Deadweather and Sunrise (18 page)

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.

M
y 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 thick 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.

“Guts is fine.” He turned his head to look at me. “Wot’re you?”

“Egg,” I said, because I liked it better than Egbert. And because it reminded me of Millicent.

“How long you been a pirate?” I asked.

“I’m not.”

“Did they capture you?”

“Nah. Bought me.”

“From who?”

He was silent, head down, bangs hiding his eyes, nose pointing past his bony knees to the ground. I asked him again.

“Who sold you to them?”

“Shut up.”

He said it quietly, not so much angry as sad. I felt bad for asking twice.

“Want more food? There’s plenty left.”

“Nah. Wrap it in some leaves. Have it in the mornin’.”

I did as he suggested, carefully putting the leftovers on top of the water barrel we’d dragged over from the beach. Then I added a few more branches to the fire and sat down again.

“Got family on that ship?” he asked.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I was a stowaway.”

“Was it fancy? Looked fancy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But not for me.”

We were both quiet for a while, staring at the fire.

“You know what I think?”

“Wot?”

“I think rich men are just as bad as pirates,” I said.

“Dunno ’bout that.” He looked at his stump as he said it.

“Not in some ways. But… what I mean is, they both think they can take whatever they want. And people like you and me are just… meat. What they don’t chew up, they throw out.”

I poked at the edge of the fire with a stick, knocking the gray ash off a branch that still glowed red underneath. As I stared at it, I thought about everything that had happened to me over the past few days. Pembroke. Birch. The passengers who’d spit on me. The pirates who’d gambled with our lives.

“No more,” I said, shaking my head.

“No more o’ wot?”

“No more taking it from them.” I sat up straight, raising my chin and squaring my shoulders. Everything still hurt, but I had a belly full of food, and I could feel myself getting stronger.

And I was going to fight back. It was the same feeling I used to get with Adonis. I could only take his abuse for so long before I had to give him some in return. It didn’t matter how much bigger and stronger he was, or how much worse he’d wallop me for fighting back. Enough was enough.

“There’s a man who lives on Sunrise Island,” I told Guts. “A rich man. They say he’s more powerful than any pirate. He’s after a treasure. It’s buried on my family’s land somewhere. He killed them for it. Then he tried to kill me.”

The fire was hot on my face. I turned to Guts, staring him in the eye.

“But it’s on my land. That makes it mine. So I’m going to find it before he does. Then I’m going to kill him. And then, someday… I’m going to marry his daughter.”

I don’t know if I really believed all of that, or any of it. For all I knew, Pembroke had already found the treasure and made off with it. And I wasn’t sure I could kill anybody, even him.

But it sure felt good to say those words out loud.

“Need a hand?” Guts asked.

I looked at him closely. He didn’t seem like he was joking.

I thought about it for a moment. Anybody with that much fight in him could be a real help. But he was crippled, and he’d nearly killed me once, and I still wasn’t sure if he was crazy or not.

“What’s in it for you?”

“Share o’ that treasure.”

“I wouldn’t give you half. It’s too much.”

“A third, then.”

“Dunno. You’ve only got one hand.”

“Yeah, so—one, two, three.” He nodded at my hands, then his own. “Three hands, three shares. Two fer you, one fer me.”

“How do I know you won’t crack my head open and take it all?”

“Wouldn’t.”

“You already did!”

“Now’s different.”

“How’s it different?”

“’Cause.”

“What?”

His face twitched as he scowled. “Gonna make me say it?”

“Say what?”

“I owe you one, you——.” He finished the sentence with one of the foulest oaths in the language.

“Just one?”

He twitched again, shaking his head in exasperation.

“Two. All right?——!”

He’d definitely spent a lot of time around pirates. There were curses in there I’d never even heard before. But coming from him, they were weirdly comforting. He was crippled, and he might be crazy, but I was pretty sure I could trust him.

“All right, then,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Partners?”

He shook it with a grip as firm as a man twice his size.

“Partners.”

He added more wood to the fire, then yawned and stretched himself out on the grass, folding his arms over his chest.

“Where’s this treasure?”

“Deadweather Island. You heard of it?”

“Course. Close by. Day or two, as the crow flies.” He stared up at the shadowy silhouettes of the trees overhead. “Too bad. Woulda liked to stay a bit.”

“Probably have to. Take us time to build a raft.”

He snorted. “Not buildin’ nothin’.”

“How else are we going to get off?”

“Same’s the pigs.”

“What do you mean?” He wasn’t making any sense.

Guts lifted his head, sniffing the air. “Smell that?”

I nodded. Even with the smoke from the fire, the undercurrent of stink was still noticeable.

“What is it?”

“Dung. This ’ere’s Pig Island.”

“What’s Pig Island?”

“Wot it sounds like.”

He lowered his head and closed his eyes, and in less than a minute, he was snoring.

BY EARLY THE NEXT AFTERNOON, we were standing on the ridge that split the island into its two sides—the wild, uninhabited one where we’d come ashore, and the side we were looking down on now, that stank to high heaven and, according to Guts, was the main source of meat for the islands around the Blue Sea. On the nearly treeless hillside below us, hundreds of head of cattle and sheep grazed in fenced-off meadows. At the foot of the hill, closer to the sea, were half a dozen giant pens holding thousands of pigs, all wallowing in muck.

Even from that distance, the smell was fierce.