The Cannibals Read online

  He glared at me. “If I want your hopinion, I'll ask.”

  Under his hand, the longboat lifted on the waves and raced across the sea. From crest to crest it bounded, flinging spray in glittering clouds. Midgely's face lit up with a broad smile. He said, “You're a cracker sailor, aren't you Mr. Mullock?”

  “I'm sure I'd say I was,” said he, with the smuggest of looks. He flashed a quick grin through his wind-torn beard.

  I'd had enough of him. “What else would you say that you were?” I asked.

  The grin fell away. But he said nothing.

  We sailed ever north, through the day and through the night. We passed islands so tall that their peaks were covered in clouds, and others that were nothing more than a single tree rooted in a scrap of rock or sand. We passed islands that weren't even islands—only heavy surf and the smell of land, where the rocks didn't rise beyond the surface.

  I had to describe each and every one to Midge, who sadly shook his head and pronounced, “We ain't in the book yet, Tom.” More and more, I wondered if we would ever find the islands of his book, or the way to the one that we had to find.

  “I think we have to go east,” Midgely decided at last. “Mr. Mullock, could you steer a point to the east, please?”

  “No,” said Mr. Mullock simply.

  “But it's the way to the book,” said Midge.

  “The book, the book,” said Mr. Mullock. “I'm sick to death of 'earing about that hinfernal book. We need only go north and we'll fetch Shanghai.”

  No one had spoken before of going to any place but Midgely's elephant island. Now the idea was there, and Weedle was quick to side with Mr. Mullock. So did Penny, and then Carrots, who'd always claimed to know everything, and now of Shanghai as well. “My uncle went there,” he said. “He met the king of Shanghai in the palace. They were going to make him a prince but—”

  “You don't even know where it is,” I said. “None of you do.” I was the only one who had studied geography, but I couldn't have placed Shanghai on the globe to save my life.

  “You muggins,” said Mr. Mullock. “We'll 'ave all the ships from all the world to guide us when we're close.”

  “Yes, even the navy,” I said. “Will you hail a frigate and ask directions, Mr. Mullock?”

  “Hah! You young spark, if I was any closer I'd give you a twitcher,” said he. “What do you expect to find to the east but cannibal islands?”

  I stared back down the length of the boat. “The way home.”

  He let out a vile oath. But Boggis turned and looked at me, and with sad longing said, “Oh, I'd like to go home.”

  “You're as dotty as 'im,” said Mr. Mullock. He looked up at the sail, then pushed the tiller and took a turn on the sheet. “You can't ever go 'ome, you miserable muggins. I'll tell you, it's irons and chains that wait for you there. They'll be on you before you know it, and you'll wear them on the treadmill, and you'll wear them in the sweatbox. You'll still be wearing chains the day you go rattling to your grave.”

  He put a fright into Weedle with that, and worse into Benjamin Penny. “Try to take me home and I'll kill you,” said Penny, glaring at me.

  Boggis sighed. “I want to go where Tom goes,” he said, which pleased me greatly.

  I stood up, I held on to the mast as the boat reeled across the waves. “Listen,” I said. “It's thousands of miles to Shanghai.”

  Mr. Mullock blanched. “It's not,” he said. “But what if it were? It's 'eaven on earth, that's Shanghai. No questions asked. You're pipe-merry the day long, and at night you're doing the handie-dandie with the most beautiful women in the world—not that you'd care for that now, but you will.”

  “Let's go to Shanghai!” cried Carrots.

  Mr. Mullock stood up. His clothes of turtle skin rippled in the wind, but his clotted hair lay stiff on his shoulders. “Well, it's settled then,” said he. “Shanghai it is. If anyone says hotherwise, we'll pitch him over the side.”

  “Do it now!” cried Weedle. His scar pulsed.

  “Pitch them over!” shouted Penny.

  We had never been so close to fists and fury. It would surely have come to that a moment later if not for Early Discall.

  “What a diddlecome lot,” he said with a laugh. “You'd think you've all got the bellyharm, the way you carry on. East or north, what's the difference when you don't know where you are? You've gone and given each other the flickets, and all for what?”

  He flapped his arms, then—having said his piece—smiled around the boat.

  No one cared what Early thought. His words had not the slightest effect. But I, like everyone, looked at him. They stared at his front, and I at his back, so they didn't see what was just then appearing on the horizon.

  “Look,” I said, raising my arm.

  Mr. Mullock thought I was pointing to him. “No, you look,” he said. “I knew from the start, from the moment I saw you, that—”

  “Look!” I shouted. “It's the headhunters.”

  The canoe was coming “hull up,” as a sailor would have said. The tall fronds at its stern swayed on the skyline, and the black of the hull was a dot below them. I might have thought it was an island—a small island with trees in the wind—if not for the bright colors of those plumes.

  Our squabble was forgotten. Whatever Mr. Mullock was about to tell me, whatever he'd known at our meeting, went unsaid. He saw the canoe, then tightened the sheet and pushed the tiller, and sent us rocketing through the waves.

  There was an island a league to our left, and a pair of others on our right, some greater distance off. It was toward those that he steered, for that was the way the wind was blowing.

  “They won't 'ave seen us,” he said. “It's only blind chance that's put them in our wake. Hah! They 'ave the brains of peas, those junglies.”

  Our longboat bucked and tossed. It reared up on the waves and hurdled the crests, then fell into streamers of spray. It rolled; it groaned, and the rudder shook in its pintles with a sound like chattering teeth. But the canoe came faster.

  Steady as a rock, it rose from the water. It grew bigger and blacker. We saw flashes of color from the feathers of the warriors, and then the paddlers below them. I felt it would keep coming like that forever and ever, that nothing could stop it.

  It was too frightening to watch. I stared instead at the islands, humpbacked and green. They seemed to advance ahead of us at the same speed as the longboat, not drawing any closer until, quite suddenly, they were looming above us. Then the gap opened between them, and I—in the bow—shouted out, “Ships!” I saw a dozen or more, a fleet of fantastic ships. But it was only a cluster of islets, each with a stand of tall-trunked trees. They looked like flat barges mounting ragged sails.

  “Where? I don't see no ships,” said Weedle.

  I sighed. “They're only islands.”

  Then Midgely sat up. “How many?” he asked.

  I couldn't count them. One overlapped the other, and they all seemed to sail along. “At least a dozen. Perhaps a score,” I said.

  “Is there one like a galleon, Tom?” Midge was peering there himself. The wind took away his voice, so that he had to shout for me to hear him. “An island like a three-master, with a quarterdeck, Tom.”

  “Why, yes,” I said. It was almost as though he could see.

  “We're in the book!” he cried. “Tom, we're at the edge of the book.”

  Midgely turned to me with a huge, triumphant grin. If he'd had eyes he wouldn't have grinned for long, for the canoe had halved the distance between us.

  Mr. Mullock trimmed his sail and turned the bow toward the southern island. We scudded into the passage, past the fleet of islets, and rounded up into a tiny cove where a river ran down through the jungle. On either side the trees leaned inward, tangling their branches in the middle. A curtain of leaves and vines hung right to the water, and Mr. Mullock rammed the boat right through it. “Lower the sail!” he shouted.

  He cast off the sheet and halyard. We grabbed the
canvas and pulled it down, and there we sat among the branches, as nicely hidden as we could be.

  “There's a chief and his family what lives on these islands,” said Midgely. “The big one's deserted, 'cept for Sunny Wheeler. He's a trader, you know. Pearls and seashells. But if it's a feast you're after, you want to see the chief. His name is Koolamalinga.”

  “Three cheers for him!” cried Mr. Mullock. “Now shut up, boy. You're talking rubbish.”

  Poor Midge. He looked shocked, then sad. He couldn't help adding, in the tiniest whisper, “It means Welcoming One.” He sniffed and settled back in his place.

  The river flowed brown from the jungle, with just enough swiftness to keep the boat pressed against the branches. From all around came the chatter and chirps of creatures. But we heard, in the distance, that too-familiar sound.

  “Hiiiii-ya, uhmp!”

  We didn't move from our spot. We didn't so much as peer out from the branches. I looked at seven faces that seemed much alike—wide eyes turned upward, mouths hanging open. We listened as the canoe came closer, the chant growing louder. We heard the water at its hull, the creak of its steering oar.

  “Hiiiii-ya, uhmp! Hiiiii-ya, uhmp!”

  The pace was slow and steady. The paddles beat against the hull with a boom that echoed from the hills. A flight of parrots went flashing up the river. Down with the current came what looked like a log, until it rose in the water, and I saw the yellow eyes of a crocodile. Longer than the boat, it nudged against the planks. It hit softly at first, and then again—harder.

  “Oh, crikey,” said Mr. Mullock. “It's smelling the turtle skins.”

  He moved to the center of the boat and kept himself there, thinking—no doubt—of his own clothes. In a swirl of brown water, the crocodile vanished. We looked to the left and the right but saw nothing. Then we heard a rubbing on the hull, a scraping at the keel below our feet.

  Between the branches, I saw the canoe—or glimpses of a thing so big that I couldn't see it all at once. There was a warrior with a necklace of teeth, another with black tattoos on his forehead and chin. There was paddler after paddler, each with huge arms, brown as chestnuts, sweated to a sheen. For an instant I looked eye to eye with a savage whose nose was pierced by a bone, whose ears were stretched around polished shells and dangled halfway to his neck. Then I closed my eyes and waited, and clenched my hands in fists.

  The paddlers slowed, and the chant slowed with them. “Hiiii. Ya. Uhmp!” they sang, thudding their paddles on the hull. Below us, the crocodile pushed so hard that the boat tipped up. Wood crackled near my feet. There was a rasp as the crocodile passed underneath; then its head surfaced again, its long snout low in the water.

  Mr. Mullock looked nearly beside himself. He had brought out his axe and was standing on the stern seat now, gripping the branch of a tree. His green clothes melded with the jungle, and the whites of his eyes gleamed between his helmet and his beard.

  The canoe went past. The paddler's chants faded slowly, then quickly hushed as they rounded a point or turned behind an island. Mr. Mullock seized his chance. He grunted and swung his axe, cracking it down on the crocodile's head.

  The brown river exploded. A thick, leathery tail lashed across the boat. The crocodile spun over, whirling white and green in the flashes of its belly. Dark blood oozed in the water, and with a terrible silence other crocodiles came slithering from the jungle, down the banks and into the river. They streamed toward us like fat and gruesome snakes, grabbed the beast, and hauled it down. The water leapt and boiled. Whirlpools opened; eddies swirled. We saw the jaws of one creature, the leg of another; then up floated scraps of flesh. Soon all that was left of a thing bigger than the longboat was a shred of scaly skin.

  “My, what a lovely place,” said Mr. Mullock. “Who's for going ashore?”

  No one was. We didn't know if the canoe had gone, or if it had stopped nearby and was waiting for us to emerge. We decided that the island was safer than the sea, and that we would pass the night upon it, and all of the coming day. So we pulled ourselves along the branches, clambered up the riverbank, and hurried into the jungle.

  The trees were so huge and dense that I felt like a flea on the back of a dog. We spent the better part of an hour bashing through the first few yards. Then the jungle opened into glades and meadows, and we came to the foot of a low mountain. A stream fell down in strands of silver, into a pool that was clear and deep. It was there we chose to stay.

  And it was on this island that one of us met his end.

  thirteen

  A MOST UNFORTUNATE CHAPTER

  It was Mr. Mullock's idea that we keep a lookout. “Turn and turn about,” he said. “We'll go in horder of our age, starting with the youngest; that seems the fairest.”

  Well, to him it was. He stretched out on the rock beside the pool, like a green lizard sunning itself. He had hours to wait until his turn, if that ever came around. Midgely was the youngest. “Off you go,” said Mr. Mullock to him, barely raising an arm from the ground. “Over there is best, I think. Up on that ledge, away from the sound of the falls.”

  “But he can't see,” I said.

  “No matter. You never see the junglies anyway,” said Mr. Mullock. “But the boy's got ears, 'asn't 'e? Can't 'e listen as well as you or I?”

  “It's all right. I don't mind to take my turn,” said Midgely.

  But I couldn't let him sit alone at the edge of the jungle. “We'll share each other's watches,” I told him. “It will make the time go faster.”

  That may have been what Mr. Mullock wanted all along, for he called Weedle to his side as soon as Midge and I went off across the glade. What was said between them, I would never know.

  We climbed to the ledge and found it bathed in sunlight, but cool from the mist of the falls, a pleasant place to sit, if it had not been for the dangers that kept us on guard. We talked little, for there was little to be said after the first few moments. Midgely liked and trusted Mr. Mullock, and refused to hear ill of him.

  I fashioned a rough sort of sundial from a twig and a handful of pebbles. I watched our time pass in the swinging of a shadow; then down we went and Carrots took our place. He was followed by Benjamin Penny, and Penny by Weedle, and so the day passed into evening. And then we learned that the island wasn't quite as empty as Midgely had thought.

  From a distance, we heard drumming.

  It was not the sound of the headhunters' paddles, but a faster and wilder rhythm, a rattle inside of a thunder that must have come from fifty drums or more.

  “Where's that coming from?” asked Midge. “There ain't a village for a hundred miles.”

  “So much for your book,” said Mr. Mullock. “You prattling blind boy.”

  “But it's true,” said Midge. “We seen the fleet of islands, didn't we? The galleon and all.” He frowned, then smiled and said, “Here, I know, Tom. There's Indians come from all over to visit Koolamalinga. That must be right; it's a gathering.”

  “Oh, it's a gathering all right,” said Mr. Mullock. “They're cannibals, you fool. Listen to the drums. That's a cannibal feast beginning.”

  With the darkness came a glow of fires in the east, and voices along with the drums. They weren't much louder than the insects that clicked and hummed and whirred around us. But it was frightful to sit there listening, so our tattered group huddled closer together as the jungle also came alive with shrills and shrieks. The last lookout had come down from the ledge at dusk.

  The water from the falls burbled and splashed. In its mist rose the moon, a silver ring above us. I could see Benjamin Penny pressed against the rock, as ugly as a gargoyle. He stared straight ahead, starting at the cries of the animals, and that dreadful drumming went on.

  Even Gaskin Boggis looked scared. There was a tremble in his voice when he turned to Mr. Mullock and asked, “Will you tell us a story?”

  “No,” answered Mr. Mullock.

  Then Early Discall began to hum his plowing song. He held his arms around h
is knees and, rocking on the stone, hummed it loud and clear. What a relief it was to hear him. The song was lovely, like a hymn, and it echoed from the rocks and trees and drowned the sounds of drums. He reached the point where a man would answer, if he were really singing in the fields. And suddenly, into his song, came the deeper voice of Mr. Mullock.

  He put words to the tune, and seemed to do it without thinking, for he sat as sullen as the rest of us.

  Suddenly Early stopped. “Why, you're a plowman,” he said.

  “What?” said Mr. Mullock. “What are you blathering about now, you simpleton?”

  But even Weedle understood. “You was singing his song,” said he. “You're from the west country, ain't you? You're from the same place as 'im, Mr. Mullock.”

  “Don't talk such rot,” said Mr. Mullock. “I'm a lord, haren't I? Hah! Do you see lords plowing fields, you miserable—”

  “Here, I knew a Mullock,” said Early Discall. “Why, it was thick with Mullocks where I was.”

  “Well, I don't know them,” said Mr. Mullock. “And furthermore, I don't care to listen to your prattle.”

  “There was a Mullock three fields over from us,” said Early.

  Mr. Mullock roared at him. “Are you deaf? Lord almighty, I wish that I was.”

  “Yes, I remember now.” Early was scratching his head. “There was a story of a Mullock what went away to London. He—”

  “Shut up, you pile of muck.” Mr. Mullock leapt to his feet. Three paces he took toward the boy, then three paces back. He whirled around. “Now remember this!” he cried. “I've seen things that would curl your teeth, my lad. Hah! I've seen more blood spilt than there's water in the sea. And two things I've learned: no man escapes 'is fate. And dead ones tell no tales.”

  It was the second time that he'd talked about the silence of dead men. I understood no more about him now than I had the first time. I stared up, as astonished as everyone else, while he stood towering there in his silly turtle helmet, with his great black beard glistening in the moonlight. He pointed at Early.