CHAPTER TWO: WHISPERS IN THE CANOPY

The first week taught Arthur that he knew nothing about survival.

He had considered himself a practical man, educated in navigation and commerce, familiar with the working of ships and the handling of men. These skills meant nothing in the jungle. He could calculate his position by the stars, but the stars were hidden behind a perpetual canopy of green. He could negotiate a trade deal in three languages, but there was no one to trade with. He could tie a dozen different knots, but knots did not catch fish or start fires or keep the rain off his skin.

He learned by failing. The first fire he attempted took four hours and consumed most of his remaining eyebrows. The first fish he caught—a small, silvery thing from a tidal pool—he ate raw because he could not get his damp tinder to catch. The first night he spent in his lean-to, a creature with too many legs crawled across his face, and he discovered that he could scream like a child after all.

But he learned. By the end of the first week, he could start a fire in under an hour. By the end of the second, he had figured out how to weave palm fronds into a more substantial shelter, one that kept out most of the rain and some of the creatures. He had found a grove of fruit trees that did not seem to poison him and a freshwater pool that did not give him the flux.

He had also found the carvings.

They were everywhere, once he started looking. On the trunks of the largest trees, someone had carved symbols—spirals and curves and stylized shapes that might have been eyes or might have been something else entirely. He found wooden totems tucked into the crooks of branches, crude figures carved from driftwood and hung with feathers and shells. Most of them depicted serpents. Coiled serpents. Striking serpents. Serpents with their jaws open wide, revealing rows of sharp teeth carved from thorns or fish bones.

Arthur touched one of the totems, and a chill ran down his spine. The wood was old, weathered by sun and rain, but the carving was fresh—sharp edges, not yet softened by time. Someone had placed this here recently. Someone was still here.

He began to sleep with his knife in his hand.

The second week brought new discoveries, most of them unwelcome. He found the ruins on the third day of his inland explorations—stones, great blocks of black basalt, arranged in patterns that suggested walls and doorways and something that might have been an altar. The jungle had claimed most of it, trees growing up through the center of what might once have been a courtyard, but enough remained to tell him that this place had been built by human hands. Skilled hands, too. The stones fit together with a precision he had not expected from savages.

Serpents coiled around every surface. They were carved into the stone, painted onto fragments of pottery, woven into scraps of cloth that crumbled at his touch. Some of the serpents had human faces. Some of the humans had serpent bodies. Arthur stared at a particular carving—a woman with snakes for hair, her arms raised as if in blessing or curse—and felt the world tilt slightly beneath his feet.

He was not in a place that welcomed English reason.

The traps began on the tenth day.

The first was a simple pit, cleverly concealed with woven branches and leaves. Arthur’s foot went through the covering, and he threw himself backward just in time, his heart in his throat as he peered down into the darkness below. The pit was shallow—only about six feet deep—but the bottom was lined with sharpened stakes, their tips blackened with what he hoped was old sap and not something worse.

After that, he walked more carefully. He watched the ground for signs of disturbance. He listened for the whisper of rope against wood, the click of a trigger mechanism, the subtle shift of leaves that should not have been there. The traps were everywhere—snares that would hoist a man into the air, deadfalls that would crush him flat, nets that would drop from above and leave him dangling like a caught fish.

He avoided most of them. Not all. On the twelfth day, a snare caught his ankle, and he spent a humiliating hour hanging upside down from a tree branch, sawing at the rope with his knife while something large and unseen rustled in the undergrowth below him. He got free eventually, but he did not sleep well that night.

He saw his first Serpent-Kin on the fourteenth day.

It was only a glimpse—a figure in the undergrowth, half-hidden by the green. But Arthur saw enough. The figure was human, or close enough, with dark skin painted in swirling patterns of white and red. It wore a headdress of feathers and something that might have been a serpent’s skull, and it carried a spear tipped with what looked like bone. Their eyes met for just a moment—Arthur’s wide and frightened, the figure’s dark and unreadable—and then the figure was gone, melted back into the jungle as if it had never been.

Arthur ran. He did not know where he was running to, only that he needed to put distance between himself and those watching eyes. He crashed through the undergrowth, ignoring the branches that whipped at his face and the thorns that tore at his clothes, until his lungs burned and his legs gave out. He collapsed at the base of a great tree, gasping, and waited for the spears to come.

They did not come.

When his breathing had steadied, Arthur looked around and realized he had no idea where he was. The jungle looked the same in every direction—dense, green, impenetrable. The sun was overhead, offering no hint of east or west. He had been running for perhaps ten minutes, but he had been walking in circles for days. He could be anywhere.

He sat very still and tried to think. The figure had not attacked him. It had watched him, yes, but it had not thrown its spear or raised an alarm. Perhaps it had been a scout, gathering information before reporting back to its people. Perhaps it had been alone, as lost in these woods as Arthur was. Perhaps it had simply been curious.

Or perhaps it had been herding him, driving him away from something the tribe considered sacred.

Arthur looked around again, seeing the jungle with new eyes. The trees here were older than the ones near the beach, their trunks thicker, their roots deeper. Vines hung down like curtains, and the air was thick with the scent of flowers he could not see. The ground beneath him was soft with centuries of fallen leaves, and when he pressed his palm against it, he felt a faint vibration, like the hum of a distant hive.

He had stumbled into somewhere important. He could feel it in his bones.

He stood up slowly, turned in a careful circle, and began to walk back the way he had come. He would find the beach again. He would find his shelter and his freshwater pool. He would survive, because that was what Englishmen did. They survived. They adapted. They bent the wild places to their will.

But even as he thought it, he knew it was a lie. This place would not bend. This place would break him, or he would learn to move with it, to become part of its rhythms and patterns. There was no third option.

The drums began again at dusk, closer this time, and Arthur sat by his fire and listened to them until his eyes grew heavy. He had stopped being afraid of the drums, or perhaps he was simply too tired for fear. They were a fact of life on this island, like the heat and the rain and the creeping things that shared his shelter. He did not understand them, but he no longer needed to.

He only needed to survive.

The drums played on, and Arthur slept.