Also by Anna Fienberg
Ariel, Zed and the Secret of Life
Power to Burn
The Witch in the Lake
Horrendo’s Curse
Number 8
Louis Beside Himself
First published by Allen & Unwin in 2016
Copyright © Text, Anna Fienberg 2016
The moral right of Anna Fienberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the United Kingdom’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin – Australia
83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Allen & Unwin – UK
Ormond House, 26–27 Boswell Street,
London WC1N 3JZ, UK
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN (AUS) 9781743319901
ISBN (UK) 9781743368268
eISBN 9781952533402
Cover design by Sandra Nobes
Cover and text illustrations by Craig Phillips
Text design by Sandra Nobes
Set by Tou-Can Design
For Kathy Muir, queen of the Cannonball Seas
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Two
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Three
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the author
Chapter 1
Will Wetherto was born with a talent for the tightrope.
By the time he was eight he could walk a rope as long as a gangplank. And when he was nine, he juggled bananas as he went.
‘You’re a natural,’ his mother told him fondly, as she strung the rope between two mangroves. ‘And I should know.’ Whenever she said this, she’d tap the side of her nose wisely and wink at him. Indeed, Wanda Wetherto knew everything there was to know about funambulism. She’d even taught him that word – the delicious name for the thing he most loved to do. He thought it right and proper that the tightrope word started with fun, because that’s what it was for him.
It was lucky that Will had a particular passion to occupy him, as in all his nine years on Thunder Island he’d never met another soul his age, or played a game with a child. Still, he lived happily enough with his mother, just the two of them, in their little wooden house on the hill. They played plenty of games together – climbing the banyan tree, swinging from branches like acrobats, juggling pawpaws, and limbo dancing in the moonlight.
But as soon as he woke in the morning, Will ran down the hill to the mangrove trees to practise walking the tightrope.
Now you might wonder at a boy practising his passion so young – although, as his mother often remarked, folk tend to love the things they are good at. And perhaps it was not so remarkable that Will Wetherto at the age of nine could dance on a rope as thin as a whisker, because his own mother had been a star of the tightrope.
Before she met Will’s father, Wanda Wetherto worked as a circus acrobat on the Mainland – she could walk the high wire, juggle flaming swords, catch anything thrown at her by the wide world. Ever since he was a baby, Will had watched his mother glide like a ballerina along the tightrope, her eyes burning with concentration. When he could walk, then run, then somersault in mid-air, he begged her to let him learn too. ‘I want to have the fun you have,’ he told her. ‘It’s only fair.’
Wanda was always persuaded by a sound argument, so she began by fixing a thick rope just a few inches above the ground. Every month the rope grew higher, until he could climb a tightrope so high and thin that when he looked down, the ducks bobbing on the river below were as tiny as the ornaments on their mantelpiece.
Wanda was delighted that her son had the gift. In time, she told him, they’d return to the Mainland together where he could perform on the tightrope and trapeze. ‘You’ll see, you’ll be a star of the circus,’ she promised. ‘But mind, we can’t go until you are grown.’
Will shivered with excitement at the thought of being grown. But for now, when he climbed the ladder and swung himself up into the branches, he was content to see further upriver than he’d ever been allowed to go before. Up here, he felt tall and wise, as if he could manage just about anything. Big things became small and unknown things became known. It was like climbing up to another land. Or being grown.
Will liked to hear his mother talk of the circus and the fun to be had there. At night, she said, bonfires were lit and Travellers read the future in the dancing flames. Musicians played accordions and steel guitars, and acrobats flew around the ceiling of the Big Top like birds. But he wished her stories didn’t have to finish with the terrible dangers of the wicked world.
‘Mark my words,’ she said gravely. ‘It’s pirates who rule the seas. Those vermin go stealing boys to crew their ships, working ’em till they drop. I tell you, no lad is safe.’ She looked far into the distance, as if she could see pirates out there going about their evil ways. ‘In this wide world folks like us must have a skill, and if it’s a skill that pays in gold, the safer we will be. So keep practising, dear boy – you’ve got to be an expert in your trade, or you’ll be left behind for the pirates to snatch, easy as a shark swallows a sardine.’
Wanda Wetherto believed in telling her son plain truths about the world; all the better to arm him, she said, for when he had to make his own way out there. In the meantime, she gave him excellent advice on the skill of funambulism. Before he set out on the rope, she would point to his stomach, just above his belt buckle. ‘Find your balance here, Will,’ she said. ‘That’s the centre of you. And remember this: take your time, check your centre, keep putting one foot in front of the other and your eyes on the prize.’
Wanda Wetherto’s words were to be more important to Will than he ever imagined, so it was a fine thing that he listened carefully to his mother. Faithfully, he put one foot in front of the other and kept his eyes on the prize. But in the dark years to come he discovered that the wide world can lead you down paths so mysterious that sometimes it’s hard to tell what is the prize and what is the devil.
The dark years
began in the autumn of Will’s ninth year, when, in the middle of the afternoon, Wanda Wetherto vanished. At first Will thought she must be playing hide and seek. He looked for her in the front garden, through the cinnamon trees and grape vines, and up into the branches of the mango tree. He ran through the tall grasses that grew at the back of their little house. He peered into the chicken coop, the toolshed, behind the newly chopped stack of wood. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’ he called.
But there was no answering cry.
Will held his breath, listening for the smallest sound. Sometimes when she was hiding his mother couldn’t help giggling, but now there was only the sigh of wind catching in the mangroves.
If his mother had heard him, Will decided at last, she would surely have appeared. She’d have leaped to the crack in his voice. When he was battling a nightmare pirate, she’d fly across the hall, her red hair flaring in the candlelight, and bounce on Will’s bed. ‘Let’s bounce on his head!’ she’d cry. ‘Come on, bounce till he’s dead!’
If she wasn’t hiding, he thought next, then she must be practising her circus tricks. She’d be down at the river, walking the tightrope.
As he ran downhill, his bare feet slid and slapped on the juicy grass. He fell and righted himself, ignoring the blood on his knee and the sting at his heel. The drum of his heart drove him on, faster, frantic, and now, wasn’t that the shape of his mother leaning against the tree?
He burst through the bloodwoods, past the clump of palms and into the clearing. The rope hung between the trees. Empty. Only a great heron stood uncertainly for a moment, then took off in a long curve of wing.
Will looked all around, his head darting back and forth like a hummingbird on a hibiscus flower. His mother was everywhere, in the sudden call of a coot, the whisper of the river; he caught glimpses of her in cloud shadows, the swish of breeze in the leaves.
But she was nowhere. There was nothing of her soft belly or her arms that held him so tight in the night. There was nothing to hold onto.
‘Come out come out wherever you are!’ he cried. ‘You win!’
But his mother had vanished.
Will picked his way upriver, along the mangroves. He searched the river’s edge and its wide brown face but he found only upside-down sky reflected there.
In his mind Wanda was tantalisingly close; she was boiling water for their supper, telling stories of the father he’d never seen. Right there in the stone-flagged kitchen with the crayfish simmering in the pot, she would conjure up the man so that he could almost hear his father’s quick laugh and smacking kiss, his pirate promise to come back for his family.
Pickle me toes and pour rum up me nose! had been his favourite phrase. ‘And a bit too fond of that particular poison he was too,’ Wanda said. But that phrase became Will’s favourite, and he and his mother used it whenever a tickling bout or a wrestling match between them got too much. It was their signal for ‘Enough!’, stopping a game in its tracks, and it worked every time.
So why the devil didn’t it work now?
Because, thought Will, this was a stinking, rotten, snake-poison game that ought to be boiled in oil and buried five fathoms deep. He couldn’t believe his mother would invent such a stupid game, he just couldn’t believe it. But where on earth was she hiding? For the twentieth time he yelled, ‘Pickle me toe … oe … oe … ssss!’ but only the sandpiper pecking at the water’s edge bothered to call back.
Shadows were lengthening along the muddy bank when Will stopped to rest. He was so weary and his legs were so numb that his terror felt distant now, like thunder heard from far away. He had never been so far downriver.
Ever since Will learned to walk, Wanda had warned him not to go beyond the mangroves below their house. For all her playful games, she was serious about certain things: snake-bite, bug-bite, and wandering out of sight. So Will hadn’t ventured around the river’s bend to the Cannonball Sea, or the other way, up to the High Lands. His mother said the sea was like a thousand rivers meeting in one, and stingrays with poison barbs and sharks with ten rows of teeth swarmed inside it. Sometimes his mother took their small boat downriver and brought back fish for their dinner. And sometimes she walked the other way, into the hills towards the High Lands where she sold her clay pots at market. But he was never, ever allowed to go with her.
‘You are my Secret,’ she whispered. ‘If the whereabouts of Will Wetherto got out, the Captain of the Cannonball Seas would come to get you – him and his scoundrels! You might be the son of a pirate, but even your father couldn’t save you from the Captain. A whisper of you on the Mainland, my boy, a moment’s loose talk drifting to other islands, and you’d be in a pickle and no mistake. But never mind, you’re safe here on Thunder Island, with not a body for miles around.’
Will didn’t know what to make of this. His mother always spoke with affection about his father, who, she said, was a pirate of Some Reluctance. Where in the world that was, Will couldn’t figure out – but wasn’t his father a man of mystery? Wanda sighed with longing for him, yet in the same breath she swore pirates were dangerous, dire and deadly, no matter where they came from. Will didn’t like to press her about it as whenever he did, her eyes grew wet and her silences long. All she told him on the subject of love and romance was: ‘Know a person for more than two weeks before you marry them. And mind you visit their place of work before you do so.’ In his experience Wanda Wetherto was a person as dependable as sunrise, as clear as water. But in the case of his father she seemed, well … different.
Will rounded the bend in the river, then stood still and gaped. Past the stubble of bush, a world of water tipped at the horizon.
‘The Cannonball Sea,’ he whispered.
Dusk was creeping in, dissolving the line where sea met sky. A chill trickled down his back. But still he stood there, unable to lift his feet. He was awestruck, standing on forbidden land. ‘Never go round the river’s bend,’ his mother warned, ‘for there lies the sea. And the sea is the home of pirates.’
Will looked away from the horizon and a flick of red caught his eye. Near his foot lay the thick brown stub of a cigar, burned down to its red paper band. His stomach turned over. He’d seen that thing for the first time yesterday, when a man came to the house looking for work. ‘My apologies for disturbing you,’ the man had said to his mother, taking the cigar from between his teeth. ‘I’m wondering if you’ve got an afternoon’s work for a feed? I’m on my way to the Mainland, but soon it will be night and I’d rather head out in the morning.’
Wanda had seemed uneasy, but she’d asked him to chop the remaining logs, and stack them in the shed. ‘It’s heavy work,’ she said later to Will. ‘I may as well take help where I can get it, and you can’t refuse a man food in return for an honest job. He’s no pirate, I’ll swear, but still, keep out of his way till he’s back on his boat.’ She gave the man a plate of salt fish and beans, and mango juice to wash it down. The man was grateful and polite enough, but somehow Will smelt danger in the drifting smoke of his cigar.
He shivered now, and threw the stub on the ground. What did it mean? He looked out over the ocean, over more water than he’d ever seen. There, beyond the horizon, lay the Mainland. The place where he would go with his mother when he was grown.
Anything could happen here, couldn’t it? In this space where rivers vanished into sky. No outlines, nothing definite. Nothing you could put your hands around. Ghosts could be hiding in the sea spray, pirates looming on the horizon. His mother had known about this shimmering world; she’d done a thousand circus tricks, a million magic acts. For a bag of silver coins she’d pulled a hummingbird out of a man’s britches, and escaped from a locked casket – under the water! She could vanish a mongoose, a bowl of frangipani flowers, his father’s silver sword, even herself. Why, once she’d disappeared in a cloud of blue gunpowder, only to reappear in the toolshed moments later.
What if she’d vanished now, in this strange place? What if she was never coming back?
Will dropped where he stood, his legs turning to water. He didn’t care if the bugs came to eat his ears or the snakes licked at his fingers. He was falling asleep and he dreaded waking up.
Chapter 2
The sun was rising over the sea when Will opened his eyes. For a moment he was almost blinded by the glory of it, and then he remembered. He moaned as he stretched out his legs. He was thirsty, and something red and itchy swelled above his knee.
He leapt up and ran through the bushes, out onto white crunchy sand. The glare at his feet made him squint. The gold sea dazzled.
A hot panic swept over him; everything was too bright, too big, too much.
Then he saw, down near the shore, a low, curved wall of stones roofed by wire. It was the only human thing in the whole vast place. He made straight for it.
Facing the water, the stone walls only came up to his ankles. But when he knelt to look through the wire, he saw the sand moving inside. A small earthquake seemed to be taking place, sending up ripples to the surface.
Will kept his eyes fixed on the spot. He could hardly breathe with watching. And then, in small eruptions no bigger than his thumb, tiny dark heads squirmed up out of the sand. Two, three, seven, ten appeared, then little arms like fins pulled free. The creatures fell and righted themselves, struggled up cliffs of sand, and collapsed. They had hard shells like crabs … but their necks were long. Were they fish or landed creatures? Would they swim or walk?
So deep was his concentration that when a voice said behind him, ‘Oh good, they’ve hatched,’ he yelped.
‘Ssh,’ said the voice. ‘You don’t want to frighten them. They must be scared out of their wits already, what with climbing up into the world and about to make the most dangerous journey of their lives. How many do you think? I’m counting twenty-five already. Fancy, the mother can lay a hundred eggs at a time!’
The voice belonged to a girl about his age, or maybe a little older. She had long hair like his mother, only hers was caught at the back in a ribbon. She smiled at him.
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