Gaskin Boggis lumbered back and forth through the boat, gathering bits of wood that had lodged themselves in the most unlikely places. More than half our supply had vanished, and what sticks were left were sodden. Boggis arranged them like fish at a fishmonger’s, spreading them out to dry.
Benjamin Penny was the lookout. He crouched in the very bow, a horrible figurehead soaring like a witch over the high waves. But Gaskin was the first to see the birds.
“Pigeons,” he said, pausing in his work. There was a thick piece of wood clamped in his fist. “Look, there’s a hundred pigeons coming.”
“There’s no pigeons out at sea,” said Weedle. “One big loon, that’s all there is.”
“Tell him, Tom,” said Boggis.
He dropped his wood and hauled me up on my rubbery, seasick legs. All I saw was water, till we soared to the crest of a wave. Then, across the valleys of the ocean, a flock of birds came into sight. There was such a mass of wings and feathers that it seemed at first like a torn-away bit of the sea, a bubble of blue and gray.
We tipped over the wave and into the trough. I staggered, but Gaskin held me. Then up we went again, though my stomach seemed left behind, and over the crest came the birds. They were fat and short, their wings beating madly. The whistling sound of their feathers carried me home in my mind, and for an instant I was small again, standing hand in hand with my father in a London square besieged by pigeons. The memory was so strong that I smelled the wool of my father’s peacoat and heard all the bustles of London. It
made me overwhelmingly sad for a moment, with the thought of my father captured by cannibals, of me steaming away from him as fast as I could. It was hard to imagine that I was living up to the riddle of his last words:
“Do what’s right by me, Tom. Do the handsome thing.”
Boggis held me tight, as my father had held me that day in London, and I watched the birds dashing through the sky.
In the bow, Benjamin Penny lifted his little webbed hands, as though he might touch the pigeons. Weedle snatched up a bit of wood and hurled it at the flock, and the birds veered to pass around it. There were
more
than a hundred, and they whistled by—now close at hand, now high above—as we tossed and fell on the waves.
“Them’s pigeons!” cried Midgely, hearing their wings. In his excitement his voice was slurred. “Pigeonsh, sure enough!”
We had seen albatrosses, and the menacing skuas, riding the breezes on great wings that never flapped. To see the pigeons flogging the air in their furious hurry was a sight that thrilled us all. We watched them until the sea again was empty.
It took blind Midge to understand what the birds really meant. “They’re heading for land,” he said. “We’ve come to the islands, Tom, just like I said.”
Well, I thought he must be right. The storm had blown the pigeons out to sea, and all we had to do was follow them back. Our need to find land was stronger than my fear of pirates. “Gaskin,” I said. “Start the engine!”
The storm had drowned the little embers of our fire. It took the better part of an hour to coax new flames from our
wetted wood, half an hour more to build up steam. But at last the engine hissed, and the pistons stretched, and off we went across the waves.
Our smoke plumed from the stack in gray and brown, a signal to any ship for miles around. But we kept the throttle open, and the paddle wheel thumped, and the boat shook from end to end. Water oozed through the seams of the planking; every nail quivered, but we steamed for the land as furiously as the pigeons.
Benjamin Penny stood in his place with the spray flying around him, and the boat sometimes plunged so deeply that he was up to his knees in water. But he was laughing, shouting out that we were saved.
Gaskin bustled back and forth, round and round the boat. The door to the firebox clanked open and shut as he stoked the flames inside. Our supply of wood shrank alarmingly, but there was no need to spare it now. Low clouds appeared ahead, white and soft like cotton, shimmering with the reflected light of solid land, of trees. Then, just before dark we sighted the first island. It was very distant, only a smudge of green and black, yet the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. In a world that had been only water, the appearance of land brought tears to my eyes.
“I told you, Tom,” said Midgely “Didn’t I say we’d see the islands today?”
He had to shout, though he was right at my side. The engine was a roaring dragon that gnashed the wood to embers, spitting out smoke and fire. Billows of ash spewed from the funnel, drifting down onto our skin and our clothes and our hair.
Boggis held up a stick and shouted above the noise. “It’s the last of it, Tom!”
I didn’t know what he meant. “The last of what?” I said.
“The firewood. It’s finished,” said he.
I looked around the boat, surprised to see that every stick and log was gone. We had pushed too far, too fast.
“Burn the boat,” I said.
He set to with our little axe. He chopped away the seats, the knees that held them, the varnished decks at stem and stern. It seemed a dreadful thing to do to a boat, to feed it to its own fire, but Boggis kept that engine running through the night, and the boat shrank as we pushed on. At dawn we could see a faint white line from surf on coral reefs.
A most horrible thought passed through my mind that moment, as the morning sun glowed in treetops, on verdant glades. What if, somehow, we had gone in a great circle, to return to the cannibal islands? Or what if the men who ate men lived there and here and everywhere?
I poked Midgely “Are there savages?”
“On the
Mascarenes
?” he said, as though I’d asked if there were men on the moon. “They’re British, Tom, them islands. But no one lives there.”
I longed so badly to step ashore that I was leaning forward on my seat, urging the boat to go faster, the way a horseman urges a jumper to the fence. Then I had no seat to sit on, for Boggis came and smashed it away.
He fed the pieces to the fire. He hacked our long sculling oar into six lengths and shoved them one by one past the red-hot door of the firebox. He burned the wood chips that he’d made. He started on the gunwales.
Five miles from the island, we could see the palm trees swaying. We could see the water curling up to break against the coral, the bursts of spray that leapt and vanished. We stared at the gap in the reef that would take us into sheltered water. The lagoon behind it glowed white and silver from the sand on its bottom.
Three miles from the island, we could smell the earth and the trees. Boggis pried the topmost plank from the ribs of the boat. In his arms he held every scrap of wood that was left to burn. I eased the throttle so that he could keep the fire going.
But less than half a mile from the island, the engine stopped.
It seemed the cruelest fate to come so close to land, and not be able to reach it. But the boat was then just a hollow shell, like a cracked-open egg. The ribs were higher than the planks, so that their ends stood up like rows of teeth, or like the bones of a rotting carcass.
All day we drifted there, in the thunder of the surf, so close to the reefs that we could see starfish and anemones. We might have tried swimming ashore, if not for the dreadful surf, and for the sharks that we feared were lurking nearby. We prayed that a current—or a favorable change in the wind—would carry us through the gap to the sheltered lagoon. Yet it was not to be; truly, I was cursed. We drifted back the way we’d come, too slowly to see any change moment by
moment. But the boom of the surf grew fainter, the ghosts of leaping spray grew smaller, and the line of palms along the shore became again a smear of green. For three days we could see the island. It shrank to half its size, to a speck, and one morning we woke to find that it was gone.
A sense of loneliness came over me such as I had never felt. I clung to Midgely, for the empty sea put terror in my heart.
I remembered being a child, and watching rainwater rise in a small pool. I had squatted down beside it to study four black beetles that were clinging to a twig stuck upright in the mud. They had climbed higher as the water rose, until they were clambering in a panic over top of each other on the last quarter inch of twig. Then that tiny branch had sprung loose, becoming an ark for the beetles, who had to squirm their way aboard as it spun and rolled, all topsy-turvy. I remembered being both horrified and thrilled. I was not yet six years old, already afraid of water.
Now I was no better off than one of those beetles. Oh, I could think and dream, and wonder about things. But in the end we were just five beetles being carried away by water and wind.
Night by night, the Southern Cross rose higher in the sky. We were drifting south toward the frozen continent at the bottom of the world, the soulless, hopeless Terra Incognita. The sun rose and set, and rose and set, and soon we had no food to eat, no water to drink. Even the rust-filled drippings that we could draw from the boiler were of no use. Gaskin Boggis, long ago, had watered his engine from the sea.
It seemed at first there was one blessing from our shared
misery, and it pleased me to find that we were better than the beetles after all. No one argued, and we pulled together. The squalls that we dreaded brought rain that we needed, and all five of us took hold of Midgely’s turtle shell to form a basin for the rain. From that we drank together, bending our heads to the pool. Even Benjamin Penny, who had surely never once lifted one of his webbed hands to help another, took to diving below the boat to feed us all. He saw fishes down there sometimes, but wasn’t fast enough to catch one. Instead, he brought up sponges and long-necked barnacles that he plucked from the boat’s weed-covered bottom. We developed a taste for the baby mussels in their blue-black shells.
But the fishings ended with the appearance of a great shark. It sliced its fin across the waves one day, then round and round the boat. It never drew away, except to come back in a mad rush straight toward us. Sometimes it thumped against the planks with its back or its tail, and then we all clung to the boat, shouting together.
“It’s an omen,” said Midgely “Sharks, they smell death. That’s what the sailors say. If a shark appears, a sailor’s going to hop the twig.”
White as a ghost, it swam slow circles around us. It was always there as we drifted steadily south.
At night we dreamed of food. We all did, as though sleep kept us as close together as we were through the days. I dreamed of muffins and pies, Midgely of lemonade ices. The pangs of hunger and thirst that greeted us all every morning became too much to bear. Boggis was the first to drink seawater.
It made him violently ill, and taught a lesson that was never forgotten by anyone—except little Midgely He took to lapping up—like a cat—the pools of salt water that collected at the stringers and the bilge. It only made him thirsty; the more he drank, the more he craved.
Midgely kept his vile habit so secret that I thought it was the fever that made him shiver and shake. I came to believe that he was not long for the world, that he was dying from the heat and the misery. I did my best to keep him comfortable, but the nights grew colder and colder. We saw an iceberg to the south of us, as big as a castle, with a blue gleam in its center that made me think of my diamond. Poor Midgely hauled himself up the shattered side of the boat, though he had scarcely strength to move. He turned his blind eyes to the south and begged me to see the iceberg for him.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. My voice was hoarse; it pained me to speak. “It’s white and shining. There’s arches and spires.”
“Like the pearly gates?” asked Midgely.
“Yes,” I said. He seemed very close to heaven then, and he must have thought so himself. It was only the next morning that Midgely talked of drawing lots.
The sun was just rising, and there was a thin mist—like smoke—on the sea. Midge held my arm and whispered. “It’s what sailors do,” he said. “They draw lots, Tom. First to see who does the killing. Then they draw again to see who dies. The first fellow gives that second one a bash with the axe and rolls him over the side. That way there’s no screaming. No fuss.”
The very idea disturbed me. “Why would we do that?” I asked.
He whispered in my ear. “To save the others, Tom. There ain’t enough food and water for five of us. But there might be enough for four.”
“Only for a while,” said I. “Then there would be enough for three. Then for two. Then—”
“But Tom,” said Midge in a whisper. “If we don’t do nothing we’re
all
doomed.”
“I’d rather be doomed,” I said.
Midgely insisted. He raised his voice until Benjamin Penny woke and called out from the bow, “What’s he talking about?”
“Never you mind,” I said. “The fever’s giving him mad ideas.”
The boat was rocking, groaning, on the swells. There was water oozing through every seam. Midgely drew me close. “Listen, Tom,” he said. “There’s more.”
I could feel his breath on my cheek. His fingers were icy cold.
“It’s going to be
him
,” he whispered. “I know it, Tom. Like I said we’d see them islands, and we did? That’s how I know. It’s going to be Benjamin Penny who goes over the side.”
“I don’t care who it is,” I said.
Penny snarled like a dog. “That blind little bum-sucker, what’s he saying?”
“We can cook his goose, Tom.” Midgely squeezed my arm with sadly little strength. “We can give him his gruel.”
I thought it was the fever that had changed him. His drooping gray eyes gave him the look of an old man, and the seawater had addled his thoughts. I loved him dearly, yet hated what he was saying.
“You’ll be the one to do him in,” he said. “I know that too; I seen it. You’ll be the one to do the killing, but it’s Penny what’s going to hop the twig. That’s why the shark’s here; it’s waiting for him. You can do it, can’t you, Tom?”
“No,” I said. “Of course I can’t.” It made me furious that he was so unlike himself that he’d think I’d agree to murder.
“Then all of us will die,” said he. “Me, I’ll be the first. You know I ain’t got much longer, Tom. And you know something else?” His dried, cracked lips became a smile. “Penny will be the last. That’s funny, ain’t it, Tom? Penny will be the last.”