by Geoff Rodkey
Almost instantly, there was an avalanche of noise behind and around me as the round of cannonballs hit—splintering and tearing and splashing and screams—and pieces of wood and metal and people and who knew what else were hitting the water all around me, and I don’t know what kind of luck kept anything from conking me on the head because that would have been the end of it.
Another wave came, and as I wriggled to keep my head above the crest, I caught sight of something floating in the trough. It passed out of view, but I struck out toward it, and after the next wave crested, I got a hand on it.
It was a section of deck rail, two big lengths of wood maybe four feet long joined by half a dozen crosspieces, splintered on either end but otherwise intact. I hung on to it with one hand while I used the other hand to finally pull off my shoes.
It would have been a good idea to hang on to the shoes, but it wasn’t like I was planning ahead right then, so I let them sink.
I firmed up my grip, turning the rail sideways and holding it by the top crosspiece with my arms in front of me so half of it was under my chest and supporting my body. Then I started kicking furiously, straight into the current, because I wanted to put as much distance as I could between myself and the Earthly Pleasure before the next round hit.
When it came a minute later, raining more debris down around me, I realized I was swimming straight for the ship that was firing on us. I was changing course to the right when the first of the Earthly Pleasure’s cannons discharged practically over my head, so loud my ears rang.
Underneath the roar of the cannon came a second sound, more delicate but similarly destructive. It took me a moment to realize it was the sound of glass breaking on the ship’s portal windows. A second cannon went off, the noise and the recoil shattering the few remaining panes. I guess whoever designed those glass windows hadn’t counted on the ship’s cannons actually getting fired.
I was swimming across the current instead of against it now, and a couple of cannon rounds later, I’d cleared the prow of the ship. I wasn’t completely out of danger—at one point, a stray cannonball hit the water close enough to capsize me—but eventually I got far enough away to catch my breath and get my bearings.
I was moving north, toward the island. It was going to be a long slog to get there, and the current wasn’t completely with me. If I didn’t swim at an angle against it, I knew I’d end up missing the island and get carried out to sea. But I figured if I kicked hard enough, I’d be okay.
I was wrong. By the time the sun went down ten minutes later, it was obvious the kicking wasn’t doing much and I was going to miss the island by a good quarter mile unless I could figure out how to use my arms to paddle against the current. After a lot of trial and error, I worked out the best way to hold the deck rail with one hand while I paddled with the other.
That got me back on course, but it hurt like anything. One shoulder was still busted up from when the horse had thrown me, and the other was burning where Guts had bitten into it. So I could only paddle for a minute or two on either side until the pain got to be too much and I had to rest, lying across the deck rail while I stared at the island up ahead in the moonlight, always pulling off to the left, never seeming to get any closer.
And it wasn’t just my arms, or my busted knee, giving me trouble. The twin lumps on the side of my head from where I’d been hit with the cannonball—at first, I thought there was just one big lump, but as I probed it more carefully, I realized there were two of them, bunched together like the summits of a little mountain range—were so swollen that every heartbeat sent a little pulse of pain through them, and the longer I swam, the more dizzy and sick I got.
At one point, I quit. I stopped paddling and kicking and just let the current carry me as I floated on my back, holding the rail across my stomach and watching the battle rage in the distance behind me. The Earthly Pleasure was burning now, the light from her fires dancing over the water. But the other two ships—Ripper Jones’s frigate and whatever had attacked us—were still trading cannon fire, although they were both under sail and moving out to sea, away from the burning hull of the tourist ship.
I watched them for a while, thinking about how pointless it all was, how stupid and cruel men were, how they made life just one kick in the teeth after another, and what a relief it would be to give up and let the waves pull me under.
Then I turned over and kept going.
I don’t know how long it took. I don’t even remember feeling the sand under my feet. I just remember how good it felt to put my head on something dry and fall asleep.
I WOKE UP with the sun burning my face, glad to be alive.
Then I tried to move, and I was a little less glad. So many parts of me hurt I couldn’t even count them all.
And there was a bug biting my arm.
I started to laugh. I don’t know why the bug struck me so funny. I think partly I was a little delirious from getting conked on the head. But after everything I’d been through, two days of getting pushed off cliffs, thrown from horses, locked in chains, punched, kicked, drowned, stabbed, and spit on… what did this bug think it was going to do to me?
“Bring a gun next time,” I told the bug.
Then it flew off before I could get around to squashing it, which struck me even funnier. I was practically shaking with laughter, which made everything hurt more but feel better, when I heard him.
“SHUT UP!”
I looked down the beach. A hundred yards away was a barrel, exactly like the one Guts had tossed over the side of the ship. Next to it were a pair of bare feet and some scrawny legs, their owner’s head obscured in the shade cast by the barrel.
As I got up and started over to him, I noticed the smell for the first time—a low, outhouse stink carried on the breeze. I looked around for the source of it, but there was nothing on the beach except sand, trees, me, the barrel, and Guts.
I was close enough to see the ragged tears in his breeches when he sat up with his usual quick, jerky motion and snarled at me.
“Sod off!”
I stopped. “Or what? You’ll hit me with another cannonball?” The swelling had gone down some by now, but I was still bitter.
“Worse’n ’at.” He held up a knife.
“Where’d you get that?” I was glad he hadn’t had it during our fight.
“Sod off!” he yelled again, swiping the knife through the air.
“Don’t be stupid. I’m done fighting you.”
“No’f ye get any closer.”
I sighed and held out my hand. “Let’s call a truce—”
“Nuts to that! Jus’ want the water!”
So that was why he’d taken the barrel. I had to admire his survival instincts. He’d washed up on the beach with fresh water and a knife. All I’d done was lose my shoes.
He was barefoot, too, but I was pretty sure he’d started out that way.
“I don’t want your water. Maybe we can—”
“SOD OFF!”
Now I was getting annoyed. “I could’ve killed you, you know. Back on the ship. But I didn’t.”
“’At’s yer problem.”
It was pointless. I gave up.
“Fine. Have it your way.” Remembering what happened the last time I turned my back on him, I walked backward so I could keep him in view until I was inside the tree line.
Then I went looking for water of my own. The forest was hilly and strewn with rocks, some of them as big as buildings. The awful stink I’d first smelled on the beach was still there, but it wasn’t as heavy higher up the hill. I walked for a while, my ears straining over the buzz of insects and the occasional rustle of an animal in the brush, until I heard what I was listening for—running water.
I followed the sound until I found a stream that emerged from an underground spring. I drank from it with my hands for a long time, pausing now and then to lie across the mossy ground and stare up at the trees. It felt good to rest.
It’s funny how you don’t appre
ciate things until you lose them for a while. Like being able to just lie quietly without somebody trying to kill you.
As nice as it was to lie there, I was famished, so I forced myself to get up and start looking for something to eat. Up the hill, I found a cluster of bushes with fat, dark berries hanging from them. The lower branches had all been picked clean by animals, and I didn’t see any corpses lying around, so I figured they weren’t poisonous.
I ate until I’d gone through all the ones within easy reach. Then I figured I’d look for something else, but my stomach was full enough by then that I got sleepy, so I went back to the mossy ground by the stream and lay down for a nap.
I woke up to an odd grunting noise that made me startle for fear something was about to eat me.
A little downstream, maybe ten feet from the end of my foot, was a wild boar—four feet long, bristly and black, two tusks curling up from under a long piggy snout—plopped on its belly in midstream. My sudden movement must have startled it, because before I could even think to get up and run, it was off like a shot, crashing through the underbrush.
Once my heart rate got back to normal, I realized this was a good sign. Not only did the boar seem as scared of me as I was of it, but its being there meant there was enough food on the island to grow wild boar to a few hundred pounds.
I spent the next couple hours foraging up and down the hillside, trying to think like a wild boar. What did they eat? Whatever it was, I didn’t find much other than more berries and more wild boar. They were all over the place, big and scary-looking but mostly skittish.
Toward the top of the ridge, I came upon a field of loose rocks and pocketed a couple of small, flinty ones that looked like they might be good for sparking tinder into a fire, which I figured I’d have to do sooner or later. I’d never started a fire myself, but that was how the tribe of cavemen in The Savages of Urluk did it, and I hoped the author knew what he was talking about even though it was a lousy book.
Around midafternoon, it occurred to me that I should probably try to build a shelter. I was making my way down the hill and mulling over where to build it when I heard the scream—not human, but animal, somewhere up the ridge above and behind me, and close enough that I could hear it thrashing in the underbrush.
Something—probably a boar, but I couldn’t be sure—was fighting for its life.
I looked around for anything I could use as a weapon, because I knew wounded animals were dangerous, and whatever was trying to kill it might be even worse. I’d just picked up a coconut-sized rock from the ground when I realized the thrashing was getting closer.
Whatever it was, it was headed in my direction.
There was a big rock outcropping jutting up out of the ground nearby, six feet high and maybe twice as long, with what looked like a wide, flat top. I figured I’d have an easier time defending myself from up there, so I hoisted the rock I was holding onto the top and then climbed up myself.
I’d just swung my legs up over the side when the wounded boar burst into view. As I turned to watch, it passed below me, almost close enough to touch, streaming red blood from a fat gash on the side of its back. As it disappeared again into the trees, I caught a glimpse of something sticking out of the wound.
Then came the thing that was hunting it—Guts, stumbling barefoot through the brush, carrying a rock in his hand and looking as fierce as ever. He plunged into the woods, following the trail of blood left by the boar.
I stared after him, dumbfounded. The kid sure was fearless. That boar was easily five times his size, and he must have gotten right on top of it to bury his knife in its back like that. I thought for a moment about climbing down and following him, because if I could help him kill it, he might share the meat with me. But I figured he was less likely to appreciate the help than he was to knife me for trying to horn in on his food, so I stayed put.
The sound of the chase had died away, and I was about to climb down off the rock when I heard a cry of surprise from Guts, followed by more crashing through the brush. They were headed back my way.
I flattened myself against the rock, lying on my stomach, and waited.
A moment later, Guts reappeared, running for his life. He tripped on a root and fell heavily to the ground. As he got up, his eyes wild with terror, I yelled to him.
“UP HERE!”
He only hesitated for an instant. Then he ran to the outcropping and tried to climb it. I held my hand out to help him up, but he shook it off. Which was stupid, because he quickly got stuck—he managed to get his good hand up over the top of the rock, but he couldn’t find a hold wide enough to support the stump of his forearm, and with just the one hand, he didn’t have enough leverage to pull up his legs.
The boar came roaring back at full speed, crazed and murderous. Some instinct must have clicked on in its head, like it realized it was going to die and decided to quit running and take its killer down with it, so when it saw Guts pinned down on the rock, it charged him.
Guts heard it coming and started to scrabble desperately against the rock with his legs, but he couldn’t find a toehold. I reached over the side of the rock and grabbed his bad arm just below the stump, lifting him up several inches as the boar’s jaws snapped in the air where his foot had been an instant before.
The boar hit the rock hard and fell backward, landing on the side of its back where Guts’s knife was still sticking out of it. It let out a shriek, but quickly staggered to its feet, lurching and bloody.
Guts was halfway up the outcropping now, and I was trying to pull him along, my arm hooked under his armpit, when the boar reared up on its hind legs and lunged.
It grazed him on the lower leg with its tusks. Guts grunted in pain and lost his handhold, but I managed to keep my grip on him and he stayed up, just barely.
The boar lunged again. It missed his flesh this time but hooked its tusks on the seat of his breeches, and it started to shake its head violently, trying to dislodge him from the rock. I was hoping the breeches would tear away, but the fabric held, and his body was getting wrenched from side to side, and I was pulling and he was hanging on with all he had but I could feel him starting to slip.
I looked to one side and saw the rock I’d brought up with me, less than an arm’s length away. With my free hand, I grabbed it and hurled it straight down past Guts, right at the boar’s head.
It caught him on the snout. The boar tumbled back to the ground, and by the time it regained its feet, Guts was wriggling onto the rock next to me. He panted, catching his breath, as we watched the boar screech with fury below us—it lunged a couple more times, getting its front legs up on the side of the rock, only to slide off helplessly.
Finally, it gave up and sank to the ground. We watched in silence as the life twitched out of it.
Guts checked out the bite on his leg, which didn’t look that bad. Then he turned his head to me.
The fierceness was mostly gone from his eyes. I couldn’t help smiling as I waited for him to thank me for saving his life.
But he didn’t. Instead, he looked down, motioning with a nod of his head at the dead boar below us.
“We can eat ’im,” he said.
PARTNERS
My plan for starting a fire didn’t work. Once Guts and I had piled tinder and kindling into a little pyramid around a circle of stones just off the beach, I spent a good half hour knocking the flinty rocks together. But they never made a spark. Maybe the rocks I’d found were no good, or maybe the author of The Savages of Urluk didn’t know how to start a fire any better than he knew how to tell a story.
Either way, after a while Guts—who couldn’t seem to stop moving, and whose eyes and shoulders twitched even when he tried to sit still and watch me bang the rocks together, his blue eyes blinking impatiently under that long, shaggy mop of blond hair—got sick of waiting and took over.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Get more wood.”
I went off to gather more kindling, and when I got back, he’d split a thi
ck branch in half and was carving a groove down the middle of it, using his knees to hold it in place while he worked the knife with his good hand. He sent me off again for bigger pieces of wood, and by the time I returned from that, he’d finished the groove and was crouched over the branch, trying to work a sharp stick back and forth in the groove. It was tough work for somebody with one hand, and I was about to offer my help when he spared me the trouble of asking.
“’Ere,” he said. “Do like this.”
On his direction, I rubbed the stick over the groove until a little heap of wood dust built up. After that, he had me tilt the branch up on my knee so the dust collected in a little pile on the bottom, then start working the stick back and forth in the groove as hard as I could.
Ten minutes in, my shoulder hurt, my hand was cramping, and I was starting to wonder what the point of it was when a thin wisp of smoke curled up from the dust. Guts lowered his face to it and blew soft, rapid puffs of air over the pile until it suddenly ignited. He grabbed the branch fast and got it over to the tinder. Within a few minutes, we had a good-sized fire going.
I stayed to watch over it while Guts took his knife back up the hill to butcher the boar. He came back at sunset, so covered in blood and guts he looked like he’d crawled inside the carcass. But he’d managed to carve some good pieces of meat, and I cooked them while he washed off in the ocean.
It was dark when he returned. We ate sitting on a log in the hot, smoky light of the fire, taking our time to savor the meat.
Guts ate hunched over his food, like he thought somebody might come along and take it away. Every couple of minutes, he’d jerk his head around and look over his shoulder to make sure nothing was sneaking up on him. And his face never really stopped twitching, even when his big, prominent teeth were tearing into a hunk of meat.
For a long time, neither one of us talked.
“What’s your name?” I finally asked.
