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Lewa gave her an incredulous stare. “Gogo, it is not like you to allow an amulet to get so low in magic...” Her voice trailed off and her eyes widened. Gogo Maya would not do that.

Gogo Maya nodded. “The amulet was fine. The boy had the power to drain it.”
 

“You got Salih to stay with the boy?” Lewa asked, her frown deepening.

“Better still, I persuaded the boy to come to us. Once I showed him the switched boy in a scry, he agreed to come and rescue him. We saw the other boy with that tiger, Hajiri, who lives with the Almohad. There were a couple of questionable crocodiles living at the place where we switched to. They offered to show the boy with the power the way into Karibu through some caves under the forest. They claim the Sobek are real.” She shook her head. “I never would have believed it. It must be like living in a hurricane down there! Salih is coming with them to keep an eye on the boy, of course.”

“Them?” Lewa asked.

“Er... he has friends. Two,” Gogo Maya said.
 

The girl looked excited. Gleeful even. “Tacari is going to be so mad,” she beamed, helping Gogo Maya to her feet.

“What’s a Sobek?” Aaron asked, tentatively offering Gogo Maya an arm. Just to be gentlemanly, his expression told her, nothing to do with weakness. “And I thought Tacari’s opening was the only entrance to Karibu.”

“Sobek are gods that live under the forest. We don’t know much about them but we know there is water under there because it squirts into the valley,” Lewa told him.
 

She glanced in the direction of the branches and spoke directly at the little spirits. “The Nomatotlo can ask Rafiki the Tokoloshe to find a way down to the waterfall and look for the boys who come from beyond. Then they can see if the boy who switched with Gogo Maya is in Almoh. And they must find out who attacked her.” She patted Gogo Maya kindly on the arm, and then, not finding that expressive enough, hugged her.
 

“Are we going to Almoh then?” Aaron said. “I am dying to go to Almoh. I am told it is breathtakingly beautiful.”
 

“You won’t think it’s so beautiful if they capture you and make you stay there,” Lewa said impatiently. “All that magic spent making themselves beautiful has sucked the empathy right out of them. In any case, first we have to get Gogo Maya home. She is exhausted from her ordeal.”
 

Ethan stood just outside the camp, trying to brush his teeth without spilling the carefully sprinkled salt off the brush. He rinsed his mouth with water from a tin that had been converted into a mug. Jimoh would not allow anyone to use toothpaste, saying animals could pick up the scent for miles around. Ethan felt strangely energised, despite the terrible night that he’d had recovering from the bloodletting.

Jimoh crouched over a rock hyrax that Salih had brought in the night before. He was trying to gut and skin it without dirtying his new clothes.
 

“I don’t know, Ethan,” he said with a wry smile when he felt Ethan’s eye on him. He stood up and turned around, inspecting the designer combat trousers and camouflage T-shirt Ethan had given him to wear the night before. “Is too fancy for bush. Feels like uniform for school.”

“Well, you’re going to have to wear it now,” Ethan laughed. “There’s nothing left of your shorts after those rapids, and you would have had to take off your red shirt sooner or later. It was too bright for the bush.”
 

Not to be outdone, Tariro had given Fisi a pair of board-shorts and a T-shirt in his blue school colours, so the two boys looked like a team as they wandered up from the hippopotamus pool, laughing and bantering in the early morning mist.
 

“I don’t know how he puts up with the smell,” Ethan joked with Jimoh, jerking his head in the direction of Fisi and Tariro.
 

Jimoh’s eyes twinkled. “Tariro, he take hyena boy down to river this morning and give him good wash with soap.” He shook his head and tsk-tsked.
 

“Was Fisi okay with that?” Ethan was surprised. He’d seen his cousins wash their dog once, with disastrous results. He wondered how much of the youth’s hyena personality lingered. Fisi cleaned up really nicely, even with his strange hair, but he still kept scratching his groin and sniffing at things.

“Oh yes, he love this thing,” Jimoh wrinkled his nose, “but now they both smell like lady.”
 

Fisi pulled a pebble back on the inner tube bands of Ethan’s slingshot, and let it fly towards them.
 

“Eh!” yelled Jimoh, diving to the ground besides Ethan. “Fisi, you must not shoot at your friends!” But the pebble whizzed over their heads, hitting a soft custard apple, which exploded in a mess all over Jimoh’s sleeping bag.

Fisi gave them an enigmatic smile, which made Ethan wonder how sharp the youth’s hearing was. Perhaps he’d heard Jimoh say he smelled like a lady.

Ethan still felt a stab of regret at the loss of the slingshot, and not least because Fisi had proved to be a much better shot than himself. It was odd how Fisi had inveigled it from him. He had woken up to find the hyena youth gazing at him and it had occurred to him what a great idea it would be to lend him the slingshot Tafadzwa had given him. Then, as Fisi wandered away with it, his feeling of generosity had faded to be replaced by a vague feeling of having been had. He’d tried to coax Fisi into giving it back as he had done with Jimoh’s hat, but it hadn’t worked.

Everyone except Ethan ate the rock hyrax and then broke camp. By mid-morning they floated swiftly through another narrow gorge. Sheer jagged cliffs towered above them, casting a shadow over the water, but even in the shade the heat was oppressive. Ethan lounged on the one remaining large tractor tube, which he shared with Salih and Jimoh. Tariro and Fisi drifted behind Amun on two smaller tubes. From time to time, when they thought no one was looking, one of them would haul the supply tube towards himself and pinch a sweet from the tin. Ethan couldn’t decide which one was a worse influence on the other.

Tariro had picked a couple of horned cucumbers off a vine before they set out, which the two boys threw back and forth between them like rugby balls. It had taken Fisi a couple of moments to understand the concept, and a couple of smashed cucumbers, but once he caught on, he was as good a throwing buddy for Tariro as Joe had ever been.

After cutting his new designer trousers into shorts using the scissor attachment on Ethan’s Swiss Army knife and stashing the discarded legs in a safe place for some undetermined use later, Jimoh nestled down into the tube and busied himself cutting the damaged tractor tube into strips to make Fisi his own slingshot. Ethan smiled at him, shaking his head. The Italian clothing designer would have a fit if he saw his precious work of art slashed in this way, but somehow it seemed the right thing to do. Ethan thought he might cut up his own pants if he could wrestle the knife away from Jimoh long enough to do it. Jimoh sure loved that knife. Not that he felt coerced in any way, as he had been by Fisi and the slingshot, but Ethan would let Jimoh keep the knife if they ever got home again. He was sure his step-dad would understand.
 

Ethan fanned himself with his hat, squinting into the sun. The general heat of the day seemed to be gradually expanding through his body and then, oddly, it passed. He realised that the feeling had not, in fact, been warmth, but a vague feeling of excitement. Since there was nothing exciting about his own set of circumstances, he looked at Salih, wondering if the leopard was somehow making him feel that way, but the leopard lay half-asleep beside Jimoh as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

Salih’s ears pricked up when he read Ethan’s confusion, though. “You can feel it?” Something that might have been shock flashed across his face before he went on in a lazy drawl, “It’s the crocodiles – I imagine it’s because we are close to their home. When we get there I think they might change.”

“Do you mean like Fisi did?”
 

“I’m not sure. The crocodiles are Sobek. All I know about them is what these two have told me, and of course, the legends of the forest. Not that you should believe any of those legends. With everyone wanting to scare everyone else out of the forest, half those stories are made up.”
 

Ethan reached into the far recesses of his memories of history lessons at school but could not remember anything about Sobek beyond the fact that they were Egyptian gods with the body of a man and the head of a crocodile. The way things were going, the world had got that wrong too, he supposed, but he wondered if Amun and Darwishi would look like that if they changed.

Salih looked as if he was settling down for another doze, but Ethan wanted answers. He prodded Salih in the shoulder, and then trailed his hand in the water to clean it. “Is that why nobody from our world knows about Karibu? Have they been frightened off by the legends?”
 

“I suppose so.” Salih did not bristle at Ethan’s touch like he did when Tariro stroked him; he relaxed, arching his back as he stood up to stretch, rocking the tube in the water. “Also, the ring of mountains between the Karibu rift valley and the outside are rugged and dangerous to cross.” The leopard gestured towards Jimoh. “Some people have known all along, I think, but it seems they don’t want to admit it.”

Jimoh was not the type to actually lie about anything, but Ethan supposed it was fairly likely Jimoh’s people knew something about Karibu. They had been far too willing to accept the witch at face value.
 

“So how big is Karibu? The part you do know,” Ethan said to change the subject.
 

Frowning, Salih considered that for a while. “It would take a full moon cycle for a man to journey from one end to the other and perhaps a little less than half a moon cycle to travel from side to side.”
 

“Oh... So how are we going to find Joe if it is so huge?” Ethan was beginning to realise their journey was going to be a lot longer than he had imagined. Certainly longer than the week they had planned to spend at Crystal Pool. He wondered how long it would be before his family came looking for them.

“Gogo Maya has ways to find the boy wherever the tiger takes him,” Salih reassured him.

“The tiger is going to hurt him, I saw it in the scry,” Ethan said, remembering his cousin asleep against the tiger, and the sudden flash of his cut face.

“No, I’m sure what you saw was just Gogo Maya, worrying. Hajiri is a kindly cat.” Salih put a soothing paw on Ethan’s arm and considered him through half-open eyes. “I am more concerned with where he is taking the boy,” he said. “The people Hajiri lives with, the Almohad, are very strange. They imagine they own everyone in Karibu and gamble and trade freely with them as if they were livestock. If they get hold of the boy it may be hard to persuade them to give him back without some sort of a trade. We need to get there quickly too. Before they persuade him he does not want to leave.”

“Can’t your Gogo Maya do something to get him from the tiger, or from the Almohad?” Ethan said, wondering what the Almohad could possibly offer Joe that would keep him from wanting to come home to his family.

“She would have if she had not been drained of all her power,” Salih said with a meaningful sigh. “She has ways to replenish it, but the source of Gogo Maya’s magic is a little... shall we say... dubious sometimes, so she will not wish to get help from the other witches. It will take time for her to build enough power to take on the Almohad.” Salih stretched luxuriously and settled down once more beside Jimoh. “Don’t worry, Ethan, I am impervious to their beguiling ways, and I think perhaps you are too, now that you have her power. Between us we will think of something.”

Ethan was not so sure he was impervious to anything of the sort. Fisi had been able to charm his slingshot out of him. On the other hand, he was sure he had somehow made Fisi give back Jimoh’s hat. There was definitely something strange going on inside himself.

“Does the power I drained from Gogo Maya have anything to do with the hippo not attacking me?” he said to Salih.

“Maybe...”

~~~

It did not look as if he were going to get any more information out of the leopard, so Ethan turned his attention to a fish eagle. It swooped down from its great height and plunged into the water not far from where they floated, then came up with a wriggling fish caught between its talons. Ethan took a long contemplative breath, closed his eyes and concentrated on the bird. He held his breath until a wave of giddiness washed over him.
 

“Drop the fish,” he commanded the fish eagle. In his imagination he had a low bass voice.

“Yewk, yewk,” it cried in triumph, ignoring him completely. It soared back up to its perch on a branch jutting out of the steep cliffs.
 

“Yep! Not really charming anything from anybody here,” Ethan said out loud.

“Be careful with that power,” Salih said with an amused expression. “There are always consequences.” He turned to look upriver. The distance between the cliffs grew narrower, and soon, a dark cave mouth yawned before them, wide, with a low ceiling. They drifted inexorably toward it on the powerful current.

Before Ethan had time to fumble in his backpack for his headlight, the tube they were floating on rushed down a four-foot incline and then drifted sedately down a long dark tunnel. He wished he could feel the sides of the tunnel to gauge how far or how fast they were going, but he was afraid he might touch a spider or something slimy. Once, they drifted beneath a small underground waterfall and Ethan got drenched.
 

Ghostly lights gradually began to play on the surface of the inky black water, and then, without warning, the entire flotilla went flying through the air. Ethan struggled to right himself before plunging feet first into an indigo pool. Swimming towards a shelf at the entrance of a small tunnel just above the water line, he belly-slid himself up and sat there scanning the water anxiously for his friends. Salih was the first to surface, followed by Jimoh and then the two other boys. Tariro came up screaming and swam towards Ethan in a panic.