The Cannibals Page 3

  “What are they up to?” I asked Midge. “Do you think they saw us? Do you think they know we're here?”

  “Not a chance,” said Midgely. “But even if they did, what does it matter?”

  The wind kept rising as the sky grew dark. I looked out to the north, hoping to see the island we would have to reach, or at least the breakers on its shore. But there was not so much as a speck of land, and soon we were fully in darkness. The wind hummed; the maintop tilted as the brig bounded through the waves.

  The air took on a hot tingle. Far away, lightning flashed and sizzled. Then the wind rose again, and a rain came driving down. It streamed from the sails above us, soaking the wood and soaking my clothes. The top became as slick as ice.

  “Can you see the longboat?” Midgely asked. “Are they hauling it in?”

  I turned around and peered from the back of the maintop. Lightning glared more closely, and I saw the helmsman at the wheel. I saw the longboat still behind us. Then the wind made a sudden shriek. The masts tilted far to the side, and I slithered across the wet top until my feet overhung the edge. We both held on—to the top and to each other—so that neither of us would go spinning off into the night.

  Bolts of lightning smoked across the sky. I saw the sails glow with a pure whiteness, the rigging etched in silver. I saw a wave towering over the deck. Below me—in one instant—was only wild and boiling water, and in the next a shattered pile of wood. The stacks of lumber were breaking apart.

  Then I saw Walter Weedle. I saw Carrots and Boggis, Benjamin Penny and Early Discall. Clasping hands, they stood in a human chain that stretched to the side of the ship. Weedle was anchored at the rail. Then the lightning seared again, and all of them were gone.

  I thought they were lost. The truth was slow to sink in, but it did. I shouted at Midge, “They're taking the boat!”

  I shifted around on the tilted top. Far behind and far below, I saw a feather of white spray where the longboat scythed back and forth on its towline.

  What happened next I couldn't say. I knew only that Midgely was falling, that he'd somehow lost his balance. He slid past me and shot right over the edge. I grabbed his arm and clutched the shrouds, ready to take the shock of his weight. But it was too much, and it tore me from the rigging. We tumbled together, down past the mainsail and into the sea.

  My canvas clothes buoyed me up. Bulges of air in the trousers and sleeves bobbed me to the surface. Midge was there, his hand still in mine. Waves tumbled over us, and spray stung our faces. As the ship sailed past, I began to struggle, and then to sink. It was little Midge who held me above the sea, but he couldn't hold on for very long.

  four

  ALL AT SEA

  Something grabbed me in the water. It clutched me by the waist and tore me suddenly through the waves. My first thought was of a shark, the next of a whale that would swallow me whole. Whatever it was, it pulled me along at a frantic speed. Then it grabbed Midgely as well and pulled him, too. I saw the spray pluming from his hands and head as, side by side, we shot along across the sea.

  I tried to fight the thing off, but wherever I pummeled and punched, my fists met only water. Then a low, dark shape went rushing by.

  In a furious tumble of foam, it sliced down the back of a wave. It dove through the crest, then surfaced again, hurtling toward us.

  It was the longboat, half on its side and half full of water. Swinging out from the ship, it had dragged the towline with it. The rope was what held us, stretched tight as an iron bar.

  As it veered across the wake, I reached out and grabbed the boat. It hauled me along, and I hauled Midge, our hands still locked together. He flailed and thrashed until he somehow got his own hand on the gunwale, and we hung on as the boat shot up the waves at a slant. I saw the ship—or at least the windows in the stern. They were squares of yellow light in a steeply slanted line, and in the middle was a figure, my father staring out. To him, the sea would be nothing but blackness, our struggle unseen.

  A rumbling wave—a giant old graybeard—fell across us. With a bang, the tow rope snapped in two, and the longboat came to a stop. It rolled and wallowed in the waves, slopping water across the gunwales. Lighting flashed above us, and I saw my father's ship sailing along on her way.

  Midgely and I clambered aboard the longboat, tumbling in turn over the side. I was shocked to see a face looking at me, a boy huddled in the stern. It was Walter Weedle, who had vowed to kill me, and once nearly had. But now he was sobbing, his eyes wide with fright. The long scar that split his face from ear to ear writhed like a white worm.

  “They're gone,” he said. “They're all drownded, every one.”

  We bailed out the boat with our hands. I told Weedle to help, but he only stared at me blankly, as though he didn't hear or couldn't understand. The storm bore away to the east in fading blinks of lightning. It carried the wind along with it, and the rain with its rumble of drops, and left us again, drifting in the moonlight.

  The oars were still lashed to the seats. So was the rudder and tiller, but otherwise the boat was empty. We had no food or water, neither knife nor gun, not even a flint to strike a fire. We had come from a ship that had been a world in itself, to a shell of a boat with not a single thing to keep us alive.

  Suddenly Weedle stood up. He set the boat rolling as he stared out at the sea. “Did you hear that?” he cried.

  We had heard no sounds.

  “They was calling for me,” said Weedle in a whisper. “They was calling my name.”

  I thought he'd gone mad. But then I heard the voices myself. Faintly, ghostly, they cried out for help.

  I worked at the lashings to free the rudder and a pair of oars. I grabbed Weedle by the collar and hauled him down to the seat. “Row!” I told him.

  I had to fit the pins myself, and place the oars between them. Then, as he rowed, I fitted the rudder and tiller. I steered toward the cries.

  Out of the night came Benjamin Penny, swimming fast and froglike, with such strength that he might have swum all the way to Australia if he'd cared to. His webbed hands reached up and grabbed the gunwale, and he swung himself into the longboat. We found the others clinging to a raft of lumber, and brought them aboard. Then, seven in number, we rowed in a direction that I hoped was north. I could see none of the stars that I'd known in England.

  I would gladly have seen Weedle rowing forever. But he was so useless that Early Discall asked to take his place. “Never rowed no boat,” he said. “But who could do worse than that?”

  Yet he did, at first. He twisted the oars and toppled himself from the seat. Laughing at his own clumsiness, he got up and tried again, and soon was rowing like an old boatman, singing away at the top of his voice. It was a plowman's tune that he piped out, in a high-pitched tone that broke off—now and then—into a deeper voice. I found Early to be a very pleasant fellow; I liked him right away.

  Boggis sat smiling stupidly, and Benjamin Penny curled up like a rat in a hole. Midgely leaned against me on the seat at the back, with the big tiller between us, and through the night we traveled on. Early told us stories of his westcountry home, in his west-country accent that was full of strange words and phrases. When Weedle began to complain of the cold, Early told him to stop his “crewnting.”

  At first light we saw the island. By what I thought was a great stroke of luck, it lay right before us, the tiny tip of a great, rocky mountain. But it wasn't the only thing on the sea.

  Far behind us were the sails of a ship. Made tiny by distance, they were stacked like wooden building blocks on the hard edge of sea and sky. It could have been any ship at all, but I didn't doubt it was my father's.

  “Stop rowing,” I said. “Everyone sit still.” If I could see the sails, then a lookout could see us as well. So we sat and drifted, in the warming sunrise, soaring on the swells. Up we rushed, and down again, in such a swooping rhythm that I felt the seasickness crawling back inside me.

  The distant ship went east and west, the sails stea
dily shrinking. I imagined my father frantically searching the sea. I was certain that he would be the one at the masthead, training his spyglass all around. It gave me a very lonely feeling when the ship finally vanished toward the south. I told Early to row.

  Weedle scowled. “Who made you the captain?”

  I shouldn't have been surprised, as he had always craved power over others. Now he puffed himself up like a rooster, and crowed, “Look here. This boat's mine, by rights. Weren't I the first one in it?”

  Midgely laughed. “You was blubbering like a baby.”

  “You shut up!” snapped Weedle. “You're worse than useless, you are.”

  Midgely trotted out that silly saying of boys. “Does your mother know you're out?” he said, sounding smug and tart.

  It was a nonsensical remark, but it seemed to enflame Walter Weedle. His long scar pulsed, and his eyes shrank to black coals. It was a look that had terrified me in the hulk, before I'd found that there was more bark than bite to the boy. But now his fury scared me again.

  Weedle was in the bow, and between us sat Carrots and Benjamin Penny, the giant, and Discall. It seemed to be five against two, in an open boat on the empty sea. In a flash they could be on us. They could throw Midgely and me over the side, and who would ever know?

  Benjamin Penny smiled. He cackled softly, and I could see that the same thoughts had occurred to him. There was pleasure in his look, a wicked expectation.

  Gaskin Boggis stared stupidly over the sea, but the rest of us sat staring in our places, all leaning to the right as the boat soared up and over a wave. Then Weedle stood up.

  “Here, we're done with rowing,” said Weedle. “It's your turn, Tom, don't you think?”

  Early Discall piped up that he didn't mind rowing. But Weedle told him to keep quiet. “Tom's going to row us to the island,” he said. “That's as far as he has to go. He'll be getting a long rest after that.”

  Boggis was too thick to see the meaning in that. “We're staying there?” he asked.

  “Only Tom and his little mollycoddle,” said Weedle. “We'll be going along without them.”

  Beside me, Midgely scoffed. “Go along! Where do you think you're going along to, Walter Weedle? You can't even say where you are.”

  The look that came to Weedle's face was almost comical. He couldn't have given the slightest thought to where he'd go from the ship. He had only fled from it mindlessly, like a bird from an open cage.

  “It's only Tom and me what knows the way,” said Midgely. “We seen the charts. We learnt the islands in a book.”

  “Midge, that's enough,” I said. But it was too late.

  “You know the way to where?” asked Weedle.

  “To the ship!” cried Midge. “We're meeting the ship, you stupid, and it's taking us home.”

  He let a thousand cats from a thousand bags with those few words. Weedle was still on his feet, rocking like a skittle with the maddening roll of the boat. He took a step forward. “What ship's that?”

  “Why, the one what we left, of course,” said Midge. “How else could we plan it?”

  “You hear that, lads?” said Weedle, looking about. “Is that what you want, to get back on the ship?”

  Early shook his head, and Gaskin rather rumbled in his chest. “I ain't going back,” he said.

  “Hold him!” shouted Weedle. “Hold Tom Tin.”

  In a moment, the giant had me in his grasp. Weedle rushed past him. He pitched little Midgely from the seat, then kicked me hard in the chest. “Now you'll row,” he said. “Another word, and it's your last.”

  Perhaps we were caught up in the currents of fate, and no matter what I'd said or done we would have ended on that island to the north. As it was, I broke my back to get there, and within the hour it was clear that the island was a small and terrible place. The tip of gray stone wasn't a mountaintop in the distance. It was all there was of a lonely speck of land, a misery of earth and rock not much bigger than my father's ship, nor half as high as the masts. There was not a tree or bush, not a single thing that looked alive. From end to end, from shore to summit, it was covered in white, as though coated impossibly with snow.

  I described it for Midge, hoping he would name the place. But he said the reverend writer had never seen a white island by itself. “We ain't in the book yet, Tom,” said Midge. “That's the trouble.”

  I hadn't imagined we would have to find our way into the book. This merely added to my growing dread as we came closer to the island. I thought what a lonely prison it was about to make for Midge and me. A prison for a while, and a terrible tomb forever.

  When we were half a mile off, we saw other islands far beyond it. Faint and blue, like smudges of clouds, they barely poked above the horizon. For a moment it cheered me, for this first bit of rock seemed a little less lonesome. But then I thought of the horror of always looking at land we could never reach.

  “Row!” shouted Benjamin Penny. He kicked sharply at my ribs.

  I pulled on the oars. Suddenly, from the island, came a fluttering and a roar, and it seemed that the rocks themselves lifted up and took to the air, blasting in every direction. It was a flock of birds, such a mass that they had covered every inch of the island, and now swirled round and round above it. The rocks turned in the instant from white to speckled black. But the crag itself seemed even smaller without the birds, and the cloud of them was enough to darken the sky. Then we heard the sound of their wings, a rumble like thunder, and the screeching cries of their voices.

  And I saw, on a jagged ridge, a man running.

  He leapt to a knoll and vaulted to another, stumbled and rose and kept running. He ran as though his life depended on it, ran like a frightened deer, hurdling rocks and leaping chasms. Over the slope he went, his arms flailing, then turned and disappeared behind the ridge.

  five

  THE WRECK OF THE LONGBOAT

  No one but me saw the running man. As quickly as he'd appeared, he vanished again. I might have thought I hadn't seen him at all, only a strange pattern in the swirl of wings and feathered bodies. But something had surely set those birds into flight, so I didn't doubt I had seen the figure, as unsettling as it was.

  What made that man flee so desperately, as though his life hung in the balance? It seemed that a glimpse of us had set him running in terror. But why?

  His island was broken and craggy, besieged on all sides by the sea. It was overcome with such a sense of gloom that I wondered if Weedle might change his mind, and not land there at all. In his place, I would have kept going to the farther, greener places. Or so I told myself. In truth, I hadn't stood on solid land for more than half a year, and I longed to get off the sea.

  Weedle looked far from happy now. He glowered at the island as he steered us west-about around it, looking for a place to land. But all along the shore, waves burst into creamy froth, and towers of spray shot high in the air. On the weather side were cliffs and caves, and the sea was at its wildest. In the middle, the island narrowed to a short and steep-sided neck, so that it took on the shape of a pair of squashed spectacles. The neck was filled with jumbles of rock, piled stone upon stone, and looked a most treacherous spot. On the eastern shore were reefs and splintered rocks.

  All this time, the birds soared round above us. The flash and whirr of thousands of wings reminded me of raging water, of eddies and whirlpools. It reminded me how all my luck ran against me.

  “I don't like this place,” said Boggis. “It's haunted, I think.” And Early agreed.

  I didn't believe in ghosts, but the island had the same effect on me. With the waves slamming against it, and the screaming birds flitting their shadows across the rock, the place seemed restless and besieged. I watched for the running man, and wondered why he wasn't down at the water already, begging us to take him off.

  “Please, Weedle,” said Boggis. “Go on to them other islands. You ain't never steered a boat. You don't know how to land it.”

  He might as well have waved a red
rag at a bull. “We'll see about that,” said Weedle. He cursed and told me to row faster. “That's where we'll land, right there.”

  I glanced over my shoulder, to see where he was pointing. It was a narrow gap between pillars of rock, where the sea reared up in an enormous bulge of green water. Then, swollen and seething, it hurled itself between the pillars and over their tops, filling a great basin beyond them. In that space the sea tumbled and writhed, and up shot geysers of white water.

  I rowed for all I was worth, but only with one oar. I spun the boat around.

  Too late I'd tried to save us. The sea already had a hold of the boat. It swept us toward the gap, and the sound of the surf grew loud as cannons. Weedle looked as though he were staring at death, and his hand was white on the tiller.

  Then we rose on that bulge of water, and for an instant it seemed that all was still and quiet. Higher we went, until we looked over the rocks and into the black-sided basin. I heard the rattling rush of an undertow sucking at pebbles and stones.

  “It's Tom's fault!” screamed Weedle.

  There was nothing that could save us. The boat was carried straight into the gap as we clung to its sides. The bow struck a boulder, and splinters of wood went flying. One of my oars snapped in two. The sides of the boat rippled and cracked as we jammed between the rocks like a bung in a barrel. The stones rumbled in the suck of the sea as the wave fell away below us. But the next came thundering behind it, lifting the boat by the stern, prying it free from the boulders. A thwart split down the middle; the tiller went flying; and the longboat flipped end over end, flinging us all into the sea.

  I landed on the beach. Midgely fell beside me, and a wave swept over our heads. I pushed him high up the beach, then held on to the stones as the undertow sucked me back. I saw Early tumbling down in the surf, and Gaskin hurry to help him. Weedle, Carrots, and Benjamin Penny were scrambling for the shore. With no thought for the boat or anyone else, they pulled themselves up to the sheltering cliffs. I ducked my head as the water came surging over the boulders again.