I WALKED FOR HOURS. The jungle rose around me like a fortress of tree and stone. Through the canopy breaks I glimpsed the volcano’s ever-present plume of smoke drifting up, up, into the sky.
After a while, I detected the smell of a campfire. It wove into my hair and clothes, pulling me forward until I heard a faint hammering noise. The trees opened ahead into a clearing. I pushed aside the high grass and found myself on the edge of a village.
I immediately covered my nose. The smell of smoke only thinly covered an overpowering stench of rotting food and dirty animals. A few sloppy thatched huts sat at the village’s edge, with dirt paths running between them. Big, ugly rats dug through piles of decaying food. One hissed as I passed.
I peeked inside a hut’s doorway and glimpsed a few signs of life: a wooden branch shaped into a plow, a tattered cloth pooled in a corner, shriveled onions drying in the rafters.
The pounding began again, making me jump. It wasn’t hammering, I realized, but drumming. As I moved closer, I heard chatter and grunts. One droning voice rose above the rest.
I wasn’t sure if I should hide or show myself. I didn’t trust the islanders, but at least these lived some semblance of normal life in a village, not like Jaguar. I slunk along the next path until I could glimpse the village center. Dozens of islanders clustered, feet kicking clouds of dirt, hands swaying in the air. Most were dressed like Jaguar, in ragged blue canvas, though some women wore faded cloths wrapped around them. They all moved with stilted steps and hunched shoulders.
Seeing so many—a whole village—made it seem inconceivable that my father had actually made them. I couldn’t deny they were unnatural. But to fabricate something as complex as a man who spoke and danced and dressed in trousers … it was impossible.
The crowd parted slightly. In their midst stood a tall man with a powerful set of elk antlers growing out of his tawny-colored hair. My mouth fell open. The odd tusk or horn on the other creatures looked malformed, but this being’s antlers looked perfectly suited to him as he held his head and arms high, blood-red robes dragging in the dirt. He was the chanter. His voice droned like beetles. At his side was a boy no higher than my waist. It was Cymbeline, though the wilderness had robbed him of his sweetness. His eyes locked on to me and he pointed.
They all turned. Their faces were things of nightmares. One of them, I thought, might even be a murderer.
Run, my body urged, but it was too late. They had already swarmed me, dirty hands reaching for my hair and pulling at my clothes. They dragged me into their midst. The antlered man raised his staff, silencing their wild chatter.
“Her hand,” he commanded.
Beside me was a slanting-eyed, bald woman with oddly translucent skin that seemed to reflect sunlight. She splayed my hand with four smooth, strong fingers. I tried to jerk away, repulsed.
“A five-finger woman,” he said.
The woman hissed, revealing a snake’s forked tongue. A python, I thought. That’s where I’d seen that skin before. The boar-faced man beside her was also missing one digit on each finger, as were the two dingy boys who pulled at my skirt. Everyone was, except the tall man in the robes whose five fingers were long and stiff and covered in a thick, coarse hair.
“A five-finger woman!” he bellowed, and the crowd pressed closer. Their sour breaths turned my stomach. My illness grappled at me, making me weak, knotting my insides.
“Who are you?” I asked the robed man.
“He is Caesar,” the python-woman hissed, petting my sleeve with strong fingers.
The crowd repeated the word, rolling it like thunder.
Caesar. Caesar. Caesar.
The antlered man brought down his staff. The sharp points of his antlers gleamed in the sunlight. “I am Caesar,” he said. “Minister of the island.”
A beast posing as a religious man. It was as absurd as the commandments that Balthazar had chanted on the ship. Montgomery had refused to tell me what they meant, and now I understood why. I’d have thought him mad.
“Where have you come from, five-finger?” he asked.
There was something too human about his dark-brown eyes. “England,” I said.
The crowd parroted the word, but it sounded foreign on their tongues.
“Across the sea,” Caesar explained. The crowd murmured and nodded, but still seemed vaguely confused.
“You come with the other one.” Caesar nodded to the boar-faced man. “Bring the five-finger man.”
I strained to see above the bobbing heads as he disappeared into the crowd. The python-woman eagerly petted the smooth skin of my arms, her fingers tickling my skin. Another woman slid forward, reaching for my ring, but the python-woman snapped at her. She grinned at me as though she and I were both in a higher class than the others.
The crowd started yapping as the boar-faced man returned. He shoved a scraped and dirty body at my feet.
“Edward!” I dropped to my knees. He sat up, a hand to his head where a small cut bled. “Are you all right?”
He nodded, throwing a wary look at the boar-faced man. He wiped the dried blood off his forehead with his shirt cuff. “As well as can be.” He spit a bloody line of saliva into the dirt. “They grabbed me by the falls. Your father’s behind this. They think he’s some kind of god.”
The crowd grew more agitated. They circled us, leaning in, watching our every move. Cymbeline and the two other boys dropped to all fours, crawling closer, but Caesar pointed his staff at them.
“Thou shalt not crawl in the dirt!”
The boys shrank back and stumbled to their feet.
I pushed myself up, but Edward pulled me closer, just for a second. “Whatever happens, stay close.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, a shadow was cast over his face. The crowd suddenly grew quiet. I spun to find the face of a different kind of beast peering at us, a fresh white parasol balanced on his shoulder.