The Cannibals (5 page)

Below it we huddled at the edge of the water. Early seemed in a daze, as though he couldn't believe what had happened. It was no wonder, really; we sprawled in a staggered row, on an island that had no name, with the wreckage of our boat tumbling at our feet.

Weedle was already at the top of the cliffs. He stood there and cursed me. He shouted oaths I'd never heard, and damned my eyes and damned my soul. “What now?” he asked. “What now, Tom Tin?”

I wanted to rest. I wanted to lie in the sun the whole day long, then sleep on dry land that didn't heave and shift underneath me. But instead I got to my feet and began to collect the bits of flotsam that came cartwheeling up on each wave.
With the surf pounding, and the spindrift flying, I staggered up and down the little stretch of beach, for the land felt anything but steady. It seemed to tilt and rock more wildly than boat or ship had ever done.

Boggis worked beside me. We salvaged two oars, a piece of another, a shattered plank and a broken thwart. We found the rudder, but not the tiller, a curve of the stem, and a chunk of the transom. We carried it all to the longboat, and threw it down inside. There seemed little chance the boat would ever float again, but I put on a brave face for Midge, telling him that a bit of work would set it straight. If he knew I was lying, he didn't let on.

We struggled up the cliffs. Gaskin had to carry Early Discall, who—still in his daze—walked like a teetering, drunken man. At the top was a path worn in the ground, scuffed through gravel and dirt. It soon forked, leading in one direction to the middle of the island, and in the other to a rocky pillar that stood alone like a castle's turret. There was even a narrow bit of cliff—like a drawbridge—that had to be crossed to reach it. There, Weedle and the others had found a small cave, and a trickle of water that smelled rather foully of sulfur. But I was parched, and the water looked like silver to me.

When we started out on the narrow ridge, Weedle called to us to stop. “Find your own water,” he said. “There ain't enough here for all of us.”

“There might not be any more,” I said.

His scar gleamed. “More's the pity then, ain't it?”

“At least give us some for Early,” I said. “He'll die without it.”

“He'll die anyway,” said Benjamin Penny. “He's off to his Early grave.”

Weedle laughed. So did Carrots, though it sounded loud and false.

“Put him down, Gaskin, and come here,” said Weedle. “There's water enough for you.”

The giant seemed torn. He took a step toward Weedle, then a step away, and turned himself fully about with Early on his back. “I can't just leave him, Weedle,” he said. “I don't know what to do.”

In the end he came along with Midge and me, trekking over the island. The birds muttered and squawked, then flurried away before us in a flap of wings. Each one we disturbed moved into the mass of others, disturbing more itself, so that the whole ground seemed to ripple and shift in our path.

On the island's low summit I found the first signs of the running man: a flattened space with a handprint in the dirt; a scattering of broken seashells.

I looked over the sea at the faraway islands, five little cones on the northern horizon.

Gaskin's breath went out in a heavy sigh. He lowered Early to the ground and sat beside him, staring to the north. “How far are them islands?” he asked.

It was a simple problem of angles and distance, one that I would have solved in a moment with a slate and a chalk. But I'd been too long away from my classes, and it made my head spin to figure it out.

From a hundred feet above the sea, how far was the horizon? I closed my eyes to think. Thirteen miles or so; could
that be right? Unless the islands were impossibly tall, they couldn't be more than twenty miles distant.

What did it matter, though? Without a boat we were doomed.

I sat there at the summit. On the ground was a pyramid of tiny pebbles, a small feather stuck in the top like a flag. I imagined our wildman building it, pebble by pebble, as he watched for a sail on the sea. Had the watching driven him mad, I wondered?

Midgely looked up, and I knew we would learn the truth in a moment. We heard a crunching on the path, then footfalls on the stone.

The wildman came toward us, stepping up along the trail. I saw the birds shifting ahead of him, a wave of white rising from the ground and spreading apart, as though he kicked his way through banks of snow. He came up the slope and round a corner, muttering away a mile a minute.

“We'll find them up 'ere,” I heard him say. “They'll be sitting at the lookout.”

Then he came fully into view, a strange figure in very strange clothes. He didn't look as wild as he had on the ridge, though his face was bearded, his hair long and bedraggled. On his head he wore a rounded hat—a helmet—the color of seaweed. His jacket and his ragged trousers were of the same green hue, each made of many tiny pieces crudely
stitched together, overlapping one another. It gave him the appearance of a sea creature, a merman scaled like a fish.

At his waist, from a leathery belt, hung an axe. Its handle had broken and split, and was now very short, but I thought it was all that separated the man from utter savagery. Then I looked down and saw his shoes. Too big by four sizes, their tops gaped open, and twisted sinews took the place of longvanished laces. How he could have run so nimbly while wearing those was more than I could imagine.

He kept muttering. “See? Told you so,” said he. “Said we'd find them 'ere.” His hand touched and stroked his hair.

His eyes had the sparkle of a young man's, but the skin around them was cracked with crow's-feet. Three fresh scratches ran down his cheek and into his beard. He reached up to his hair, and I saw movement there, a shape, then a face.

I nearly cried out in surprise. Clinging to his matted hair was a little creature. For a moment I thought it was a bird, a nearly black and bone-thin bird. But then it peered out at me, and I saw the face and pointed ears of a small brown bat.

It was to that creature, and not himself, that he was talking. “Why, they're only boys,” he said. “Do you see that, Foxy? Only boys.”

The bat let out a shrill little murmur. It was clinging upside down in the fellow's hair, its horrible feet hooked on the helmet rim. By the way it moved, drawing upward, I guessed that it had been licking the blood from those fresh scratches.

The man laughed, as though the bat had answered with a clever riposte. Then he turned his twinkling eyes onto us and said, with a bow, “I'm Lord Mullock.”

“You're a
lord
?” I asked.

“And more,” said he. “Hah! You could never imagine.”

He showed none of the joy I might have expected. Shouldn't he have capered about or danced a jig to find other people on his lonely island? All he did was look at us in a wary sort of way, as though he owned riches that he suspected we'd hoped to plunder.

“Out with it, now,” he said. “Where 'ave you come from?”

I saw no reason to lie. “We're convicts,” I said. “We escaped from a ship.”

“Escaped?” The bat swung in his hair as he turned his head. “You hear that, Foxy? They escaped to 'ere!” He cackled a laugh. “Hah! Now, my boy, you must be thanking the living saint that led you to this speck of God's good earth. Well, thank 'im today, for you'll curse 'im tomorrow. Oh, you'll curse 'im soon enough, you'll see.”

He said this in a friendly fashion, in an accent like none I'd heard. Whatever he was, he was not a lord; of that I was certain. He was clearly a man who shaped his words to sound as he imagined a lord should sound. The result was like a poor mimicry of Mr. Goodfellow, with the addition of a strange and unlordly habit with
h
s. He dropped them from the front of words, and tacked them instead onto others. “Now, what hunspeakable crimes 'ave you done?” he said.

Midgely was quick to answer. “It was only buffing dogs for me, sir. I killed them for their skins, was all. But Tom Tin here…” His voice swelled with pride. “For Tom it was
murder
.”

“Hah! A murdering boy,” said the man. “Now, what do you make of that, Foxy?”

I wanted to explain that I was innocent, but the man gave me no chance. “Where's your boat?” he asked. “You didn't land at Sheerness. You didn't come up by the Thames, I know that.”

Well, he
was
loonie. Sheerness was in England. It was where the prison hulk had been moored, and where my voyage had begun. The poor fellow must have imagined himself on an island as big as Britain with rivers and cities and all. I pointed and told him, “The boat's wrecked on the shore over there.”

A little sound came from his throat. “Wrecked?”

“In splinters,” said I.

“Hah!” His head shook unbelievingly, his green helmet flopping from side to side. He made another choking sound, then laughed quite loudly—at the irony of it, I supposed. “Why, what else could it be but wrecked? What else hindeed?”

“Will you help us?” I asked. “Our friend here's hurt and he needs water. But the others…”

“How many others?”

“Three,” I told him. “They found the pool and…”

“That stinky place,” added Midgely.

“They wouldn't let us near it,” I said.

“Hah! At each others' throats already, are you?” asked our “lord” Mullock. “Well, that's the
baths
, you poor, besotted boys. You don't want to be drinking from that.”

“Is there other water, m'lord?” asked Midgely.

A wonderful smile came to that bearded face. “Of course there's other water. But don't lord me round,” said the man. “No need for that 'ere. To you I'm
Mister
Mullock, and that's
good enough.” He'd clearly taken to Midgely, and gave him a friendly pat. “Now, what's wrong with your friend?”

“He hit his head when we landed,” I said.

“He's bleeding,” said Boggis. “There's a big lump behind his ear.”

“Heggs!” shouted Mr. Mullock.

“What?” I said.

“It's heggs 'e needs, not water. Heggs will save 'im.”

Mr. Mullock waded in among the birds. He chased them off with his arms waving, then plucked from the ground a dozen small green eggs. Of these, he gave one to each of us, then piled the rest beside Early, and knelt to feed the boy. He cracked each egg on the ground, and touched to Early's lips the little green chalice of shell. Early spat up the first one, and nearly choked on the second, but the change that came over him was remarkable. After four eggs he had stopped his trembling and was sitting upright, greedily feeding the rest to himself, pushing them whole into his mouth, crunching the shells in his teeth.

Yet there was something strange about him. I didn't know what it was, except that he asked no questions. Here he was, sitting with a bearded man who had a helmet on his head and a bat in his hair, but he didn't so much as blink his eyes. He just sat there chewing eggs.

Gaskin Boggis looked relieved. For such a huge boy, so easily angered, he had a surprising tenderness. He smiled at Early, then got slowly to his feet. “I'd better go back,” he said. “Weedle, he'll be hopping mad.”

“Who's Weedle?” snapped Mr. Mullock “Is 'e one of the boys at the baths?”

“Yes,” I said. “He likes to give orders.”

“Hah!” Mr. Mullock reached up for Gaskin's arm. “You tell them this, you great cabbage. Tell them not to go wandering. It's not a safe place for boys who wander about; is it, Foxy?”

The bat squeaked. It held on to a thick curl of the man's hair, its little eyes like black beads. Mr. Mullock didn't seem so friendly now. Such a change had come over him, so quickly, that it made me cringe inside.

“The same happlies to all of you,” he said. “Stay out of the caves and away from the wall. Whatever you do, don't hever cross the wall.”

“But we ain't found no wall,” said Midgely.

“Then don't go looking, mind,” said Mr. Mullock. “But if you 'appen to find one, don't think of breaching it.” His voice was low and menacing. “There's no telling what might get out if you did. I believe there's a Gypsy back there.”

It was a long while since Mr. Mullock had been as young as us. I guessed he'd forgotten that to tell a boy not to think of something was enough to brand the notion in his head. As for his Gypsy…well, many a time my mother had tried to scare me with such warnings. On her list of frights, Gypsies had been only lower than chimney sweeps, and at six I'd lived in terror of them both. But now I had the sense to know that a rock on the ocean was fairly safe from Gypsies.

Not so for Gaskin, it seemed. Not so for him or Midgely. I saw worry come over their faces, and they cast furtive glances over the island. Then Gaskin stepped back. “I'd better hurry,” he said.

I suddenly didn't want him to go, and not for any thought
of Gypsies. I wished only that he was a friend to me instead of Weedle. “You can stay with us if you like,” I told him.

“Golly,” he said. “Thank you, Tom.” A blush came to his face, and he looked down in shyness. It was as though no one had ever offered such a thing before. “But that's where I should be, ain't it?” he said.

With that he went away, slouching down the path. Early watched him go, then cracked another egg and said, “Seems a nice fellow, that one. Not too fitty, but fore-right, eh? Has he been longful on the island?”

Midgely gaped. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing more,” said Early, shrugging. “I like him, that's all. Big bruiser, though, ain't he?”

It was clear that Early had no memory, that he'd forgotten everything he'd ever seen or done. For him, it seemed, there had never been an England, never crime nor punishment, only this tiny island and a few people of whom he knew nothing.

Mr. Mullock understood it too. “You've lost your recollections, boy,” he said. “You've had a bump on the noggin.”

Early touched his head, and felt the swelling there. “Strike me dead!” he cried. “So I have.”

“Well, never mind, lad,” said Mr. Mullock, all kindness again. “We'll 'elp you along.” He pointed at me. “You—Tom, is it?—you're 'is size, more or less. Prop 'im up, and follow me.”

I gave him a dark look that he didn't see. Nothing annoyed me more than a lazy fellow; it was what had come from having a mother who'd lain flat out all the day long. But I did as he asked, and we started for the southern end of the
island. Instead of leading the way, Mr. Mullock trailed behind, calling out directions—“Turn left at that rock. Straight down the 'ill now.”