The Cannibals (19 page)

It was like a mysterious bridge, a phantom of shimmering colors. And right below the arch, framed in the streaks of red and blue and yellow, was Midgely's elephant island.

The shapes of the land, the pattern of rocks and trees, formed an enormous head. Gray cliffs gave it spreading ears and a trunk that curled back on itself. Veins of stone and running water formed a pair of curved tusks.

I stood up, the seasickness forgotten. “Midge,” I said. “Midge, we've found it.”

“The island?” he asked. He turned his dead eyes to the sea. “What does it look like, Tom?”

“Like an elephant.” There was nothing more I could say. Its skin was rippled and wrinkled by the folds of land. There were even nubbins of rock for its eyes. “It looks exactly like an elephant, Midge.”

“I know that, Tom,” he said. “But what does an elephant look like?”

I couldn't help laughing. All this time we'd been searching for an island that Midgely wouldn't have recognized if he'd still had eyes that could see. “It doesn't matter,” I said. “It's big and green and beautiful.”

Boggis scratched his head. “I didn't know elephants were green.”

We stoked the fire and steamed toward the island. We spewed more smoke than had ever come from the Limehouse chimneys, but that didn't matter to me. It was wonderful to be rushing toward the rainbow and the island in its middle. As I stood at the tiller, as the smoke swirled from the funnel and hid the colored bands in the sky, I recalled an old tale of my mother's.
“Never pass through a rainbow,”
she'd told me, one rainy afternoon.
“Pass through a rainbow, and you can't ever get back.”

It was an impossible feat, I thought. Rainbows had always moved away as quickly as I'd gone toward them. But this one seemed to hover where it was, and I had to look higher and higher to see its arch. When passing clouds darkened the sky, and at last the colors dissolved, I wondered if it was somehow still there above them, and if we didn't go steaming right through it.

Boggis stuffed the firebox until the metal glowed. The little valves chattered and whined, and bubbles of smoke burst
blue and black into the air. I wondered if my father was watching it, if he could see the sunlight sparkle on the boat, and if he was even then turning a spyglass toward us.

I had to shout, almost, for Midgely to hear. “Where's the harbor? Which side of the island?”

“North and east,” said Midgely.

I wondered if I should circle the island to get there, or land somewhere else and go on by foot. But after all my waiting, I couldn't wait another moment. I steered for the tip of land on the eastern side. It was below the point of the ele-phant's tusk, a jagged fringe of trees.

The island changed when we drew closer. As the rainbow had done, the elephant's head dissolved. Where its trunk had been was suddenly nothing but hills and rock. The ears became nothing more than stony cliffs, and I couldn't find where I'd once seen the tusks. It gave me a small shudder to think that we would have missed the island altogether if we'd come at it from a different side.

Boggis scurried for more wood. He pulled an armload from the stack beside the engine, then straightened up and seemed to turn to stone. He stood like that, unmoving, as the boat tipped on a wave and rose on another. The wood tumbled from his arm as he pointed ahead. He looked back, shouting something that I couldn't hear. And with a terrible thump the boat hit something hard.

I heard it bang on the bow, then bang again on the keel. It missed the paddle wheels, but thumped below me as we ran it over. I saw it surface behind us, breaching from the foam in our wake. A big slab of white wood, it stood up on its side and slowly fell flat.

It was the side of a boat, or part of one. The planks were shattered and torn.

Boggis ran to the engine, to the big levers and wheels. Down our left side passed a barrel, down our right a broken spar and a tangle of rope.

With a shrill blast, the engine blew off its steam. A white cloud shot out from the valves, with a shriek that nearly pierced my ears. The paddle wheels made a breathy, shuddery sound in the water. They no longer drove the boat, but slowed it, and we began to wallow in the waves.

“What's wrong?” asked Midgely.

More wreckage drifted by. I saw the white bow of a boat, then the stern. I thought I saw the head of a man, but it was only a wooden pulley.

“Tom, what's happened?” said Midgely.

“The sea's all full of bits,” I said. “There's wood and rope and everything all floating around.”

“I wonder what is it,” he said.

I was afraid I knew already. By the look on Midgely's face, he must have thought the same. The cannon fire that we had seen in the night, only that could have caused this ruin. But what ship lay shattered around us?

We steamed on, more slowly. I watched barrels rolling in the waves, and chunks of wood so blown apart that I couldn't tell what was what. Boggis tried to catch something as it drifted by, just below the surface. I saw his hand dip in, then a shape appear as he pulled. It was a trouser leg that he held, and a man's foot that rose white from the sea. He dropped it, and it sank again in our wake.

I looked at the island, at the fringe of trees. A speck of
color there caught my eye, but it was several minutes before I could see what it was. I made out the two masts and spars of a brig, a topsail furled on its yard. Beyond those trees in the island's harbor, a vessel had come to rest. The speck of color was a flag, and in a moment that was both terrible and wonderful, I recognized its pattern. The Goodfellow flag. I was looking at the masts of my father's ship.

Where the wreckage had come from was a mystery. It was a mystery that I didn't care to solve just then, for my father was safe in the harbor, and I wanted only to reach him. I had Boggis stoke the fire again, and we plunged across the waves. He pointed to the left or right, and I steered past timbers, past staves and broken planks that tipped over the waves ahead and slipped away behind.

I rounded the point of land. I turned into the harbor. Straight ahead stood the masts of my father's brig. They were tall and straight, the yards neatly crossed.

But I felt little joy at the sight. For it was
only
the masts that I saw. They poked straight from the water itself, straight from the sea to the sky. My father's ship lay deep beneath the waves.

I steered across the bay, feeling that what I saw could not possibly be true. That if I kept going toward those masts the hull would appear below them. Surely it was only hidden by a strange mirage, a trick of the shoreline or a quirk in the clouds. It had to be so. It wasn't right—it wasn't fair—that I could come all this way for nothing.

As the steamboat shook and chugged along, I looked nowhere else but at those masts. Boggis did the same, and no one watched behind. We saw the rigging stretching down, the braces and the stays, the ratlines and the halyards, all leading into the sea. Some were broken, others tangled, but the yards were squared and the sails furled; the ship seemed to lie at anchor.

As we neared the masts, Boggis slowed the engine to a
heartbeat thump. We glided between the mizzen stays, and I looked down through the water at the hatches and deck. I saw the spoked wheel rippling as though it were turning. A gleam of light shone from a sword left lying at its base. We steamed slowly from stern to bow, staring down at a ship that had drowned.

I had always been selfish, but never more than then. My first thought was not for what had befallen my father, but for the terrible fix it had left me in.
Where am I to go from here, who is to help me now?
I wondered.

It was Midgely who tore me from those shameful thoughts. “Don't worry, Tom. They must have gotten ashore,” he said. “They must be all right, don't you think?”

I couldn't imagine what had been said to make him realize the ship was gone. Perhaps he only sensed it, in that mysterious way he sometimes had. He was facing the shore now, with the handle of his parasol wedged by an elbow, his hands cupped to his blind eyes.

“Can you see the village?” he asked. “Can you see any sailors there?”

There were only trees ahead, and a brown river tunneling out from the jungle. I thought Midgely was wrong again, that the island was uninhabited, until I turned far enough to see the fringe of trees we had passed. There was his village, stretched along the shore, a long row of brown buildings standing on wooden stilts. On the beach below them was a line of canoes, and the Indians were already busily launching them.

“Lucky it's a friendly island,” said Midge. “It's the friendliest of them all, you know.”

I had steered between the masts and the rigging. We were passing then over the windlass, and I could see the bowsprit poking ahead through the water. One of the foresails had come loose, and it flapped in a current. A cloud of bright fish darted behind it and turned, all at once, to dash behind the bow.

“I wish Lucy Beans was here,” said Midge. “She could talk to the Indians. She could ask what happened.”

I steered between the forestays. I looked up along their length, to the tall mast that they braced, and saw the Goodfellow flag at the top. It fluttered on a sky full of ragged clouds, split by shafts of sunlight. I was looking at nearly the same sight I had seen day after day on our long voyage south, and in a flash of memory I recalled the moment when I'd found that my father was the captain. I felt the same joy and comfort, but not for more than a second.

Boggis cried sharply, “Tom, look!”

I thought he was shouting a warning that I was about to tangle the boat in the rigging. I pushed the tiller over, then saw him pointing back.

A rainbow stretched above the fringe of trees, one end on the shore and one on the water, as though we had, indeed, passed through it. At its watery end, something was moving in a haze of clouds. I couldn't quite see what it was, but I
heard
it then. Across the bay came the splash and thump of a hundred paddles.

“Is it them?” asked Midgely. “Is it the headhunters, Tom?”

Out from the rainbow, from its glow of colors, came a whole fleet of canoes. There were small ones and large ones, some driven by a single man, others by a dozen. They formed a line right across the bay, trapping us at its head.

“Tom, tell me!” cried Midge. “Is it the headhunters in that big canoe?”

“No. I don't know who it is,” I said.

Boggis leapt to the wood; he stuffed the firebox. He pushed the lever, and the engine raced; the pistons whirled. “Break through them!” he cried. “It's our only hope.”

I turned the tiller. I aimed the boat for the mouth of the bay, and the paddle wheels beat at the water.

“No!” shouted Midgely. His parasol tumbled into the bottom of the boat as he threw himself across the tiller. “What about your dad?” His voice slurred in excitement. “Don't you want to shee what happened to the shailorsh?”

“Never mind him, Tom. It's too late for them,” said Boggis.

The steamboat was surging forward. Ahead lay the freedom and safety of open water. Once we'd charged through the canoes, there wasn't one that could catch us. It was go on and escape, or stay and… And what? And battle the savages? We were already too late. We could be of no help to my father.

Waves spread behind us. They rolled through the rigging of my father's ship. They splashed against the masts. High in the mizzen, a pulley swung on a broken halyard and rang against the mast like the tolling of a wooden bell. Boggis had the firebox open. He was throwing in the wood that Mr. Mullock had cut.

Our wake spread farther and faster. Spray tossed high at the bow. The canoes were closing together into a pack, like wolves on the water. I looked at my father's ship; back at the canoes.

“Full steam!” I said.

“Tom, no!” cried Midgely.

But I pushed him away, then turned the boat and aimed it, not at the canoes, but straight for the river.

Our smoke was thick and billowing. The fire raged in its box, and steam shot whining from the valves. We crossed our own wake, rolling far to the side as we battered through it in a cloud of spray. We passed between the masts of my father's ship, over the drowned hull, then up the bay with the trees flicking by on the shore.

The water turned from blue to brown as we met the currents of the river. They pushed the boat sideways; they nearly spun it around before I straightened us out again. The water boiled around the hull, streaming foam in streaks behind us, but the trees on the shore passed less quickly, and then less quickly still.

The canoes gained on us as we fought against the river. I watched the ripples and the eddies, and steered where the water was smooth. It brought us close to one bank, then right across to the other, and the branches of trees scraped on the engine, and the smoke tangled up in the leaves. I looked back again, and was afraid to look a third time.

But the river that slowed us slowed them as well. And the mechanical arms of the steam engine never tired. They went round and round, and back and forth, and pushed us up the river.

The river narrowed; the banks closed in. For a terrible minute it seemed that we weren't moving forward at all. Then slowly the shores spread apart, and the trees went by again. A crocodile, riding the current, hurtled past like a green torpedo.

Round a bend, round another, we beat our way into the heart of the island. The trees grew taller, and they reached their branches across the river. We surged through a tunnel that was surely too small for the red canoe. But we pushed on, turning left where another stream came in to meet ours, left again each time it divided. Then we heard a roar and rumble ahead.

Around the next bend we found a waterfall. It stretched from bank to bank, a rocky ledge where the river tumbled into tea-colored foam. It wasn't more than five feet high, but it might have been a Niagara. We couldn't go around it, and we couldn't go up it. Our journey had come to an end.

There was a broad pool below the falls, and a narrow, tepid stream flowing into it. I drove the boat full steam at its mouth, crashing through branches. They swept aside and closed behind us, and we ground to a stop in the midst of the jungle, wedged between the muddy banks like a cork in a bottle. Boggis stopped the engine. “Douse the fire,” I said.