Tiger Lily (16 page)

As they walked, he told her stories, filling the empty spaces, and talked about the pirates. “I’m glad they exist,” he said. “It gives us something to focus our energy on. And it makes us learn to be sly.” The rationale didn’t quite make sense to Tiger Lily, but she respected that it did to Peter. She told him about the truce the pirates had with her tribe, but he already knew.

Along the way, she picked plants for them to eat, pulling tamarinds from low branches, cracking open palm nuts to share. She showed Peter how to find hog plum, and how to chew on the stem to get the juice out. She grinned at Peter around the stem sticking out of her mouth, making a face, and he laughed. “We don’t have people to teach us those things,” Peter said. “Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t be so hungry all the time.”

“I’ll teach you,” Tiger Lily offered with a shrug of her shoulders.

“Did your mother teach you?” he asked.

“I don’t have a mother,” she said. “Like you.” For some reason, Peter was glad to hear it.

That first night, they made camp in a cave. They wouldn’t reach the ancients until the following afternoon.

After they ate, they sat on the dirt floor by their fire and listened to the noises outside. A wolf howled somewhere far off. Tiger Lily had cut her knee on a thornbush, and she rubbed at the wound unconsciously.

“Peter, why don’t you think the pirates are dangerous?” she asked.

Peter looked at her. “I know how dangerous they are. But I don’t want the boys to know. I think it’s probably a matter of time really, till they find us.” He looked up at her. “I want the boys to be happy. How could they be happy knowing?”

Tiger Lily took this in with worry. And Peter picked at tiny pebbles on the ground. He looked up at her from under his eyebrows.

“Something about you makes me feel like I can tell you things like that. You’re so still. It’s like, you’ll just hear it.” He smiled wryly. “I can’t even hear what I’m thinking most of the time,” he said, his brow wrinkling. “My brain’s noisy.” He was right about that.

“But you’re so happy,” Tiger Lily said.

“Yeah, I’m happy,” Peter said brightly to the fire.

They sat and looked at each other.

Peter gave her a crooked smile. “The way I see it, ignoring things is important.”

Tiger Lily thought about home, and her engagement. Peter’s eyes turned to me.

“Why does this faerie follow you everywhere?” he asked. “Do you think she’s plotting to murder you in your sleep?” he teased. My wings and the tips of my feet tingled with anger. But then he reached a finger toward me gently, and the anger melted. “Let’s name her Tinker Bell,” he said, like I was their child. He swooped his hand underneath me. “Hi, little Tink.” Hearing him say it thrilled me—a name Peter had invented, just for me.

Tiger Lily nodded. “Okay.” Peter let me go, and turned back to her.

“I’ve never had someone like you around before. What do people do who are together?”

Peter could be like that, so suddenly guileless that it caught at your heart. Tiger Lily held her breath and said nothing. I could see that her approval meant the world to Peter, and that he was hanging there, waiting for it.

“Peter, I shouldn’t keep coming to see you. I’m supposed to …”

Peter shook his head hard, annoyed. “If you have reasons for not coming back, I don’t want to know them. I just want you to come back anyway. Ignorance, see?”

Tiger Lily sat still as Peter crawled toward her and settled beside her, looking at her cut knee. The way he stared for so long at her knee made her blush, and she knew he must see it. He put his hand on the scrape, which hurt and made her flinch, and then leaned forward and kissed it, then sat up and kissed her lips, hesitant at first and then with more force.

Peter sat beside her and kissed her for a long time. Tiger Lily’s heart was racing, her thoughts a blur. Then he abruptly pulled away. He seemed upset with himself for being so little of a gentleman, and moved to the other side of the cave to sleep. I knew Tiger Lily would rather have held on to him, to keep him next to her a little longer, but she let him go in silence. I watched him pulling off his shirt to go to sleep. His chest was concave. There was a long scar on his lower back. And a little birthmark on his stomach.

Tiger Lily had already turned to the wall, and they both pretended the other wasn’t there for the rest of the night. I lay in the crook of Peter’s arm for a while, and could see he didn’t sleep but only closed his eyes. I watched his eyelids flutter, the creases and the fine rims. And then I went and settled into Tiger Lily’s hair and drifted off. In the morning she woke to Peter crouched beside her, studying her, looking tired.

“Time to get up,” he said.

They reached their destination at midday.

Everything here was old and overgrown. The ferns were enormous, big enough for a person to use as a bed. The insects were thick and swollen. The dragonflies were five times my size, and I hid in Tiger Lily’s hair, though if she felt me trembling, she didn’t act like she noticed.

Tiger Lily didn’t feel these were her woods, and neither did I. They slowed their pace, and seemed to anticipate something jumping out at them at any second. They climbed a rise, which promised to crest just beyond the tree line.

Almost at the same moment they reached the top, a horn blew. They hid themselves in some tall grass, and looked down into the small valley.

Below, there were the ancients, or a group of them, gathering. Some had a shock of white in their otherwise dark hair. Others looked very young. With my sharp eyes, I could see that many had grown their finger- and toenails impossibly long, now brown and crackly and old looking. They moved slowly toward each other, one foot in front of the other. They stood still together, and one minute passed into the next. They stood and stood.

“I don’t understand why they move so slowly,” Peter said, troubled.

“Maybe when you’re so old, you don’t have any places to hurry away to,” Tiger Lily said. She felt guilty. It seemed like they were looking on a private sight not meant for their eyes.

They lay watching for a long time, and the ancients barely moved. Occasionally one would wander into the group, or wander away, but generally they stayed together and did very little.

“So that’s what it’s like to live forever,” Peter said. For reasons I didn’t know, there were tiny tremors in his muddled heart.

“Well,” he said.

“Well.”

“Let’s go,” Peter said. And, unceremoniously, as if they hadn’t walked for miles and miles to see the sight, he turned and began walking away. Tiger Lily watched him for a moment, surprised, and then caught up with him.

That night they slept in the open, by a fire Peter had lit. Peter didn’t kiss Tiger Lily except on the forehead, and he retreated to his bed quickly.

The next day he was quiet for the whole walk home. But at the place where she was going to say good-bye, and when he seemed to be thinking of something else as she turned to go, he suddenly pulled her close and hugged her tight, and rested his chin against her cheek. “Thanks for coming with me.”

Tiger Lily made her attempt at a smile. After having felt the need to glower at other children for most of her life, smiles never came easily to her face. But this one was half all right.

“I miss you already,” he said.

Tiger Lily wanted to say it back. But she held on to the words greedily, too caught in the habit of keeping herself a secret. And Peter—half sadly, half expectantly—let her go.

T
he rains began to let up a little more each day, and one morning Tiger Lily came out of her house to see the sun winking at her as she walked into the middle of the village. The hot season had arrived. This was usually Tiger Lily’s favorite time, when the jungle—having soaked up the rains—was at the height of its greenness. It lasted for about the cycle of three moons. But today, it worried her. She knew at the end of it lay the dry season, and her marriage.

Phillip had taken to walking the village, or rather, hobbling it. People kept a wide berth when he came shuffling down a path they shared, and pressed themselves against the houses on either side to let him pass. But they had also adopted him as a sort of pet.

“What’s the white one up to this morning?” Silk Whiskers, one of the older warriors, would ask as he watched him walk by the well or sit by the fire, and the others would pipe in with their latest observations.

“I saw him yesterday whistling at a parrot,” Stone would say.

“He has walked that circle eleven times by my count,” Red Leaf’s brother, Bear Claw, would throw in.

Still, weak and slow as he was, the village was starting to catch the shape of Phillip’s personality where it overflowed his wispy edges. He recoiled from too much raucous laughter. He wrinkled his forehead when the men drank caapi water, and looked concerned and unhappy as they were transported into deeper and deeper trances. He was clearly put off by Tik Tok’s womanly dresses and hairstyles. During the day, Tiger Lily still brought him food and sat with him. Occasionally Tik Tok showed up with a potion he’d mixed for a speedy recovery, and each time, Phillip stared at him like he was a foreign creature, and a puzzling one. He kept a very spare bed. He didn’t eat meals with the tribe but just ate the grain and beans plain. While everyone gathered at the riverbanks to fish, he would bring the one book he’d arrived with and read, which made the villagers poke each other and laugh quietly as they watched him. He was kind, and smiled gently at the children. He didn’t seem to grieve for his lost ship and his lost life with the same wild, inconsolable terror and pain that the villagers seemed to feel at loss.

But the most striking thing about him was his control over and denial of his body. The villagers painted their bodies with messages and meanings—they liked to tattoo themselves with symbols, painted their faces to mean different things. Phillip seemed to float above his body, like it was just an attachment. He didn’t seem to revel in the food Tiger Lily and Tik Tok faithfully brought him, or fresh air, or dangling his feet in the river on hot days the way the villagers did. The only things he took pleasure from seemed to hide somewhere in his head.

He spoke to Tiger Lily from time to time, singling her out.

“I’ve never experienced a heat like this,” he’d murmur, fanning himself and his sweaty, shiny bald head. He told her about his wife back home, who had died three years before. “She settled for me,” he admitted one afternoon. “I always knew she loved someone else. But God works in mysterious ways.” Tiger Lily listened to all of this patiently, only half understanding the things he meant. She wanted to ask questions, but there were too many to begin. She was proud that he was alive partly because of her. And tending to him was a welcome respite from her other duties in the village.

Since his mother’s death, Giant had gone from tolerating Tiger Lily to actively hating her. He purposely made messes for her and created extra work that sometimes kept her up late into the night so that she couldn’t go to the burrow at all. He liked to berate her in front of others, and in private—because Sky Eaters had no tolerance for men hitting women—he had even tried to knock her down twice with a slap. Though much to his frustration, it was almost impossible to knock her over.

Tiger Lily was invulnerable. She wrapped her secret around her like a blanket, and it kept her warm over the next few weeks, when people in the village eyed her, or whispered in their usual way. Tik Tok often looked at her, puzzled, while they sat to eat or mix medicine together. But he didn’t ask her any questions. It was his way to wait for her to tell him.

She was carrying boiled water to Giant’s house one afternoon when she noticed Pine Sap slipping out of the village with a hatchet.