Eye of the Forest (7 page)

It was then that he saw Nimrod and the others.

“I’ve lost it,” Groanin said flatly. “That box, with Frank thingummy’s skull in it. I say, I’ve lost the flipping thing.”

“You’ve lost the head of Don Francisco Pizarro?” Nimrod sighed loudly.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” said Groanin unhappily. “Some Peruvian bird tricked me into thinking her handbag had been pinched and then nicked it.”

“That was pretty stupid of you,” said Zadie.

Groanin shot her a poisonous look.

“Give me your hands, Groanin,” Nimrod said gravely.

“It were an accident,” said Groanin. “I say, I’m sorry, sir. Look here, you’re not going to do anything unpleasant to me, are you?”

Nimrod took hold of Groanin’s hands. “Not to you, Groanin,” said Nimrod, and closed his eyes.

“What are you doing?” demanded Groanin. “She can’t have gone far. We’ve got to find her.”

“That is precisely what I am trying to do,” said Nimrod. “If you will shut up and let me get on with it.” Nimrod lifted Groanin’s hands to his nose, inhaled deeply several times and muttered his focus word: “QWERTYUIOP!”

“What’s he doing?” whispered Philippa.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know about
odorari,”
scoffed Zadie.

“Odorari,”
said Mr. Vodyannoy. “It’s a mystical technique practiced by only the most powerful djinn. You see, traces of the box’s atoms are still on Groanin’s hands. Another few minutes and it would probably have been too late. You just watch. Nimrod will get the scent in a moment or two.”

Nimrod took another deep breath from the sweating palms of his butler. He could smell some cheese, bread, throat lozenges, a trace of lemonade, and some soap. Then, finally he had it. Just a few particles of lead from the box lining but more than enough for his immediate purpose. Nimrod lifted his distinguished, fastidious nose high into the air and drew in a mixture of coffee, beer, cigarette smoke, fried food, human sweat, soap, silicon, water from
the fountain, wood smoke, carbon monoxide, lead from gasoline, and finally the same carbon he had detected on Groanin’s large hands. Then he opened his eyes and smiled.

“I believe I have them,” he said quietly. “Wait here.”

The woman from the café carried the box containing the skull around the corner to where her friend and accomplice was waiting in his car. She hadn’t had time to look inside the old box, but she thought maybe it was an antique and probably very valuable on its own. She opened the front passenger door and sat down with the box on her lap. Neither of them noticed the invisible figure that crept into the backseat behind her.

“What is it?” asked the man, and nodded at the box.

“I don’t know, but there’s a name on the lid. Don Francisco Pizarro Demarkes.”

“Never heard of him. But he sounds rich.”

“It looks kind of creepy. But valuable, don’t you think?”

The man grinned wolfishly.

“Perhaps there’s something even more valuable inside,” he said.

“There is only one way to find out,” said the woman, and lifted the lid.

Nimrod was not a cruel man but he had little sympathy for thieves and felt that giving this pair a good fright — especially the kind of fright that might cause them to stop stealing — would, in the long run, be in both their moral
interests. For a moment, he considered changing his appearance to something much more frightening and then rejected the idea, for he had no wish to give the two thieves heart attacks. So he confined himself to looking like Pizarro, as imagined by the English painter John Everett Millais, in a picture Nimrod had once seen in London’s National Gallery, which is to say he wore a beard, a red doublet, a golden breastplate, a ruff around his neck, a soft hat with a feather in it, and carried a sword in his hand. This sudden appearance in the backseat of the car was accompanied by a bang as loud as an exploding paper bag.

The two thieves screamed and reached simultaneously for the door handles, only to find that these came off in their hands, and the doors stayed locked. In her haste to be out of the car, the woman managed to empty Pizarro’s skull from the lead-lined box and onto her lap, which only caused her to scream even louder. And then she tried to climb up onto the dashboard of the car, at which point the skull bounced onto the floor.

“Who dares to purloin and then fumble my head like a pomegranate?” demanded Nimrod in a loud, imperious, and quite frighteningly Spanish voice. Leaning forward in his seat Nimrod allowed a very garlicky smell to escape from his mouth and nostrils, fouling the confined atmosphere of the car, before he added, “You dogs. You curs. You mongrels. You felons. You, who stole that precious box and the head of Don Francisco Pizarro Demarkes, must prepare thyselves to suffer the most terrible of punishments.”

“Please,” whimpered the man, twisting around in his seat, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “I beg you, Don Francisco, please don’t kill us.”

Nimrod sneered in his face sulfurously and rattled his sword in its scabbard. “You dare to entreat me, thief?” He was almost enjoying himself, as an actor might enjoy hamming it up as the villainous genie in some crummy Christmas pantomime. “Ask of me only by what mode of death thou wilt die and by what manner of slaughter shall I slay thee and thy worthless accomplice. Thou Mother of Amir, thou hyena, thou leper. Speak only that thou wilt swear on the life of thy mother and thy mother’s mother that thou wilt never steal again, and then, perhaps, will I spare your worthless lives. Otherwise, hold thy tongue, for thy last lying breath is in thy thieving nostrils and in thy dishonest mouth.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said the man. “I swear it. By my mother and my mother’s mother. I’ll never steal again. We both do, don’t we?”

“Yes,” squeaked the woman lying across the dashboard. “I swear it.”

“I believe thee not,” growled Nimrod, and made the car vibrate with his wrath until the radiator began to overheat. “For thou dost say nothing of returning my skull to the poor fool thou stole it from who must himself die a terrible death. And I hear thou sayest nothing about making amends to all the other fools whom thou hast tricked and robbed.
But perhaps because thou hast both softened my heart a little I will give thee a choice of terrible deaths. Now then, shall I shut thee both in a leaky jar and then cast it into the dirtiest sea on the planet? Or feed thee both slowly to a boa constrictor with very bad breath?”

“No, no, no,” said the woman, “we will take the skull straight back to him. I promise. And I will give all the money I have ever stolen to the church. I swear it.”

“Me, too,” squeaked the man.

Nimrod nodded. “Very well,” he said. “I do believe it. But if either of you ever again so much as steals a bit of stationery, avoids paying a bus fare, or causes a book to become overdue at the library, I will come back and replace your heads with elephant dung and make scarabs of your ears. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“Now go. Return the box and the skull to the cream-faced loon in the square.” Nimrod caused the doors of the car to fly open and the two scrambled out, pausing only to collect the box and return Pizarro’s skull to its lead-lined interior.

Chuckling a little, for he had rather enjoyed himself, Nimrod got out of the car and watched them run away. Thinking he might just remind them of the need to turn over a new leaf he turned to the car, muttered his focus word, and made a few alterations to the basic design — blacking out the rear windows and adding bars to them so that it looked
more like a prison van. For good measure, he even laid out two orange jumpsuits and two sets of shackles on the seats. “Who says you can’t reform criminals?” he said.

“Does she have to do that?” said Groanin as Zadie tap-danced her way around the café table where he, John, Philippa, and Mr. Vodyannoy were awaiting Nimrod’s return. “I don’t mind telling you I’m hoping there’s a mantrap or an open drain cover somewhere around this square.”

“That’s a little cruel,” observed Philippa.

“I don’t think so,” said John.

“She’s driving me mad. All that dancing. Who does she think she is? Gene Kelly? Ginger flipping Rogers? Is she hyperactive or something? I say, is that daft girl hyperactive?”

“I believe she might be, yes,” said Mr. Vodyannoy. “It’s what we djinn call a fugue state. Like when someone chases a sort of baroque tune around a church organ. Quite a few djinn suffer from it when they’re young.”

“There you are,” said Philippa. “She can’t help it. That means we have to be sympathetic.”

“Speak for yourself,” said John.

In truth, however, Philippa was already regretting having asked Zadie along on their South American adventure. It wasn’t the tap dancing she minded or even the toothbrush that was always in Zadie’s mouth so much as the other girl’s sharp and often critical tongue. That really bugged her.

Zadie was still tap-dancing when the woman who had taken the box presented it and then herself at the table on the plaza with a cringing, fearful bow.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I apologize. I’ll never ever do it again. Please forgive me,
señor.”

“Aye, well, that’s easy to say,” said Groanin. “You should be ashamed of yourself, young woman. I’ve a good mind to go and fetch the police and have you locked up. I say, I’ve a good mind to fetch a copper, do you hear? I’ve no time for thieves. Really I don’t. Especially not when they steal other people’s property.”

The woman smiled abjectly and, wringing her hands piteously, bowed again. “Please, forgive me,” she repeated with tears in her eyes.

“Never,” Groanin said firmly.

“Groanin,” Philippa said sternly. “I seem to remember that you were once a thief. In fact, that’s how you met Nimrod, isn’t it? Because you stole a decanter that he happened to be inside.”

The English butler harrumphed loudly and looked at Philippa stiffly. “Yes, well, that’s as may be. Thanks for reminding me of that, miss. Now you come to mention it, I suppose I had rather forgotten my former life.”

“It is human to err and divine to forgive,” said Zadie.

Groanin bit his lip. It was one thing being lectured by Philippa, whom he loved dearly, but it was quite another being lectured by the intensely irritating Zadie. “And to
think I ever complained about that lad Dybbuk,” he murmured.

“Hmm?” said Zadie, who wasn’t listening, anyway.

“I say that’s fine and dandy for them as seem to be almost divine,” said Groanin. “But for us mundane mortals, things are a bit different.” Groanin waved at the woman irritably. “Go on, be off, you baggage, before I change my mind and have you in the stocks or whatever it is they do to thieves in this pigging country.”

The woman turned and fled.

“There,” said Groanin triumphantly. “That told her, I think.”

T
hey chartered a plane and flew to Cuzco, the old Incan capital, high in the Andes. The plane was a Cessna Caravan, which it needed to be, given all the equipment they had brought from New York. While the plane was being refueled in Cuzco, they took a helicopter ride up to the citadel of Machu Picchu, the so-called “lost city” found by Hiram Bingham in 1911.

Machu Picchu almost seems to be up in the clouds, and the twins thought it one of the most spectacular things they
had ever seen. Almost as good as the pyramids, although it was more recent in origin.

“Hard to believe the Incas moved all these huge rocks up here without djinn power to build this place,” observed John.

“Well, they did,” said Nimrod. “This place was built in 1450, long after the djinn king of the Incas, Manco Capac, had died.”

“There’s not much humans can’t do when we put our minds to it,” Groanin said breathlessly, because at nearly eight thousand feet above sea level, the air in Machu Picchu is quite thin. “Except perhaps treat a place like this with a bit of pigging respect. I must say, it doesn’t look very lost. Look at this place. I say, look at this place. It’s like Heaton Park in Manchester on a bank holiday. There are folk chatting on their cell phones or having picnics, hippies selling postcards, religious nutcases having prayer meetings — flipping heck, there’s even a group of Yanks over there making an advertisement for suntan lotion.”

It was true, the ancient citadel was crawling with tourists of all nationalities, and John came away from Machu Picchu with the thought that it might have been best if Hiram Bingham had kept his discovery of the site a secret. Philippa found herself thinking it was rather hard to believe that another site like it — in Machu Picchu, there are one hundred and forty different constructions covering five square miles — such as Paititi, really could await discovery.

At least she did until they got back on their Cessna and
flew east and over the other side of the Andes to a little town named Manu, in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon.

The Amazon rain forest is the largest tropical rain forest on Earth and covers almost three million square miles. The Peruvian Amazon is only a small part of that huge total, but it is the wildest, least accessible, and hence, the most unexplored rain forest in the world. As the plane dipped low over the near-unending canopy of trees, Philippa decided that it was almost as if she was looking down at a thick layer of green cumulus clouds.

“Wow,” she said to John. “It just goes on forever, doesn’t it? I mean, when you see how thick that canopy of trees is, it’s a lot easier to buy the idea that there really might be some kind of lost city down there, isn’t it?”

“You bet.” John smiled and nodded back at his twin sister. “Isn’t this cool?”

Groanin, however, was doing his best to ignore the view.

“I hope that pilot knows where he’s going,” said Groanin. “I should hate to run out of gas and have to start looking for a good landing spot down there.”

John clapped the butler on the shoulder. “Good old Groanin,” he said. “Always looking on the bright side.”

“Someone has to,” said Groanin. “That way nobody’s surprised when things go wrong.”

John laughed.

“I’m glad you find it so amusing, John,” said Zadie. “Because I don’t. I’m not a good air passenger at the best of times.”

“Somehow I suspected as much,” said John.

“Look on the bright side,” Groanin told him. “At least she’s stopped tap dancing.”

“Did you know that there are a thousand different species of birds down there?” said Philippa. “To say nothing of sixty different species of bats, including five different kinds of vampire.”

“Do please say nothing about the bats,” said Groanin. “Especially the vampire bats. I hate bats. Nasty things. Like rats with wings.”

“Unless you’re careless enough to leave a foot sticking outside your tent at night,” said Mr. Vodyannoy, “there’s very little chance of you being bitten by one.”

“There’s very little chance of me leaving so much as a single hair outside my tent at night,” declared Groanin. “Some of us have got more sense than to go gallivanting about in the jungle with all them headhunters about.”

“I can’t see anyone wanting your head, Mr. Groanin,” said Zadie. “For a start, there’s not much hair on it. And not much in it, either.”

Groanin swore at her under his breath and began to eat a jar of Baby Balance Scrummy Tuna Penne, which, unless he was very hungry, was the only kind of food he intended to eat while they were in the Amazon. He hoped that at least there would be something nice to drink. He’d heard the local beer,
chichai,
was delicious. And Groanin was fond of beer.

“Look here,” said Philippa, “can we dispense with this ridiculous myth once and for all? There are no headhunters
in the Amazon rain forest. Possibly there were headhunters, about a hundred years ago, but not anymore. Isn’t that right, Uncle Nimrod?”

“You might very well be right about that, Philippa,” said Nimrod. “Then again, this is the Amazon we’re talking about, not Yellowstone National Park. This is the last great primeval forest on Earth and there are three million acres of it, most of it untouched by humans or, for that matter, djinn. So we really have no idea what might be down there and what might not. But at the very least I should say that all of us are in for some surprises when we step on the ground.”

They were met by their South American guide and expedition manager, Sicky, and his cook and boatman, Muddy. These two were old friends of Mr. Vodyannoy’s, having accompanied him on previous trips up into the jungle.

Sicky was extremely tall for an Indian, with huge hands and enormous feet, and his arms, neck, and chest were covered with a variety of strange tattoos that he was more than happy to show John. All except the tattoo on his stomach. Sicky told John that he kept this particular tattoo hidden because, just like a Gorgon, it had the power to turn all living creatures to stone.

“Gee,” said John. “I’d like to know where that tattoo parlor is.”

“Many years ago, Mr. Vodyannoy gave me three wishes,” Sicky explained. “And that tattoo was one of the things I
wished for, so that I could always defeat my enemies even when I wasn’t armed.”

“Wow,” said John. “Do you have many enemies?”

Sicky smiled. “Not anymore.”

Otherwise, Sicky was kind, with a good sense of humor, very reliable, and scrupulously honest. It seemed he was also quite an accomplished sculptor. Or so the children thought. But chiefly Sicky was remarkable for the size of his head, which was no larger than a grapefruit or, for that matter, his own fist. John and Philippa tried to pretend Sicky’s was a perfectly normal-looking head, but this was difficult when Sicky was talking since his English wasn’t great, and they had to look closely at his lips to be sure of what he was saying. These lips were almost as strange as his head. The twins had seen body piercings before. There were plenty of weird people walking around New York with strange pieces of metal in their noses, ears, lips, and belly buttons. But Sicky was the first person they had ever seen with lengths of colored cotton cord sewn into his lips, like several Fu Manchu mustaches. And, for several hours at least, how he had come by these remained something of a compelling mystery.

The origin of his nickname was easier to understand, however. Every time someone asked Sicky a question like, “How are you today?” Sicky would always answer, “Not so good. I’m a little sick today.” Of course, the twins were much too polite to ask Sicky about his small head and unusually decorated lips. Zadie lacked their diplomacy and good
manners, however, and it eventually was she who blurted out the question that was on all of their minds.

This is how it happened: They were having dinner at Sicky’s wooden lodge in the village named Manu, on the edge of a palm-rimmed, sparkling oxbow lake where they were to spend their first night in the Peruvian Amazon. A delicious goat stew had been prepared by Sicky’s cook, Muddy, who was an excellent chef and a fine guitarist to boot. Zadie had drunk several glasses of something she had enjoyed so much that she had asked Sicky what it was and how it was made.

“It’s
chichai,
a sort of local beer invented by the Incas,” said Sicky.

“There’s nothing like a glass of decent beer,” said Groanin, and toasted Sicky happily.

“Adults like Mr. Groanin have alcoholic
chichai,”
Sicky told Zadie. “Which is called
chichai.
But Mr. Vodyannoy said to give you the zero-alcohol version, which is called
holy chichai,
so that is what you are drinking. It has all the taste of
chichai,
but without any of the alcohol. And zero calories, too. Of course, if you weren’t American kids, I’d have given you regular
chichai.
But Mr. Vodyannoy said —”

“Yes, I understand all that, of course,” said Zadie, interrupting him. “But what’s it made from? What’s in it?”

“Corn,” said Sicky. “Same as any other beer. And saliva. Human saliva.”

Zadie swallowed uncomfortably. “Excuse me, did you say human saliva?”

“Yes,” said Sicky. “Spit.” He picked up his empty glass and, gathering the cords in his lips to one side, dribbled copiously into it as if it might remove any doubts that still remained after his explanation. “Like this. Yes?”

“You’re joking,” she said.

“I’m afraid he’s not,” said Mr. Vodyannoy, lighting his pipe.

“I’m not joking,” said Sicky. “It’s a very old Inca recipe. Very old. Good, huh?”

Philippa smiled politely. “And do you buy the
chichai
in bottles?” she asked. “From a supermarket?”

“No, Muddy makes it himself,” said Sicky.

“So, let me get this straight.” John’s inquiry was sadistic and meant entirely for the effect it might have on Zadie and Groanin. “This
chichai
is homemade. Muddy makes it with his own spit, right, Muddy?”

Muddy stopped playing his guitar and, standing up, took a bow as if proud to acknowledge the true origin of the spit in the
chichai.
He wasn’t much taller than about five feet and, standing up, was no bigger than Sicky sitting down. But he had a big heart.

“My own spit, yes,” said Muddy, and spat into the bushes as if he was keen to add some further evidence to what he had alleged. “I like to spit. I can spit pretty good, too. I can spit maybe thirty feet and hit what I aim at.”

“There’s not a man in the whole of South America who spits better or more than Muddy,” said Sicky.

Groanin got up and left the table quietly.

“Oh, dear,” said Nimrod. “Poor Groanin. Perhaps I should have told him before he got the taste for it. He’s had several large glasses of the stuff.”

“Delicious,” said Mr. Vodyannoy, and drained his glass.

“Can we talk about something else?” said Zadie. She was clutching her stomach in horror and feeling too nauseous to follow the butler into the bushes, where he was already throwing up loudly.

But John wasn’t about to let this subject go. Not yet. “About how much of your own spit do you need, Sicky?” he asked. “To make, say, a gallon of this stuff.”

Sicky nodded and dribbled several mouthfuls of saliva into his empty glass. “About this much,” he said, holding up several inches of thick yellow saliva. “For the
chichai.
More for the
holy chichai.”

“Please, if you don’t mind, John,” said Zadie. “I really think we’ve heard enough.” And thinking John and Muddy would only be diverted from the disgusting subject of
chichai
if she provided another topic of conversation, she smiled brightly and said, “So, Sicky. How come your head’s so small? And how did you come by all these weird pieces of string in your lips? Did you sew them in yourself?”

Philippa gasped that anyone could ask such a direct question to such an obviously afflicted person. But Sicky didn’t mind. He was used to it.

“I am a Prozuanaci Indian,” said Sicky. “The Prozuanaci are old enemies of the Xuanaci Indians. The Xuanaci are plenty more savage, plenty more uncivilized than we are. The
country they inhabit is plenty inhospitable, too, with no tracks through very dense jungle, and they are seldom seen by anyone. Which is just as well. Anyway, plenty long time ago, when I wasn’t much older or bigger than the boy, I was captured by Xuanaci Indians. Except for my young age, they would have cut off my head as a war trophy. What they call a
tzantza.
Instead, to humiliate me and always make me be reminded of how they had captured me, they decided to shrink my head while it was still on my shoulders. Something that we Peruvians call
pernocabeza.”

“But surely that’s impossible,” said Philippa.

“Not for the Xuanaci. The Xuanaci know plenty things about taking and shrinking human heads as trophies. First of all, they tied me up tight and sucked the fat out of my face with little straws. Then they shaved my head and painted it with special oil from a rare plant that grows only in the Amazon, and which is known only to the Xuanaci. Then they made me lie with my head in a bucket of other secret herbs and hot sand for many weeks, drying it out before painting it again with the special oil, and drying it once more. And always they kept sucking the fat from my face.”

“Kind of like liposuction,” said John. “I get it.”

“This happened plenty of times,” said Sicky. “And all the time my body was growing, my head was shrinking. Of course, I would have cried out for help. Because my own people were looking for me. And to prevent this, the Xuanaci sewed my lips together with these cords that you see I still wear.”

“What happened next?” asked John, who was fascinated by Sicky’s story. “Did they let you go?”

“When my head was plenty small they held a special
pernocabeza
— a feast at which I was the guest of honor. They gave me a drink that contained all of the fat drained from my own head.”

“And did you drink it?”

“Of course. If I had refused, they would have killed me for sure. This fat made my body much bigger than it would have been, and which made my head seem much smaller, too.”