THE ORCHARD
The air is so hot I am already sweating when my body wakes me up. It feels as though I’m breathing through steam. The sky is that same flat grey as yesterday, and there is no sign of the sun just yet.
The rains are coming very soon. I hope we get to Culion Town before they arrive, but you can never tell. Sometimes they come on blue days, the cloud sweeping over like a tide and opening in a great rush of water that soaks the ground so fast our houses flood before we can build dams, or lay down sand or rushes. Other times they fill the sky so thick and heavy with clouds you think it will fall like a blanket, but instead the rain comes a little at a time, as though it might change its mind at any moment and be sucked back into the sky.
There is no jackfruit for breakfast so Mari hands out the last of Luko’s oranges.
‘I never want to eat another orange again,’ I say, pocketing mine. Mari grins and chomps hers. Her obsession with oranges is a little worrying.
She makes a half-hearted attempt at luring another fish but they are all full from a night of feeding and wary in the morning light. We fill our bellies with water and begin walking. The trees are closing in closer to the bank, so we weave between them, Kidlat trying to skip and giggling when he stumbles. It is good to see him unafraid.
My stomach begins cramping after a couple of hours, and after another hour Kidlat tugs on Mari’s hand, gesturing for food. Though we scan the trees for fruit and the ground for roots, all I can see is a thicket of thorny acacia that catch at our tunics and arms. We don’t break any branches though, because diwatas live in acacias. They are the trees’ guardian spirits who do harm to those who harm their home. When Nanay told me about them I imagined beautiful women a foot high, draped over branches in orange silk. Now, seeing how sharp the thorns are, all I can think is that the gods must have very thick skin.
A strange smell fills the air as we walk: sweet, cloying and slightly rotten. If I breathe it in too deeply my head spins and my teeth ache. It is not entirely unpleasant but Mari covers her nose with her tunic. Around a long bend of the river we see something that makes both Mari and me pull up short. Kidlat, walking slightly behind by now, steps on the back of my foot but I barely notice.
Before us is a sudden clearing, the ground covered by a thick, beautiful carpet of green and black and gold. It spreads either side of the river, which is narrower now and flowing faster, so we must be nearing its source. The threads catch the light and glisten in the high sun. The smell is stronger than ever and I feel my head spinning, my body slow, a bit like how Bondoc described being drunk. Mari swings out an arm before I can step forward.
‘What are you doing?’ she hisses through her tunic.
I look down at the carpet, except it isn’t a carpet any more. I stumble backwards, gasping. Kidlat tries to move out of the way but I trip over him and we collapse in a heap.
A tide of flies and wasps rises from the ground before us, no longer glimmering threads of black and gold, but blur-winged, bulbous-eyed and buzzing. The orange and green colours of the carpet are many fallen mangoes in various states of decay, the smell pungent and sickening. The insects flick across the clearing, disturbed by our presence, before settling again, like a net thrown over the rotting fruit. I see the scuttle of rats. The heat and smell are making me nauseous.
Mari laughs at my stricken face. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
I feel my face prickle with embarrassment. I don’t want to tell her what I thought it was. I shrug, and laugh hollowly. Kidlat has wriggled out from under me.
‘Yuck.’
We both jump and look at him.
‘What did you say, Kidlat?’ I ask, tentatively.
‘Yuck. Flies, yuck.’
They are the first words he’s said in front of us, and Mari snorts with laughter. ‘Well said, Kidlat!’
‘So you can speak,’ I exclaim, but Kidlat only shrugs an of course. I shake my head wonderingly.
‘An excellent choice of first word.’ Mari grins and points to the edge of the clearing. ‘We’ll need to walk around. You may enjoy the feeling of rotten fruit and flies underfoot, but I don’t.’ She tosses this over her shoulder at me, already striding away.
I take Kidlat’s hand and we follow her.
‘This must be the mango grove we passed on the way here,’ I say to him, the idea just occurring to me. This is near where Mr Zamora dropped the butterflies, and where Datu picked the rotten fruit. I wonder what the children back at the orphanage think of our running away. If they think of us at all. ‘We’re nearly home.’
‘Home,’ Kidlat says, seriously. ‘Your nanay.’
‘Yes.’ My face stretches in such a big smile I feel it might crack. His voice is clear and sweet. I feel a rush of warmth as he looks up at me, smiling so wide his whole face stretches. Only Nanay has ever made me feel like this before: like a person could be home and safety and everything that mattered. A universe, just like Nanay said Ama was to her.
‘And my nanay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ami! Kidlat!’ Mari’s voice is joyful. ‘Look!’
She is out of sight. We fight through a thick tangle of acacia, planted – I realize now – to protect the fruit from thieves and trespassers like us. We reach her.
‘Look!’ she says again, and Kidlat runs forward into the lines of trees ahead of us, laughing happily. The clearing was only the start of the fruit farm. This grove is full of pitaya, dragon fruit with their bright pink and green frills only just ripening beneath the canopies of spiny green. Kidlat slices one open across the sharp leaves and runs back to us.
‘Hands,’ he says. We dutifully hold out our palms. He rips the dragon fruit apart and turns the skin inside out so that the fruit drops out, the flesh white and seeded. ‘Eat.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ says Mari, slipping into another low bow. He laughs and goes to fetch more. The fruit is lightly scented, a welcome change from the rotting mangoes, and tastes sweet and clean. After three more my hunger begins to fade, falling to a low ache in the pit of my stomach.
‘What a place,’ says Mari, lying back and stretching like a cat wanting its belly stroked.
‘We’re so close, Mari,’ I say, too excited to lie down. ‘This grove, we passed it on the way. A few miles, I reckon. Maybe three—’
‘Must’ve been abandoned a while, judging by those mangoes.’
‘Mmm. Did you hear me?’
‘It’s a shame, all this waste. And it’s so beautiful.’ She sits up suddenly. ‘Ami,’ she says in a low voice, her irises golden, her gaze fixed on me. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘What?’
Her face is smiling but there is something uncertain in her expression, as if she is nervous or unsure. But of course Mari is never nervous, and definitely never unsure.
‘After we get back to Culion Town, and after whatever comes next, can we go back to the forest? Not this forest, necessarily,’ she adds, waving around her. ‘But somewhere with trees and flowers and fruit and a river?’
‘Why?’
She frowns. ‘Because it’s beautiful. And I like being here – if it weren’t for why we’re here in the first place.’
The thought drops a stone into my chest, because ‘after’ somehow seems sad, or scary. After whatever comes next. I don’t like most of the options for what is coming next. Mari lies back down.
‘Forget it,’ she says sharply, as though we’d argued. I open my mouth without knowing what I’m about to say when we hear Kidlat screech. Mari reacts quicker, already up and running by the time I am on my feet, disappearing out of sight through the grove.
I round a line of trees and see Mari holding Kidlat to her.
‘What is it?’ I pant. ‘Not a snake?’ I scan the ground around them.
‘No,’ says Mari, and her voice is strange, mesmeric. ‘Ami, look up.’
I crane my neck back. The branches are burning.
It is just like the orphanage fire: the trees flickering gold and red and brown, but there is no heat. I blink stupidly, trying to stop my mind tricking me, like it did with the rotten fruit, trying to see this for what it really is. Some of the flames resolve themselves into flowers, but the others shift and flutter like leaves, and it takes me a long moment to make shapes I recognize out of them. The branches are not covered in flames . . .
They’re wings.
My mind flicks to diwatas, but then Mari claps and they lift in a great swell, not fast and angry like the flies, but like birds, swooping as if through water.
‘Mariposa,’ she says in the same, wondering voice.
And now I can see them clearly for what they are: the colours patterning each wing, the black bodies, some large, some small, and all of them shifting like breath across the clearing. Butterflies. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them, coasting on the air like a visible, fluttering wind. I wonder if Nanay and Ama’s gumamela flowers had brought so many.
‘I—’ I want to say it’s beautiful but the word feels silly and flimsy in my mouth. If beauty had a colour, had a shape or a taste, or a smell, it would be the colour, shape, smell and taste of this moment. Exactly this.
Mari’s hand slides into mine and we watch as the butter-flies glide over our heads, twirling around the flowers and fruit, dipping so low I could reach out and brush their wings. Some hang in drips from branches, like oil thinking of dropping off a spoon. In the lower branches, at eye-height, are endless rows of chrysalises. Some are green, some brown, but most are transparent. Showing through some of them are wings, but most of them are empty, leaving only filmy, cylindrical twists.
I walk away, dropping Mari’s hand. The trees, I realize now, are flame trees. Their flowers are red and splashed across the branches, showing through the coat of brown and yellow and blue. It is late for them to be flowering, so close to the rains. One miraculous thing follows another in this forest. A lump rises in my throat. Nanay loves butterflies and it’s she who brought me through this forest to this fruit farm. I want to stand there for ever, and it is beginning to feel as if we will when Mari breaks the whispering silence.
‘Come on,’ she says, shaking off the trance. ‘We’re so close. We shouldn’t stop now.’
I nod. The butterflies have lifted at her voice and are swirling again. They rise off the eddy of the air like leaves shedding water, wings shining.
We turn away slowly, my heart dropping with every step. But when we walk on through the trees, there are more, hanging from fruit and from each other, and taking flight as we walk past until a flock is beating its way above our heads. Anything else in this number would be frightening, but I am learning that it is impossible to be scared of butterflies.
We rejoin the river on the far side of the rotten mango grove, and again the road is visible from the bank. We are so close now. With our escort of wings above us, around us, we walk through the butterfly forest. Before I’ve noticed the time passing or the distance closing, we are in front of the small, rocky escarpment that marks the outer boundary of the town. The water slides beneath it, but we have to climb.
We crawl, keeping our bodies close to the rocks, and lie on our bellies to peer over the top. Buildings come into sight – the backs of houses and the low-slung shadow of a fence. There were never houses this close to the forest before. I’m not sure how we are going to get to the hospital without being noticed. I can hear Touched children laughing from the gardens ahead as the butterflies swoop around them. Culion is swarming with them. I hope Nanay has seen them.
I feel something light brush my face, and a large blue-and-white butterfly lands neatly on the back of my hand. It opens and closes its wings once, twice.
‘Ami.’ Mari says my name slowly. ‘Don’t move.’
‘I know,’ I breathe. ‘It’s amazing.’
‘No.’ Her voice is tight, a coiled spring. ‘Don’t. Move.’
Then I feel something else. A weight on my leg, moving across my calves. Slithering. My body tenses.
‘Don’t move!’ Mari breathes.
I try to remember what Nanay told me about snakes. A hundred different kinds and only ten that are poisonous. The weight is shifting up my thigh, and I try not to shudder as I feel it cross my lower back. My insides are locked in a silent scream. They won’t do harm unless you do harm, like diwatas. Up the flat of my back now, and though it is impossible, I imagine I can feel the tongue flicking out across my back.
Mari has moved silently beside me to grab a large stone. I can see her hand from the corner of my eye, white-knuckled and shaking. Only ten poisonous. More scared of you than you are of it. The snake is nearing my shoulders. I wonder if I can move fast enough to flick it off before it has a chance to strike. I should have kicked it off my leg. I focus on the butterfly, its wings opening a third time, a fourth, the eye at the centre of each shimmering on each beat.
The snake is over my shoulder, and it is all I can do to stop myself turning to look at it. I can see its head in my peripheral vision – a spade-like triangle. Through my panic comes a memory of a snake cornered in the kitchen, ready to strike. A temple viper, said Nanay, opening the back door wide and leading me out of the house. Never anger it, best to leave it to find its own way out. The tongue flicks. Never anger it.
Definitely poisonous. A chill descends my spine, although I am sweating in the heat. I can see Mari’s hand clenching the stone tighter and suddenly the butterfly is lifting off my hand with a soft kiss of pressure and the snake strikes at it, fangs bared, piercing my skin.
A boiling brand burns down to my bones. And then Mari’s stone comes smashing on top of it and Kidlat is screaming and just before I fade into the pain I think how Nanay always kissed me better if I hurt myself, and how everything is the wrong way round.