Across The Sea (4 page)

He turned to the burly pirate
holding him –
smack
! – as a heavy, cloth bag cuffed the man
in the head.

“Ho!” screamed the pirate.

A hand grabbed Francis’ own and
pulled. Francis looked up, and saw Lily’s big, round eyes, her
stringy hair. He latched onto the gunwale of her boat and hoisted
himself up. Lily repositioned herself to shift her sail, gliding on
the water’s surface at top speed. The pirates ducked their heads
into the water, fearing injury from the swift vessel.

Francis, dripping wet, looked
up at Lily, amazed.
This girl sure knows what she’s
doing.

Lily tacked, speeding them back
toward the corner of the shoreline, the pirates left far
behind.

She held her right hand out
toward Francis, who shivered from the wind as it passed through his
soaked clothing. “Captain Lily Still,” she said. “Welcome
aboard!”

Francis smiled. “Francis
Bright,” he offered as he took her hand in his and shook it. “Most
gracious.”

Lily smiled back.
Maybe this
boy will want to be my friend.

Francis hugged his legs against
his chest to warm up. “Where did that bag come from?” he asked.

“That was my anchor,” Lily
replied. “And it’s a shame ‘cause those bricks inside were real
nice and heavy.”

Francis looked up the boat’s
lone mast and saw a flag at the top. It was all white but for three
black, short letter m's, painted, scattered. They appeared to be
three birds in flight.

As they sailed around the rocky
corner, Francis turned toward the shore and saw all three
red-headed boys as they stood there, waiting for them. A dense
forest loomed behind them.

“My cousins,” Lily said.

“What are you doing with him!”
Mallon shouted. “Come here right now, you idiot!”

Lily leaped into the shallow
water, not caring that her smock would get wet, and pulled her boat
toward the beach. Francis hopped out on the other side and pulled
as well.

Karl, the middle brother,
pointed a finger at him. “He’s a pirate,” he said.

“He’s just a boy and he needs
our help,” Lily explained. “His name’s Francis and he’s my friend
now.”

Lily and Francis dropped the
bow onto the sand and pebbles.

At once, Mallon clutched
Francis’ arm. “You’re coming with us,” he said, glowering into
Francis’ eyes. “You’re our prisoner.”

Francis did not look away. “If
you want to hold hands, just say so.”

“Let go of him,” Lily said,
moving toward Mallon, but Karl stepped in front of her, gripping
both her arms.

“What are you doing?” Lily
muttered, annoyed. She brought her arms down flat against the sides
of her body and then back up and out, making Karl lose his grip,
and balance. She then kicked at his feet, tripping him to the
ground.

“Let him be,” Lily ordered,
stepping toward Mallon.

Francis put a hand up. “It’s
fine. Let’s just go and get out of sight.” Francis felt safer as
the captive of these three misguided brothers than of the beastly
man and his nasty thugs.

“Smart pirate,” Mallon said,
pulling Francis.

Lily followed her cousin and
Francis into the woods. “Be careful with him,” she warned.

All five walked up a well-worn
path and soon reached a group of flat rocks which they stepped up
like stairs. At the top, Francis could see that through the trees
ahead there stood a small house.

As they neared the little home,
its front door burst open and a thin man with flaming red hair
stood in the doorway.

“Who is this?” he asked,
miffed.

Francis turned to Lily. “The
more family members I meet, the more I love them as my own.”

“He’s a pirate, Father,” Mallon
said, still clutching Francis’ arm.

“He is not,” Lily
protested.

“Yes, he is,” Mallon
reiterated. “He was swimming away from the Red Mist.”

A woman came to the door behind
the boys’ father. She had humourless eyes and her dull brown hair
was pulled into a tight bun.

“The Red Mist?” she uttered,
disbelieving.

“The Red Mist?” the man
repeated, baffled.

“Would you like to know how
it’s spelled?” Francis offered.

“We saw it, Father,” Karl said,
nodding his head. “We sailed right past her.”

The woman slapped a hand over
her mouth, horror-struck.

“Get in the house!” the man
yelled.

The boys and Lily did as they
were told. Walter, the smallest brother, moved at a snail's pace,
so his father grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and threw him
inside. Once everyone was in, Lily’s uncle slammed the door and
glared down at the boys, his chest heaving. Francis glanced about.
They were standing in the kitchen, as a vat of pungent, beef stew
simmered in a cauldron suspended over an open fire in the hard
earth floor.

“Why did you… why did you drag
this urchin home to us?” Lily’s uncle demanded, stammering.

“He’s a pirate, Father,” Mallon
answered.

“A pirate? What did you think?
A pirate’s better than an urchin? Safer perhaps?”

Francis held back a laugh,
making air shoot out of his nose.

“The Red Mist thinks she can
sail in our water whenever she fancies,” Mallon said. “I thought we
should make an example out of her boy pirate.”

“Oh!” Lily’s uncle exclaimed.
“And who shall choose the example and teach the mighty Red Mist and
all her cold-blooded murderers a lesson? You? Who in God’s name do
you think you are, actually?”

Francis turned to the much
bigger boy. “Yeah, who do you think you are?”

“But Uncle,” Lily protested.
“This boy’s not a pirate.”

Lily’s uncle spun toward his
niece. “Quiet. If it weren’t for you and those slipshod buckets, we
wouldn’t be involved in this abduction of our very own pirate, now
would we?”

Lily’s uncle reached and
grabbed Francis by the arm.

Francis looked up at him. “Not
a pirate.”

Lily’s uncle bent down, and
with his other hand, seized a round latch in the floor, pulling
open the trapdoor attached to it.

“He’s to wait down here,” the
boys’ father said, throwing Francis into the underground cellar.
Francis fell on his knees, then hands, against the ice-chill ground
below. The trapdoor was shut and Francis found himself enclosed in
darkness once again. He felt around with both hands. He had
glimpsed vegetables when the door was open. He was starving. He
grabbed something which felt like a bunch of carrots. He broke one
away and took a big chomp. It was crunchy and juicy.
Yessss…
Food. Finally.

Overhead, Francis could still
hear Lily’s uncle berate the children.

“You’ve no idea what you have
just done. You stole a boy from pirates. From the Red Mist no less.
You can’t even begin to know what you’ve brought down upon this
family.”

“Father,” Walter interjected.
“It was Lily. She snatched the boy pirate from the water.”

“He’s not a pirate,” Lily
repeated. “The pirates were chasing him. He was in trouble.”

“You snatched him from them,”
Lily’s uncle stated. “Maybe in your ever-expanding brilliance you
thought they would wholeheartedly enjoy that? I don’t know. I can’t
read your mind.”

“He’s a pirate, Father,” Karl
said.

“Karl,” Lily’s uncle said. “The
mouth. Keep it shut.” He turned back to Lily. “You’ve been nothing
but trouble ever since you arrived here in nothing but a basket and
a blanket. If you weren’t Mother’s late brother’s daughter…”

“Oh,” Lily’s aunt said,
interrupting. “I no longer care whose daughter she is. She’s to go.
She’s to go to a nunnery as soon as they’ll have her. She’ll serve
God, she will.”

“Perhaps the Lord would fare
better with pirates taken hostage!” Lily’s uncle cried. “Mallon, go
to the village and search out a member from the village council.
They’ll advise us on what to do with the boy. Perhaps they can take
him off our backs. If we let this boy loose now, he’ll surely blab
to the pirates and tell them where we live, tell them what beds we
sleep in, and make it that much easier for them to drown me out at
sea, tied up in an old wheat sack.”

Karl trembled. Walter gulped.
Lily rolled her eyes.

“The pirates will surely avenge
their lil’ weed’s extraction. All right, everyone else help me move
furniture. We’ll place it over the cellar door just to make certain
this thieving, amoral leprechaun stays put.”

Francis heard raucous rumbling,
for quite some time, as if the entire house was being rearranged,
and Lily’s uncle never ceased his ranting.

“I need to warn you all about
pirates. They’re not the jolly adventurers having picnics with
fairies and mermaids. The pirates of the Red Mist are notorious for
their highly enjoyable yet evil, evil, however pleasurable, evil
way of life. Evil, evil, fun-loving, evil men.”

* * *

Mallon returned less than an
hour later with three senior members of the village council, and
the members asked everyone to move outside to discuss matters. They
did not want the “pirate” to hear their thoughts as they were
spoken aloud, and required everyone to be interrogated thoroughly
before a final decision could be reached on what was to be
done.

Shaking in his cold, wet
clothes, Francis sat, waiting, in the musty cellar.

Lone footsteps sounded in the
room above. Things were moved about the floor. The trapdoor opened.
Francis put an arm up to cover his eyes from the intense daylight.
“Quick,” he heard a whisper order.

Francis hastened up the cellar
ladder, toward Lily in the kitchen. Lily lowered the door with
care. Scattered about them was a set of stacked stools, shelves
with books, lumber and three straw mattresses.

“Ingenious,” Francis
quipped.

“Let’s go,” Lily whispered,
running toward the back of the house. “They’ll be back any
second.”

They reached her aunt and
uncle’s bedroom and Lily climbed out an open back window. Francis
followed suit. Outside, they ran into the woods. Much deeper into
the forest, Lily stopped, and turned to Francis.

“Are you a pirate?” she asked,
panting.

“Of course not,” Francis
replied, breathless as well.

“I knew that. Just wanted to
make sure. Why were you swimming away from all those men?”

“I hid on a smaller boat back
in Langer, my village. I thought the man who was sailing the boat
was one of the pirates who took my brother so…”

“Wait a minute,” Lily said,
cutting Francis off. “They still have your brother?”

“Nobody knows for sure. Pirates
raided a ship he was working on and he disappeared. We’ve never
known if he was killed or not. I just wanted to find out from this
man. I just didn’t know how.”

Francis told Lily the rest of
his story.

“My father worked on ships just
like your brother,” Lily revealed. “He loved the water. He died
when his ship sank in a storm.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But if there’s a chance that
your brother’s still alive, we have to find him.”

“I need to get home. I need to
tell my parents everything I’ve seen.”

“There’s no time, Francis. The
Red Mist won’t be here forever. If that man in the red cloak or
those pirates have your brother or they know what happened to him,
we have to find out before they’re gone. We have to do this,
Francis. Now.”

“How?”

“My father taught me a lot. As
a matter of fact, he pretty much taught me everything.”

‘What?” Francis was scared to
think this but this Lily girl was sounding more and more like a
crazed person. He took a glance at her appearance. Her dress was
well-worn with a few tears, and her face, arms and legs all had
dirt stains.

This girl is a wild
child
, Francis concluded.

“I’ve always lived with my aunt
and uncle,” Lily said. “My father told me my mother passed on when
I came into this world. But when my father was still alive, he used
to come home a few times a year. He showed me how to make boats,
how to sail.” Lily picked a branch from the ground and swung it
from side to side as though it was a sword. “And how to fight,” she
added. She backed up against a tree root, tripped and fell.

“Ahhh damnation!” she
exclaimed.

“I think I should get home.”
Francis was now certain this wild child girl was out of her
mind.

“I’m the perfect crew member,”
the savage one said, bouncing back to her feet. “Francis, I’ll be
your crew.”

Francis shook his head. “This
isn’t a game, Lily. It’s not pretend time.”

Lily looked offended. “Your
brother’s lost. And the Red Mist is getting away. If your brother’s
still alive…” Lily paused for a moment, then finished, “If he’s
still alive then he has to be found. Not forgotten.”

Francis could not agree more.
Perhaps he had underestimated this demented girl. “What do we do?”
he asked.

“The market. There’s a man who
used to work with my father. I go see him whenever I get the
inkling. He’ll know more about the Red Mist and this man in the red
cloak. Follow me, Francis.”

Lily ran off. “There’s no time
to lose,” she continued, as Francis hurried after her. “The Red
Mist will be gone before we know it.”

After a minute, the forest
ended and Francis found himself at the edge of a bustling village.
Lily darted into the crowded street and Francis followed close
behind. They reached a village square populated with merchants in
stalls selling food and other goods. This was the Pond Vale Isle
market and today was its busiest day of the week. There were
shoppers everywhere.

Lily, panting, halted before a
fish stand. Cutting fish inside was a short man with a round belly,
a chubby face and a long, dark moustache which curled up at both
ends. Once this man laid eyes on Lily, aggravation set into his
stare.