echoed from inside. “I cannot see properly. It is not possible to reach.”

  “Let me see, Yara,” said Ben. “Pass me the head torch, Raffie.”

  “It’s died,” said Rafael sadly, cradling the torch in his hand, then giving the casing a hefty whack. “Must have got water inside and developed a short circuit.”

  Ben knelt by the opening and peered inside the plunging hole. Yara was right: there was something down there, resting on some kind of ledge, but it was too dark to make out what – only the shape; it looked like some kind of box. That was it, though! That had to be it! The clue to the next trial – it was in that box!

  Ben lay on his stomach and wriggled forward, stretching his arms, but the box was out of reach.

  There was only one thing for it, Ben told himself.

  He was going to have to go in head first.

  “Hold my legs!” he told his friends, and he felt them grip hard as he eased himself down.

  “Are you sure about this?” said Rafael. “If we can’t hold you, you’ll fall to your death!”

  “Keep hold then, please, Raffie,” said Ben. He felt his hair flop forward as he went deeper into the shaft. Now Yara and Rafael had hold of his knees. The box was tantalizingly close … but he still couldn’t reach it. “Just a little bit more!” he shouted up.

  His friends’ grip shifted to his calves, then his ankles. Sweat dripped off Ben’s face and down into the void. His body was hanging vertically, and he had a dizzy sensation as the blood went to his head.

  Now they had hold of his boots.

  Ben had a vision of his shoes slowly coming off, the way you saw in films, which always made you wonder why, oh why the silly guy hadn’t thought to tie his laces more tightly before he started.

  Oh.

  “Ben!” Even Yara’s voice was worried now. “We cannot hold you much longer!”

  His boots were definitely slipping.

  “Two more second
s!” He swiped his arm about. Now there was literally only a fingernail’s width between him and the box, and if he could only shift it forward a bit, he’d get a grip. Ben strained every fibre of his body, willing himself to stretch that tiny bit further…

  “Ben!” whimpered Rafael.

  Yes … he had it! Did he? Yes! “Pull!” Ben shouted, and there was a wrenching and a scrambling as he was yanked harshly up.

  “You got it,” panted Yara, grinning.

  “Yes!” said Rafael, his face bright red with the effort.

  “Thanks, guys!” said Ben. “Teamwork, or what! But you nearly skinned me pulling me up!”

  “Skinned you!” For some reason Rafael thought that was hilarious. “Skinned you!” he laughed. He rolled around clutching his stomach, hysterical, and Ben couldn’t help joining in. It wasn’t even funny, but it was like a pressure valve being released. Soon all three of them were in fits, their faces streaming, their giggling cries echoing round the cavern.

  Ben sat back up and wiped his eyes with a sigh. He cradled the box, and the others pressed in close round him to see. It was made of smooth stone, creamy white, with no engravings of any kind; just two gold hinges, and a small gold catch on the lid – a glittering hook and an eye.

  “Alabaster stone,” said Rafael.

  “Here goes,” Ben said. “Fingers crossed we find the clue to the next trial.” He slid the catch and opened the lid.

  A murmur went up on either side of him. Inside was a piece of gold, about the size of his palm, exquisitely fashioned into some kind of figure.

  As he picked it up, Ben felt his hand tremble. The gold had a heaviness to it he wasn’t expecting. He’d once seen a design like it in the British Museum, at a South American exhibition he’d seen with his dad. The face was something like a devil, something like a man, with swirling spirals sweeping from each shoulder.