Deadweather and Sunrise (17 page)

M
y first impression of being dead was that it was awfully loud. There were screams and shrieks and great blasts of noise and chaos, and when I opened my eyes, I was still sprawled flat on the deck, but there was fire and blood everywhere and something was hurtling down through the sky at me. I rolled out of the way in a hurry, and it thudded to the deck right where I’d been lying, making the planks shudder.

It was a body. Actually, part of one—when I looked up into the mast, the rest of it was still hanging there, tangled in the ropes.

Then I heard a cracking sound and looked to the forward mast in time to see the upper third of it splinter and tumble halfway to the sea before it snagged on its own ropes.

I sat up. Dead pirates lay all around, the deck red and slick with their guts. The ones who weren’t dead were either scrambling to raise what was left of the sails or running belowdecks to
man the cannons. I couldn’t see Ripper Jones, but I heard him somewhere behind me, bellowing orders.

I got to my feet and swooned, almost falling back over. Something was making it next to impossible for me to stand up straight. I put a hand to the side of my head and found an angry lump the size of a fist where Guts had hit me with the cannonball.

I looked around for Guts and saw him standing at the deck rail, struggling to heave a barrel almost as big as he was over the side of the ship. As I watched, he managed to get it over, and the barrel plummeted out of sight.

He turned, scanning the deck with his fierce eyes, and saw me. We stared at each other for a long second.

Then he went over the side.

It took me a few seconds of wondering why he’d jumped in the ocean before I realized that whoever had just unleashed the volley of cannon fire on us was probably reloading, and this was a stupid place to be standing once they finished.

I ran to the spot where Guts had been and looked over the side. The barrel was bobbing in a field of debris—everything from clothing to bodies to big hunks of wood from the ship—and Guts was frog-swimming through the junk to get to it.

I looked out across the sea. It was almost sunset, and the island in the distance looked even farther away than it had been the first time I’d seen it.

But it beat waiting for the next round of cannon fire.

I took a deep breath and jumped overboard.

It was a long way down. I felt like I was in the air forever, and most of the way I regretted jumping. Then I was plunging down
through the cold water, and I wasn’t coming back up fast enough, and I realized my shoes were pulling me down.

I broke the surface and was gasping for air when a wave hit me and I got a lungful of water instead. Then I was choking it back out, but the shoes were still sucking water and pulling me down and I couldn’t kick them off.

Then there was another wave, pushing me back toward the ship, and I was thinking the sea hadn’t looked nearly this choppy when I was fifty feet above it and this was definitely a mistake because I was going to drown. I tried to pull a shoe off with my hand, but I couldn’t keep my head above the waves that way, and I was starting to get panicky when I heard a distant cluster of booms, like a string of firecrackers going off.

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 appreciate 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.