Like everything involving the triplets, it had quickly devolved into meaningless shouting and punching. I felt that me and Kit and Ed and Sal and Charlie were trying to find this funnier than it was.
Peter strolled into the clearing whistling like he hadn’t been gone for almost a day.
“Peter!” Ed shouted, standing up.
The triplets heard Ed’s cry and immediately stopped pummeling one another. They ran to surround Peter.
“Peter, where have you been?”
“Peter, did you kill all the pirates?”
“Peter, were you on the pirate ship? How did you get back again?”
He didn’t answer any of their questions, only frowned around at the small circle of adoration around him.
“Where is everybody?”
“Oh, all the others were killed,” Nod said. “Except for Nip, of course. He’s in the tree being boring, as usual.”
“A cannonball hit them,” Fog said.
“Jamie said it made a big mess,” Crow added.
“All of them?” Peter said. “One cannonball killed all of them?”
Even Peter was taken aback by this. We’d always fought the pirates hand-to-hand, though we’d understood that the cannons were supposed to be a threat. Still, we’d never seen them fired until the day before. And Peter clearly hadn’t known what happened onshore while he was off adventuring on the pirate ship.
“Did you kill any pirates, Peter?”
“Mmm,” Peter said, by way of answer. He was looking around at the sparse audience for his adventures and not liking it.
“How many pirates, Peter? Jamie killed six. Well, he says one of them jumped off the boat and got eaten by a shark, but he was running from Jamie at the time so that counts, doesn’t it?” Nod said.
“Six pirates? That’s nothing,” Peter said. “Jamie’s killed more than that before.”
“Not all at once like that,” Nod said. “He’s always fought them one or two at a time only.”
I felt that this was probably true, but I couldn’t be certain. The thing I would never tell Charlie or Sal or even Nod or Fog was that I’d killed so many pirates over the years that I couldn’t remember how many of them I’d taken on at one time or another.
Nod was impressed not only that I’d slaughtered the pirates but that I’d swum out to the rowboat and taken them by surprise. That was the best part for him. He’d made me tell it all through three times already, and every time I’d left out more details, aware of Sal and Charlie’s eyes on me.
Each time I did this Charlie would add back in all the bits I’d left out, and generally make me sound more heroic than I was.
I wasn’t a hero. I’d just been angry.
Only I didn’t realize at the time who, exactly, I was angry with. I’d thought it was the pirates, for firing a cannonball that took away six of my mates in one fierce swipe.
But it wasn’t the pirates. It was Peter.
It was Peter’s fault all the boys were dead. Peter had burned the pirate camp. Peter had fed their Captain to the Many-Eyed. All of this was because of Peter.
Because Peter promised them adventures and happiness and then took them away to the island where they died. They weren’t forever young, unless dying when you were young kept you that way for always.
In all that time, and all those years, only four boys had not died or grown up—which was the same thing, really, for growing up meant death was closer every day.
Four boys—Nod, Fog, Peter. And me.
And then Peter glanced around and saw that his band wasn’t big enough for him, and he said, “I’ll be back soon.”
He turned and left the camp as suddenly as he came, and the other boys slumped in disappointment.
“But, Peter, where are you going? Can’t we come too?”
He waved his arm back at them, and the few who’d started to follow stopped.
I knew what he was about, and I wasn’t having any of it.
“Stay together,” I told Sal and Charlie.
I was more worried about Nip since we’d lost so many boys. There were fewer eyes about to watch him. But Sal and Charlie were getting better at looking out for themselves every day, and I had to trust them to do so.
Peter was distracted, and thinking about his plans, and so I caught up with him after several minutes’ hard running. I was lucky he hadn’t decided to fly, else I wouldn’t have been in time.
I grabbed his shoulder and jerked him around. He raised his eyebrows at me.
“No, Peter,” I said.
“No, what?”
“No more boys from the Other Place,” I said. “You can’t look after the ones we have now. I won’t let you bring them here just to have them die.”
“I don’t bring them here to die,” he said, clearly insulted. “I bring them here so they’ll live forever.”
“But they don’t,” I said. “Can’t you see? The island takes them and chews them up.”
Peter shrugged. “And then I get new ones. It’s always been like this, Jamie. I don’t see why it should bother you now.”
“You didn’t see them,” I said. I could see them, just as sure as if they were laid out before me at that moment. I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t want to see anyone like that ever again. “You didn’t see all the boys with a hole in their middle, their insides torn out. There was nothing left of them, Peter.”
“It’s a good thing the pirates went away, then, so that won’t happen anymore.”
“It won’t happen anymore because you’re not getting any more,” I said, my teeth gritted. “I won’t let you.”
He laughed then, and my dagger was in my hand. I hadn’t thought about it. I just wanted to make that laugh go away forever. It wasn’t his happy-Peter-come-play-with-me laugh. It was Peter laughing at me.
Laughing at me.
He didn’t think I could stop him. He thought it was funny.
That was the first time I hated him.
His laugh faded when he saw my dagger, and he squinted at me. “What are you going to do, Jamie? Stab me?”
“If I have to,” I said. Oh, how I want to. I wanted to make that laugh go away forever.
Peter looked at me for a long time. I let him look.
I couldn’t guess what he might be thinking. All I knew was that I would stop him if he tried to go to the Other Place. I was tired of burying boys. A permanent sense of grief had settled over me, and every time I saw Charlie or Sal smile, all I could think was that I would lose them too.
Was this, I wondered, what it felt like to be a grown-up? Did you always feel the weight of things on you, your cares pressing you down like a burden you could never shake? No wonder Peter could fly. He had no worries to weight him to the earth.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the biting flies buzzed all around our heads. I didn’t wave them away, because I wanted to be ready if Peter decided to fight. Peter could be very, very tricky in a fight.
A fly landed behind my ear and bit, and blood rolled down the back of my neck to mix with sweat, and still I waited.
Finally Peter sighed, a long, long sigh. “Very well.”
“Very well what?” I asked suspiciously.
“I won’t go and get any more boys.”
My grip loosened on the dagger. I’d held it so hard that it left a bruise on my palm, I found later. “You won’t?”
“No, I won’t,” he said. “But you have to do something for me.”
“What?” Just the fact that Peter was asking for something immediately made me suspicious.
“I want you to play with me more. Just me. Not with the others all the time,” Peter said, and he sounded very young then. “You hardly play anymore, always worrying about chores and keeping the other boys safe. I brought you here to play and lately you’ve been
acting like a grown-up.”
He spit out the last word. I could almost see his disdain dripping from his tongue.
I didn’t know how to explain to him that for all that I still looked young, I had been feeling old. The years had passed, so many of them, and they were starting to wear on me. After a while it wasn’t fun to always feel like you had to have fun.
And as I thought this, I felt a little twinge in my legs, like the muscles and bones were stretching.
“Well? Do we have a bargain?” Peter asked.
“I won’t leave Charlie alone all the time just to play with you,” I said. “If this is some kind of trick so you can set Nip on him again . . .”
“No harm will come to your little duckling,” Peter said. I checked both hands to make sure they weren’t crossed behind his back.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll play more, and you don’t get any new boys from the Other Place.”
Peter held out his hand and we shook on it.
“Now,” he said, and his eyes gleamed. “How about we bother the crocodiles?”
• • •
The day before the Battle, Nip went off in the woods early in the morning and didn’t come back until well after dusk. He returned sweaty and scratched from his exertions, but overall he looked much healthier than he had been. His broken cheekbone appeared to be mending, though an ugly ridge had formed where the two pieces joined together.
He was gone so long that day that I wondered if he had gotten lost, or perhaps just decided to keep going straight across the island and join the pirates. It would be better for him if he didn’t fight me, though he didn’t seem to realize that.
The pirates, surprisingly, had returned to the island a few days before. Peter and I had been out scouting in the mountains (just the two of us, as Peter wanted) and had seen their ship anchored in their usual cove.
We’d crept down for a closer look and found that the previous first mate was now wearing the Captain’s coat, and that he’d managed to replace the men he’d lost to Peter and me and the Many-Eyed. They set up a new camp while Peter and I watched from a cliff just above the beach.
“The new pirates look a good deal younger and healthier than the others,” I said.
“That means they’ll fight better,” Peter said. “We should have a raid, and welcome them to the island.”
I chose my next words carefully, not wanting to irritate Peter. He’d been in a better mood since our bargain, mostly because he seemed to think he had me on a string that he could tug anytime he liked.
“Maybe we should wait on a raid until after Battle,” I said. “After all, I could get hurt in a raid, and then the fight wouldn’t be fair.”
“You wouldn’t get hurt, Jamie,” Peter scoffed. “When have you ever gotten hurt in a raid?”
I had, plenty of times. There was a long scar on my right thigh where one of the first mates had managed to slice open the skin and muscle there. That was probably the worst I’d ever gotten.
A boy had lived with us at that time called Rob, and he said he’d once been a servant to a doctor. He told me the doctor sewed flaps of skin together so they would heal, so I tried that with some deer gut I stretched into thin strings. It seemed to work all right, except that the place where the skin and muscle joined was swollen and tender for a long time after, and cutting the deer gut out after the wound healed was more miserable than sewing it together in the first place.
Under my left ribs there was a hard knot of skin where another mate had almost got me, except that I danced away at the last moment before he managed to plunge the knife all the way in. There were assorted other small marks and scars, many of them faded white, but they existed. Peter had just forgotten, the way that Peter did forget about anything that wasn’t right in front of him at the moment.
“Still,” I said, not liking to remind Peter that he was wrong. “I could get injured. And if I was, you’d have to put off Battle until I was better.”
“Why?” Peter asked.
“Because you put it off until Nip was better, so you’d have to do the same for me. It’s only fair.”
“Oh,” Peter said, his mouth twisting to one side the way it did when he was thinking hard. He wanted the raid, was excited about the return of the pirates.
At the same time, I sensed that the ongoing tension of Nip’s presence in the camp was beginning to wear even on Peter. Nip never spoke to anyone except to insult them, and he certainly did not come along for games or adventures. He was secretive and angry, and that did not make for Peter’s idea of fun. Delaying Battle, even for a few more days, was not appealing to him. Peter wanted the trouble with Nip to be resolved.
“I suppose we could wait until after Battle,” Peter said slowly. “But not too long after. I don’t want these new pirates getting ideas. The island belongs to me.”
Not to us, I noticed. Not to all the boys, or even to Peter and me. Just to him. It was Peter’s island.
But I didn’t let this irritate me. Peter was doing what I wanted. There would be no raid until after Battle.
• • •
On the morning of Battle we all woke early. It was a half-day walk to the Battle place and Peter wanted to reach it before midday. It wasn’t so far as the crow flies, but it was nestled right in the mountains to the southeast and there was a good deal of climbing to do to get there.
This meant that Peter was cock-crowing us awake before the moon had set. All the boys except for Nip and Sal and Charlie (who were the only new boys left after the terrible day with the cannonball) had been to the Battle place before, and so were familiar with Peter’s routine. We rolled out of sleep and collected our things while Peter scampered around shouting for us to hurry.
I’d carefully prepared all my weapons the night before and packed them—except my dagger, which always went on my waist—in a kind of sling-bag I’d made from deerskin.
Ever since the day Battle had been announced I’d quietly picked up useful rocks that I saw here and there—smooth round ones that would fit inside my slingshot. Those stones were in my bag, along with my freshly strung shot.
I had also found a couple of larger rocks, ones that would just fit inside my hand, with spiky bits on them. They were worth carrying the extra weight. If I got Nip’s skull with one of them he’d go down in an instant and then I’d just have to finish him off.
After Del died I’d taken his pirate sword, though I didn’t prefer swords, generally. I was good with them, and would take a sword from whatever pirate I fought and use the sword against him, but I mostly found swords unwieldy. The dagger suited me better—I liked to be quick, to dart in and out again, to kill before my enemy knew I was even there.
Swords weren’t permitted in Battle, nor daggers either, because Peter liked Battle to be about the boys who were the best fighters—not who was able to steal the best weapons from the pirates. Still, I put Del’s sword inside my sling-bag, because I had a hunch that Nip might cheat.
I’d been teaching Sal and Charlie swordplay with it, anyhow. The necessity of keeping Peter company meant that I hadn’t taught them as much as I’d have liked, but I’d feel better if they had the sword with them while I battled Nip.
There was a voice whispering to me that Peter was being too nice, too good, that he hadn’t forgotten the way Charlie and Sal took me away from him. Going after them while I was distracted by Battle was a distinct possibility.
Nip was cross, as usual, when Peter woke him. This might have had something to do with Peter treading on Nip’s hand instead of shaking his shoulder. The other boy woke with an angry shout, and spent several minutes swearing words I’d never heard before while he packed. I’ve listened to pirates too, and still I hadn’t heard some of those words.
Soon enough the ten of us were trekking through the last hours of night toward the mountains. The Battle place was a crater that seem
ed carved for our exact purpose. It was a bowl-like depression in the rock—the southeastern mountains were rockier and spikier, generally, than the northeastern ones—and about twenty-five boy lengths across. All around the rim of the bowl was a protruding lip that seemed just like a bench for watching what happened inside. When Peter and I found it, so long ago, it seemed as if the island had made an arena especially for us.
Peter took the lead, of course, and I let the other boys get between us so I could walk with Charlie and Sal. Nip, surprisingly, wanted to walk near Peter. I guessed that perhaps he was thinking of what might happen if he beat me. He would have to find his way into Peter’s favor again, and from my view it appeared he was laying it on thick.
I didn’t mind. I knew that Nip was unlikely to win without cheating, and I was glad of the chance to spend a few hours free from Peter’s expectation that I amuse him.
“Jamie,” Sal asked quietly, for the night was still and voices carried. “How many of these Battles have you fought?”
I frowned. “I’m not sure. The first one, the first real one, wasn’t until maybe twenty or thirty seasons after I came to the island. Until then Peter and I used it as a place to practice fighting, but just for fun.”
“Nod said Battle is for fun,” Sal said, and I heard the question in his voice. How could it be for fun when one of you dies?
“Sometimes it is for fun,” I said. “Usually Peter sets a Battle day once or twice a year. He picks two teams of boys and then we fight hand-to-hand, no weapons, first in groups and then one-to-one. Whoever wins is the Battle champion until the next Battle.”
“How many times have you been Battle champion?” Charlie asked.
I was thankful for the moonlight, which hid the blood that rushed to my face at Charlie’s question. Sal looked at me curiously when I didn’t answer right away.
“I, um . . . I’m always Battle champion.”
“Always?” Charlie’s eyes glowed in the moonlight.
“Always,” I said. Why should I be embarrassed about this? I was the best fighter. But something about the way Sal cocked his head to one side made me feel silly about it.
Lost Boy Page 13
